This week I’m hosting Django Wexler to discuss his new indie project, The Thirteenth God. But let’s kick things off with some time-sensitive information!

• I’m teaching at the Alpha Young Writer’s Workshop this summer. Alpha is a really special program for high-school-aged writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror—the kind of program I would have jumped at back in high school. If you know of (or are yourself) a young person of a literary bent, applications for 2026 are open until March 1.

• This is How You Lose the Time War is a Kindle Monthly Deal in the UK, available for 99p! I believe that price should be matched by other online bookstores.

• On Feb 25, Rozzie Bound Books is hosting me at Distraction Brewery in Boston. Come by and chat!

• I’m on break for a bit now, so—no newsletter next week. I look forward to catching up soon.

Now: roll tape!

Max Gladstone: Hi Django! I’m really excited to be chatting with you about the release of The 13th God.

Django Wexler: Thank you for having me on your newsletter.

Max: It's my pleasure.

MG: So 13th God is the beginning of a new venture for you, in a lot of different ways. Most of your work has been traditionally published on the yearly release cycle through New York. How are you thinking about approaching independent publishing differently, having come out of that ecosystem?

DW: It’s interesting. I'm in a very privileged position, basically. Basically, I can, you know, the traditional publishing guys are happy to have me, but I can write faster than they want to publish. The publishers generally want to do one or two books a year, and I can write probably two or two and a half books a year. 

Obviously, from a small business perspective—which is kind of what a writer is—the only sort of input is my time. And it behooves me not to waste it. So I try to stay active and not just like take vacation when they're not ready for me to write more. In the past, I've done things like tie-in fiction. I did Magic the Gathering, I did D&D, I also sometimes had two series going with some children's book series or whatever. And that was all fine. 

The children's book thing is harder to do these days. And the tie-in fiction got a little bit unsatisfying. And so my agent was like, hey, indie is now—and has gone sort of in my lifetime—from weird fringe, like nobody cares, to completely mainstream and very respectable. So my agent’s like, why don't you just do something for yourself? And then you own it, right? The problem with tie-in is if it does really well, nothing happens.

MG: Yeah, it's great for the brands—for the rightsholder.

DW: And my history with tie-in is a little checkered in terms of, you know, sometimes it gets buried. You're just completely at the mercy of the commercial partner. So sometimes they change their plans and they don't do the thing that they were originally going to do, and then all your work goes in the trash. You get paid anyway. So it's like on the one hand, you're like, well, you know, I got paid…. it's fine…. But like, on the other hand, you're like, but you wrote a whole book.

MG: I’ve been there. “I worked really hard on that and nobody saw it!”

DW: Yeah.

MG: And like, it's also very weird to have a book that you've written in somebody else's drawer.

DW: Yeah.

MG: Especially, I don't know if you think about it this way, but for me, it feels like every project kind of leads into the next project in my own mind. It may not be visible to the reader because often the thing that led into that project is a book that for some other reason is not getting released for another two years. But in my head, there's this logical chain. It's very weird that nobody is ever likely to read the piece of tie-in fiction that I wrote in that I drafted in November to December of ’16. It's just gone.

DW: I had one set of things that ended up, due to a publishing SNAFU, coming out after the thing that they were supposed to be a prequel to. That obviously decreased readership, so a lot of people didn't see it. And that had another book that was literally just a tie-in for a thing that never released. 

MG: Oh! 

DW: So that book is just in a drawer somewhere, you know, it was canceled or whatever. There's one guy at the company who describes himself as the only fan of this book, which is literally true in this case, because he's one of three people who have read it.

MG: He’s in the extremely long tail.

DW: Yeah. Better hope he buys a copy every week for the next like 30 years.

DW: Anyway! The point of all this was that I was like, how can I do something for myself that I own and that also isn't the kind of thing that would work all that well in Trad or that Trad wants or whatever. I can take more risks. I can just do whatever I feel like, which is both kind of empowering and terrifying. And…  I'd been reading a lot of progression and lit RPG type stuff. Obviously, Dungeon Crawler Carl is just like the best of the best in that genre. But also Cradle—those are the two like pole stars of the genre for me.

MG: They're great.. I haven't read widely in the genre, but I've read both of those at least.

DW: And there's a ton of others. But a lot of them, not Cradle, but Dungeon Crawler Carl, started on Royal Road. So I started reading some Royal Road stuff and that was really fun. And then of course, I'm an anime guy from way, way back, and that kind of like isekai LitRPG stuff is everywhere in anime right now and I've read some light novels there. How to Become the Dark Lord was also inspired by some of that. There's a show called So I'm a Spider, So What? and another one called ReZero—and if you're into anime then that connection will make sense. Anyway, the long and the short is I'm like, people are doing this and people are reading it and it seems like a ton of fun. And I kind of want to do something like all these things I've been reading.

