Beers & Beards w/JollyJupiter

Welcome And Meet Jolly Jupiter

Welcome everyone to In Other Worlds, the LitRPG Gamelit and Fantasy Podcast. I am your host, Jess, and today we have Jolly Jupiter. How are you doing?

Good. Thanks for having me on the podcast.

Yeah, of course. So right now you have one series that is currently out and published, uh, Beers and Beards, an adventure in brewing. I know that's the name of the first book. Is that the name of kind of the whole series as well?

Uh, there was a lot of sort of conversation, right, when the series first came out because it was originally started on Royal Road as a serial under Beers and Beards. So do we go with Beers and Beards book one, or do we go with Beers and Beards and Adventure Brewing? So the series name is uh now Beers and Beards, and each title has its own title. Uh and they're all, of course, brewing puns, because why not?

The Premise Of Beers And Beards

Which is fantastic. Uh so give us kind of like an overview of what the series is about.

So Beers and Beards is the story of Pete, who is a well, Peter, although everybody calls him Pete, but yeah. Uh, who is a brewer and vintner in Yokanagan here in Canada. And he dies, unfortunately, and reincarnates as a dwarf in a fantasy world. And of course, dwarves are famous for their mining, their blacksmithing, and their beer. So he's very excited to try dwarven beer, only to discover that in fact it tastes terrible because they venerated it so much that it became taboo in their society to change it at all. So thus his quest becomes a quest to save beer.

And so when the main character uh passes in the very beginning of the book and he gets kind of isekai'd into this new body in this new world? He ends up finding himself in the body of a dwarf in kind of like an indenturement camp who himself was going to or did die in a mining accident. What made you decide to put him into a dwarf in an indenturement camp versus one that's like already working in a brewery that was in a fermentation accident or something?

So the book started really as a love letter to dwarfs. Uh, I decided I wanted to write something like it. I was playing a game of Deeperop Galactic after playing again one day. You know, I'm reading all of these LED RPGs. Surely somebody must have made some kind of fun dwarven lead RPG, but there weren't any. Uh in fact, every piece of dwarven literature I could find was very, very dour. Uh, the most famous ones are, of course, the Dwarves by I think Marcus High. I need to go look up the specific name, but there's a couple out there, but they're they always paint dwarves as a very dour society. And I wasn't capturing that feeling I wanted. So I went and started putting together beers and beards, and I wanted as a callback to start in that dwarven mine, right? Because if you're writing a story about dwarves, you gotta have it starting in a dwarven mine.

Oh yeah.

Why The Story Starts In Mines

And so I have I have people note that the beginning of beers and beards, I do have people bounce off it because they say they're they're coming here for the brewing, but it starts slow in the mine. And it's well, number one, that was my first writing experience. So uh it's written slow because I was still getting a feeling for writing, but also because well, that's what a large majority of dwarven literature is actually like.

Yeah, I mean, and as someone who is a huge fan of dwarves, I will play one every chance I get in a game. Uh Deep Glock Deep Rock Galactic is a ton of fun. I I have played it, I love it. Uh, I was so happy to find a book about dwarves and just how kind of jovial they can be and the found family and the clans. And I thought it was very needed, and I was happy to find one. Uh so Peter in the story loves a good pun. He's full of them all the time. Are you do you love puns as much as Peter does?

Oh, absolutely. Uh, I would say if there if there was one one piece of author insert in there, it would definitely be Pete's love of puns. Um my friends and family are always quick to say, no, Pete's not a self-insert. Because I I, you know, you worry when you're an author. Is my MCA just a self-insert? Now I just living out of fantasy through my main character. And so it is gratifying every once in a while to to hear people say, you know, he's so different, but he's just as bad at Huns. It's like, well, yeah, he's a dad. Uh he he dad jokes with the best of them.

One of the things that I did love about this book and the dwarves that you wrote is the female dwarves have beards. I love that. Female dwarves should have beards.

They should I do get I do get flack for it every once in a while. Like, why what's with the weird? What's with the beards? Why is he suddenly falling in love with beards? What is with what is all of this? And well, I'm just I'm sorry, if dwarven female beards make you uncomfortable. I don't know what to tell you. It's part of the dwarven mythos. There's there's lots of arguments, beards are no beards for dwarven women.

Um yeah, yeah, I am firmly on the side of female dwarves do have beards, so I was happy to see it.

