Infinite Farmer

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.

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.

The Settings

Ouros

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.

Ouros is one setting in a larger world. It's essentially a small town out in the sticks, the kind of place certain kinds of kids are very eager to get out of. It's even a little worse than that because it's an island, and thus physically difficult to actually leave. The first and most important thing about Ouros is that it's a part of Tulland's world that he wants to escape from, primarily so he can go be an important, adventuring part of the rest.

Ouros was originally an island because I wasn't sure if Tulland would be able to leave The Infinite or not. If he did end up being able to leave, then I needed him to live in a place with a really limited amount of arable soil, which would have made his ability to farm food in what amounted to a place with unlimited virgin farmland a big deal. He would have been able to supply fruits and vegetables nobody else could, and could have grown staples like grain and rice in big quantities that the island couldn't otherwise match.

That fell by the wayside because I decided it was more interesting if Tulland was stuck in The Infinite, and that the book would feel like it had higher stakes if he couldn't cross to and from home. If I'm being honest, it was also because I was being a bit lazy. It was hard to think of mechanisms by which Tulland could go home but would have to return that didn't feel dumb and tacked on, so I just skipped them.

Originally, I was going to make Tulland's betrayer another kid, who shoved Tulland through the arch because it would free up a slot for him to get a cool class that Tulland was otherwise occupying. To make that work, Ouros was going to have very rich people and very poor people, and the betrayer-kid was going to be one of them. That would have let him be a bigger threat while Tulland was inside the tower, menacing Tulland's (much bigger) family until Tulland was so powerful inside The Infinite that he could solve the problems outside it.

None of that happened. Outside of those things, what we see of Ouros is that it relies pretty heavily on fish, has a light but not omnipresent church presence, and that only every once in a while does anyone from there receive a class. Besides that, it's a pretty boring but wholesome place. That was sort of the point.

Tulland's World

Tulland's world is a bit more interesting still. I find the idea of a System that just is to be pretty boring, and I like system worlds where either something explicitly weird is going on, or we get the sense that something odd is happening that hasn't been explained yet. That added complexity is just interesting when it's done right, and I'm always trying to fine-tune it.

In Tulland's world, there are two entities that have something to do with the usual function of a LitRPG system. The first, the System, is basically his world's devil. It's a villain lurking in the darkness, tempting innocents to do terrible things. At least that's how the other entity competing for control of the world tells it, and very few people seem willing to openly question the Church on the matter.

Over the course of the book, that gets fleshed out a little bit more in an attempt to set up a bit of a mystery. We see that humanity has a limited territory, and that monsters wait just outside the gates to ruin everything if they get the chance. It doesn't seem like humanity is making much headway in neutralizing that threat either. The Church seems like it could give out more classes, but doesn't, which again seems counterproductive in that situation.

We know that sometimes their world has wars, not just with the monsters, but with each other. We know that it's a large enough world that someone who travels it is instantly notable and respectable for having done so.

But what we don't yet know is a larger piece of the puzzle. If the church isn't all good (and it doesn't seem to be) then that has implications for Tulland's System, which might not be all bad. Figuring out the exact shape of what that looks like is necessary not only for us to understand Tulland's home world, but also is (spoiler, kinda) going to be important for the plot if this book series ends up being 4-5 books long instead of just three.

The Infinite and Other Worlds

We know that Tulland's world is just one of many in his system universe, and we get the feeling that people on Tulland's world at least kind of know that. While we don't see many of those worlds, we get a sense that they aren't that alien from Tulland's experiences. Necia and him can sit down and interact with peers without too much trouble, The Mad Rogue's world might be a little different, but not so much that he doesn't at least have a model of Tulland that lets him manipulate Tulland a little.

The main function of the other worlds isn't so much to be explored or understood as it is to add a bit of texture to what The Infinite is and does. Tulland's world has classes and dungeons, and every other world is at least implied to have the same things. But when the elite veterans of those dungeons (or anyone brave) decides they want a greater challenge, they can step into The Infinite. There, any feats or accomplishments they manage earn their world rewards of the kind that improve life for everyone in them.

