I love reading the feedback about Original Enchantment. It’s encouraging to see so many people enjoying it, and it’s helpful to hear the constructive feedback. One criticism I’ve seen several times was the lack of source code.

In hindsight, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. When you make the protagonist of your fantasy novel a programmer, you’re likely to get at least a few programmers reading it. Of course they’ll open it up hoping to see what’s written on the tin. It’s not even out of character for the genre as a whole; many of the things fans of litRPG books like to see, from leveling to gear planning to dungeon design, involve nitty-gritty details that would have questionable literary value anywhere else. Arguably, that’s what distinguishes litRPG from something like gamelit.

Why, then, am I not going to show the source code? There are three main reasons.

Most readers won’t get it.

I’ll start with the obvious: Most readers won’t get it. Sure, there’s a greater-than-average number of people reading my book who know at least a little about programming, and the first draft did include some of these things. I remember going on in great detail about the difficulties Ike faced without a proper IDE, for instance. Without exception, my beta readers hated it and asked me to make it more accessible for non-programmers. I’m not saying the series needs to have global appeal, but I hope folks understand that too much programming detail narrows its target audience considerably.

I’m a PHP programmer.

Yeah yeah, I hear you groaning now. PHP gets a bad rap. I could defend it (PHP powers ~80% of the internet, after all), but that would be missing the point: A lot of the folks who want to see source code probably don’t want to see it in PHP. I know other languages, of course – plenty of JavaScript, some bash scripting, C++ from my college days, a smattering of Python and Java – but then I get into the weeds trying to produce code to the audience’s perceived level of quality. I could also go with a fully made-up language, but then I have to try to design something fake that makes enough sense to seem real. I’m good at what I do, but I’m no language architect.

I have a day job.

This is not a complaint about the amount of work it would be to add source code. True Calling is a labor of love, after all, and it’s been very rewarding to spend time on it. I’m just pointing out that I spend 40 hours a week writing code. When I’m writing for my own enjoyment (or with the hopes of being a full-time author one day), I prefer not to have a debugger open. Sue me; I’m selfish like that. 😉