Hûw Steer's Blog, page 16

Palate Cleansing

I need to cleanse my creative palate.

I’m well into Boiling Seas 3 at this point – with a bit of luck I’ll have the first draft done by the summer, which should keep me on track to actually Do Editing and have it out in the autumn. (As long as it’s not December by the time it comes out, I’ll be happy.) But after 50,000+ words of this adventure, I find myself in danger of waffling. I have a decent outline for the whole plot, and I’m sticking to it – but, as I always do, I’m thinking of cool new things along the way to slide in… which leads to things starting to feel a bit bloated. And I really don’t want that. Apart from anything else, it makes Doing Editing that much harder.

So I’m taking a brief break and throwing together a shorter piece or two. Different world, different plots, different characters; something different to channel my jungle-hacking, find-the-plot-as-I-go-along tendencies into that’s not the third book of a trilogy that needs a tightly planned ending to resolve all the dangling threads. I can (within theoretical word limits, anyway) just go for it and come up with something fresh to give my brain a break. And if it’s good, maybe I’ll submit it somewhere.

I think it’s important to do this every so often – it is for me, anyway. I try to only have one Big Project (i.e. a novel) on the go at a time. At least in terms of writing it; I have lots of Big Projects stuck in the editing stage. Some of them might even escape it, one day. But it’s one book at a time for me, otherwise my tiny brain gets confused as to who’s meant to be where and what they’re doing (a risky business when I switch readily between sci-fi space and lasers and fantasy swords and sorcery). So I’m creatively focused on just one story at a time for quite a long time. It takes a while to write these things, y’know. Thus, the inevitable period, about halfway through, when I’ve been on one thing for so long that I need to step back for a little while and reassemble my original, much more coherent thoughts and ideas. My ‘just make up cool stuff as you go along’ instincts need to be restrained, especially here with BS3 when everything needs to make sense by the end. Not restrained, really – more given another outlet so I can stay focused with the main project.

I want this third book to be good.

So: random short story time. Our protagonist is currently in a desert, on a horse with a name. (He himself doesn’t have one yet; he may never have one.) I have a very vague idea of where he’s going and what he needs to do. I know very little else other than that. It’s a solo protagonist in an empty world, with no threads to resolve other than the ones I make up along the way – about as different to Boiling Seas 3 as I can make it, basically.

I’ll be back on the book, and soon. I just need a little brain holiday. So let’s see where it goes.

Who Are You Again? Character Names

There are many ways authors give their characters names. And it’s often important to get it right – I’ve talked a little about the – when these characters are going to take up so much stage-time, as it were. But where do I get names from?

An easy answer is just naming characters after people you know. I know lots of authors do this – I tend not to as a general rule, but I definitely have done so. If I do pick a real name I’ll go for people I’ve met, but not people I actively spend time with; it seems a little weird to write about a fictional version of someone and then go and spend an evening with them at the pub. But real human names are real human names for a reason, so it’s always worth remembering interesting ones for later.

Observation is another way to gather names. Keep your eyes open and you’ll find all sorts of interesting person- and place-names around you – the sort of thing I tend to record in my notebook, forget about for six months, and then dig out when I’m desperately wracking my brains for a village name in a short story. For instance ‘Whetstone’, the setting of The Fire Within (and, I realised later, of a completely separate short story that I might try and tie in later), is a real village in the UK that I pulled off a road sign. It’s often more fun to give people place-names and vice-versa, too. While I was in Pembrokeshire a few weeks ago, I jotted down a few good signs, and now I really want to name a character Wiseman Bridge.

Sticking with theme works too. If I’m writing a story set in space or on another world, I’ve gotten good mileage out of looking up early astronomers and scientists and nicking their names for characters – the sort of people who’ve got a crater or two on Mars named after them. It makes a fun easter-egg for knowledgeable readers too, and I definitely like an in-joke. (As readers of the Boiling Seas have either figured out already, or will do so in book 3…)

But there is another way to get names. The way that I got most of my secondary character names for years. I would labour for a long time getting my protagonists just right, but when it came to background characters and one-scene wonders, I had a foolproof method.

Because in the early days of my proper writing, I was a student. I was a history student. A history student with at least one or two essays on the go at all times; essays which required lots of reading, lots of books. My desk, therefore, was always home to at least one stack of at least seven or eight weighty historical tomes, most of which were secondary sources. Books on Ancient Rome, on medieval medicine, on satire and science-fiction and all sorts of other weird stuff. And on the spines of those books were the names of their authors.

