Worth the Candle, FAQ

Meta/Writing Questions

How can I give you money?

Patreon is best for me, mostly because it's consistent and that helps a lot with budget. If you dislike Patreon, or dislike recurring payments, there's a PayPal link here. 

When is the next chapter coming? 

This is the actual most asked question. I maintain a word count spreadsheet that is usually up-to-date on unpublished chapters. When I have a release date, it will be on that sheet. If there's no release date, then it's unspecified, and will depend on how many chapters/words are in the next update.

Why does Worth the Candle not have a consistent release schedule?

I find deadlines to be stressful and I think they have some unwelcome side effects, mostly with regards to the pressure to publish things that aren't done. Worse, I get some social anxiety, and hate having to answer questions about when things will be done, and I get a knot in my stomach when I have to explain that the writing is going poorly and it's going to take longer than expected. Not having deadlines means a lot of burden removed from my shoulders. I think from an income/readership standpoint, it would probably be better to have a consistent release schedule, but I think it's worse for my enjoyment of writing, the quality of the work, and production speed. So, at least part of this you can blame on depression/anxiety, and the other part you can blame on me being an artiste.

Why are chapters released in batches?

Web serials are hard to edit after chapter release because readers have already read things, and if you make a change to what's been published, most people won't read the changed version unless that edit happens within the first few hours of posting. By publishing in batches, I can do my best to make sure that I don't miss out on foreshadowing, that everyone is getting the development/screentime that they need, and that I'm not missing a trick, exploit, or some natural consequence of the world I'm writing in.

What defines a batch?

A batch of chapters will usually be a mini-arc within the greater arc, though that's not always possible. More generally, I try to keep each batch in a theme, or having some relation between chapters or scenes so that they can reinforce each other. This doesn't always work out, but that's the nature of writing, especially for serial fiction.

What does your workflow look like?

I write in Google Docs, one file per chapter. My browser usually has the timeline doc, the character sheet doc, the word count doc, the worldbuilding doc, the full published text so far, and all the chapters that will be in the current batch. I'm a stay-at-home dad with a three-year-old, so writing mostly happens either during naptime or when my son has gone to bed. After a batch of chapters is Ready™, I'll usually do three editing passes, the first to read back what I've written and make some corrections/elaborations along the way (and get to any outstanding TODOs I've left myself), the second to try to catch errors, and the third as quality check. After that, I publish Google Docs links on Patreon for people on the Early Birds tier and ping everyone in the #earlybirds channel on my discord. Those links include commentable links, which allows for faster typo corrections and responses to questions/comments. Approximately twenty-four hours later, I publish to AO3, publish to RoyalRoad, publish to my own website, post to reddit, and ping everyone in the #worththecandle channel. (If you see an empty header on a AO3 chapter in the first few minutes after posting, that's a hack I use to get around AO3 not providing thumbnails to reddit.)

What platforms do you publish on?

Currently, AO3, RoyalRoad, and my own website. This is probably overdoing it. The story started at AO3, and I began publishing on RoyalRoad in part for a larger audience, in part because AO3 has rules against openly admitting to being on Patreon, even for non-fanworks. RoyalRoad is what I would consider the current canonical home of the work, in part because AO3 put an age-gate on the story. Three platforms is about as many as I would ever want to have, because typo corrections and other changes need to be propagated to three different services.

Where can I get a physical or e-book version?

AO3 offers a download function, in the upper right corner. Unless a publisher approaches me, my current plan is to put out e-books on Amazon and maybe a few other platforms within about a month of Worth the Candle finishing, meaning that there will be minimal editing done. The current book divisions will be used as actual book divisions, and price is TBD (though probably low, given that I don't plan to take it offline).

Is there an actual rule system you're using? Do you actually roll dice?

No and no. The rule system exists primarily in what's been revealed through the text, with very few things that are "behind the scenes". I do have a character sheet for Juniper with his virtues, skills, entads, etc., but that's mostly for bookkeeping and making sure that I don't contradict myself in the text. Nothing is rolled, mostly because I think there's no point in doing it that way, and it would probably be bad for the story unless I fudged like heck. A real game of D&D often has moments of anticlimax where the dice don't behave, and if I'm doing prose, I would rather avoid that. If I were doing that, it would be for the feeling that the story really is controlled by the dice, so I would be more public about the dice rolls. (There is a full list of all 256 skills, plus a lot of as-yet-unused virtues, but that's mostly for planning and continuity than it is an actual game system. Similarly, there are a number of rules I have for keeping things consistent, but that's all they're for.)

Why is this story tagged as a self-insert?

Worth the Candle is kind of, sort of, autobiographical, if you squint at it, and only include the Earth stuff. A lot of the non-Juniper Earth characters are amalgams of Earth friends, mostly because writing about people I knew in high school and don't talk to anymore seemed kind of rude, but Juniper himself is like ... 90% me as I was at 17, except a little less intense and a little more likeable, plus slightly less pretentious. I had a lot of pen pals in high school, along with a lot of written stuff that has survived the intervening years, and Juniper's voice is based on those, though it's not too substantially different from what I sound like now.

