Hûw Steer's Blog, page 20

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.

Artefacts

I like stuff. As I’ve mentioned before in various contexts, I am descended from a long line of Men With Many Sheds, a terrible condition which will inevitably result in me having far too many power tools, random electrical components, and in severe cases enough parts to build at least two cars, if only said parts were actually from the same type of car.

As I’m still currently renting, and living in London, I have yet to actually possess a shed of my own. But that hasn’t stopped me acquiring and inheriting plenty of interesting things – and for the purposes of this post it’s the inheriting that’s most important. Old watches, books, tools – the things I have that once belonged to someone else, someone long or relatively recently gone, in most cases, are some of the things I treasure most.

There is a writing connection here. As I do sci-fi, I often find myself writing about the future – which allows me to take objects from today and turn them into artefacts that will be valued in years time. This gets done all the time with famous buildings and the like – I try to take more obscure things. There are swords being swung around in my current WIP, for instance, which are currently on display in London museums as replicas of ancient blades. I use houses I’ve lived in, places I’ve worked. It’s really fun to invent future histories for utterly mundane things – if you’re writing, I highly recommend trying it. Because everyone has some stuff somewhere that to an outside eye would just be rubbish, but could become so much more with the right context.

Take, for example, the trappings of my great-grandfather. By all accounts he was a fascinating (and highly amusing/irritating, depending on who you talk to) man: the story I remember best is the time he befriended a German veteran amputee by immediately, and against my grandparents’ strict instructions, Mentioning The War. I did meet him, I believe, but he died when I was about 1. I have no memories of him beyond the stories my family have told me.

But I do have his spirit level. It’s a beautiful thing, all wood and brass – it had been hiding at the back of my dad’s garage for some time (after a long time in his dad’s garage). Amusingly, for some reason it has 2 bubbles, which somehow give different versions of ‘level’. That sums him up pretty well. I also have a gorgeous old leather suitcase – he was a draughtsman in the war, so had many boxes full of drawing tools and pencils and the like. I use it to store all my notebooks and hand-writing/drawing implements. It just feels right to do so: I’m no great artist, but I think he’d be happy to know it’s being used that way.

The best example, though, is all the cassette tapes.

A small fraction of my collection. I have hidden the big box well. My parents still do not suspect.

I’m no great audiophile, but I recognise the superior sound of vinyl and the massive convenience of .mp3. CDs are, these days, ultimately a means to a digital end, though it is nice to have a physical thing sometimes. And then there’s tapes. They do not have great sound quality. They are not convenient. They tangle, they break, they jam. With the one exception of extremely high-capacity storage (which is useful if you’re an archive and that’s about it), tapes are rubbish.

I have dozens of them. I still have a portable player. In fact I have 3, though 2 of them have been in my ‘to tinker with and maybe fix’ pile for some time. (The working one is my childhood one, a venerable orange beast.) I grew up with tapes, or at least in the transition period where CDs were very much a thing, especially for music, but audiobooks were mostly still cassettes and every car and stereo still played the damn things. But that was 20-odd years ago. Why do I still have a pile of dusty cassettes?

Because my grandfather made them for me. He was the custodian of old BBC radio comedy, the shows that are almost entirely responsible for my current sense of humour: The Navy Lark, a bit of Hancock, and most importantly of all The Goon Show, one of the most influential comedy programmes of all time. (Seriously: if it’s remotely absurd today, chances are it’s got roots in the Goons.) He had them all on tape, and when he showed them to me, and I turned out to absolutely love them, he fired up his two-track stereo and made copies for me. Because you could just do that with cassettes: play the tape on one side and record it onto a blank on the other. Every time we visited my grandparents, I’d come home with another set of Goon Show episodes, and I’d spend the time in-between listening to them all again and again. It is not an exaggeration to say that those tapes made me the person I am today.

He’s been gone a few years now, sadly. But that means I now have most of his original tapes. Nobody else in the family wants them, and most probably don’t even have a way to play them. But I do. And while most of what I’ve got on tape is freely available online, every so often I’ll dust off the player and listen to some old comedy as it was intended: a bit crackly, plugged into an inconvenient old box that the rest of the world left behind decades ago. It’s awkward, it’s a bit annoying, it’s wonderfully entertaining and I wouldn’t change it for the world. Bit like Granddad, really.

Old stuff isn’t just stuff. Objects have stories. I like to tell them. You’d be surprised what an old tape can tell you, even without listening to it.

On Redrafting

My current WIP is a bit unusual for me, because I’ve already written it once.

I’ve been meaning to edit this book for a while, but hadn’t gotten round to it for a multitude of reasons (not least the fact that I had other books to write). So it’s been sitting on my hard drive waiting for… *checks file date* 4 years. Wow. That’s longer than I thought.

I should say now: I’m not going to tell you what this book is about. It is (at least in my opinion) one of the best story ideas I’ve ever had, and I thought the first draft was, overall, bloody good. But I’m saving it. I would like, in theory, to send this one out to agents and try and get it published traditionally. So I probably won’t be self-publishing it – which means, alas, that I can’t tell you much about it, just in case. It is dystopian, and I would probably call it sci-fi over fantasy, but that might purely be because of the tech level and not the actual themes. That’s all I’m saying.

But said first draft is definitely not ready for agents. It’s got plenty of flaws that developed along the way – many of which were entirely predictable, given my usual approach to planning and outlining. Namely, that I don’t really do it at all and just throw myself into the process with no idea of what’s actually going to happen. (In partial fairness to me, I think I did write an outline for this book at some point, but I suspect that I didn’t do that until I was about 50,000 words in, and only vaguely paid attention to it.