And so when I was looking for a character name, I would glance up, pick a forename and surname at random from the stack, and that would do. Booksellers, map-makers, guards and whoever I needed – random names from the bibliography. It worked well – a wide range of secondary sources meant a wide range of nationalities too, which really helped make the world seem wider. And writing lots of essays meant a constant change-over of books, so I seldom had the same books twice. Even more significant characters got this method sometimes. Mikhail Siras, villain of The Blackbird and the Ghost? Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (1990).

While I’m glad I have an actual job and don’t have to write a massive essay every couple of weeks anymore, it is annoying to no longer have this handy and ever-changing resource. I have to actually think of names… or look at the credits in nearby film posters, or steal village names from maps, and things like that.

But I suppose in conclusion, the best source of names for writing is… names.

Probably didn’t need to write this whole thing out, did I?

Fantasy Maps Are Missing Something

Maps are great. Maps in books are even better. Having that visual guide to the geography of strange new worlds is a marvellous thing when it’s done well.

But something I’ve come to realise is that even the best fantasy maps are missing something very, very important.

Example number one: the map of Midkemia from Feist’s Riftwar books.

Copyright, of course, is Raymond E. Feist’s.

It’s pretty good. The Kingdom of the Isles has loads of cities, great and small, all labelled, and as there are so many books in the Riftwar saga and therefore so much travelling, most of them get visited or mentioned at some point. The geography of trade and commerce is important; towns are built along strategic roads, ports in good anchorages – the workings of entire nations rationalised around this geography. It’s a damn good map. But it’s not quite there yet.

But for the comparison that best makes my point, we can look at Tolkien’s map of Middle-Earth – probably one of the most famous fictional maps ever drawn. Those sweeping mountain ranges, those esoteric place-names, the carefully plotted rivers and routes – it’s a masterpiece, and given the nature of the journeys in The Lord of the Rings, it’s very helpful that it is so detailed. But again, it’s missing something very important. And to show you what, let’s zoom in on the Shire, where it all begins.

And this of course belongs to the Tolkien Estate.

The distance from Hobbiton to Bree is, according to some hasty research, about 120 miles. The whole Shire is about 300 miles across, which is roughly the size of Wales. In all that space, there are, according to the map, a handful of settlements. In the book many more are of course mentioned – about 30 or so different little towns and villages.

Now let’s look at a real map. Let’s look at Herefordshire, which is where I grew up – and which is also, conveniently, one of the Midland counties on which the Shire is based, along with neighbouring Shropshire and Worcestershire. (Yes, I grew up in the Shire, I am small, eat too much food and have big hairy feet; I am literally a hobbit.) This is a map from the 1800s – it hangs on my wall right above my desk.

There are dozens of place-names there. Twice, maybe three times as many as the Shire at least, from Pembridge to Tenbury to Little Dewchurch. Tiny hamlets, hefty towns, villages that have been there since the Domesday Book. There are probably more than twice as many place-names in this single county of the U.K. than there are in the whole Shire that is based on it – and which, as previously mentioned, is something like ten times as large. And that’s just one county in a whole country in a whole world – one county whose number of named settlements is more than all those on the maps of Midkemia and Middle-Earth combined.

Now of course, the aforementioned fantasy maps are huge in scale. They’re mapping entire continents or countries, where this detailed map of a single county can afford to list every single village. Our modern world maps only show major cities and settlements too; it’s a necessary concession to matters of scale. But even if you don’t show it on the map, you have to remember that all these little towns are still there in the book. The Riftwar does this fairly well, mentioning many little villages and the like on characters’ travels from City-On-The-Map #1 to City-On-The-Map #2. But there’s still a lot of blank space out there, especially to the east – space where there should be towns, visible even at this scale, and they’re not there. Tolkien mentions his villages in the Shire, but how many other towns have the elves got? How many human cities get mentioned beyond Edoras, Minas Tirith and Osgiliath? Yes, I’m sure there are plenty, but my point is that it’s not enough. Look at that huge, empty space in Enedwaith – there must be people there. Or if not, there must be a reason why not…

And I’m guilty of this too. My one published map might be of a pretty small island, but it’s not that small – there should probably be more than two or three towns on the Corpus Isles. I excuse my geography in Ad Luna because, y’know, they’re on the Moon, and so sticking almost everyone in one big sci-fi mega-city is, I think, forgiveable. But the Corpus Isles of the Boiling Seas should be better populated if it’s to be realistic. When I’m drawing up the maps for book 3 (yes, there are going to be some), I’m going to have to remember that.

