Hûw Steer's Blog, page 19

Submissions

In my new life as a More Full-Time Author Than I Was Before, I’ve not just been writing. There’s much more to do than that. Apart from my dubious and ongoing efforts at sorting out publicity, and all the editing I’ve still got to do, I’ve been hard at work submitting stuff. Behold, if you will, the mighty Submissions Widget.

Red is available, yellow’s submitted, and clear (because I didn’t have green) is accepted.

This device is just for short stories – of which I realised I have a surprising number ready to go. Many had been languishing for some time without being sent anywhere, so my first order of business was to sort that out and get as much as I could into the wind to see what stuck. As you can see from the contents of the red column, I’ve already had some rejections. But the height of the yellow column continues to give me hope. And while I haven’t had any new acceptances (the 3 in the clear column were added for morale purposes), there’s no sense getting down about it. As I’ve remarked before, the life of an author is a life of constant rejection interspersed with shining moments of acceptance and glory. Especially with short stories.

Submissions to literary agents, however, are a whole other thing. If you’ve never done one, they are essentially job applications (or at least as much effort). You’ve got a full cover letter to write, a synopsis to beat into shape, and an extract to prepare – like with short stories, of varying format and length. It would be very convenient if at the next Grand Convocation of Editors and Agents if everyone could just sit down and agree on one manuscript format and extract length to use going forward. (But obviously different recipients have different requirements, so it’s absolutely fine – just time-consuming.)

And, I’ve discovered, they’re just as nerve-wracking as job applications. With a short story it’s somewhat easier to adopt a fire-and-forget approach (emphasis on somewhat): the cover letter is shorter and the content is too, and if the editor doesn’t like it, it could be worse – it’s only a few thousand words, after all, and I’ve got plenty more in the pipe.

But a book? That’s a different beast. That’s tens of thousands of words, waiting to be read. And it’s an extract, which means you’re constantly worrying about whether the selection you’ve prepared is a good enough representation of the book as a whole. I’ve sat for hours debating over frontloading action scenes or Flashy Stuff for submission purposes even if it throws off the flow of the actual story I want to tell. It’s like flyering at the Fringe Festival – you’ve only got so long to give a pitch before the people you’ve accosted on the street manage to escape, and even if they take your piece of shiny paper there’s no guarantee they’ll do anything with it.

So you hone your pitch, or your cover letter, or your synopsis, and of course your manuscript. You get them looking as good as you possibly can. And you send them off, and it’s still mostly up to Dame Fortune whether you’ve picked the right person and whether they’ll like it.

In a long-winded way, this is my way of informing you that I’m doing agent queries again. I’ve got one out there right now. I don’t know if it’s going to land. But if it doesn’t, I’m going to keep on trying. Because eventually (hopefully), I’ll find that perfect person. And even more hopefully, they’ll actually like what I’ve written.

Comics Are Stupid: When Is An Arrow Not An Arrow?

I’m currently quite ill, so have some comic-related rambling.

To distil Green Arrow into a few words is fairly simple: he’s a wisecracking socialist Batman. Like Batman, Oliver Queen is a very rich man who moonlights as a crime-fighter in a daft costume. Like Batman, he uses his public wealth to fund good causes while beating up criminals on the side. Unlike Batman, however, he’s a veritable blabbermouth – he could give Spider-Man a run for his money with his barrages of quips and one-liners. He is fundamentally a bit of a silly character, though he’s had plenty of dark storylines over the years. He’s also very anti-establishment, which makes a nice contrast to Bruce Wayne; in his earlier material especially he goes off on political rants every other page. (For a long time Green Arrow’s comics were a hotspot of ‘let’s tackle social issue X this month’, notably with the storyline where his sidekick Speedy is a drug addict. Probably should have picked a more subtle name.)

Aquaman’s face says it all. But ‘five-fathom fascist’ is a cracking insult, let’s be honest. Green Arrow #4 (2001)

While the Emerald Archer has been a fixture of many of the Justice League and other team-up books I’ve read over the years, I’ve only actually read one solo series of his, because it was the only one that was in the library when I was growing up. (The same library in which I first encountered the Justice League in a random 2004 TPB.) It was a collection from 2001, containing the Quiver and Sounds of Violence arcs. The former deals with Green Arrow’s resurrection – like almost every superhero, he died heroically and then came back to life, dealt with some amnesia along the way. It’s a fine arc. But it was Sounds of Violence that stuck with me, for one specific reason. It’s this page.

Green Arrow #12 (2002)

Yes. That is Green Arrow, interrupted while out to dinner, shooting kebab skewers out of a harp. And…

Green Arrow #12 (2002)

…nailing it, because of course he does.

The fundamental problem with Green Arrow – and to a slightly lesser extent the more serious Hawkeye – is that they run around with lethal weapons and don’t like killing people. (In the comics, at least: the Arrow TV series went more murder-happy, and the MCU Hawkeye has no problem with killing, which works a lot better in my opinion.) Hawkeye has become more and more ‘serious’ over the years, as far as I can tell, despite the odd trick arrow. Green Arrow went through a similar journey; initially he killed nobody, then he killed someone by accident, then he was forced to kill someone… (Different interpretations, of course, vary.) In Quiver/Sounds of Violence he comes very close to killing on several occasions, and he’s generally forgoing the trick arrows in favour of simply crippling criminals by shooting them in the hands or legs. You know, not painful at all.

