Dark Souls Prepare To Die Edition Archive

[Yamila Comejo]

I don't necessarily see these two things as linked, but I will try to answer this together. No, that never occurred to me. That was not something that I ever had as an idea. There was a time when there was a lot of pressure on me to have him go through a thorough romantic life, so therefore he would have multiple love interests. Some of the romantic relationships would end badly or end soon. But that would've taken up a lot of the books and I didn't want to write it, so there you go.

That depends on whether Crusher's conceptual ability to destroy it outranks the Tartarus steel's ability to be indestructible. I'll either get into that at the end of Cradle or I'll get into it in the next Traveler's Gate series, but there are ranks to that sort of thing. When the principals that outrank physical laws come into contact, it depends on which one outranks the other one.

Mu Enkai is not only dead, but he - somebody asked earlier about the afterlife in Cradle and I'm going to give a non-canon answer. Mu Enkai died and his soul went to Cradle Hell, and then it was killed again. So, he's double dead. He's the deadest man in all of history. There has never been anyone as dead as Mu Enkai is now dead. It set a record, as a matter of fact.

So... My most despised food are red bell peppers. I can't eat 'em. I just can't do it. I cannot eat red bell peppers. Anything with red bell peppers in it, if I smell red bell peppers, I will die. It is the worst, I can't taste them. Anything with them in there. And one of the big problems is with a lot of this frozen foods they don't have a whole lot of flavor so they add red bell peppers to it in order to give 'em a little bit of color and flavor and I can't; I can't do it; I just can't do it. And a lot of cheap crab cakes too. They just add red peppers to it. And I love crab cakes, but I can't do it.

What favorite spiritual food... most despised spiritual reward. I don't know what that means. I guess maybe like if red peppers gave you a power, what would it be? It would be something related to venom aura or poisonous madra because they are toxic and the food of death.

There has been debate about exactly what happened when Northstrider took Dross from Lindon but ended up letting Lindon join. Did Lindon prevent the spatial opening from fully closing? Did he start re-opening it? Or did Northstrider just feel Lindon's strength of desire and decided to re-open it and bring him? What exactly happened?

I think, probably, the number one thing that I regret or think is weird, is names and terms. That's the weird stuff. I shared in the blog a while back that I had a pokemon trader vibe for Ziel and I wrote out that character thing and nah; just nah. So I cut that stuff and then I look back and I go... no. But then usually it's just names. I have to come up with so many name ideas before one sticks that inevitably I have one that's really stupid.

One of the other things, as I was starting writing Cradle, I was coming up with these ways where I wanna make it clear that this is inspired by Chinese cultivation fantasy, but doesn't take place in China. Even mythological china. It's also inspired by a lot of Korean and Tibetan mythology and all this stuff as well. But it's primarily, especially early, these Chinese cultivation novels. So, I was like "how do I show that?" and I had a lot of bad ideas for that. Not really. I mean I was just brain-storming, so I on all these tropes I could take over, but didn't work. So I ended up striking a balance I was pretty happy with.

In your last stream, you compared the Valinhall Incarnation to Overlords from Cradle. Since Simon with the mask is equal-ish to an Incarnation, would that make White Light Simon somewhere within the realm of Archlords? The boost seemed like it was pretty big.

It's hard to make these comparisons. I think I probably said is that Lindon as an Underlord or Overlord is roughly physically compatible with Simon when he's using the mask and going full power. That's probably true, but Lindon can also shoot disintegrating fire from his hands. There's a lot that Cradle has a lot for more deadly powers than Valinhall does. I would say that Simon would be outclassed in Cradle pretty quickly. At least as he is now.

That is up to interpretation. Lindon doesn't know; he didn't see. So who knows. Probably a little bit of all of that. So he probably went out, found a fight he knew he was going to lose, and went out fighting.

Negative? A lot of people demonize adverbs. I do not think adverbs and adjectives are necessarily wrong. When we overuse them of course they're a problem. But I think it's a tool like anything else. Passive voice is just generally worse than active voice in most cases.

The plan was to get a job. Preferably teaching because I had taught during grad school at UCF. I was planning to get a job teaching English somewhere and I just assumed I was going to have to. I didn't consider it a backup plan. I considered it a, I'm going to make a couple hundred bucks so I can survive the summer so I can apply for another teaching position. But the books worked so I never had to do that.