The point(s) I’m making is, essentially, that there’s got to be far more to a fictional world than what you can easily show on a map. Even if you don’t draw it, you’ve got to account for it. And so when you’re sketching out your vast expanses of rolling countryside and dotting in maybe three cities, consider all the other places people would be living – and maybe add a few more dots and names to your landscape.

How Many Words Must A Man Write Down

I’m a writer. I write a lot. It sort of comes with the territory. But occasionally I wonder, having been doing this for some time now, just how much I’ve got to show for it. And I don’t mean published works, long or short, self or trad – I mean raw mass, the volume of my ramblings over the years.

Simply put, I want to know what the big number is. How many words have I written?

There is a simple answer, because for a little over 8 years – since the deaths of Monty Oum and Sir Terry Pratchett – I’ve written a minimum of 500 words a day. Every day. I have not stopped. Even yesterday, when I overslept by an hour and managed to get 500 words down in about 20 minutes before dashing off to work, which is definitely some sort of record.

8 years, 2920 days, 500 words a day: that works out at a minimum of 1,460,000 words. Not bad.

But a minimum is a minimum. So let’s do some maths (dangerous, I know) and pore through a lot of word-counts, and see if there’s a more precise total. Here, then, is a list of everything I could be bothered to count.

Enjoy the peek behind the curtain, too. Some of these titles you’ll be familiar with. Most, you won’t. Some of the latter you’ll hopefully see some day… most you definitely won’t.

Ok, so I didn’t write Shakespeare or my own graduation guide, but they had to go somewhere.

Ad Luna: 88,000

The Blackbird and the Ghost: 62,000

Nightingale’s Sword: 98,000

Boiling Seas 3 (so far): 53,000

The Fire Within: 18,000

Before The Dawn (the original draft): 127,000

The Future King: 287,000

Negative Saints: 18,000

Salvage 7 (including the unfinished part 2): 118,000

The Scar: 67,000

The Seven Shards (including the unfinished part 2): 237,000

Smoke and Neon, Blood and Gold: 90,000

That Bit Of Warhammer: 40,000 Background That Got Out Of Hand: 39,000

The Short Stories I Counted Before I Got Bored: about 180,000

Which, altogether, comes in at 1,482,000. Huzzah: I have beaten the bare minimum!

But this is just the finished products. (Or the most recent versions, for the ones I haven’t finished editing yet. Which is most of them.) I’m not including a lot of short pieces – any of the Curtis Brown lockdown workouts, for instance. Or all the stuff I wrote for that videogame that never happened. Or these blog posts, which I’ve been doing regularly for quite a while now. Or countless half-finished or half-started bits and pieces, which clog up my hard drives no end, or the rewrites, the alternative versions, all the stuff consigned to the cutting-room floor. And if you add in 4 years of academic essays and dissertations, and another 3 years of documentary scripts and history book chapters from my old job…

 It’s entirely possible that I’ve cracked 2 million words at this point. And that is a big number indeed. It’s almost 4 Lord of the Ringses. It’s almost as long as Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive. Well, the first 5 books. Of 10. Not counting the novellas.

Obviously, most of these words are rubbish. Most of them will never see the light of day. Those that do will be re-read, re-written, edited and warped beyond recognition. (Seriously, you should see the original drafts of some of the titles above. Or maybe you shouldn’t.)

But even if just 5% of those words were worth reading, that’s still enough for a decent book. And it’s not like I’m intending to stop or anything. This is the first 8 years. Plenty more to go.

So who knows? In a few decades’ time, I should have written enough decent words to add up to a properly good series or two, and enough rubbish ones to build a space elevator.

The Great Riftwar Re-Read – Conclusion

So, I’ve done it. I’ve finally finished the Riftwar. 30 books, more than a year. If you count from when I first started the series, it’s taken me about 15 years. Which is nothing compared to Raymond E. Feist. For all the criticisms I’ve levelled during these reviews – all of which I do think are fair – I have to take my hat off to the man. 30 books in over 30 years. While the journey was long and at times meandering, to bring such a huge saga to a genuinely gripping and emotionally satisfying conclusion is a feat nothing short of epic. The Riftwar is one hell of a journey.

