Hûw Steer's Blog, page 10

Back to the Cutting Room Floor

Right. It’s about time I got down to editing.

A vast manuscript looms before me like a colossus in the mists, but significantly more papery. I had rather hoped that in the last couple of months, while I wrote an unrelated short story or two and worked on my RPG storylines, my mind would be filled with notions of how I could improve Boiling Seas 3. How I could cut it down, how I could rework all the meandering plot threads into something a lot more coherent, and how I could cut it down. There’s a priority here, if you hadn’t already guessed it, and it’s making the damn thing less than three-to-four times the length of The Blackbird and the Ghost.

I had hoped I’d have these ideas. Have I had any such thoughts? Have I hell. My traitor brain has instead been having ideas for completely different stories, which are far more tempting prospects to begin than returning to the existing story I have before me and tweaking it. And it is very hard to sit down and focus on editing when I have all these ideas dangling in front of me. They’re so delicious.

But as much as I hate editing, as much as I hate going back and revising what I’ve already done (my mind always rebels; didn’t I write it well enough the first time?), it is time. I said I’d give myself a couple of months and I meant it. Because the whole point is that I have time to do all this editing. I don’t have to rush it, or spend entire days at the grindstone, if I start now, doing a little bit at a time, I can chip away at the huge edifice before me.

Because I can’t just do that. I can’t just edit: I have to be creating something new, all the time. And also, practically, I normally write first thing in the morning, and while my somewhat sleepy brain is able to create it is not able to concentrate on editing and honing things to a fine standard. And thus while I start editing Boiling Seas 3 I shall also still be writing… well, a few things. I still have a short story to finish – it started with a good concept but has very much gone off the rails and needs reining into something actually decent.

And the other day I also put pen to paper (figuratively) on something that really is just for fun, with a series I haven’t touched in a long while. A scene had been in my head for a few weeks and I thought I’d just get it down, and it turned out well. Perce and Gideon have aged a day (or few) since anyone last saw them, but that just means there’s more mad magic they can do. Consulting two of my primary audience yesterday (by which I mean two of the handful of children who have actually read The Fire Within) has reassured me that someone will, in fact, read this book as and when I eventually figure out a full plot and write it down. Whether I can afford (literally) to publish more in that series is a matter for another day: for now, it’s nice to write.

So that’s going to be me for the next few months: a few wild ideas, hopefully some progress on more Perce and Gideon, and a beginning to the mammoth editing task before me. Right now, I’m optimistic. Right now, I haven’t started yet. I suspect I will feel differently this time next week…

The Littler Things – February Worldbuilding

I’ve always said that in worldbuilding it’s the little things that end up mattering most. (In fact I said it at length in the TBRCon panel I did last month, if you fancy watching that!) Small details that seem innocuous at first glance but actually show that the whole setting is turned on its head: things like the glass clothes I put in Ad Luna, or the complete lack of bees and therefore knowledge of what they sound like in a recent RPG session I ran, or many more besides. These are the markers of cognitive estrangement, the ripples that show us something much more significant is going on beneath the waves.

But even if one covers all these little things when worldbuilding, it turns out there are plenty of other aspects to cover – bits I’ve never thought about, because either they just don’t come up or because I just glossed over them in favour of the more exciting scene around the corner, or things that I have inadvertently mentioned but not consciously at all. Things like… food. What’s the cuisine of the Boiling Seas like? What are the clothing styles? Are there defined social classes? How does the government actually work? I might mention all these things but are they a proper part of the world I’ve built in my head and on paper?

I’ve been exploring a bit of this for the last month over on Twitter (never X), thanks to a great series of prompts from Erika McCorkle (Kira of the Wind), who’s been getting a fair few people to expand on all that lore bubbling away in their minds and tell us how the worlds they’ve built work.

Thank you to Kira of the Wind for putting this list and image together!