And sometimes he just openly admits that he’d like to murder you. Green Arrow #3 (2001)

Green Arrow gets angry. Batman does too, of course; he beats his villains to within an inch of their lives on occasion, held back by his iron will and his self-imposed no-kill rule. But Green Arrow doesn’t have that restraint. Green Arrow tries not to kill you, but he’ll really hurt you in the process. And if he gets too angry… well, he’s a man with a bow and arrow, and he’s a very good shot.

I think that’s why I like the Quiver/Sounds of Violence arc so much. Because it starts off with classic Green Arrow, boxing-glove arrows and political rants and plenty of pow/biff/wham action. Then it gets serious. Green Arrow is back, and he’s angry, and people are going to get hurt until his city gets better.

But even an angry Green Arrow is still an arrogant, mouthy show-off, and we can’t help but love him for it. And while he might have put down the boxing gloves, he still can’t resist a little unconventional weaponry from time to time. Or a good quip, even in the face of death.

The guy killed a lot of children. It’s fair. Green Arrow #10 (2002)

It should go without saying, but all of the images above are the copyright of DC Comics.

D&D and Character Development

I did D&D a couple of days ago. It was brilliant. In rambling about it now, I want to touch on not just how fun it was, but a little on the wonderful organic storytelling that D&D engenders. But mostly on the fun.

Therefore, meet Sir Geoffrey du Babbage and his incompetent manservant Hansard.

Think slightly more competent series 1 Blackadder, accompanied by significantly taller series 2 Baldrick. Add a hefty dash of Monty Python and you’re there. In D&D terms, a human fighter.

Sir Geoffrey will tell you that he’s the greatest hero of the age, a magnificent knight, adventurer and all round great guy. In reality, he’s flat broke, mostly an idiot, and went on a crusade through the wrong county due to a clerical error. The only thing that stops him looking like a complete imbecile is the fortuitous presence of his manservant Hansard, who is an idiot in search of a village, and serves as a replacement for Geoffrey’s horse. (Sweet Bucephalus; taken too soon.)

I haven’t been Sir Geoffrey du Babbage in a long time. He was first created long ago for my second Edinburgh Fringe run, in a sketch that was, while far too long and only semi-amusing to watch, was an absolute joy to perform. I got to ride onto the stage on my co-director’s back, brandishing a wooden sword and a false moustache, and do my best Python/Blackadder pastiche. It was awesome. So when I had to roll up a D&D character, there was only one choice, really.

The original Sir Geoffrey (me) and Hansard (Luke Reilly) in 2016

It was a one-shot (Escape from the Crystal Fortress by Will Humberstone, the plot of which I will try to avoid spoiling here) with several members of my choir. Geoffrey, a teenage Halfling barbarian, a cat-bard and an elephant Druid went to prison, beat up some zombies and saved the day. The actual one-shot campaign was really good – the Crystal Fortress was amazingly atmospheric, the encounters were nail-biting (especially for a novice like me), but it was all concise enough to finish in an evening. (If you’re looking for a one-shot, Crystal Fortress is a great choice. Just remember to pick up some bricks along the way.)

The fact that it was a one -shot meant that this was the first time I’d actually finished an adventure. Both times I’ve played D&D before were the first sessions in what should have been bigger campaigns, which then of course fizzled out and were never picked up. In an alternate universe, Sir Geoffrey and Hansard have been standing completely naked in the middle of a town square for about 5 years. As this was a one-shot, however, we actually made it all the way through our little plot.

And it was fun. Because in most fantasy universes you’d never dream of throwing characters like ours together. You’d certainly not do so without a prodigious amount of backstory to set up their relationships, their motivations, the reason they’re all here in this magical prison. That’s certainly what I’d be doing if I was writing it as a conventional story.

But instead, we just turned up and rolled (heh) with it. And because we were a group of people instead of just me trying to think of everything, the story just bloomed into something wonderful. Mad and hilarious, but wonderful. We threw bricks at skeletons, we rescued cats. We bonded, or we started to at least. (We the players bonded magnificently; in character Sir Geoffrey is an arse so it’ll take a bit longer there.)

Thanks to our DM there was no need to think about the story itself – just what I would do. It was writing and acting and improv all at once. And it was a really, really good way to develop a character from a comedy sketch into something approaching a human being. I’m definitely playing with Geoffrey again. But I think I need to do it with some of my other characters too, if nothing else just to see what they’d do. I’ve always thought that good characters are the most important part of any story, setting and plot be damned – and it definitely feels like I might be right.

Maybe I should do what I originally planned, and turn the Boiling Seas into an RPG campaign. I’ve already got a map…

The Next Book

The good news: the novel I was planning to try and edit to publish this year is a full 80,000 words shorter than I’d feared it was.

The less good news: it’s still almost 130k and that is definitely about 40-50k too many. Such is the way of things when you’re me, and you throw yourself into a jungle of words and just try and carve a path through to some kind of ending.

