Infinite Farmer

These author’s notes are tradition, and traditions are first and foremost something you just do. There might be reasons behind them, good logical objectives that someone was trying to achieve when they instituted them. They might even achieve those goals, and prevent sure disaster every single time people follow them.

That’s not why you actually follow traditions, though. Every time you run into a tradition, the person telling you to go ahead and do it will say something like “well, that’s the way it’s always been done!” and you will be asked to fall in line. If they don’t do this, if they actually explain the reasons to do the thing, you hardly ever think of it as a tradition even if it is.

It’s frustrating. Some people refuse to follow traditions at all, just for that reason, and I can’t blame them. Sometimes, however, it’s worth your time to follow traditions even if they aren’t explained well, and it's up to you to sit down and figure out the reasons it’s a good idea for you to do it.

When I was sitting down to figure out all the bits and pieces for this author’s note, I had to take a second to do just that. I’m at the end of a pretty long book that was hard to write in comparison to some other books I’ve written. I had to fight for every single word in it. It was tempting just to skip the author’s note and be however many words deeper into the next IF novel, which will be the last in the series.

The reasons I’m still doing it, though, are compelling. The first and weakest is that it’s still tradition. I expect me to make an author’s note at the end of the book, and there are some readers who really like them. It comes up in reviews for the books I see online all the time. If I left this out, there would be people (including myself) who wanted it and didn’t get it, who would feel like I was being a little lazy.

That’s not enough reason all by itself, but there are more. Way back when, there were two reasons I decided to write my first author’s note. The first was that I wanted people to get a little extra with their book, some added value to reward anyone who got that far with. The second was that I wanted to help other writers. I might not be the best writer in the world, and I certainly don’t give the very best writing advice. But every time someone gets something useful out of my novel notes, it’s a win. It might be an even bigger win if they say “no, that’s not me at all, and not how I want to write.” That’s helping someone solidify who they are as a writer, and it’s worth it.

Not everyone reads every single one of my novels, even people who like my books. If you ever wondered when you were going to get past the point where everyone you knew stopped ignoring your art and started paying attention to all the neat things you do as an artist, the answer is (mostly) never. It’s not even their fault. Taste is such a particular thing and people have so little free time that it’s almost not even fair to ask them to look at your stuff. The practical upshot of all this is that even people who really, really like me as an author typically haven’t read more than 50-60% of my books.

Someone who runs into this book naturally out in the wild might only read this series. And even if the note might be a little repetitive for anyone who has read eight of them, that would mean missing all the writer’s advice I could ever give them.

So, accidental readers, this one is for you. In the note, I’ll typically go over everything that occurs to me as being interesting in the entire book. I’ll talk about where I think about characters as being in their stories, what I thought of the setting, and why I made various choices. The idea, as always, is that by reading these you might get some benefit either as a reader (because you get more story in a behind-the-scenes way) or as a writer (because you get to watch me work, to some extent).

I hope that it’s helpful. Now onward!

Setting

The Infinite Dungeon

You know the really hard part about writing stories in The Infinite? It’s that there’s only so many changes you can make to how it works. If I suddenly tell you there’s entire organized towns of permanent, sentient residents, you’d have lots and lots of questions about why I never told you that before. If I tell you there’s NES Mario Brothers warp-points that let Tulland skip levels, you’d suspect that I didn’t plan those and am just using them as an easy cheat to fix story problems.

That makes certain things hard. As the dungeon stands right now, we have established that almost anything can go on in a floor, so long as it’s not a sentient former-world-dweller who lives there permanently. Since this is a world designed for danger and warrior-types, it makes sense for The Infinite to put most of its efforts towards pursuing interest in the form of enemies, which means there’s sometimes not a lot of interesting things for Tulland to find, but that can be interesting in and of itself because it leaves him weak and poor.

