Hûw Steer's Blog, page 14

What Next?

I’m not that close to finishing Boiling Seas 3, but it’s getting there.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been doubling back and streamlining what I’ve already written before I push on into the grand finale – an approach which has already paid massive dividends even before I get to the bits that really need cutting down. I think I’ve cut about 10,000 words or so already, though I’ve been adding plenty back in to fill in the gaps and make things more coherent. The problem I always end up having, whether or not I have a proper outline for a book, is that I think of really cool ideas halfway through which I should have introduced much earlier – which means I end up half-arsedly introducing them too late in the narrative and then having to scramble to edit them in earlier on when I go back. But with this new ‘editing-halfway-through’ approach, it’s a lot easier to do that reworking of ideas. As a result, my proper villain now takes shape; characters are moving around the massive board of the Boiling Seas on a tighter schedule, and once I’ve cut down the accidentally and absolutely mammoth Chapter 37, I should be in a much better place to blaze on and write Part 3, which is something I’ve been looking forward to writing for a long time indeed.

(And then I need to do the boring things like ‘come up with a title’ and ‘make the cover’, but that’s all a future Hûw problem.)

But drawing towards the end of this trilogy has got me thinking: what am I going to do next?

I’ve been on a rough schedule of publishing a book once a year since I properly started self-publishing, and I’d like to keep that schedule up. Boiling Seas 3 will be this year’s book, all being well, but then after that… what am I going to write? I have a beefy fantasy manuscript that I started editing down a while ago (but quickly fell off) – I definitely want to put that book out at some point, but it’s a pretty dark one. Lots of desperation and despair, which I’m not sure is the vibe I’m after right now. Though it would be a good contrast to the optimism and adventure of the Boiling Seas.

I also, of course, have a kids’ book series that isn’t really a series yet. I wrote ‘Book 1’ on The Fire Within’s cover for a reason: in my head it’s at least a 5-book series, if not more, though typically while I’ve got a good idea for book 5, the intervening books 2-4 are very light on… anything. Maybe that should be the next big project – I say ‘big’, but they’re only very short books so far, which at least means they don’t take quite as long to write.

Though it does take a while for Laura Wingrove to create these excellent covers

Or maybe it’s time for something completely different. A totally new world, a totally new cast of characters. Maybe it’s short, maybe it’s long; maybe I do some long-form SF for the first time in a while; maybe I stick to fantasy and take on a different style.

I’ve got options. I just need to pick one.

Any ideas?

Getting from A to B

You can draw as big and magnificent a map as you like for a fantasy world, but at some point you have to consider one minor issue: how do people actually get around?

As I speed towards the countryside on a mighty metal serpent (well, the 9:47 from Paddington), I spare a thought for all the poor protagonists out there who have to set out on their epic quests without so much as a bus. But of course we got by for thousands of years with nothing but our legs and the legs of whatever creatures we could persuade to give us a lift, as is reflected in most fantasy. And while that works, it does require a little more thought to make your maps make sense.

Compared to someone on foot, horses are fast. Compared to a thousand-mile epic quest, horses are slow. It’s easy to forget, in this modern, hyper-connected world, that most places are actually a really long way apart. I’m off on a 3-hour train journey now – or alternatively a 2-day walk, and that’s with modern roads and infrastructure to speed me on my way. So when I’m drawing my little maps, and looking lovingly at the far more detailed maps of books like The Lord of the Rings or the Riftwar, I have to consider just how far apart these cities really are. We think nothing of a quick jaunt to a neighbouring town that might have been a week’s round trip, once.

Many books and fantasy works get this perfectly right. Half of The Lord of the Rings is literally about travelling from one place to another, and I’ve mentioned before how Feist makes sure to include some of the stops along the way as characters go from one end of Midkemia to the other. Sometimes, though, there are… shortcuts, taken. The last seasons of A Game of Thrones are notorious for teleporting characters across Westeros, and there are some awfully fast horses off-screen in The Last Kingdom.

And ultimately that’s because, unless you write it well, travelling can be boring. If there aren’t exciting plot points along the way, you’re just writing about people going from point A to point B. A quest is inherently a long journey with cool stuff happening along the way, but even Tolkien glosses over a lot of the actual walking in-between the interesting bits.

