Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon

At the end of every book, I try to write an author’s note. I feel weird saying this because I write it so often. In the last just-over-a-year, I’ve written… oh, I don’t know. Over a dozen novels. It’s my full-time job, I spend most of my waking hours doing it, and I like it an enormous amount. The only troublesome bit is that I write so many of these Author’s Notes sections that I’m sometimes worried they might be getting a bit boring for the average person.

Then I remember something important, which is that not every single reader is reading every single one of my books.

There’s an author I absolutely love (Bujold) who wrote the best-paced science fiction novel of all time (The Warrior’s Apprentice) who says that she writes every book in a series making the assumption that readers won’t necessarily encounter them in order. She tries to make sure every story is self-contained in a way that someone could pick it up, read it, and enjoy it without having read the other entries in the series. For original chapters go to NoveI-Fire.ɴet

The point of these Authors Notes is twofold. I want readers who want just a little bit more time in the universe to get it, hopefully picking up details and clarification that didn’t quite fit in the book. And I want other writers to either know how I did something (if they liked it) or how to avoid doing something (if they didn’t) to know the thought processes that produce my work.

What I’m hoping more and more is that I can apply that same kind of Bujoldian completeness to each of these notes, and that someone who wants to know what kind of writer I am can get the whole picture from each one, without reading any of the others.

I don’t spend a lot of time editing these notes. That’s on purpose, because I don’t want to decipher what is often thousands of words of nonsense. I also want to make sure I don’t overthink things too very much, that I write my first impressions of what I was doing with each character and setting without getting too high on my own supply and lying to make myself seem deeper or more thoughtful than I am.

So without sandbagging it too much, I do want to warn you that here be dragons; moving forward, you will get a lot of details spit out rapid-fire with very little extra attention paid to making sure it’s especially impressive.

With that said, let’s get going.

Originally, there was an open question of whether we’d show Tulland’s home world at all. The first few drafts had him just appearing in the dungeon, confused and alone. A few early readers thought that this was a little abrupt and got confused by it. So where I had originally planned on just filling in his background through internal dialogue and flashbacks, I found I needed to do a little bit more work.