Hûw Steer's Blog, page 2

Small Stories

I feel the urge to write about lighthouses.

This may appear to come entirely out of nowhere but I know exactly why: we took the kids at work to the theatre this week, to see a lovely little play called Tales From The Lighthouse. 2 actors, one of whom spent most of the time lurking offstage and playing the accordion, clever puppetry, good music and a nice simple message of ‘sometimes stuff gets overwhelming, but try to be kind’. If you’re in London I’d recommend it, honestly. I’m especially always a sucker for well-done puppetry and the like on a small stage; bring me your big blue sheets and model boats on a stick to evoke the endless ocean, show me those surprisingly elaborate water-horses. And most importantly, of course, the children had a good time in that little conjured world. I do love the theatre.

But I love… small stories, I think I’d call them. I love a sprawling, epic narrative as much as the next SF&F buff, and I read my fair share. I love action, I love high stakes, I love grand conspiracies, I love all the things that I often write – the things I’ve been writing lately, in short. I’ve been jumping between a cyberpunk mystery, a diamond heist and the conclusion to an RPG campaign that could very much still end in an entire city exploding if my players don’t get their act together sharpish. These are not small stories. They might not all be as grandiose as my last example but they don’t fit this bill.

I mean things like The Singer, things like my other ‘walking stories’, or like the old novella I dusted off the other week for a likely-looking submission. Slow stories, contemplative stories, stories that feel no need to rush or raise the stakes. There’s an emotional core to most of them, but it doesn’t have to be hard-hitting in the slightest. It can just be watching the world go by and loving it, if needs be. These are stories that evoke a kind of peace in me, when I read or write them – or watch them, as in the case of the aforementioned Tales From The Lighthouse. These are stories that build a world and just… let the reader sit there for a while.

I like doing that. I always do that in my writing, to some extent – but sometimes the building of the world is all the plot has time for. Sometimes my characters are busy. Sometimes there’s too much going on to simply sit back and smell the roses, or the sea breeze. But even then, sometimes one can start small and find stakes later – I’d count ‘A Vintage Atmosphere’ in this category even if stuff does start exploding in the second act. It’s still a story built on a slowly constructed landscape that I lavished a lot of detail – almost certainly too much – on describing. The story, in a way, is secondary to that setting. I wrote it because when I thought of it I wanted to feel like I was there. Same with The Singer. Same with a fair few others.

Not lately, though. I’ve been plotting and scheming and I really do need to get on with more plotting and scheming for a story that is anything but ‘small’. But sometimes one needs a break, and I find that as a writer I can make one for myself while still working. Sometimes I just need an escape. So I find a setting, and I write it, and sometimes something approximating a plot turns up along the way, but always there is the world, as rich and real as I can make it.

The play made me feel that way, while I was there, watching. So I think it’s time to see if I can conjure another world like that, someday soon. Maybe it’ll just be a lighthouse, maybe it’ll be in space, maybe it’ll be a ‘darkhouse’, which is purely a word and not even slightly a concept right now but it’s wearing a hole into the back of my brain with the weight of potential. Maybe it’ll be something entirely different.

Maybe you’ll see it. Maybe it’ll just be for me. We’ll see.

Ode to an iPad

First things first: go get a copy of Ad Luna for a mere 99p. You’ve got until Tuesday the 12th. Do it.

If there’s one thing I do well, it’s relentlessly anthropomorphise almost every object I own. And this is apart from the myriad Little Guys that lurk on every corner of my desk that are actually designed to represent some manner of creature: I mean the normal things, the things that I’ve owned for so long that they’ve taken on a life and personality of their own for me. Sometimes I don’t realise they’ve done this, until they go wrong, or break, and I have to mend or replace them and the stakes of swapping out a battery suddenly become far higher than I was expecting. I had a taste of this earlier in the year, when I finally upgraded from my ancient 2010-era Kindle to a still old but significantly less old model – but given that was actually the third Kindle of that model I’d owned and used until it gave out, replacement had lost its sting.

This week was different. This week I had to retire a very old friend. Because for my 18th birthday, almost 12 years ago, my godmother bought me an iPad, and I have used that machine every single day since, until finally I had to bite the bullet and admit that its working days were done.

Its second case and its second RWBY sticker.

That old tablet has served me impeccably in a dozen different ways for 12 years. I have watched thousands of hours of content on it; I have played thousands of hours of games; I have read thousands of pages of books and comics. For the entirety of my time at university that iPad was the repository of every piece of lecture reading I was ever given and more besides – whole periods of history were held on that machine, ready to be perused at the touch of a button. In those days my actual laptop was an elderly beast, only kept functioning by raising it off my desk with LEGO tyres so that the fan could get enough air to not overheat. Even when I replaced that, with the laptop before the one on which I write this post, it was with a hefty, heavy machine, impractical to cart around to every lecture. Not so the iPad. It was only about 5 years after I left university that I actually cleared out all the history reading from the drive to make space for other stuff – over 1500 articles and book chapters. (That I still haven’t gone through and sorted out, because while I could see the thumbnails and titles on my iPad, on my computer almost all of the PDFs are called 1012389235297343.pdf and I have no idea what they’re actually about. One day.)