So what happens when you start adding in other means of transport? (Say, airships, or giant steel boats?) Well, first things first: obviously you can make your journeys quicker. No need to swim when you can take a ship; no need to sail when you can fly… if you can afford it. Because that’s point two: just because swifter and more convenient transport exists doesn’t mean you have to use it. Airships in The Boiling Seas are expensive and infrequent, for all that they’re far faster than lumbering metal sailing-ships – and some journeys are too short to justify any travel other than on foot. Just because you’ve got a huge map at your disposal doesn’t mean that your story has to cross a vast swathe of it. Sometimes it pays to do something a little smaller in scale.

I doubt I’ll be introducing railways to the Boiling Seas any time soon, though, for all that it’s perfectly possible with the technology I’ve already written. There are rails, there are engines, there’s a lot of metal… but as tempted as writing this sentence has made me, it’s rather difficult to build trains that cross over vast expanses of boiling seawater. Railways only really work when you’ve got a big network of them, after all, which took us thousands of years to build in the real world. Even though the ancient Greeks had physical rails in some of their mines, and also invented the steam engine, they never thought to put them together. (Which is a concept that I am constantly tempted to drop everything and start writing about…)

Just look at all those lines. Cheffin’s Map of the English and Scotch Railways, 1850

But that’s my point, really. Trains could exist on the Boiling Seas, but they wouldn’t be very useful because of all that water in the way – and I doubt I’d be able to resist making them constantly delayed and overcrowded. Airships are fast but I’ve made them expensive, and impractical in other ways that will be revealed in book 3, that mean they’re far from ubiquitous. Steelships are there, but they’re about as slow as it gets. For the most part, when it comes time for my protagonists to cross my map, they’re still on the reliable Shanks’ pony.

And that means that, for all that increased connectivity and ease of movement make our modern world feel that much smaller, they don’t have to do the same for your world. There are always ways to work in drawbacks and other considerations, and ways to write a long journey that make it just as interesting as what happens at either end. After all, just because you’re sitting on a train doesn’t mean you can’t admire the view.

Breaking the Block

It’s rather tricky to write when you can’t really think.

Writer’s block is an annoying and frequent inconvenience for any writer. For me, there’s always at least one big project on the go – which means that there’s always a narrative I need to get stuck into, every day without fail. And sometimes, for whatever reason, it just doesn’t flow. The right words won’t come, or none will come at all.

When you’re, say, on an eight and a bit-year streak of writing 500 words a day, this is something of a problem. I’ve got to get something down every day, block or no. So I have to try and find a way around it.

Just forcing your way through the issue doesn’t really work. Or at least it doesn’t work well; even if I can make myself get some words down they’re really not good ones. But as mentioned above, when you can’t even think your way through the next bit of story, just ‘writing anyway’ doesn’t cut it. Whether it’s just a slow day, or you’re ill, or, as in today’s case, you’re very tired after a long weekend of choir singing and carousing, getting words through the brain-fog is almost impossible.

Sometimes switching projects helps, but even then, you’re often still trying to wring creative juices out of a dry sponge/brain. And usually when I’m really stuck, it’s a universal thing: I’m not just struggling for specific ideas, I’m struggling for any ideas at all.

But I’ve got a trick. It’s served me very well in the past, for slaying the dragon that is writer’s block, for getting things flowing again. There is a way around the block. I’ve done it when I’m hungover, I’ve done it when I’m ill. And I’ll share it with you right now.

You are, in fact, already reading it.

If you find yourself unable to write, the only solution is to write about being unable to write. You can make it complex or simple, anything from a concise explanation to an overblown bit of theatre full of mad metaphors and exaggerations. Either approach has its merits – every bit of writing you do is practice, after all, and so however you decide to approach breaking your block, it’s going to be useful.

I’ve written about illness, I’ve written about rain. (I sit here now on a train back from Brighton in the pouring rain, in fact, which isn’t the most conducive environment for storytelling but it’ll do.) Whether it’s describing what’s directly ailing you or the environment around you, just get it down on paper (or chosen virtual equivalent). It might not be going in any novels any time soon, but just the act of articulating why you can’t articulate will let you break through.

If you’re a writer, you’re a storyteller. Take a moment to tell your own story, even if it’s boring.

Because now, having written 500 words about how I can’t write 500 words, I’m nicely warmed up. The block is broken, the thoughts are flowing – and I can get back to the good stuff and get writing properly.