And so that's how I got here. I had an idea for a story that felt like it was too weird for Trad. I mean, maybe it wouldn't have been too weird. I don't know. It's hard to say. The pacing is definitely that of a serial. Like it has these short chapters, which always try to leave you wanting the next chapter right away, which is obviously, in a serial that's the goal.

MG: It’s something I love about the book—on top of that “just one more potato chip” feeling, it also gives you a place to stop, even though you want to get back in as quickly as possible. And as a parent, you know, my weekends are often really full. So it was an enormous amount of fun to be able to read something in five minutes while I was waiting around, or in between tasks. I just blazed through it.

DW: And I find that, you know, not all stories on Royal Road are done this way. My chapters are probably a little on the short side for Royal Road overall—but I find that one of the benefits of Royal Road is it's great for, you know, 10 minutes of reading . You know, a 2000 word chapter. My chapters are about a thousand words. It makes it kind of a blast to write because a chapter is just about one writing session. So I would just sort of sit down and write a chapter front to back and then do another one later in the day. And that's just like, that's my push for this book. And that was a lot of fun.

MG: That's great. What, if anything, felt different on the writing side: when you're targeting a short chapter like this, how are you approaching the scene differently? Or are you conscious of approaching it differently?

DW: Sometimes it's easy because like, sometimes it's just a matter of putting a chapter break where I would have put a scene break previously.

MG: Sure.

DW: And in a more traditional setting, I might shoot for like 6- or 7,000 word chapters, and those usually have multiple scenes in them. I'm always looking for like, what is the big thing to end a chapter on? And so it's just a matter of turning down the bigness a little bit. It was challenging in some places. Sometimes you try to sprinkle in some lines that are good to end a chapter on, like they're funny or foreboding. Because you end up needing to split stuff over multiple chapters, just to kind of maintain momentum. 

MG: Rather than having a single longer exposition sequence.

DW: Yeah, it can help sometimes with structure, actually, because it sort of forces you to spread that stuff out rather than dumping it all at once. I have a real problem—and this is actually one of the things I started this project to address. But a problem I often have in books is skipping time. I don't know if you've ever had this problem, but I always am like, like, oh, I shouldn't just skip forward. People will be confused. And like, it's hard to set it up properly . But then if you don't do it, then you end up with like boring stretches of time where nothing happens where you need to sort of manufacture filler.

And I find it easier—

MG: It's very easy when a character's on their own—I just reread the Big Sleep. And there are lots of periods where Philip Marlow is just basically one wandering around Los Angeles and he can wander around Los Angeles and, you know, in a paragraph, because there's nobody else there and there's nothing consequential happening. But when you have other characters, all of a sudden, it feels like, oh, maybe there's a conversation that happens in the next 14 hours of travel.

DW: Yeah. It's one of those like acceptable breaks from reality, honestly, where like, if you think about it realistically, you often end up with these characters who are like, their character development feels like not enough time has passed.  Where it's like, okay, we fought some bad guys. Now we take a 14 hour road trip. Then we fight some more bad guys, but it feels like it's only been like an hour since they met. They didn't like spend in 14 hours in a car together. You know, sometimes they conveniently sleep the whole time or whatever. 

MG: It's hard to get that over in prose, right? In film you have techniques like montages.

DW: Well, in film, you just do one shot of like the guy grimly driving and he looks over and the other guy's asleep and that's it. You cut to the next scene. But anyway, the point of this is that having the short chapters gives you more opportunities to cut. And it feels like you can do a bigger cut at a chapter break than you would at a scene break. And so especially later in this story where there is like a long trip that they have to go on, like there's some jumps that felt easier because of that.

MG: Did you find yourself changing or shaping characters to fit that tight chapter rhythm? Like, there are characters who will sometimes just want to go on, “and just one more thing.” Did you find yourself selecting for people who would cut or hold information back or don't know, reticent?

DW: Not really. I think it was more style stuff. Like there's just some stuff you just elide. You know, one of the things, and this is also just like more for this kind of story, the Royal Road story, these progression stories need to be, they need to move. They need to have momentum. And so whenever I found myself sort of slowing down and being like, let's discuss the architecture of this town, I'd be like, no, just cut it, cut all of that. Just go forward. And so I would say less changing the characters and more like, like, if I had the inclination to have two characters have a long but ultimately pointless conversation, I'd just write, ‘they had a long but ultimately pointless conversation’ and let’s move on. There's a lot more gentle telling, but not showing at times. Just for momentum, right? This is a thing that's supposed to burn rubber.