And at first I was gleefully typing away. Natural features? Things that make your world stand out? I’ve got a whole Boiling Sea/s (I really need to pick the plural or the singular) to talk about there! Turns out when you base a whole series around (and name it after) a quirk of the world then that’s easy to wax lyrical about. Magic, too, was satisfying: I take great delight in coming up with weird uses for a relatively simple and soft magic system, hence how I’ve invented the radio, plumbing and a bunch of other things I won’t spoil yet.

And then we got to ‘society’, and I realised where the holes in m world were. Because Tal, Max and Lily don’t exactly spend much time in ‘society’, because they’re dashing off into the jungle to search for ancient treasures at every chance they get. It took a long time for me to skim through my own damn writing to find that yes, I’ve mentioned bits of hereditary nobility, that I’ve hinted at an implicit class system without ever consciously planning it out. Thankfully I seem to have remained consistent, or at least vague enough that if I ever do codify the precise social dynamics of the Seas then I can make it work. And food and drink! Obviously everyone eats, obviously everyone drinks, but what? Apart from a few scenes in fancy restaurants I don’t think I’ve ever really specified what Boiling Seas cuisine is like. But are those restaurants representative, or are they outliers? What’s street food like? I might have actually written it in a forgotten scene and just not found it.

Now we’re back on firmer ground with systems of government, as I have a convenient tyrant sitting waiting in the wings. But this series has done its work magnificently. Not only am I sharing digestible details with you lot on the internet, but I’m finding details that I didn’t even know I had about my own world. There are all sorts of extra little aspects that I want to just sit down and brainstorm about now and add to the scattered, fragmented world bible of the Boiling Seas – let alone all the other worlds I’ve got brewing. This hashtag has made me think more about my own process than anything has in months.

So cheers, Erika. You’ve given me a lot of food for thought.

Weights and Measures

I am an inconsistent creature when it comes to writing measurements. Or at least I’m varied. I very much blame being British; being raised with two different systems sort of working in parallel but sort of not just means that I have both running all the time and there is no consistent logic as to which I’ll apply in any given situation.

For whatever reason the relative imprecision of inches and feet and miles feel slightly more ‘fantastical’ to me – the metric system is objectively superior but in a fantasy realm it feels like nobody would have quite gotten to that level of precision and standardisation yet. But I’m certainly not going to write an Imperial currency system in anywhere, because as much as I love the old money it is a baffling mess. Similarly, though I’ll write ‘yards’, it’s only because I’m conceiving the distance in metres and it’s close enough for an estimate.

But that’s in fantasy. When I’m writing SF ‘kilometres’ – and especially ‘klicks’ – feel futuristic and clever. (I blame much Artemis Fowl and Chris Ryan as a kid.) Most of my SF is very ‘soft’, though, so it’s not like I stick to this: someone will issue orders in kilometres and metres, but when in the middle of a firefight rounds will absolutely whizz past ‘inches away’. And I’m certainly not going to be measuring anyone’s height in centimetres any time soon, thank you very much. (Again, metric is objectively better but I’m a creature of habit.)

When I do write a ‘harder’ SF story, though, precision is important. I force myself to take great pains to measure everything metrically – kilometres, centimetres, all that. That’s the way that actual scientists and space people in the real world do things, after all, and so I must follow suit. If we carry the Imperial system into the far future then we’re doomed as a species, let’s be honest.

All this is building up to the slightly nerve-wracking but very righteous events of yesterday evening, when I had to correct a US copy-editor who had Americanised my story and switched ‘tonnes’ for ‘tons’.

Now, the style guide for this magazine is all US English and that’s absolutely fine; it’s the way they do things, and there are far more important arguments to have with our cousins across the pond than how to spell things right. But when you get to measurements then find-and-replace won’t cut it. 200 Imperial tons is only 180 metric tonnes, and so (without spoilers) a key object in the story was suddenly able to tighten its belt by 20 tonnes worth of notches. And that’s the sort of thing that could be quite important further down the line. I took the time to change all my speeds to  KPH, all my distances in kilometres, etc – and my weights to the correct and more precise tonnage.

(And this is a very easy mistake to make – it took me long enough to figure out which tonne I should even be using, let alone what the difference was. I didn’t even know there was a difference until this story!)

