Hello everyone,
Occasionally, I have the opportunity to talk to a few movers and shakers within our community. Now, normally, I post these on my website. Mostly because it's prettier, but also because it's more fun. You can find the link for that here: Link
But otherwise, this is a one-and-done interview. Normally, I prefer a short series with a specific focus. Two or three authors with targeted questions that expand their thinking within the genre. However, I’ve been trying to interview pirateaba for a long time, and now that I have it, bammo, it’s a solo.
Here’s how it works. I sent the author a series of questions I came up with myself because I wanted to know the answers. The authors have time to respond; it’s all done through email or messaging, and I don’t edit their response in the slightest.
Because I have completed so many interviews in the last few years, I created a database that readers can access at will. That database can be found here.
Okay, enough about me, let’s get to pirate!
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The author’s preference is all lowercase for their name, so please don’t assume it is a grammatical error.
About pirateaba
pirateaba first published The Wandering Inn on their WordPress blog in mid-2016. Nearly six months later, they expanded to Royal Road, eventually moved to Amazon, and are now published by HarperCollins as of March, 2026.
pirateaba’s requirement for anonymity is the stuff of legend. Luckily, I only do my interviews through email, so this all worked out very well. It also makes the next part of my standard process rather amusing.
Their About Me
Special note: This is taken from the HarperCollins website. The profile image is missing.
pirateaba is the author of The Wandering Inn, a story where monsters, magic, and adventurers collide in unexpected and wondrously hilarious or tragic ways. Their story is an ongoing webserial set in a constantly evolving world filled with levels and skills, chaos and ordinary people rising to extraordinary times. When not writing and publishing their story, pirateaba can be found reading other fantasy stories, eating popcorn with nutritional yeast, or slaying monsters, generally in video games. pirateaba is not officially a pirate in any way and does not affiliate with any known pirate groups. You can find pirateaba at wanderinginn.com or follow The Wandering Inn on Twitter @WanderingInn for more news and updates.
pirateaba’s Amazon page Link
pirateaba’s website Link
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The Interview
The Wandering Inn has become old enough that some readers have literally grown up alongside it. Has knowing that changed the sense of responsibility you feel toward the audience?
Absolutely. I’ve always felt responsible to my readers in that I know I have to end this story, and end it well. The length of the story is one thing, but abandoning or failing to tell it as well as I can would be a disservice to all the time and emotions they’ve put into staying with it so long.
I’ve been trying to write a will in my spare time, that summarizes the ending of the story. Just in case I were to die. It’s not nearly close enough to be finished, but I do want to do it. Not in any morbid expectation I pass away. Just because, I’ve seen it happen. Robert Jordan’s tale is always one that springs to mind. He did pass away before his story was finished, but he left all the pieces and work for Brandon Sanderson to finish the story. I’ve always respected him for that.
I hope that I don’t pass away before finishing The Wandering Inn, but if I do, I’d better have a roadmap finished. So people know how it ends.
When I first tried writing a novel, I found that all the history I’d designed for the world somewhat pigeonholed my plot. It causes me to wonder: Are there things you can no longer plausibly do in Innworld because ten years of story have made the world too defined?
Worldbuilding is an interesting kind of trap, isn’t it? I know exactly what you mean–when we develop worlds, we want to flesh out the lore, history, and context for the places and people our characters interact with.
However, frontloading a reader with that kind of information can put off a lot of readers. Let alone the trap of history…there are certainly cool events and things I can’t bring to life. There won’t be insert species here because they’re dead, to use a simpler example and that does make me regret it.
But the power of a fantasy story means that there’s always ruins, or hints of bygone eras. If I lock myself out of writing of an amazing age in the past, I can bring a broken relic of theirs to the present-day. We might not be able to have flying mages in today’s Innworld, but we can have people create an era of flight in a new way, with machines and other tricks. It’s an endlessly creative knot to figure out how to write what I want and it’s mostly fun.
When you started The Wandering Inn, you were writing a story. At some point, it became an institution with employees, publishers, audiobooks, merchandise, and millions of words of history. Has there ever been a moment where protecting The Wandering Inn conflicted with writing The Wandering Inn?
Protecting The Wandering Inn? No, that’s mostly a job for lawyers and trademarks and while that takes money and time, that’s something I can entrust to them.
Managing it? Yes, that does take effort and sometimes it feels like I’ve had to carve out more time to do non-writing things that I can resent or find intrudes on the process. However, I’d just say that like everything, it’s the choice of an author.
You can be a hermit who never interacts with anyone, doesn’t have an interest in movie deals and just practices your craft. Or you can be on book tours constantly, giving speeches, self-promoting and marketing. Neither one’s a bad kind of writer. You just have to be cognizant of the tradeoff of each method. Where I am is where I think I’m comfortable spending my time. A bit of sacrifice on either end.