MG: That's great.

DW: And that's, it's a style. And it helps. I really love first person present for that kind of thing. Ever since I read like, Aiden Truhen / Nick Harkaway’s The Price You Pay and it just like fucking blew my mind…

MG: Masterclass.

DW: And I'm like, all right, I want to do that. I don't even remember if that book is first tense is present tense. I think it is.

MG: It is, yeah.

DW: And then I did Davi in that style, and that was just like a ton of fun. It can, at times, feel limiting because the point of it is that you're so firmly in your character's head, you know, this is me narrating what's happening right now. And so obviously you're kind of locked into that and telling a wider story can be a problem, but there's trade-offs for any style. 

MG: And it works better with some characters than others, right? A thread I see connecting Jack Price in the Aiden Truhen books and Davi, for example, in the Dark Lord books, is that they're both deeply traumatized people who are working their legs as fast as they possibly can to exist in that topstream, like, absolute present moment, the conscious 0.001%, ignoring everything else that's going on in their psychology. They want to stay as far above the darkness as they possibly can.

DW: Exactly. Yes, yeah, that's very true. And as I was saying sort of before the interview started, the big difference with this stuff is that you get feedback right away. You’re familiar with the traditional publishing process where you write a book and then your editor takes months to read it and then you go through and then it comes out another nine months later and then maybe you get some feedback from readers.

MG: Of course often at a certain point, you try to insulate yourself from feedback as much as possible because of how you can read 10 comments about how meaningful your work was and how much of a genius you are and how important you are in the lives of your readers and so on and so forth. And one comment that's like, yeah, it was okay. And then like, that's obviously the one that you focus on…

DW: Or the person who has an issue with your book that is like factually wrong?

MG: Yeah, right.

DW: You're just like, I want to fight you.

MG: Yeah, I'm going to show up at your house with big post boards that explain how wrong you are.

DW: I’m going to give you a three hour lecture on why this is not correct.

MG: I’m going to get Folding Ideas to come in here and two hours of YouTube video on the subject of “your wrong ass.”

DW: Yes.

MG: So how's it been? How's the live feedback going?

DW: It's great. I mean, so I've been lucky enough that it's been, you know, about as good as I could have expected. There's followers, there's people on Patreon. I'm so gratified. I have had help from a ton of really nice people. My agent and a guy who works with him named Jackson Dickert, who is also a writer. Jackson in particular is like a master of this space and he's helped me enormously in putting all my stuff together and the ads and the cover and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And also just like introductions to a bunch of people he knows. 

So I feel like I can't take too much credit, but I feel very gratified anyway. Some of it obviously is the story, and ultimately that's the thing, I feel happy about that. But getting that in front of people's eyeballs is a challenge. Indie has the wonderful quality that no one can stop you, but it has the negative quality of being completely spammed to hell because not only are there a zillion people who want to do it, there's also a zillion bots and copycats and whatever. So, you know, discoverability remains a serious challenge.

MG: Right. One of the advantages of traditional print is that once the book is in a bookstore, people do go into bookstores—and then the book is right there for them to pick up. Or it’s in their library or whatever.

DW: I feel like we didn't realize until there was an alternative available how useful the curation effect of bookstores actually is.

MG: Yes.

DW: That, like, when you go into Barnes & Noble and look at the new sci-fi fantasy as I used to, like once a week when I was a teenager. You know, it's not all going to be great. The bookstore owner's not reading all that stuff. I mean, if it's Barnes & Noble, there's some buyer who maybe does read all that stuff. But it will probably be a book, right? An original book that is not plagiarized. If you do the same thing on Amazon, that is not true. You know, Kindle and Kindle Unlimited are just chock full of garbage. And now, especially AI garbage. It’s bad. But then, obviously, at the publisher level, they're weeding out a lot of people, and that's kind of a mixed bag. Obviously, you end up weeding out voices that maybe publishers are not so interested in, a traditional problem. But at the same time, there's a lot of people who are not up to the challenge and you don't have to go through that. I think what we've discovered in the age of the internet is that someone has to perform the gatekeeping function.

MG: Right?

DW: It's not optional. And if it's not the publishers, it's the readers. And if you've ever just kind of like looked for new stuff on Amazon trying to find diamonds in the rough, the rough is pretty rough. 

MG: There does seem to need to be some kind of middle layer between people and the fire hose of everything that anyone might want to post.

DW: I remember thinking back in 20 years ago that what would happen was that some consolidated middle layer would evolve, that there would be some blogger, as we thought back then, some set of bloggers who would become like the de facto guardians and would police things. And it really hasn't happened. There are individual bloggers who read things, but the flood is just too large. No one can drink it all. 

