Hûw Steer's Blog, page 16

Environments and Observations

Crumbling watchtowers, standing alone on windswept headlands. Great circles of stone like fallen amphitheatres, where flowing magma once met the sea. Island fortresses whose walls are still strong, because they’ve never actually fired a shot in anger. Smooth-walled caves, whose stone seems to have grown like a living thing.

I’m not talking about something I’ve written – not yet. I’m talking about South Wales.

St Catherine’s Fort, Tenby

I’ve just been in Pembrokeshire for a week with my family, trying to work off many large and delicious meals by walking – and occasionally climbing – many miles across the endless expanses of sand and stone that are the Welsh beaches. But just because I was on holiday doesn’t mean my writer’s brain wasn’t at work. I was in a new environment, after all. (Well, new-ish: having grown up in the Marches with half my family in Wales and the other first in Eastbourne, then Devon, I’ve spent a lot of time around castles and British beaches.) And a new environment means new inspirations – which means it’s time for reference photos to be taken, and for the ‘Environmental Observations and Other Such Stuff’ notebook to come out and play.

(I’ve talked about this before, but just as it’s always relevant to make notes like these, it’s always relevant to mention it again.)

I put a lot in this notebook. I make notes about interesting buildings, like the aforementioned watchtower: the remains of Tenby Castle, a single Norman tower overlooking a glorious view of a vast harbour; or the neighbouring St Catherine’s Fort, which looks unassailable, and has in fact never been assailed. But there are also far more seemingly random things: a section of ruined wall on a beach, an abandoned farmhouse. There are no blue plaques or information boards for things like these: there’s just what I can write down or sketch out. It makes them all the more appealing.

Near Saundersfoot. Look, was I supposed to not climb through the ruined wall?

I make notes about local cultures, past and present. It’s Wales, so it was mining: coal and iron, a lot of which is still visible in the cliffs or underfoot. (Or underhand, as I climbed across a slope of it. It tasted like coal, anyway.) There are rail tunnels for steam-engines, memorials to old disasters, old pit-sites marked on maps. I take note of amusing or interesting place-names, or place-names that could become people’s names, or vice-versa. I make notes on the natural environment: the towering cliffs, the amazing caves that look like they’re straight out of Doctor Who, with their eerily organic weathered stone. I take pictures. I remember.

Seriously, look at this stuff. It’s so cool.

And yes, I do make notes on the weather: in this case, cold and damp, but with occasional bouts of glorious sunshine to take the sting out of the salt breeze coming off the sea. It may seem mundane, but even that is useful.

Because later – maybe a few days later, maybe months or even years later, I’ll be sitting at my keyboard and trying to think of how to describe a mine, or a fort, or a sleepy little village on the coast. I’ll be trying to write about a walk on the beach – or maybe a ship at sea on freezing (or more likely boiling) waves. And my imagination will get me so far. I’ll have the shape of the walls, or I’ll be able to describe the waves, or I’ll have a miner in mind. But I might not have the weather right. I might not be able to think of what scents are on the air. I might not have a good name.

At which point, I’ll open that notebook, and look at those photos, and I’ll find everything I need. Because these are the little things that make good writing great, the things that really immerse you in a story: not grandiose descriptions, not elaborate backstories, but the feel of the wind on your face and the coal-dust on your fingertips.

Wherever you go, there will be something worth remembering for later, whether it’s the weather, the view, a place itself or just its name. Take pictures. Write them down. You never know when you might need them.

Riftwar Re-Read #16 – A Crown Imperilled

Ok, I guess we’re at the middle book of a trilogy again. A Crown Imperilled essentially continues the plot threads from A Kingdom Besieged without really resolving any of them. But there are some good character moments, some nice callbacks, and it at least sets up a very dramatic finale to the whole series.

And then there’s the end. But I’ll get to that.

In one of our two main storylines, Pug, Magnus and the rest of the Conclave of Shadows are still trying to get a handle on what the Dread are doing as they try and invade their universe. In doing this they are finally joined by the resurrected demon-Miranda and demon-Nakor, which leads to some fantastic reunion scenes. Nakor is just a delight in whatever context he finds himself – I’ve missed him as much as the other characters have. But Miranda’s return is far more emotionally charged: Pug is faced with something that isn’t quite his late, beloved wife, whose original death he really hasn’t gotten over – and Magnus is faced with the same, but as his mother. It’s easy to accept the ‘return’ of a friend, but a direct family member? Pug and Magnus can’t quite deal with it. Is this demon really Miranda? Can she be trusted? It’s great stuff.

And it leads to one of my absolute favourite scenes in the whole series, one that’s honestly been overdue. A moment I’ve been thinking of as “Pug Finally Gets Called Out On All Those War Crimes.”

There are a few moments of this in A Crown Imperilled. A subplot deals with the fact that the Pantathian snake-people – who have heretofore been an exclusively evil species – are actually pretty chill, and it’s just the Serpent Priests who are cackling megalomaniacs. Pug is therefore confronted with the reality that he, and all his followers, have spent a lot of time and effort wiping out some snake-people who could actually have been entirely innocent for the crimes of just one part of their society.

But then there’s the scene with Magnus. Which I’m actually just going to leave to Feist’s own words to summarise.

“You destroyed a world, Father. You did your best to get people free of it, but in he end… I don’t know how many died because of what you did.”

“I had no choice!” shouted Pug.

“There is always a choice,” said Magnus. “From the choice to do nothing and let events take their course, to constantly meddling and wreaking havoc on other people’s lives. It just seems that your choices bring about the most destruction.”

Because Pug has done terrible things. From the first book, Magician, where he killed hundreds of civilians at the Tsurani games, to when he threw a moon at Kelewan, to exterminating every Pantathian within reach, to orchestrating wars and coups… all to save the world, in theory. But it is Magnus who finally asks Pug: “At what price?” What price will Pug justify to save the world? What is he willing to do? We know that his personal price is to watch everyone he loves die in front of him – but does that mean Pug has been using his loved ones as pawns all along? It makes the return of Miranda all the more tragic, even though Feist doesn’t outright state it: Pug already watched her die once… so does her return mean that he has to watch her die again?

While this storyline didn’t actually resolve much in terms of saving the world, the character moments were brilliant.

Plot-wise, there was much more going on in the other storyline: Martin of Crydee fighting the Keshian invasion, his brother Hal evading capture and rescuing princesses, and Jimmy the Hand III (and some other very fun spy characters) trying to unravel Many Plots and prevent a succession crisis. (Probably Spoilers: Hal is definitely going to end up King.) As in Kingdom, I’m really enjoying the circularity of this Kingdom-centric plot and how it calls back to Martin, Arutha and Lyam’s relationships from the original Riftwar trilogy. Hal and Ty’s swashing and buckling is just fun, and Martin is so very like Arutha in the best ways. And Jimmy the Hand III is just as compelling to read as he sneaks around as Jimmy the First, and there is no higher praise that I can give a fantasy rogue.

So all this was fine: some continuations of the main plot, some good character drama, and more setup for a grand finale.

And then, about 20 pages before the end, an army of angels shows up. The angels I’ve been waiting for since Night Hawks. The angels that should have appeared long before now. It’s finally time for them to do something!

We are told that the angels have been waiting off-stage for potentially centuries for their moment to intervene and fight off an army of demons. We are told that the time has come for this to actually happen. And then the messenger who is about to call the angels into the main universe is intercepted en route and killed by a Big Evil Presence. So the angels just… stay outside reality. Making the entire – shoehorned and far too late in the narrative – scene seemingly completely pointless.