In the days when my phone was rubbish, which was a very long time, my iPad was the only decent bit of portable technology I had. I awkwardly carted it around to take photos on holidays and at conventions; I once had a friend film one of my job applications with it; I recorded thousands of images of friends and family with that too-big-to-comfortably-hold screen. I used it for scripts – every Fringe show and play I performed in was held on that machine, for which it actually was very practical. In these last few twilight years it was reading, as well as watching videos and stuff like that, that kept the iPad alive and useful for me; bugger squinting at a little phone screen, I want a proper page to turn.

And I wrote on it. For any short trip that didn’t justify lugging the laptop around, the iPad was my portable solution. Every story I’ve written in the last 12 years has, at some point, been copied over to that iPad for a few thousand words of additions. And then transferred back, and fiddled with, because the formatting always got changed slightly and no matter how many settings I tweaked it would always come back to Word as US not UK English. I wrote three whole books on that iPad – novellas, sure, but whole damn stories that one day I’ll rewrite and throw out there into the world. I remember vividly when I started the first of them, sitting in an airport in New York waiting for a delayed flight, looking out at the nightscape and realising that I had all I needed to just write at the tips of my fingers.

It served me well, that iPad. And it never broke. Beyond a couple of glitches that just required a quick reset to fix it never once went seriously wrong, in 12 years. Despite the overall tone of this post I am not an Apple fanboy: I have always used Windows computers and Android phones and I genuinely dislike using their Apple equivalents; I don’t like how restrictive they are in terms of their programs and I especially don’t like how phenomenally overpriced they are. But I have to admit that Apple makes their machines to last. My wife’s old Macbook lasted a decade; my iPad 12 full years. That’s more than I can say for any other computer I’ve had by a factor of two, at least.

But times change. And this iPad is 12 years old, and though its hardware was perfectly functional, software is not so long-lasting. One by one, apps stopped working, because the OS wasn’t sufficiently up to date. I could deal with losing a few games; I had access to most by other means. I could deal with having to run BBC iPlayer in browser. I will forever salute Netflix and Channel 4 for maintaining legacy versions of their apps that keep working with older OSes (and I think that every app, particularly big streaming things like them, should have to do the same, especially the damn BBC). I could, after a while, adjust to having to run YouTube in browser, as irritating and clunky as it was. I could even just about cope with the Kindle app being unusably laggy, and having to separately offload my comics to another app to even read what I owned. I could handle the big button getting stuck and not working, forcing me to use that floaty onscreen accessibility one to close or open anything.

But all of that together was getting old. And I held on, for as long as I physically and financially could, because these things are expensive and these books don’t really pay the bills. And because over 12 years I’ve grown attached to this venerable, reliable machine, that has never once let me down.

12 years, though. It was time.

So this week I bought not a new iPad, because those prices are crazy, but a refurbished one. Only 4 years old is a lot better than 12. It arrived on Tuesday. And, of course, it was instantly and immediately better in every way. All the apps work, and are actually up to date; I can install things like Disney and Dropout, apps that didn’t exist when my iPad was new and so have never worked with it; the Kindle app is fully functional and all my comics are back at my fingertips. The keyboard doesn’t lag when I try to type in Pages. The battery is much better. The big button is no longer broken. There’s a tool that lets you do automation/shortcut stuff so I can, for instance, automatically pause my VPN when I open iPlayer so that the BBC remembers that I’m actually British. I can actually install my VPN.

It’s faster, and slightly bigger, and superior in every way. I will doubtless use it for another 12 years until the relentless advance of technology forces me to go through all this again. I remember, now it’s in my hands, just how many things that my old machine could once do that I’d forgotten about.

Felt like a new machine meant a new look. It’s not pretending to be the old one, after all.

And I turned the old iPad off, once everything was installed. I put it away. And I was sad, because it has done so much for me, that little glass box. I’ve done so much with it. After 12 years it’s impossible not to get attached to something like this. It has been reliable, and constant. It has seen me through almost half my life. If software updates hadn’t forced me to change I would have used it for another 12 years. It is an old friend, that iPad, and I will always be grateful for it, and to my godmother for getting it for me.

