Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

Imagine you spent years and years doing the wrong things. You worked jobs that didn’t pay well. You did tasks that didn’t fulfill you, and often didn’t seem to matter to the people you were doing them for. All the while, you knew that it was all just a gigantic waste of time.

You did that while fighting off despair and sorrow just enough to keep trying new things, to keep pivoting around different talents and skill sets. You help hope of finding a worthwhile thing to do, something that was useful to people in a way that let you wake up every morning knowing that you were spending your time in a way that made both your life and the lives of others better.

Now imagine that one day you woke up and got to do that. The world that kept covering you in scrapes, bruises, and wounds had somehow shifted just a few degrees, leaving just enough of a gap in the walls of the prison that you could squeeze through into an open world of worthwhile effort. Imagine what that would feel like.

That’s Arthur’s story. It’s also mine.

For years and years, I kept a family of four going on an amount of money that, if I told you what it was, would shock you. We had a list of tricks we’d work through every time we needed to get something done. When we needed to buy new shoes for the kids, there would be a whole song and dance to figure out how we could do both that and pay the rent. In the meantime, I’d be doing my best at jobs that were horrible fits for me in almost every way. I’d never move forward because I didn’t (by the standards of whatever business) deserve it.

And I think something like five years ago, I was so deep in the despair of uselessness and bad-fit jobs that I never felt like I’d get out. And then things started to change. I got lucky in some non-fiction writing, which got me better jobs, which gave me more time to write, which let me meet people who encouraged me to do even more writing, and eventually led me to be confident enough and positioned well enough to make a big bet on Deadworld Isekai. Deadworld did well enough that we could take another bet on How to Survive at the End of the World, which in turn let us get to Demon World Boba Shop.

And finally, after a long, long journey, I feel like I’m writing exactly what I’m supposed to be writing, and doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

I’ve had readers ask a question that usually goes something like this:

Why does Arthur feel so undeserving of success? He’s been told he is liked. He’s seen the effort he puts into his work. Why can’t he accept it?

The answer is the same for him as it is for me, I think. When you go far enough into the dark, it becomes hard to imagine that the light even exists. You begin to believe that the physics of the world are such that it’s impossible for a sun to exist. And then one day when you’re finally lifted out of the blackness, the thought that sticks in your mind is that one day the world will realize that it made a mistake, adjust the physics one more time, and plunge you back into the pit of darkness. It’s hard to imagine you deserve it, let alone that you can sustain it.

It’s incredibly hard to feel like success is something you really earned.

And, in turn, it’s incredibly easy to be thankful for what you have. As of the time of writing this note, the first Demon World Boba Shop novel has just become available for purchase in various places, joining the entire How to Survive trilogy. In a few weeks, Deadworld Isekai will be published through Podium.

To all appearances, all those series are doing pretty well. It’s starting to look like I’ll be able to keep doing this long term, which absolutely doesn’t feel real for a guy who once had a job that stressed him out so much he threw up blood.

So, first things first, thanks for that. You reading this has contributed in a big way to me being able to keep doing what I like to do, and feeling for the first time in my life that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. When/if you review the book, it helps that much more. If you recommend it to a friend, you help in real, substantial ways, and I’m thankful to you for it.

Second, the current plan is to keep writing Demon World Boba Shop novels until people get fully sick of them. Part of that plan is because I really like writing them, of course, but a bigger reason is because people have told me they’ve helped them get through hard times, or made already-good times that much better for them. I feel a duty to keep serving those people for as long as I can, to keep them as happy and as stress-free as a humble writer is able, until they, as a group, tell me to cut it out.

And, third, it means I’m always looking for ways to repay that debt. One of the ways I try to do that is by giving you a peek behind the scenes of what I was thinking, feeling, and trying to do as I wrote the novel. It’s not an exhaustive list of every single element of the story, but I try to paint a picture of what my writing process was like that’s detailed enough for other writers to read and get some ideas from.

You don’t have to be a writer to read them, of course. But it’s a dream of mine that in some small way this might let someone who is trying to find their place in the world find it. If I can help with that, it’s just that much more confirmation that, like Arthur, I’ve found the place I should be.