We have safe zones, which are break floors you can return to after each new floor to rest and restock. In this book, I had to lean on safe zones much more heavily, since the format would have otherwise been “Tulland participates in battle after battle with his friends and not a whole lot else.” They needed a place to talk and plan.

Basically, book one was about isolation. Book two was about having Necia with him. Book three is about community, as Tulland slowly escapes the tower in a metaphorical way, from within. He hasn’t really noticed, but he now has mentors and uncle-types again. He has friends. He’s going on exciting adventures. It’s the worst version of everything he ever wanted, but it’s still a version.

After that, I looked down at the setting and realized I was tapped, at least for the moment. I could keep going with stories in The Infinite, but fundamentally I don’t have anything in my writer’s-ideas bucket that keep Tulland entirely in The Infinite and give you a book four that you find interesting and fun.

That led to the biggest changes to the setting yet. Besides knowing how Tulland interacts with The Infinite Dungeon, we also know what it’s for. The idea as presented to the reader for the main setting is that it’s a last ditch, go-for-broke environment meant to let someone test their greatness against certain death. The Infinite, in return, sends back benefits to their world. The adventurers do real good for the place that built them up, fame that lasts beyond their lifetimes, and overall, it’s not the worst way to spend the last bits of your life as you near the end of it.

That facet of The Infinite Dungeon had to remain true. It was too big of a promise to the reader to mess around with as a double-cross. At the least, The Infinite couldn’t turn out to be offering them a much worse deal than that. What it could do, I decided, was sweeten the pot. People who had fully expected to die and gone through with it would be rewarded in a different way; they’d get preferential reincarnation to the available world that suited them best and needed them most. Everyone else would sort of get sent wherever, semi-randomly.

You might notice that this is still awfully imbalanced. Particularly great and brave warriors would find places that needed them, but particularly good tailors and blacksmiths would just end up in random worlds no matter how good they were at metalsmithing or sewing. The Infinite itself seems to agree, and has been pulling for someone like Tulland for a long time. We may never see it, but he’s the push that gets the ball rolling for correcting that imbalance.

What we are left with is a dungeon that promises death and delivers it, but also promises rewards and makes good on the offer. Then, unpromised, the dungeon makes sure you are happy with where you end up after that, even if you didn’t know there was an after that to be happy with.

The last thing we learn about the dungeon is a bit more granularity about how it operates. Everyone who goes there optimizes for getting as far as they can, under the assumption that getting farther means more rewards. This isn’t exactly untrue. Any given person going farther gets more than if they hadn’t gone farther, and the main thing to optimize from their point of view is how long they can survive.

From The Infinite Dungeon’s point of view, it’s a little different. While everyone else thinks it’s judging purely by the floor number reached, what it’s actually doing is a big more complex. It’s looking at how good a person’s build is, how great a class-fit it received, and then adjusting their results downward the more it would expect them to do well from build alone.

As you read, this means Tulland was doing very well the moment he passed a single floor because he shouldn’t have even been able to fight the motes. When he got to levels that rivaled pure combat class elites, he was unknowingly a great legend of doom, bringing farmer-death to all he saw. The power that goes back to Ouros after he leaves The Infinite Dungeon is going to be huge enough to merit its own side story.

Ouros

Ouros is still a story setting for us, even if we don’t see it much. Most of what we learn about Ouros in this book is acquired second hand from the rescue squad that comes after Tulland, and it’s not great.

Throughout the book, we get more and more confirmation that the Church kind of sucks. The biggest sign of this is Rossi, who is chosen to lead his squad based on his lack of ability to question orders or think clearly, both of which are good for the Church staying in power but virtually nothing else. On top of that, the squad he’s leading was sent to their deaths for no gain except the Church not having to explain a long-standing lie.

There’s also the matter of the world itself being a bit unstable. We get hints and statements that indicate that Ouros, like other worlds, had a System for a reason. Without a System, things that run the fabric of the reality around them are slowly getting out of whack.