At least they showed up for a moment, I suppose?

But even more annoying than that is the very end of the book. A Kingdom Besieged ended with the dramatic revelation that another, evil Valheru, Draken-Korin, has returned to the mortal world. We see Tomas, our friendly neighbourhood Dragon Lord, waking up in a cold sweat, having had a vision of Draken-Korin’s presence. That would seem to set up a whole plot of Tomas going out and dealing with this massive, existential threat.

Nope. Instead, we get one scene at the beginning where Draken-Korin continues to manifest, and then he apparently just does that for the whole book and nothing else. And then A Crown Imperilled ends with an almost identical scene of Tomas waking up in a cold sweat, having had a vision that Draken-Korin is actually really here now. It’s honestly lazy. Either wait to bring Draken-Korin in, or have Tomas actually do anything during the second book. It’s not a dramatic cliffhanger if it’s almost a word-for-word repeat of a previous dramatic cliffhanger.

So there we are. One main plot is sort of dealt with, some characters get together to deal with more important things, but don’t actually manage to do it yet, and More Bad Guys are here. But I did enjoy it an awful lot regardless.

There’s a lot to deal with in Magician’s End. Good thing it’s over 600 pages. Feist is going to need every single one.

The Power of Nicknames: XCOM

May 2016. Term 2 of university had finished, and all the students were released from their enclosures for a few weeks, before reluctantly returning to finish essays and do exams. I was one of these students. I still had exams at this point in my History degree – each year my workload shifted further towards the coursework end until by my Masters I had no exams at all. (Which was definitely a good thing for History, which is a degree that trains you to be a historian, which means writing with sources to refer to, not just cramming facts into your brain to regurgitate on one June afternoon.)

So I’d gone home for a few weeks, nominally to revise and do some essays. And I did. Some of that. What I actually did most of the time was sit in the kitchen with our new puppy asleep on my lap, and play XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

XCOM: EU is one of my favourite games (though Stardew Valley has threatened its position in my top 3 of late). It’s basically a 50s B-movie in game form: little green aliens are abducting humans with their flying saucers and trying to take over the world with mind control, and the heroic soldiers of XCOM have to stop them. Everything is exaggerated, the graphics are a bit cartoony and the aliens are delightfully old-fashioned. Later entries in the series take a much more gritty approach, with more realistic graphics and darker storylines. They’re also great games and I enjoy them a great deal. But there’s something about the goofiness of Enemy Unknown that makes it so much fun.

Image credit: Teugene on XCOM Wiki

And that’s before you start playing it. XCOM is a turn-based strategy game: on each mission you order your little soldiers around the map and try not to get them all brutally murdered by space lasers. But there’s also a higher layer of strategy where you manage the world’s defences, recruit troops, research tech, etc. And a big part of that is managing your soldiers – each of whom has their own appearance, personality and skills. The more missions they do, the stronger they get, and the more personality they develop. Randomly generated pixels they might be, but when your shotgunner misses a point-blank shot for the fourth time, or when your marksman pulls off an impossible shot, they start to make stories around themselves. A nice aspect of this is the nickname system: you can assign monikers to your soldiers to give them a bit more personality. You even get to award medals. John Smith is nobody. John ‘Imperator’ Smith, master sniper, Urban Combat Badge 2nd Class, is a character. (The later games actually let you write paragraphs of backstory too, which is great fun for a writer like me.)

Annoyingly I can’t find ‘Imperator’, who was a great sniper, but this guy will do.

You get attached to all these little packets of data. Which makes it all the more powerful when they abruptly, messily and permanently die without the slightest warning.

Because XCOM is infamously difficult. The aliens are strong. They always outnumber you, they get stronger and stronger as time passes, and they can and will snipe your most powerful soldiers from halfway across the map whenever they feel like it. And when they’re dead, they’re dead. Spent in-game months training your machine-gunner to be an unstoppable death machine? Whoops; they just got their head torn off and they’re never coming back. You can, of course, save-scum (reload a previous save and try a different path to save a life), and sometimes I definitely do that. But wherever possible I avoid it, for the sake of organic storytelling. Sometimes great people die, and it makes a burgeoning story that much more compelling.

All this brings me to the saga of my first XCOM campaign, back in that summer of 2016, spaniel on my lap and essays ignored. It brings me to the base defence mission, and Mary Watson.

About halfway through the game, things get shaken up. Instead of you shooting down UFOs or invading alien bases, suddenly the aliens come to you, attacking XCOM headquarters and catching you completely off-guard. It’s neatly done in gameplay terms: you don’t get to prepare at all; no equipping different weapons or organising your squad, you’re just thrown into the mission with whoever’s first available, with your other soldiers turning up in ones and twos as the mission goes on. “No problem,” I thought, as the fight began. “They’ve given me some of my best people, and they’ve still got decent weapons from the last fight. I’ll be alright.” Most of my A-Team of best soldiers were with me straight away. I had a Major with a shotgun, several Captains with a variety of weapons and a few Lieutenants bringing up the rear. I’d be fine.

I was not fine. One by one, the best XCOM had to offer fell. My Major was torn apart by eldritch Cyberdisks. My captains were eviscerated by plasma fire. Even my lieutenants and sergeants got killed, stomped by giant robots or mind-controlled into murdering each other. Every soldier made the aliens pay a price, but there were just too many of them. A few turns later, and XCOM had essentially been wiped out.

Except one soldier. She wasn’t from my A-Team. She’d barely made my B-team. She was carrying a glorified laser pointer and I’d barely noticed she’d been promoted. She was sniper Lieutenant Mary ‘Angel’ Watson. And, through extraordinary luck, through turn after nail-biting turn, chipping away at the remaining aliens from the shadows, running and firing and running again, she managed to finish them off. XCOM was saved. But I had almost nothing left. All my best soldiers were dead; all I had were a bunch of rookies and now-Captain Mary Watson.

But she was all I needed. ‘Angel’ Watson had been an angel, saving XCOM from the brink of destruction like a divine guardian. Now she would guide it to victory as ‘Archangel’. And she did. With ‘Archangel’ at the front of my reeling army, I pulled things back from the brink. I recruited more soldiers, I survived mission after mission, I slowly and painstakingly turned things around and finally defeated the alien menace – and I did it all with ‘Archangel’, the most decorated soldier in my army, the most experienced and the most capable of all, at my side.

Watch out ayys, she’ll blow you up.

Remember how I mentioned nicknames? When a soldier first earns a nickname, it’s randomly generated. Mary Watson became ‘Angel’ by complete chance, and then saved my entire campaign. (I added the ‘Arch’ myself after her extraordinary victory.) It was such a small thing, a single random word, but it made that whole game feel so much more special. It gave Watson her personality, it transformed her into a character, with more emotional weight to me than the protagonists of any scripted drama or narrative game.

And she lived on, too. XCOM 2 takes place in a different timeline, where the aliens win that base assault and force XCOM to become a guerrilla resistance force. But who should turn up in my first campaign, skull mask and all, but the sole survivor of that assault: Mary ‘Archangel’ Watson? Who then went on to be my best soldier again in another excellent campaign.

A single deed. A nickname. A few words. Sometimes it really doesn’t take much to turn a few scraps of data, or a miniature, or a handful of words, into something extraordinary.

Riftwar Re-Read #15 – A Kingdom Besieged

I am more excited about reading the next Riftwar book than I have been since the Serpentwar. And that was 8 books ago.

