Author Info

Farmerbob1 is clearly a pseudonym, but I’ll say for those that have an interest in knowing that I am from somewhere around Atlanta, Georgia.  I have been writing serial fiction since September 2013.

One of the quick and dirty rules of writing is that it takes at least a million words of practice to even think about gaining income as a writer.  At the time I started Set In Stone, I had about eight hundred thousand words in serial webfiction on the internet.  Over the course of my online writing I’ve surely rewritten at least two hundred thousand words.  So, on this dubious footing, I begin my current project. I plan to release Set In Stone as an E-book, and may eventually release sequels.

But if you are interested in the past, here are the works that led me to where I am as of July 2015:

Discovered web fiction in mid-year 2013, after being introduced to Worm

I decided to create my own terrible fanfiction of Worm, and did so.  That was Arc. Beware the tense errors.

I got a lot of compliments about Arc.  I also got many complaints about terrible writing errors.  I fixed quite a few things, but clearly not all of them.  After I had a better feel for writing, I started Symbiote.  Symbiote’s first twenty chapters proved to me that I had a great deal of work ahead of me to control my tense errors.  I also made lots of other mistakes.  A LOT of corrections went into making Symbiote what it is today, and it’s still littered with poor choices and is a shining example of character power creep.  The power creep was intended, but it wasn’t ever planned to go where it ended up going.  The vast majority of Symbiote was written with zero planning at all, just wandering from place to place as the mood struck me.  I plan on returning to Symbiote one day, and doing it a little bit differently.  With improved writing skills, and *gasp* planning.

I decided that I wanted to write in a superpower universe next.  That was Reject Hero.  In Reject Hero, I worked on better writing, and better control over the power level of characters.  Only one character, and one group in that series ballooned in power from the eyes of the reader, and that ballooning was intentional.  The other characters remained mostly stable in power and ability, which made me happy with myself.  However, planning was still conspicuously absent.

I got an idea for my next project, but I wanted a small project first, so I could experiment with this strange thing called “planning.”  I decided to write a crossover fiction between Pact and the Dresdenverse.  I planned out and wrote a very short novel about Blake and Evan from Pact meeting Butters and Bob from Harry Dresden’s world.  Since both of them wield physically broken swords, I chose to call the story Knights of Broken Swords  The planning part was a success.  The actual characterization of the main characters didn’t go as smoothly as I’d have liked.  Writing in other people’s worlds is annoying!

And so, here we are.  Set In Stone.  In this story, I plan to continue the strange and esoteric process of planning what I’m writing ahead of time, both for the book, and for the series.  I’ve also added two other challenges to my writing.  This series will be set in an almost metal-free world, in a stonepunk genre.  It will also be rational.  I discuss these restrictions in the About section.

 

Some other things I’ve written since this about page was created:

Overseer is a fan fiction where I’ve crossed Dwarf Fortress into the Worm Universe

The Hunt Is On is a fan fiction where Wile E. Coyote finds his way into the pre-canon Worm Universe.

Benefactor is an original super-powered character story exploring ‘the greater good’ from a different angle.

Active fanfiction side projects:

Any Port in a Storm Kongo and Fubuki, two shipgirls from Kantai Collection, cross over into post-canon Worm. This is a completely unplanned series of stories. When the muse throws me at the keyboard, I write.

Business as Usual Vlad Taltos is involuntarily sent to the post-canon Worm universe by Verra. This is a highly planned story. It has it’s own planning thread. Like ‘Knights of Broken Swords’ this fanfiction is being used as a learning experience for me, to experiment with things from the books on writing that I’ve been reading.