By the end of the book, we have strong indications that another System is going to be assigned there, one that the Church hasn’t specifically warded their entire world against. Since it’s going back with an unrealistic fortune in Infinite-Delver energy to work with, it looks like this might get fixed.

Bonus Dungeons

The bonus dungeons do both a mechanical thing and a story thing. The mechanical thing is pretty clear, in that they provide an opportunity for Tulland to get just a little more ahead of the game than he could from the main floors themselves. He sees exactly two of them each with their own unique theme, and both of which push him in the very particular Chimera Sleeve direction that eventually unbalances him enough to make The Infinite Dungeon useless as a Tulland-Diagnostic-Tool.

The story thing was a little more valuable to me than that. I needed a way to get Tulland into dangerous situations away from other characters, or with a limited cast of characters that allowed for combat combinations besides just-him or him-and-everyone.

I didn’t end up using that story thing as much as I thought I would, but it still did what I needed it to. Having a way to get him alone for a long development arc was big. It will come up more in the next book, but he’s much more of a farmer now, having actually finally talked to another farmer about how to do his job. He had weeks of instruction there, most of which he hasn’t put into play yet specifically because it was all from a peacetime, normal-world farmer who never saw a lick of combat in her life.

The arc with Brist was fun, if not as necessary to the story. It was a nice way to build up Tulland’s best-with-special-weapons class peculiarities one more time before that all went out the window due to the Chimera Vines, and I just like Brist enough as a character that he was worthwhile to do it with.

Originally, if there were more arches, I was going to build up a not-so-subtle indication that they were all designed for various kinds of classes to find. Tulland’s was for someone who knew plants very well, or just someone unbelievably perceptive. Brist’s was for people who saw weird things and punched them before thinking about it too hard. There would have been arches all over eventually, all meant for one particular kind of person to find and exploit.

The New World

We know nothing about the new world yet. You might think that’s because I have a whole plan of goodies laid out for you to discover one by one as I, the mighty author, deem it fit to reveal them.

That’s not the case. I have jack shit of a clue what that new world is like right now. From a writer’s perspective, this might seem like something that distresses me, but that isn’t the case.

When I first started writing books, I had a mentality of “If I ever give a character so much as a cracker to eat, it will make a difference down the road, and I need to know every single implication of that act.” Luckily for my sanity, this isn’t really how anything works. Yes, everything has an implication for later story things. Yes, you have to be a little careful before you give an archer an Uzi. But no, you don’t have to know every single thing before you make any little choice.

The reality of stories is that they are a little bit organic, and have a little bit of life and will of their own. People tend to think of them as stone sculptures, a thing that responds to chisel-strikes and nothing else, and where the chisel has to have 100% control over the final product.

Instead, it’s more like wood carving. The grain of the wood is its own thing, and it’s going to drag you into different paths than you thought if you let it. That’s not bad. You can give up that little bit of control and see where it takes you, and sometimes this is how you get around to doing special things you didn’t know you had in you in the first place.

More to the point, it means that you can learn to let go a little. Right now, here’s what I know about the new world:

It’s a world, not a dungeon.It has some sort of problem that needs to be fixed.The problem it has is global and serious.The world, like all worlds, has a System of its own.The world knows about The InfiniteThe problems that the world has probably are vaguely agricultural.Despite being agricultural, the problems will take some reasonable amount of combat to solve.That’s not a lot to know, and it’s far from a set of instructions on how I can best write the next book. There are a lot of different ways things could go with that knowledge, and some of them wouldn’t be great to write or read.

But that’s the wrong way to look at it.

What you want to be able to do in this situation is look at that list, give up a tiny bit of control, and just acknowledge that there are good things to find there. Then, you need to have the confidence to set out, grind the writing dungeon, and find them. Because that list above isn’t very exact, but it IS flexible. It’s going to give me a lot of freedom to build that world from the ground up, adding elements as I go until I have a complex machine that I can tell a story with.

