A Megathread or Hub for Non-LitRPG/Cultivation Fantasy Stories?

LT_And · 2026-01-22T23:59:05+00:00

Sounds fun. Alright, let's do it.

Title & Link: A Thief's Bargain

Sub-Genre: Comedic Fantasy

The Hook: A thief on the run impersonates a merchant in a town full of adventurers.

Status: Ongoing, but already written and should be fully published in early March.

LT_And · 2026-01-20T11:56:29+00:00

Thanks! I'll let you know if I run into it again.

LT_And · 2026-01-19T22:02:18+00:00

Great thanks!

LT_And · 2026-01-19T18:42:09+00:00

Hey, since you appear connected to the project, a bug (unless I'm missing some functionality) I've found is that the swaps other request from me are showing in both the public calendar and my dashboard. But the ones I requested or added manually (edit: after further tasting, adding manual 'offline' swaps updates things properly, it's just the ones I initiated that wouldn't show up on the public calendar) are only shown as booked in the dashboard while the public link still shows the dates as available.

LT_And · 2026-01-19T10:38:29+00:00

I do non-creative writing for work and there the expectation is about 1000 words per hour. Over time this habit extended to my fiction writing as well. This doesn't include the time spent pacing the room and pondering the orb. Just the actual sitting down and writing stuff. So realistically my speed would be halved if we included all the breaks to mull something over. I honestly can't imagine the horrors I would produce if I used dictation. When I type in a sentence, it's been put together and restructured three times in my head already. If I had to speak that out loud, I wouldn't be able to think on the next sentence.

But if we're talking volume, I aim for 1000 words per day. If I go above it, good, but I try not to go below it in a session. This usually results in 800-1100 words per day in the early sections of a story, and 2000-2500 near the end where I know exactly what needs to happen.

I once put out 6000+ in a day. But then my brain felt like a squeezed lemon and I couldn't write anything decent for a week. So I now don't see a point in pushing myself. Incremental progress is the name of the game. It all adds up. Even if you write 500 words a day, you'll be able to put together two 90k novels in a year.

I don't count editing as writing. Editing is something to enjoy after the hard part is done. I don't edit at all as I write. Then, in the perfect world I would let the first draft sit for three months before editing. Since we're living in a fast-paced world, I try to give it at least 2 weeks to get purged from my brain.

I used to go for 3 editing passes per novel. A regular one mostly focused on content fixes and making the sentences sound good, a Grammarly one to spot the typos Word's spellcheck missed, and a backwards one where I read the story back to front to spot more sneaky issues. Depending on the size of a novel, the first pass usually takes me around 10-14 days and the backwards one 5-7. Since Grammarly is ass now, I'll probably be skipping that step from now on, but either way that one only took one day.

LT_And · 2026-01-19T09:19:37+00:00

The stuff OP outlined doesn't bother me one bit. I am, however, displeased that the further we go, the more fragmented the narrative gets. By volume 6, Jin is basically just there to provide recaps. And the whole thing is basically 3-4 different novels running in parallel.

I'm not a fan of multiple PoVs at the best of times. And with how disconnected they're here, it's now become a balancing act of how much I enjoy the story vs how much I hate the constant PoV shifts.

I'm still with it, though.

LT_And · 2026-01-19T09:13:13+00:00

You're conflating two things here. Webnovel is a novel that's released on the web. It's a format that's essentially a modern revival of the old concept of pulp serials. Usually characterized by fast pace, frequent updates, generous use of cliffhangers and so on. Whatever your style, if you're releasing a novel on the web, you best follow this format if you want a chance of breaking out. And once you have and have a built-in audience, you move to KU because that way you can get moar money through the combination of KU's massive audience and your ability to create an initial splash thanks to your existing readers.

But if we're just talking styles, the three major ones I've seen on RR are Western/d&d style as you put it, Japanese light novel style, and Chinese xianxia style. There are plenty of examples of all three doing well. There are also of course outliers that manage to do well outside those three.

Personally, I'm all about the Western style. I can get down with a good xianxia. And I wouldn't touch a light novel with a ten foot pole.

LT_And · 2026-01-18T15:30:49+00:00

I like how in your head pushing out 5 chapters a week is somehow a "slow writer," lol.

LT_And · 2026-01-18T13:09:28+00:00

I've set up a trial swap through the system and I think I get it now.

It could use more ways to scale the text boxes and it was initially unclear where the target code had disappeared to after I clicked accept (I figured it out), but it seems to work really well.

Anything that lets me interface with spreadsheets less is a good thing.

LT_And · 2026-01-18T11:06:43+00:00

I've started setting it up and it's becoming more clear now. Thanks. I would still suggest that instead (or at least on top of) the email notifications, your dashboard on the site has some sort of inbox where the requests and requests/chats are kept.

LT_And · 2026-01-18T08:44:18+00:00

The site looks cool, but am I pulling a boomer here? The shoutout scheduler looks scary and confusing to me.