Said approach has some advantages: it leaves plenty of room for flights of inspiration, which can often lead to some truly spectacular set-pieces as I think ‘But what if this…’, and then write it down before my rational brain can stop myself. The problem is that I inevitably think of great plot points that really needed to be introduced at the beginning two-thirds of the way through. For previous books – i.e. Nightingale’s Sword – I went back through with a fine-tooth comb, cutting excess bits and adding in suitable foreshadowing to make everything seem a bit smoother. But this book is… longer. A lot longer. Like, ‘I should probably pitch it as a trilogy’ longer.

So rather than spending months going through and editing, I’ve just started again. This way I can get the world looking the way it should right from the start, instead of faffing around trying to warp everything to a new design. I know the plot already, I know the characters, and I know the handful of new things I need to have them do. I just have to get it all flowing in some slightly different directions. I’ve done this once before, with my very first ‘novel’ – the first time through, it was about 50,000 words long. By the time I finished the second go, it was about 200k. (One day, I’ll go back and finish the sequel. Those poor lads have been sitting on their cliffhanger for far too long.)

I also have the advantage of 4 years’ more experience. There are some scenes from the first draft that I might well lift out wholesale, or with minor tweaks, but for the most part I’d like to think I’m a better writer than I was 4 years ago.

But revisiting the story I told back then is… nice. It’s all just how I left it. I might be rewriting it from the ground up, but fundamentally I was very proud of the concept and the characters, and bringing them to life again is really fun so far. (And I’ve only actually introduced 3 of them, and their best moments are very much yet to come.)

So stay tuned, though any news of this story will be a long time coming. But you’ll definitely see it some day, in some form. It’s too good to sit on forever. At least I think so. I just have to get it to a stage where other people think the same.

The Emperor of the United States

A while ago I was in San Francisco, and I took the opportunity to visit a grave in Colma. Actually, I spent some time trying to find a plaque in a bus station in the city centre, only to find that it had been moved a few months before to a pub several miles away. But I persevered. Because it was the grave of a genuinely unique person in US history: the first, last and only Emperor of the United States of America, Protector of Mexico, Joshua Norton.

His Imperial Majesty.

I was in SF for work, and coincidentally I’d actually read about Norton a week or so before, in Gaiman’s Sandman of all places (issue #31, ‘Three Septembers and a January’). Gaiman’s version of the late Emperor was brilliant, and it got me researching – when I realised I was going to the same city where he’d ‘reigned’, I had to go and see for myself. Cue much wandering around a bus stop.

Joshua Norton was once a wealthy businessman, but after losing all his money on a series of shipwrecks and bad deals, he went into seclusion for a couple of years. When he emerged in 1859, Joshua Norton issued a proclamation to the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. To save America, he appointed himself “Emperor of these United States.”

The papers ran the proclamation. And for the next 21 years, Emperor Norton reigned in San Francisco.

He was not taken wholly seriously, of course. Norton was very likely mentally ill, possibly from a breakdown after the loss of his fortune. But he lived a pretty good life. The eccentric Emperor spent his days inspecting the city’s parks and infrastructure, his nights attending political galas. He had no money, but pretty much everywhere in the city let him eat for free. He made small amounts of money from selling his own banknotes to tourists. He wore an imperial uniform that the US Army gave him as a present – when it wore out, the city government made him a new one.

San Francisco loved their Emperor. It was seemingly hard not to like the eccentric Norton. He issued proclamations constantly, demanding everything from the dissolution of Congress to the construction of a bridge across San Francisco Bay. He also, apparently, hated the abbreviation ‘Frisco’ (so watch your tongue, lest you be haunted by an imperial ghost). The government didn’t action any of his demands, of course. Norton was essentially harmless: the people liked him, but he had no political force. (Except, notably, in the case of Hawaii: King Kamehameha V refused to recognise the US government, and instead chose to deal only with Norton as the legitimate ruler of America. Nothing ever came of it, as Kamehameha died shortly afterwards, but still. Cool.)

Sandman #31, ‘Three Septembers and a January’

But for all his dreams – or delusions – of imperial grandeur, Norton was a poor man who lived alone and survived only off human kindness. He was very likely mentally ill. He died, almost penniless and alone, on a street corner, in the rain, in 1880.

And for almost anyone else, that would have been that. For anyone else in Norton’s position, their death would have gone unnoticed. But Norton was Emperor Norton.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, 10,000 people turned out for Norton’s funeral. Their Emperor was dead, and they had genuinely loved him.

San Francisco looked at this probably mad man, listened to him proclaim himself Emperor, and collectively thought ‘sure, why not?’ And they fed him, clothed him, listened to him for his whole life. When Norton was arrested and his prosecutor tried to send him to an asylum, there was public outcry. He was pardoned, and from that moment on the San Francisco Police would salute him in the street. The city adopted this strange man as their own, for no other reason than because they thought it right.

Even now, well over 100 years later, San Francisco remembers him. There are plaques to him dotted around the city, his image appears on the side of buses and phone boxes. There’s a campaign to have the Bay Bridge renamed after Norton, given it was technically his idea first.

I found Norton’s gravestone en route to the airport on my way home. People are still leaving coins and flowers there.

Sometimes, human beings prove themselves to be better than we give them credit for.