In a few weeks, I’ll have a good portion of the next book written. Let me assure you that by then, I’ll have figured out the kinks. That’s not because I’m some kind of great genius. It’s because you simply don’t need to know every single element of what your story will eventually be before you start writing it. You can work things out. I promise.

Characters

Tulland

Tulland started out his journey in book one very, very young. He was a bit of a shit, someone who didn’t listen to others very easily, who rejected all forms of authority, and whose pride and general disobedience to anything good got him into a lot of trouble.

A lot of people didn’t like Tulland-of-Ouros, and that’s good. Tulland was about to be thrust into a really dangerous place that would force him into a lot of really drastic personal changes in quick succession, and even after a few days, would be almost unrecognizable compared to his normal self.

A quick story: When I was born, I had a father. A pretty good one, in fact. He worked hard, was reasonably successful, and provided for his family well. He cared a lot about his kids and if they did well. He was a bit controlling, mostly because he only knew of only a few ways to be successful in this world. This meant that he was always trying to make sure his kids did well, but only on a certain track. I’m pretty bright. With a different dad, I might have ended up a doctor. With the dad I had, I found myself doing pretty alright on a different, more business-y kind of track.

It wasn’t a good fit, but such is life. It still worked because I had the support of a pretty good father, who tried his best to make sure I was succeeding there. I could call him for help at any time, and often did. I could call him to be proud of me about the kinds of things he understood, and he would, which meant I mostly valued doing things that he understood because those were the ones where I’d get the best approval.

And then, as people sometimes do, he died. Having-a-living-father was something I took as a given my entire life, and I don’t think I ever really understood that he could die. With a living father, I was able to be a certain kind of person, and in turn, it would have been hard for me to change into anything else. With a dead dad, I suddenly found that I was living in a new world where I’d have to change, and that I didn’t know who I was in that new context.

So I changed. The next decade was really hard, and then eventually I finally found my footing as a new kind of guy that my dad would probably be surprised to see.

Everything in Tulland’s life was a taken-for-granted constant before a certain point. Like me with my dad, he existed in a world that pushed him forwards in some ways, held him back in others, and that seemed constant and unchangeable. And in that environment, he was sort of a shit.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The very next day, he was getting chewed on by not one but two different kinds of monsters, just before he was almost driven to death-by-puncture-wounds by a nasty plant. The biggest change Tulland ever went through, by far, was deciding to dive into those spikes. A day ago, he couldn’t have done it. He just didn’t live in a world that would have wanted him to. On that day, it was the only choice. And so he became the kind of guy who would tolerate a spike through his eyeball if it meant living a single extra hour.

That was book one. It was Tulland losing a certain kind of comfortable humanity to gain survivability. In book two, he started to claw some of that back. He now had a purpose in the form of spending time with Necia and making sure she survived. He had a clearer danger in the form of The Rogue that threatened that. He started to understand, in a way, that he couldn’t survive without some level of trust, even if the trust might stab him in the back. By the end of book two, he had Necia, some unlikely allies, and a sense that personal survival maybe wasn’t the most important thing to him anymore.

And in book three, he finally had enough things figured out about who he was going to be in this new world to start to work on achieving the new, important goals with others.

Having achieved those, he’s now entering a new, different world where he will once again find that the kind of guy he is can’t exist without changing. That’s going to be book four.

The System

We’ve learned a lot about the System now. I think from book one onwards, the biggest question about the System wasn’t if it was evil (it was) but if it could change. To that end, a lot of what Tulland learned about in book two were things that made what the System did more understandable but that didn’t actually change the fact that it had tried to kill him or that their goals were still absolutely opposed.

It was always all-important that the System didn’t lie to Tulland after that first big deception. If it ever had, I think it would have been too much of a stretch to say that Tulland ever had the room to come to trust it, even if he wanted to. For three books, people have been waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of the System betraying Tulland, but it just never happened.

