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Part 1 Author’s Retrospective
🕑 Added 2023-03-26 17:08:38 +0000 UTCFinally, it is done. Part 1 is finished at about 260k words and with 5 months of writing and 3 months of hiatus. I’ve seen other authors like Temple write retrospectives like these, and I’ve always liked reading them, so I thought to do one of my own. Here, I’ll gather my thoughts on writing Maid to Kill so far, what I’ve learned, direction for the future, etc.
If this type of thing interests you, read along! If it doesn’t, you can skip this without worry. First, some background.
About me
Maid to Kill part 1 is actually the first major writing project I’ve ever completed (I don’t count rock), so this is a pretty big milestone to me. I only started writing fiction a bit under a year ago, so I am still very new to all this, but look how far we’ve come!
As some of you may know, this is actually my second attempt at a story on Royalroad. My first story was a cultivation comedy about a silly sect leader, and it was also the first piece of fiction I ever wrote. That’s right, I started publishing my writing right from the very start! Chapter 1 of that story is genuinely the first bit of fiction writing I’ve ever done.
Before that, I was mostly reading an insane amount of books. I basically went down the pipeline of actual books → light novels → Machine translations → Chinese webnovels → western webnovels in about two years, after which my reading addiction got so severe I decided to exorcise it once and for all by trying my hand at writing.
Sect leader reached 400 followers on rising stars, which is amazingly good for a first work—my initial goal had been only 200 followers. However, I wasn’t satisfied. Few ever are. Us webnovel writers tend to always crave more success, and seeing as the reviews for Easygoing Sect Leader were very mixed, I wanted to try something new.
Easygoing Sect Leader was basically my attempt to see whether I could write fiction at all, so I chose to write a self-insert character to make things easy for myself. However, the issue with the fic was that it was my self insert, and as a result, rather strange. Most RR readers didn’t really like him very much.
The concept
For my next story I wanted to do something different. First, I wanted to try writing a LitRPG. I had only read like three LitRPGs at the time, so it was very new ground to me. But what kind of LitRPG should I write? That was the question.
A large part of a webnovel’s appeal comes from their main character, so I started by thinking about what kind of main character I should do. I did some research and discovered that while Combat Maids are a popular trope in anime and light novels, there aren’t really any good stories with one as the main character.
Thus, I decided to test the waters. I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to even write a good LitRPG, so first I decided to write a short-story to see how well the concept could do. That became A Day in the Life of a Combat Maid, a short story that some of you may have read. Basically, I just tried to think of every possible way a [Maid’s] abilities could be used in brutal, gorey fashion, and wrote a quick and fun plot around that.
A big thing I decided on early was that I wanted to have a [Combat Maid] who really fought like a Maid. Most combat maids in stories end up feeling more like ninjas or assassins in maid cosplay, so that’s why I decided to very intentionally limit myself to maid-like things.
The short story did pretty well, gaining around 16 followers pretty fast, so I saw that the idea had potential. I decided to turn the idea into a full webnovel story. But then I faced an issue. How would I make a long webnovel about a Maid MC? What kind of plot should it have?
Stories focusing on a strange main character can quickly become gimmicky, so I needed to add something more to the story that would make it have actual staying power. Then, I suddenly had a vision in my head.
Combat Maid X French Revolution.
It felt perfect in my mind. Just the general vibes and aesthetics of that period felt perfect for a Maid story, and the themes of class struggle would fit really well with LitRPG stuff, forming a good thread for longer term plot things. Thus, the idea was born.
To make sure I could write a good LitRPG, I read several of the biggest ones on Royalroad before I started really writing maid, and tried to make notes on what made them popular. I set a goal for myself: 2000 followers. Then I started writing.
The characters
I like having a learning goal with every story. For Easygoing Sect Leader, my goal was to learn how to write fiction at all, and just see whether I was actually capable of it. For Maid to Kill I had two goals: Learn more about writing interesting characters and learn how to write interesting fight scenes.
Now, as many of you may have noticed, Fayette is a rather strange character. This is very intentional—in my first story I did a self-insert MC, so with Maid I wanted to do the opposite, and write a character that was very very different from me, almost an anti-self-insert. Thus, I created Fayette.