Would I recommend you, dear readers, undertake this whole journey? Honestly, mostly: no. If you just want to read some damn good fantasy, then read the original trilogy: Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon. Read their Tsurani counterparts too: Daughter, Servant and Mistress of the Empire. The beginning of the Riftwar is without doubt the strongest and best-written part of it. It’s also the bit with the actual Riftwar in it! Feist and Janny Wurts spun two magnificent worlds and magnificent stories within them, and these two trilogies are the absolute best bits of all of them. The stories of Pug and Tomas, of Prince Arutha, of Jimmy the Hand, of Mara of the Acoma, are stories that everyone should read.

Why yes, it is annoying that they don’t all fit in one line and I have to double-stack the Empire trilogy. Don’t even talk about the Legends books.

As for the rest of the saga? Well, there are definitely great books there. Prince of the Blood/The King’s Buccaneer. The Serpentwar has its merits, though it drags in the middle. I will always, always have a soft spot for fantasy James Bond in Talon of the Silver Hawk. But to even start on this journey is a temptation to try and finish it, and for most readers I really wouldn’t recommend doing that. The weak books stand out as much as the strong ones – Exile’s Return, the Darkwar, etc. Feist pivots to this grand narrative of universal threat, and while that’s satisfying to some, it’s nowhere near as strong as the earlier books. Kelewan is also woefully absent past Sethanon and the Empire trilogy, which is a crying shame, given that it was one of the founding worlds of the whole saga.

Most readers will get the very best of Feist and Wurts by reading those opening trilogies, and leaving the rest of the saga on the shelf. That’s my considered recommendation, after reading the entire saga.

But if you’re like me? If you’re a sucker for a grand universe and an ongoing, generational narrative? If you’re ok with reading bad books if there are good books coming, and if those bad books still advance that overall story, even if they don’t do it very well?

Well.

I spent over a year reading 30 books. Many of them great, many of them really not. And the moment I finished Magician’s End… I wanted to read Magician again. I wanted to go straight back to the beginningof the saga and read it all again. I emerged from this great sea of magic and dragons and story, and I want to dive back in.

The Riftwar is a long and winding journey. And I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

And I know that I will.

Hang on.

An Interview with Raymond E. Feist (The Fantasy Review), February 7th, 2023

Feist: “Writers rarely retire unless circumstances require them too. I’m working on the 1st book of the DragonWar Saga, A Darkness Returns.”

A Darkness Returns.

Returns.

Well.

I’m going to need a bigger bookshelf.

Riftwar Re-Read #17 – Magician’s End

This is going to be a long one.

I’m posting this not on a Sunday but on a Thursday, because I stayed up all of Wednesday night finishing Magician’s End. It is not a perfect book by any means. There is much waffle, and ultimately the contents of this book could basically have replaced A Crown Imperilled, which, while fun to read, wasn’t that relevant.

But once I got to the second half, I could not put it down. It’s a love letter to all 29 books that came before, and it’s wonderful.

Much of the first half of Magician’s End is, essentially, spent on waffling. Pug, Miranda, Nakor and Magnus, having been whisked away to a higher plane of existence, spent some time finally ‘learning’ what the stakes of this final confrontation are – unsurprisingly, the end of existence at the hands of the Dread – as well as figuring out how to stop it. On an objective level, this whole arc takes up far too much space and could – and should – have been taken care of much earlier in the trilogy. But as the ‘lessons’ each magician learns are taught by characters from the series’ past, I can’t help but enjoy this bit. Pug get to meet his old teacher Kulgan again; Nakor gets Prince Borric – it’s another throwback to the series’ past, and helps add to the love-letter aspect of this whole trilogy and particularly this book.

Meanwhile there’s a Kingdom civil war going on, with Prince Hal, his brothers, Ty Hawkins and Jimmy the Hand III fighting to ensure the succession goes as planned. It’s fun stuff, though it’s almost entirely unconnected from the grand ‘stop the end of the universe’ narrative. None of the non-magicians are even aware there’s a battle for the fate of existence going on, even if they all do briefly intersect with aspects of Pug’s storyline. But while I predicted that Hal was going to end up king pretty much instantly, it’s still a satisfying payoff. And again, Feist is cyclical here. The Riftwar began with three young ConDoins averting war and taking the reins of the Kingdom, and so it also ends. Hell, there’s even a third battle at Sethanon to cap things off, though this one for once has no magical significance at all – but it’s still a nice touch.

