The Challenger Sarah Novel
This is the next “Arachnomancer” to explore Challenger Sarah’s origin story before we see a lot more of her in Arachnomancer 3. It is now available as Bookworm to Badass
“Hey, man . . . So what is this book?”
It has been 201 days since Arachnomancer 2 launched, and my Projects page lists Challenger Sarah as an active novel project but not Arachnomancer 3. What’s going on?
When I wrote Arachnomancer 1, I wanted to delay publishing it for three weeks. In this time, I was going to build my author website and write a newsletter magnet, which is something you give in exchange for an email address.
Everyone told me I needed to publish.
No more delaying.
As such, I resurrected an old story I wrote called Dungeon Runner and offered it as my newsletter magnet. Since this was not what I wanted to give away, I told my readers that if they subscribed to my newsletter, they’d get bonus stories for free, such as one that explored Challenger Sarah, a fan favorite character.
Many months passed, and I published Arachnomancer 2. I still didn’t have a series-related newsletter magnet to offer.
Further, I was now stuck trying to write Dungeon Runner and Arachnomancer at the same time, which ultimately led to The Dungeon Runner Dilemma. Not only was trying to write this other series proving to be rather difficult, but it was also drastically slowing my progress on Arachnomancer books.
So what is this book?
Challenger Sarah’s book was meant to be a free bonus novella for my newsletter subscribers. I was aiming for 20k words, which is about 80 pages.
Since I was discovery writing the story (not writing with an outline), I didn’t know exactly how long it would be. I hit 20k words and had barely scratched the original idea. I knew then that this wasn’t a novella; it was a full novel.
A novel-sized book for Sarah is unfortunate for a few reasons.
- It means that Arachnomancer 3 will take longer to release
- It’ll likely upset readers who are waiting on Arachnomancer 3
- Female protagonist GameLit stories don’t often do well
But here’s the thing, guys, I love this book.
Sarah is awesome, fun, and funny. She’s a quirky girl that I think you guys will love once you see who she is and how much she changes after her unfortunate death that brings her to Olindale 8 years before Dhane.
We get to see what it’s like to be a vampire in this odd gamelike world. And not just any vampire, the first vampire. She has some really neat abilities with some unfortunate—and often hilarious—side effects.
GameLit doesn’t like female protagonists?
I know several authors who have written female protagonist GameLit stories. Despite the various requests from the communities for such stories, these books often don’t do well compared to their male protagonist counterparts.
This has never truly made sense to me since I don’t even consider the gender of the protagonist before buying a book. But I’ve seen enough proof to accept that I’ll be fighting an uphill battle to find readers for this story.
This makes me push myself harder to make the story better. And while that sounds good, it can be disheartening to invest so many hours into such a fun story and know—or at least believe—it’ll be overlooked.
So what is this book?
Oh! You want to know what it’s about?
Eight years before Dhane enters Olindale and becomes an Arachnomancer, Sarah died. Her journey into the afterlife is so very different than his.
Gameus—god of games—buys too many souls during the buy one, get one free sale and decides to run a contest to see who stays and who gets flushed back into the Primordial Sea of Souls where all dead things go.
This novel explores Sarah’s life and death and her transition from bookworm to heaven’s first vampire. Up until now, we’ve only known of Challenger Sarah, but now we get to see who she was before she became the woman every has learned to fear.
1/21/23: The book has launched! Select the book below for more information.
Haven’t read Arachnomancer? Check it out below.