Now, for some additional background, before I started writing webnovels, I was spending a lot of time reading them. In the two years before, I was reading pretty much all day, and I read like well over 200 light novels in one year or something like that. When you do something like that, one’s brain starts to mesh into a slurry, and I gradually began to lose my mind.
The series that finally did me in was Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! Now, I liked that story a lot in a way, it was very calming to just read through it… but there were a few things that grated at me. The bandits. Basically, the main characters would constantly end up attacked by bandits, but then manage to defeat them with zero casualties, and then spend a bunch of time escorting them to an adventurers guild.
It really grated at me. Then I read more stories, and I noticed that a lot of these 4-cute-girls go on an adventure stories had a main cast that was very averse to killing. I started to get mad. Just kill those damned bandits, dammnit! I don’t want to read another prisoner escort sidequest!
So, inspired by those feelings, I decided to make part 1 of Maid to Kill a 4-cute-girls-go-on-an-adventure type story, loosely framed upon other stories like that, except I would make the main characters savage and murderous as fuck.
Thus, we got Fayette, a Maid who is a bit too enthusiastic about killing, and ironically, ends up having to not kill the bandits.
A lot of people actually disliked Fayette’s murderous tendencies, especially as I made them a bit subtle at first. I think my most upvoted review is still a negative one complaining about how Fayette killed those first two bandits in Palogne. The reviewer was very upset about it, calling Fayette a murderous psychopath.
I was very confused, because that was like the whole point of her character. You read a story called “Maid to Kill” and are surprised that the Maid kills? The review still haunts me, because it has so darn many upvotes. More on that when we talk about the hiatus.
Now, I wanted Fayette to be a bit airheaded. Basically, she is good at thinking on her feet in active situations, but she isn’t so good at thinking long-term. To counteract that, I added Mireille, who is basically modelled after a more typical, rational Royalroad protagonist.
Unsurprisingly, adding her in made a lot of people upset too. Basically, I wanted her and Fayette to have a dynamic where Mireille starts of bossy and makes up all these plans, and then when they inevitably fail, Fayette steps in and saves her with quick thinking. I played up the dynamic a bit when I introduced her, so a lot of people got upset that I had suddenly “dumbed down” Fayette (some people even wished that Fayette would die so that Mireille could become the MC!).
I made her a seamstress because seamstresses just felt fitting for the vibe of the setting, and I thought I could think up cool abilities for her to use. Seamstresses were sort of a fading group in the industrial revolution, which Mireille’s arc follows somewhat, as she spends a lot of time lost and searching for a fitting role to play.
Now, as I was writing a Maid story, I of course had to add a [Lady] to the mix. How could I not? Perhaps even with some forbidden romance along the line… (We’ll get there eventually!) I wanted Marie to act as a counterbalance to Fayette’s murderousness and Mireille’s cold rationality, so she is the empathetic saint of the bunch.
This initial three have a very clashing dynamic, and I’ve noticed that a lot of people end up disliking some of them while really liking others, which makes sense. This also resulted in the character score being my lowest score on the RR advanced review metrics….
But I didn’t want a group of characters that all agreed with each other and had no fights, so I made sure there was ample opportunity for tension.
Now, Olivia was the last of the four to be added in, and I spent a lot of time thinking who she should be. We can’t have a 4 cute girls go adventure story with only 3, can we? Eventually I landed on the old Victorian doctor archetype, as it felt like a good fit. I made her sort of murderous too, as I felt we needed some additional murder in the party now that Marie was in the mix. This is Maid to Kill after all.
Murder is always the final result.
Setting and Tone
You may have noticed that the story has a bit of an industrial bent to it. Basically, I just thought: “Why have only one revolution, when we could have two?” Thus, the industrial revolution vibes joined the story.
The world is not quite our earth, but obviously is very close. If you are curious about the map and countries, it’s actually based on the mod Divergences of Darkness for Victoria 2, so you can have a look there to see what the world looks like.