A Kingdom Besieged is the first book in the final trilogy of the Riftwar, which is apparently called the Chaoswar. It picks up a few years after the end of the Demonwar, in which Pug and co. fended off a demon invasion but were left with Many More Questions, as has been tradition for the last few arcs of the overall Riftwar. Now yet More Questions are raised, as the desert empire of Kesh abruptly launches a full-scale invasion of the Kingdom of the Isles, for reasons that nobody can figure out – and also there are still demons knocking around, but this time they’re running from something.

Our heroes are, with some additions, the same heroes that we’ve had for a few books now: Sandreena the templar, Gulamendis and Arimantha the demonologists, Jimmy the Hand III; brief appearances by Tad, Zane, Jommy, and a few others, and of course Pug and Magnus and their crew. But we also have a few new characters, and they are cracking.

First and foremost: demons. The demons of the Riftwar started out as classic ravening monsters from hell, before becoming a reluctantly organised army of ravening monsters with kings and lords and peasants – but still evil monsters who wanted to burn the world to the ground. But in A Kingdom Besieged we get to see first-hand what our demonologist friends told us a few books ago: there’s a whole demon society in hell, and it’s almost been wiped out. Part of the book follows a pair of demons, Child and Belog, as they struggle to escape an encroaching Darkness that’s eating their plane of reality, fleeing through the ruins of demon society, while also dealing with memories that aren’t their own. It’s a really good bit of storytelling; in the same vein as he brought the twisted Dasati society to life, Feist makes demonkind seem… well, human. But also still demons, in a well-written way.

But the main plot is threefold: Pug, Jimmy and co trying to figure out why Kesh is invading, a new Prince of Crydee, Hal, trying to not be murdered by the Keshians off in Roldem, and his younger brother Martin under siege in Crydee itself.

And that’s what makes this book so great to me. Because after 30 books, the Riftwar has come full circle. We began this epic series with a hostile empire invading the Kingdom, laying siege to the pastoral idyll of Crydee and being fended off by a charismatic young man and his band of loyal friends. The first time it was the Tsurani versus Prince Arutha. Now it’s the Keshians versus Prince Martin, descendant of Martin Longbow. And it’s brilliant. Feist is very consciously doing this as a repeated refrain, and the characters are aware of this too: Martin is constantly comparing himself to Arutha and Martin Longbow as he fights to protect his people, and he’s very clearly their descendant while still being a great character in his own right. (He’s also explicitly a really bad archer in contrast to his ancestor, which was a fun detail.)

And we also revisit another favourite location of mine in the second strand of the plot: the Masters’ Court in Roldem, where Prince Hal dodges assassins and buckles swashes alongside both Tal Hawkins and his son Ty. Theirs is a lovely little brotherly relationship that brings up all the best parts of the Conclave of Shadows trilogy and Tal’s James Bond-like exploits.

This last trilogy is shaping up to simultaneously be a ‘Riftwar Greatest Hits’: we’re revisiting and calling back to some of the best plotlines and locations in the whole series, which is a really nice circular way to wrap up such a long series. But of course, there’s fresh plot too in Pug and co.’s efforts to unravel why this is all happening.

When I finished the Demonwar duology, I was left with the following outstanding questions:

What are the alien angels in the Peaks of the Quor?Is everyone going to go to war with the Space Elves?What’s happening on New Kelewan?What the hell was Macros the Black doing?Who’s trying to destroy all of existence – and why?

None of those questions are completely answered in this book – and given it’s the first in the final trilogy of a 30-book series, I wasn’t expecting them to be just yet. But most of them are at least addressed, in an ‘answers coming soon’ way. The Peaks of the Quor are mentioned, if not explored. The Space Elves are clearly about to try and do some conquering. New Kelewan, sadly, doesn’t get a mention, and Macros is, as he’s been for the whole series, always in the background somewhere. But the last question does get answered, even if we sort of knew already what the answer was. It’s the Dread, the terrifying shadow-creatures from outside reality who destroy everything they touch. They’re the ones trying to destroy it all.

We’ve met the Dread before, of course – one of them was the Dark God of the Dasati and the ultimate antagonist of the Darkwar, and they actually appeared as far back as Sethanon, facing down Pug and Tomas. But those were individuals rather than the whole of the Dread, and there have also been quite a lot of demons and evil snake-people in-between who seemed like the real Big Bads. I’d sort of predicted that the Dread would be the endgame enemies, and the Darkness eating the demon realm was so similar to what happened to the Dasati in the Darkwar that it tipped me off too. But it’s nice to have it confirmed, especially as for the last 27 books, everyone who’s mentioned the Dread has done so in a ‘oh gods, they’re unstoppable’ sense.

And the villains are another way to circle back to the beginnings of the Riftwar. The Dread first appear in Sethanon, when Pug and Tomas beat one up and imprison it in the City Forever. They were dangerous then, and they’re dangerous now, and I’m really hoping Pug and Tomas will take a quick jaunt outside reality to interrogate the prisoner they’ve kept there for over a century. But the Pantathian Serpent Priests are back too, though we don’t know what they’re up to yet.

But there’s one more villain left, who came out of seemingly nowhere but has, in fairness, been built up since Magician. As Tomas found the armour of Ashen-Shugar and became a Dragon Lord, so does a random bloke stumble across the armour of Draken-Korin, Lord of Tigers, Really Nasty Dragon Lord who appeared briefly in Sethanon and has been alluded to for the whole series. Tomas doesn’t appear in this book – but his opponent for the final showdown just turned up.

In 30 books, Feist has introduced and wrapped up a lot of plots: the initial Riftwar, the Pantathian serpent-priests in the Serpentwar, the machinations of Leso Varen, the Dasati in the Darkwar, and plenty more besides. A Kingdom Besieged takes up most of the outstanding threads left over, and brings back the best ones for a final hurrah. The Pantathians are back. The Valheru are back. The Dread are back. The Nighthawks are back too – and they’re teaming up with the good guys. The demons are back. And somehow, so far, he’s making it all work. Move over Endgame. This is how you tie together decades of work into one grand finale.

Oh, and those two demons from before? The ones with the unfamiliar memories? Those memories are very familiar to us. They belong to Nakor and Miranda, our late lamented magicians. So they’re back too. And their resurrection doesn’t feel cheap at all. It feels ominous.

I wasn’t kidding at the start. I’m more excited for this trilogy than I have been in many books of the Riftwar. I cannot believe that years ago I read this book, got to the end with all its setups and cliffhangers, and then didn’t read the next one. But I’m also sort of glad I did that, because I’d forgotten literally everything about this book except Miranda and Nakor’s comeback.

I’m deliberately pacing myself. I have not yet picked up A Crown Imperilled. I want to savour this, the ending of a saga thirty years in the making and over a year in the re-reading.

Because it’s shaping up to be great.

The Notebook of Theseus

Upon occasion, I am afflicted by every writer’s curse, namely that of Having a Good Idea in a Public Place.

This obviously causes a dilemma, especially when I’m actively doing something in said public place; working, wandering, socialising, etc. The temptation is to simply think ‘huh, that’s not bad – I’ll write it down when I get home.’ Sometimes that works, and the idea simply sits in the back of your mind until you reach a convenient computer. But more often than not, your award-winning screenplay concept or cure for world hunger will get overwritten by something that happens five minutes later, and you’ll get home with the nagging feeling that you thought of something really good, but you can’t quite remember what it was. Just like when you have a fantastic dream, then wake up to find that all the details have vanished before you could note them down.