This is a different story to the Secret Rewrite I’ve been doing: that’s (hopefully) for agent submissions and the like; this is for self-publishing, to try and keep up my streak of a new book roughly once a year. It’s not Boiling Seas 3. That’s next year’s entry if all goes to plan. It is fantasy, but it’s a standalone. Providing I can get it to a short enough length to cram it all between a single set of covers.

It will be a darker tale than what I’ve put out before. To summarise without giving too much away, it’s about a world that’s already mostly ended, and the unhappy few who stand in the very last fortress between the apocalypse and what’s left of humankind. It’s not a cheery story. There are monsters, of both the monstrous and human variety, and some of them are even on the side of the enemy. There’s a lot of death, a lot of despair. But there is, underneath all that, hope. There has to be, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything much for me to write about.

I wrote this manuscript a good while ago – according to the file metadata, I finished it at some point in 2018 – so even if it wasn’t far too long there would be a need for a decent amount of polishing and tweaking. But I genuinely thought this thing was over 200,000 words, and had thus written it off as far too big a project to get finished and ready by the end of this year. Finding out it was only about 130k was a very pleasant surprise indeed. And from glancing at it, the prose seems pretty good by my standards. (It was written after The Blackbird and the Ghost, and that seemed to go down well enough!)

But it will need plenty of cutting down. Thankfully I can already see plenty of places where I can lift out whole unnecessary chunks, and I’ve got a tighter structure in mind to keep things nice and contained. Once I get that down, it’ll hopefully just be a matter of trimming and tweaking to taste.

I think I might be able to get this one done by Christmas. And I’ve certainly got more time to try and do it now. So I’m going to give it a damn good go.

If that doesn’t work, you can have a novella. I’ve got a few of those kicking around and I’d like people to read them eventually. But the plan is to get the book out. It might be tight, but I think I can do it.

Stay tuned for more news.

King of Games

When I was about 6 years old, a kid at school gave me a piece of cardboard.

And I was hooked. I was enthralled by wizards and robots and knights, usually at the same time; I was captivated by spells and traps and cartoon characters with ridiculous haircuts. For this was, of course, 2001, the very year in which the actual Yu-Gi-Oh! card game was released in Europe and the UK – and when the original anime started airing here too.

I’m writing about this, sadly, because Kazuki Takahashi, the man who created the world of Yu-Gi-Oh, who wrote the original manga and anime and most of the spinoff series too, has died. He was only 61. And his creation has had a genuine, tangible effect on my life ever since I first picked up that trading card and wondered what the hell ‘Life Points’ were.

For those of you who don’t know, Yu-Gi-Oh’s original story is about a teenager who accidentally awakens and is possessed by the spirit of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh – who is conveniently very good at children’s card games. Said children’s card games (i.e. the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game that we know today) are also conveniently a cornerstone of life in this universe. Everyone plays Duel Monsters. It’s the biggest sport in the world, played by adults and children alike (it will never not be entertaining to look at the KC Grand Championship lineup in the anime and see several teenagers standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a literal practicing surgeon and nobody batting an eyelid). It’s played for fun, in tournaments, against supervillains for the fate of the world and against the actual police to avoid being arrested. On motorcycles.

From ‘Duel Art’ (2011), a book I am lucky enough to own.

Said card game, Duel Monsters, is also enhanced in the fictional world by a) being played with massive holograms of the monsters that beat one another up for your entertainment, and b) being connected to ancient Egyptian magic and spiritualism. The Pharaohs used trading cards made out of stone. I’m not even joking.

It’s a delightfully absurd premise for a show, made eve more so by the coincidental nature of it. In the original manga, Yugi and the Pharaoh played a different game in every chapter – Duel Monsters was meant to be a one-off. But when faced with a tight deadline, Kazuki Takahashi decided to just have them play the card game a second time. Then a third time. A fourth. Every week. Then an anime was commissioned. Then he realised that if he was going to keep doing this he’d probably better write some rules that made sense. Then we got the real card game.

I spent countless hours as a kid playing this game. I had a few friends who collected the cards too, but most important were three of my cousins, who were just as into it as I was. We held tournaments, we traded cards, we watched the show together (I remember one family wedding where we spent the whole reception watching a bootleg of Pyramid of Light and fighting to be crowned champion). Yu-Gi-Oh basically defined my interactions with that half of my family for years, and it was wonderful. We had a fantastic time.

All my Yu-Gi-Oh related stuff now. Yes, all the boxes are full of cards. Yes, that is an Orichalcos Duel Disk. Yes, it’s awesome.

And then, as it goes with these things, we drifted away from it for a while. My cards went into the back of a drawer, and I spent years just doing other stuff. But then when I was at college, aged 16 and dealing with all the inherent issues of being 16, I saw some booster packs in a shop. I had a job now. I had money. Back in I went. I found the show on Netflix and started watching it again (from start to finish for the first time, in fact, kids’ cartoon programming being what it was in the UK). And it helped, in ways I still can’t quite describe. In my time away the game had evolved drastically, but I managed to just about relearn it (even if it’s still too fast-paced for my taste these days) and played a lot online. I rediscovered the thrill of cracking open a booster pack (which is still a seriously addictive feeling; they don’t call these games ‘cardboard crack’ for nothing).

