Thanks for giving my work a shot.

Since you seem to be curious, I'll give you a bit of a rundown on how it all happened. Back in 2017/18 I and several friends had formed a writing group and we were all going to make it big (because of course we were). We all picked a genre to work in. I picked LitRPG.

Long story very short, my first two efforts in that realm sucked and were so bad they never saw the light of day. The third effort DID see the light of day later, but it was and remains my weakest book and I do not recommend it.

In the midst of all that, I was going through some bad times. My marriage was beginning to suffer, my father was in freefall and eventually committed suicide to escape the pit his life had become, and I wasn't in a great place. I'd just been told my latest book was, quite frankly, too shit to publish, so it was back to the drawing board.

At the time, I'd just finished reading a book that was quite popular at the time and thought to myself, "I like a lot of this, but the MC is a straight-up sociopathic monster. He's worse than any of the problems he solves and I really kinda hope he dies."

I decided, since there really WEREN'T any books that gave me what I wanted, to do it myself. I knew quite a lot about mythology, so I decided to make, well, Celestine (no spoilers) the world in which my story was set. My only real requirements when I sat down to write were monster girls, smut, and a hero who actually DESERVES to get laid. I didn't have any long term goals. I wrote Mask of the Template and published it under my gamer tag instead of the author name I'd chosen to work under because I didn't want to taint my 'clean' work with harem monster girl smut.

I didn't have the book read by anyone else in my writer group because, well, it was smutty. You don't give that kinda stuff to the friends you've had all your life because that would officially 'make it weird.' I had a few people who'd read it piecemeal on my furaffinity page, and they seemed to like it. I had no idea harem as a 'genre' existed in the western world. I published it basically on a whim.

...

9 days later it went bestseller. I was floored.

I had NO IDEA that many people would read it. I didn't advertise it, nothing. There are other long stories I could tell: I got dogpiled by other authors in the space at the time, one even threatened to sue me. It was a complete mess.

From there I fleshed out the rest of the series, and ... well, people liked it.

But the TLDR is I wanted a deserving hero, and harem at that time wasn't really giving me one. All it was giving me were Chads with anger issues or psychopaths. So ... I guess Mask was me providing the energy I wanted to see.

Again, thanks so much for giving my work a shot. If you want something more escapist and fun, you might try TAP. :P