I don’t like losing out on good ideas. These days, of course, we’re all carrying tiny computers around in our pockets which can hold an infinity of hastily typed notes. But it really wasn’t that long ago that this wasn’t the case. When I was first figuring out that I wanted to write, my phone was a brick that could barely run Snake. Sometimes the old ways are the best.

And thus, this: my constant companion for well over half my life, purchased on a whim at the Ludlow Medieval Fair and inhabiting my pocket ever since.

It’s tiny. The string keep sliding off the cover. The pencil is a 2B, because that’s all I had to hand that was short enough to fit inside when I first got it, which means that everything I write starts to smudge after a while, and for some reason I’ve never replaced it. It lives in my trouser pocket at all times, which forces me to do an awkward shuffle with phones, wallets and keys between jackets and bags and my one remaining front pocket.

I’ve used it for over 15 years, and I’m not about to stop now.

Most of it isn’t even the original notebook. I filled that up long ago, and then, because it’s a decidedly non-standard shape, had to find decent paper and cut strips to size to refill it myself. And then I filled those pagesup too, and replaced them again – this time with a new bit of string to replace the old, fraying one. The pencil is still somehow the same, as is the cover. That’s it. We’re rapidly approaching a Ship of Theseus scenario here.

And I’m not changing a thing. Because this notebook has, at one time or another, held most of the decent ideas I’ve ever had. If I’m struck by inspiration for a short story, I’ll scrawl it down in here. If I think of a new plot point, it goes here. If I’m out and about and start thinking too hard about novel outlines, I’ll plan out entire books in here. I jotted down the structure of my entire undergrad dissertation in here while at work as a kitchen porter. Scraps of poetry, random lines of dialogue, interesting town names – they all go in this little book, scrawled down before I have a chance to forget. It doesn’t matter where I am, this goes with me. (To my mother’s eternal annoyance whenever she sees me in a suit. If it ‘ruined the line’, why did they put pockets in the trousers at all, mother?)

 The whole point, of course, is that the ideas I scrawl in this book usually vacate my head immediately afterwards. So every so often, I sit down at my desk and flip through the last few weeks of random notions. Most of them are, in fact, random notions: scraps of doggerel that will remain as such forevermore. But some of them are good. Some are really good. Some became the stories and books you might have read.

All in my pocket. Always in my pocket. Because no matter how much more convenient it would be to just use my phone, it’s not the same. If it’s a good enough idea for me to pull out that notebook, it’s worth writing down properly.

Comics are Stupid – The Martian Footballer

The Martian Manhunter is an odd hero. Despite the fact that the Last Son of Mars is heralded as “the heart and soul of the Justice League” by his fellow superheroes, despite his incredible powers and his interesting backstory, in all his 77 years of existence he’s had just 7 solo comics – and only one of those lasted longer than a year. J’onn J’onzz, last surviving Green Martian, is a shape-shifting telepathic super-cop who is forced to disguise his alien nature by living as imaginatively-named detective John Jones. Despite literally being connected to everyone’s minds, he feels utterly isolated from humanity, only able to find friendship with his fellow superpowered beings in the Justice League.

Brightest Day #18 (2011)

You may have already spotted the main reason why the Manhunter seldom gets a solo series. At a glance, he’s basically Green Superman:

Last survivor of a dead planetIncredible powers – including flight, strength and heat visionAnd One Big Weakness (fire, in his case) to counter all of themLives among humanity in disguise, isolated because of alien nature

And his comic appearances reflected that. In his early days J’onn would serve as a substitute Superman in JLA stories when the writers didn’t want to bring out Superman himself – and in more recent stories he’s been used as an explicit counter to Superman, when the New 52 Justice League of America was presented as a shady counterpart to the main Justice League of… everywhere, I guess. His similarities are his real weakness, not fire: DC has seldom felt that a Martian Manhunter story would do well enough to eclipse the same story but with Superman instead.

There have been brief solo appearances every decade or so, with a few more recently – most notably a really good 2019 mini-series, where the normally noble Manhunter is reimagined as a corrupt super-policeman – but otherwise J’onn  is a supporting character: he’s an essential component of the League when he’s there, but that means he usually only gets to work as part of the League and seldom on his own.

Martian Manhunter (2019)

But I’ve always liked the Manhunter. Ever since the 2000s JLA series, of which he’s a key part, I’ve had a soft spot for the Manhunter from Mars. His self-imposed isolation, his fear of discovery despite his huge power, his guilt and trauma from being the only survivor of his world – much stronger than Superman’s, as J’onn was an adult when Mars died – they all add up to a really compelling character.

And so I recently tried out his 2006 solo mini-series in a search for some good Martian content – and in doing so, found one a lovely bit of classic Stupid Comics Writing. I’m not even going to mention the plot of the series here – it’s good, and I’d recommend it if you like the Manhunter, but it’s irrelevant to this bit of stupidity.

Specifically, I’m talking about character names. More specifically, I’m talking about character names that some American writers clearly thought would seem like completely ordinary names to their American readers. But I’m not American. I’m British. And from my perspective, these names are a) hilarious in context and b) show that the writers of this series were pretty lazy when they got to the naming stage.

See how quickly you spot what I’m talking about.

In the first issue, the Manhunter fights a brainwashed assassin named Paul Gerrard. This made me go ‘huh’. Then we are introduced to another assassin, whose name is Giggs. Alarm bells were now ringing. When the comic-stereotype sexy female FBI agent introduced herself, without a hint of irony, as Rio Ferdinand, the bells were really ringing loudly. When the bad guy was introduced as Mr Keane, they rang yet louder.

Martian Manhunter #2 (2006)

And then there came this panel, and I had to put the book down.

Martian Manhunter #2 (2006)

For those not versed in British culture or sports, Rio Ferdinand is an extremely famous footballer (and now pundit). At the time this comic was written, he was playing for Manchester United. So was Ryan Giggs. And Roy Keane. And Alex Ferguson – who had been referred to simply as ‘Alex’ until this point in the book, hence my utter disbelief – is of course Sir Alex Ferguson, Man United’s manager and (apparently) the most successful football manager of all time.

I don’t even like football. I find it boring to watch, not fun to play, I don’t like the culture and I especially don’t like all the human rights abuses and corruption. (Rugby is a better sport in every single way.) I have never followed football on any level, and even I recognised all of these names instantly. And while Americans might not have got it, surely every British reader Martian Manhunter fan would have. (Maybe it’s a good thing he didn’t have many solo series, eh?)

On one level it’s hilarious. The image of the Martian Manhunter flying around trying to rescue Alex Ferguson from the clutches of Rio Ferdinand, Roy Keane and Ryan Giggs is really funny. Giggs is even in a red beret and rough enough to plausibly be British, which helps no end. On another level, come on, A.J. Lieberman: this is just lazy. Pulling names from real people is fine – but at least vary your sources, or even mix the first- and surnames up a bit. While I found it funny, the endless series of football names did take me out of what was a pretty good story somewhat.

And then there’s the third level, at which I have to wonder whether A.J. Lieberman was actually just a really big fan of British football. Because despite the DC wiki only picking up on the Manchester United names, there are other football names in this series – and some of them are pretty obscure. Like the ‘Gerrard’ I mentioned earlier. His full name is Paul Gerrard. My mind jumped immediately to Liverpool player Steven Gerrard – but at this time there was also a Paul Gerrard playing in goal for Stockport, a pretty minor team. And the secret identity the Martian Manhunter adopts in this comic is that of William Dyer – who could either be a bloke who played in Spain in the 1920s, or Willie Dyer, who was playing for low-league team Brechin City. This level of knowledge is pretty impressive.