EDIT: I am reminded by my partner that I do play the game physically. Against my partner. Who I taught. And who almost always beats me.

But it was the show, and the manga, which I also started reading, which were the biggest help. I watched the whole thing from start to finish, started on some of the spinoffs, and discovered the incredible labour of love and mockery that is LittleKuriboh’s Abridged Series. (If you’ve ever liked Yu-Gi-Oh and not watched the Abridged Series, do so right now. It’s phenomenal).

Fundamentally, Yu-Gi-Oh is about friendship, and trust, and belief. Belief in yourself, and belief in others. It’s about taking losses and getting back up again, about striving to better yourself day after day. In its darker moments it’s about obsession, and greed, and loss – but always, always about overcoming or coming to terms with those things. There is no character in Yu-Gi-Oh who does not leave their respective series a better person than they were when they started. And that was a balm to the soul of a depressed 16-year-old. It’s still one to the soul of a usually-less-depressed 26-year-old. Every so often, I just sit down, put on the anime, build decks and just bask in the soothingness of it all.

I love this image. I love how Kaiba is standing outside the Puzzle because he still doesn’t believe in magic. I love these characters. ‘Duel Art’ (2011)

I hope Kazuki Takahashi was proud of what he made. He wrote about a world where card games brought people together, and to some degree he made it true. There are real professional Yu-Gi-Oh players now, and while none of them are undead Egyptians or have as amazing hairstyles, they’re still legion. His stories, and the game they inspired, have spread across the world and brought joy to so many people, including me. I’m glad that he got to see that happen. I’m glad he got to make The Dark Side of Dimensions, too, wrapping up his original manga story. I’m just glad he was here, really. And I’m sad that he’s not anymore.

Rest easy, King of Games. If there’s anyone who deserves that title, it’s you.

‘Duel Art’ (2011)

I Quit My Job To Try And Be A Proper Author

So I quit my job to try doing this writing thing properly.

Now that statement requires clarification in many areas, which I will provide below, but essentially… yeah. I have made the potentially unwise decision to make a serious attempt at doing this author malarkey for a living. As in, get a literary agent, get a traditional deal, sell some books and ultimately retire to my private library island with a collection of antique smoking jackets.

Maybe not the last bit. But otherwise, that’s the plan. I realised that if I don’t give it a proper go now, I might never really have the chance – or at least that it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to try and become a full-time author now than it will be in 10 years when I’ve got a mortgage/kids/dog to worry about. I know other authors who’ve managed that and I salute them all. But it’s hard enough to get a break in this business already without having to worry about the rest of my actual life.

I have been a documentary researcher and writer for the last 3 years, which is a great job: I got to write for a living, I got to go to awesome places, meet great people and tell amazing stories. But because I was doing that writing 5 days a week, I was pouring most of my creativity into that, rather than into my own work. I’ve kept up my 500 words a day, but most of the time that’s all I could manage. And that’s saying nothing of editing, proofreading, formatting… After a solid week of writing (and then another day of working with children), the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer all day and write even more.

So I’m leaving that job. (I’m actually staying on as a freelancer for a while at least to finish some projects, but 1 day a week is still a lot better for my brain.) I do, of course, still need to actually have money, so I’m expanding some other jobs, including the aforementioned working with children and LEGO. But I’m not writing for those jobs. The only creativity I’ll need is sufficient imagination to build cool stuff out of plastic bricks. For the first time in a long time, the only person I’ll be writing for is me. Apart from the freelancing. But still.

Essentially, I needed headspace to think about writing and more time to do it in. And space to do all the other things that come with writing and that I’ll need to do a lot more of if I’m to ‘make it’, as it were. Agent applications, submissions, editing manuscripts – all the things I’ve spent the last 3 years largely putting off because I just didn’t have the time or mental bandwidth. Well, in a week or two I’ll have that time, and I’m determined to use it properly.

I’m still going to be self-publishing stuff. We’re over halfway through the year but I’m still going to try and get a book out if I can, and with the extra time I should be able to crack on with my next batch of projects a lot more effectively than I can now. I would like to get an agent and be traditionally published – that’s the dream, and I’m going to be dedicating a lot of time to trying to achieve it – but until that actually happens, it’s going to be business as usual. Just more business, and more effectively.

I don’t know exactly how long this will last. I am making many lists and plans and timetables of what I’ve got to do, how much time I can commit to everything, how long I can afford to commit to it. I don’t know if this is going to work. In all probability, it won’t. But I’m going to give it a damn good try.

I’m terrified. I’m excited. Let’s see how this goes.

Onwards and Upwards (and Sideways)

Ironically, given how much I make my characters do it in the Boiling Seas books, I’ve only taken up climbing relatively recently. I’ve dabbled frequently – I was a Scout once, I grew up in the countryside surrounded by trees, and every family holiday seemed to take us to beaches with convenient bits of low cliff. One particular trip saw me and two of my cousins climb all the way around a section of headland from one beach to another, with no adult supervision, over wet rocks, in flip-flops. I’m fairly sure we had to fully jump from one bit of cliff to another at least once. Somehow we managed not to die.

Here is little(r) me climbing in apparently 2007.