But of course I’m not getting rid of it. Recycling obsolete technology that I’m almost certainly never going to use again? Insanity! That iPad will sit forever next to my old Kindle, and my old phone, and my old laptop in the blue plastic box that is the Old Device Retirement Home. They can sit there and swap stories about the days when software was simpler, when batteries held charge, when screens didn’t get black lines across them for no reason. And they can do that for as long as they like. Because if, if, if something goes wrong, if modern technology fails me as, it seems, the world is going to force it to, if I am ever in dire need… those old, reliable machines will be there. That old iPad will still be there, and even if that day comes in another decade’s time, I’ll bet anything you like that it’ll still work. Slowly. After a judicious recharge and a dusting-off. But it’ll work. It always has. It probably always will.

Embers Rising Indie Sale – 5-12th August

Book sale time!

The fabulous Cindy L Sell just released the second book in The Last Draegion saga, Embers Rising – so a bunch of we indie author types have gotten together to celebrate with a cheeky sale. 10 authors, 10 books, and less than 10… whatever your currency is for the lot. (By which I mean 0.99 each.) Not bad, right?

My own Ad Luna is up for grabs, as are:

The Heir of Swansgrove by K.J. Pritchett

A Distortion of Fate by M.J. Lindsey

Dust And Crown by Havelah McLat

The Dark Side of Happiness by Coley Taylor

Qetran Odyssey by Derrick Hall

Beyond the Darkness by Avra Blake

Star Spire by E.R. Donaldson

Unnatural by H.M. Duvall

And of course Remnants of a Scarlet Flame (and Embers Rising!) by Cindy L. Sell

So why not grab a book or few this week? Go on. You know you want to.

What Have I Done: August 2025 Edition

The year is rather flying by, isn’t it? Suddenly we’re well over halfway done and it feels – in terms of writing, anyway – like I’ve both done a lot and precious little.

I have done things. There’s a whole damn fantasy trilogy out there right now waiting for you to read it.

The Owl in the Labyrinth hasn’t exactly rocked the indie fantasy world since it came out in June but given it’s a) an absolute brick of a book and b) the third in a trilogy I’m not particularly surprised. If all you people reading this who picked up a copy – or haven’t yet – could get on with it, though, I’d be much obliged. Especially if you could tell me what you thought of it!

Obviously this was the biggest piece of work I’ve done this year; obviously getting that done took a lot out of me creatively… but it’s done. And I find myself sitting thinking ‘well, what else have I got to show for myself in 2025?’ And the answer, right now, is ‘nothing’ – but thankfully that is right now. For there are short stories coming, dear readers; at least one, hopefully two, within the next few months. Some contracts are signed, others awaited, and given my last published short was around this time last year (and that was after a long production window) it’s a very welcome bit of knowledge. Where and when? Soon and I’ll tell you when they’re out! One is with a new publication, for me, and the other with some old friends…

Satisfyingly, I had to upgrade my submission tracker because it wasn’t tall enough for all the published stories; oh woe! Also robots. And a dragon.

But of course that submission grind continues, as I relentlessly pitch all the other stuff I’ve written. Some of it’s recent, most of it’s been rattling around the markets for a while now, but all of it’s good. At least I hope it is. I stare at my emails and fruitlessly check Submittable and Moksha notifications every few days, as is the writer’s curse. With some luck maybe there’ll be a bit more good news on that front before the year is out. I do hope so… especially because one of those submissions was for a full novel competition. Did they need a whole book? No, just the start of one – the winners get mentored and supported through the rest of the process. Did I send them the start of a whole book anyway? Yes I did. It’s only half-redrafted, so it definitely needs all that work regardless… but it’s a good story, I reckon. It’s a darker one than my long-form work tends to be, but it’s a good one. As is the other book that I need to start editing for agent eyes…

And then there’s the other project I’ve been putting off – entirely for selfish reasons, I confess – which is quite the opposite of dark. It’s also not writing – not technically. It has been ready for my review for some months, and to my shame I have not actually knuckled down to get it approved. But I have a little time this week, and I rather think I should try to use it wisely: if I do, then perhaps The Owl in the Labyrinth won’t be the only Big Thing I get done this year.

I always feel like I’m waiting, in this writing business. Either waiting for my work to be released, or waiting for the next submission window, or for the next response, or for the first review, or for inspiration to strike. The moments when something actually happens can feel very brief when you set them next to all the waiting you did in preparation – even when all that waiting time is filled with more writing. But good things, they say, come to those who wait, and in my experience it’s not entirely untrue. I just wish there was a fast-track service available for valued customers, is all.

Niche Nerd Stuff in Superman

I like Superman. I like him when he’s saving the world; I like him when he’s rescuing a cat stuck in a tree. I like him when he’s punching giant space robots and when he’s punching Nazis, and when he’s doing both at once. I like him when he’s struggling with his secret identity, I like him when he’s being an illegal immigrant analogy. I just like him. Sometimes you don’t need a brooding Batman in a dark detective story or whatever the hell Marvel is doing these days. Sometimes you need a hero made of pure optimism, an objectively good, kind person. You need Superman.