What Am I Doing: June 2023 Edition

It’s update time again. All three flavours of news this week, plus a little something extra.

The good: I had another short story picked up. By which I mean a very long story – by which I mean, not that much shorter than The Fire Within, and that’s a whole book. As usual, I’ll make a full song and dance about it once it’s actually coming out and I’m allowed to tell you when and where – but I’m rather pleased with this one. Without giving away that which I’m not allowed to, it’s a big deal.

The usual: Boiling Seas 3 progresses, though I’m getting a bit worried about the word-count and my inevitable diversions from the original plot structure as I think of interesting things with which to pepper the narrative. I’ve got a couple of weeks off work coming up, so when I’m not gardening, I think I’m going to pause actually advancing the manuscript, go back and start editing what I’ve got so far into something more coherent. Normally I’d finish the full draft first, but I think this will be a better approach. Means I’ll be going into the final stretch with something much more streamlined to work with, which should make the second round of edits that much easier. It’s bloated, and there are definitely things I can excise – and definitely some emotional moments I need to add in throughout. I’ve been steaming ahead with plot without paying enough attention to how my three loveable rogues are feeling about all this – all of that’s in my head, but not yet satisfactorily down on the page.

But ultimately, the book is coming along nicely, and though we’re halfway through the year I’m definitely more than halfway through the book, which is a good sign.

I do need to start looking at the cover, though. Looking for human stock images in the current AIpocalypse, hooray…

The less good: had a few short stories rejected, too. It’s par for the course, as I’ve talked about before, but it always rankles a bit – especially as one of the stories is historical rather than straight fantasy, which limits me a little more in where I can submit it again. If anyone knows any magazines that like a bit of slightly fantastical historical fiction, drop me a message!

Another of those rejected stories, though, was a micro piece for an incredibly specific competition – Apex’s Strange Machines anthology. Writing user manuals for twisted sci-fi machinery is a great idea, and I had a lot of fun putting my entry together… but I think it unlikely that such a specific prompt will come along again any time soon.

So I figured I’d put it up here. It’s only a page, so give it a read – won’t take long. And as I said, it was a very fun prompt to think around.

EyeBall Installation Guide

Right, back to the Boiling Seas. I’ll keep you all posted.

Pride: Gay Space Elves

Alright, let’s talk about something more cheery than the upcoming creative apocalypse this week. It’s Pride month. How about some gay space elves?

The Lunars of my own Ad Luna are based, as is much of that book, on Lucian’s True History: a society of elfin creatures that live on the Moon, flying around on giant three-headed vultures and making glorious war on the people of the Sun. Like everything in the True History, they only get a few paragraphs of actual description to explore their weird physiology and characteristics. Highlights include:

“Over each man’s rump grows a long cabbage-leaf, like a tail, which is always green…”

“Their noses run honey of great pungency, and when they work or take exercise, they sweat milk all over their bodies, of such quality that cheese can actually be made from it…”

“They use their bellies for pockets… they are all shaggy and hairy inside, so that the children enter them when it is cold.”

You will be unsurprised to learn that I didn’t keep many of these characteristics when it came to adapting Lucian into Ad Luna. But other things I did keep, and expand on. Specifically, this bit.

“…they are not born of women but of men: they marry men and do not even know the word woman at all!”

Now when I was first plotting out what I wanted to do with Ad Luna, this posed something of a problem: no women on the Moon, at all, at first glance made it rather difficult to include any female characters, something I was quite keen to do, given the classical male-dominated nature of SF&F. I got around this in the end by adding some fun human women into Lucian’s crew, and also making the fiery Solars all gender-neutral… because they’re literally made of living flames, so why would they be concerned by binary gender?

But the main society I was exploring, that of the Moon, had no women. Which turned out to be great, because it meant that all of my Lunar characters could be gay.

And this isn’t just my idea: Lucian’s writing, satirical as it is, presents an image of a society that was surprisingly tolerant to homosexuality for 2000 years ago. At least for men: relationships between men were common in the later Roman era, even at very high levels. “Homophobia in the modern sense seems to have been virtually absent from Roman culture.”[1] (If you’d like to read my old, full academic take on this topic, have a look here at the relevant part of my old dissertation on the True History.) And that’s pretty cool, as historical LGBTQ attitudes go.