But now I’m bouldering (i.e. no ropes, because they are expensive) on a regular basis. London sadly being lacking in actual rock faces, my usual haunt is an indoor wall, but it’s built into an old theatre and so fits a surprising amount of vertical space. I’ve been going for about 6 months now. I’m not good yet. But I’m getting better. And so I’m starting to appreciate exactly what goes into climbing in a way that I didn’t before. I know better how it feels to reach for that next hold, how satisfying it is to solve the puzzle of a tricky route. I know which bits hurt afterwards. I have felt the physical caesura as I lose my grip, in the instant before I fall.

So when it eventually comes to writing Boiling Seas 3, which will inevitably feature plenty more scaling of walls and stealing of things, I should know what I’m talking about a bit better, which will hopefully translate into me writing about it better. And that got me thinking about what other real-world things I do or have experience of that I try and write into my stories. Initially, it doesn’t seem like there’s much. Despite my most fervent wishes to the contrary I am not a master swordsman, marksman or thief (though I continue to dabble with the notion of learning lockpicking).

But I do climb. And I do research. All those passages where Tal and Max are poring over maps, deciphering ancient texts and languages – that I know how to do. I can handle history. Which of course helps with places and worldbuilding, too: the nebulous Arcadian Empire from the Boiling Seas is of course essentially ancient Rome with some other bits thrown in. (If in doubt, pseudo-Latin is your friend.)

And though I’ve never been to the Boiling Seas, there are real experiences in those books that I’ve given to my characters. I don’t want to spoil anything, but in Nightingale’s Sword there is a section where Max has to do a Postman’s Walk, which is a high-ropes course obstacle where you do this:

Not me, unfortunately (from Camp Fire) – lots of old high-ropes photos but none of this.

I love high-ropes. But when I was a kid, I hated the Postman’s Walk. Even now I find it hard to do. There are no poles, no dangling bits to hold onto to keep your balance – it’s just you and those two wires, a long way off the ground. And so in Nighingale’s Sword, Tal (who is the character I would like to be) has no problem with it, and Max (whose temperament I am much closer to in reality) also absolutely hates it. I know how it feels to be up there. Everything Max experiences in that moment, I’ve been through.

Back on artefacts and places, in Super Secret Project, which has something approaching a more real-world setting, I’ve been liberally scattering the narrative with places and objects I’m familiar with, everything from old castles to old workplaces. It’s the latter that are the most satisfying, because the odds are on none of my readers ever having visited said places or having the faintest clue that they’re based in real life – but for me, and the one or two people who have, it’ll be one hell of an unexpected easter egg.

I’ve digressed a little. But the point, I suppose, is that the old adage of ‘write what you know’ can be taken in many different ways. I’ve never been a medieval soldier, but I’ve walked on plenty of castle walls. I’ve never debated ancient philosophy but I’ve read the words of those who have. And while I’ve never climbed the cliffs of an abandoned observatory, I have climbed. And who knows? Maybe, some day, I really will.

Riftwar Re-Read #6 – Prince of the Blood

At long last, it’s back to the actual main story of the Riftwar. I didn’t realise until reading this book how many filler/interquels Feist slipped between Sethanon and Prince of the Blood. Prince is, in terms of publication order, either the fourth or seventh (if you include the Empire trilogy) book in the Riftwar series, but with the Legends books and the Krondor trilogy, it seems like it’s taken forever for me to get there. I do think that overall the filler books added to my own experience, but you could definitely skip some of them if you wanted.

Or not, as the case may be. Because when I reopened Prince of the Blood, I was momentarily astonished by Feist’s foresight. Despite being published in 1989, a decade before the Krondor trilogy, the characters were all referring to events and other characters from said Krondor trilogy. I was amazed at the depth of Feist’s planning… and then I was suspicious, and then I read the afterword, from which I discovered that Feist actually rewrote parts of the book in 2004 to accommodate the additions from Krondor. That made things make a lot more sense. I’ve never owned a copy of the original version of Prince of the Blood, but I’m definitely going to try and pick one up for comparative purposes – but this review is of the newer version.

A newer edition alas means a newer style of cover. Don’t worry, there’s more glorious 80s/90s art to come in the Serpentwar.

I’ve harped on about the multi-generational aspect of the Riftwar often enough now, but in Prince of the Blood, the torch is finally properly passed for the first time. Prince Arutha stays at home, and it’s over to his twin sons Borric and Erland to adventure into the desert Empire of Kesh, for a spot of diplomacy that rapidly turns into a fight against conspiracy. The central conceit of the novel is taking the twins – who begin as near-identical personalities to go with their identical appearance – and putting them through very different experiences to round each out as a character. Borric and Erland, unlike their father, have grown up in relative peacetime. They’ve not fought a major war – their dad fought two. They’re a pair of feckless womanisers with no concept of responsibility… and they’re the heirs to the throne. So in an attempt to make them a bit more worthy, Arutha packs his sons off to Kesh to represent the Kingdom at an Imperial jubilee. Whereupon they immediately stumble into a conspiracy: their caravan is ambushed, Borric is kidnapped and presumed dead, leaving Erland suddenly the sole heir to the Kingdom.