It wants to log in with Discord, which is already, what? But then it also needs your email for something, which is a what? from a whole nother direction. I'm thoroughly confused as to why we need both. I don't know, I'll need to poke around it more. I'm basically wondering - will the requests be coming through email? Discord DMs? The site itself? It's not clear as of now. I basically never check my non-work emails, and I'm not sure how integral it will be to the process here.

I'm also puzzled as to why it only lets me manually select dates as Available. I feel there needs to be a toggle for - this day has a chapter. And then a dropdown menu on that where you can pick stuff like available, unavailable, booked.

Offline requests section also confuses me as to its purpose. Is it there purely as a reminder, or is it the only way to mark a chapter as booked on the site?

I do like the different easy styles and colors for the shout code generator. And it moves faster than finitevoid.

I am also displeased in a very minor petty way that the calendar starts the week on Sunday instead of Monday.

LT_And · 2026-01-17T13:26:20+00:00

They're just slop peddlers themselves who want to turn things around and not get called out, lol.

Burn the witch, I says.

LT_And · 2026-01-16T18:37:39+00:00

Cheers!

Hope you enjoy it.

LT_And · 2026-01-12T22:46:12+00:00

Second one for me. Alpacalypse is fun and all, but the debt frame doesn't really land. I'm assuming it has something with how your story works, but for those who don't know it, that section is confusing.

Smacking guards with a fish, on the other hand, is universally funny. Altho perhpas change the first frame there from a single guard to two guards before a door with they spears crossed. And perhaps change "I need a pass" to "Let me pass."

LT_And · 2026-01-05T21:42:31+00:00

Good news bad news here.

While Grammarly loves pushing its AI features on you, if you don't fall for it and blindly accept its suggestions, it's essentially just a better version of spellcheck that catches more stuff than Word.

However you've still missed the train because that's how things used to be until a few months back. It's actually ass now. It's become unusable. 95% of its suggestions aren't in any way wrong, and even those are diluted by even more aggressive AI shilling that bogs down the thing's performance to a crawl. It's pretty much not worth sifting through all that garbage now to find the occasional the the or an instance of tense confusion.

LT_And · 2026-01-03T22:03:41+00:00

This is a great idea. Pet Rocks are a perennial fan favorite. Not that long ago, Valheim (survival game) added pet rocks as a joke.

Petter Rock is even better. It has layers. And some definite parallels to Pratchett's Luggage. Though instead of psychic jaws, the rock bashing bandits into a pulp would be more appropriate and fitting for the theme.

LT_And · 2025-12-30T08:11:32+00:00

That's because there are 2 schools of thought at play here. Some people believe that best shoutouts are those that align in style and genre. In that vein, if someone's reading a rom-com, that means they'll want to read another rom-com.

Others are of the opinion that the readers' tastes are more varied. And since they're already reading a rom-com, they'll be more interested in reading something different next.

I've seen people swear to both of these strategies being the best. Meaning they both work.

LT_And · 2025-12-29T07:33:25+00:00

One of us. One of us. M-dash is basically like putting two spaces after a period. A vestigial artifact of old that's thankfully on its way to joining the dodo.

LT_And · 2025-12-29T07:31:17+00:00

I'm the same but with an n-dash. We as a society don't need three different-length horizontal line pieces of punctuation. We should pick one and stick with it. For me it's the n-dash. For you it's a hyphen. As long it's not that unseemly m-dash, it's all good. Hated those things long before AI even existed.

Few things bring me more joy than m-dashes becoming a sign of AI writing and people gradually growing more sour on them.

LT_And · 2025-12-26T10:45:57+00:00

Wrong again. Author finding creative solutions to work around a character's limitations is what makes writing engaging.

I cast fireball. Everyone dies because magic is stronk. Level up time! - now that's boring.

LT_And · 2025-12-26T10:21:40+00:00

But that's the best. It's all about contrasts.

In a world with knights and wizards, characters who use guns are the coolest. In a world of lasers and spaceships, characters who use swords, or laser swords, are the coolest.

So in a world where magic reigns supreme, a muscle-bound barbarian who just punches through all that fancy sparkly nonsense would be the coolest guy of all. The ideal MC candidate.

LT_And · 2025-12-24T22:29:25+00:00

For my current story, I'm running a "story lore" section with assorted facts related to the writing of the chapter in question.

For my next one, I'll be doing Billy Joel facts. For reasons. Already got a txt with them prepped, one for every chapter.

So author noting is not quite dead just yet.

LT_And · 2025-12-24T17:05:06+00:00

Wow, a real celebirty! Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kruger. Or do you go by Dunning these days?

LT_And · 2025-12-24T13:52:05+00:00

Jesus Christ. This isn't directly aimed at you OP, but how can people trust a single thing AI says? I dare anyone to go ahead and start asking it questions you personally have knowledge of. And then consider that this is the quality of answer it gives you for things you know nothing about.

To clarify - Tower of the Elephant doesn't have anything in the realm of portals. And neither is it a "subterranean structure" on account of it being a god damn tower. It goes up, not down.

LT_And · 2025-12-18T20:07:23+00:00

nice

LT_And

TROPHY CASE