🧙‍♂️Apocalypse Parenting Interview with Erin Ampersand | Delightful Recs | Recurring Revenue Monster

This week, we interview the very talented Erin Ampersand from Apocalypse Parenting, get our newest favorite stories, and salivate over these earnings.

WEEKLY RECS | INVITEAPALOOZA WINNER | ERIN AMPERSAND INTERVIEW | SNOOPINGS |

Inviteapalooza Winner - GREAT Story - Come on over to Immersive Ink

Immersive Ink, my favorite Discord Server for Authors, Readers, Media (hey that’s me👀👀), and anyone else held our Inviteapalooza! The winner for most invites was Author Sean Hall, from Towers of Ascension. Yes, it is very good. You like action? It’s got it. You like Family Adventure? Yup. Towers and Powers? Evil Gods? Yes. Yes. Go check it out here!

Weekly Recommendations - Stupendous Stories, Hidden Gems

Interview with Erin Ampersand from Apocalypse Parenting

Erin Ampersand’s Apocalypse Parenting follows Meghan navigating and surviving a forced System integration by evil Aliens in her Alabama suburb with her three young children. Most Author’s have the System protect children, or place them in limbo. These Aliens force the System, Skills, and Quests on kids as well. All three released books were like a breath of fresh air, with Meghan’s motherly instincts forcing her to take on a leadership role and while protecting her children in the only way possible, by making them as strong as her!  If you enjoy excellent writing, badass female MC’s who are fantastic mothers, and superstar children fighting for their home and family, check it out here. You will love each and every chapter as Cassie, Gavin, Micah, and Meghan take the Alien System Integration head on. Seriously, I devoured all three released books in 5 days. Another warm hug/pep talk of a link here.

Hello Erin! Thank you for agreeing to the interview. I’ve loved Apocalypse Parenting, and am half-way through Engineer’s Odyssey (Meghan’s husband Vince’s perspective. Seriously good folks.). I’d love to know how Apocalypse Parenting came to be. Can you tell me about how you planned out the story? How did you stumble on LitRPG and Royal Road and what prompted you to take the dive into publishing your story there? It fits the genre so well, yet stands apart in its characters and themes. Do you have any thoughts of the Royal Road community, and would you recommend it for other aspiring writers?

I’ve wanted to write for years. My past is filled with the abandoned corpses of dead novels, largely, I think, because I tried to overplan. When you plot your story tightly, it can be hard to let your characters breathe and be themselves. Some authors can overcome that, but for me, my characters eventually ended up feeling very wooden and I ended up disliking what I’d written.

I started writing Apocalypse Parenting on a whim, after reading a lot of other gamesystem apocalypse stories. I enjoyed them, but I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to everyone else – everyone who wasn’t a fit twentysomething with no attachments. All the parents, all the elderly, all the kids… what were they doing?

Some stories had the cruel system slaughtering billions but inexplicably exempting the children. As an authorial decision, I understood that, but as a reader and a parent, it seemed a little implausibly convenient.

For me, personally, Royal Road has been great. Posting serially give me a deadline to meet and helps me carve out time to write, and it also forces me to take a break from editing at some point. After a chapter is live, if I really think something major ought to have been different, I might make a note to change it before I go to eBook… but I don’t get stuck in an endless cycle of tweaking what I’ve already written. The feedback from readers also really helped! Yes, some readers can be cruel, so you do have to not let bad reviews and the occasional angry comment get to you, but the vast majority are incredibly kind, and they definitely help motivate me!

Let’s talk about characters. I think your story absolutely shines in the character department. From Cassie, to Pointy, Micah, and finally the hilarious Gavin. How do you plan out your characters? What goes into you crafting the different characters and having their voices ring from the page? You write children very well, and I’d love to know about the challenges with that. Is writing children more difficult or easier than writing someone like Priya (family friend and another Mother in the story)? Which character did you find easiest and most difficult to write? Lastly, was having a Mom as the MC your initial plan, as opposed to a murder hobo?

Having a mom as the MC was 100% my plan. I’m a mom, and you don’t see enough of us in the limelight! There’s Elastigirl from The Incredibles and… uh… who else? I honestly can’t think of anyone who actually acts as a mom on-screen or on-page and isn’t a side character, outside of family sitcoms. Even dads don’t get a lot of attention. Usually, their kids are kidnapped or something and they’re trying to get them back, and then the story ends before they spend any real time with them. The Last of Us and the sequel to God of War are pleasant exceptions, but the general rule has been that parents aren’t to have a major role in any adventure story.