EDIT: So there’s an Imperial ton and a different US ton apparently! It still works out at a difference of 3 tonnes, so I still feel justified, but slightly less so. Why is this so confusing.

It was a slightly nerve-wracking email to send, but this is actually a matter of precision over principles. Sometimes measurements don’t really matter, but sometimes they do, and two letters can turn into 20 tonnes with worrying ease. I reckon in future I’ll be paying much more attention to my distances. Maybe I should draw some diagrams. I know a guy with a very nice gridded battle-map…

Under Siege

I’m incredibly excited for this afternoon, because I’ve managed to orchestrate a medieval siege. (In Dungeons and Dragons. But still.)

I spent last weekend with my parents, ostensibly for the purpose of getting rid of a load of old stuff I didn’t need so there was space in my room for the old stuff I do need. The main thing I jettisoned were my old university notes, which I’d kept in the vain hope that one day I would need to refer to them. (Of course I never have, and if I do ever need to look up a topic I studied I can just consult all the lecture reading lists and the many gigabytes of articles that I’ve still got saved digitally. And I’ve kept the essays and important stuff like that too.)

But what I did keep, weirdly enough, were some books from my GCSEs – which definitely weren’t 13 years ago, how dare you – because thanks to the vagaries of different exam boards, I actually got to study interesting things back then. No 20th-century politics for me – we got the history of medicine, cowboys, and a local history project. And for a school in the old Welsh Marches, that could only mean one thing. Castles.

There are more castles on the Welsh border with England than there are anywhere else in the world, because my ancestors were professionally irritating – which meant that we as students got to spend many glorious hours studying and visiting them. Ludlow Castle was our nearest one, and is still a favourite: I worked festivals there, saw plays, wandered endlessly within its high stone walls. It’s even where I got my sword, and in unreleased fiction I have both besieged and blown it up. But there were many more within easy reach: Chepstow, Eastnor (even though it’s not really a castle), Clun, the list goes on.

The inner bailey of Ludlow Castle, 2017.

And so I have studied them all. I learned all the intricacies of mottes, baileys and keeps; the benefits of different tower shapes, how to defend a wall-top, what a machicolation is and what it’s for. Arrow- and rifle-slits, volley fire, the list goes on – but not before mentioning my favourite feature, the batter, which is the angled bit at the bottom of a wall that lets you safely drop rocks off the top and have them bounce into an attacker’s face. At college I studied some seriously big sieges in the Crusades – most notably Antioch – and how a vast army can be stymied by something as simple as a big wall. And in more recent years an awful lot of Sharpe has taught me how a siege changes when you can blow stuff up.

And, y’know. Helm’s Deep has lived in my head in its entirety for decades now.

So when, in our last DnD session, our characters managed to infiltrate and steal a small fort from under our enemies’ nose, when we realised that we could now hold this fort against our enemies when they came back… I just started talking. For about 5 uninterrupted minutes. I ordered trenches dug, barricades built; I deployed the magicians and archers high and the heavy hitters at the front, with multiple fallback positions and chokepoints so we can make the bad guys pay for every inch of ground we give. I painted hidden range markers for our various bows and spells and scattered them in the open ground. I drew two maps.

They’ve really gotten sloppy at Ludlow; get rid of all those trees, your sight-lines are awful!

And this was all in character, mind; Sir Geoffrey is a former soldier with siege training and experience. He knows what he’s doing… because I’ve studied all this for years and I think I know what I’m doing, and Geof is, when you take away all the fictional life experiences, an extremely silly version of me at his core.

When I’d finished talking, I looked around the group, somewhat embarrassed, and asked if anyone minded awfully if we had a go at this obscenely detailed plan. And because my friends are the best, and because, as our game master admitted, I did seem to know what I was talking about both in and out of character, they gave an enthusiastic yes.

Quietly, our GM told me that my eyes lit up like a kid at Christmas, and they could all tell it meant a lot to me. So thanks, guys.