Puns And Bearded Dwarven Women

I was really, really super pleased with how well my um artist for adventure and brewing did the the female dwarves with beard. He somehow managed to nail that uh clearly uh feminine, but still have that beard look. Yeah, it does capture attention.

That's a female, but they all have beards and it was just fantastic. Yeah, yeah, he really he did nail that one. He was able to really get that down. So Peter in the story is in his former life, is I guess the CEO and owner of a winery. In the book, after he's isekai, he starts brewing beer. Does he eventually branch out into wine or spirits?

Wine In Book Four And Series Ending

Uh yes. So in book four, which is just with the editor and with Christian Yellowland, uh, he does move into wine. What I found really interesting when I was doing because there's a lot of research that I had to go into beards, beers of beards. Um, and I mean fun research, because I got to just, you know, go to a brewery and tell them, hi, I'm an author, I'm writing a book about beer. Can I get a tour around the brewery? And they would do that, uh, especially there's lots of local brew pubs where I live. And so I got to go to pretty much every brewery and brew pub in the city and just look around and try their drinks. And there's lots of research that goes into it, and it's all very thought research. Uh, but with wine, with wines, it was a lot more difficult because you can't it's a lot harder to just go to a winery, and they're often a lot more secretive, yeah. Their their methods and everything. So while there is a lot for wine, because a lot of that is not as open, I was a little more limited, but I I still did get to do wine, right? Uh plus with the way the story worked out, um wine just wasn't as much. For those of you who haven't read it, wine is locked down essentially by a godlike uh a god-given ability where only one person in the world can actually properly make wine. And book four is all about pretty much mostly about Pete's trying to find a way to overcome that while also dealing with sort of the all of the all of the storylines throughout the entire series all coming together for a climax at the end. Uh I probably could have done a fifth book, but uh I think it's a miracle I managed four. And I was ready to start something new.

So and so do you think the four books is gonna be that's just gonna be it for the series?

Yeah, the series is very much close. Um I know some people who are happy with three, where the the beer story, the tale of Pete saving beer does very much come to a conclusion at the end of book three, where book four is more of a conclude is more looking at the broader world as well as the overarching plot and bringing that to a close, as well as dealing with why need and to a lesser degree spirits. But uh Pete was just never really a spirits person. Um I think that's that comes up in the very first chapter. He goes to make this first spirits, and his steel blows up, and his wife gives all heart on it and kind of so never again. So never again.

And now I think in the book they'd mentioned that uh the elves have kind of the market on the wine. Is that gonna be like a point of contention in book four?

Elves, Culture Shock, And Plant Folk

Yes, so book four starts trying. Book four Pete steps out of the Dwarven world and into the Elden world as well as uh human and beast book. So it's more cross-cultural. I know book one says no elves allowed, but uh book four is very much uh lots of elves. And it's kind of funny because uh, book one, the the first series is really a culture shock for a human from Earth trying to brew beers for people who really don't want him touching the the sacred brew recipe. Uh culture shock's a big story, and him slowly becoming a part more and more dwarven. Um, Christian did a great job with. I've had a couple people know how Pete starts not sounding or talking dwarven by the but by the end of the book, he is sounding talking dwarven. And that was something Christian and I worked out, and Christian did a great job on it to really show that transition of him slowly becoming more and more and more like a dwarf. And by the end of book three, he's really a part of that culture. And so then book four, again, he's a fish out of water, but this time as a dwarf in elven society.

Right.

Right? So when you when he's doing business deals and and the start of book one, he dwarves finish fill they um shake on their business deals by spitting in their beard and then grabbing their beard and shaking with wet beards, and so he goes to just do that to an elf who, of course, is like, whoa, because they don't do that. And so he's in another culture shock. Oh, we've got to do something different again. All right, I'm just getting used to this, and now you're all throwing me for a loop again.

Yeah, I can't imagine that that uh that anyone other than a dwarf would think that that's very sanitary. And elves don't typically have beards, so nope, he would just be shaking when it's empty, spit in hand.

Yeah. Although the the elves in this and in beers and beavers are are a little different. They are uh quite literally plants, uh, and they grow to look like the settlements that they essentially bloom in. So you have elves that look like dwarves, and elves that look like humans, and elves that look like gnomes. Uh, they're all just slightly mini more miniature, aside from a few, and are green with sort of bark and they're more like dryads than elves, I would say. If you if you think of the sort of ecologically speaking, they feel more like dryads, but they've got the the definitely it's Holkianask Eldish society with some slight changes because they're plants.