This is, oddly, kind of the plot to Joe vs. The Volcano as well. You can imagine planets where this stops happening just because the overall comfort level gets high enough that nobody wants to do it anymore, which is what happened in the film. In Tulland's world, the input of brave adventurers has stopped for another reason we kind of know is related to the Church, but the specific reason isn't entirely clear to us yet.

The Infinite

The idea behind The Infinite is simple enough on paper. It's a bigger, meaner dungeon that (probably) goes on forever, which isn't all that original in and of itself. As mentioned before, it's sort of a new game plus dungeon for various worlds, and the rewards it gives are broadly for those worlds. But the people who enter it do eventually die, it seems, and it's not supposed to be entered lightly or involuntarily.

Given that the people who enter it don't make it out, most of what any given world knows about The Infinite seems to come from the Systems of their world reporting back, as well as things that are just generally true of dungeons in general (like the dungeon motes).

Something that was once true of The Infinite was that it was just one of many dungeons on Tulland's world, but that people were selected for it rather than volunteering, and that they could return to normal life here and there. The whole "The Infinite" part of it came from the fact that other dungeons ended, and farming them became the jobs of the people assigned to them. The Infinite, in contrast, would push adventurers on and on, and not only would they eventually have access to better loot (for themselves and the world they lived in) but that various "high scores" in terms of how far people had gone would mean good things for their world as well.

In that telling, the point of a world was to raid The Infinite, and the point of The Infinite was to act as a yardstick for the world, measuring its progress. This was because the will of the gods or something, and I hadn't got that much farther than that when I scrapped the idea.

When an adventurer enters The Infinite, they lose all their levels as well as their class. When they pick up a new class, the idea is that it's usually something similar to what they trained in their original world - Necia, for instance, does not question her heavy-armor class, and the Mad Rogue seems to be a skulker-murderer type to his very core.

Tulland's experience is a little different in a way The Infinite does not like. While he does enter voluntarily (and at a full-tilt run), he doesn't enter with a full understanding of what he's getting into at all. And, in a way that's very odd for any world, he doesn't have a class. The System has just enough influence to determine his class on the spot, and screws him over. We don't see it, but this is something The Infinite has an immediate interest in remedying.

The Infinite can have this interest because of the kind of thing it is. It's not just a dungeon, but also the intelligence that runs it, a sort of chorus of thousands of personalities that comprise a single mind and who are all concerned with running the dungeon in a fair, productive way.

It's not explicit, but one of The Infinite's stretch goals is to actually get more crafters into The Dungeon anyway, pushing things forward for everyone else by means of support.

We see a bit of that framework in the bent rules Tulland operates under. He has more time to move from floor to floor, for instance, and can dilly-dally leveling and grinding a lot longer than a swordsman could. In my mind, The Infinite had imagined that the classes that people would send would likely be blacksmiths, high-strength classes that could make themselves weapons first thing and get through the first five levels pretty easily so long as they had enough time to mine ores, smelt them, and make badass swords using their presumably deep home world experience in armaments.

Tulland is sort of half that, but once he starts to have successes in the dungeon we see The Infinite take a wait-and-see approach to things.

Open questions about The Infinite I'll eventually have to answer is whether it's a truly an all-good entity like it seems, whether it's endless (the name right now has more to do with the intelligence running the place than the floors), and whether or not there's some way to survive long-term once you've entered it.

Characters

Tulland

Tulland was originally meant to be a pretty flawless, virtue-heavy character. He ran errands for his uncle, who ran a shipping depot, and did a very good job at it. He loved his parents. He was handsome, hardworking, and had great cardio. As such, it made sense for him to be selected to get a rare, especially good class, and for some drunk slob of a rich kid to betray him.

I got talked out of that eventually (thanks, Dotblue) and instead went with a character who had a little more nuance. Tulland is smart, but he's also a smartass who thinks he knows more than everyone else and that he's figured out some here-to-fore unknown truth of every little thing he ever sees that only he understands.

It's that kind of personality that leaves him vulnerable to the System's lies because when the System tells him that he's the chosen one and very much deserves all the good things that are happening to his friend, it's not introducing new information. Tulland doesn't have to be convinced that he's a chosen one, really. He already believes it, and always has.