I’ve gotten a lot of compliments on the children I’ve written, which actually prompted me to write a blog post for anyone who wants an in-depth answer to “How do you write them?” The short version, though, is that kids are just people who don’t really understand the world and often lack adult amounts of self-consciousness and self-control. Every action a child takes makes sense, at least from their perspective. Getting into that perspective can be difficult, but kids’ actions aren’t usually dumb or random, even if they can easily look that way to a casual observer.

Most of my characters – kids and otherwise – are inspired by people I know, but I never use anyone in a direct way. Priya, for example, is very different than a close friend of mine that inspired her. Priya is nothing like her inspiration physically, has a different cultural background, and is way more stubborn and aggressive. But the friendship she has with my MC is 100% based on my own friendship. The details are different, but I’ve tried to keep the feeling the same.

I generally know pretty awesome people, so they wouldn’t make great book characters if I didn’t change them up substantially. Book characters need interesting flaws!

I don’t find adults or children difficult to write, inherently. For any character, you just need to put yourself into their frame of mind and let things flow. I think the most difficult characters to write are just those from a culture I don’t have direct personal experience with, because it takes a lot of research to fake a realistic-seeming voice for them. When writing military characters, for example, it’s easy to use a term that seems natural and correct to me, a civilian, and is just flat-out wrong. I try to listen to my alpha and beta readers and make changes when I make mistakes like that, but I’m sure I’m still imperfect.

The aforementioned blog post is here:

https://erinampersand.com/writing-believable-children/

I’ve really enjoyed your magic system in Apocalypse Parenting. Each and every character takes on Skills that fit their personality or situation very well, and you’ve packed so much in there while keeping it very easy to understand and follow. How did you go about developing your Magic System? Meghan takes on in my mind the Paladin/Protector/Tank role and I think it’s awesome. When assigning Skills to characters, are you always considering their character as well? For the children, did you know the direction you were going with their Skills? How important are Identity and Abilities to you? I think you have some serious chops in the Magic System department that some might overlook. Can you provide any advice for other Author’s when they’re making their own System?

Yes!!! Thank you so much. I worked really hard on the magic system. I enjoy games, and I enjoy LitRPG, but too often I find authors get lost in “stat soup.” Oh, wonderful, his strength is now 6,508. What… what does that mean? What does having 28 Intellect mean? Is it substantially better than having 26? I often find myself not really processing these sections, and having no memory of any of a character’s actual statistics, and – worse – no opinions about them.

Some authors do a great job with minimizing statistics, like Alex Kozlowski in Alpha Physics. Others have done a great job doing away with them entirely, like Pirateaba in The Wandering Inn or (if memory serves me right) JP Valentine in This Quest is Bullshit!

I didn’t want to go as far as that. I wanted numbers, but I wanted all the numbers to be something people cared about. In service of that, I cut everything I could. I was initially thinking of including Hit Points, but then I realized that I couldn’t clearly define the relationship between Hit Points and human anatomy, so I cut them. People get harder to damage as they “level up,” but that’s represented by a monster’s claw scratching them instead of gouging them, not by them taking 12 damage instead of 30.

Mana was a statistic that held on in my mind for longer, but then I realized that if I replaced “mana depletion” with “physical exhaustion,” it made a lot of potential situations more dangerous and interesting. If you run out of mana and have to stop casting, there’s a little drama there. If you overuse your abilities and collapse in the middle of the battlefield, you suddenly become a big emergency for everyone! It also gave me a more natural metric to communicate a character’s “available abilities for use.” If I tell you Meghan has 50/100 mana, you have to remember that Assisted Strike takes 10 and Paralyze takes a minimum of 15 scaling up to 50, depending on how she uses it, to decide what she should do. It’s a lot of calculations that a lot of people probably don’t want to do when they’re reading a relaxing story.

On the other hand, if I tell you that Meghan is feeling pretty tired, but not exhausted yet, you can still come to the same decision as someone who did the math before: she can keep using her abilities, but she should be careful and conservative with how she uses them.

The crunchiest part of my system is probably also the most mysterious: the synergy percentages associated with each ability that determine each ability’s strength. Figuring out which abilities synergize – and why – isn’t at all obvious, and getting it right is life-and-death for my characters.

On your other question… making abilities “make sense” for the character that takes them was very important to me. Too often I read LitRPG and I don’t see a lot of difficult choices. The system offers the most powerful option that also meshes perfectly with the character’s personality. I think it feels better to have a character look at their options and say “This isn’t perfect… but it’s the best for me.”

I wanted to ask you specifically about the theme of Family. On the one hand, you have a lovable family dynamic navigating the Apocalypse, headed by a strong mother figure. On the other hand, you’ve introduced Universe-wide Alien dynamics, and the US military haphazardly getting itself back together. Was the family dynamic navigating the new world one of your main focal point when planning the story? What were some things that surprised you when writing about a Family that you didn’t consider? Was it important for you to have a sense of home stay at the forefront for your story? Is it difficult to interweave these competing dynamics, and is it something you want to dive deeper into as you continue on? What made you take this difficult path!?