I’m not pretending that I made a huge deal of this in Ad Luna. I tend not to make much of any romance in my stories – I slip in the odd scene, but generally I have much more fun writing about giant-vulture-versus-giant-ant fight scenes and madly fantastical technology. But characters are people, and people have relationships, and so I try to let them flourish where I can, even if I don’t make those relationships big focal points of my narratives.

And so it is that Alexander Dio, Ad Luna’s space-elf protagonist, takes a little time out of his busy schedule of fighting interplanetary wars to flirt shamelessly with a space-radio operator named Taavi Karras. It was a nice relationship to write, because it was just that: a relationship. Gender was irrelevant (in this context) – I was writing about two people who fancied each other having a nice time, and that’s all it needed to be.

That’s how I’ve been trying to approach romance and relationships in my stories of late. People are people, love is love. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Of course it can be, and many fine authors have written much better romances than I will ever even attempt on the subject – but it doesn’t have to be.

Happy Pride.

[1] Dynes, Wayne, & Donaldson, Stephen (eds.), ‘Introduction’ in Homosexuality in the Ancient World (Garland Publishing, 1992), p.xiv

AI and All That Jazz

Alright, I guess it’s time to talk about AI a bit. I’ve put it off for long enough.

If you’re vaguely involved in book/writing Twitter and/or observing the upcoming SPFBO 9 competition, you may have seen some controversy regarding the cover competition. I don’t want to get into that specific issue too much – it’s very much still being discussed by people far more qualified than I, and some people (predictably) are taking things too far in accusations and all that normal Internet nonsense.

 But to summarise where things are at as of 10am this morning:

SPFBO book cover wins cover contestPeople think it might be AI –not allowed under contest rulesArtist says it isn’t AI, posts original Photoshop files to prove itPhotoshop file contains a bunch of AI imagesBook cover is withdrawn from contest(Update as of 11.30am) Book cover is disqualified under contest rules – and no more cover contests in the SPFBO

That’s the recent drama. But it’s far from the first instance of ‘AI covers on SF&F books controversy’, and not the most high-profile either. Christopher Paolini’s new book Fractal Noise was published with a cover based on an AI stock image. The UK edition of House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas did the same. These are pretty high-profile works – and they’re out there, now, with those covers, and most people likely have no idea.

And of course it’s not like people aren’t trying to use AI to write as well as do visual art. Someone made a (very bad) children’s book using AI back in December, and Clarkesworld, Grimdark and several other magazines have all had to close submissions to deal with a flood of AI-generated stories.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and a lot of other people have said it better than me, but I’ll have a go at articulating what I think about all this.

Firstly: simply writing a prompt for an AI is not ‘creating art’. You are putting no effort in whatsoever. It’s not yours. If I were to just type ‘third boiling seas book’ into ChatGPT, the result would not be any work of mine. (I haven’t, by the way, and I never will.)

But how much AI involvement is needed before something counts as ‘AI art’? Generating a whole image in MidJourney is obviously not involving any human effort. But the SPFBO cover in question is a collage/combination piece, using multiple images layered and combined in Photoshop to create a new one. Artists have been doing this with non-AI images for years. If some of the images in a collage piece are AI-generated but there’s still a human putting it together, is that overall ‘AI art’?

I don’t have an answer. Such art makes me uneasy, and I don’t like it, but I don’t feel qualified to decide what is and isn’t human ‘art’.

But that brings me onto a second point: passing off a thing you’ve made using AI as fully your own work is also not ok. The SPFBO rules are clear that no AI input is allowed at all, and I agree with that. If people really want to read AI-generated fiction – which, I mean, you do you, but right now it sucks – or look at AI art, then they can. But it should be made obvious that it is an AI work.

Which is a problem, currently, because while various stock-photo sites have clear rules about either not uploading AI art at all, or clearly tagging it as such, loads of people are ignoring those rules, and their stuff is getting through. I experienced this personally, recently, when the editors of Etherea Magazine realised that the stock photo they’d picked for the latest issue (the one with me in it) was an AI image. They switched it, and all is well – but as an experiment I tried looking on stock sites for alternatives, and so many of them were clearly AI but not properly labelled.

(And kudos to Aidan over at Etherea for being very open about their own dilemmas on using AI art and the difficulties of not doing so in this day and age – it’s worth checking out Etherea’s site and Twitter to see that reasoning.)

