Hûw Steer's Blog, page 26

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #11 – Productivity Ahoy..?

As I considered doing a few weeks ago, I’ve taken the week off work to get on with some writing… which unfortunately means I actually need to be productive for the next week instead of just lounging about the house and painting Warhammer. Not that I won’t be doing some of that anyway, given my local Games Workshop reopens on Wednesday…

So, priorities for the week as follows:

Come up with a title for Boiling Seas 2Cut many thousands of words from Boiling Seas 2Fill in all the gaps in Boiling Seas 2 by setting up all the cool plot points that I only thought of halfway through writing the first draftGenerally make proper progress on editing Boiling Seas 2

Also, I’ve got a short (or maybe long) story to write, as part of a new artists’ network, Artemix. They’re currently running the Chain Project, which is basically Chinese Whispers but with artwork – an artist gets a prompt, has a week to make something based on it, then they give their piece to another artist, who makes their own something based on that piece, and then they give it to someone else… You get the idea.

My week is this week. I’ve just received a mysterious folder from the last artist in my chain, which I’m not going to look at until tomorrow morning when I can properly get started. It’s going to be fun. There might even be a show in the summer of all the pieces, general state of the world permitting.

So yeah, hopefully a productive week ahead. Hopefully. You’ll find out how it went next Sunday…

Short Story: Planetkiller

Happy Easter, everybody. It’s always nice to sit back and celebrate the day that Christ was hatched again from a giant chocolate egg. It’s even sunny outside.

If you fancy something to do with your eyes while eating copious amounts of chocolate, why not take a look at this short story? It’s another one I wrote a few years ago (2018 judging by the metadata), and like ‘First Contact‘ it was based on a prompt from /r/WritingPrompts on reddit:

“After Paris was razed by an alien weapon the world awaits the imminent invasion. What humanity doesn’t know is that it was just a stray shot of a war fought millennia ago.”

Paris does not appear in this story, but I liked the idea a lot. Maybe eventually I’ll work it up into something longer.

Read and enjoy here.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #10 – Burned Out

Clocks went forward. Forgot. Slept less.

Spent today writing applications and editing short stories and trying to write more stuff. Insufficient brain for proper blog post. Apologies.

Did finish Mankind Divided DLCs again this week though. Good storytelling. Sad there’s no more. Actual thoughts will come later.

Also did this Turing Challenge thing which was fun.

And the IDW Transformers comics are awesome.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #9 – Side-Stories

If you’ve been reading these posts for a while, you’ll know that I really like Deus Ex. Specifically the modern games (I own the original and Invisible War, but I just haven’t been able to get into them). At the start of this latest lockdown – which seems like forever ago – I replayed Human Revolution, one of my favourite games ever. It was fun. I got thoroughly immersed in the world again, even if I now know it so well that I’ve started min-maxing a little.

But a game I don’t know so well is the sequel, Mankind Divided. I’d played it once before, but on a laptop that could only barely run it at all – even on minimum graphics it lagged enormously, and while I could get through the game, it was a serious struggle. When a game starts to freeze when someone fires more than one bullet at a time, you know the hardware’s not up to it.

But then in February I obtained access to a significantly newer and more powerful laptop. And as I’d just finished playing Human Revolution, and re-reading Black Light and Children’s Crusade, I figured I might as well carry on and play the second game again.

And holy hell it was good.

Long story short, but nobody likes augmented people anymore – as in they’re now segregated on public transport, beaten up by corrupt cops, and packed off to cyberpunk ghetto-cities whenever society gets the chance. In Human Revolution, people complemented Jensen’s augments in the street. In Mankind Divided, people are openly shouting insults at him, and the police take every opportunity to get in his way. It’s obviously an analogue to several different bits of history and, depressingly, things that are still happening today.

And even the ghetto is gorgeously rendered.

And it’s very well realised. It’s hard to tell who’s the ‘bad guy’ a lot of the time, which in a setting where you’re fighting against the literal Illuminati is quite impressive. People are openly discriminating against augmented people… but given that a few years earlier augmented people all turned into insane rage-zombies for a day and killed a lot of innocent people, it’s not entirely black-and-white. Mechanical augmentations like the ones in Deus Ex are dangerous. Should they be regulated? Should augmented people be separated from society for their own safety?

In Human Revolution, the ‘Purity First’ group of anti-aug terrorists seem like madmen at first – but by Mankind Divided, it seems like they might have had a point. And when another group of pro-aug terrorists turn up, things get even messier.

