Cultivine Retrospective

Man, Cultivine was a story, wasn’t it?

It really was a story, that’s all I’ll say.

It transcended its badness to become something that was stupidly enjoyable to most readers, and gained way more success than anything of its caliber deserved. Even though it finished way back in March, I still wanted to give a little bit of insight and honesty into its extremely stupid existence.

Let’s reminisce about that time when the vine invasion of Royal Road had just begun…

It all started in an unnamed writing Discord I am a part of; we found a joke story that, to increase wordcount, spammed “vine vine vines vines vines” for thousands of pages, and before deleting boosted it up to a high rank with many 5-star reviews. It became a minor meme, all the way up until everyone decided to start making crappy vine-related stories.

There were seven stories in all. In addition to Cultivine, there was CHAOS VINES ONLINE, Vinal Fantasy (now deleted), VINES: A Short Story, The Vines of Bramblekeep, Spiritual Vines and a Somkey Pull Cauldron, and Divine Thorns. We each challenged ourselves to write as many words as possible in a 24-hour period, trying for 25,000 words as the target, and then we would post all of these stories, one chapter every day all at the exact same time.

I attempted one of my dumbest feats, here, too; drunk writing a whole novel. Yes, as you might have expected, my entire time writing Cultivine was spent under the influence of substances, and basically the only thing I have ever written in such a way. The pathway went like this: Wake up at 6 AM, start on the first tallboy beer at 7 AM, start writing at 8 AM, stop writing when I crash and fall asleep, or hit 25,000 words, whichever came first.

That is the reason Cultivine turned into the story it was. I lowered my inhibitions to incredible levels, and then with all my power tried to come up with the worst and dumbest ideas possible. Before writing, I had maybe 3 ideas of where to go with the story, and the rest was completely random, made up on the spot, wherever my brain would take me next. Utter madness like Chapter 2 or the California Raisins chapter could never have existed if I was just trying to make something while sober.

Sadly, it turns out that inebriation is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be distractable. I wasn’t able to keep up a good writing speed, and by the time it was getting dark, I was only about 16,000 words in, and finished only with Vines 16. I wasn’t finished!

So I had to do a second day a week or two later, and ANOTHER drunk writing marathon. You can probably tell if you’re paying attention the stylistic shift between the first half and second half once you know about it. My brain took much different turns on each day, but also my brain had time to forget everything it wanted to build towards on the first day, so any possible cohesive plot was lost. This second writing marathon fizzled out for the exact same reasons, ironically, and I ended up with another 16,000 words right as I finished.

Once I and everyone else finished our Vines stories, we created a posting brigade and scheduled our chapters for exactly the same time as everyone else each day, just to flood the Recent Updates page with half a dozen or more vine-related stories and confuse everyone. It worked very well. Everyone was boosted up in a huge way, and “Spiritual Vines” even got on Trending (now Rising Stars) to become a very popular story! It has over 1,300 followers as of this writing, which is so awesome. It’s also the one that had actual editing and stuff put into it, which is probably the main difference here.

The entire vine onslaught was wonderful.

Just the sheer community spirit of a lot of authors working together, having fun, confusing readers, and finally attracting a few people in on the joke, was so nice. When Cultivine got a full, complete audiobook reading from kgy121, that was just amazing, and I don’t know if any other stupid parody story I would have ever written could have had such energy to allow for a literal audiobook. That’s the power of the vines.

Cultivine has a dear spot in my heart as the Quinlan Circle’s worst, yet best story, filled to the brim with nonsensical nothingness, no fourth wall, constant antagonism of the readerbase, and references to obscure things I like. It made a certain Royal Road member into a primary villain, and ended on an extremely depressing but very stupid note.

My hero NoDragons, who designed the basis for the Systemless LitRPG system, also designed an overly convoluted Soul Palace System for this story as well, and I tried pretty hard to figure out how to incorporate that with vines, how to turn this system into humor. Well, I couldn’t do it, so instead I just made fun of it by making it this super detailed thing in Chapter 1 and then ignoring it the rest of the story. This pissed off a number of commenters, which also fulfilled the story’s secondary mission. I am very happy about that.

So, while Cultivine will never be a member of the Quinlan Circle All-Stars, and probably won’t be remmebered by anyone in a year or two, it was a blast to make, brought a lot of web fiction authors together, and hopefully entertained a few hundred readers. I’ll never forget it, that’s for sure.

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Please read my new story Her Golemancer Girlfriend, or read about in its own blog post.