Okay. I don't know. I don't I can't recall if that was mentioned in book one or not.

Uh it's mentioned more in book three.

Okay.

Yeah, book one, he never really has much uh interaction with elves because he's well, he starts in that dwarven mining camp, right?

Audiobook Choices And Voice Acting

Yeah, so he doesn't get really to see anyone outside of outside of eventually gnomes. He does get he does get to meet gnomes. Yep. Uh yeah, and that's for Christian, I think that that's probably a testament to how good of a job he does with that, because that's a lot of thought and kind of conscious effort to as the character progresses, just slowly lean more and more into talking like a dwarf instead of just a normal, and then all of a sudden it shifts into dwarf.

Yeah, I've had um I've had a lot of people say they consider the audiobook the the seminal version of it. And he does he does do an incredible job. Um, he sent me when he was still working on it, he sent me samples of full voice over drinking songs. Uh but Christian really got into it. Uh, it was one of the reasons I went with him uh for the audiobook. He really leaned into the uh I guess the atmosphere of it. Uh hilariously enough, he he went and built himself a uh bar and a brewing station in his basement after doing which he really got into the the the aspect of it, which is it sounds like it.

Yeah, that's actually pretty cool.

Yeah. So he's he's he's living the book, which is awesome. Um, I actually I had a bunch of options for my narrator um when I was kind of choosing. I actually had Athon pitched me Roger Clark. He's the voice actor for Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption. Oh yeah, so he's yeah, so they pitched him because he really had that thick uh accent, could really pull off that thick uh Dish accent. But um when Christian sent his he sent in his initial reading, he he just really nailed that I guess the the comedy, the the comedy beats and the comedy feeling. It's hard for me now uh when I go back and listen to him do the voice acting for it, for me not to go, oh yeah, I should have uh played off of certain things he was doing. But uh I I I never actually listened to my own series in full on audiobook. Uh when you uh when you're so sort of deep into your books and you've read them and reread them and edited them and re-edited them and then done them over and over and over again. Uh first off, I didn't want his performance to impact my own writing. If that makes sense, yeah.

I would imagine that that would be a really difficult thing to not have happen if you like listen to the audiobook for one as you're writing book two, not to write to the narrator.

Plotting, Spreadsheets, And Crafting Stats

Not right to the narrator, right? And that can change your own authored voice, and that can have some impacts on the characters. And then the second was um when I finished it and went back and started listening to book one, I was like, I don't want to listen to it again. I w I wanna I want to start on my new series. And I I definitely felt for some of my favorite authors who are writing three or four series at once, like Dakota Kraut. And it's like come on, go finish this other series, don't start new series. But now that I've done a four-book series at almost a million words, it's okay. I get it. I get it.

Yeah, that's a lot of words.

Uh so what was it that pulled you into Beers and Beards in the first place?

It was dwarves. I I was looking for dwarves. I was looking around. I was at Dragon Con and I was at the Aethon booth in the vendor hall, and I was looking at all their books, and I was like, oh, this one has dwarves on it. This is the one. This is the one. If I'm only getting, if I'm not getting anything else today, it's gonna be this book right here. And it was fantastic. It was everything my little dwarf loving heart could have hoped for, which is perfect, right?

That's really who it was made for, right? That that book was made for you and the all the people like you who just wanted something fun and dwarfy.

Yeah, because that was the first one that I had seen that covered dwarves. Um, you know, I've seen cozy fantasy with dwarves, and I've seen normal fantasy with dwarves. I just I hadn't had that that lit RPG scratch or itch scratched um with the dwarves.

There are there are a couple. Uh there's the Mine Ward is one. Uh but like I said, they are very much more action and vengeance and battles of plans oriented.

In the book, we find out why Peter was sent from Earth to this new universe. It's a whole like ordeal game with the gods. And so I guess each god has a chosen one that they have picked. We do meet uh at least one other chosen one in book one. Uh, through the course of the four books, do we meet all of them or most of them?

Yeah, you do meet all of them. Uh by the end of book three, you'll meet a good portion, and then book four is really about closing that up.

Um, spoilers, of course, for anybody who hasn't read the series.

Yes, there is. Pete does have a there is a greater reason for Pete to be here, but there's no really kind of like divine quests. I I really wanted to avoid the the chosen one. You know that the chosen one trope. And so um they're described more as catalysts than as being chosen for any one thing in particular, where there these are people who from different universes and worlds who all have a particular skill that they're good at, and they've been punked down in places where the gods think is the most appropriate to enact catalysts for change.