Maybe Lieberman wasn’t lazy at all. Maybe he just wanted to reference a sport he loved.

But he could probably have done it in a slightly more subtle way.

Martian Manhunter #2 (2006)

(Alex Ferguson. For crying out loud.)

It should probably go without saying, but all images in this article are the copyright of DC Comics.

Riftwar Re-Read #14 – The Demonwar

Alright, here we go. It’s the Riftwar home stretch, with this duology, the Demonwar, and then one last trilogy to go. Now after the largely disappointing Darkwar I was prepared for the worst. But the Demonwar was something of a return to form for Feist. We’re not quite at the high level of the early books or the Serpentwar, but it’s definitely a lot better than the previous trilogy – so with any luck we’re in for a good end to the series. Time, and my next few reviews, will tell.

Rides a Dread Legion opens 10 years after the events of the Darkwar, in which magician Pug and our other heroes ventured to an Evil Parallel Dimension to defeat a Very Evil God. While various minor characters popped up and took up way too much screentime, the lasting consequences were a few reveals for the Grand Evil Plan that’s been bubbling in the background since Sethanon, the destruction of the Tsurani homeworld of Kelewan, and, unfortunately, the death of everyone’s favourite gambler Nakor. But Rides a Dread Legion soldiers on.

We are introduced to a new bevy of supporting characters, largely abandoning the extra focuses from the Darkwar (which is honestly fine by me) – though Kaspar, Tad, Zane and Jommy do show up from time to time. Jimmy the Hand III, however, finally takes the much more important role that he should have taken in the Darkwar, and provides us with plenty of casual thievery and skulduggery. Our new characters, though, are quite fun. We have Sandreena, a Knight-Adamant (basically a paladin) from the Order of Dala, who is pleasingly no-nonsense and practical. There is a minor element of ‘men writing women’ here – nothing award-worthy, but there are too many scenes where Sandreena laments how gorgeous she is for my liking. We also have Amirantha the conman/demonologist, who is very entertaining as well as showcasing a whole new school of magic – rare at this point in a very long series that is fundamentally about magicians. He’s also the little brother of Leso Varen/Sidi, everyone’s favourite mad necromancer, except Amirantha is nice. And there’s a third brother, Belasco, who is Even More Dangerous (because of course he is), and serves as one of our main antagonists. And then there are Gulamendis and Laromendis, the Space Elves.

Yeah, I should probably talk about the Space Elves.

There are a lot of elves running around Midkemia now. There are the original edhel (wood elves), the moredhel (dark elves), the eldar (high elves, who used to live on Kelewan but are now chilling in the forest), the glamredhel (‘mad’ elves, who are a bit bloodthirsty), and the ocedhel (foreign elves). Most recently, the Darkwar introduced the anoredhel, the Sun Elves, who hung out in some distant mountains guarding some very interesting angelic aliens. I was hoping for some more development of these angel-like entities in this book – it is, after all, the Demonwar – but we didn’t get any. (Apart from one line where a magician wonders: if there are demons, where are the angels? Which gives me hope for the future.) I assume Feist is saving that plot point for the very end.

What we got instead in this book was the introduction of the taredhel, the Star Elves, who have been off running an interstellar empire for the last few thousand years, but have also been being beaten up by demons for most of that time. Looking for a refuge, they build a rift to Midkemia – their original home – and start building a city to house all their refugees. Unfortunately for everyone else, they’re not actually very nice people. They’re big, strong, arrogant and powerful, and don’t intend to share their old homeworld… they intend to conquer it. It’s a bold step and a really interesting new potential antagonist for the series.

As this is, again, the Demonwar, not the SpaceElfWar, this potential conquest is left to stew while Pug fights demons. Which is a bit disappointing, but enough seeds were sown of a possibly inevitable fight that I’m largely satisfied. We get some great scenes of Tomas going full Dragonlord to cow the Space Elves into being friendly… for now. But largely the Space Elves – including POV characters Laromendis the illusionist and Gulamendis the other demonologist – serve as context for the seriousness of the imminent invasion of Many Demons, who have been annihilating their advanced interplanetary empire, and will surely wipe the floor with fantasy Midkemia.

Rides a Dread Legion is, like most first books in Feist’s later sub-series, largely worldbuilding and setup. We meet our new protagonists, hook them up with Pug and the Conclave of Shadows, and set them to investigating how to stop a war with the demons actually starting, while foiling the plots of Belasco the More Evil Wizard along the way. It’s a fun book, and Feist does a very good job of setting up the demons as a powerful threat, building on what he’d already done with the Serpentwar, where one demon nearly conquered the whole world. We visit strange new worlds, encounter strange new magics, and there are enough threats to pose even Pug a problem. To show this threat, Sorcerer’s Isle is burned down, again, this time by demons.

And then quite suddenly and brutally, Pug’s wife Miranda – magician and sass machine extraordinaire – dies. It’s not a big magic duel. It’s not a heroic sacrifice. She gets her throat torn out by a demon and just bleeds to death. Pug’s son Caleb is also killed in the fire. It is a genuine shock to both the readers and to the characters, and is just well written enough to not come off as a cheap hammering home of the threat, even though that’s of course what it’s meant to do. Losing Miranda hurts everyone, and makes sure we remember that not only is nobody safe, but that Pug literally had the Goddess of Death tell him that he would have to watch everybody he loves die back in the Serpentwar. And Feist hasn’t forgotten.

Tangent: the titles of these two books should really have been switched around. Apart from the fact that the titular Dread Legion only actually Rides out in book 2, the sentence flow just doesn’t make sense as published. But anyway.

At the Gates of Darkness picks up a year later, giving Pug and son Magnus enough time to be depressed, but not enough time to make any meaningful progress towards stopping the demons. The plot is actually fairly easy to gloss through, as it’s basically just more of the same from Dread Legion. Our heroes flit around planets looking for clues, the demons are evil, the Space Elves imply they’re going to wreck everyone at some point in the future, etc. etc. But Feist handles it well, picking up on lots of seemingly unimportant threads from the previous books in the way only he can. Remember that one dead demon we saw in Serpentwar 3? Yeah, that was actually critical to figuring out the demons’ plan. The desert fortress the Nighthawks were hanging out in back in Krondor: The Assassins? That’s the location of our final showdown, because you can’t write a place name like The Tomb of the Hopeless in The Valley of Lost Men and only use it once. I mean, good gods, Raymond, it was from a videogame spinoff 17 books ago and you’re still somehow making it relevant reading. My hat is tipped.

We have a satisfying enough final showdown with the demons and Belasco, with all our new protagonists taking a decent role. Amirantha uses his demonology, Gula and Laro fight demons the way only Space Elves can, but Sandreena also kicks some serious buttock. Jimmy III also does plenty of skulking for the public good. But unlike the Darkwar’s minor heroes, all of this lot feel important. We’ve explored their personal woes throughout these two books, and they were very nicely balanced: enough to make them rounded characters without taking up too much space, and more importantly intersecting with each other enough to make the presence of all of them at the end feel warranted. I like this crew. I hope we get more of them in the final trilogy.

