Thus, a mission statement:

Can I get it signed?

Sure you can! But you will need to get in contact with me directly in that case. Easiest way to do that is through my email: Jacobharbo@gmail.com.

I also ship internationally, but you will need to pay the shipping costs. Each book will be sent, gift-wrapped, inside a large bubblewrap-lined envelope.

How long did it take to write Viridia?

I began the first furtive steps of actually writing Viridia during the Pandemic of 2020, so from the first words on paper to the publication has taken almost 5 years.

Though this is partly because I accidentally Pavloved myself into only being able to write while travelling. I could not simply sit down and write, I needed to be in transit before I was able to get my act together: Whether by bus, train, the back of a car, or even in the occasional plane, I wrote only while travelling.

I finished writing late 2023, from there it was the publishing process taking about another year

Again, I am not a professional author. Viridia was a project I wrote as a hobby, not because it was expected of me.

How did you get started?

It depends on how you define the ‘start’. I’ve been writing for roleplay purposes for more than fifteen years. Got my start in World of Warcraft, and from there it has just never really stopped. I enjoy creating characters to explore situations that the world we live in cannot provide.

I’ll never be a fantasy paladin, or a space explorer, or so many other things. Doesn’t mean I can’t write about such characters though.

But if you want to know how I got started on Viridia, it is this comment right here. I wrote a few paragraphs related to the events of the video, and people liked it, including the channel owner, Sethorven.

One of the people leaving replies to the comment, @connor5070, made a comment that I should write a book. And so… I began to give it thought.

I began to think up Viridia as a setting, as a concept, but it would have remained an idea…

If not for Sean “Day[9]” Plott deciding to start what he calls his DK30 - biannual 30-day periods where he gets his viewers encouraged to start on projects they might have for a 30 day period.

Well, I decided I would participate, and I spent the 30 days learning a few things from Masterclass.com from professional authors. In particular this class from James Patterson, and by the time the 30 days were over, I had a skeletal outline, a 0’th draft, of Viridia.

From there, it was just a matter of writing.

How did you find a publisher as an unproven author?

In a word: money.

I did not create Viridia to make a profit - I am not a professional author. I had money in the bank, and I was willing to pay to get Viridia published. I did not want my work to languish in self-publication, I wanted this done right.

And so, I approached Olympia Publishers, who offered me what is known as a Hybrid Publication deal - essentially, you pay them a one-time fee (in my case, 3.000£) and from there, you are given the full professional publishing process.

Now, hybrid publishing gets a bad rap from professional authors: publishers are supposed to make you money, not the other way around. But that’s the kind of elitist attitude that will have you running from publishing house to publishing house to agent to agent until you find one that is willing to take a gamble on an unproven author.

By paying that one-time fee, I was certain that the publisher I found was reputable. And that really gave me peace of mind.

If you want to make a profit, I cannot recommend this way, but if you have money and want to spend it to make your writing see the light of day, I cannot recommend it more.

Because at the end of the day, time is more valuable to me than money. And I would rather spend money finding a publisher than spend weeks, months, or even years of my life with constant rejections.

Is this porn? Did you write porn?

No, Viridia is not porn. But it does contain explicit sex scenes. There are a number of reasons for that, but the main three are thusly:

1) I wanted people to recognise this is a book for adults. It deals with some heavy topics about the nature of what it means to be human, topics that are not suitable for those who are not physically, emotionally, or sexually mature.

Consider the sex a filter: If the thought of reading about two - or more - people having sexual fun is a deal-breaker, you weren’t going to like the book in the first place.

2) I wanted the reader to feel some amount of culture-clash discomfort. Sexuality is far less taboo in the future than it is today, and thus it served as a great way to get the reader to recognise that the culture of the future is not the culture of the present. It’s a way for me to get people in the right mindset for reading the book: The world of Viridia does not conform to today’s society.

3) To quote TBSkyen, a Danish Youtuber and art-critic: “The world is kinky, human beings are kinky, and it's broadly speaking harmless so long everybody's educated. Repression is what leads to the damage, you know?” - it is a quote that I wholeheartedly agree with.

What about the story made you want to publish it?

This ties into the thought I had at the beginning of this page: I wanted to provide a counterpoint to all the fiction that posits the future will somehow be horrible for one reason or another.

It does not need to be. We have many problems that face our species - but so did our ancestors, and their ancestors. I bet that if they could see how the world developed in the aftermath, they’d think we have it made. You’re reading this thanks to the manipulation of atomic structures through the medium of electromagnetism.

Our world must seem utopic to them - at least if they could get past the cultural changes since their time.

What was the hardest part to write?