It is getting harder and harder to tell what is AI and what isn’t at a glance – hence the SPFBO controversy.

My third point is rather important to me personally, as a low-level writer and freelancer: if you’re a big publisher, and you’re sorting out cover art, why are you even considering using AI? TOR is a big SF name; Christopher Paolini is a huge author and has been for years. Why would they even use a stock photo for a cover rather than actually commissioning an artist – let alone using an AI image?

I use stock photos for some of my own covers – Blackbird and Nightingale, and I’ll use them for Boiling Seas 3 because I hate it when series change cover art direction halfway through. But that’s because I’m making those covers myself, for books that have sold a few hundred copies at most, and because I do not have much money. And even then, I’ve commissioned artists to do my other book covers (Ad Luna and The Fire Within). If I, a lowly indie author, can do that, then TOR has no excuse.

Because that’s one of the things that’s scaring artists and writers like me. Not just that our work will be outsourced to an AI, but that AI will be considered the cheaper and easier option than hiring actual humans, by publishers and other companies who could very easily afford to hire an actual human, but won’t, because capitalism.

I know it’s not a new take to say that this scares me. But it’s getting worse. Until recently I’d had the comfort of knowing that AI writing, at least, is pretty bad. But the leaps and bounds in AI visual ‘art’ over just the last few weeks, let alone months, make me wonder how long it’ll be before ChatGPT and the other ‘writing’ AI can put out something genuinely convincing.

Maybe it’s already happened and nobody’s noticed.

And it sucks, because part of me thinks that this AI revolution is cool as hell. Sure, it’s basically a very sophisticated predictive text algorithm, but it’s a step towards the genuine artificial intelligence that fills so much of the genre I love. There are genuine, awesome applications of this tech which could make the world a better place. I want to love it.

But I’m scared of it instead, because it’s being used for the wrong things. It’s being used to screw over occupations that really didn’t need more screwing over. And it’s only going to get worse.

So: pay artists, real human artists. Don’t try and pass off others’ work as your own, AI or not; don’t lie. And if you’re a creative, do your work yourself.

Just because it’s convenient doesn’t make it right.

Character Work… In Character

A quick note to begin: for the next week, Ad Luna is £0.99 on the Kindle store . It’s one of my favourite books that I’ve written and I’d love for some more of you to (hopefully) enjoy reading it – so if you want to pick an copy up, now is the time.

A swift blog this morning, because I’m about to go off and do a lot of storytelling – which is convenient, in that it gives me something to talk about. All being well I’ll be in two very different universes today: first out on the Final Frontier in Star Trek Adventures, and then back to our Dungeons and Dragons campaign. In which I’ve just been informed that gunpowder does exist, and thus my daydreams of working some dramatic speeches from Sharpe into my dialogue have become that much more achievable.

Because there’s an awful lot to be said for storytelling in character rather than just about characters. I realise that I’m not necessarily typical in this regard, as I’ve done a reasonable amount of acting, as well as some stage writing, and, helpfully, improv work too – so I’m extremely comfortable doing that sort of thing. By which I mean that when I’m playing a game in character, I’m almost always in character. That doesn’t just mean putting on a silly voice (although let’s be honest, I always do). It’s remembering those motivations I scrawled down on my character sheet, approaching situations in the way that a First Officer or Sir Geoffrey du Babbage would do.

I know I’ve been doing it properly, especially with Geoffrey, because occasionally I’ll be going about my day-to-day business, maybe thinking about DnD, and Sir Geoffrey will have a really good idea about what to do in an upcoming session. And I don’t mean I had an idea about what Geof will do – I mean Geof had an idea. I didn’t consciously switch characters, but suddenly I was considering how I could convince my fictional friends to go along with this madcap plan of mine. (Geof did manage to persuade them, in the next session. But some demons appear to have showed up and made things rather more complicated than Geoffrey had hoped.) By being in character rather than thinking about it from an outside perspective, the ideas flowed far more smoothly.

Helpful in this instance is the fact that Sir Geoffrey is in many ways a highly caricatured version of myself – he’s not exactly a difficult character for me to inhabit, given that he was originally created for a very silly comedy sketch. But I’ve occasionally managed to pull this off with other characters of mine – with Tal and Lily, and with Dio from Ad Luna, and many of the rogue’s gallery of my many short stories and other works you’ve never seen.