Because we’d better get some tying up of loose ends in the final trilogy, that much is certain. Feist wraps up the demon invasion nicely, but yet again, Pug is left with more questions about the ‘Big Bad’ behind it all, and what their ultimate plan is. In terms of outstanding dangling plot threads, we have:

The aliens in the Peaks of the Quor who might be angels, and their elf guardiansThe Space Elves and their desire to conquer everythingHow Tomas is going to handle both the above sets of elvesWhat the hell Macros the Black was doing(Every time you think this one’s answered, he turns up again…)What’s going on on New Kelewan (something I felt was sorely neglected in this very Midkemia-centric book)And finally, the minor issue of who’s trying to destroy Midkemia and why

It’s a lot to cover in one trilogy. And it is only one trilogy. There are 3 books left, and while I have read the first one long ago, I can’t remember a single page of it. I’ve never read the last two.

There’s a lot to wrap up. But I reckon Feist can do it. Let’s see, shall we?

New Year, New Reading List

A very happy Year of the Querulous Megapode to you all.

Real life may be resuming after the ethereal Cold Holiday Time, but happily I am now furnished with a nice long list of other worlds to escape into – some given to me, some bought by me, all sitting waiting on shelves physical or digital for me to get stuck into. So while I’m wrapping my head around what I’m going to be writing this year, I thought I’d let you know the first chunk of what I’m going to be reading.

Blackest Night/Brightest Day

I’ve owned DC’s Blackest Night crossover for many years, have read it many times and am re-reading it now, and it’s great. (To summarise: evil Black Lanterns resurrect dead heroes as zombies, apocalypse ensues.)

Having recently dipped into some of the other ‘big crossover’ comics DC and Marvel have put out over the years (Final Crisis, Death Metal, Battleworld, etc.), I have to say that Blackest Night is the high mark they should all be measured by. So often these crossovers are diminished by having to branch off and read other stories – Marvel especially is guilty of this – that the core story falls rather flat. But Blackest Night is good on its own without any spinoff bits – despite cramming in Green Lantern, the Flash, and a ton of other characters.

But what I’ve never read, and now finally have, is the follow-up story, Brightest Day, which covers the fallout of this superpowered zombie apocalypse and what a bunch of suddenly resurrected heroes – and villains – have to deal with when they’re suddenly back from the dead. I’m looking forward to it immensely.

Rides a Dread Legion/At the Gates of Darkness

The final stages of the Riftwar Re-Read are at last underway. I was waiting for my birthday/Christmas before buying the last few books in case someone got them for me, a caution justified as I was indeed given the next book I needed for Christmas. So now it’s onto the last-but-one arc, the Demonwar, in which some space elves show up, which is pretty neat so far. And then there’s just one last trilogy to go before I’m done with Midkemia. It’s an odd feeling.

Intergalactic Bastard

I’ll be honest, I bought this for the title alone. But I’m always down for gladiatorial combat In Space, and this looks like a bit of fun.

A Song for the Void

An SPFBO 8 contender I saw recommended on Twitter, I like the look of this eldritch mystery. I don’t tend to read that much horror, but I like a bit of Lovecraftian stuff as it scratches the fantastical itch while at the same time dragging me kicking and screaming out of my comfort zone. (I also played a game of Call of Cthulhu recently, which has primed my mind for existential terror.) And the fact that it’s a bit historical, being set on a pirate-hunting ship during the Opium Wars, is also a bonus for my historian’s brain.

Saga vol. 10

I have rambled before about how phenomenal Saga is, and have done so with good reason, because it’s probably the best comic and one of the best stories I’ve ever read. This cosmic Romeo and Juliet odyssey is amazing. After the heartbreaking end of volume 9, Staples and Vaughan went on a bit of a hiatus before starting the second half of the, well, saga. As far as I knew said hiatus was still going on – and then I stumbled across volume 10 in Waterstones a few days ago. I can’t wait. Though I am going to have to reread the whole thing again first… oh no…

Good Omens

I’ve read this before, but I’ve got book club next week and I really need to refresh my memory of the actual book, for my mind is (as it often is) full of the excellent BBC show. But if you haven’t read Pratchett and Gaiman’s fantastic version of the coming of an 11-year-old reluctant Antichrist and the shenanigans of the delightfully incompetent angel/demon pairing of Aziraphale and Crowley, then you really need to. It’s fabulous.

SPSFC – GSV Galactic Beards

And finally come the rest of my immediate rivals for the SPSFC: the other books being read and reviewed by the GSV Galactic Beards team. From what I’ve read so far: The Pono Way, a cracking near-future climate crisis tale; and The Engineer, a sprawling epic fantasy/romance; I’m up against some stiff competition. To find out just how stiff, I’m going to have to do some more reading. Goliath Fallen might be the first on the list – I like a generation ship story.

So that’s what I’ll be reading. Let me know what’s on your list for the first bit of the year. (Especially if it might happen to be one of these…)

The Boiling Seas Not-Christmas Special

To round off 2022, here’s a little treat for you all.

Because I write every day – every day – I end up writing during the festive period. And because it’s not particularly jolly to write bloody battle scenes on, say, Christmas Eve, I like to take a break from my main narratives and give my characters a festive break too. ‘Christmas’, of course, doesn’t exist in the Boiling Seas universe, but there’s something close enough.

Happy New Year, everyone.

“I do miss snow,” said Lily. She set down her bundle with a thump and stretched, looking out to the steam-wreathed horizon. “Really made it feel like winter, you know?”

“We had two white Solstices when we were kids,” said Tal, putting his own bundle down with significantly more care than his sister’s and rolling his scarred shoulder. “Two, out of fifteen. We didn’t exactly grow up in the bloody North.”

“These things make an impression,” Lily replied. “On clever children, at least.”

“I’ll make an impression in your face if you’re not careful,” Tal grumbled, but he grinned, and Lily stuck her tongue out good-naturedly.

“Two hundred and thirty years ago,” said Max. Her bundle practically shook the earth when it fell, and she leaned heavily on her knees for a moment.

“What was two hundred years ago?” Lily asked.

“The last time it snowed on the Corpus Isles,” Max said, straightening. “The coldest winter in recorded memory. It melted by the next morning. But it was two feet thick.” Lily whistled. Max smiled. “When there’s all this moisture in the air, it’s got to go somewhere,” she said.

It certainly didn’t look like snow today. Even the day before the winter Solstice, the coldest time of the year, the Corpus Isles and the Boiling Seas around them were positively balmy. Tal had put on his leather jacket, but the scalding water and the steam that rolled constantly off it were more than enough to keep things pleasantly warm. More so down here at the shoreline, in a little sheltered beach just west of the charmingly-named Murder Point, tucked into the cliffs below the towering Lantern. Tal had found it when examining a very old map, and had been pleased to discover that the cove was not only still there, but appeared to have been left untouched for all the intervening centuries. Or at least whoever else has been here tidied up after themselves, he thought. It wasn’t like it was a difficult journey down – they hadn’t even had to climb, though the path had gotten a bit treacherous in the wind. But all three of them had made it down to the beach, and now it was just them, and the sand, and the warm salt wind.

“Come on then,” Lily said, rubbing her hands with glee. “Let’s get started!” Tal rolled his eyes. For as long as he could remember, she’d woken him up with the dawn on Solstice – at least when they’d been living together as children. Clearly her convalescence hadn’t dulled her spirits.

They unrolled a colossal chequered blanket to lay on the sand, and Max produced a couple of bottles of wine and a very fine set of glasses in a leather case from her enormous bundle.

“You didn’t need to lug those all the way down here,” Lily protested as Max poured wine into the glittering crystal glasses.

“It’s Solstice,” Max said firmly. “If you don’t get the fancy stuff out then, when do you?” She flushed a little. “Besides, I got given these years ago and never used them. Never had anyone to use them with.”