Once Tulland hits the floor in the entryway of The Infinite, all those lies become clear. A great hero would not have to struggle against the motes. A great genius would not have been tricked by the System in as simple and easy a way as Tulland was. And a good person would not have been so enraged by his friend doing well that he cast aside reason.

When Tulland accepts The Infinite so easily, it's partially just because he knows he had it coming. Not entirely, but kinda.

Once Tulland is out of the entryway and focused on survival, his biggest character trait turns out to be pragmatism. He isn't particularly brave, he doesn't take particularly big risks, and he isn't particularly talented. He is very focused on survival, and very stubborn in a way that lets him wait day after day for plants to sprout while he sleeps and eats fruits he doesn't particularly like. He's very convinced he's right in a way that lets him look sure death in the face and say, "Well, maybe not, I might be the first guy who beats that."

In doing so, he completes a framework that The Church and The System started. With both of those entities, we can see that they are both presented as entirely good or entirely bad, and that neither of those assertions is exactly right. Tulland is not entirely good or bad either, but his dual nature is a bit more nuanced. What we find with him is that stubborn and determined are very similar traits, and arrogant and innovative and confident are all very closely linked.

I think about this a lot because I don't seem very much like an artist if you knew me in person. And even now, as a person who writes things that people seem to like, I can tell that a lot of my friends sort of subconsciously treat it all like it's fake somehow. There are some jokes or interesting concepts that do very well in my books but fall flat in my real life.

I don't say any of that to whine (I think it's pretty normal) but to point out that talented and pursuing a dream that will never happen in a deluded way are really close together.

What I wanted for Tulland was for him to be a sort of stubborn jackass who assumed he was always right, and then to be put into a situation that needed a determined, never-quit, never-say-die attitude. I wanted there to be a good, productive version of himself for him to find and live up to.

By the end of the book, he's even realizing that's what's happening a bit, and that stubborn streak ends up being instrumental in him reaching his goals.

Tulland has also never had a girlfriend, really. That also changes for him.

Necia

Necia was originally supposed to die. That was the whole point of her character. She was going to show up, be someone Tulland was fond of in a few ways, and then have to move on ahead of his schedule. Even if her death wasn't confirmed, she was supposed to be a kind of embodiment of loss for him — a thing he couldn't get strong enough to protect soon enough, and who moved on to a place he couldn't follow.

The scene where Tulland finds Necia's helmet in the tunnel is a second draft. Originally, he found her ice-cold, fully dead corpse. Some beta readers convinced me that they really, really did not like this abrupt death, and I changed it.

For better or worse, that also changed the entire tone of this book. A book where Necia dies is a darker, grimmer book. It's much more about loneliness and despair. The book we are getting instead is much more about hope. I don't think that's bad, but it's a different kind of thing.

If I'm trying to dig a piece of unique writing advice out of Necia, it's that all of your main characters should be like that. They should be important enough to the story that changes in their personality or personal outcomes drastically alter how the story goes. If they aren't that important to the story, they should be side characters or replaced with someone who actually matters to the story.

In terms of Necia's build, I wanted to address something that you sometimes see called waif fu, which is the idea that a 100-120lb woman, however fit, could have a fair fighting chance at taking down a 225lb man. Even in real-world boxing between men, weight classes are a thing just because size and weight matter that very much. A 150lb man fighting a 250lb man is putting his life at risk. At high skill levels, ten extra pounds is a huge difference.

For Necia, I wanted a way to address that beyond a handwave answer like "well, stats make it up." And what made sense for it to me was to make her conditionally large, able to be as heavy and tall as a big man, and without having to be that all the time. That's the other way people do with that is they make being a very large, very buff woman the whole character.

That seems basically unfair to me. I'm a big dude, and I'm allowed to imagine myself as a Paladin or a Rogue without having to edit out the parts where I'm a big dude. What I wanted for Necia was the same rights that Prince Adam from He-Man gets, and to just be a big, yoked muscle freak when the situation called for it. Same with the dudes in this universe, although it doesn't come up — a very small man would probably get the same advantage.

