Author Spotlight: RPGLit Sci-Fi Author, eskay
eskay (no pronouns/eskay) is a queer millennial who has successfully managed to turn a hobby of reading visual novels on YouTube into a hobby writing original fiction. eskay works as a proofreader and editor for video game writing, has 1cc’d ‘Embodiment of Scarlet Devil’ on normal difficulty, and is quite tired at the moment, thank you very much.
Author Links
Novel: 8pr.itch.io/mrrd
Bsky: @gravitygales.bsky.social
YouTube: catgirl.training (yes, that is a legitimate hyperlink)
As a debut author, can you share what you’ve learned through your writing journey, and how you found your own voice through that process?
In short: writing is hard. I was one of those people who had a bad experience with high school-level English classes and then took a while to recover. While I never lost my love of reading, something about how I was taught to regard literature killed my curiosity towards the written word.
It wasn’t until much later in life, when my wife and I began playing visual novels together, that I would rediscover that interest. Something about reading with a partner reignited my appreciation not just for the story portrayed, but the text itself. I began to notice how the specific choice and ordering of language could convey so much more than the words on their own ever could, and that led me down a rabbit hole I would never emerge from.
From there, I put in years of graceless practice, deep reading, and short story writing in order to find my voice. I also spent a lot of time writing fanfiction—having characters and settings pre-made and ready to go made it easier to focus on the actual craft of writing when ideas were scarce. I was also fortunate to have practice editing others’ writing, something I have my frequent collaborator ChaseFOX to thank for.
Comparing my own writing to others’ gave me a much deeper appreciation for the unspoken rules of written language. But having put in the work to get here, I can definitely say that I’m better of for it. Written expression is something that is uniquely in reach for anyone with patience and a keyboard, and if you had an early bad experience like I did, I would encourage you to revisit that passion if it catches your interest.
Tell us about your first novel, Summoned to Another World, but All I’m Supposed to Do is Farm MYTHIC-RARITY RAID DROPS. Where did the idea for the premise come from, and what were your main influences?
The main premise of the novel came to me just before I was furloughed due to the pandemic. Having worked in various retail jobs for the entirety of my adult life, I was becoming increasingly radicalized by the disparity between the effort I put into my work and the compensation I received. It was becoming impossible to envision a future where I didn’t end up taking my own life, and having decided it was pointless to continue trying, I turned to video games as a coping mechanism. For a very long time, they were my refuge from the unthinkable.
It took a while longer before I recognized my unhealthy habits for what they were: escapism. And in naming that particular malady, the concept for this novel came to me. What if I did actually manage to escape from my daily life into a video game world—what would that change about my future? What problems would it solve? And would it even help things in the end? And then it took me six years to write the damn thing.
As for influences: I am definitely not the first person to write about living within a video game world, and I certainly owe a debt of gratitude to series like ‘Sword Art Online’ for popularizing it as a literary device. But most of my influence is taken from more placid and thoughtful takes on the trope, especially the early-aughts anime ‘.hack//SIGN.’
I also drew a lot from media that explore how humans use video games and the internet and as a means of communication, like the comic series ‘User’ and ‘Recovery of an MMO Junkie.’ And, of course, the game world I portray obviously borrows heavily from looter shooters like ‘Destiny’ and ‘Borderlands 2,’ with a healthy dose of ‘No Man’s Sky’ on the side.
While this is a light novel, it has some heavy themes. What drew you to explore the darker sides of specifically adult, queer life, within the genre/s of portal fantasy/pulp Sci-Fi?
This may be surprising to people who are only familiar with the genre in passing, but death-as-escape is an incredibly common trope among portal fantasy and isekai novels—especially those that wind up being adapted into popular anime (and are therefore more widely recognized in popular consciousness). I think there’s a common misconception about these stories that misses the underlying purpose behind them.
Many popular light novel series are dismissed as empty power fantasies or idle distractions, when the real reason they’ve become so popular is that they are always presented as an alternative to the dead-end struggles of modern life. The vast majority of these stories start with the protagonist dying, often regretting decisions unmade and a life spent toiling aimlessly. Thankfully, some otherworldly deity is quick to intercede and offer them a comfortable karmic rebirth in apology for their suffering. In this context, the fantasy being sold is not a sudden influx of incredible power for it’s own sake; it’s the prospect of not having to work a nine-to-five anymore.
The power is just the means to support that end. In that way, this genre was actually the natural choice for someone like me, who wanted desperately to write about suicide.
If there’s something different I’ve done, it’s only that I’ve made that initial death and the reasoning behind it the centerpiece of my story, and not merely the inciting action.
There’s also a kind of gratuitous permission to light novels that allows authors to write about difficult or upsetting subject matter without having to dress it up in the pretensions of mainstream literature.
Consciously or not, people tend to expect less narrative depth from a story featuring dragons and spaceships and talking guns, and that underestimation can allow authors the license they need to express difficult ideas. …Okay, not always. Sometimes a power fantasy is just a power fantasy. But that is not categorically the case is my point.
How did you go about world building within the video game world? Were there any constraints you applied or game mechanics you came up with that were challenging/fun to work with?
A common trap I’ve noticed with stories about video game worlds (or fantasy worlds using video game-like mechanics) is that they feel the need to explain the inner workings of their settings in meticulous detail, even when it’s not needed to move the plot forward. This often leads to needlessly technical info-dumps that can easily alienate an audience whose investment in your work you must fight to retain.
Early on, I made a conscious decision to leave everything about the mechanics of the game world as open-ended as I possibly could, and only specify details only when it made narrative sense to do so. This means that the actual mechanics I portray follow from the needs of the plot, and not vice versa. This would certainly be a terrible way to design an actual, literal video game, but hey—I’ve got different priorities. This is a novel, so the story has to come first.
Share your favourite scene or quote with us (if you can without too many spoilers).
My personal favorite part of this story is a running joke involving a specific weapon that spouts incorrect Nietzsche quotes whenever it is used to defeat something. In writing about the allure of suicide and how to move past it, Nietzsche was obviously not far from my mind. That said, there’s a certain perverse joy I found in taking his well-considered thoughts and turning them into silly jokes about MMO game mechanics. I’m sure he would’ve been both confused and appalled.
Do you feel this experience has set you up for future writing projects, and if so would you also publish these on Itch.io, or are you looking at widening your distribution?
Having proven to myself that I can write a novel from start to end, I am now possessed by the desire to continue doing so—and unfortunately for my friends and family, that is now their problem to deal with. I have already started working on my next novel, though I’m still very early in the research phase at this moment. I chose to release Mythic-Rarity Raid Drops on itch because I had originally released some short-form interactive fiction pieces there. It just seemed easier than trying to find a different way to share a story that I wasn’t sure would even generate much interest in the first place. I don’t know if I’ll ever expand how I distribute my writing in the future. For all of my literary posturing, novels about suicidal trans women with talking swords are still kind of niche. For now, I’m content releasing it for free and knowing that it’s reached some small number of people beyond my own circle of friends.
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