Thankfully, James Gunn appears to understand this, because the new Superman film absolutely nailed it.

I’m not going to try and do a full-on movie review here, because far more competent people than I in their droves have already done so. Instead, I will, as is my wont, explain a bunch of extremely niche comics things I noticed and liked – and there were a lot of these. Not that they got in the way of the viewing experience for a non-comics nerd, mind; I, whose brain is stuffed with ancient DC Comics trivia, and my wife, who has seen the Wonder Woman movies and read Hawkgirl’s Wikipedia article, both thought Superman was great. But as many of my previous posts have demonstrated, when I’m not sitting wide-eyed and honestly slightly teary at the sight of Superman in flight, I do rather enjoy spotting niche Glup Shittos and their ilk.

So if you saw Superman already and didn’t recognise some side characters, or if you haven’t seen it yet but are desperate to know if your favourite hero of the Golden Age is ever mentioned, strap in.

The Engineer

First things first, a secondary villain I really didn’t expect to see was the Engineer, who until a few years ago wasn’t even in DC Comics at all. Angelica Spica, whose blood is full of nanobots, is from The Authority, a superhero team from Wildstorm Comics which was created, essentially, as a Justice League with dirty hands and no qualms about doing what’s best for Earth, whether Earth likes it or not. Up to and including installing themselves as a surprisingly functional dictatorship.

Note Apollo (definitely not Superman) and Midnighter (definitely not Batman) in the background. ‘Stormwatch’ Vol. 3 #11 (2012)

The original comics are a damn good read, honestly. But this was a completely separate universe with completely separate characters… up until 2011, when the original Wildstorm universe ended and the characters were sort-of integrated into the main DC universe. To varying levels of success. But the Authority exists, and the Engineer, with her crazy technological powers, is a fun character, played very well by María Gabriela de Faría, who I did not expect to see on the side of Lex Luthor. (Though honestly, given how authoritarian the old Authority got, it does work pretty well.)

Buzzsaws for hands buzzsaws for hands
Superman (2025)

And speaking of Lex Luthor…

Lex and Corp

I cannot not talk about Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, because it is perfection. No origin story here: this is full-power comics Lex Luthor, with a megacorporation and an army of robot suits, crazy biotech, at least two pet metahumans, and an infinite monkey setup dedicated entirely to slagging Superman off on Twitter. This, to paraphrase my good friend Jack, is a man who weeps with anger at the mere fact that Superman dares to exist. It’s wonderful. Hoult plays him fantastically. Honestly, every actor in the film played their part fantastically, but Hoult’s Lex is just perfection.

James Gunn has the opportunity to do the funniest thing imaginable for the inevitable sequels. Just saying.

But in a nice bit of parallelling, Superman’s own supporting cast at the Daily Planet was mirrored by Lex’s supporting minions at LuthorCorp. (Why not LexCorp? I guess it sounds more official, but I did miss that old name. So much more egotistical.) And among those two minions were Otis Berg and Eve Teschmacher, two minor characters who are not from the comics at all, but from the original 1978 Superman film! They are far less bumbling now, as henchmen go, and Eve is actually quite an important character, but it was a cool nod to where it all began.

And speaking of where it all began…

That JSA Mural

There is a scene in the Hall of Justice, headquarters of the fledgling Justice Gang (name pending). First cool thing: it’s a real train station in Cincinnati, the very real train station on which the Hall of Justice was originally based way back in the 1973 Super Friends cartoon. All they had to do was write ‘Hall of Justice’ on the outside wall and it looks perfect, basically.

Cincinnati Union Terminal (Ohio History)

But inside the Hall of Justice is a big mural of some suspiciously 1930s-looking superheroes. The opening crawl of Superman establishes that metahumans/superheroes have been around for about 300 years… which means that the Justice Society of America, the original DC superhero team from the 30s and 40s, has had time to exist – and judging by that mural, did so to great success!

You asked for it, you got it. Here’s the full mural honoring the History of Metahumans in the DCU adorning the Hall of Justice in #Superman. pic.twitter.com/GUALUPFsR0

— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) July 25, 2025

Now I only spotted Wildcat, Jay Garrick’s Flash and someone who I thought was Alan Scott’s Green Lantern but apparently isn’t; some more gifted nerds than I have done a full examination and identified all of these ancient superheroes. Whether there’s been an actual JSA in this new DC film universe or whether a bunch of its members have just shown up, I guess we don’t know – but it was a very nice bit of worldbuilding that you could literally blink and miss. Give us a gritty noir Sandman film, Gunn; you know you want to.