Feist does a good job of setting up Borric and Erland as both being, well, arseholes. They shuck responsibility wherever they find it, are needlessly cruel to their little brother Nicholas (who will shortly get his own back by having a much longer book all to himself), and are generally unpleasant people. That makes their separate journeys much more rewarding. Borric – the elder twin, and the one who’s going to become King – is made a slave, abruptly confronting the realities of life when you’re not a pampered aristocrat. He has to skulk, steal and fight his way across Kesh to reunite with his brother, a gruelling journey made possible by a gang of lovable rogues; beggar-boy Suli Abdul, Big Guy Ghuda Bulé, and mad magician/monk Nakor. (Remember that last name – Nakor will be very important later. For now, he’s an entertaining bringer of chaos, merriment, and light deus ex machina.)Ghuda is basically just the muscle, but he does serve to ground Borric in what normal life is like. Suli becomes a stand-in for Borric’s brother Nicholas and is a good vehicle for softening him up in that regard. Borric himself has to escape slavery, become a pirate, duel and steal and murder just to survive. He is transformed from posh git into a far humbler man, with a genuine appreciation for the hardships of life and a resolve never to take anything for granted again. It’s a well-written journey that leaves you with the sense that Borric will actually make a good king.

But Borric’s plot is of course only half the book, as his (slightly) younger brother Erland must now grapple with both life without his brother and suddenly having future kingship thrust upon him. As he isn’t kidnapped, Erland makes it to the Imperial court unscathed. Initially, it seems like he’s getting a much better deal: he spends several chapters in the (ahem) company of dozens of beautiful and scantily-clad women, as the celebrations of the Imperial jubilee unfold around him. Said initial debauchery is a little gratuitous, honestly, but it is plot-relevant and becomes better-presented as the book progresses. But there is a conspiracy to unravel, and so Erland and his own (less motley) crew dive into murky Imperial politics to uncover a) who murdered Borric, b) who’s trying to depose the Empress and c) why they’re trying to start a war between the Kingdom and Kesh.

I said ‘less motley’, but 2/3 of Erland’s retinue are Jimmy and Locklear. But it’s now been 20 years since Sethanon, and both of the unruly young men have matured. Mostly. Both are now Barons; Jimmy (or James as he is now largely known) continuing his skulduggery as Arutha’s secret intelligencer, and Locky as Knight-Marshal. There are some nice moments where the pair look at Borric and Erland and see their younger selves – but as both men note, they’d already fought a war by the time they were the twins’ age. The comparison is well done. This was another moment where I was glad of the existence of the Krondor books, too, as without Locklear’s time as a main character in Betrayal, Prince of the Blood would have been his only other proper book save Sethanon.

The third member of the party is Gamina, adopted daughter of good old Pug, who we’ve met before in Silverthorn and Sethanon as a child. While Pug isn’t a major character here, Feist still gives him sufficient space here – Pug’s magical academy at Stardock, which we get to explore a little at the start of the book, will, like Nakor, be very important later. In said visit to Stardock, Jimmy and Gamina go through a rather rapid (as in literally instant) courtship that does read as Feist scrambling for an excuse to just get Gamina into the party so he can use her telepathic abilities later in the book. For all that it seems contrived as first, though, Gamina is a good character and a great complement to Jimmy – and after the heartbreaks of Jimmy and the Crawler it’s nice to see Baron James a happy man. And it turns out that having a telepath on your team when you’re trying to investigate a conspiracy is rather handy.

By the end of the book, Erland has been hardened in a different way to his brother: he might not have been weathered by the desert, but he’s seen the duality of humanity, with seeming friends turning into deadly enemies, dealing with lies and murder and politics (shudder) in all their unpleasantness. His is an emotional maturing rather than a physical one, but it’s well handled. As he’s reunited with Borric at the end, Erland is of course no longer heir to the throne – but again, we’re left with the sense that Borric’s right-hand man will be a canny political operator and advisor.

Essentially, Feist takes two young men who are completely unsuited to rule, and turns each of them into half of a perfect monarch. Despite being a very short book for the Riftwar, Feist manages to develop both Borric and Erland very effectively, and introduce plenty of new characters, and give us sufficient Jimmy the Hand action for my own personal tastes. Prince of the Blood probably could have been longer, and it might well have improved things, but that doesn’t mean it’s not good as it is.

In the hands of Borric and Erland, we are left to believe, the Kingdom should do alright. Which is good. Because by the time the next big crisis comes around inthe Serpentwar, Arutha and most of the first generation of characters are gone. It’s up the new blood now.

Things Done and To Do

It’s been a long week, so forgive me for a general update post. I was away for work, again, a trip which culminated in my worst flying experience yet: to summarise, it is not ideal to get off a plane in Terminal 2 at 10.55pm when you’re supposed to be taking off in another one in Terminal 4 at 11. I made it, though. My luggage did not. But it’ll be here eventually, so I’m just dealing with the aftereffects of the soul-delaying jet-lag.

I then spent yesterday first at my other job and then in east London singing. I’m in a choir called Ready Singer One. We sing videogame music. It is amazing. This time we were supporting an orchestra (the LVGO, a group of fellow musical nerds), which sounded bloody good. I can now add singing in 4 different languages to my CV, and 3 of them are real ones. (We actually got a mention on the BBC of all places the other day, though we have yet to be contacted about the Proms. Maybe next year…) At some point I will write properly about how incredible the experience of being in this choir is, but suffice it to say for now that it’s phenomenal. Being part of a greater whole is cool – being part of a greater whole that is uniformly obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy in all its forms is even cooler.