MG: And even the communities that exist to try to do some sort of joint curation are often limited by the fact that only the most popular of the most popular is widely read even within that community.

DW: Right.

MG: Like this is the sort of paradox of the long tail. I started seeing people talk about this a couple of years ago. We thought that in the future, there would be this explosion of weird and interesting work.

DW: And there there has been.

MG: There has been. But there's also been an erosion of the ecosystem for allowing that weird and interesting work to be distributed, and to capture the public imagination. Instead, the only things that people talk about are the extraordinarily popular.

DW: Yeah, in a way, we've concentrated things at the top more.  I think we under-appreciated the extent to which books have a network effect. Like social media has a network effect. Everybody wants to be on the number one platform, whatever. But books, people like to talk about books. They like to recommend books. And so there is some amount of things that are popular become more popular because they're popular.

MG: Yes.

DW: Have I ever told you my sort of ‘standard theory of book mega hits’ and why their quality is so variable?

MG: No, go for it.

DW: I thought of this a while back. I think I had just read The Da Vinci code, which is very bad. I don't know if that's like a bold, hot take, but I feel like we're fine in 2026.

MG: The Da Vinci Code is damn compulsive read. Not a good book.

DW: And the thing that sort of shocked me is if you had read any other thriller…

MG: Yep.

DW: The things in the Da Vinci Code were just like not particularly interesting.

MG: Right.

DW: If you’d ever read John Grisham or any of that stuff. And I wasn't even like an aficionado of that stuff, and I still knew all the tropes. It was just sort of tiresomely familiar. But I remember watching a local news report—LOL, remember local news reports?—on when it became this big hit. There were all these people, people were doing it through Christian groups or whatever, but the gist was like, ‘I really don't read fiction, but this one was great.’ So the theory of mega hits is like, you have to remember– and it's easy to forget when you we're in our circles and everybody reads all the time—most Americans don't read that much, or at all. And so for something to achieve a certain level of popularity, the people reading it basically never read books. 

DW: And so if something's super cliche, like they're into it, right? Everybody gets hit by cliches once. You know: Darth Vader is Luke's father?!?! What a twist!

MG: I've also hit on this concept at times, and I've flirted with calling it the Iron Law of bestsellers, which is: a bestseller is by definition a book read by people who don't read books.

DW: Right. And it doesn't mean that bestsellers are always bad. It's more complicated than that. It means that the fact that they are bestsellers doesn't have a lot to do with their quality. They just like get that mysterious bump.  And sometimes it's great and sometimes it's like, oh.

MG: Cecilia Tan said to me once, this also stuck with me that a bestseller is on a basic level in market correction.

DW: That is interesting.

MG: That is to say, it's that the audience for thrillers generally may exist, but the Da Vinci Code succeeded by being a thriller that was targeted, that was accessible to, or was properly presented to people who would or would like thrillers but didn't read that kind of book. Or Fifty Shades of Gray. There was an appetite for very erotic romance that was being underserved in the romance community.

DW: That makes sense. And it makes sense in the Da Vinci Code where it's like, if people are sort of culturally not consuming that kind of work, but would like it.

MG: Yeah.

DW: And then you have this potential for a breakthrough.

MG: It puts this in an interesting place now, come to think, where, you know, a lot of people don't read that much. So there's a space for them to convert into being readers.

DW: It’s not clear if it can happen again these days just because we don't have the same consolidated media we used to have.

MG: True. People who would do the report on the Da Vinci Code phenomenon—how many of those are there? How Da Vinci code copies were moved by the fact that people were seeing earned media about the phenomenon or, you know, or the TERF Wizard books.

DW: Another really good example of that is like the whole YA boom, sort of post-Harry Potter, you know, Hunger Games and all that stuff. I feel like after Harry Potter, there was just this like, ‘oh, kids like books that are fun.’

MG: Right. What a concept!

DW: What I like to say when I was growing up, kids' books were like Newberry Award winning books about dead dogs. Like that was what was available.

MG: And there was Diane Duane. And Dianna Wynne Jones.

DW: You could find fun stuff if you were looking, but otherwise just Hardy Boys and Babysitters Club.

MG: Oh, gosh, yeah.

DW: Now, you know, kids like cool adventure stories with spaceships and explosions and, and gunfights. Like, obviously!

MG: So, really quickly because I’ve taken a lot of your time: are you planning to continue to publish traditionally? And what projects are you working on now in addition to The Thirteenth God?

DW: Definitely still working on traditional stuff!  I have a new series coming from Orbit later this year, the first book is The Only Way Out Is Up, and it’s about a guy who climbs a giant tower via a robot pokemon fighting tournament. So between that and continuing Thirteenth God, I’m going to have my hands full!