While the gameplay is pretty much the same (stealth, shooting, conversation mini-games and hacking to your heart’s content) albeit with more bells and whistles (shiny new augmentations, including a TASER-fist and remote hacking), the way the story progresses feels very different. Human Revolution sent Adam Jensen across the world, from Detroit to Hengsha to the Arctic and several places in-between. There were side-missions scattered through each hub city, enough to keep you occupied for a while, but the plot kept things moving.

But Mankind Divided, apart from a few story missions that take you elsewhere for long enough to change the scenery, is entirely set in a hellish version of Prague. You’d think that lacking multiple hub cities to play around in would make the game seem less deep.

You’d be wrong.

Prague is probably the best-constructed little open world I’ve ever wandered around in in a game. There are tons of side-missions and secondary characters, and every one is a seriously satisfying mini-plot. There are drug dealers to bust, murders to solve, rogue AI to rescue. The choices in them are amazing too, and they have consequences. When you can only stop one innocent augmented person from being deported to the ghetto, which do you choose? You’d better choose wisely – because when you visit that ghetto later in the game, you’re going to run into the one you didn’t save, and they won’t be happy.

The police aren’t very nice in this game. But are they just doing their jobs, or are they actually prejudiced? (Bit of both. Lots of the latter.)

It’s not a ‘deep’ game – you’re not progressing through as much of the world as its predecessor. But it’s broad, and every side-story makes the world feel even richer. The fact that you keep returning to Prague helps, honestly. You watch the city change as a result of your actions, in the main story and in the side-missions. What you do has consequences. What you fail to do has consequences.

Oh, and there’s one DLC where you pull off a virtual bank heist with a crew of sarky hackers, and another where you have to break out of a crazy super-prison in the middle of the desert.

There’d better be a third game, Square Enix. Please. The Avengers is crap, apparently, so just give us more Deus Ex.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #8 – Getting My Act Together

I have long been a master of procrastination.* This manifests itself in my writing. Often.

I have two finished novels that need significant edits so they’re ready to send to agents/publish – and that’s not including Untitled Second Boiling Seas Book, or the still-unfinished Salvage Seven. I’m also working on a short story for an April deadline (the second version, sort of, of ‘Vigil‘), which is at least written, but needs cutting down and plenty of tweaking.

If I had nothing else to do but write, I’d have been able to get all these things done long ago. Unfortunately, I have a job to do and bills to pay, and though the fact that my job involves a lot of writing makes it enjoyable, it also burns me out a bit when it then comes to writing creatively. The last thing I want to do after a full day of staring at a document on my computer is spend a few hours more staring at a different document and doing edits.

One of my novels has been waiting for edits for about 3 years now. The other isn’t much younger.

But I have deadlines, both self-imposed and external, to meet, and so I need to get my words in a row and get on with meeting them. In priority order:

Edit the sword-and-sorcery short story, because the deadline is April 1st and it’s probably about 2000 words too long and ramblingEdit Boiling Seas 2, because I want to publish it in the summer and it’s probably about 20,000 words too long and ramblingAlso sort out the cover for Boiling Seas 2 so it looks niceAlso come up with a title for Boiling Seas 2Start thinking about the plot of Boiling Seas 3?Go back and edit the older novels, because they deserve better than just sitting on my hard drive

I just hate editing. Or at least I hate starting editing; it’s usually ok once I’ve gotten into the swing of it. But the idea of going back over words I’ve already spent plenty of time writing once instead of writing new ones is just very frustrating. And due to the aforementioned job, I don’t have that much time in a day to write – I usually take an hour or two before I start work in the morning. I want that time to be spent writing, not tinkering.

Therefore, a vicious circle of unending procrastination. Sigh.

Maybe I’ll take a few days off just to get on with things. Easter isn’t far away, and bank holidays are gifts from the gods. Or I suppose God, given all that Jesus stuff. Either way, a little retreat to get some writing done would do me some good. It worked for ‘The Only Cure‘, after all.

*It was even the namesake of my old band.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #7 – Rambling About Books

Slowly but surely, I’ve been working my way through the many books I bought/was given around my birthday and Christmas. (As well as Carried Away, which I have almost finished, honest, Ethan). It’s been a slow process, because new books keep coming out, people kept giving me more, and the lack of commute for the last year has really eaten into my normal reading time.

But I’ve gotten through a fair few recently, including almost all of my festive reading list (Carried Away still ongoing…). I don’t quite have the brainpower to write full reviews of all of them, and you probably don’t want to read reviews of all of them, but I’ll summarise my thoughts on a few of them below.