In the meantime, we learned things about the System. The main thing, something that I tried to handle subtly, was that it was always an entity that was more interested in the people it had authority over than other entities of the same kind. The Infinite talks to Tulland sometimes, but not more than it needs to. The System talks to him all the time, and used to talk to the founder of the Church all the time too.

This got it in trouble, once, and all the banishment-and-exile issues the System had could have been entirely avoided if it just wasn’t a being who values company. Even the punishment it did get for that wouldn’t have been so bad, so long as it didn’t care that it was all alone. But since it did care, it’s a bit more understandable that it would do anything to break out of its loneliness after centuries of isolation.

By the end of book three, that comes to a head in the form of a choice. It can either go back to being a normal system in a normal way, losing big chunks of who it is in the process, or it can set off on a more uncertain path where the only sure reward is more company with a person it has come to be familiar with.

It chose company, and something very important happens for both it and Tulland. For the first time, book four is going to be a situation where their goals aren’t opposed, where one of them only benefits and gets their needs met by not frustrating the goals of the other.

Necia

Necia doesn’t change a lot in this book, mostly because I think she doesn’t have to. Necia resolved most of her own plot by doing a couple of things early on.

The first happens offscreen, in an attempt to find happiness by becoming her own person outside of the strict control of her-father-the-king and what’s planned for her on her own world. To her, it seems that she’ll never be anything but a princess there. It also seems like a terrible fate to her at that time, something she’d do anything to change.

Later on, whether she realizes this or not, she finds out she was very subtly wrong about the exact shape of what she wanted. She learns this through Tulland, who at first doesn’t see her as a princess because she doesn’t tell him, and who later and much more importantly doesn’t see her as a princess because there are much more important aspects of what she is to him besides that.

Once she has that, I think she has what she wanted the whole time, which is not to be a person. She was that anyway. It’s more that she wanted to be a person to someone else, and in providing that, Tulland sets himself up for a satisfying long-term sort of thing without even knowing what he did to deserve it.

She finds she likes all that very much, and her life simplifies a lot. As of really the end of book two, Necia has a couple goals in her life compared to which everything else is simple:

Enjoy what time she can get with TullandKeep both of them alive as long as possible.These aren’t very complex goals, but they don’t have to be. She’s basically happy where she is, and happy people are generally pretty easy to understand and track in that way.

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The main difficulty writing Necia is to make sure she’s never just Tulland’s support structure. This is especially hard because there just aren’t a lot of things for Necia to want within the dungeon besides survival, so I occasionally make sure that everyone knows that Necia knows a lot more about people and the world than Tulland does, and that she was a much more impressive person back home than she was ever was in his. She’s a learned person, has seen a lot of operations of government at a high level, and has a lot of training in combat even if it wasn’t particularly good. She entered the arch voluntarily, whatever her reasons were. Where she can flex those skills and characteristics in the dungeon, I make sure she has a chance to.

Another aspect of that is making sure the story doesn’t coddle her. A lot of Necia’s build would render her basically invincible in a normal dungeon, but in the greater Infinite Farmer setting, she ends up being severely hurt an awful lot of the time. In some forms of media, this is avoi becauseuse women-getting-hurt really is sort of inherently ugly. I think it works here because Necia is sort of an actual badass and deserves the respect of not being handled with kid gloves.

The Infinite

The Infinite has always been a tricky character. I’m not saying that he’s tricky to write, even though he is. I’m saying there’s a conflict for the reader buried deep within what The Infinite is as a system entity that makes it weird and hard to think about.

The first exciting thing that ever happens in this series is the betrayal, where we come to hate the System because it sent Tulland to sure death. From there, we identify The Infinite as a source of hope because it’s another not-clearly-evil system that seems to have power and dominion over Tulland’s System. If he’s going to survive, it’s going to be through some interference of The Infinite, and so The Infinite is set up right away to be our eventual good guy.