And so I'm assuming that we'll eventually see more of um the gods as well.

Uh they they they very much remain a back seat. Uh they are they are pretty much limited to observers. There's sort of one god who is maybe a little more rule-breaky, but that's expected. That's expected of that one particular god, and that has big implications for book four. But they they they pretty much do just remain in the the background. Uh, as soon as your gods start getting really geeky involved, uh it becomes really easy as an author to fall into oh god did it, which I was trying to avoid.

So who was your favorite character to write?

Um, I really enjoyed keep, but I think if I had to pick a care favorite character, probably Gaylon.

I really like the goat.

Dropship Cultivation And Eldritch Canada

Yeah, or Penelope. Penelope to defend it. Penelope is right up there. Um it's a weird character to really like, which is funny because I so Penelope came out of a actually came out of a Patreon vote where I put up a bunch of I put up a bunch of different names for breweries for the brewery that Pete would end up with. And uh everybody the the winner by a long run was the thirsty goat. And so of course, if it's the thirsty goat, they have to have a goat mascot. And so Penelope was born out of that. But if it if they if if you know if my patents had chosen a different brewery name, then you probably probably would have ended up with a a different character.

Yeah, it's weird that one of my favorites is a goat, but there we go.

Yeah, so well Penelope, Penelope's great, right? And she she does play uh a fairly big role in book four. Uh not too big, she's still just a goat. And uh but it was hard to avoid phanderizing her into just you know the drunk goat uh who has thinks she's a princess, which is better than a cat that thinks it's a princess and gets drunk on dirty Shirley's. Really goats with this Rampon Bear are the and thinks they are princesses of the superior. Yeah, you just have to ask uh pripetente, he would agree.

Penelope knows she's a princess.

She knows she's the princess. She's royalty, she's the 912th.

Yeah, you kind of feel bad for for the goats at that at that uh brewery a little bit.

She's happy.

Yeah, I mean, she seems like it. She gets what she wants. Most Letter PGs that have been published are very heavy on the fighting, very heavy on. Dungeon diving. Did you have any difficulty writing a more cozy lit RPG?

No, I don't think so. Um, lit RPG crafting mechanics have always been a big part of RPGs and gaming systems. So having stuff based around that wasn't overly difficult at all. Um, the harder part was so many of the stats in a lit RPG are not really relevant to crafting, uh, which was an issue. Uh my partner in crime, Miss Neptune, she's writing a new LitRPG here. And we put a little more effort into making it so that there's actual mechanics for around things like durability and crafting speed and things like that. Make you that more RPG element to the crafting side of things. I I'd say that's one regret is that the the stats stats went up, but it was hard to show stats went up rather than tell stats went up when you don't have like a strength-based character or a speed-based character, right? How do you make how do you make characters more perceptive? Well, Pete starts clueless with regards to interpersonal relationships and becomes more perceptive in them as time goes on and less likely to put his foot in his mouth as his charisma goes up. Um, but he's not a fighter, so maybe when his strength goes up, we don't really see it.

Yeah, it's kind of hard to put that through into a story when there's not a ton of fighting.

And the the the the marriage between the RPG systems and the real world brewing was definitely really fun to work on. Um, especially when I got to in in book four, when I was working with wine, well, how can magic and god-given abilities overcome certain aspects of the winemaking process? Especially with the Nalf, who's lived for thousands of years and has perfected it. Well, what does that look like and how does it compare? So at the end of book three, uh, Pete's using you know magic bottling systems where he starts out, you know, putting together pipes in a cave.

Your current work right now is dropship cultivation, which is currently on Royal Road. I personally am not on Royal Road, I don't use Royal Road, but I did look this one up, and from what I could read, it looks like a reverse Isekai.