Ready Player One is a book I’ve heard a lot about, and most of it was quite critical, especially after the film adaptation released. I haven’t seen the film, and hadn’t been intending to read the book… but then my mother bought me Ready Player Two for Christmas, so I figured it was about time I read the first one.

And I really, really enjoyed it. I devoured it in two or three sittings. It was fast-paced and full of 80s nostalgia, which while I don’t directly get as a child of the 90s/2000s was still really well-done. The world was really well put together and described – if humanity really did build a massive virtual reality universe tomorrow, it would look like Cline’s OASIS, full of videogame and film references from top to bottom. And yes, the protagonist is a somewhat misogynistic nerd stereotype at first, but he does get much better as the book goes on – and even though it was a minor aspect of his journey, his push towards physical fitness and mental wellbeing was quite well handled. I had to stop myself from immediately picking up Ready Player Two and force myself to take a break before devouring that too. Good book.

Saga. Saga is amazing. If you haven’t read Saga, then you need to stop whatever it is that you’re doing and go and read Saga, because it is quite possible the best comic series I have ever read, and one of the best sci-fi series of the century. I’m not exaggerating. It’s sort of Romeo and Juliet, but in space, and Romeo and Juliet are a) adults, b) soldiers on opposite sides of a brutal interplanetary war, and c) don’t die, have a baby and go on the run to try and have a vaguely normal life while literally everyone in the universe tries to capture, kill and generally be unpleasant to them.

It’s beautifully written and beautifully illustrated. I finished Volume 9 a few weeks ago. It’s not the end – it’s the end of the first half of the story, apparently, and the authors have been working hard for years on the next half. It also broke my heart.

Read Saga. I will come to your house and force my copies into your hands if necessary. You won’t regret it.

I also really enjoyed Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythm of War, and was so hooked on his Cosmere by the end that I immediately ploughed into The Way of Kings Prime, which was a fascinating insight into what the Stormlight Archive could have been – but if I start talking about Sanderson in this post I’ll literally never stop, so I’ll save that for a later date.

Last but far from least, I’ve started rereading Dan Abnett’s various Inquisition books, because Penitent, the second Bequin book, finally exists after 9 years. I didn’t wait quite that long, as I only came to Eisenhorn and Ravenor a few years ago, but it’s still a very exciting prospect. But I’m making myself reread everything before I start Penitent, and I’m very, very glad I did.

I’m halfway through the Eisenhorn trilogy now, and I’d forgotten how fantastically written it is. Eisenhorn is a marvellous protagonist, and Abnett’s creation of his own spaces and worlds within the main Warhammer 40,000 universe is second to none. If you like Sherlock Holmes and detective dramas, and also eldritch horrors from the depths of space and fantastic action sequences, start with Eisenhorn and go from there. If you prefer Band of Brothers or Sharpe, read Gaunt’s Ghosts.

Lots more books on my list now, including Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth… but first, the grim darkness of the far future.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #6 – World Book Day

I’d almost forgotten about World Book Day. In fairness it hasn’t been quite as relevant to me, a supposedly adult man, since I was at school and it was actually an Event. But walking through the shop the other day and finding a stand of the new books brought it all back in the best way possible.

Getting the books themselves was always great. There was usually a representative from one of the various series I’d been reading at the time (given I devoured books like they were biscuits throughout school the odds were always in my favour) – and occasionally I’d manage to come by an extra token from somewhere or other and pick up more than one. The concept of the short books is a great one – whether you read a lot or barely at all, you could manage a hundred pages or so. And some of them were genuinely great. I still have quite a few of my World Book Day books – Eoin Colfer’s The Seventh Dwarf was a cracking little entry into Artemis Fowl, for instance.

It’s also interesting to look back and realise that these books are essentially all short stories – which may seem obvious now, but not to a child to whom a book was a book, no matter how long it was. Reminds me to keep hold of all the random tangential shorts I’ve written for Boiling Seas and my other series, just in case…

This year I grabbed Skulduggery Pleasant, and Derek Landy’s outdone himself in squeezing a nice rounded plot and plenty of sarky banter into such a short tome.

The other highlight of the day were, of course, the costumes. I was a Viking, I was a Boxtroll – and on one occasion I was Arthur Dent, complete with home-make Hitchhiker’s Guide prop, a costume I later used again at MCM Comic-Con. (If you’re looking for a cosplay, it’s a great one – no awkward armour or unwieldy props, just a comfy dressing-gown. Almost fell asleep on the Tube.) Everyone at school turned out in costume, and while there were always plenty of Harry Potters there were loads of weird and wonderful ones too.

