Hûw Steer's Blog, page 27

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #5 – Using What You Know

When I started writing, I started writing fantasy. I have, of course, continued to do so, but I’ve branched out a bit into sci-fi as I’ve gone along. But there were a few reasons I started with fantasy, and there are a few more reasons that I’ve continued doing it: because while I’m far from being an expert, I’ve picked up a lot of random bits of knowledge of history, culture and the like over the years, and they help to make things feel more alive.

I would tentatively describe myself as a historian (unless it’s on my business cards or my LinkedIn). I do, after all, do history for a living. And I’ve studied various bits of it for most of my life. Now I won’t pretend that I’ve actually remembered 90% of the things I’ve learned – if you’ve also studied history and written essays you’ll know that having reference books on hand the whole time means you don’t even have to remember dates – but some things have stuck with me. And because of the nature of most fantasy, those random bits of knowledge are the sorts of things that can be liberally sprinkled throughout tales of pseudo-medieval and ancient worlds to spice them up a bit.

For example: thanks to the AQA GCSE History syllabus and the fact that I lived near the Welsh border, I’ve learned a lot about the history of a) medicine and b) castles. Medical history is brilliant – the development of knowledge of the human body and science in general is fascinating to study (hence why I picked it up again at degree-level).

There were philosophical debates about the superpowers of angels in the Middle Ages that genuinely read like DC/Marvel fans debating who would win in a fight between Batman and the Hulk (Batman, fight me). Hippocrates and Galen’s theory of the Humours looks idiotic at first glance, but when you delve a little deeper you can see that it wasn’t actually as awful a set of ideas as it could have been. Medieval anatomy… that’s a complete mess, but at least we got wound-men out of it when the Renaissance came along. And all this knowledge comes in real handy, when you’re say writing a story about a plague doctor, or whenever someone needs mending in your fantasy writing (which if you’re me is quite frequently). Or if you’re writing about scholars of other disciplines. Ancient schools of thought are fascinating things.

Hans von Gersdorff’s Feldtbuch der Wundartzney (Strasburg, 1519)

Castles were another great topic. As I mentioned earlier, I lived near the Welsh border – which has more castles built on it than anywhere else in the world, because the English/Normans found the Welsh that annoying. (Go, possible distant ancestors!) That meant that I spent a lot of time in said castles, looking around them and learning how they were built to be impenetrable strongholds – which is extremely helpful when you’re, say, writing about a fantasy fortress under siege.

Did you know that the angled bit at the bottom of some castle walls is called a ‘batter’, and is designed so that when you drop rocks off the top of the wall they’d bounce straight outwards and brain besieging soldiers below? And that during the Civil War (the English one, not the American remake), the Roundheads systematically knocked all the battlements off the castles they captured and made holes in the walls so they couldn’t be used against them in the future? It was called ‘slighting’, and it’s the reason most British castles are in such sorry shape these days.

Except Beaumaris on Anglesey, which is gorgeous and I want to go there so very badly…

I’ve picked up plenty of other weird trivia over the years, and there are lots of historical events I’m itching to write analogues of (like the Siege of Antioch, which we made a fantasy cast-list for in my A-Level class which would make an amazing movie). But you don’t have to have studied history. Whatever you know about, whatever weird facts you remember, there’ll be a place for them somewhere if you choose to start writing – whether as a key part of the story or just as an aside. So don’t forget them.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #4 -What Next?

At the time of writing, I am very, very close to finishing the first draft of Boiling Seas 2: Airship Boogaloo. I’m writing this on Saturday, so, with a bit of luck, by the time you read it… the draft will be complete.

Hell yes.

It’s not even remotely close to being publishable, of course. As I am in the annoying habit of doing, I started writing this book without really knowing how it was going to end, or what the overarching plot of the series was going to be. That’s why several sections ended up being significantly longer than they were supposed to be. Tens of thousands of words longer. And why plot points that I should really have brought up at the beginning turn up half-baked halfway through because I’d only just thought of them.

But that’s what editing is for. That’s probably what rewriting is going to be for, honestly – not the whole thing, just the awkward chunks, like the airship cruise section that could currently be its own book, and the friendly battle against currently-one-dimensional rival tomb raider Lord Bartholomew Rubin. It is not a finished book. I still don’t even have a title. But it is, at least, a finished draft.

And over the course of writing it, it became a little more… epic than I was expecting.

The Blackbird and the Ghost is a pretty self-contained adventure. Do some thieving, find the MacGuffin, defeat the villain and sail off into the sunrise. Simple. But I’ve been doing some worldbuilding as I go. There are secrets that the first book hinted at (because I didn’t know what they were yet) that will be coming to the fore; ancient magics and hidden knowledge that is still partially hidden to me. There’s scope to this one. The stakes are a bit higher. Or at least they are by the end.

2 Boiling 2 Seas seems to have become the middle of a trilogy. I had no idea how many stories I was going to write for Tal, Max, and REDACTED when I started. I still don’t, honestly. But this one feels like a middle. It’s gone a little Empire Strikes Back. It may not have a happy ending, at least not immediately. There will be questions that won’t be answered straight away. I still need to figure out what those answers are.