Though the new Kingdom is in quite a different shape to how it was back then. The map of Midkemia, absent for the previous books of this trilogy, returns – and, just in time for the end of the book, it’s been updated! A few new cities and towns established over the course of the series have finally been added – very welcome, as much of the plot directs the reader to the map to establish where everyone is and where they’re going. This is nice – until by the end of the book one of those cities, and an entire mountain range, has been wiped off the map entirely.

Because that whole ‘end of the universe’ plotline wasn’t going to resolve itself. The last act of the book – almost half of it – is taken up by the final gambits and battles against the Dread. Pug has been doomed to sacrifice everyone he knew and loved since the Serpentwar. Now we see that pay off. And it does actually pay off all the hanging plotlines, somewhat to my surprise. Some better than others, in fairness: we still don’t get to see the angels properly, but we learn what the alien Sven-gar’i are for, we learn what Draken-Korin was for, what the Space Elves were doing – it all does get resolved.

And it is fantastic. I read the whole last half of the book in one sitting. I couldn’t put it down. Everything, and everyone, came together to solve this final problem: the elves of Elvandar, their evil cousins to the north, the surviving Space Elves, the Conclave of Shadows, the Academy at Stardock, Pug and company, and – finally – Tomas, Dragon Lord and one of my favourite characters of all, who leaves the forest of the elves for the last time.

He flies out and meets Draken-Korin, the resurrected Dragon Lord whose purpose we finally learn. It’s to kill Tomas. By which Feist means ‘kill Tomas the personality, and allow Ashen-Shugar, the world-crushing Valheru, to take the reins again so he can beat up the Dread.’ Seeing a Dragon Lord unleash his full power again is glorious, and Tomas’ acquiescence is bittersweet. For all of Magician we saw this teenage boy struggle against the power that overwhelmed him, and Feist calls back to that original fight beautifully. From Magician:

“I am Ashen-Shugar! I am Valheru!” sang a voice within, in a torrent of anger, battle madness and bloodlust.

Against this sea of rage stood a single rock, a calm, small voice within that said, simply, “I am Tomas.”

And from Magician’s End:

Again he stood on rocks, with an inky-dark sea swirling on all sides. He had climbed out of that black tide over a century before and knew what it meant to be swept under and pulled down by it. It was an ending and a beginning for him. He laughed in a triumphant voice and dived head-first into the water.

“I am Tomas!”

It’s beautifully written. Tomas hasn’t played anything like the major role Pug has in the whole Riftwar series, but he was there at the start, one of the original protagonists, and he’s there until the bitter end. Because of course Tomas manages to regain control right at the end – so that, when Pug goes in to close the final rift, cast out the Dread and meet his doom, he does so with Tomas at his side. Pug and Tomas, together, against the end of the universe. It’s the only way this series should have ended, and it feels right.

And of course Pug watches Tomas die. Ashen-Shugar doesn’t, of course, which means Pug can defeat the Dread by basically hurling them into the Void, along with Ashen-Shugar, trapped in a fight that they will literally never end and thus safeguarding existence forever. Pug then has to close the rift that he is trapped inside – again, calling back to the end of Magician, when he helped Macros the Black do exactly the same thing. This time, though, there’s no way out. And in collapsing the rift, Pug also basically drops a magical nuke on Midkemia, levelling a mountain range and killing thousands (no other choice and all that) – including his own son Magnus. But he saves the world. He saves existence. And, after a chat with the gods – because they thought he “deserved to know” that his plan had actually worked, which is a lovely bit of closure – Pug finally dies. Though not before resurrecting Magnus, so he dies happy.

The Magician has ended.

