What happens if you drink the ritual coffee?

I’ve chosen to start with an easy one. No one knows! Reed mentions at one point that a single cup of it would be valued at almost half a million dollars, and he’s mathematically wrong, but it’s just something that they have enough uses for that they don’t need to test it on humans. And, as a result, I’ve never had to answer that question as an author. Yet, anyway.

Are we ever going to see the wikipedia dungeon?

Maybe! Though I worry that I’ve done the thing where I’ve built it up too much and it’s actually just a series of geometrically perfect rooms full of complex physics puzzles, where maybe you lose parts of your brain if you guess wrong answers. Wait, that sounds neat. Okay, we’ll see.

Do the different species of infomorphs actually do different things?

Yes. Assignments, like from purple orbs, tend to focus on things that center around categorization of information. Authorities have an influence more in terms of changing the physical world by drawing strength from regimented organization. And navigators feed off of and work with geographical motion. They all overlap in conceptual space, in the same way that humans and deer overlap in biological space; they can interact with each other, but might not find instant common ground.

Can the alchemy tree fit in-

Nope.

But what if they-

Nope. But it’ll work out somehow, don’t worry.

Where did the Tree of Knowledge come from, anyway?

This is something I find really fun about this world; the Order are not the first delvers, and they’re not the first organized group. But they are the one with the best documentation so far. The tree came from… a dungeon. Same thing as the Status Quo items, sorta. Somewhere. Somewhen, in the past. The Alchemists don’t know; they inherited the thing, and have been around for over a century. And if it seems odd that they’ve had a hundred years of rotating membership and commercial grade potions, and they still only discovered a half dozen potions and no one really talks about them, then yeah, that is kinda weird.

Aren’t the police still after Alanna?

A small town in Florida’s police department, yes. They never actually caught her, so it’s not like they have a useful warrant out for her arrest.

Wouldn’t [any purple orb] work really well with the giant road mech they’re building?

Probably. The mech is, honestly, one of my favorite background jokes. Because it is objectively very cool, but it requires a lot of effort to actually deploy into any given situation, and the number of times the Order would have actually been able to make use of that strength, was the time they were dealing with an angry magical effect that controlled asphalt. I didn’t actually write that on purpose, it’s just sort of how everything came together. Maybe in the next book, we’ll find a place for it, even if it is just picking up something heavy.

The mech is completed, by the way. Someone else asked about that. It’s ‘ready’, in the sense that a bunch of easily amused engineers keep making improvements to it, but it works.

Did this book have a musical playlist like the last two?

Abney Park - Wanderlust

The Offspring - Come Out Swinging

Miracle Of Sound - Never Alone

The Garages - Sidelined

And then, some characters actually have their own songs. At least, as far as music that to me personally resonates when I’m thinking about characters. You might notice these aren’t really for the main trio, and that’s because I have an exceptionally hard time thinking of stuff that fits them. So if anyone has suggestions, drop those below.

Penelope Scott - Sweet Hibiscus Tea, is for Momo

David Earl (RAD OST) - Remade Again, is for Arrush and Keeka

Blue October - Inner Glow, is for Sarah

Rare Americans - Gas Mask, is for Nate

Is it possible the main trio of James, Anesh, Alanna, Anesh, and Anesh, could expand their polycule to other characters?

That seems like something that could happen, yeah. I actually want to explore more of how relationships might change not just when you’re dealing with a bunch of chaotic progressive personalities, but also when magic and nonhuman species are in the mix. That includes stuff like the challenges of dating while you are both poly, and putting your life at risk every few days. I don’t know exactly how their relationship might expand and change, but I try to let my characters be living people, and not just vectors for a plot, so we’ll see what comes up.

How do you plan to balance slice-of-life fun with world changing magic and conflicts with external forces?

I feel like work-life balance has been an issue for most of our characters this whole time, and honestly, I don’t see that changing much. A lot of the slice-of-life happens within dungeon delves, or while our trio are puzzling out orb mechanics. And really, that’s kinda where I like the style at; their lives are chaotic and messy, and they have to make time to share small joys, because there’s not as much downtime anymore.

Will there be more Rufus and Ganesh?

Yes. Also more Fredrick. Because all of them are precious and deserve more attention.

Will there be more species?

Absolutely. In a lot of different ways. I would actually really like to challenge James’ desire to build a better world for everyone, at least logistically, by making ‘everyone’ a much more chaotic mess than normal.

What happened to the iLipede that could scan things?

Still around, hanging out down in Research helping with magic item detection.

There have been a number of plot holes that were unintentional and later got explained in ways that added to the story. Are there any ‘plot holes’ that were intentional, and you had a plan for?

Yes. At least twice that hasn’t been explained yet. Also, kind of an answer, Ben, from the Winter’s Climb delve. That one paid off pretty fast, but I did actually enjoy seeing people wondering if I’d just forgotten an entire character. Also, James ‘forgetting’ repeatedly to tell El about her lost friends was not because James was being a jerk or because I was a forgetful author. It served as a narrative reminder that humans have no passive defense against things screwing with our memories and thoughts.