And speaking of grit…

Woman of Tomorrow

I have heard on the grapevine that there is a Supergirl film in the works. I have heard that it is specifically based on the Tom King comic Woman of Tomorrow. Tom King is attached to the film as a producer. This, and some hints in the Superman film, confirm that basis. Woman of Tomorrow is basically True Grit in space: an alien child wants revenge on some space outlaws who killed her family, and Kara Zor-El is roped in as her reluctant guardian for some good old morally ambiguous heroing. It gets real dark. I can’t wait.

It had an angry bald genius, it had giant monsters, it had an immigration subplot, it had some niche side characters. (I will absolutely be diving into Mr Terrific; expect a future post on that guy.) It had Jimmy Olsen. (Expect a post on him. He’s so weird.) It had Krypto the Super-Dog. It had a man with his pants outside his trousers, whose most foul-mouthed utterance was ‘darn it’, and who spent his action scenes shoring up buildings, rescuing civilians, and reassuring them that all would be well. He rescued a squirrel. A squirrel.

There have been too many dark Supermen in the last decade or so. Homelander in The Boys; the Superman of the Injustice games; Omni-Man in Invincible. Superman himself, to a lesser degree, in the Zack Snyder films. While TV and comics have done their best to remind everyone what Superman should be – Superman and Lois and My Adventures with Superman are both fantastic – mainstream media has overshadowed them, I think. So many creators have been obsessed with putting godlike power in the wrong hands of late.

These are the right hands. These are Superman’s hands. This is a big blue Boy Scout with a flying dog and a big smile. And it’s only a shame that we don’t have him around in real life. Seeing him on-screen, saving that world, will have to do for now. Maybe it’ll set an example. That’s what Superman is for, after all.

Superman (2025)

A Reflection on Archetypes

I write these words at a painfully early hour for a Sunday morning, because my choir is performing at the Hyper Japan convention this morning, our soundcheck is at ten past eight, and I must shortly spend an hour on a rail replacement bus to get there. The joys, dear readers, of showbusiness. So a post about the new Superman movie, and its long-inevitable follow-up about the ridiculousness of Jimmy Olsen, is going to have to wait another week, because my brain definitely isn’t functioning well enough to write that right now.

Instead I wanted to ramble about the unexpected lucid literary moment I had last night, when I was walking around my old haunts near University College London and glimpsed the BT Tower. A familiar sight, for a former UCL student, and the star I steered by on most nights: like Coldplay I too found that no matter where I was in London, if I could see the BT Tower I could probably stumble my way home eventually. It’s not surprising, then, that in my longest, most niche unpublished novel, I blew it up. Twice.

And in the way that thoughts do when you’re walking late at night (and when you’ve had a couple of drinks, in fairness), my thoughts turned to that novel. They turned to those characters, sitting idle now for a good 7 years, the first draft of their tasks complete. They turned to that world I built. And as I thought about them I realised just how strong their character arcs were. This is a book where good people stand up against tyranny, a book about good people becoming, to varying degrees, heroes. This is a book where those good people have their roots very firmly in some of the oldest stories of the vaguely-British mythos, where many readers will have Opinions, explicit or subconscious, about how those heroes should behave.

And the more I thought about the way I wrote them all those years ago the more I thought that I captured them pretty well, actually – I think my versions fulfilled those core, long-established tropes of what these characters should be. There is a man who seeks perfection in himself, though he’d never say it aloud; damn good at what he does, without arrogance, but falling short of his own standards. His old story forces him to confront that drive for perfection and rise above it, realise that he doesn’t have to reach that standard – and multiple times throughout my new story he has to face that in himself, overcome a new perceived failing, be better without having to be the best. There is a woman who, in her old tale, is relegated suddenly to her sibling’s shadow; has to scramble to prove a worth she thought she had nailed down already. I actually removed the sibling, in my version; the shadow she must escape, the worth she must prove, is to her father instead. And her father – he might be one of my favourite characters of all; a man who has fought hard all his life to make a better world for his children and has to accept, however reluctantly, that he must let his children take on their share of the danger to see it through. And then there is the perfect warrior undone by love, and the ancient sage undone by trust, and a king who must earn his mantle, and many more besides. And honestly? The more I thought about their arcs, the more I thought about the archetypes I was echoing, consciously or not, the more I thought I’d done it quite well.

Now whether any of this is actually true or not remains to be seen. Whether I actually convey any of these arcs on the page, whether what’s in my head properly made it out, I don’t know. I won’t know until I get some other people to read this old book, I suppose. But I think, honestly, that these characters might be the best I’ve ever captured in paper and ink. They are archetypal, however much I’ve deviated from those archetypes or built them up in my head as something the source material may not really have supported. And their journey is a hard and bloody one but it is a damn good one all the same.

I’m going to have to fix up The Future King, aren’t I? All 350,000 words of it. Bugger. I thought I’d be able to take it easy now the trilogy’s complete.

A writer’s work is never done.