Because of all that, it’s hard to remember that when Tulland’s System kills Tulland, it’s by sending him to The Infinite, who kills a lot of people all the time. This is modified a bit by the fact that it’s usually a voluntary thing, but we also see that The Infinite isn’t too picky about how it gets the human grist for its mill. People have to walk through the arches voluntarily, but it’s pretty flexible on what “voluntary” means. It will accept people who would otherwise be executed, for instance. That’s not necessarily bad guy behavior, but it’s not great guy stuff either.

We forgive this a little because when Tulland’s System betrays him, it’s pretty clearly extra-system behavior. It’s not its job to betray Tulland. It does it selfishly. It’s unfair.

The Infinite is nothing but pretty fair. It has rules it operates under and things it does that aren’t beneficial to the people delving in it, but when it does something bad to you or puts you through an especially large risk, it pays you back. It might not be as big of a payment as you want, but at least there are guidelines. The worst we see from it is offering Tulland bad deals that don’t match up to his get-out-of-jail outcome, but even then, the deals are the best it can offer at the time without actually freeing him.

Note, though, that it doesn’t want to free Tulland. It gets forced into it, but isn’t happy about it. It has a job to do, and that’s its terminal value.

In the end, it does provide Tulland’s exit door, even allowing the good guy to bypass all that inconvenient dying-and-being-reborn stuff that usually goes along with reincarnation. But it is never Tulland’s friend. At most, it’s more like his boss at work.

Brist

Brist is older than Tulland, and knows a lot more than he does about at least one subject. In a strict, story-driving sense, this is all Brist is for. Tulland needed someone to train him up on all the fundamentals-of-fighting things he had never learned, and Brist was great for that. By the end of the first training sequence, Brist has given him enough basics that now Tulland can work on his own to bolster his own (very bad) skills at doing battle with his body. If I didn’t like him as a character, that would have been the extent of his involvement. But since I do like him, he got more of a showcase.

Brist’s big thing is that he’s who you are supposed to think of when The Infinite explains great souls. He’s a guy who loves fighting, who was born to do it, and who isn’t even probably on his first trip through The Infinite Dungeon in pursuit of more and better fighting to participate in. When Brist eventually dies, he will be reborn to a world that has a lot of things that need punching, and he will happily punch them.

Brist tells us he was a big, important, nation-toppling warrior back on his world, and it hardly matters to who he is as a man. He was a great general, given control of tons of troops. He handed off those responsibilities to his secretary and just kept punching. He was the protector of an entire kingdom, it’s implied. He doesn’t care, except for that it gives him an opportunity to turn previously solid enemies into piles of mush.

Tulland knows basically nothing compared to Brist. This shows us one of the only other characteristics Brist has, which is that he likes to teach people to fight too. His method of doing this might be to non-lethally punch them until they figure out ways to stop him, but there seems to be a method to that madness which actually works for quick advancement through the fighting-capability ranks. Tulland almost immediately gets better enough with weapons and melee that it’s truly useful to him for the first time, and all is well.

To Tulland, Brist reads as a real adult. He knows a lot of stuff Tulland doesn’t, and post-Infinite-dungeon-initiation Tulland respects that and tries to get what knowledge he can out of him without giving him too much trouble. To Brist, Tulland is a kid. This is the same way he sees everyone else who can’t hang with him in a fistfight, from the lowest foot soldier to the most exalted of kings.

Brist may or may not be a reincarnation or pre-incarnation of Karbo from Demon World Boba Shop, even though this makes no sense given the way their two universes work.

White

White is pretty boring in this book. I don’t think this is really his fault. In the second book, he was important as an indication that not everyone in The Infinite was desperate, murderous criminal, even when they were stronger and better equipped for battle than Tulland. In this book, he takes a back seat to other characters. He does his job, which is commanding troops and maintaining order, but only just.

The idea of White has always been that he was optimized for urban peacekeeping, like a sheriff, but that he probably got pretty far into the career progression of that kind of work. In this book, he gives us some indication that this got as far as to make him the commander of a paramilitary force, like the captain of the guards in a large city. Those commanding skills give him something to do besides protect Necia and Tulland, who he figures have proved they don’t need to be nannied and handheld anymore.