Yeah, sort of. Uh the uh I this originally the the story of Dr. Cultivation is interesting because originally it was called Going Post-Troll. I was going to do essentially a mail delivery for a troll and uh that sort of standard RPG. But then I was reading, I've been reading recently Lord of the Mysteries, which if you don't know it, it's uh essentially a Lovecraftian style story that uses set in a Victorian world that uses cultivation, a cultivation system, like from uh Eastern Jian Zhenha. And I didn't I I really loved the story, and I was looking at well, has anybody done the reverse? Is there a Lovecraftian system set in a Wuxa world? And I couldn't find any. So I sat down and I essentially mapped the sort of Lovecraft mythos to eastern systems like the elements and the trigrams and the meridians and everything, and it uh fit together rather rather terrifyingly well. And so I said, Well, if it fits together so well, let's just have fun with it. So I decided just to do it, and so it's the the story of a fantasy Mongolia, essentially, where a young man slash you know boy comes of age and undergoes his family's ritual to commune with one of the elder gods and get his cultivation powers, but there is a mishap that sh causes him instead to commune with an eldritch Canadian.

Eldritch Canadian? Yeah, and so the uh those two seem like they'd be opposite ends of the spectrum.

Of the spectrum, no. So he he ends up uh with this strange being that says A a lot stuck in his head, and uh they then have a relationship, but they need to kind of figure out how it works now that he's got this little tag along sitting in his head, uh playing tourist in uh a Kung Fu world.

Researching Beer And Strange Foods

And are you are you more of a panther or a plotter?

Um I my character's pants, I write the plot. So I I have the all of my books have the main story beats all laid out, and I know so when I started writing book one of Beers and Beards, I had all the way out till book four or five mapped out. Uh all the major story beats, what was going to all happen, but what all the characters did. Uh they I I found very often my characters took control and things went where they wanted. So I would say my plot is plotted and my each chapter is passed.

That seems so hard to keep track of.

That's why I bought something like 60 Excel spreadsheets. Oh my gosh. You know, I'm looking at one of my main beers and beards book notes one here, and it's book one is a four-page Excel spreadsheet with plot points and important things, don't forget, and beer names, beer mixes, Pete makes these specifically uh coddle, shandy, sea beers, coffee beers, uh antagonists, you know what they do, what their goals are. So all the care I I would say I very much plot my characters and put a lot of thought into them, and then their interactions with themselves and the world, they're just what living their life. So I don't really have to plot that.

And then with this current series, you have this one uh plotted out as well.

Yes. Uh I've got this one plotted out for about three books, four books again. Uh, with you know, obviously space to grow for more if I want to. Uh, but the idea is can I show the creation of a sect? Uh a school that is a postal delivery school in a uh eastern Bouchabat.

Do they have a motto like our our United States Postal Service?

Uh there definitely will be a motto. Yeah. Uh that the US Postal Service motto has come up at least once already, as well as discussions on the true immortal uh and great hero Santa Claus.

That is fantastic.

Yeah, and his uh light foot reindeer that are capable of no mystic flight. Yeah.

Definitely how far how far along on Royal Road is it?

Uh it's at 20 chapters. I've got I'm just 30 chapters, 30 chapters. Uh I'm just coming up on writing my see chapter 53 or 54. I'm just coming up on a hundred thousand words written out for it. And I've just finished the climax on Patreon. But it's definitely different because it's but at the same time, there's certain parallels, right? Like honor was a big thing in uh Dwarven society, and face is a big thing as uh you know this sort of social currency in Kung Fu Worlds, and uh I get to do lots of food and drink chapters because of course it's a cozy story. Uh, although I've been told it's more noble bright than cozy, which I wasn't even aware was a genre until I started writing it. Where well I've been told, or by I sort of looking more into it. Apparently, noble the big difference between cozy and noble bright is noble bright, you can expect a certain amount of action, but uh it's heroic characters with this feeling of hope, and you know that they'll get through it. Whereas cozy is more of a focus on sort of that day-to-day fuzzy warm feeling. There's a lot of cozy moments mixed with noble bright. Uh, but getting getting to sit down and write down, you know, then eating food is fun when it's you know weird dishes I've never heard of or tried and can't. So with with beers and geards, I always made sure that I would go and drink what it was and look and you know, go to a brewery and see it made before I wrote about it.

That sounds like some awesome research, right there.

Yeah, awesome research. Uh putting beers on my company card, which I could uh the uh my accountant says you could try, but is it really worth it when the revenue agency comes walking on, did you really need to buy a hundred, you know, beer? Is that really a business expense?

I mean, you have to speak from experience, right?

I have to speak from experience, but uh some of some of them are harder. So when, for example, Pete talks about African beers, it or it was I couldn't find any, right? I look there, there are certain types of African method beers, and I looked for them, but I couldn't find them. They're just there there weren't any in importing them is almost next impossible. But that gets to the next level when I'm writing about Mongolian stuff, and it's like, all right, well, we've got fermented mare's milk wine. Can I get um a fermented mare's milk wine locally? No, okay. No, I can't.