This whole book really is a love letter to what must have been a thirty-year labour of love in the first place. It’s full of callbacks: thematic ones to plotlines past, like the princes’ war for the Kingdom, the rifts, Tomas’ story; but also explicit reminiscences and reappearances, like the brief moments we get of Kulgan, of Borric, and of course of Macros the Black. Kalkin, God of Thieves, appears in the guise of Jimmy the Hand, and I can’t help but think it’s Feist talking directly to the reader when Kalkin says that Jimmy was always one of his favourites. And though there was far too much setup, much of which could and should have been edited down, Feist manages to make pretty much every plotline of the previous 29 books matter in the final conflict. The third Battle of Sethanon couldn’t have been won without some daring Tsurani-descended cavalry. Magnus would have been eaten by the Dread, if not for the son of Gorath, the dark elf protagonist of Krondor: The Betrayal. All these little things might take a lot more setup than strictly necessary, but it works.

And while the series is over, the world isn’t. Feist makes that very clear indeed. There’s a little bit of Dread stuck at the bottom of the massive crater where those mountains used to be, waiting to be a Big Villain for Magnus – who has now taken Pug’s mantle as the Black Sorcerer, just as Pug inherited it from Macros. Said massive crater is also full of “strange and alien life fashioned by wild magic”, the perfect hook for future stories. The Kingdom might be at peace once again, and the threat of the Dread over, and it’s ultimately a happy ending, but the world of Midkemia spins on.

And of course, there’s one little epilogue. One little extra bit, that at once gives a fitting end to Pug and is the ultimate callback to the very beginning – and I mean page 1 of Magician. Years later, Magnus is walking through Crydee. He comes upon a boy, gathering crabs on the rocks, in the aftermath of a storm. The boy is the son of the castle cook. He is clever, and quick, but doesn’t know what his future holds. Soon he’ll be old enough to become an apprentice, but he’s worried that none of the masters will choose him.

His name is Phillip. But everyone calls him Pug.

See you on Sunday for my final thoughts on this saga as a whole.

What Am I Doing: March 2023 Edition

It’s another grey, cold day in London – apparently spring is meant to be happening but you wouldn’t bloody know it – which means it’s time for an update post. In addition to my crippling LEGO and Warhammer addictions I’ve been getting into Transformers, which has caused my wallet to cry out in pain; otherwise general life ticks over very nicely. But you’re not here for that, you’re here for writing stuff. So here we go.

Boiling Seas 3 Progress Tracker

We’re now at around 45,000 words, at least 10,000 of which I anticipate having to cut. The biggest struggle at the moment is balancing two very separate plotlines and 3 POVs. It wasn’t so difficult in Nightingale’s Sword, as Tal, Lily and Max were almost always together, and when they were doing different things it wasn’t for long. But of course now Max is in a very different place to Tal and Lily, dealing with some very interesting things that I can’t talk about because it’ll spoil the book for you. (But know that I really want to.) The main issue is timelines. I think I’m going to have to go back once this draft is done and write out what’s happening every day to make sure things roughly line up, as I suspect that currently Max has spent about 6 months wherever she is, while Tal and Lily have passed around 3 in their part of the world…

But it’s coming along nicely. I’m about to get to the bit I’ve been looking forward to most of all, too, so that’ll be very fun indeed.

Short Stories and Stuff

It’s actually looking rather good on the short story front. I have, of course, had several rejections, which is par for the course in this business really, but it’s far from all doom and gloom. In addition to one story that’s been on a shortlist for several months now awaiting a final decision, I’ve got another piece in the final 10 for a rather exciting competition… that I can’t tell you about just yet, because the official announcement isn’t up yet, but as soon as it is I’ll be all over it. I also got to do a solicited submission – as in, they asked me to send them something – which was a nice change. Whether they like it or not is another question, of course…

Oh, and I had another story accepted for publication. In Australia, excitingly. So that’ll be fun. Again, more info coming as soon as official things are said.

Reading Stuff

I have started Magician’s End. No turning back now: the end of the Riftwar is alarmingly close. I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’ll let you know when I’ve finished it, probably next week. I also had a go at Intergalactic Bastard, but for the first time in a long while I DNFed. The writing style just didn’t do it for me. Sorry, Dave.

A side note – I did get knocked out of the SPSFC, in case anyone hadn’t realised yet; good luck to all the more fortunate semifinalists!

 A Song For The Void, however, was great. A very nice bit of eldritch horror, especially considering that I don’t normally read that genre. The historicity helped – since devouring all of Sharpe I love me some 19th-century action – and it balanced nicely with the consuming dread and some genuinely unsettling gory bits.

So that’s where I am right now: cracking on with Boiling Seas 3, awaiting competition news and the opportunity to properly announce some more good news. In other words, doing pretty good.

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.