Monster Girl Extravaganza - Sir Bedivere the Mad with Cat Girl Evolution

Monster Girl Extravaganza Day 1!

We are kicking off this event with Sir Bedivere the Mad and Cat Girl Evolution

Some may know of their posts to Royal Roads Reddit sub. Always a mind of information.

So let's dive in!

First of all, tell us a little about yourself? Online or Offline.

I’ve got an engineering degree, I like playing FPS games, and I read significantly more webcomics than actual books.

Where does your inspiration come from? What childhood books, or movies were your biggest draw? 

I originally wrote a big long thing, but it was long and rambly, so here’s my progression of most inspirational stories on my from childhood to now (not 100% sure on the order cuz I just rambled this out in a couple minutes):

Start → Magic Treehouse → Percy Jackson → Harry Potter → Lord of the Rings → Hunger Games → Ender’s Game (and Ender’s Shadow, and also Speaker for the Dead is one of the greatest books ever written) → A Song of Ice and Fire (and all its supplementary material) → Name of the Wind → Anime Phase → Fullmetal Alchemist → Bleach → Hunter X Hunter → Black Clover → That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime → So I’m a Spider, So What? → Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina (underrated peak, and for better or worse, very influential on my writing style) → Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song (more underrated peak) → Food Wars → Manga Phase → Tokyo Ghoul (Still my all time favorite manga) → Fullmetal Alchemist and Hunter X Hunter again → too much random stuff to list → Berserk → Light Novel Phase → Slime Tensei and Kumoko again → A buncha other random stuff → Webcomic phase → Solo Leveling → The Beginning After The End → Tower of God → Peerless Dad → Mookhyang - Dark Lady → Honestly, too many to list. I have a tier list with literally 300+ webcomics on it, so I’ll just list a couple of the most influential ones → The Boxer (one of the greatest stories ever written in any medium. So good I reread it literally as soon as I finished it the first time) → Hand Jumper → Royal Road Phase → Mother of Learning → Perfect Run → A Practical Guide to Sorcery → Magical Girl Gunslinger → Super Supportive → Phantasm → The Oscillation → Collective Thinking → Cyber Dreams → A Tyrant, Sort Of → Amazon + RR Phase → Primal Hunter → Hell Difficulty Tutorial → Bookbound Bunny → Syl → The Legend of William Oh → Sky Pride → The Art of Gold Digging → New Life as a Max Level Archmage → Present Day

Other influential stories that I can’t remember when I read/watched: Piranesi, The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Martial Peak, It’s Hard to be a Man After Travelling to the Future, Lolita, The Five Rings, Anna Karenina, I Shall Seal the Heavens, Uma Musume, Netflix Daredevil, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (actually really, really good. More people should watch it.)

Okay, that was still really long, but I think I covered everything influential. I’ve read/watched a lot more, but those are the ones that stuck with me the most.

What was your first story on Royal Road and how did it grow you and your brand from there? 

My first story is a secret (for now), but Bunny Girl Evolution was my second. I don’t really know about growing my brand, but I’ve kept the story going with no intention of ending it any time soon, so I guess I’ve built a brand of reliability and at least a basic level of quality.

The exciting part, tell us about this newest release?

Cat Girl Evolution is a much more lighthearted, comedic take on Monster Evolution than Bunny Girl is. It’s a story about Yona, who (allegedly) was a human in her first life, getting reincarnated as a cat and fully embracing the cat life. She has a System Assistant named Abby, but unlike many stories where the System Assistant is either snarky, or has no personality whatsoever, the System Assistant here plays the straight man to Yona’s antics. 

I’d say the main appeal of this story is the dynamic between Yona and Abby, and also Yona and the world. She’s a bit of an unhinged protagonist and she makes it everyone else’s problem. It’s kind of the opposite of Bunny Girl Evolution in a way. In BGE, the main character is stuck in the dangerous world, but in CGE, the world is stuck with a dangerous main character.

What made you choose to tell this particular story? 

I started it on a whim, and it ended up being really fun to write. That’s how all my stories start, really. In this case, someone said something like “What if we all wrote Monster Girl Evolution stories and released them at the same time?” and I wrote Cat Girl Evolution as kind of a joke and then it went from there. 

What have you learned with previous writing that you’ve harnessed here?

I’ve learned a lot from mistakes made in previous stories. In my first ever story, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and set some things in motion in the first few chapters that eventually broke the entire story and left me stuck deep in a hole I didn’t know how to dig my way out of. In Bunny Girl Evolution, I ended up accidentally breaking the promise of the story pretty early on, and while I somewhat fixed it with some dev edits, the story never really recovered from that. In Cat Girl Evolution, I’ve tried to take the lessons I learned in both those stories (and in other stories I may or may not have written) and implement them. I made sure to set up the System and the world in such a way that it scales properly and can handle what happens in the story beyond 200k words or so, and I made sure to keep the main promise of the story, this time not making any drastic tonal shifts or inserting arcs that take away from the main plot up to that point.

Ie what is your writing process?

My writing process is a 2 step one:

1. Sit down
2. Write

I don’t really do anything fancy. I am a pure pantser, and while I do kind of plan things, the plans are all in my head and are constantly changing. I don’t have any outlines or planning documents or anything like that. I just write.

What is your biggest regret with writing? Or your hardest lesson learned?

My biggest regret is probably what happened to my first story. In retrospect, now that it’s been almost three years since I started it, I actually did a lot of things really well there that I didn’t realize I was doing well, and I also see ways that I could fix the story. It was definitely broken and needed fixing, but I gave up too easily. I do eventually want to get back to it, because I want to finish that story and I feel really bad about abandoning it, but I just haven’t had the time. I think I definitely needed to write the other stories I’ve written since then to be able to understand how to fix that story, but because of those stories, I also have less time. I think I might have time now though. I’ll have to start easing back into it because it’s been a while since I’ve touched it.

If you could tell our new authors 3 things that helped you get to where you are today, what would they be? 

1. Read
2. Read more
3. Write what you want to read

A lot of new authors don’t seem to understand that you need to read to be able to write well. Even more end up sacrificing reading time for writing time. If you are an author and find that you don’t have time to read anymore since you started writing, your writing is probably slowly declining. 

Any other parting nuggets of wisdom? 

Luck doesn’t exist. In the words of Seneca “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.” If your book failed, it’s either because you didn’t prepare enough, or you didn’t get an opportunity. If you’ve marketed your book (good cover, shoutouts, maybe a couple ads, hit Rising Stars, posted on Amazon with proper self promo) and your book didn’t make you money or reach the numbers you were expecting/hoping, then it is an issue with preparation, because you’ve gotten all the opportunities already. And by “an issue with preparation,” I mean that your story wasn’t good enough to make the cut in whatever market you were trying to sell it to. 

All Social Media Links.

https://www.royalroad.com/profile/512699

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Sir-Bedivere-The-Mad/author/B0F9T2PMQB