Hûw Steer's Blog, page 15

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.

Etherea Magazine #17 – I’m In It

I’ve been mentioning this quietly for the last few weeks, but there’s something to actually show you now: Etherea Magazine issue #17, featuring a quite long actually short story by yours truly!

With this, my reach officially expands across the world to Australia. (And soon America too…)

This one is Weft and Warp, a hefty number I wrote a while ago. To summarise it succinctly and sans spoilers: submarine warfare in space.

And I’ve even got my own bit of artwork, which is always fun!

I’m pretty proud of this one. Thanks to Aidan and the rest of the Etherea team for taking it on!

If you want to read it, grab a copy of Etherea #17 here.

Real People or Daft Joke?

Among other things, I work with history. Specifically I write documentaries and books, which means I spend a lot of time, even though I’m now a mere freelancer, digging into old books and newspapers looking for information. And it was while doing this one day that I came across something that, on the face of it, was very daft.

The London Gazette, March 17th 1901

Now your first thought may well be, ‘surely this is a joke’. And it was my first thought too. This is an extract from the London Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers in the UK. It’s not exactly a ‘normal’ newspaper, in that it’s a ‘government journal’ – basically it’s a place where official notices are published, from bits of legislation to royal proclamations. It’s particularly important for the armed forces, as, among other things, it’s where notices of promotion are published (hence the old phrase ‘being gazetted captain/whatever’). And, in times of war, it’s where dispatches end up.

Dispatches being letters (well, I guess not letters anymore) from senior officers on the front lines, where they chat about how things have been going – and, importantly for this post, where they would commend anyone under their command who’d done a particularly good job. Being mentioned in dispatches was and is pretty important – it was required for a soldier to be awarded certain medals, and you even get an extra bit to stick onto any medals you do get awarded as a result to commemorate it. It might just have been a single sentence in one of a dozen similar letters all crammed into the same issue of the Gazette, but for any low-ranked soldier who’d pulled off something impressive, it was a big deal.

Which is what made me suspicious. Because at first glance, talking about a pair of Royal Navy gunners named Mr Cannon and Mr Ball, in 1900, seems like a joke. Cannon and ball. Being commended as part of a detachment of artillery. Obviously a joke, right? The dry tone of the whole letter makes things very ambiguous too. But this is an official dispatch, from a proper officer – specifically William Lowther Grant, who was only a commander at this point but ended up a senior admiral. Dispatches are not a place for joking around, they’re serious business.

The question, therefore, is this: in the Boer War, were there genuinely a pair of Navy gunners named Cannon and Ball?

Off down the rabbit-hole I go.

The first, useful, note, is that while ‘ball’ is obviously a word that comes up fairly frequently in the London Gazette, ‘cannon’ is not, as by this point in history everyone is calling big guns… well, ‘guns’. So it’s not that hard to do a word-search for ‘cannon’ and filter out the right results. There is a Mr Cannon working as a solicitor in London in the 1850s, for instance, who I can discard fairly quickly. But I also find, in the same issue of the Gazette as above (hidden in some very dense blocks of text, I might add), Commander Grant’s account of the last few months of the war. It’s brief, dry stuff, listing events by day – ‘marched here’ and ‘camped there’, etc. But sometimes, there are names. Normally they’re other generals or senior officers. But occasionally…

12th August.—Marched at 3 a.m., arriving at Welverdiend, 14 miles, at 9.45… The wheels of No. 1 gun were now so bad, being retained on the bosses by the nuts only, most of which had sheared, that it could go no further, and it was accordingly left behind for repair with Mr. Cannon, 28 men, and 100 rounds of ammunition.

There he is! ‘Mr’, for context, would only have been used for an officer, albeit usually a junior one. As Mr Cannon is in the Navy, he’s probably a Warrant Officer – a low rank, but at least an officer’s one. Hence the responsibility of looking after this gun.

22nd August.— …With regard to No. 1 gun (left at Welverdiend), it being found impossible to repair it at that place, it was ordered to Pretoria…

And now Cannon and his… cannon have been sent off to Pretoria – one of the Boer capitals, at this point captured by the British and being used as a large staging-area, being a large settlement.

…On August 29th, the whole Brigade was at Krugersdorp, Mr. Cannon having returned with his party and No. 1 gun from Pretoria…

He’s back!

11th September.—House to house search for arms, prisoners, &c. Mr. Cannon, with detachment from Brigade taking part.

Another day and a new job for our favourite gunner. But enough about Mr Cannon – where’s Mr Ball during all this?

13th September.— About 6.30 parties of Boers were sighted ahead. Came into action and fired 11 rounds at 5)000 to 9,000 yards. Boers haying bolted out of range, force proceeded (sending cavalry in chase) and bivouacked at 9.15… Mr. Ball went to Welverdiend to obtain ammunition from Krugersdorp (50 rounds) and to arrange for a further supply being sent up from Bloemfontein.