Now I just have to hope that I do vaguely know what I’m talking about and am not about to get all our characters killed. We’re about to find out…

Review – Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Jan/Feb 2024

Wow, it really has been a while since I wrote any proper book reviews, hasn’t it? The Riftwar Re-Read took it out of me. But what better way to start again than with something very recent, and relevant: the latest issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact?

This is my first full issue of Analog, and it’s a pleasantly chunky thing, absolutely packed with content – 21 stories and poems of various lengths as well as 4 beefy factual pieces. I will confess that much of the hard science went straight over my head, though there were some interesting bits and pieces. New supercolliders! Microbial ‘soft cities’! Moon habitat stuff!

But I’m here for the sci-fi, so let’s get cracking on that.

As I just mentioned, 21 stories! Many were excellent, all were at least good, though some didn’t land so well for me. I’m not going to review every single one, and not in detail, but I thought I’d briefly go through some of my favourites. Because there were some great pieces in there.

‘Kagari’ by Ron Collins was a fantastic start to the magazine. We’re dropped, to my initial surprise and delight, straight into a fantasy story, where a society of medieval-ish bird-people are celebrating their prince’s coming of age, in a high mountain aerie overlooking the strange soil of an alien world. The prince, Rythane, is conflicted; his high position in a caste-based society is breaking his relationships and forcing him to grow up much too fast.

And then “a small, featherless creature”, “a wild avatar of the Sky Gods”, is brought to him, and Rythane begins to learn that the universe is a much bigger place than he had realised.

Collins conjures a beautiful world here. An alien culture of alien beings is deftly realised with barely any exposition, and Rythane is a genuinely sympathetic character. It’s a fine writer who can turn the ‘human explorer in an alien society’ trope on its head so well, and to make the token human character feel so alien in their own right, so well constructed is the rest of the world. A very good start indeed.

Next of note for me was ‘Homesick’ by H.A.B. Wilt, which takes the form of an interview with an astronaut in the wake of a Gravity-style orbital debris crisis. It’s a short piece, but elegant and highly emotional: this is an astronaut confronting the fact that she’s never going to be an astronaut again. But the optimism of it all regardless – the idea that the human drive to explore will never be fully quenched – was briefly, but beautifully, presented.

In a break from the science fiction, ‘Microbes, Interstellar Travel, and Protocells: A Conversation with Dr. Rachel Armstrong’ was an interesting read. Again, a lot of the scientific minutia whistled over this ancient historian’s head at great speed, but the idea of microbial ‘soft cities’ and the complexity of their natural systems, as well as some of Armstrong’s concepts for the applications of microbial technology in a more sustainable future, was rather intriguing. (I’m almost certainly going to misappropriate the ‘soft city’ concept for a short story some day, so thank you, Rachel…)

Back to the sci-fi: ‘Song of Nyx’ by Sam W. Pisciotta was a really inventive piece. A marine biologist with brain implants is taking dictation for the last surviving humpback whale. The story has a nice arc contrasting the biologist’s own personal problems with the loneliness of Nyx, the last whale, but it was the concept of whale mythology that grabbed me: the idea that these majestic creatures with their enormous brains are fully sentient, with their own creation myths, their own stories, which we simply can’t understand the telling of. I hope it’s true, which is about as fine a bit of praise I can give a piece of speculative fiction.

Then there was ‘Tepid War’ by Jay Werkheiser, which very much appealed to my dark sense of humour. It’s a perfectly ordinary business story, with some tech company employees trying to get the edge on their competition while dealing with some inter-team friction. Except that this is a world at war, with the US, Russia and China throwing high-tech drones at one another in the streets of San Francisco and beyond… and nobody bats an eyelid. Thanks to guided smart bullets and seriously advanced surveillance tech, this war can be waged above civilian heads with no civilian casualties whatsoever. It’s a very clever bit of background worldbuilding: the core business story is related to the war but didn’t have to be. The characters proceed about their daily lives, completely ignoring the robotic battles happening right in front of them. It’s a masterful bit of writing when a character is more worried about being late for a Zoom meeting than about the drone exploding outside his bedroom window. I liked this one a lot.