I write these notes in a fairly stream-of-consciousness fashion, so you get raw, unprocessed, and honest thoughts of what writing the book was like. It also means it’s going to be rough/weird in parts. Be forewarned, then, that here be typos and bad grammar. But also, I hope, insight.

Enjoy.

Setting

Coldbrook

I’m imagining that most of you haven’t read Twilight. I have. It’s not an incredibly well-written book in a lot of ways. The prose isn’t great. The characters aren’t fantastic. But there is one thing it does incredibly well, something that I’ve read and marvel at and that makes the book entirely deserving of its success.

The author manages to create a main character with absolutely no characteristics whatsoever. Bella Swan has no personality, no traits, and almost no appearance. Guys like her, but it’s not because of anything she is or does. She just smells nice, very literally so, and that’s enough for them.

If that seems like weak writing, bear in mind that it allowed an entire generation of young women to effortlessly imagine the book was about them, and that all the vampire-and-werewolf romance bits were happening in their own lives. They could do that because Bella herself was nothing. You can’t have a contradiction without details.

When I was writing the setting for the third novel, I wanted a town that stole some of that non-specificity. Here are the things we know about Coldbrook:

It’s kind of a peninsula

The town is walled in by cliffs on the peninsula’s two “long sides”

There’s a stream that goes through the town

There’s a beach on the far point of the landmass

There’s generally terrain and forest outside of the “mouth” of the town

And that’s it. There’s an actual place my mental image of the place was based on (Elk Creek Second Meadows, in Colorado, a place I’ve only seen on deep-dives in Google Maps) but my intent was always to make it vague enough that you could imagine it for yourself. I don’t truly know what makes things beautiful for you, and my description of a perfect place could never really match your own imagination’s ability to tailor beauty for itself.

And so you are left with a vague image of two cliffs, a river, and a beach. But my hope is that you were able to fill in the gaps yourself, and that you were able to do a better job than I could. I think for most people that’s probably true.

There were difficulties related to that, though. It’s a peninsula, which means its size is somewhere between “smallish” and “Florida”. Since this is never made clear, it’s hard to imagine at what point they will fill the cliff-bound space and have to create bigger and bigger walls around the town. We don’t really know how wide it is, so it’s hard to imagine how many rows of houses and shops can fill it.

Writing around that was kind-of hard. Believe it or not, vagueness is in some ways much more difficult than specifics. In the end, I think I was happy with how it turned out. It was a cloud of cobblestone streets (Slapstone, really, and then brick), buildings of tan and red, a cold, clear river and one beautiful terraced-tea farm. To me, it was beautiful. I’m hoping it was for you, too.

Slapstone

Slapstone was a fun imagining for me. I myself am incapable of making buildings, so if I tried to talk to you about laying mortar down or erecting brick walls, you’d almost immediately sense the bullshit and it would make the story less real to you. What I do know, at least a bit better, is how building works in video games. In video games, you stack blocks. It’s electronic Legos, a situation where you point-and-click walls into place. And it’s highly satisfying when it’s done right.

Slapstone was meant to be the fantasy equivalent of the video game material. It’s a stone that likes to break in straight lines (which is a real thing that falls under the geological concept of cleavage in some materials) and that “heals” to other blocks of Slapstone it’s adjacent to.

The demons tend to think of Slapstone as a great find, a kind of gift-of-the-system that allows people to build without having building classes. If you can cut it into blocks (which you can) and stack it (which Karra can, or anyone with a pretty good strength stat) then you can make structures.

Later on, the town’s supply of the stuff becomes pretty unlimited. But at first, I tried to make it seem very much a finite resource, so they’d have a reason to keep pumping out bricks and doing their best to not count on magic rocks to see them through all their troubles.

Trapped Dungeons

How do dungeons work, really? Because in almost every LitRPG setting, they make themselves and restock themselves with monsters and treasures. They have to be getting the energy to do that from somewhere, right?

Depending on the setting, they’re either doing this as a function of the system, or as a function of the world and the way it works (and would work, even if the system wasn’t there, like in dungeon-invasion novels). In DWBS, I tried to make it a hybrid. It’s part of the world, sanctioned by the system, and it works by drawing in ambient majicka (which is a lot like how dungeons worked in Deadworld Isekai). That majicka is formed into monsters, which are then harvestable as materials/food/whatever. The only problem is that if you don’t actually go in and harvest all that majicka-made-beast, it eventually overflows, the dungeon breaks and sends out a wave, and you get eaten.