The tone of the story sort of shifts between gritty violence and light-hearted banter, and this is very intentional. I think combat maids are inherently a bit of a silly thing, so just doing full seriousness would have felt wrong. The tone is a hard thing to nail, and is something I will be honing a lot in further edits for ebook release, but I am generally satisfied with how it is.
The release
The release of Maid to Kill was a hectic one, and I have quite a few regrets about it. Basically, I wanted to have the story written up to the point where Marie gets introduced before I launched (chapter 42), but I instead ended up in rewrite hell, just writing the same set of chapters over and over again. The first 8 chapters of Maid to Kill were originally very different, and they went through over 6 rewrites before their current form, with no sign of an end.
The cover was a big factor in this. After writing the initial drafts, I commissioned a cover from my sister who is super talented(big shoutout!) and it turned out fantastic! I looked at the cover, and suddenly felt that I had to make the story a lot better so it could live up to the cover, and so the rewrites went on.
Eventually, I decided to just release the story so that I could move on, and I did so with a backlog of only 8 chapters. Surely, I would have ample time to write more, right? Wrong. Somehow, Maid started growing crazy fast.
We hit rising stars with only 7 chapters, and hit number 1 after only 14 chapters posted! We grew a lot faster than I could have imagined, so I was writing new chapters in a mad panic, especially as I needed to get a patreon set up before my author friends yelled at me too much. This sort of ended in disaster.
The hiatus
There were a lot of reasons why I went on that 3-month unannounced surprise hiatus, so let’s go over them. First, I was struggling to write. I was moving to Japan, and with a schedule of four chapters a week I just couldn’t keep up.
Especially as I felt like the quality was slipping.
Once I hit the top of rising stars, I received quite a bit of negative reviews and comments, and they got a lot of upvotes. At one point, the front page of my story had like 3 negative reviews which said the story had gone to shit after chapter 8, and should have ended right there.
Not the nicest thing to see upvoted to the top, and rather demotivating, but I could deal. What really got to me were the numbers. Publishing online content like this really makes you obsess over performance, and I spent a lot of time just staring at my author dashboard as the follower numbers went up.
But then they started going down.
After I fell from rising stars, suddenly I was losing followers with every chapter I posted. I would post a chapter, then instantly see my followers drop by 20 right after, and then they would recover by 15 by the time I posted the next chapter. It did not feel good, especially as I felt I had managed to write some pretty good chapters too.
In the end, I sort of crashed and burned. While writing a story, I basically spend all my time thinking about the story and about how I should be writing it right now, and I spent my first month in Japan like that. The reason I didn’t announce a hiatus or pause patreon was that I genuinely planned to return soon, just tomorrow, I’ll write any minute I swear!
Then I didn’t. I stopped thinking about the story every moment, but instead I started feeling dread because I had disappeared on everybody. During my hiatus, I didn’t open my royalroad or patreon page even once, since I was afraid of what I would see there.
It took quite a bit of time before I finally managed to return to writing, and honestly, those first few weeks where I just wrote without posting to RR were my most productive ever. It felt great. I managed to return to writing consistently.
And we started growing. Somehow, since coming back from hiatus, Maid to Kill went from 5.2k followers to 7k followers in just two months! Then I released a silly rock story, and that somehow hit best-rated.
I had been worried that I would be stuck at 5k forever and never manage to write another good story again, so this all relieved me a lot, and made my confidence in my own writing stronger. While on hiatus, I honestly doubted whether I would even ever write anything again. Now, however, I do feel like I want to stick to this long-term.
Can I maybe even become a professional author? Hopefully. Let there be lots more maid.
Regrets
I take all my feedback very seriously (I do read every single comment and review!), and am constantly trying to improve as an author, so naturally, I know quite a bit about the missteps along the way. Here are the biggest things I would want to change if I could go back in time.
1. My number one regret was launching too early and trying to write too fast afterward. It affected my writing quality, mental health, and also sabotaged my patreon launch quite a bit. A late patreon with only 5 small chapters really isn’t ideal, and Maid never really recovered from that.
2. My second regret is the beginning of the Palogne arc, because I sort of had the worst idea of all time there. As I said earlier, Maid to Kill part 1 is loosely based on certain types of light novels, so I had the idea that every arc we would sort of pretend things would devolve to standard boring adventurers guild stuff, and then I would pull the rug all like “surprise! You thought the story was becoming boring? No! Murder murder kill kill fire explosions!”