And then there’s the last story in the magazine, right at the back… ‘A Vintage Atmosphere’ by Hûw Steer. A farmer brings in his oxygen harvest from fields of lichen and algae, before a disaster at his local space marketplace throws him into a thick of the action he’d rather avoid.

Now I haven’t read through this story properly since I wrote it. And I’ve certainly not read it as a ‘reader’, divorced from the writing and editing perspective. So I approached this with a little trepidation.

And, honestly? It’s alright. I think the core concept of farming oxygen holds up, and I like how I extended the concept to the market, to the people who need to buy oxygen for space travel and habitats and what their particular tastes might be. I definitely waffled too much near the beginning in particular; there were a good few hundred words that I could have cut, and I kept wincing as I unnecessarily repeated turns of phrase in close-together sentences. But overall it’s still a decent story: it’s got some drama, some rise and fall, and I’m still proud of the worldbuilding. Not the best story in the magazine, but not the worst either, I reckon.

There we go. I’m seriously considering subscribing to Analog myself now: I rather like the idea of new short SF arriving every other month. And I will admit a selfish desire to keep an eye on the letters section at the back, in case anyone has anything to say about ‘A Vintage Atmosphere’…

What I’m Reading – January 2024 Edition

2 RPG sessions and a TBRCon panel down, but I’m still not done; I’m off to sing for the BBC today, so this morning I blog at speed. And so instead of talking about what I’m writing, I thought I’d share the current list of what I’m reading. It’s been Christmas, after all, and so a small stack of tomes awaits my attention. (Though when doesn’t it?)

Ken MacLeod – The Lightspeed Trilogy

I’ve liked Ken MacLeod since I was a teenager, when my old English teacher donated a chunk of his own bookshelf to the school library, including the Engines of Light trilogy. While a lot of the socialist themes went rather over my head as a kid, subsequent re-reads have absolutely held up, and so when I spotted the first book of a brand-new trilogy just after my birthday last year I snapped it up straight away.

A new future, where new national conglomerates are already scrapping over the Earth before someone comes up with (a very cool spin on) FTL travel and expands their reach to new stars, is magnificently explored. You’ve got humanoid robots who don’t know they’re robots, an omnipresent AI that might not have all your best interests at heart – and, as is MacLeod’s custom, a vision of a future, socialist Scotland that confronts this new future head-on. I’ve got book 2, Beyond the Reach of the Earth, sitting waiting on the pile.

Christopher Paolini – Murtagh

Oh, I do love the Eragon books. This is another fixture of my childhood; I devoured each book as soon as it came out, absolutely loving the classic hero’s journey of Eragon and the dragon Saphira, and the vast world that span out of that core tale over the course of four hefty books. I was picking up sample chapters of Inheritance months before the final book came out (which gave me an early glimpse of just how much can be rewritten during the editing process, as none of those chapters or their implied plot threads ended up in the finished product). It was a staple epic of my youth. The short stories of The Fork, The Witch and The Worm were a pleasant surprise a few years ago – but not half as much as seeing the truly massive tome that is Murtagh, the novella accidentally turned standalone sequel to the original 4 books.

And, come on. Murtagh was always cool. Yes, he was a bit of an edgelord, but you can’t not love a hard-bitten mercenary with an unexpectedly dark past, coming to terms with the new world he reluctantly helped create with his Darth Vader-esque turn to the light at the end of the original series.

(Also, I love how the image of Murtagh’s dragon Thorn on the cover is the very same one as on Eldest, his first appearance).

The only reason I’m not halfway through this book already is because it’s way too big to carry to work every day…

Taran Hunt – The Immortality Thief

Having discussed worldbuilding at length with a panel of excellent authors, I’m trying to catch up with the books they were discussing, and next on the list after Marina J. Lostetter’s Noumenon is The Immortality Thief by Taran Hunt. I’m only a little way in, but it appears to be, at its core, a space heist – which is definitely good material even without the themes of far-future archaeology, sinister aliens and a crew of thieves whose hearts may not be as golden as they try to pretend.