Necia's personal journey is in some important ways already resolved by the time she meets Tulland. Not that she doesn't have a lot of room to grow, but her big journey was trying to be a meaningful person in a world that wanted to treat her like a piece of expensive jewelry. Her being in The Infinite means she's already rejected that, and is now learning to be her own person.

Other parts of her journey are very much not done. She's doing the first-romance thing with Tulland. She's learning that just because her training was fake on her home world doesn't mean that she can't be real and talented in The Infinite, given enough time. And, given that she's not dead, we should have plenty of time to see that happen.

The System

The System was hard to write. I wanted his way of speaking to be just a bit formal without saying "thou" or intentionally using a lot of big words. In the end, I decided the best way to do that was to use a lot of short sentences with mostly short, simple words and very little voice, which I think mostly worked.

That was important to me for a couple reasons. I wanted the System to be a bit ambiguous. I think at one point it calls Tulland a fool, but outside of that it never really mocks Tulland or makes fun of him. It never seems truly gleeful that its con worked out. Most of all, it never seems happy. It factually states that Tulland's ill benefits it, but it's not pleased with that state of events.

And that leaves the door open for what we eventually learn about the System, which is that it was desperate. That it doesn't seem to regularly lure people to their deaths, but did so here because it was starving to death and had little other choice. And in the wings, there's a hint that its goals aren't entirely evil, either, even if Tulland dying is a big part of what it has to do to attain them.

One thing that I made sure of was that the System never actually lies to Tulland, outside of their time together on Ouros, where it seems to actually lie as little as possible to get Tulland through the arch. If it was unreliable even once in The Infinite, I think that would put it beyond redemption forever. Instead, the worst we get from the System is that it tells Tulland to flee The Infinite, which is something that seems to come from it being terrified of The Infinite himself rather than a specific desire to deceive.

If you've read my other books, then you might have noticed that on a purely mechanical level, the System does a lot of the same work that Lily and Lucy do. It's a sidekick of sorts, someone who is always there to have dialogue with when there's nobody else to talk to. It's company. It may not be very sympathetic, easy-to-love company, but if anything I found that made it more interesting as a character to me.

Of all the characters in the book, I think its eventual development as a person will be the most important to where the plot goes.

Uncle

Uncle is Tulland's adoptive father, and has been his caretaker since birth. He has known no other parent. They get along fine, and love each other despite neither of them being the kind to say it.

The most boring character in the book, hands down, is uncle. He's a fisherman, and apparently a good one, but aspires to nothing more than competence at his job. He has what seems to be a simple house, and all the meals we see him prepare are simple, hearty, calorie-heavy stuff. To the extent we see him talking to Tulland as a teen, it seems that most of their conversations are a bunch of very boring lectures about how Tulland should listen more and have a bit more humility.

To put it another way, Tulland's uncle was the exact thing Tulland needed. If Tulland had understood and respected his uncle's way of life a little more, none of his problems would have come to pass. In rejecting his uncle as boring, Tulland rejected every chance of saving himself.

Tulland's uncle is one half of Tulland's education. It takes another character to understand the whole both halves come together to complete.

Tutor

Tulland's tutor is an incredibly exciting man who has seen everything, knows everything, and understands everything. He is implied to have a class, or else to have done a lot of class-level adventures without one, which is even cooler. He has traveled the world, observed it with his own eyes, and understood it. He's incredible.

All this is completely lost on Tulland for two reasons: First, his tutor is very, very old. Old people, as far as Tulland knows, are default-boring. The other is that his teacher has understood reality as it is, and knows that the ways reality works are often boring. Since he's a good teacher, he presents the often unsatisfactory parts of how the world works.

Tulland hates this. He imagines war to be shining swords and glory, but likely has never imagined it with blood, or what it would feel like to lie dying on a battlefield. He thinks of all the adventure the world might offer, but none of the pain, inconvenience, or lonesomeness it would require. His teacher presenting these things as fact is something he initially understands as the man being intentionally dull and lifeless, sapping all the joy out of things that should be glittering and glorious.