But time to start looking for some good Mongolian restaurants.

Publishing Wins And Explaining LitRPG

Yeah, well, the uh the closest we've got is a place that is a Tibetan place that does do certain kinds of that sort of steppe food. For example, I've just written a whole chapter here about booze dumplings, which are dumplings in salty milk tea. So they're lamb uh they're lamb dumplings in salty tea soup with uh some with generally speaking a little bit of lamb fat kind of uh added to the soup to thicken it.

I don't know how I feel about that.

Right?

I'm not quite sure about that one.

Hey, dumpling dumplings and tea soup definitely sounds like it could be interesting.

It definitely could be. Um once the story is done on Royal Road, do you plan on independently publishing it or shopping around for a publisher? Or do you already have one lined up?

Um A Thon already reposted it and we we built a good relationship. They so they jumped on beards, abusing beards quite early, actually. They they took it farther than I had imagined it would. Um I hit uh I was in the top hundred on Audible for a while there, which is the hundred most purchased audiobooks on the site, which is pretty pretty good.

Yeah.

And I've been consistently within the the top thousand, which is still good. Uh I just really like having them at top hundred for a short while. That was I I think I maxed out around the top 50, which is really good. I was there for about one.

Yeah, I mean that's definitely uh bragging points right there.

Yeah, uh, I get to say I'm a best-selling author now. Uh and people say, I'm not sure. With with what? Thanks for interesting conversations.

Right, right.

Uh so we just moved actually, and um we we moved into uh sort of a townhouse complex, and we were meeting with the neighbors, and uh the fact that we write came up, and uh the the neighborly said, Oh, well, what what do you write? And I said, Well, uh I read that RPG, and she says, Oh, what's that? What's the what is that? Because my husband kind of reads stuff like that. And I said, Oh, you should ask him if he's ever read Dungeon Crawler Carl, because that if you're not sure what he's reading, just say, have you has he read Dungeon Crawler Carl? And then no. So she went she went home to to talk to her husband about it. I realized later this guy probably thought for a short time that Matt Dinneman just moved in next door.

That would be hilarious, though.

Right? Well, wait, Dungeon Carler Carl, the guy who wrote it moved in. No, that was all I write like serious. I write in uh a genre similar to Dungeon Carling Carl.

He comes knocking on your door with like six books in his hand waiting for you to sign up.

Yeah.

Uh but yeah, the the what is lit RPG question comes up so much.

Comes up so much, which is funny because when you when when you think about it, really at its basis level, lit RPG is uh DD and video game fanfic.

It really is.

It is, especially depending on the series, right?

So that's actually a really good one. I've never thought about describing it that way before, but that is the easiest, like most succinct way to describe that the genre without having five minutes.

I will be crucified if that's how it starts being described. We were almost respectable, and then you went on that podcast and described us as DT fanfic, and now that's every that's all everybody thinks of us as.

I think that's perfect. What was your introduction to Lit RPG? How did you find it?

I really wrote actually. But Z-O-G on Royal Road. So my first uh Lit RPG really was probably Legendary Moonlight Sculptor. Uh, if you don't know Royal Road, started out as a scalmation for Korean and Japanese light novels. And Royal Road, the name is taken from the Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, which is a VR. And the genre is kind of semi-bed in the West now, but it's a VR style that RPG.

I kinda love those so much.

There's a couple really good ones. Um there's Overgeared is one that sort of got me started. But the the definitely the the big one was Legendary Moon Knight Sculptor. And I I was always really sad that I don't know if you've ever read it, but the the end never really got properly done in the especially in the I think it's actually still ongoing. But a lot of the Western translation sites and they had a really great web novel for it that disappeared, and I know there were talks about an anime that I don't think they they went anywhere. Although with the success of the Road of the Mysteries anime, we might see it.

Hopefully.

Hopefully. So uh Legendary Mullight Sculpture on Royal Royal Road, the uh which was what they're named after, is where I got started with it. And that's the reason I post Beers and Beers on Royal Road in the first place, was because that's where all that was.

Influences, Releases, And Where To Find

Do you think there's one lit RPG book or series that's been more influential on you than any other?