What's with the cthulhuraejepsen pseudonym?

For what it's worth, Alexander Wales is also a pseudonym. I started writing under the CRJ pseudonym for this one because I didn't want to have the attention and baggage that the AW pseudonym had, but the story got too popular, and it was getting to be work to keep them separate, which, combined with the fact that I wasn't enjoying the low profile I wanted anyway, meant that it wasn't serving a purpose. So, they got combined, and the AW one is the dominant pseud because I have a bunch of accounts with that name (plus it gets points for being slightly more professional).

Am I being directed to this FAQ because you don't like my question?

No. This FAQ exists because these questions are frequently asked, so it makes sense to put them all in one place for easy reference and canned responses that don't need more elaboration. Prior to this FAQ becoming public, all the answers were either buried in threads or hidden in old Discord conversations.

Story Questions

What additional material is available?

A Brief Description of Aerb is the worldbuilding document, which I would only recommend reading when you're caught up, or failing that, after finishing the first 'Book', mostly because if you read it first, you'll get descriptions of some things twice, the second time being the narrative one. It was created as a Patreon goal.

The Council of Arches is a slice-of-life story that takes place around ch 65 of Worth the Candle, which covers the group playing a tabletop game of Juniper's invention. It was created as a Patreon goal.

A third work, tentatively titled The Exclusionary Principle, Seventh Edition, is the next Patreon goal, which will cover the existing exclusion zones, their histories, and how they work.

How do they know that Aerb is an infinitely tiling hexagon? How does that make sense?

If you walk far enough in one direction on Earth, you'll arrive back at the spot that you started at. Because it takes the same amount of time/distance to arrive back at the spot you started no matter which direction you go, you can map the Earth and find that it's a sphere (alright, technically you would find that it takes longer in some directions, and your mapping would show that it's an oblate spheroid). In the same way, individuals on Aerb can walk different directions and find that it takes different amounts of time/distance to wind up back where they were. A mapping of these distances will eventually reveal a hexagonal pattern with six cardinal directions.

If there are six cardinal directions, why do people refer to north, south, east, and west?

It's easy to find east and west: all you need to do is to track the sun and mark a line. It's also easy to find north and south, because once you have east and west you just draw a perpendicular line. Finding the cardinals for the hexagonal tiling is much more difficult, and the three-axis coordinates are only used in specialty applications.

But doesn't it work equally well to map Aerb as an infinitely tiling offset grid of rectangles with ratio 3/2:√3?  

Yes. And yes, this is easier to fit on a conventional rectangular map without wasted space. However, there are two considerations here. The first is that if you make a map that just shows a rectangle, the offset means that your map needs additional information about where you end up if you go north, south, etc. Going north on the right half of the map means that you end up in the south of the left half of the map, but going north on the left half of the map means that you end up in the south of the right hand of the map. You could maybe make up for this with color-coding the edges, but it's kind of ugly, and doesn't result in good distance calculations. Second (and this is long-standing Word of God, canonized in "A Brief Description of Aerb"), Aerb fits more neatly into a hexagonal shape than a rectangular one. In other words, you can fit all the major and minor landmasses in a hexagonal shape without cutting anything off, but you can't do the same with a rectangular map.

How much do dragons actually impact air travel?

It varies. Aircraft are used a number of times in Worth the Candle, but almost always under special circumstances. Dragons are another bit of bureaucracy to be dealt with when filing a flight plan, primarily in order to appease the dragons, who consider the air to be their domain. That said, there really aren't that many dragons left in the world, and their ability and willingness to engage in rapid response for no real benefit to themselves is pretty low. Given how vast Aerb is and how few dragons there are, actual interception is sometimes considered an acceptable risk, especially in places that are far away from any known dragon's interests. (Each dragon would be responsible for roughly four million square miles of airspace if the dragons were distributed evenly, which they're not.)

When is the story going to end?

I don't know, and as of April 2020, have stopped answering that question, in part because it might be seen as spoiling things or sapping tension from certain conflicts. I will say that it's gone on a lot longer than I thought it would, in part because I made a commitment to myself that I would do my best not to rush the ending. One of the things that I like most about the web serial format is that you can sprawl out and take your time, and I've been doing my best to leverage that.

How much is actually going to get covered?

Not everything. There are quests that are only mentioned in the addenda, off-hand mentions of people and places, and other stuff that's intended to make the world seem vast, some of which is completely fleshed out in notes somewhere and is probably never going to make it to the page. I think there's a temptation to just run a serial indefinitely, but I like endings, and more than that, I like working on different  projects. So this won't be a 100% completion kind of story, but I do plan to wrap up all the threads that have gotten a sufficient level of narrative focus.

What were the inspirations for this story?

Probably too many to name, but the most obvious influences are tabletop roleplaying games, starting with Dungeons & Dragons. At least some of the 'feel' of Worth the Candle is meant to mimic what it's like to play long campaigns within those games, and some of the setting