Analog Magazine

And then there’s the latest issue of Analog, which is proving to be a bloody good read so far. Some very informative factual bits and bobs, and a particular highlight is the royal court of a magnificent species of birdlike aliens and their contact with human explorers in Ron Collins’ ‘Kagari’. I’ll do a proper review of this later, I think, especially when I get to the last story; the author’s name is familiar somehow…

TBRCon 2024 – Sci-Fi Worldbuilding Panel Link

At the time of writing, I’m on in 15 minutes. If you’d like to join me, or catch up after the fact, here’s the video link.

Stage Fright

In many forms and many places, I’ve done my fair share of performing. And I’ve done enough now to be able to basically academically document my own form of stage fright. I know exactly how I get anxious before a show of any kind – which doesn’t stop me getting anxious, of course, but it at least means that I’m consistent enough to manage myself.

Since the long-gone days of my teenage band, I got to observe variations of stage fright. Our bassist would get nervous the day before a gig and then be completely relaxed, our guitarist would be fine up until about half an hour beforehand and suddenly get the shakes, and our drummer would be utterly chilled until halfway through the first song, when he would suddenly realise that we were in fact onstage and not just jamming in his parents’ spare room.

And then there was me. My stage fright methods carried me through all that music and through four years of plays and comedy at university, and of course only got worse as I ended up directing some of the stuff I was performing. I was around a whole new group of people who coped with nerves in different ways; we were adults now, so we could have a pint to settle ourselves if we chose, and many of us did.

Not me. Never me. I’ve never taken to the stage anything but cold sober, because I spend the day of a show – pretty much from waking up, through all the setup, the soundchecks, the rehearsals, the waiting – being absolutely insufferable with nerves. I pace, I run lines – and when I’m directing I force other people to do the same endlessly, for which I apologise to three generations of comedians – I check props, I micromanage absolutely everything I possibly can to distract myself from the crippling fear of what I’m about to do.

This was something that did reduce a bit with repeated performances, like runs at the Edinburgh Fringe, but it never went away. And thankfully when I’ve been onstage with Ready Singer One of late it’s a largely absent fear – being part of the Great Entity that is a choir of 40-80 people does wonders for one’s individual nerves. But it’s still there a bit.

And when I have to go solo – when I’m running an RPG session, which I’m doing twice this week, or when I’m doing a TBRCon panel this Tuesday with a bunch of significantly more accomplished authors and feeling very much like a small fish in a very big pond – then it all comes flooding straight back. I’ve got a lot on this week: the aforementioned two RPG sessions, the panel, and a concert on Sunday with BBC Sounds; and it is very much fair to say that I’m pretty bloody nervous.

But it’ll be fine. I know it’ll be fine. Because the other thing about my stage fright, the important thing, is that the moment I step onstage – the moment the first note is played, the moment I open my mouth to speak, the moment I actually start to perform…

Then, it all just washes away. The nerves vanish like they were never there, and I’m absolutely in my element. Because for all that it ruins my nerves on a regular basis, for all the controlled panic beforehand, and no matter what form it takes, I love performing like nothing else in the world.

See you on Tuesday. Unless you’re in my RPG group or my choir, in which case you have your own dates.

TBRCon 2024

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that in-between actually showing you stuff I’ve written, I spend much of my time rambling about aspects of writing: character, worldbuilding, description, all that sort of thing. It seems to be interesting to you lot, and it’s good for me to actually get my thoughts down on (virtual) paper. When you’re stuck on something or there’s an idea that’s almost there, writing about it can be what tips the balance and makes it fully realisable.

But I don’t spend a lot of time actually talking about this stuff. I’ve done a few interviews to chat about books I’ve written but mostly they’re in text. And it’s not like I’m in high demand on the TV circuit or anything – I’m a writer, I write things down. It would be a significant event to catch me actually talking live about the craft and all that jazz.

Well.