We lost the costumes at high school, alas, but the spirit of the day remained. And when I picked up Apocalypse Kings from the shop this week, it turned out to still be there now.

Happy World Book Day, everyone.* Wear something stupid and do some reading.

*On the 4th of March, obviously. Better early than late, I figured.

Short Story: Vigil

In order to take a break from Boiling Seas and editing, I’ve been writing some shorter pieces. The one I’m currently working on is going to be an entry for the wonderfully named Tales from the Magician’s Skull – I haven’t written proper sword-and-sorcery for quite a while now, and it’s nice to stretch myself a little by going back to the classics.

I’m working on a story now – my second attempt. I was quite happy with the first go, but not quite enough to enter it – though I’ve pinched some of the best snippets for V2. I want to take the actual entry in a very different direction. This one ended up a bit more… well, depressing than I intended. Things got introspective.

But I don’t want to let V1 languish in obscurity forever, so I’ve uploaded it here. It’s about a mercenary at work, doing a job that turns out to be a bit more morally complicated than it first seems. There are parts that owe a lot to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ‘Ironclads‘ (not the novel, the short story from the Shadows of the Apt universe, which is a series you should all immediately read in full because it’s fantastic) – because it’s the best-written description of someone using plate armour that I’ve ever read.

You can read it here. Hope you enjoy it.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #6 – On Romance

Short one this week, as I have chocolate-eating and old-film-watching obligations with my partner. But as it’s that time of year again, I started thinking about writing romances and all that jazz… and the fact that I’ve never really done so.

At least I’ve never done so and been happy enough with it to actually consider letting anyone else read the results. Except, I suppose, the end of a certain short story (I won’t mention which, in case you haven’t read it, and also because now hopefully you’ll go through all my short stories to try and find it), which while it does technically constitute a romantic bit is a surprise, and something that’s not present in the rest of the story at all. So I’m not counting that one.

That’s pretty much all the romantic sub-plotting I’ve done really: setting up some relationships throughout the course of the book but not actually pulling the trigger and doing anything with them until the very end. This has the pleasing side-effect of sparing me the necessity of actually writing the characters as in any kind of relationship for longer than a few hundred words. That much I have done a few times: in said short story and in another couple of first-drafted novels that won’t be seeing the light of day for a while at least.

Maybe it’s just because I get too wrapped up in the setting and the madcap plots to think about romance – and by extension so too do my characters. There’s not much time to worry about going for a first kiss when there’s a world to save/evil robots to fight/mystical MacGuffins to obtain.

If any writers who have done romance at all are reading this: how do you do it?

Still, maybe I’ll give it a proper go at some point. I’m in the middle of what’ll be a trilogy at least with the Boiling Seas. Three books might be long enough to set something up and then actually spell out some of the consequences. Who knows?

Happy Valentine’s, everyone.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #5 – On Romance

Short one this week, as I have chocolate-eating and old-film-watching obligations with my partner. But as it’s that time of year again, I started thinking about writing romances and all that jazz… and the fact that I’ve never really done so.

At least I’ve never done so and been happy enough with it to actually consider letting anyone else read the results. Except, I suppose, the end of a certain short story (I won’t mention which, in case you haven’t read it, and also because now hopefully you’ll go through all my short stories to try and find it), which while it does technically constitute a romantic bit is a surprise, and something that’s not present in the rest of the story at all. So I’m not counting that one.

That’s pretty much all the romantic sub-plotting I’ve done really: setting up some relationships throughout the course of the book but not actually pulling the trigger and doing anything with them until the very end. This has the pleasing side-effect of sparing me the necessity of actually writing the characters as in any kind of relationship for longer than a few hundred words. That much I have done a few times: in said short story and in another couple of first-drafted novels that won’t be seeing the light of day for a while at least.

Maybe it’s just because I get too wrapped up in the setting and the madcap plots to think about romance – and by extension so too do my characters. There’s not much time to worry about going for a first kiss when there’s a world to save/evil robots to fight/mystical MacGuffins to obtain.

If any writers who have done romance at all are reading this: how do you do it?

Still, maybe I’ll give it a proper go at some point. I’m in the middle of what’ll be a trilogy at least with the Boiling Seas. Three books might be long enough to set something up and then actually spell out some of the consequences. Who knows?

Happy Valentine’s, everyone.