But what if the dungeon was encased in rock, far underground? What you’d get would be a machine that focuses majicka, overflows constantly, but is entirely contained. The area near it would be constantly fertilized by that power, and would benefit in a variety of ways. At least until the pent-up monsters explodes outwards.

I wanted the problem of the trapped dungeon to be real, but not super dangerous or long-lasting. So when they find it, it’s still mostly contained, and right until the boss-monster of the wave crashes out. When the boss monster does get out, the trouble it causes is pretty well contained to one chapter.

Mana Sensitivity and “Allergies”

If you had a couple more points in vitality, you wouldn’t get allergies. Some people on Earth don’t.

There are some lucky bastards in real life with bodies strong enough/insensitive enough to toxins that they don’t get sniffy noses from pollen. In the Demon World, this wouldn’t be a thing. Having twice the vitality of a standard-issue human would pretty well nullify most of those kinds of problems.

Arthur, being from Earth, has never thought about this. To demons, allergies are a children’s disease, something you get before the system steps in to make you stronger and hardier than any natural-born being should be. When he coughs and sneezes, he thinks of it as normal. Other people think of it as something he’s probably smart enough to get checked out, and the problem continues building in the background of the book for a time.

When it finally floors Arthur, it’s a dangerous thing. He’s been in a majicka-rich environment for too long without treatment, and his skills have started to go haywire from the abundance. He becomes psychic, kind of, but that’s just a side effect of the fact that he’s about to get to fatally toxic levels of majicka buildup.

Part of why I included this (since I could have just, you know, not) was to get Itela in town. But I also wanted to start fleshing out the idea that health in the demon world is an odd thing. Most things can be cured, but the things that are left on the list of uncurables tend to be very commonplace or very dangerous.

Characters

Arthur

Arthur is still mostly Arthur. He doesn’t necessarily understand why nice things keep happening to him, and doesn’t feel like he deserves them. Worse, everyone trusts him in an absolute sense, relies on him constantly, and makes that reliance official by making him the mayor of the new town.

He deals with this in pretty standard Arthur ways, mostly by going hyperactive, forgetting he has a tea shop for a big part of the book (which is more understandable since the town doesn’t have a ton of people in it yet) and doing every single thing he can do to help everyone.

The biggest moment of the book for Arthur, at least for me, is when he stands up to Mizu’s mother. It’s not his business, and it’s something he could have easily avoided. But he’s been watching his girlfriend-who-he-loves steadily wilt under her mother’s disapproving gaze. He can’t tolerate that, so he yells at her, which brings some problems out of the shadows and gets them dealt with.

I think that’s less about development of character than it is about relationships. Arthur has always been the type of person who would stand up for a friend. But he didn’t really know that about himself, and other people didn’t really know it about him. After this, it’s pretty clear that Arthur isn’t the kind of guy who will let you hurt the people he loves without saying something.

Lily

Arthur’s class development takes a major backseat to Lily’s in this book, to the point where I don’t think we see a status sheet of Arthur’s until the novel is approaching the last third or so.

I have a brother who wrestled in high school and, because of the frankly insane way wrestling weight classes work, was forced to “cut weight”. For the uninitiated, this means that if he wanted to be competitive in that sport, he had to maintain a weight much lower than his natural, healthy weight, which meant he had to starve himself periodically. He’s much shorter than I am, probably as a direct result of that caloric deficit during his teen years.

I wanted the concerns around Lily’s class to revolve around the same kind of concern I wish someone felt for high school wrestlers. She’s not supposed to have a class yet at all, and she’s too young and too in-a-hurry to make good decisions about it. For Arthur, Eito, and anyone else who cares about her, there’s a real risk that she’ll work herself into a corner class-development-wise, or else hurt herself in some way they can’t anticipate.

Meanwhile, all Lily wants is to help people. The main person she wants to help, as always, is Arthur. While this is sweet, I think he correctly identifies a problem with that, in that she’s her own person with her own future, and “tea shop assistant” is a very limited scope for a person to build a future in.