On Speeches, Part II

It might be almost a year since my own wedding but that doesn’t mean I’m done with writing speeches.

I write this in a state of good-natured fatigue, having spent last night carousing merrily at a friend’s wedding: much dancing, much drinking, much delight all round. I am now somewhat delicate, but when one is offered cocktails named after one’s friends’ golden retriever, one simply does not decline.

But I wasn’t just partying – I had a job to do. Or rather we had a job to do. Or rather we each had multiple jobs to do besides the one that we had to do together. My wife, being a bridesmaid, had quite a lot more to do than I, but being handy with a microphone I was also press-ganged into various bits of odd announcement and that sort of thing. But for the most important job we shared that mic, because we had a speech to deliver. A speech we co-wrote, a speech which was full of as much love and respect as we could squeeze into it. A speech which had some fairly stiff competition, given that we went last out of five, and were already up against the magnificent personal vows that the happy couple had already made.

A speech which went down very well, thankfully – it’s almost like having two professional writers for friends is quite handy when you’re in need of some good words.

It was odd, though, writing that speech, because I was obviously thinking about this time (ish) last year when I was writing my own wedding speech. A speech similarly crammed with as much love and respect as possible, just in different ways; a speech delivered to my wife and not alongside her. A speech where the pressure of getting it right was crucial to someone else’s day and not our own. And we did get it right, and they did have a wonderful day, and all was and is very well indeed. But it’s a strange feeling, still, baring your heart in that way for the people you love. I enjoy it. It’s worth it every time for the look on their faces.

And I’m not done. I have another wedding coming up, in a bit over a month; another wedding for which I must co-write a speech, for I am one of the best men/people/beings. This speech may have to strike, at least in part, a somewhat different tone: obviously we love the groom dearly, and we will make damn sure he knows that, but he is also the groom, and we are the best people, and we must therefore first subject him to at least a gentle level of mockery. He expects nothing less, and so we shall deliver.

Writing speeches I find stressful; delivering them I find a joy. I am a writer: I am no stranger to descriptions and praise and jokes and all that which goes into a speech. I am no stranger to writing speeches of all kinds. But the speeches I normally write are for other characters’ mouths, are about their loved (or hated) ones. It’s a different prospect to write one for me to say myself, about people who are really there and really matter. My fictional characters will forgive an accidental insult – my friends will not.

But it’s so worth the doing, if it makes them happy. And I’m at 2/2 so far on that front, so let’s go for 3, shall we?

Fantasy Accents Should Be Weirder

Fantasy adaptations really are very British, aren’t they?

This isn’t the first time this has occurred to me but it’s the first time I’ve really thought about it. The spark was when I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 until far too late at night on Friday, something which I very sensibly repeated last night as well. BG3’s voice cast is excellent all round; every character is beautifully acted. Pretty much every character is also some variation on a British accent of one kind or another, from Cockney to Scottish and everything in-between – more than enough variety, in other words, to make the world feel fully vibrant and alive, and not just like it’s all set in the same small English town.

And I didn’t notice. I just let the sound of the game sweep me along… until Friday. Until the arrival of a character named Ketheric Thorm.

Ketheric Thorm, by Alena Dubrovina

Ketheric is voiced by J.K. Simmons. He voices him just as well as you’d expect from Simmons, all gravelly and gravitas-y. He also does it in his normal, American accent.

And it was weird.

It instantly cracked my immersion, because that American accent just sounded wrong in a way that it’s taken me the last couple of days to be able to fully articulate. There are multiple reasons, I think, why it threw me off so much.

So far in my 50+ hours in the game, Ketheric Thorm is the only character with an American accent – out of probably hundreds I’ve come across and spoken to. And because it’s 50+ hours into the game before you meet him, it’s jarring – I’d gotten used to the generally British-ish and -adjacent sound of the game’s characters. But it can’t just be that, because there are plenty of other weird voices in the game. Just yesterday I encountered a town full of sentient psychic mushroom men, and you can be assured that they don’t just sound like British people. And yet their voices didn’t break my immersion in the slightest.

Why?

I have nothing to offer but my own conjecture, and so here it is.

Point the first:

There is a tendency, in all fantasy adaptations, for stuff to be British-sounding, and ultimately it’s probably Tolkien’s fault. The father of fantasy wrote a very British-coded set of books that were rendered in film with a fully British set of accents and actors, and that, I think, has absolutely coloured just about everything else that’s come since. We expect our sword-wielding heroes to have those accents, in part, because it’s the way things have so often been done. As Pratchett said:

“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”

Point the second:

Fantasy is usually pseudo-historical in nature. Obviously it’s not historical in a secondary world like Baldur’s Gate but whenever one creates a world where people are still running around with spears and riding horses and whatnot, it’s all going to draw from ancient and medieval history. And sorry, Americans, but the United States simply doesn’t have any of that history, because they didn’t even start existing until the 1600s.

