Chương 38: State of the Grindhouse (Reader Update #2: Play Scared origins & inspirations, book two, and beyond)

Hey, Fiends! It's me, ShawnD! I didn't expect this. I hoped for it, in the way you hope for things, just enough that if they don't happen, you're not hurt too much. But the reception you've given this story has made dreams come true, and I don't know how else to say that without it sounding so dorky. It isn't. I mean it every time. As we close in on the end of Book One, I wanted to check in and give you a look at how this whole thing started and where it's going.

Play Scared was born out of a love of Dungeon Crawler Carl, which grew into a love of LitRPG, which grew into a love of Royal Road, which eventually became this. Two things pushed me over the edge into actually writing it: 1. I realized the story I wanted to tell hadn't been told. 2. I knew that Royal Road gave me a direct pipeline to readers without the gatekeeping of publishers, studios, agents, and all the other machinery that has kept so much of my work from ever seeing the light of day.

Those two things together were enough. Because writing comics, movies, and TV scripts is isolating, for the most part, unless they get produced/published, they sit on my hard drive gathering whatever the digital equivalent of dust is called. I've been pounding the pavement and knocking on doors as a writer since 2006 (when I was... uh... 8-years-old... yeah...) and in all that time I've written what has to amount to millions of words.

A peek in my writing folder on Dropbox shows me 15 comic book series (of which FOUR are published), 29 feature film scripts (ONE produced and they stole my writing credit), and 16 TV pilots of which I've had ZERO produced. Oh, and also a video game script, which I'm told will have a small demo soon but isn't fully funded. Now, some of those projects paid me money, which is cool and helps me eat and pay bills and stuff, but money for something no one sees or hears of doesn't get you more jobs.

And having movies in "development hell" for years (one of them is going on TEN YEARS in development) doesn't get eyes on your work. I JUST want readers/viewers... eyes. And all of the above amounted to a ton of writing experience and a deep understanding of my craft. What I didn't have was any experience writing a novel—every attempt I'd made before this one I'd abandoned after a few chapters. What was different about Play Scared was that this story demanded to be told.

It's rare for characters and a world to arrive nearly fully formed in my mind, but the moment I caught glimpses of the Grindhouse, Nora, Tre, and Plaxx, they were as real to me as anything I've ever written. I credit a huge part of their creation to the inspiration for the characters. Nora is modeled (as a lot of my female lead characters are) after my wife; she's all of my wife's grit, tenacity, brilliance, and pop culture reference points.

Tre is a little more loosely based on one of my wife's best friends, not his personality so much, but their dynamic and the relationship they share is closely modeled after the IRL relationship it's based on. As for Plaxx, it's not like I know a real demon (although I, like many of us, have some real demons), but his performative showmanship and flair for the dramatic are definitely pulled from my time as a musical theater nerd in my youth. I finished a full draft, then revised it five more times.

The version you're reading has maybe thirty percent of the words from that first one. For me, writing is rewriting. As Book One's ending came hurtling closer on Royal Road, I realized Book Two needed more time, and that if I was going to do the web serial thing properly, I had to rethink how I was approaching the story. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The key was when I stopped thinking about Book Two as a novel and started thinking about it the way I think about comics: serialized arcs that work as satisfying standalone units but build into something larger. That shift unlocked everything. All of the above was either an interesting look into the process or bored the living fuck out of you. If you made it this far, I appreciate your dedication to my words. I'm 40k words into Book Two, and the shift in energy between the two is wild.

Book One has a slow-burn, find-your-footing quality that mirrored my own experience: Nora figuring out the rules of the Grindhouse as I was figuring out how to write a novel. Book Two opens the world in an incredibly exciting way, not with bombastic action (although there are plenty of those moments), but by giving me time and space to let the characters develop, grow, and get closer to each other.

It's making me eager to sit down and write every single day, which, coming from someone who spent years in screenwriting and was genuinely terrified of prose, is not something I take for granted. The title of Book Two I've been sitting on for a while. It has to wait until after the epilogue. It's very silly. Maybe too stupid. Time will tell. I think it fits. But what does 30k words mean for you?!

It means that thanks to shifting back to 2x a week, I only foresee a week or so break before I start running Book two chapters here. I know it would be fine to binge everything all at once, and I wish I could write that fast, but quality over quantity! As for Book One: I'm proud of it in a way I didn't expect when I started. This began as an experiment. A "let's see if I can actually do this" that became something I think about constantly.

This story feels more alive to me than anything I've written for film and comics, and I think that's because this format allows the story to be shared and experienced. Writing for you, with you reading along, is nothing like writing in a vacuum. And for me, it changes everything. Shoutout to the comment section OGs and MVPs: JackValhalla, Ziggy, Hauntedcauliflower, and Cristine for their thoughtful, insightful, and often funny contributions. Okay, that's enough outta me. Enjoy another YTITG.

See you guys for the gets SOTG. — ShawnD Your Time in The Grindhouse You're in a sewer. Your right ankle is fractured; a parting gift from when you dropped off the highway overpass to escape the Landscaper. HEALTH: 56% [-40% Agility - FRACTURE PENALTY] FEAR: 67% [ANXIOUS] -20% Stamina Regen The tunnel is narrow, low-ceilinged, and the sludge running through it is a shade of greenish-brown you've never seen before but smells as horrid as it looks.

You're half-crawling, half-dragging yourself along a maintenance ledge that's maybe eighteen inches wide, your back scraping the curved concrete wall above you, but at least you're not in the sludge. Next to you, keeping pace with genuinely insulting ease, is your best friend Jax. Who is currently three and a half feet tall, and wearing a permanent scowl that came with the evil leprechaun body he's stuck in, but honestly isn't that different from his regular face. He hasn't complained once about the sewer.

That's how you know he's worried about you. There's an item in your jacket pocket you haven't told him about. THE LEECHING SUTURE Type: High-Tier Heal Effect: Parasitic. Siphons structural integrity from active companion to repair host skeletal damage.

"Give nothing, take a lot." If you take it, your ankle knits back together. You can run. Jax takes the fracture instead, dropping his max health by 50%. His size makes him more nimble than you, and you've been telling yourself that maybe it evens out. You've been telling yourself that for forty minutes. Then you hear the high-pitched whine of a gas-powered weed whacker, its modified circular saw blade singing off the tunnel walls from somewhere behind you.

As it gets louder, you know the Landscaper has found another way in. Jax hears it too.

"What do we do? You can't run?!" You feel the Suture in your pocket. The whine is getting closer. What do you do?! Answer in the poll below. Maltheris is watching.