I need to actually send people my updated author photo…

That event is TBRCon 2024, hosted by FanFiAddict on the 23rd of January, and I’m on the ‘Building Believable Sci-Fi Worlds’ panel! This is, I suppose, a positive indictment of Ad Luna and my SF short stories; at least one of them must be sufficiently believable. Which given Ad Luna is about space elves and their giant bird friends on the Moon, is… interesting.

But yes: I’m going to be talking, with other human authors, about worldbuilding and sci-fi, which is honestly brilliant. It’s one of my favourite topics to ramble about, and for the sake of maintaining most of my friendships I don’t tend to ramble about it much in person. (Except for some of you poor people. You know who you are.) There’s so much I can dig into with just about my own work, and there are 5 other excellent authors on the panel with me! We have:

Christopher RuocchioAliette de BodardJonathan NevairTaran HuntMarina J. LostetterAnd me

Rather intimidating authors, honestly. All of them have written some extremely well-received books (which I’m trying to read a bunch of in time for the panel…). Some of them have Wikipedia articles. And I am also there, with my handful of shorts and one very, very weird published SF book. The whole TBRCon lineup is pretty stacked – Adrian Tchaikovsky! Mark Lawrence! – and I’m feeling rather like a very small fish in a very big pond.

But it’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m excited to get to discuss my favourite things with some excellent contemporaries, and if you want to watch too you can tune in to the panel on Tuesday the 23rd at 3.30pm UK time. (Or you can watch the recording too – I’ll post it on here probably.) The con itself starts on Sunday the 21st and runs all week – everything’s live-streamed and free, and there are some really cool panels on the lineup that I’m going to do my best to attend in-between work and all that jazz.

So yeah. I’m on a panel. It’s going to be fun. Come watch.

A Fresh Start

So this is the weird few weeks where I’ve not really got much to talk about, writing-wise, because I’ve only just gotten started with the year. And unlike last year, I’ve not currently got a massive novel manuscript on the go.

It’s… weird. Really weird. I’ve been writing Boiling Seas stuff for so long now, and even when I took breaks before to write shorts or children’s books or what-have-you, the manuscript always loomed before me, unfinished, waiting. And obviously it’s still not finished, because I’ve got all the editing to do – a process that will probably be far more time-consuming than the writing of the whole thing – but it looms in a different way now. Still there, still a huge thing on the horizon, but a little further away. A little less urgent. It’s nice.

So: how am I spending my Boiling Seas sabbatical so far? Well for starters, I’m writing up the session #2 material for my semi-homebrewed Warhammer 40k RPG campaign, which my players have been very patiently waiting for for months now. I have a plan, I have a plot coming together, as well as a bit of a ‘hub level’ for them to wander around, which was accidental but I think will add a little more flavour to the whole experience – and flavour, in stories like these, is everything. There is now an orangutan. Don’t ask questions.

It’s second-person writing, too, which is always an interesting challenge. I sit there and tell the story – thought it’s not like I’m just reading big chunks of prose while the players just sit there. For all that I’ll spend hours writing thousands of words, I’ll barely actually read any of them. This writing down is an exercise in getting the structure of the story and how it might go out of my head so I can tinker with it – and then when we actually play, I’ll throw half of that plan away and use the rest of the prose as notes to bounce my players off.

All I need to do now is finish the story bit, then figure out the rules for stealth combat and draw up some level designs…

But my progress was stalled by an unexpected blockage. Well, I say blockage: I got distracted by another idea. I rediscovered (thanks to the excellent Tom Scott’s excellent newsletter) NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of The Day website, which of course meant that the other day I stumbled across a very interesting astronomical phenomenon I’d never heard of before. And now, of course, I’m writing a story based around it. In the same vein as a few of my other SF pieces (I had to stop myself spoiling an upcoming release there), it’s basically taking some real science and mashing it into a completely different scenario. Like oxygen production and farming, for instance.

Not telling you what the phenomenon is yet. Have a look through the last week or so of pictures and see if you can figure it out.

That’s me for the next few weeks sorted, anyway. I’ll let you know how I’m getting on when it’s done. But for now, it’s a few small things, before the monolith begins to loom again.