So it’s been a busy week in a busy year, which means writing has just been plodding along at its normal pace. Secret Redraft Project is proceeding fairly well, as my POV characters are finally about to meet and punch one another in the face, which turns out better than you might expect. I think the world is turning out more fleshed-out than before this time round, which is good as that’s the whole point of redoing it. It’s relatively slow going though. I have only so much time to write at the moment and it does slow me down.

However, happily, once various things are finalised (the specifics of which I will share once they are), I should soon have a fair bit more time and headspace to write with. Which bodes well for the long, long list of projects I want to get cracking on, including, but not limited to:

Boiling Seas 3 (which I have loosely started but needs a proper plan)A bundle of short story ideasEditing whichever book I try and publish this year – currently down to 2 choices, one of which will either require much more or much less work than the other…The aforementioned current Secret Re-Write

It’s a lot of work. But I’ll get through it somehow. Boiling Seas 3 definitely isn’t coming till next year at the earliest, but it was never going to be. I’m essentially torn between which old manuscript to dust off and tweak for this year. It’s a choice between dark epic fantasy and some much older cyberpunk-ey stuff, which would be a bit of a departure from my previous catalogue but is also a book I’m rather fond of. So if you’ve got any preferences, let me know.

More news soon. But it’s all ticking over well enough.

Riftwar Re-Read #5 – Krondor

The 1990s were a glorious time for computer gaming, especially adventure games – text-based games had given way to Actual Graphics and 3D environments, and the industry was booming. This was the era of King’s Quest, Monkey Island and Myst – everyone wanted to get in on the action. And because a lot of these adventures were fantasy, some game companies started drawing on existing books.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. In 1993, Sierra released Betrayal at Krondor, the first in a pair of Riftwar adventure games. It was very well received – Game of the Year territory for a few magazines. The follow-up, Return to Krondor (1998), was apparently a bit rubbish, but so it goes.

I think this is supposed to be Gorath the dark elf. Judging by the description in the book… well.

I haven’t played these games – yet. I’m definitely going to. But I have read them. Because while Feist didn’t write either game, he did turn them both into novels. He also wrote an interquel book to fill the gaps between them, and when the third game in the series was cancelled he did a novella to tie up the loose ends too. These I have read – and they’re alright.

Like the Legends of the Riftwar books, the Krondor trilogy were published out of chronological order. They’re set about a decade after Sethanon, but a good 7 or 8 years before Prince of the Blood, the next entry in the series. Prince Arutha is well established as ruler of Krondor –  he doesn’t feature much in the plot, though. Feist had already passed the torch to the next generation, Arutha’s children (shown here as happily running round the palace as kids do), in Prince of the Blood, and for the most part he doesn’t go back on that. What he does do, however, is take the opportunity to expand on some other characters. That’s right: it’s the Jimmy and Locklear show.

Krondor: The Betrayal (the novelisation of Betrayal at Krondor) has a wide group of POV characters as a necessary consequence of being based on a game with a wide group of player characters. At the forefront, though, is Squire Locklear, a minor character from Silverthorn and Sethanon who’s now all grown up and buckling his own swash. He’s a nicely written dashing rogue, mostly in the company of Owen, a young magician who’s presented quite well as powerful but out of his depth, and Gorath, who’s one of my favourite one-off characters in the series. He’s a dark elf, a group who’ve been entirely antagonists in the series so far – but Gorath has gone rogue and joined the good guys, while still being nicely morally ambiguous. His internal conflict between his own people – the rest of whom are the bad guys in this book – and his own morality is well-realised, and it’s also a welcome sight to have dark elf society depicted as, well, a society, with its own distinct culture. We get to see actual societal reasons behind all the marauding and invading, and a degree of acceptance from the human Kingdom. I didn’t expect to find this hidden away in a game novelisation, but it was a pleasant surprise.

Plot-wise it’s a simple affair, and one tied tightly to Sethanon: the dark elves are invading, again, to seize the power of the Lifestone left behind at the end of the original trilogy, supported by various elements of dark conspiracy in the Kingdom. Most of the characters are veterans of that first war too. I pity whichever gamers picked this up without having read the first Riftwar trilogy. Our heroes thwart the invasion, having some nice character moments along the way, and it’s all wrapped up in time for tea and medals.

On its own, that’d be fine. But, unfortunately, this is very clearly the book of the game, to its detriment. The story meanders through the Kingdom, diverging constantly on what must have been actual side-quests that aren’t really relevant to the plot no matter how hard Feist tries to make them so. 1 in 3 chapters seems to end on a character finding a magical item and going ‘oh interesting, I’m sure this will be useful later’, and putting it away. That’s not a chapter hook, Feist. There’s a whole sequence at the end where the magician characters are trapped on a mysterious island and have to wander around physically picking up mana to recharge their magic gauges. The description also suffers enormously: half the environments barely get a sentence before it’s time for another conversation. The Betrayal is far too tightly tied to its origin as a game to be a good book in its own right.