And it worked too. With the beginning of the Palogne arc, I introduced a boring random girl character so readers would think she is joining the party, I had Fayette go on a pointless adventurer’s guild thing and then had her go hunt slimes and rats. And quite a lot of readers left. Damn, I managed to fool them good, didn’t I?
Why did I think this was a good idea again?
3. Revolution. Now, when I first had the chapter where Marat and Robes Pierre were introduced, a lot of people were surprised. “Wait, what? This story has French revolution things in it?” I even had one review lower the score because they got so confused.
That was when I realized my mistake. The whole concept of this story was Combat Maid X French Revolution, but somehow I forgot to add much of any revolutionary elements into the first bits. In my defence, I wanted it to be a sort of slow-burn plotline, and the main character is named after a very famous revolutionary figure, but I can see how it felt odd to many.
With a second draft, I will probably add Marat to the Palogne plotline somehow, though I don’t know quite how yet. Fun fact: the original title of this story was going to be Revolutionary Maid Fayette. Things would have probably been a lot clearer if I had ended up using that.
4. Progression. I receive a lot of comments from people asking about when Fayette will get a class-up, what a capstone skill is, when she will get one etc. This is because I didn’t make the story an isekai, and I also avoided doing direct exposition dumps for how the system works, which isn’t ideal for Royalroad stories. It’s hard to build anticipation for levelups when readers don’t understand what they should be anticipating, so I hope to improve on this in the future.
Future of Maid
With the first part of Maid to Kill, I wanted to focus on exploring the world and seeing how the lower strata of society were treated. Basically, part one was the tale of workers and commoners. With part two we will be moving upward in society, and there will be a lot more historical fiction elements involved.
The French Revolution forms the overarching plot of the series, while the individual parts will all have their distinct flavor to them. Part one was a travelling adventure thing, which was fun to write, but also had its issues. It was difficult to have a good side cast with the MC gang always moving, and it was tough to write fights and other scenes when I always had to have all four main characters in there.
I ended up splitting the party a lot later, but for my first story featuring fights, having so many group fights was very challenging.
In total, my current plan is for this story to have five parts, and you will be able to track how far along we are by seeing what historical events are happening. Right now, we are barely started, so it’s going to be a long path to proper revolution.
For part two, I will be focusing a lot more on only one distinct place as the setting, and the crew will be spending most of their time there. My main writing goals are to focus on writing a good sidecast, managing anticipation and suspense better, and to have more interesting villains.
I also think I will move back to somewhat shorter chapters, on a faster schedule. This is something I’ll keep on testing out and refining as I search for a comfortable writing pace.
I hope you will enjoy it!
Patreon
I’ve kept my patreon as a 5-dollar tier only even with the larger chapters, because I felt guilty about abandoning my patreons for 3 months, so I wanted to make sure my patreons got a finished volume 1 before I do any changes.
For now, I’ve also been uploading chapters right after I finish them, which has resulted in a bit of an erratic schedule, where sometimes I’ll have two chapters on the same day, then a few weeks of silence before another big chapter drop. I think this has been bad for my patreons performance, so I’ll be moving to more consistent uploads, where I post chapters at a more consistent pace with a bit of backlog.
I will also be adding a 10 dollar tier with more advance chapters some time in the future, because I want to see if I can make this story have a viable patreon. I live in an expensive country and right now Maid has one of the worst performing patreons on RR, so the current situation means I will probably have to publish the story on Kindle Unlimited if I want to write it for a living.
Supporting Fayette
This is the part where I will beg my RR readers to leave some nice reviews and stuff so my falling rating starts to go up. But you all are my patreons. You all are awesome enough to actually pay me money for my writing.
Somehow, that still feels unreal.
Super big thanks to all of you! I hope to keep writing a story you all will enjoy.
I’ll be taking a quick break of around two weeks to rest up and to plan out part 2 before I start posting again. If you have any questions or things you want to say after this long and rambling blogpost, leave them and I’ll do my best to answer!