“Well, I’ll drink to that,” Lily said, raising the glass Max handed her. They all followed suit. It was good wine, Tal thought, taking another sip. Very good. And still cold, by some miracle of artifice – or, he thought it more likely, by the rime of frost that Max was surreptitiously brushing from her fingers.

They sat back in the warm breeze for a moment. Tal closed his eyes and felt it rushing in from the sea, flowing over them, up the cliffs and spilling over onto the island behind them.

“Come on then Tal,” said Lily. She was practically bouncing in her seat, as excited as if she were still eight years old. Tal rolled his eyes.

“She’s never changed,” he said to Max. “When we were at home, when we were on the street. I caught her trying to escape the bloody hospital back when she was ill.”

“You’d have tried too, stuck in that place.”

“To get out into the world, yes. To open my Solstice presents?” Lily scowled. Max laughed.

“Well, we’re all here now,” she said, “and we’re all well. Unless anyone’s got any bombshells to drop?”

“Tal’s going to be missing some fingers if he’s not careful,” Lily said, patting the buckle of her sword-belt. Tal raised his hands in mock surrender.

“Get the presents out, Max,” he said, “quickly. She’ll be drowning us in the Sea if we don’t hurry up.”

They wedged their wine-glasses upright in the sand and each unwrapped their bundles. Each of them had two parcels. Tal’s were neatly wrapped in brown paper. Lily’s were just as neat, but the paper was brightly coloured and wrapped in equally bright ribbons. Max’s were twice the size of the others, but it was unclear how much of that was present and how much was the many crumpled layers of paper, tissue and what looked like note-paper, complete with notes.

“No wonder your bags are always so heavy,” Lily commented, mock-wincing as Max passed her one of the huge presents.

“It’s fragile!”

“There’s such a thing as cotton-wool.”

“I know, there’s half a reel in there as well.” Max blushed scarlet as Tal tried to read a page of notes on the bottom of his package. “I ran out of good paper, alright?”

“Aren’t these from the Marr heist?”

“We didn’t need them anymore!”

“A Solstice miracle,” cried Lily, raising her glass. “Max has voluntarily thrown something away!” There was laughter, and even Max joined in once Lily and Tal had both given her warm smiles to show they meant nothing by it.

“Who’s first then?” Lily asked, eyeing her two presents eagerly.

“I mean, obviously you,” Tal began, but Lily shook her head.

“No, no, me last.” She looked at her gifts in Tal and Max’s hands. “The only thing better than getting presents is giving them. Come on!”

Max began to carefully slice open the paper with her fingernail. Tal held his present up, turning the oblong over gently, flexing it.

“Book,” he said, “hardback… but a newer printing. That’s cloth, not leather. Three, four hundred pages?”

“You’re really still doing that?” Lily asked. “You can’t just let it be a surprise?”

“The surprise is better if you narrow it down,” Tal said, finally starting to tear open the paper. “Too many possibilities otherwise!” He beat Max’s meticulous opening, unveiling a cloth-bound hardback book of three hundred and fifty pages. Tales of the Moribund Kings was etched in gold along the spine. Tal beamed at his sister.

“Been wanting to read this for ages,” he said.

“I know,” Lily replied, smiling. “You forget, I know where you keep your list.”

“I thought someone had been through my bag!” Tal immediately opened the book and began to read. Max leaned over his shoulder.

“I’ve seen this one around,” she said. “DuChamp does good folklore compilations.”

“Stop looking at his and open yours, woman!” Lily cried, throwing her hands up. “You’re as bad as each other!” Max obediently finished slicing her paper open. Within was a wooden box – polished mahogany, Tal noted – which bracketed a sleek reservoir pen, brushed metal and gilded accents, and a series of ink-bottles in several different colours.

“You’re always using pencil,” Lily said – a little nervously, Tal though – “and you write so bloody much. And it dries fast, and they said it ought to work at altitude as well. And under pressure.” Max carefully took the pen out, examined it. Deft fingers took it apart to reveal the ink reservoir, which she filled, shook the pen, then wrote a few careful letters on a scrap of paper from her pocket. She grinned.

“Smooth as silk,” she said, and beamed at Lily. “It’s perfect.” Lily sighed with relief.

“Should be a travel case in there too. I was praying you didn’t already have one.”

“You knew she didn’t,” Tal pointed out, “because you broke into her office last week and checked.” Lily elbowed Tal hard in the ribs and knocked him off the blanket, but he was laughing as he fell.

“I gave both of you keys!” Max protested. “You could have just walked in!”

“Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?” said Lily. “You need a new lock, the one on your door’s rubbish.”

“You can get me one next year,” Max said, shaking her head.

“You were the one who decided to befriend a pair of thieves,” Tal pointed out.

“You showed up on my doorstep with a crossbow bolt in your shoulder,” Max retorted. “It was hardly my decision.”

“And yet here we all are,” said Lily cheerfully. She raised her glass, and they all clinked them together once again. Tal uncorked the second bottle of wine. We should probably have brought some food, he thought.

“Right, me next,” said Max, pointing at the misshapen parcel each Wenlock had been given. Tal hefted his. It was lighter than its size would suggest, but there was so much paper crammed around it that it was impossible to tell what its real shape was. Lily chuckled as she watched Tal turn the package over in his hands, holding it to his ear and frowning as he heard nothing.

“I might get you to wrap all of his next year,” she said to Max.

“It’s… hollow,” Tal said weakly. “I think?”

“You are correct,” Max said with a smirk. Tal shook it gently, once more, then sighed and began to tear away the layers of paper. It took him some time. Lily started on hers, too, in the interests of not being there for a month. After many layers and an awful lot of string and glue, Tal triumphantly pulled free a long leather cylinder with caps of beaten metal, and two metal rings to attach an adjustable strap that he found inside the cylinder.

“A map case?” he asked excitedly, testing the stiffness of the leather before slinging the whole thing around his shoulders on its strap.

“Better than shoving them in your bag,” said Max. “And with what we’re off to do I figured you’d need a bit more storage space.”

“Definitely beats folding them up,” Tal said, grinning. To prove it, he rummaged in his satchel for a crumpled map of some distant island chain, smoothed it out, and furled it carefully before slotting it neatly into the leather tube. There was plenty more room to spare. “Thanks, Max.” The scholar smiled, satisfied.

“Here we are,” said Lily, finally piercing the layers of paper. There was a leather-and-metal case within. When opened, Lily whistled at an array of vials of oil and a series of long, flat stones with a perfect colour gradient from pale grey to black. She held one up to the light; at the right angle, its surface glittered.

“I went to the Guard swordsmiths down in Malice,” Max said, a little embarrassed. “With a list from Willard.”

“I think he only meant for you to get one, Max,” Lily whispered, comparing the whetstones, one by one. “This is… all the grades. Chef’s knives to axe-heads. And all these oils…” When she looked at Max her eyes were filled with delight. “You’ve made her a very happy girl.” Tal ducked as Lily slid her belt-buckle – and the sword-blade that came with it – free of the concealed scabbard wrapped around her waist, some very clever magic stiffening the belt into a straight and slender sword. Lily ran her thumb across the edge and winced. “I think we’ll have to start from the coarse one.”

She put the sword down in the sand and gave Max a long hug. Tal examined his map-case until Lily let go of the furiously blushing Max. She was blushing herself, but Tal pretended not to notice.