As a result of the town’s guidance, she ends up with a much more general class than that, one that lets her help people just by being around them. It’s an aura-based buffer class, but avoids being absolutely passive by allowing her to be more effective the more she understands about the work she’s observing.

The class will grow more later, but for now, she’s in a class that mostly wants her to be around a lot of different kinds of work, rewards her for learning about a lot of different things, and gives other people a reason to keep talking to her. It’s a good fit.

Character-wise, she stays mostly the same. I think she’s naturally aging a bit as I write the character, and I think that mostly affects how she talks, rather than who she is at a fundamental level. I think I’m going to start tackling more of “who is Lily becoming?” in the next book, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Milo and Rhodia

We see very little character development from either of these people, mostly because they’re already who I want them to be. Rhodia works hard and is game for doing less appealing jobs (like brick making) and Milo is developing his mechanic class, but neither of these facts was interesting enough to hold up entire plots, and I didn’t try to make them.

And then they get married. I think for some readers this will seem a little out-of-the-blue, but the context is that they exist in a low-stress world with very little in the way of financial problems, sickness, or other things that often tank marriages. They’ve also been spending massive amounts of time with each other for what seems like year-to-years, and get along very well.

Combining those things, I tried to think of reasons why it would make sense for someone like Ella to object to them getting married, or for the demon world to have a prohibition against frontier marriages, and couldn’t think of any.

So they got married, and this is a good idea long-term because they live in the same house now. Less walking, more talking.

Don’t ask me about kids yet. I haven’t gotten that far.

Spiky and Leena

Spiky and Leena had very little to do in this book. Their actual jobs are “Taking care of books” and “Writing things down about things they see”, which aren’t always the most interesting things. I wanted them in the town, but they were necessarily not a huge part of this section of the story.

They won’t get married any time soon, for people who were worried about that. I think the next few books will have more problems that need academic solutions, and Spiky in particular taking more leadership roles. In particular, I’d like to see him take a swing at being the mayor. It makes sense to me that librarian classes would be good at leadership when things lined up well for them, so I’d like to give them some room to do that.

Karra

Karra was an exercise in the idea that jobs in the Demon World would probably be much less separated by gender. Since anyone can stack points in vitality and strength, differences in frame would matter much less, and you’d expect to see some warriors, workers, and ditch diggers who didn’t necessarily fit the physical shapes you’d normally associate with those things.

She’s Karbo’s niece, which I didn’t want to mean she was a carbon copy of exactly what he was. To the extent she takes after him, I wanted it to be how she interacts with the physical world. She likes moving, she likes working, and she’s exuberant when she gets a chance to do either.

Everyone likes her right away, which makes sense for the Demon World. That said, I tried to make her transition to “full member of the friend group” take a little bit of time. She’s appreciated and everyone is fond of her, but she’s not as close to everyone right at the beginning. It takes a bit of time.

Corbin

Corbin is around almost the entire book. If you don’t see him, that’s because your perception stat is just not high enough.

Mizu and Maar

I’ve said before that Mizu is not definitively autistic/spectrum. Some readers interpret her that way, and it’s a valid way to read her character. But to me, she’s mostly just… quiet. She watches things. She learns about people, and eventually talks more and interacts more as she learns more and gets more comfortable.

Maar, on the other hand, is spectrum. She is not a great communicator. She does not read other people’s emotions well or easily. I tried to write her at the level of some of my friends who are spectrum in a way that actually hinders their lives to some extent, that have to work really hard to interact with people with very different communication styles.

And what happens when you put the quiet girl who is a little afraid of her own mother in a situation where she suspects her mother will disapprove of her with the mother who misreads the situation and doesn’t communicate well? An emotional disaster.

Maar, for the record, is never anything less than proud of her daughter. She loves Mizu and is thrilled that she’s trying new things. She’s upset because Mizu doesn’t seem to have trusted her enough to ask her for help. When Arthur tells her that Mizu thinks she’s mad at her because his girlfriend wouldn’t follow in her footsteps, she sprints to clear up the misunderstanding just as soon as she’s sure Arthur won’t die.