Why did the potion people keep the potions to make more of themselves?

So no one would use them.

Are Harlan’s Wolfpack good or bad?

Yes. No.

What did you feel most constrained by, having TDG set during our active timeline, and not just a nebulous ‘present day’?

Our present timeline is insane, and in ways that are not fun. By allowing events to actually unfold, I have done two things; make the fiction less escapist, and also make the protagonists capable of reacting to things. What this means is basically that, from the moment a strong tie to our timeline was established (probably the pandemic, really), the world of The Daily Grind is no longer our timeline. From that moment onward, everything that happens is fiction.

And that’s kind of liberating, but also now that I’ve established that this is supposed to be our world, at least starting from there, it asks a lot of questions. Questions like, why aren’t they helping with X problem? Or, what happens if a problem is actually a people problem? Reality is under this magical banner of fiat hand waving where nothing in reality ever has to make sense. Fiction does, though, and it makes it kind of awkward.

The absolutely most constraining thing though, which I’m not super interested in being constrained by anymore, is discussing politics. And I don’t just mean political parties or active politicians, I mean the day-to-day philosophies and structures of life. The problem that I’ve been skirting around is that the Order has no ideological opposition, because their ideological opposition would be… uh… monsters? Who looks at a group that says “we have magic and want to build a utopia you can live in for free” and goes “fuck those guys”, right?

Except there are people who do that, in the real world, and those people suck. And I’ve been trying to avoid hurting their poor feelings by reminding them how much they suck, but it apparently doesn’t matter what I say or do, someone is gonna get offended by it. Hell, on the last chapter of book three, someone accused me of having a bias against Republicans because Davis expressed that he did not predict his own arc of character growth from “guy who votes for Bush” to “guy who thinks we can do better than prisons”. I was accused of bias, because I showed a Republican undergoing personal growth.

And I feel that if I’d set The Daily Grind on the world of Myerth, in the country of Amoraka, that maybe I would have less of this problem. At least then, when I say the name of a fictional political party, the people with no introspection can just casually assume I’m talking about their enemies.

If the cast members of TDG were furries, what animals would they be?

Thank fuck a less touchy subject.

James would be an eight foot tall komodo dragon. Alanna is a badger, Anesh is an otter. Sarah is probably the most adorable mouse girl ever. Nate’s an orca, Arrush is a butterfly.

Frequency-Of-Sunlight would be a zebra, but like, in a camraconda way. As in, instead of being an anthropomorphized zebra, she’s an ophiomorphized zebra. A zebra that is snake-esque.

Momo also wanted to be an otter but feels like she can’t steal Anesh’s thing, so she goes with squirrel instead. Reed stares off into the distance for slightly too long then asks if he can choose tumblefeed. The rest of Research then also starts picking dungeon life they would like to have as their fursonas. Mars is a shellaxy, John is away at the time and gets assigned as whatever weird infomorphic event the extra person from Winter’s Climb was.

Everyone in Response independently chooses a different breed of cat or dog. They high five over this.

In the distance, Harlan senses someone assuming they have a wolf fursona. They don’t. There’s no joke here, they just know that, and they don’t appreciate it.

Karen glares at whoever asks her, but secretly knows she is a horse.

Why did James originally learn to fence anyway?

James picked up fencing because his parents told him he had to do a sport, and he’d already learned that soccer meant playing in freezing rain sometimes, baseball bored him, and football was mostly populated by people who hated him. Being a teenager who was getting into fantasy games and other nerd stuff, he said fencing so he could play with a sword, and then ended up liking it. He didn’t stick with it that much, but has found a renewed interest with Anesh and JP around and magically good enough to make it fun, so they do that as a hobby.

Is there a choice you've made, that you wouldn't have made if you were writing it today, that you think has turned out better than what you'd have written now?

A lot of my best ideas are accidents. Secret, Sarah, most of the dungeon power interactions, I make errors when I’m writing and then cover them up and pretend I was planning it the whole time. Literally the only thing I intentionally foreshadowed for the first twenty chapters was that I absolutely was going to have James and Anesh smooch.

I think if I rewrote anything, I’d make different mistakes. I dunno if it would be better or worse, but it wouldn’t be the same. It’s why I’m hesitant to redo earlier chapters, even though it’s really obvious how much my writing has changed.

How well do camracondas taste food? What flavors like sweet or sour are accessible to them? How do they handle peanut butter?

They have a very strong jaw strength, so peanut butter is a lot easier for them. They can't taste sweet as well as humans, but everything else is mostly the same. They can also experience something like flavor when observing recorded footage. Not media, specifically security footage.

Since dungeons have apparently been around for a long time, is it possible someone intentionally shaped human social development to get the dungeon they wanted?

That’s an interesting thought!

And finally. When does the story start up again?

The Daily Grind will resume public posts on September 1st, 2022. Patreon posts resume on August 1st, 2022. My other new story begins in a couple days, also hopefully on August 1st. If you’re interested in that, follow my author page and get notified when it’s released.

And that’s all this time. Thanks again to everyone for reading, and I’ll see you when we’re back.