As half of Tulland's education, the teacher is meant to be Intelligence and Knowledge. He offers facts, figures, and cold, hard realities. He's a logistics guy. Uncle, in contrast, is Wisdom and Understanding. They overlap with each other's territories, but as a whole Uncle is the person who understands what life is and where to find satisfaction within it, while Tutor is more of a nuts-and-bolts, it-runs-on-math type of teacher.

Together, they should have been able to build the fairly bright Tulland into an intellectual monster, fully prepared to wring the value out of any type of life. He wouldn't let them, but that doesn't mean he didn't get any value out of their lessons at all.

Tutor and uncle are mostly presented in the books in the forms of flashbacks, showing where Tulland got the intellectual underpinnings he needed to survive in this new world. But they also, as foils to Tulland's personality, show what he is on a basic personality level. Neither is disposable.

The Mad Rogue

Initially, I needed someone to kill Necia, and to be a sufficiently evil character. I needed you, as a reader, to not feel bad when Tulland took him down.

After Necia went away, it wasn't absolutely necessary that he be super-evil anymore, but it seemed more interesting just to leave him that way. He's the kind of guy who hunts other people for power, and is probably from a world that more or less rewarded that. He's not super complex, mostly because we don't see him for very long, but what we see is dangerous. We don't know what to expect besides violence from him, and we still mostly haven't seen him fight.

The way I write, that put me in a weird place. He wasn't a character I built because I loved him and thought the strength of his story would hold its own weight, and he wasn't a character the plot demanded anymore. He also wasn't a character that really drove plot in a way I couldn't replace, which meant in the three ways I consider characters important, he doesn't currently have a role.

I decided, hopefully wisely, to kick that can down the road by simply leaving him alive. He's out there, somewhere. We know he can do evil, and we don't expect he's stopping doing evil wherever he is. He's a bad-guy-in-waiting, ready for whatever badness we might need him to do later.

Altreck

Tulland's best friend is a bit of a Rorschach test. When Tulland sees him, he sees inferior and nonthreatening, and the reason he sees this is because the character is (objectively) dumb. Any way that Tulland likes him is enabled by that — he doesn't have to worry about that guy competing to be the chosen.

When the person who doesn't have the thing Tulland thinks is important (intelligence) gets something Tulland wants, his entire world falls apart, however temporarily. This is because, in ways Tulland hasn't grappled with yet, he is a bad friend.

For other people, Altreck might look different. To the Church, he really probably does look just as easy to control as the System says he is. And maybe that's the reason they decide to let him have a class, since he's a known quantity who is unlikely to go too very rogue on them.

But he's also, you know, the kind of guy who makes a great Paladin. He's a good dude. He seems good-natured and relatively pure. He's probably not smart enough to be truly greedy. So to Gandalf the White (née Grey) he looks like Samwise Gamgee - absolutely someone who is going to prove his worth, given enough time.

Somewhere, on Tulland's world, he's probably busy doing just that. If this story had followed him, it would have probably ended with him very injured and still struggling to his feet simply because that's what was required to protect the weak. Or something like that, anyway.

Captain Hugg

Captain Hugg was only mentioned once, but it's funny to me that there's a character named Captain Hugg.

Conclusion

This is the first book in a series, so it's hard to say for sure whether it will really have legs. At the time of this writing, nobody who doesn't know me has read it. I'm going to put it up on the internet soon, where some people will like it, and some people will tell me outright that they hate it and think I'm a very, very bad writer indeed.

Depending on the proportion of one to the other, I might get to keep writing for a living, or I might not. It's always a bit of a balancing act, as far as new stories go. It's a risky business where people's tastes change a lot, which means trying to write something you'd call a hit novel is a moving target that's almost impossible to plan to hit.

So it's hard, and it's stressful, but there's nothing else I'd rather do.

When I write these authors notes, I really wish I had better advice to give. I'd love to have profound wisdom to pass out to the readers well beyond what I'm actually capable of giving. And the reason for that is that every reader who makes it through one of my books helps me to keep on keeping on at a job that is objectively hard in some ways, but ultimately very fulfilling in most other respects.

When you do that for me, you do me a favor. A big one. And it's something I appreciate.

I'm glad you are here, and I love y'all. Thank you so much for facilitating this kind of life.

RC