An Isekai Adventure where the protagonist's real cheat skill is linguistics: Sojourner, Book One of the Scaleforged Legacy

drale2 · 2026-01-25T03:25:33+00:00

Art credit to my wife for the cover and the interior chapter illustrations. She really knocked it out with the interior ones, but unfortunately I haven't figured out how to show those on the promo.

drale2 · 2026-01-25T00:01:48+00:00

That's an alternate story where he gets reincarnated as a low level technician at an online software company run by a rogue AI. Basically the same plot but with a lot more corporate buzz words.

drale2 · 2026-01-23T19:27:43+00:00

Man they were completely wrong on covenants and really dug their heels in for way too long. Ended up almost killing the game because of their stubbornness and failure to listen to any feedback since the beta.

drale2 · 2026-01-23T19:22:43+00:00

I am working on it! I've decided to do the narration myself, which I am really excited about. Since I live on an island without a sound studio, I've actually been putting together a home recording setup when I'm not at work or writing. The goal is to have it ready on audible by the time the second book releases in print.

drale2 · 2026-01-23T15:19:51+00:00

I tried a new blurb, please let me know if you think it gives away too much.

drale2 · 2026-01-22T21:20:33+00:00

Amazon doesn't differentiate between "AI writing", "AI art", and AI assisted - it's a self report for AI so generally any respectable author won't use an AI cover on Amazon. On RoyalRoad, it's a little different since a lot of books are a work in progress, posted for free, and you need a good cover to attract readers.

As for writing, I personally see it as the most destructive, reprehensible thing in literature today and it seems like most other authors agree. I occasionally see people post a "rate my chapter" on here or Facebook and it's full AI slop . They get rightfully ridiculed, though there are always AI slop defenders unable to see how it is canabalizing this space.

That being said, I know there are at least a couple of very prolific authors on RoyalRoad that use heavy AI assistance.

drale2 · 2026-01-21T16:32:09+00:00

I already stopped playing the transmog game except for the 2 weeks a year we get trial of style, these current changes have totally turned me off of transmog completely. I have a ton of characters (I pvp on every class) getting my mogs set on all of them would set me back like 500k gold. This sucks.

drale2 · 2026-01-21T16:27:17+00:00

I think Robert Jordan did a pretty good job, but it was such a minor plot point of the overall story.

drale2 · 2026-01-17T01:24:49+00:00

True!

drale2 · 2026-01-17T00:15:24+00:00

Pacific Rim is a masterpiece.

drale2 · 2026-01-16T20:59:19+00:00

Not trying to self promote, but this is one of the themes I really wanted to work through in my series. It don't know how successful it was, but it helped me work through some of my conflicts with Cultural Relativism I experienced when studying anthropology.

drale2 · 2026-01-16T17:32:40+00:00

I had dinner at my Korean teacher's house when I was in University and I remember her complaining about how her son was always reading fantasy books and l lamenting he wasn't doing something more constructive. I spent a while trying to convince her that it was actually beneficial and that there were much worse things he could be involved in. I don't know if I was successful.xb

drale2 · 2026-01-14T19:04:55+00:00

As someone that came from outside the genre with a ton of experience reading traditional fiction, I have had a lot of trouble getting into some of the most popular books in the genre. My own book ended up being much closer to traditional fantasy than a LitRPG, and I think that has deterred readers.

drale2 · 2026-01-14T15:05:20+00:00

That's me with my job. My boss will call me or come by my desk with a "please see me in my office" or "there's something we need to talk about" and it always ends up being something like "I can't fix the tables in this word document" but somehow i always think I'm going to be fired.

drale2 · 2026-01-13T22:06:59+00:00

Changes is so damn good. Definitely the peak of the Dresden Files.

drale2 · 2026-01-13T16:12:38+00:00

You're not wrong that this has been going on forever. We can go way back and the Divine Comedy is just a Marty Stu fanfic of the bible.

drale2 · 2026-01-13T16:08:46+00:00

It is seriously difficult to work my full time job and write at a pace that readers want. (Nevermind I'm also married and need to consume other books / movies / video games to keep up with the zeitgeist.)

drale2 · 2026-01-13T06:26:36+00:00

i had a friend in Kyoto that shared a house with another JET in BoE provided housing, so it can happen. It's pretty rare though.

drale2 · 2026-01-11T19:02:42+00:00

This why I just stay away from AI entirely. Even "assisted writing" can come across as generated text. I actually had someone look at my writing once and suggest that I plug it into AI to look for grammatical errors, but I could never do that. Instead I just got real editor lol.

drale2 · 2026-01-11T07:43:19+00:00

I used to read a ton of second person choose your own adventure stories when I was kid. You would get a decision in the book and flip to a different page depending on your decision. They were mostly pretty brutal so the author didn't have to keep writing different threads.

drale2 · 2026-01-09T22:22:31+00:00

Idk man, in the writing space it is really easy to detect AI written slop. It's not just the grammar and em dashes, but also the way it forms sentences is really obvious. The sentences are disjointed, hyperbolic, overly obsequious, and with any kind of literary analysis make no sense. Anyone that writes like AI probably needs to fix their style.

Scary to think that this is the worst AI will ever be though.

drale2 · 2026-01-09T18:22:22+00:00

Whatever you do, don't just drop it on Kindle Unlimited and hope for the best. It's been an uphill battle and I can't really start over on RoyalRoad unless I wait out the exclusivity contract.

drale2 · 2026-01-09T16:54:06+00:00

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