Of everyone in any of the books, White is there for the most normal reasons compared to the usually stated purpose of the dungeons. He was getting old, didn’t have much else to be tied down with on his world, and took the next logical step in an I-keep-people-safe class by spending what potential he had left to improve his own world. It’s not super-interesting, but it’s at least good to know there’s at least one person using The Infinite as intended.

Potter

If White is in The Infinite to grow his world, Necia is there to be her own person, Tulland got tricked in, Brist is there to fight things, the Rogue was there to find more victims and so on, what’s the deal with Potter? How does an academic strategist of sorts find his way there?

The idea behind Potter was that he was a purer, less combat-specific form of the family of classes that Ley Raditz belonged to. He’s a person whose class runs on what he knows, who does more damage the more knowledge he’s obtained. His method of dealing damage seems to be either by empowering other people’s attacks, or a pure-damage area attack meant to shift the odds on a whole-battle level by giving each enemy present a fraction of the total damage he can do.

It’s an incredibly lame class. But it’s also apparently been effective enough to get him this far. How?

I think the general thought on him is that if you have a class that runs on knowledge, and you get to bring all your knowledge with you, you are like a Moon Druid in DnD 5E: You start out strong and then fail to scale very well as the game goes on. The first several floors likely just involved Potter curb stomping every enemy that stepped into his area-attack-aura range, something that only slowly got harder until he likely would have had very serious trouble with the Chimera and Sphinxes without help.

Of course, him having a combat-scholar class at all indicates there was some need for it back on his own world, and that such things are more common in all worlds (since nobody treats it nearly as oddly as Tulland’s class). It makes some sort of primitive sense that a class of curious scholars couldn’t resist popping in to learn more about dungeons (including The Infinite) every now and again, and that there would be classes that let them survive this. Potter is very much one of those, in addition to just being a general learn-everything type.

Of all the people in the book, my assumption is that Potter is getting the least overall points, since he seems to have had an easy time in the beginning and is going to top out about as soon as you’d expect him to. He’ll be carried through the rest of the collaborative battle floors, but probably die on the next independent-combat level. He’s certainly done well, but that’s the kind of thing that gets adjusted.

Classes

Tulland’s Class is a bit of a mixed bag at this point. He has good to above-average good armor, a decent enough weapon, what amount to summons (the clubber vines), area-of-effect status grenades, and caltrops. That’s warrior, summoner/tamer, poisoner/bomber, and rogue qualities all in one, none of which seem to out-and-out suck.

And of course now he also has a stat-enhancing ironman suit which takes his warrior-abilities to higher levels than should otherwise be possible. The actual inspiration for this is from the book Children of Dune, where a kid figures out that he can layer desert-slug-things on his body, let them integrate with his nervous system a bit, and then essentially become a demigod. It’s a cheat there, and it’s also a cheat here, which is part of the reason you only see it becoming viable right at the end of the book.

When someone is super-strong in one way and versatile enough to cover most of the ways you’d counter it, the general consensus is that they are overpowered. The counter to that is to say, “Overpowered for what?” Since the next step for Tulland is probably a world that needs normal, superpowered farming (which he sucks at) and is also facing a global threat (which can be as big and strong as the story needs), balancing what he can do with whatever is going to happen later shouldn’t be that hard.

Of greater concern is what it’s interesting for Tulland to do and be able to do from here. As much as he’s currently pretty good at melee, that was never meant to be the entire focus of his class, and even the clubber vines weren’t meant to change that. He’s taking a sharp transition from being underpowered, but what he does still has to feel plant-driven at its base. The Farmer’s Tool is at best that a step removed, so I’ll have to figure out some fun plant stuff to make the new world be as enjoyable as it should be.