She adores Arthur for dozens of reasons, including that he stood up for her daughter. If they wanted to get married tomorrow, she’d be against it because it’s too soon, but would absolutely accept Arthur as a potential husband for her daughter.

Maar, unlike Mizu, uses an even more archaic version of the “we did bad things to you” water demon greetings. She does this out of a deep respect for her family’s history, and probably does not fully understand how terrifying it makes her.

Mizu is mostly just still Mizu in this book, but we learn a little more about her, mostly that she’s not the kind of demon who gets married young, and that she’s a bit more ambitious/brilliant than we might have known in the city.

Lith, Kout, Skal, and the Lumberjack

The town needed more people in it than just the main crew, and I tried to make them useful but not game-changing classes. Lith is a hunter, which means they have a bit more protein, and Skal is a fisherman, which solves that problem even more. The lumberjack (whose name is used once or twice, and I consistently forget) and Kout help solve some problems with actually finding and harvesting materials the town would logically need. Between them, we can imagine the town getting through its early days without starvation being much of a problem.

Beyond the mere mechanical setting-enabling functions, I tried to make a few of them more interesting. Lith is brave and protective of the town, serving as its only real defense for much of the book. The fact that he’s only about half of a combat class (he’s mostly about food acquisition outside of dungeons) means he’s only slightly tougher and safer than everyone else.

Skal is a man in retirement, just trying to find a quiet place to fish and live out his elder years. He’s a wise grandpa who knows enough to not hurt the kids by getting in their way, and who allows them to make mistakes as needed. He is, quietly, an old master on the level of the breakfast master from the second book. I’m not sure whether or not I’m going to use that too much.

The Adults and the Moms

Karbo, Ella, Itela, and Minos are all a good distance away from Coldbrook. I wanted them to be close enough to come by if there were huge problems, but not close enough that they could always be relied on for this. The only times they are called on as a strategic resource is when Karbo is needed to curb stomp a monster that would otherwise have eaten everyone, and when Arthur is very sick. In both cases, they barely make it in time.

These are characters who I absolutely want in the series, but the difficulty in keeping them there is that most of them can easily solve problems that are more interesting if solved by the young people, who are figuring them out for the first time. In future books, I think they will be needed less and less, and will eventually be people who visit fairly often but otherwise don’t provide a ton of help.

The herd-of-moms was something I think would necessarily happen. Coldbrook was isolated for a while, well outside easy travel. The moms were discouraged from bothering them too soon too. Once the roads made travel easy and word that the town was doing fine got out, that would have unshackled dozens of worried mothers whose children were away for the first time. Better yet, it would have happened at a single point in time for all of them.

And thus you get a swarm of moms who verify their kids are safe and then find that it’s exactly wine-thirty and go into vacation mode. However beautiful you are imagining that Milo and Rhodia’s wedding was, understand that I’m just a mortal writer. The moms made it more beautiful than I have the skill to describe.

Daisy and Rumble

At some point during the writing of this book, I went to Bearizona, which is a park where you get to drive your car right past rescued bears. Bears are, to me, ultra-cute balls of fat that tumble around the woods, climb trees, and do fun bear things 24-7. I am unapologetically obsessed with them.

Daisy and Rumble are not quite bears, but they are the close. If they had met Arthur out in the woods, they might have eaten him. Instead, they meet him in a context in which they both need help that he is able to provide. Daisy dimly understands that he saved both her and her cub, and proposes a strategic alliance.

When Arthur is attacked by a monster, she is only somewhat bound to risk her life fighting off the threat. That said, she’s a big aggressive beast and sort of a badass, and makes good on her commitments in the most comprehensive way possible.

Because Arthur isn’t a monster tamer, Daisy and Rumble are still mostly wild animals. They will always be around, but will likely never jump through flaming hoops or live in the village.

Conclusion

As always, this book was a blast to write. It was, as a novel, a transition to a slower pace. I want to keep writing these forever, and I think long-term that means a transition to a more slice-of-life, has-a-plot-but-moves-a-bit-slower format. I think I accomplished that pretty well here, and I feel good about the chances of this series being a worthwhile read from now until some projected eternity.

To all the people who choose to read it, I once again can only offer more writing and my absolute thankfulness that you make my dream job possible. I love you, and I’ll see you in book four.

RC