An actual fight for this lot now, and Mr Ball makes his first appearance. Even though this is his first mention, he must have been doing good work, because the next mention of either man is the original commendation at the start of this post, congratulating both soldiers on their good efforts.

But it’s Mr Ball who has the last laugh, as he gets mentioned in dispatches by a second officer, one Captain (also later admiral) Bearcroft:

Mr. Ball, gunner.—A most excellent and hardworking warrant officer.

It’s nice to actually have Mr Ball’s rank confirmed – and a little digging reveals that there would have been a few warrant officer gunners on a ship at this time. They’re not just members of the gun crews, they’re in charge of them.

What more is there to find about these men? Well, Mr H. Ball and Mr J. Cannon both served on the HMS Doris under Captain R.C. Prothero, one of the ships that was under Grant’s overall command at the time. Prothero was apparently known as ‘Prothero the Bad’, and was a violent and bad-tempered man, so it was probably a good thing for Cannon and Ball that they got detached from the ship itself and assigned to the Naval Brigade on land under Grant. Doris was decommissioned in 1901, They both received the Queen’s Service Award, with bars for Paardeberg, Driefontein and Traansvaal, and, judging by the names on the HMS Doris memorial, both survived the Boer War.

Beyond that there’s very little to go on. Both their medals were “sent to Cambridge” in 1902, which implies they might have lived there, but I couldn’t find any dates of birth or even their full first names, which rather restricts what records are actually useful. But they were real. It wasn’t just a silly joke in an officer’s letter – it was genuine nominative determinism in action.

I do think that Commander Grant was having a bit of fun. Mr Cannon and Mr Ball were real officers, and they did (presumably) deserve their mentions in dispatches. But who could have resisted using that particular phrasing, given their professions?

Mr Cannon and Mr Ball, gunners.

Heh.

You really couldn’t make it up, could you? Which just goes to show, as it so often does, that real history has far weirder stories in it than fantasy can ever conjure up.

Short Stories – Check-In

Let’s check in on my short stories.

Last week, I said I was going to dabble in something short for a bit to give my brain a rest from Boiling Seas 3 before I get cracking on finishing the first draft. I started doing that. And then the next day I found out about a submission window for a medieval horror anthology. I learned about it on Monday. The deadline was on Saturday.

With such a short deadline, I would normally not even try – rushed writing makes for bad writing, after all. But it was history, and it was horror (something in which I like to dabble from time to time), and I happened to have an outline for a historical horror story just lying around. So I wrote 6000 words in less than a week. (And they were actually good ones – I made a lot more time than I’d normally have and knuckled down to tweak and improve things.) And, after that surprisingly productive week, I submitted it. Yay me.

This added another brick to the teetering pile on the Desktop Submission Tracker, which we should probably take a look at, as it’s been a while. (In fact I don’t think I’ve ever shown it on the site before, so here you go.)

Feat. Bootleg Green Iron Man, who is a) surprisingly good quality for a fake Lego figure from a Spanish market, and b) holds my laptop charger cable for me.

You will note that the yellow – ‘Submitted’ – column is now so tall that you can’t actually see the yellow brick on top anymore, because I’ve both written a few new things and dug out some older pieces, polished them and thrown them out into the wilderness. This does include a bit of micro-fiction, in fairness… but also two novellas, so it all balances out. One thing left in the red ‘Not Currently Doing Anything’ column: a story I really, really like but which hasn’t had much success, so I’m evaluating what to do with it. Which may include actually starting the full novel I’ve had bits of rattling around my head for many years now.

And then, excitingly, a couple of new things on the right. One I mentioned back in March as having been picked up, which was and continues to be exciting, but as of this Friday I’ve had another piece picked up for an anthology! Drinks all around, etcetera. I didn’t so much ‘write’ this story as ‘ruthlessly distil it from the first chunk of an unfinished novel manuscript’ – more cutting things away and then stitching the useful bits back together. But it’s a good story (I mean, it got accepted, at least), and I’m proud of it.

This little tracker was a good idea. I’d recommend something similar to anyone else with this sort of thing to keep track of. (Purely practically, Lego is a great building material for this sort of thing; I’ve got a little set of bookends too, which you can see on the left of the photo, which are very easy to expand when necessary.) Of course I’ve got digital lists all over the place – with more information as well, such as ‘where did I submit this one again’ and ‘how many months ago was it’ – but having a little physical widget just feels good. It’s very satisfying to literally stack the stories higher and watch the right-hand column slowly get taller. And even when I’m levering bricks out of ‘Submitted’ and back into ‘Doing Nothing’, it doesn’t feel so bad. I just have to grit my teeth, maybe make some edits, and find a reason to move them back again.

And it’s Lego. Can’t stay sad at Lego.