Necia’s Class

Necia’s class is the most boring one in the books, right now. I think having a class that’s just very, very good at blocking is classic enough that I don’t have to explain much about “tanks are boring” dynamics, but in a book that can be a little troublesome, especially when your familiar cast-members count is about to dive down to two characters total.

There are two ways to address this, in my book. The first is to take Necia’s class and change it to be more interesting, to give her more direct-damage powers and more interesting ways to use them. That could be fun, and it might be the direction I’d go with her, but I do like the current dynamic of her taking a lot of damage, being unable to return it, but opening up foes for attack in the meantime. If I keep liking it, it would mean I’d build in whatever interest I could around just blocking in more entertaining ways, but it would be limited.

The second way to deal with things is to make the problem more social. Necia’s class might stay very boring and blocky, but she and Tulland would talk about that. It might cause a conflict, or be the focus of a few chapters as he tried to help her block better and better in a way that made her take less damage, get injured less, or eventually cast out a shield so strong it blocked the sun itself (or something). He might grow her armor, or a new shield. They might go on a quest.

Right now, I’m letting this cook for a while before I get anywhere close to handling it, but it’s going to be on my mind until it’s resolved in book four one way or the other.

The System’s Class

The System doesn’t really have a class, as such. But it is a party member, and the way things are going I want it to be able to do a little more than simply talk to Tulland, especially as Tulland has more and more people around to talk to.

I think the way I think about this right now is that to figure out how the System is useful, I should figure out how it’s been useful so far, and how its environment is changing the way that can work. So far that’s been something like:

It’s a store of information. It knows things Tulland and Necia don’t.It’s a negotiator. Its access to information about how Systems work and its ability to interact with the system-stuff going on in the background means it can sometimes get Tulland more bang-for-his-buck than he’d be able to get for himself.It’s an eye-in-the-sky to a very limited extent. It can see slightly further than Tulland can, or at least could at the beginning of the series. It also might see things Tulland doesn’t.Up until now it has been Tulland’s world’s system, and had restrictions on it that had to do with that. Soon it’s going to be a system, but not one that’s connected to any world. It’s easy to imagine this doesn’t affect its restrictions at all, but it might!From this point, that’s what I’m thinking about for him. I sort of like the character of the System, so I don’t want to have it just fade back to nothing. Some combination of these factors has something interesting I can do with it moving forward, and I just have to find it.

Conclusion

Hey, y’all, writing is kinda hard. Don’t ever misunderstand me on this to think I’m complaining about getting to do it. In a lot of ways, it’s a lot less hard than something like digging holes in the ground or talking to angry people on the phone. But it’s still work, and it’s sometimes harder to write one word than it was to write the word before it, or the next.

I think I mentioned this is a writer’s note somewhere, but this whole series has been the hardest one I’ve written so far. I’m not sure why. I certainly don’t hate the characters. I like the world well enough. But it’s been like pulling teeth, y’all. Every day has been an effort. It doesn’t help that the book series before this was Demon World Boba Shop, which was mostly just easy any given minute.

Trust me on this: you can keep writing. You can even keep writing a lot. It’s just that it’s going to be work sometimes, almost as hard as other kinds of work. And really the only way out of it is admit that sometimes the really hard part is just sitting down and getting to typing. The thinking part is something you can do. Anything can be edited enough that it shines. But you can’t get there without actually getting your butt in the seat.

After that, you have options. When I write easier books, I hardly plan at all. The characters spring to life fully formed, or at least as formed as I could have got them anyway. Some people plan more, including me lately as I struggle through this series. Some people edit endlessly, going back and polishing again and again before anyone sees it.

All of this is fine, so long as you write. So long as you get the words out.

For frequent readers who are wondering, things have been going well for me from a writing perspective, and it’s looking more and more like I’ll keep writing books for a living for a while yet. That’s all you guys supporting us, leaving reviews, making sure book launches go good (which is the most boring but possibly most important thing), and generally just being around and reading.

As always, it’s the best gift you could give me. Thanks so much for being here.

RC