So when I started writing, there weren't very many cozy or crafting-based lit RPGs. There just weren't a lot. They've become more popular now, uh, in part through um actually I I'm on a lot of Amazon pages for for fans of beers and beers. So that's a that that feels pretty good. Right. So there's there's more now, but when I was first getting started, there weren't too many. There was Crafter's Dungeon was one. But if I if I had to say which lit RPG had the most impact on my work, I would say Legendary Moon Light Sculpture.

So that was uh almost everything that I had for you. Uh before I ask my final question, is there anything that I didn't ask or that you wanted to mention that you wanted everyone to know?

Yeah, well, but well, Bears of Beards Book 4 will be out sometime this year. We're still kind of waiting on that. Now that it's all gone through all the editing, we're now just waiting on finalization of the audio for it. But dropship cultivation will come out sometime here in August. Uh it's being put out by Aethon Books again. So, well, it it'll go to editor sometime in the summer and probably be finished, and then we'll be deciding who to narrate and everything. But that's definitely exciting. So keep an eye out for dropship cultivation. Um, it's very different than Beers and Beards, but it's still my writing, and you'll you'll see certain parallels in the the feel of the book. My wife, Misty Neptune, she just finished her I Run Away to Evil series. If you haven't read it, definitely check it out.

Which is hilarious because that spells out irate.

Yes, that that's uh all of her titles are acronyms like that. Uh her her last book, book four, was I rant. And uh so she she's just finishing up uh and it's going to hit your audio and shelves soon. She wrote a stand-alone kind of adjacent to the I Run Away to Evil World. And she's just going to soon be releasing a new series called Plucky Port Penny.

Fictional Worlds To Live In

Fantastic. So my final question before I we before we tell everyone where they can find you, uh, if you could live in any fictional realm, which one would you pick? And do you think that you would survive for longer than a day?

I mean, the Pokemon world has free healthcare.

Yeah.

Uh-huh. But if you if you have to actually if you actually read some of those entries in the Pokedex, I'm pretty sure I'd be dead within a day because there's some nightmare stuff in that Pokedex. Yeah. Um, but if I had to pick one fictional world to live in, and would I live there for more than a day? Definitely not Marvel DC worlds. Uh uh, no. Statistically, things aren't uh that hot in those worlds. No, no, no, definitely not the Warhammer 40k universe. Uh that would be that would be fun for maybe exactly the 30 seconds it took for some server to do terrible things. Um it would be fun to live in my own fantasy world, and that would be uh I could definitely see myself surviving more than a day there.

Uh so where can everyone find you?

Favorite Beers And Sign Off

You can find me. My books are all in Amazon. Uh, if you search Beers and Beards, it'll show up right away. If you search Beers on Audible, like I've said, it is very much the I really do recommend the audiobook version. Christian really knocked it out of the park. And you really get that feeling of sort of Dorban's society from all the work he's put into the voices and the singing and the voiceovers. Um and huge thanks. I I always have to say huge thanks to the Augscast who gave me permission to use Diggy Diggy Hole in book one. Uh and it comes up again, of course, in book four. Again, it's absolutely necessary. It started with Diggy Diggy Hole. It's got to end with a diggy diggy hole.

Perfect. I love it.

And thanks for having me on the show. Uh yeah. Yeah, it was really fun.

I will link to uh your Amazon store. I will link, I believe you're also on the Aethon uh website as well, so I'll link to them.

And then um you can also find me at lazydragonbooks.com. That's my and my life's main website. So that's lazydragonbooks.com. And uh before we go, what's your favorite beer?

I am a big fan of sours and ciders. There was a cider that I had in Atlanta years ago, and it was a pear cider, and it was so good.

Oh cider I haven't been able to find it since. Yeah, so if you want to know more about ciders, that's book four. Um I just had a mango lime cider, it was really, really good. And then it turned blueberry apple cider.

It was uh not quite as great. That sounds

Really good.

Yeah. I'm more of a lager person. I don't actually like the sour beers. Yeah. They just taste sour.

Well, sometimes you get them and they are too sour, but then sometimes you can get them and they're a little bit on the sweeter side. And the fruit stuff really comes through on the ones that are just a touch sweeter. Uh, I like a good goes.

Yeah. I'm crambling. One fun thing of writing a series about beer was what sort of getting to try all of these things and really nailing down understanding what these all mean and how you know brewing some of them in my own.

So yeah, lots of research. That's everything that I had. I'm gonna link to everything down below in the description of the video. Thank you, Jolly Jupiter, for coming on. Thank you, everyone, for hanging out with us and keep leveling up.