Try it, if you’re writing. Don’t think about what your character is going to do. Think about what you’re going to do. Step into those shoes, be in your own world. I am faced with this problem: how am I going to get out of it? What am I going to say?

If nothing else, it’s a lot of fun.

The Little Details

Diving back into the finale of the Boiling Seas trilogy (well, finale of this trilogy, at least), one of parts I’m enjoying is all the little things.

My main focus is, of course, wrapping up the actual story: resolving the cliffhangers of Nightingale’s Sword, addressing the main hanging threads of both books so far (what the Scrolls are, etc.), and making sure all the characters get to where I want them to get. So far, so 70-odd thousand words of first draft that I’ll need to hack away at. We’ve had a few set-piece heists and scraps, I’ve played with some very cool environments, and generally it seems to be shaping up into a fun adventure to round off this arc.

But it’s the small things that are some of the most fun. Not the grand vistas and the intense plot, but the little details: the moments when I’m setting something up and think ‘ooh, what about that random thing from a throwaway line in Blackbird? Or this location I mentioned that one time, or this book, or this thing?’

Almost by accident, I appear to have written myself quite a lot of miscellaneous background and worldbuilding details on which I can now very satisfyingly draw. Or at least to my own satisfaction.

Such as near the beginning of the book, where I wanted a little rogue’s gallery of treasure-hunters to appear, sort of like that scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Bossk and Boba Fett show up for the first time. But where was I to get such notorious characters? Why, from the list I made as a throwaway line in The Blackbird and the Ghost when I introduced villain Mikhail Siras. I realised that if I was going to give all these treasure-hunting types cool nicknames like ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Nowhere Man’, I would need some other examples – so I threw some Cool Titles For Cool Characters at the wall and called it a day. I didn’t ever intend for any of them to show up. But then two books later I found myself in need of some Cool Character Cameos, and there they were.

Mostly never to appear again – but they were great fun in Lego Star Wars II in the bonus bounty-hunter levels. Because everyone’s favourite Star Wars character is… 4-LOM.

And then I found I needed one of them to become a minor antagonist, which turned out to be very fun as I figured out how this particular character would actually work. (If you happen to have a copy of The Blackbird and the Ghost, feel free to speculate who I’m talking about and what they’re going to be like. Points or something for correct guesses, once the book’s out of course.)

And it keeps happening. I’ve been touring around locations that I mention briefly but never got to properly, providing punchlines to some very bad jokes that I set up right at the beginning. It’s very satisfying to me to write it and hopefully will be satisfying to read. Even if I did randomly make up most of this stuff as a throwaway to begin with, referencing it again seems to be reinforcing it, in a way; making it feel like a more integral part of a more coherent world.

If I just kept making up new little details, never to be referenced again, it would probably be fine. I doubt most people would notice. But for those that do, hopefully it’ll make the world of the Boiling Seas feel that much more alive.

Fantasy, Wonder and Magic

I sometimes wonder what it is that makes me love fantasy so much. Why specifically it’s SF&F that captivate me so much. And the other day I think I saw it, of all places, at a wedding reception, which had a magician. Card tricks, bending spoons, that sort of thing. And he was good, very good. He was mostly there to entertain the various children wandering around the place, but it was telling that every time he started doing a little show for the kids, every adult in the vicinity would turn around and watch too, and be just as impressed as the kids were.

And that’s what made me realise it, watching this magic. Because, rationally, we as adults are all supposed to realise that these magic tricks are ‘tricks’. That it’s skill, and not sorcery. But standing there watching this guy do his thing, I saw what the kids were seeing: magic. A little glimpse into the space between knowing things and believing things where weird, wonderful things are still possible.

There’s an ongoing arc in the Welcome to Night Vale podcast at the moment that touches on this theme. If you’ve never listened to Night Vale: a town in the middle of the American desert where all the conspiracy theories and cryptids and weird stuff are real, and just… accepted as a normal part of life. The podcast is the local radio station, which broadcasts adverts for the mysterious glowing lights above the local restaurant, run an interview with a flesh-eating ghost, and warn everyone to NOT GO IN THE DOG PARK AND NOT ASK WHY YOU SHOULD NOT GO IN THE DOG PARK. The point is that everything is weird, and wondrous, and that’s a good thing. It’s both funny and poignant in a great way. But the current storyline deals with a group of ‘normal’ scientists who have come to the town, and are going around explaining all the weird things that are happening. The ghosts are just noises, the lights are just atmospherics.

