Total pages in book: 210
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 200837 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1004(@200wpm)___ 803(@250wpm)___ 669(@300wpm)
It’s Finn. He’s talking about Finn. And whoever that redhead girl is he was carrying when things exploded back in Tau City.
“You’re going to get ahead of him on the line, cross over, take over the factories, and you’re going to kill any pseudo-gods you find inside the factories. Every single one of them until they are gone. And of course, put an end to this rebellious Worker and his product. When you’re done with that, we’ll talk again.” Delta taps the glass and it all disappears.
I wait, but apparently this meeting is over because he comes out from behind the desk and offers me his hand, looking me straight in the eyes as we shake on it. “You leave in three days. Prepare your Courtesan, she’s going with you. All gods need food. Good luck and Godspeed, Godslayer.”
I open my mouth to ask just what the fuck that means, but he disappears, right before my eyes, like he was never here.
All gods need food.
And there it is. Confirmation.
I’m in the game.
EOBS
Welcome to the End of Book Shit. This is the part of the book where I get to say whatever I want about what you just read. It’s never edited so there’s always gonna be a typo or ten.
I actually have a lot to say about this book. First of all, it took me four months to write. Which is a very long time for me to spend on a single book without stopping to work on something else. I worked on this book exclusively from August 13, 2023 until December 17, 2023.
I wasn’t gonna write this one next. I put up a post on my author Facebook page early summer 2023 (I think) listing a bunch of projects I had on my list. Sparktopia was one of them but I was calling it ‘Dark Romantasy’ back then.
People had all kinds of opinions on what I should write next but one comment stood out to me. She said that I should write the one that sounds the most fun, or would make me happy. Something like that. And the comment stuck because Sparktopia was the one on my mind.
I had only come up with the idea a few weeks before. And I think I actually came up with it while I was on a zoom call with the guys for writing sprints. And all I had was the ‘high concept’.
And this is exactly what that was:
“There is a god in a tower in the center of the city.
He is not good; he is not bad; he just is.
But, like all things, he has desires.
Every ten years, ten Maidens are chosen.
But only one is presented to the god in the tower.
Until now.”
By the time I sat down to write this story in August I had a little more than that:
“Unexpectedly, the god starts demanding more Maidens for Extraction and one by one they are called inside the tower. Now Clara stands on the precipice of her turn and her dreams of living life with the man she loves are threatened.
But there is hope. Clara’s childhood sweetheart, Finn, is in charge of the Extraction. Surely, he will save her from the insatiable desire of this mysterious god. Won’t he?
At the same time, a rebellion is brewing. The forgotten underclass has a plan in place to finally put an end to the tower and the god. But there is a price for freedom. And it might be more than they can afford to pay.
When Clara is forced into the tower against her will she discovers something very unexpected.
The thing inside the tower is not a god at all.
He’s just a man.
One who will destroy the entire city to get what he wants.
Her.”
I almost NEVER follow the plot presented in the “before book” blurb. It’s just a way to get started or fill in a field when putting a book up on pre-order. And I thought for sure that I would have to abandon this blurb when I was about halfway done.
Which is fine. I did write another one. Several, actually.
But looking back I don’t think the ‘before book’ blurb is too far off. Of course, we now know that Anneeta was the god in the tower and she had nothing to do with Clara’s Tau City at all. At least we don’t think so at present. So that’s kinda off. And I had envisioned Tyse being a little more… mean, I think. But he didn’t present that way and I don’t like to twist characters into something they’re not just to fit into my initial expectations.
So he’s not mean. But he is a little bit rigid.
Anyway, I want to talk about the characters one by one in this EOBS and Tyse is last, so I will save any further comment for that.
First up is Clara. She is pretty much exactly how I imagined her in my head when this idea came to me. She and Finn stayed the same throughout. Their struggle changed a little because, believe it or not, I didn’t have the spark magic system set up before I started writing. I don’t even know where the whole ‘spark’ thing came from—it’s just one of those weird things that pops out while you’re writing. And I’m pretty sure that it didn’t show up until I started Part 2, so I was a good 50,000 words into this story before I had the magic figured out.