I titled my series “Apocalypse Parenting” partly as a promise to the reader. No matter how far Meghan goes, no matter what sort of stage she finds herself competing on, her identity as a mother will remain relevant.

As for why I wanted to do it? I guess the biggest thing is just wanting to see a character like myself being a hero. It’s common to hear people say things like “My dad is my hero,” and “my mom is the strongest person I know,” but that’s not really something we see a lot in media. I felt like I had the ability to tell a story like this, and I wanted to do it.

Could you provide some recommendations for Authors and Readers alike? I think I would be doing myself and readers of this interview a disservice by not asking you for some recommendations. What are some resources that you would recommend to fellow Authors that you’ve learned from? Apocalypse Parenting is well written and I’d love to know about your favourite resources. What about for Readers? Are there any pieces of media, from movies to books that you love that you want to shout out or just highly recommend?

Oh, man. First off, thank you so much for your kind words. It’s difficult for me to point to a singular resource. A lot of my instincts have been gleaned little by little over time, in decades spent as a voracious reader, and others have been honed by reading articles on grammar for fun. Yeah, I’m a weirdo. Even then, I’m far from perfect. I have to give a shout-out here to one of my Patreons who routinely calls me out on using “I” instead of “me.”

As much as I love the LitRPG genre, it’s probably not the best place to develop your chops in this respect. A lot of emphasis is put on the speed of publication, and readers tend to be very forgiving of errors. I think more authors in the genre should spend some time reading outside the genre as well. Yeah, still read mostly LitRPG, fine, but make some space to read nonfiction or traditional fantasy or popular sci-fi.

My biggest inspiration in-genre is Pirateaba. Out of the genre, I have to go with Peter S. Beagle, author of the Last Unicorn, Terry Pratchett with his incredible Discworld series, and Douglas Adams. If I ever learn to use metaphors one-tenth as well as Adams does, I’ll be insanely proud of myself.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to a few series that I feel don’t get enough recognition for how good they are: Whispering Crystals by H.C. Mills, Forever Fantasy Online by Rachel Aaron and Travis Bach, and Will Wight’s Traveler’s Gate series (he’s written more than just Cradle, guys).

Let’s talk about process and writing in general. I’m in a bunch of different communities for both writers and readers alike. How do you approach the physical act of writing? Are you writing 1500 words a day? Are you planning out your chapters and arcs Brandon Sanderson style? What works for you? I think any inputs here would help Authors out, as many of them are always looking for ways to be more productive and actually get their story going, and hopefully, finished! Additionally, what’s the plan for Apocalypse Parenting? How long are you anticipating the series being?

I wish I had a rigorous approach to writing like that! I’m lucky enough to have a supportive family, but I am still a mom to school-aged kids, so writing is still a part-time gig for me, and one that has to work around my other responsibilities. Some days I get a solid four hours to write, some days I get thirty minutes, and other times I go five days straight without having a chance to touch a keyboard.

As far as planning, I touched on this earlier, but I’m far more of a “pantser” on the “pantser vs. plotter” spectrum. I always have a path to get to the end of my series, but I never write it down. That helps me stay flexible and accept detours if needed or even choose an alternate route to my goal entirely. Sometimes I think I know how something is going to go down, but then my characters get there and I realize that they would handle the situation completely differently and I have to readjust. It’s fun for me to discover how it “really” happened.

At this point, I expect the series to be five books long. There’s a chance that I’ll get surprised and end up with six, but I think the odds are low. There’s also a standalone side story, Engineer’s Odyssey, that I am working to edit now that will come out sometime next year.

Thank you again Erin Ampersand for the fantastic interview answers. If you want to check out Apocalypse Parenting, I would highly, highly recommend it. Check it out here.

Yummy, yummy in my tummy earnings.

Honestly, I’ve been to 4 weddings in 4 weeks. That’s 11 for the year. I am wiped. My poor ears have heard “A Bar Song,” about ten thousand times. Please no more double shots of whiskey. My bank account is dry. My liver has curdled. I cannot give any more bustas (envelope of cash, pronounced boost-ah). Please. Unless you’re getting married, then you’re getting a busta. I can’t help myself. Come along with me and salivate at this recurring revenue monster. Seras, hats off to you. I’ve loved all of your stories and you deserve it.

Side note, we are opening up for Interview Requests in 3 weeks!

Hope you all enjoyed this edition,

🧙‍♂️Saga Scribe