(I’m not talking about the much longer history of indigenous Americans here, of course: I am firstly no expert, secondly not a lot of it is recorded, and thirdly fantasy fiction tends to skew towards a European-ish historical inspiration. Not all of it of course – and I’m enjoying the books I’m reading with different world origins, give me more! – but I’d say still most.)

So when one reads a fantasy book with a medieval European-inspired world, you expect European accents. And especially when you’re an English speaker you expect British ones. If I’m reading about the Count Franz Wolfgang IV, I’m picturing him as a German – if I then turn on the TV adaptation of his book and he’s American, it just doesn’t work. If Game of Thrones – whose world is literally the British Isles bashed about and stretched a bit – had cast an American as Ned Stark, the lord high Bluff Northern Bloke, nobody would have watched it.American accents feel ‘modern’ to us because in our minds they are (even though this might actually be the inverse of the historical truth, because American accents are supposedly closer to what 16th-century English accents sounded like). We experience American accents through the lens of modern TV, shows and movies set in the modern day, in reality – not fantasy. House MD suits the American accent; Haus MD, my friend James’ medieval parody, does not.

Point the first expansion on the above:

American accents in sci-fi are absolutely fine. It’s the future. America presumably still exists there, or did once. Go nuts.

Point the second expansion on the above:

What also happens in some fantasy adaptations is that what should be more generally European ends up being entirely British instead. The Witcher books, for instance, are by a Polish author who writes a Polish-coded world: the games and series do not have a Polish cast, but instead sound – you guessed it – largely like Fantasy Britain. Now partially this is because the shows are being made in English for an English-speaking and -listening audience, which largely means Brits and Americans… but I think it’s definitely those Tolkien-esque expectations bleeding through. We expect anything ancient/medieval/thusly inspired to sound British because that’s how it’s always been done.

So is this a bad thing? Not always. As a British person I always appreciate British accents in a fantasy thing being done well – not just applying them willy-nilly but thinking about what accent suits what character. Fantasy dwarfs, for instance, usually get lumped together as Scottish – it’s fine, I suppose, but far better in my mind is any adaptation where dwarfs – small hairy people whose culture revolves around mining and singing – are coded as Welsh. Stephen Briggs’ Discworld audiobooks – and Pratchett’s very clearly Welsh dwarfs – are my favourite example of this. Welsh is probably the least commonly used of the British national accents in fantasy throughout history, so I’m always happy to see it used more – my own audiobook experiments are currently featuring an awful lot of Welsh people and it’s lovely.

On a basic level you can make the higher-class characters sound ‘posh’ and the lower ones a bit more rustic: my favourite version of this is actually not fantasy at all but Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin. Every character in The Death of Stalin is Russian; every character in The Death of Stalin is played with an American or British accent, but accents that are chosen to fit that character’s background and presentation. Field Marshal Zhukov was born a peasant before working his way up to Soviet high command; he’s a rough, tough country lad, and so Jason Isaacs makes him a Yorkshireman. Stalin himself came from rural Georgia and spoke with that accent his whole life – that ‘common’ accent is translated into Cockney in the film. It works pretty damn well.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

But I am British. I’m used to British accents. I write all my books as if most of my characters were British because that’s how they sound when I read dialogue back to myself, but that doesn’t mean they have to be read that way. For every well-done translation of accents there’s yet another version of the Three Musketeers where a quartet of entirely French men are all British, or another suspiciously British Witcher, or a dozen other Anglicised characters who really should be allowed to sound different every so often. And that does not work so well. Not at all.

Writers, adaptors, filmmakers, game designers: give us more accent diversity. Fill your vast worlds with people who sound like they’re from all corners of your vast worlds. Make your Witchers sound Polish, make your Musketeers sound French. If you’re going to base a nation on a real country then base the accent on that too – and if you’re bringing that world to stage or screen or console then make sure those accents make it from page to voice. If your voices are more diverse then your options are more diverse, and I won’t need to write posts like this about J.K. Simmons sticking out like a sore thumb, because he won’t be alone.

And yes – throw in some Americans too. Why not? It’s fantasy, not reality.

Feedback – This Time It’s Personal

It is a surprisingly simple thing to make a writer happy. You can write reviews, you can accept a story, you can do many things, but ultimately, all you need to do is this:

A couple of my friends have pulled this on me recently, which is honestly outrageous: I didn’t even give them copies, or talk to them particularly about my books, or anything. The devious bastards just decided to start reading all by themselves. And given at least one of them is now on the second book of the Boiling Seas they appear to have the audacity to be enjoying the reading. How dare they. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Knowing that someone somewhere is actually reading my books is honestly what makes it all worthwhile, as a writer. I can sell or give away hundreds of copies but by and large those books are hurled into the void, and I never actually know if they’ve been read, if they’ve been enjoyed – I certainly don’t have the reviews to prove it. Among many other things the hunt for feedback is the curse of any creative. We spend so long working on books, art, whatever, and by and large we get nothing but silence in return.

