Jakob H. Greif

So … what can I say about myself?

I was born in Singapore, though my parents returned to Germany soon afterward.

I’m bilingual thanks to my father who taught me English by watching movies with me and having me translate subtitles. For some reason, I never really got any good English teachers until I was fully fluent, my favorites were the one who let me read in class, and the other who pointedly ignored it when I snuck my Kindle into school and read under my desk.

Back in kindergarten and elementary school, I used to be a huge dinosaur nerd, though that soon changed to a general interest in biology and zoology, as well as all the various mythological beasties found in old stories.

I also read a lot. If it weren’t for my Kindle, my room would probably look like something straight out of Hoarders, with three-quarters of the overall volume being taken up by books.

I started writing in 2019 while on a marine Biology internship in South Africa. It was Saturday, everyone else had gone out and I hadn’t realized that all of the keys were gone and I wouldn’t be able to get back in if I left. The internet was out, though, and I got bored. I’d always told myself that I’d start writing at some point and then was as good a time as any.

Of course, that first book didn’t go anywhere. I did a ton of research and around a hundred pages worth of worldbuilding but stopped writing after 20 thousand or so words.

It took another two years for me to really get into writing again, this time, it was 400 thousand words worth of fanfiction that started out as „writing practice“ and I just kept going until the story was done.

By that point, I’d also found extremely long web novels like Wandering Inn and Worm and really got into them (It took me around two months to catch up with Wandering Inn and I don’t think I left my room for anything other than buying food during that time).

Eventually, after finishing that absolute monster of a fanfiction story, I had the idea for Apocalypse Redux, wrote the prolog, and submitted it to Royal Road before I could talk myself out of it.

And the rest is history, I suppose.