What problem did you think success would solve that it didn’t? And what problem did success create that you never expected to have?
Success…I think success is something you keep chasing, because what it looks like keeps evolving. The Wandering Inn is amazingly successful, but for all that the attention has achieved like physical books, there’s always something else, if that makes sense.
‘If we were X times as big, maybe all the movie studios would come calling’. ‘If we were this much bigger, we’d have video games, or…’
Which is crazy to want when this all started out as an anonymous blog on the internet, but that’s the thing. The further you go, the more doors you start to see and perhaps success will open them. But they haven’t yet, so those are the problems. I’d love to have The Wandering Inn come to all kinds of mediums but no one’s come knocking down the doors to make that happen–yet. But time will see if these things happen.
As for success’ problems, I’d say it’s mostly just the pressure to keep delivering quality stories, and the pressure any person with a following online or off could tell you about. Tons of feedback, positive, negative, having attention on you is just hard. Since I’m anonymous it’s not as bad and I won’t belabor the point; everyone has some awareness of how that is.
A lot of LitRPG uses progression primarily as wish fulfillment. What do you think gaining power should cost a character?
I think there’s a good place for wish fulfillment in LitRPG’s, even if I think my story isn’t as direct in how it goes. My objection to more wish-fullment style LitRPG’s is how it presents characters with all they ever wanted.
Power, wealth, harems (in way too many of these stories, which reveals something about the author, character, and readers, perhaps), and there are few downsides aside from the big bad enemy.
Where is the apathy having all this handed to you causes? The megalomania I think comes across, even if it is not always intended on the part of the writers, but at some point, you get what you want and you may feel hollow, directionless.
Or the wish changes. When someone is handed all they want, where do they go from there? I think that’s the cost I’d like to see most. Power can be handed to the undeserving, or by chance; it’s like someone winning a lottery. What I want to see believably done is what happens after that moment.
Ryoka has always been one of the more divisive characters in The Wandering Inn. Has the intensity of reader reaction to her ever affected how you write her, or have you had to consciously resist letting that reaction influence the character?
I think that I tend not to bow to reader pressure that often. It’s a weathervane at times, but if I know the character is divisive, like Ryoka was always sort of intended to be, I don’t take it as a failure or sign I need to change things.
She’s hard to love and there are fans who adore what she represents and how she evolves, and some who just never took to her. If it were all one or the other, I’d be more concerned. However, having both positions represented strongly sort of makes me feel like I’m threading the needle properly.
A character that evokes strong likes in some readers while others hate them? I think that’s, if not a great character, a pretty fun one to have made.
Note for the reader: I was offered the opportunity to ask a few follow-up questions, so I came back with an already used one, but at a different angle. Sue me, I was curious.
Success can mean many things to different people. For example, teachers might see their form of success in the shape of their students’ futures. A businessman might see it in the growth of his life’s work. But I’m curious, for you, what does success look like?
I’d say success to me looks like people both enjoying and finding my story. So a two-part dilemma. I have to keep quality up and maintain a good output of chapters for existing readers, but I would like more people to find the web serial.
Part of why I wanted the physical book release is because it opens doors to a lot of people who have no interest in or would never find online stories like these. My hope is they start reading, and those that like The Wandering Inn catch up and say that quality has not decreased in the 10+ years I’ve been writing, and that things are still new, fresh, and worth reading.
When I’m done, I hope that the series becomes one of those stories that finds its way into people’s collections, and has a presence in lists of books worth reading. That’s a good legacy to have.
This is just abhorrent curiosity on my part. What books are you currently reading?
One of the authors I’ve been into recently is Lois McMaster Bujold; I was put onto The Curse of Chalion and I was so impressed by their writing that I bought the rest of the books they’ve written. I think I’m on The Paladin of Souls at the moment, but I sometimes move onto other series and come back for a change of pace.
Another author I recently read was Jacqueline Carey and her Cassiel’s Servant books–she’s an author I very much respect for her amazing worldbuilding so if I hear of a new book from her I’ll probably buy it.
I have also been reading Katalepsis, and Archmage’s Co-Efficient for the web serial side of things, but I spend so long on the screen that I haven’t managed to catch up to either. I also find that my writing muscles tend to tire out the reading muscles in my brain too, so it’s slow progress.
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And that’s the ball game.
I had the opportunity to meet with pirate’s staff at LitRPGCon to set up this luminous venture, and I wanted to thank them (thank you again, Damien), and of course pirateaba, for agreeing to answer a few questions.
Be on the lookout for more interviews to come. I have a hankering for a fruity publishing company.
p.s. I'm shit with markdown. Sorry for how it looks.
