Welcome to the Kitchens
· 4 min read
Every monastery in my books has a kitchen, and every kitchen has somebody at the very bottom of it. This series is about him.
Welcome to the blog. I'm Brett Bockmon, and I'm writing The God-Eater's Apprentice, a progression fantasy series about a kitchen servant who swallows the heart of a god. This is the first post, so it seems polite to start with introductions: who I am, what the series is, and what you'll find here if you come back.
Who I am
I live in the Midwest. That is the most exciting true fact I have, which is why the About page takes a few liberties (the corn is involved). The plain version is that I'm a reader first. Progression fantasy is the genre I keep coming back to: stories where you watch a character get stronger one hard-won step at a time, and where every step costs something. Eventually I wanted a particular story in that genre badly enough that I started writing it myself.
Most of the work happens the way you'd expect. Coffee, an outline that is never as finished as I think it is, and characters who make decisions I did not authorize.
The world
In the world of The God-Eater's Apprentice, gods are not worshipped. They are farmed.
Gods fall from the sky, and when they land, kingdoms, sects, and guilds race to carve them up. Divine bones become weapons. Divine blood becomes elixirs. Eating what's left of a god is how people grow powerful, and the people who do it call it sacred inheritance.
Somebody has to do the butchering, though. Somebody has to salt the meat so it doesn't rot. That job falls to the coreless, people born without a core, the inner vessel that lets a person hold divine power. The coreless are kept as labor. When it's convenient, they're used as fuel.
The kitchen boy
Solren is coreless. He has spent his whole life in a monastery's kitchens, preparing the flesh of gods he is forbidden to taste. He's careful, quiet, and very good at being overlooked, because being overlooked is how the coreless survive.
Then a courier collapses in the kitchens with a god's heart in his satchel, the reckoners' footsteps are already in the corridor, and Solren makes the worst decision of his life.
He swallows it.
He shouldn't be able to keep it down. Everyone knows the coreless can't hold divine power. But he can. And the heart he swallowed isn't dead. It's warm, it's patient, and it's listening.
Why start in the kitchen?
A lot of fantasy about godlike power is told from the top: the prodigy, the chosen one, the heir to the great bloodline. I wanted to start at the bottom of the kitchen instead.
Salt keeps meat from rotting. In a world where the meat is divine, the people who do the salting end up knowing things about gods that the priests never bother to learn. Solren's edge isn't talent or bloodline. It's that he has spent his whole life with his hands in the work, paying attention. I'll write more about the salt in a future post, because it turned out to matter more than I expected when I started.
The Eater's Ladder
Progression fantasy lives and dies by its power system, so here is the shape of this one. Power is measured by how much of a god you can hold without it holding you. There are six tiers: Awakened, Tempered, Anointed, Exalted, Ascendant, and Crowned.
The catch is that nothing you eat is just power. Every divine remnant carries the nature of the god it came from: its hunger, its temper, its idea of who you ought to become. Climbing the ladder means taking that in without being rewritten by it. Some people manage. Most don't. And Solren has a bigger problem than most, because the first thing he ever ate is still in there, and it has plans of its own.
Where things stand
The series is planned as nine books.
- Book One, The God in the Salt, is coming soon.
- Book Two, The Unlicensed God-Eater, is coming soon as well.
- Book Three, The Carrion Markets, is next.
I'll share release dates as soon as I have them, and newsletter subscribers will hear first.
What you'll find here
I'm aiming for a new post every week. Some will be about the books: news, cover reveals, and behind-the-scenes looks at the world and how it works. Others will be about the genre itself: what makes a power system satisfying, why we can't resist an underdog clawing his way up, and the books I've been reading and would recommend.
The newsletter goes out once a month. When there's news about my books, that comes first. When there isn't, I'll write about progression fantasy and fantasy in general, with reviews, recommendations, and the occasional deleted scene. If you love this kind of story, I'd be glad to have you. You can sign up here.
Thanks for stopping by the kitchens. Please keep your hands inside the brining vats at all times.
— Brett