This is only more apparent when you read Krondor: The Assassins. Because The Assassins wasn’t based directly on a game, but was intended to fill the gap between the first two games. And because of that, it’s a far better book. Jimmy the Hand – now Squire James of Arutha’s court – goes after the various assassins and conspirators who were hinted at in The Betrayal supporting the dark elf invasion, culminating in a dramatic showdown in the desert between Arutha, Jimmy, and a bunch of demon assassins. This book is everything a retroactive filler book should be. We get to see Jimmy the Hand properly transitioning from the boy thief of the first books to the politician and spymaster he’ll ultimately become. Jumping from Sethanon to Prince of the Blood skips over a lot of development that Feist masterfully reinserts in The Assassins. I get the feeling he enjoyed going back to a younger Jimmy. Another character who’ll turn up more prominently in later books is William, son of the magician Pug and career soldier, who serves as Jimmy’s muscle. He’s a fun character: good at what he does but with a chip on his shoulder from not being a magician like his father. He and Jimmy work very nicely together and it makes the book very fun to read. And at the end, we get one last hurrah for Prince Arutha himself, who throws himself into a nice bit of demon-fighting like he never gave it up.

The Assassins doesn’t feature all the videogame nonsense of The Betrayal: there are no obvious side-quests or MacGuffins (or if there are, they’re worked far more elegantly into the story than the first book), which leaves space for a more in-depth look at the setting. Krondor is a big city, and it’s always an important one throughout the Riftwar series. This is the first book to spend almost all of its time there, and it turns the place into a really well-realised setting. As you might expect, given the trilogy is named after it.

Tear of the Gods is based on the second Krondor game, but, thankfully, Feist writes it more in the vein of The Assassins than The Betrayal. Jimmy and William are once again the main protagonists, joined now by magician Jazhara, who provides a nice balance to the other two, being somewhat arrogant but passionate with it. Following more or less directly from the plot of The Assassins, it’s half intrigue in Krondor to continue rooting out the existing conspiracy, and half dramatic quest to save the magical Tear of the Gods from being corrupted by dark magic. Now, while you can again tell that it’s based on a videogame – there are several prominent Important Items, and a bit towards the end where the party tramp back and forth from a village to a witch’s hut for Plot-Advancing Conversations – it’s much better than The Betrayal. Some of the scenes are actually very well handled: there’s a moment where Jimmy has to solve a magical puzzle lock that’s clearly just a puzzle from the game, but Feist is a little tongue-in-cheek with it and it’s rather funny.

There’s also definitely an advantage in William and James having already been set up as characters in the previous book: Feist can have their story threads continue from before rather than having to set it all up at once. It helps plot-wise too, as there’s no need to introduce the shadowy Crawler or the goings-on in Krondor again, allowing the action to start straight away. It’s far from perfect, as the videogame-ness begins to show particularly at the end, when everything comes together into a very clear boss fight, but even those scenes are able to serve an emotional plot purpose. It’s no The Assassins, but Tear of the Gods is at least better than The Betrayal.

Alas, gloriously 90s cover art, we will miss you.

We then come to the last bit of the story: Jimmy and the Crawler. This is to my knowledge the only novella in the series – apparently there were originally going to be 5 full books and a third game, but after Return to Krondor flopped it all got shelved, so Feist salvaged some of the plot and tied things up with Crawler. As it’s much shorter, there’s less room for grand description and extraneous story elements, which does keep everything tight. It’s clear that Feist had a list of things to do, though: tie up the stories of William and Jazhara, give closure to the Crawler storyline of the game (i.e. establish who this shadowy presence actually is), and add a little more to Jimmy’s journey from thief to spymaster. Off to the desert city of Durbin the trio go, therefore, chasing the last remnants of the Crawler’s network while Jimmy establishes a network of his own. We get some lovely rooftop sneaking, some tense battles in the underworld with demons and assassins, a not-entirely-unexpected romantic plot, and everything tied up neatly with the unmasking of the Crawler and everyone’s return to their proper places for Prince of the Blood and the continuation of the series proper.

Jimmy and the Crawler does the job. I do feel it could have done with being longer – the romance plotline in particular, while hinted at in Tear of the Gods, is started and finished in the space of about 50 pages. Feist clearly had grander plans for this bit of the story. But at least there is closure. It’s not a perfect ending to the arc, but it is an ending, and it’ll do.

The whole Krondor trilogy-and-a-bit is very much a filler arc. Obviously Feist had little room to deviate from the story he’d already set up – by the time Return to Krondor was released, Feist had already published the entire Serpentwar saga, meaning that he was 6 books ahead of the point in the timeline where Krondor takes place. But while Betrayal is weak and Crawler is too short, it’s still a fun enough read, especially if, like me, you’re a sucker for any Jimmy the Hand content you can get. Assassins and Tear of the Gods make it a worthwhile endeavour. You won’t miss anything by not reading them (though there are a few sneaky scenes that actually set up a villain from much later in the cycle that I was surprised by in this re-read). But you might as well. They’re a bit of fun.

Maybe it’d be a better idea to play Betrayal, read Assassins, and then play Return. I’ll let you know when I’ve done it – because I’m certainly going to give it a try.