No, not particularly. I wrote her in Uncrowned to be another Akura to be another notable person in this generation. Then I realized I was going to use her again in Winter Steel. And then she just kind of worked out. I sort of killed most of those people. Interesting

Yes I have. I have been to Guatemala, Honduras, Spain. Canada if that counts as abroad. Florida counts as abroad so the rest of the United States counts as one and then Florida counts as it's own thing. And I have been to Alaska. And Germany. And Israel.

The reason why "Canada, if that counts" is not because Canada isn't a different country, it's because with Canada all you have to do is cross the boarder. I wasn't saying Canada is part of the United States.

Well I would have authority over all of Florida, I think. It would colloquially be known as the Swamp Icon. It would be a gator halfway disappearing into some muck. I would gain the ability to turn things into swamps, survive in swamps, and permanent sunscreen.

So it's been a while. I don't remember which Yan Shoumei scenes I kept and which ones I did not. I don't really remember. So it's hard for me to answer. There was some stuff about her being abandoned as a baby and raised by a group of fishermen then she's kind of representing her city and Anagi was a local Archlord who was sort of pushing her out. I had all that in there, but I don't remember if that made it to the final book or not. Someone will have to tell me.

We'll explore that a little bit, I think. I think that's something I'm going to go into in the future. But, definitely the more powerful you were, you get to skip some things when you ascend. One of the things is, a lot more people ascend than are considered to be recruits for the Abidan. I sort of implied this a little bit [unintelligible] the books, but I didn't really go into it. But, a lot more people ascend on their own than are considered Abidan recruits, either because of talent, or temperament, or they just don't want to, yada yada yada. There's a lot of reasons why you could ascend from your world and then not be recruited into the Abidan. So powerful individuals coming in would be higher priority recruits and would get to skip some of the extra hoops that other people have to jump through.

You get into the hundreds of years, easily 200 years as an Underlord. 100-200 years more as Overlord. Archlord would be high hundreds. Functionally, people on Cradle don't ever live to their maximum lifespan. The more advanced into the sacred arts you go, the more risks you start taking. So then at Sage and Herald it's functionally an unlimited lifespan. It's not technically unlimited and you'd live for several thousand years before you died. There're ways to extend that though. If you wanted to live forever you could.

I feel like the Eldest Nye would win, but he'd be annoyed by the game. Eithan would be very annoying the entire time. He wouldn't care whether he'd won or not. The Eldest Nye would win the game, but he wouldn't have a good game with Eithan annoying him.

Since sacred beasts can become sentient over time, do advanced ones view ownership of sacred beasts akin to slavery? For example, Eithan says his family owned a breeding pair of Heavenly Sky Tigers. What would Reigan Shen think of that?

By and large, its kind of like how humans think of monkeys. So, if it's not a sentient sacred beast, they don't really care. It's just an animal to them as well. They eat non-sentient sacred beasts. So its just a distinction between are you sentient or are you not sentient. That's it. While virtually any animal can become sentient by absorbing aura, its so far removed that that's not considered something that anybody really worries about. Unless they have developed sentience, in which case, then they're off limits. And that counts as effectively cannibalism in their world, if you ate a sentient creature.

100%. It's gonna be romantic comedy following Fisher Gesha's dating life as she goes around and really just lives it up. It's kind of like Golden Girls, but its one girl. So, it's Spider Girl, but not the comic.

I assume so, at some point. The problem is that I always have other things to work on. So, I didn't realize this until today, but I've released 4 books in the last 365 days. So, that's a lot. That's a lot of books. There's always more to work on. I'm always trying to make it more efficient, always trying to work on the next book and short stories are never important or urgent. They are always kind of low on the totem pole and while I enjoy writing them and people enjoy reading them and I would like to get back to them, it's hard to find time to do that when I could be working on another book, for instance.

Wow, that's a really good question. So the way Presences work is they have to, uh, they have varying degrees of personality and individuality. So obviously Dross is on the higher scale of that. Whereas Suriel keeps hers toned down. So they still have a sense of identity and they still have a sense of - I can't name the word I'm thinking of, so I'm going to skip it. They still understand who they are and they are individuals, but they don't necessarily - you do kind of form a partnership, but it's either- sometimes they don't really mind. But every once in a while you would have conflict. Some people even prefer that, they prefer to have somebody who will talk back to them. You see that a little bit with Suriel in book one. She likes having a voice to debate.

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