But sometimes it does work out. Sometimes we do get feedback and reviews or even just acknowledgement, that our work hasn’t been wasted. And in this modern age that largely comes online, on Amazon pages or Goodreads or hidden away in comments on blogs that can only actually be found by the occasional narcissistic searching of one’s own name. But sometimes it’s tangible. Sometimes there is something to see. Like when I went to my old local library to add The Owl in the Labyrinth to their kindly curated little collection of my books – and saw, when I wandered over to the fantasy section, that The Blackbird and the Ghost and The Singer were not in fact on the shelves, which means that either they’ve been removed from the catalogue for some reason or that someone has actually taken them out to read them. Or when the one kid at work who I know for a fact has read The Fire Within asks me for the umpteenth time when I’m going to write the second one (answer: eventually).

Or when a friend sends me the picture above, and I know that they liked their introduction to the Boiling Seas enough to carry on. Because every time I see that someone’s bought or read Nightingale’s Sword I relax a little, because I’ve been thinking more and more of how Blackbird is actually quite a weak book, in comparison to what comes after it; that I don’t want to disappoint people with the start of the trilogy so that they never get to the good stuff that comes later. Because it is good stuff, or at least I think so; more imaginative and better-written by far than that initial, brief adventure.

But that’s overthinking it. Because the important thing, the affirming thing, the thing that makes me want to keep writing, is that somebody’s reading.

It is a surprisingly simple thing to make a writer happy.

Too Many Stories, Too Little Time

I keep having ideas. It’s actually slightly annoying.

At this point I have three different stories actively on the go, and annoyingly I’m enjoying writing all of them. I have ‘The Package’, the continuation of my prompt response from my interview on Indiosyncrasy, which is now 16,000 words long and still showing not many signs of stopping. Largely because ‘The Package’ is, in fact, a secret sequel to a trio of old stories that will never see the light of day in their current form, because they were written over a decade ago when I’d first discovered cyberpunk and decided I might as well have a go. At the time, they were good examples of my writing. No longer. But I still love the concept, and dusting off investigative journalist Damon Bryce has been immensely fun. Writing a suspicious bastard is great.

I haven’t worked on that story for over a week, though, because publishing The Owl in the Labyrinth left me feeling a bit bereft. The Boiling Seas are in my blood – especially in this hot weather – and so I started playing around with a little bonus story I’d had on my mind for a while. It’s not another full book, nor is it a sequel – just an extra, which I’ll talk more about eventually. It’s Tal, and it’s Lily, but not quite as you’ll have seen them before, and it’s also an excuse to flesh out a piece of rather important backstory. And again, I just love writing these characters, no matter what form their story might take. And I have placed them in their element, of course, namely trying to steal some stuff, and thus they’re having just as much fun as me.

But I haven’t worked on that story for a few days either, because of course I had another idea, fuelled by several train journeys on which I’ve been reading a bunch of old  Doctor Who books in an effort to remind myself what good Doctor Who looks like after the tragedy that was the end of the last series. Side note: some of those books are really good sci-fi, not just because they’re Who but because the writers take advantage of the freedom of prose over script to get a lot more clever with time travel and with very interesting aliens than an actual episode would allow. Worth reading.

And so of course with a head already full of monsters I had an idea for a story of my own. Not the first time I’ve had a Doctor Who-related idea but the first time I’ve actually started writing it. I’ve placed a monster in an environment and time in which I don’t ever recall seeing it before (and, of course, I’ve played around with what that monster is as a result of that environment), and I’m seeing what happens. I know roughly where it’s going. I know what I want this creature to do. What I don’t know is if the Doctor and co will ever actually need to show up. I’m hoping that this is a good enough SF concept to stand on its own before I actually bring in any too explicit Who-ness. It’s creepy, and it’s unpleasant, and it’s a very fun – but difficult – perspective to write from. The monster’s perspective, that is. That’s the most fun part. It’s not often that I take on a truly alien point of view and while it’s difficult to get right I’m having a blast trying.

So these stories are all well and good, but each is not only distracting me from the others but distracting me from the other stuff: my RPG writing, my next long-form thing, and the big project that I need to get stuck into. It is a daunting project. It is an exciting project. It is a project that could change my writing fortunes dramatically, if it works. And so it’s a bloody hard project to get properly started due to that pressure alone, let alone the fact that it’s just objectively a lot of work.

But I am writing, and I am enjoying doing it. And that is ultimately the most important thing.

Also, go read the Boiling Seas books. Go on. Go do it now. You know you want to.