And it kills the wonder. In the case of Night Vale, it’s literally killing the wonders: once these impossible things are given a rational explanation, the magic is literally gone, and they no longer exist. The thing that makes them special is the not-quite-knowing, the leaving of a space for something that doesn’t make sense.

But it’s human nature to explore these things. It’s human nature to find explanations for things that can’t be explained – that’s science, that’s one of the things we do best. The drive to take the universe apart to see how it works is what makes us who we are. I know that desire so very well. We won’t ever explain everything, of course, because there will always be new mysteries, but we won’t stop trying.

But sometimes, maybe we shouldn’t try too hard. Maybe we should leave that little bit of space, even when we can explain everything about what we’re confronting. And even if we have figured it all out, we shouldn’t forget what we used to think. We know that storms aren’t a beardy bloke in the sky swinging a hammer around… but what if they were? You’re pretty sure that the magician’s trick is just sleight of hand, but what if it’s not? Kids are blessed with the ability to see into that gap where wonder lives. We could learn a thing or two from them.

That’s what writing is for, what fantasy is for, at least for me. Telling stories about places where those amazing things we’ve explained away can still be amazing, tapping into that wonder that we had so much of, when we were younger, and seem to lose inexorably over time. As the great Terry Pratchett said, “HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.”

And who knows? Doing card tricks and pulling rabbits out of hats would be an unusual career choice, if you had full-on wizardly magic. But maybe that’s the point.

Crime Doesn’t Pay – Does Writing?

It is, unfortunately for many of us in the UK, tax time. Self-employed tax time, anyway: unlike our cousins across the pond, the government normally just taxes us as we go rather than making us… guess, as far as I can tell. But alas, for we freelancers and writers and all such others, we do have to do paperwork. (But at least it’s better than in America. Sorry, guys.)

Now the details of my tax return would a) make for an extremely boring blog post and b) probably reveal quite a lot of personal information that I really shouldn’t stick on the internet, so I’m not going to do that. But as I add up things and look at spreadsheets, I am confronted by a harsh reality of being an author – something which many others have also eloquently stated, if you follow writing types on the social medias.

Basically, this job don’t pay well at all. Or at least not easily.

From selling books last tax year, I made about £60. There are many advantages to using KDP to publish books on Amazon, as I do – they take care of printing, distribution, all those other things that would doubtless be more expensive if I did them myself – but the royalties aren’t much. Selling a single short story – which thankfully I have done this week, and with a bit of luck might do again – brings me more income than a year’s worth of selling books.

The main issue, of course, is that I’ve not sold that many books. I’m definitely selling more and more as time goes on (and as I have more books in my catalogue to sell). This month, in fact, I sold over 300 copies of The Blackbird and the Ghost! I was in the top 10 for one specific category of free ebooks on Amazon for a hot minute!

Well, I say ‘sold’. They were mostly free, because I put it on sale. I’m hoping that a fraction of those readers will enjoy Blackbird enough to pick up some of my other books. But I have no way of knowing if they will. It is, at least, good exposure. The more people pick up one of my books, the more likely one might leave a review; the more reviews or other little bits of publicity I get, the higher the chance I might sell another book.

I’m well aware that I’m not great at self-promotion, and I’m always trying to find new ways to push my books. But frustratingly one of the best metrics is reviews and ratings, on Goodreads and Amazon and all those things, and most readers just don’t leave those. (Hell, I don’t leave enough of those on the books I read, even though I’m trying to do so as much as possible nowadays.) Having such an important thing be essentially out of my control is frustrating, to say the least.

It’s important to state that I do have a full-time job, and another freelance job. This is not my primary income. But I’d sure as hell like it to be, some day. I want people to just read my writing and enjoy it, most of all, but it’d be wonderful to be able to do this full-time, or even just more part-time than it currently is.

I’m aware this post has been a bit of a downer. Don’t worry. If anything I’m just even more motivated to try harder and keep clawing my way up the mountain that is being an author. The size of that mountain has just been brought into perspective, that’s all.

But if you’ve read one of my books, drop a review. There are, gratifyingly, hundreds of you at this point. Let me know what you think, and let other people know too. I don’t care if you loved it or hated it – either way, I want you to tell me.

Everything helps.