“That leaves mine,” Tal said, motioning to the last two presents in their brown paper wrapping. Lily carefully closed her case of oils and whetstones and began to tear into her parcel. Max took a more sedate approach, but she was less precise than she’d been before… and Tal noticed that Lily was deliberately slowing down to let Max get there first.

The paper came away, and Max held up a thick journal, its cover heavy, carved leather, its pages heavyweight paper.

“It’s lovely,” she said, but Tal could tell she was slightly disappointed. He grinned.

“Check the spine,” he said. Max did so.

“Oh,” she said, “that’s clever.” She twisted the copper catches on the spine, and the whole cover came away from the leaves of pages within. Each segment of the book could be separated, as showcased by Max as she did so, examining the catches and connectors that held everything together.

“Now you can file your notes and keep one book,” Tal explained. “Or, well. Fewer books.”

Max frowned as she poked her finger into a gap in the cover, then brightened. She slotted Lily’s reservoir pen into place. It fit perfectly.

“Almost like we planned it,” said Lily, and she and Tal slapped hands with a grin.

“It’s lovely,” Max said, smiling broadly at Tal. “I’m sure I’ll find plenty of use for it.”

“A month,” Tal said.

“Six weeks,” Lily countered. Max frowned. “How long it’ll take you to replace the pages,” Lily explained, and Max chuckled.

“Depends where we’re going next!”

Lily had returned to tearing into her own present. Within the neat brown paper she found a padded wallet. She held it up, frowning.

“Nice,” she said. “I appreciate your optimism that I’ll be filling this up.”

“Look inside, for the love of all that’s holy,” Tal said, rolling his eyes. Lily opened the wallet – and it unfurled, rather than unfolding, revealing a velvet interior studded with slender lengths of metal.

“Oh, now we’re talking,” said Lily, face splitting in a huge grin. She slid one of the metal skewers free. It was carefully, meticulously jagged. She flexed it with her fingers. “Nice,” she murmured. “Very nice.” Tal dug in his bag and tossed Lily something heavy, which she caught deftly. It was an iron padlock.

“Give them a try,” he said. Lily smiled, found the torsion wrench in the wallet of lockpicks, and set to. She had the lock open within seconds, but immediately re-locked it and tried again with a different pick. There were almost two dozen, each a different shape, from waves to hooks to rakes, some stiff, some flexible, all useful.

“I know a guy,” Tal said, “near the docks. He’s good.”

“He certainly knows his business,” Lily said, unlocking the lock for a fourth time with a triumphant grin. She tucked the picks away and vanished the entire wallet somewhere into her clothes. “I’ll make good use of these. Thanks, little brother.”

“May the gods help the people of Malice,” Max muttered.

“Oh, Malice is far down the list,” said Lily. “I’ve got a whole tower full of interesting artefacts to nose around first.” Max groaned.

“Don’t worry,” said Lily. “I did your office already.”

As Max groaned again, Tal refilled their glasses with the rest of the second bottle of wine. He raised his.

“Happy Solstice,” he said. “Here’s to another… interesting year.” Lily and Max raised their own glasses.

“To mysteries,” Lily said, “and to solving them. And to making a profit into the bargain.”

“To friends,” Max said quietly.

“To family,” Tal said, smiling.

They drank. Then they sat together before the scalding horizon, in the warm wind. The Boiling Seas were endless, and so were the possibilities. It would be a very interesting year indeed.

Resolutions: 2023 Edition

It’s been an interesting year for me creatively.

I didn’t really start it in a great place. I was working 6 days a week, 5 of them in documentary writing and filming – which, while fascinating work that took me around the world, was exhausting, both physically and creatively. I was in a position where the last thing I wanted to do was write and edit more, and where that was exactly what I needed to do.

So I dealt with that problem by doing some career restructuring – namely leaving said job (except for a bit of freelancing) and trying to do this writing thing properly. (And also building LEGO with children.) And so far, that’s been going great. I’ve done a lot more writing, I’ve done a lot more submissions, and generally I feel better. My creative brain is clearer and cleverer than it’s been in years.

But because I’d been burning out for the first half of the year, I had a lot of catching up to do. I started with big intentions – edit down a seriously chunky manuscript and publish it this year, submit to many agents, get some shorts published. And obviously those plans didn’t quite survive contact with the enemy that is Life. But I still did alright, I think.

So let’s look at last year’s creative resolutions and see how I did.

1 – Do Another Book

I managed this one, just about. It was a shorter book than normal and it was for a different audience, but I’m very proud of The Fire Within. As mentioned above, I didn’t have that much time and headspace this year to really get stuck into a longer manuscript, so a kids’ book turned out to be the perfect solution.

2 – Write Reviews

If you count the Riftwar Re-Read, then I’ve smashed this one. Even if you don’t, I have been writing more reviews – I’ve just not been posting all of them on here, but on the Goodreads/Amazon pages of the books themselves. I’m determined to read through the rest of my group in the SPSFC – which I entered again, and haven’t yet been eliminated from, which is another achievement I mustn’t forget  – I’ve done The Engineer and The Pono Way so far – so maybe I’ll do a big post on this site with all my thoughts once I’ve read the lot.

3 – Write Short Stories

I managed this too – you just haven’t seen any of them yet. I wrote 3 short (or not so short) stories this year. 2 of them need editing before they see the light of day, but I’m pretty happy with the concepts overall – they’re both sci-fi ideas of varying daftness. The third (also SF), is submitted, and actually sitting happily on a shortlist waiting for further review. So that might be some future good news. And I’ve had a lot of other short stories flying around the place to various magazines and anthologies, too.

4 – Agents

This goal obviously hasn’t had much progress, because I’d have been shouting it from the rooftops if it had! I have submitted to several agents this year, just to no avail. I guess I just need to do more.

So while I didn’t achieve my 2022 goals to the degree that I originally wanted, I didn’t actually fail any of them – which is good enough as a start. So let’s refine them a bit for 2023.

 1 – Do Another Book

It’s going to be Boiling Seas 3, and I’m going to try and get it done well before the end of the year. I’m over 20,000 words into the first draft already, for once I’ve got a proper outline of the plot to work from (and I’m actually sticking to it, mostly!) and it’s all coming along nicely. I will also be continuing the edit of Unrelated Big Manuscript for future usage… and once BS3’s first draft is written, I think I’ll have to think about a sequel to The Fire Within…

Ambitious, I know, but I think I can do it.

2 – Write Reviews

Reviews are seriously important for indie authors. For any authors, really, but especially for we happy many whose publicity is entirely our own affair. So apart from finishing my Riftwar Re-Read I’m going to write more of these, and read more indie books that I can write about. We’ll start with the SPSFC group and go from there.

3 – Write Short Stories – and Edit Them. And Submit Them.

I’ve got 2 in the pipeline in need of editing and I’m going to get them ready for submission. And I’ve been scrawling down many ideas that I’ll be writing up. My brain is free and clear for all sorts of random concepts to germinate, and I intend to take full advantage of that. The trick, of course, is that I need to actually make them short stories instead of 10,000-word behemoths…

4 – Agents

Keep submitting and do more of it. It’s hard work, but I’ve got to do it. So I will. Not much more to say here really.

I’m thinking of this first 6 months of ‘proper’ author-ing as a warm-up. I did, after all, change a lot about my working and writing situation all at once, and if nothing else I’ve been getting used to the new status quo. So this coming year is the ‘real’ start of this author malarkey. Let’s see how we go.

Happy New Year, everyone. I’ll see you in 2023.

Oh, and there’s one last thing coming this year (i.e. tomorrow), just as a little treat. Enjoy.