But I like the look of my working so far.

So I’ll be putting down this draft for a while and writing some shorter pieces to cleanse my palate. Then I’ll get to editing. And then hopefully in the summer, you can get to reading.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #3 – Old Friends and Old Games

A PSA before this post actually starts: the ebook of Ad Luna is currently FREE on all the Amazons. If you haven’t read it yet, grab a copy now – it’s free until Tuesday.

Long ago, when the pyramids were still young, and I was about 14, Portal 2 came out. I had a relatively new – and my first – laptop. I liked video games. The trailer was awesome. So I went on Amazon, and I ordered a USB mouse and a copy of the game.

And it was amazing. It was funny, it was engrossing. The puzzles were mind-bending and the acting was superb. (I say was – it all still is, as my recent forays into Portal Stories: Mel have only proven further. I will write about that game. Honest.) But what was really fun, the thing that turned Portal 2 from a great game into a great experience for me, was the co-op multiplayer.

You and a friend abandon mute protagonist Chell in favour of plucky robots ATLAS and P-Body, as the acerbic wit of Glad0s guides you through a whole other campaign of mad puzzles. And they really get mad, too, because instead of 2 portals you now have 4, which means that the physics-bending insanity of the base game can be twice as complicated. Or even more.

The gameplay is fun. But you get to play it with a friend. And that’s what I did, many years ago. With an ancient, broken headset around my neck (the only working microphone I had) and Steam’s then-rudimentary voice chat looping endlessly through my ears, my friend Sam and I tackled every single level together. And it was so much fun. It was the first time I’d played a co-op game online – the first time I’d played with friends online at all, save for the odd early foray into Runescape. Sam and I had an absolute blast as we stole each other’s heads, dropped each other into acid, burned each other with lasers and eventually figured out all the puzzles. The story was already good, the gameplay was already great – but doing it together made it exponentially better in every way.

Fast-forward a decade or so. Since we all went our separate ways to university I don’t see my old schoolfriends as much – though I still do regularly. And despite the fact that we could easily have played games together online every night if we’d wanted, we never really did. There was so much going on in our lives that it fell by the wayside. And even in the grips of the last year’s worth of lockdown, we never got round to anything more than a bit of Jackbox.

But last week my friend Jack told me that he’d never played the Portal 2 co-op on PC, and a plan was hatched. So yesterday, with a significantly better microphone, a slightly better laptop, and a still-laggy voice chat, we started the whole thing again.

And I’m genuinely not exaggerating when I say it felt like ten years just melted away. It might be old, but Portal 2 is still a brilliant game. And we might be older, but playing it together is still just as fun as it was the first time around.

So if you’re bored or sick of lockdown, dust off some old friends. And some games. It’s a hell of a lot of fun.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #2 – GCSE to Grimdark

I had a new short story published this week. It’s called ‘The Only Cure’, and it’s a nice dark piece about a plague doctor in a pseudo-medieval world, generally having a miserable time of things.

I wrote the story while in Edinburgh last year on a nice little writing retreat (back in one of those little windows when travelling was allowed) – but the idea for the story is much, much older. It came from another story I wrote… for a bit of History homework I was set when I was 13.

We were, of course, studying the Black Death and all the associated loveliness of 1347; rats and fleas and buboes galore. If I remember correctly (and given it was 12 years ago this is fairly doubtful), we’d just spent a lesson learning about the progress of the disease, and all the ways that the people of 1347 Europe died horribly. The homework was to write a short story about one of those unfortunate victims, dead or dying, presumably to test how much we’d actually been paying attention and to get a bit of crossover with English class. So off all 30 of us went to dutifully scrawl a few lines about buboes and pus.

But what had caught my eye wasn’t the plague itself, but the doctors who’d been trying to treat it – and more specifically the quack doctors who’d been trying to make a dishonest living from pretending to treat it. So, thought I: bugger the plague. Let’s write about a conman.

Despite taking a somewhat more liberal approach to the brief, my homework went down well. I stuffed it with medical references, with disgusting symptoms and mad, outdated ‘knowledge’ of how disease was thought to work back then. That was enough to pass muster. But I remember feeling proud of how I’d managed to take what was intended to be a very straightforward prompt, and turn it into something different.* Something mine. And I’m pretty sure the feedback I got reflected that a little.

Conveniently, because I’m a hoarder, I save pretty much everything I’ve ever written, which meant that when Grimdark‘s competition came along I hadn’t forgotten about this ancient bit of homework. I took nothing except the most basic concepts from it, of course – because as much as I liked the original story when I was 13, I wrote it when I was 13 – but in spirit it’s the same story. And I was very happy to be able to do it proper justice.

So if you want to read the final product, grab a copy of Grimdark Magazine #25 – and get a load of other great stories and essays into the bargain.

* Incidentally, I would later go on to do this at university. An essay prompt on ‘our favourite character from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms‘ was intended by the lecturer to be about Cao Cao – as he was who she’d spent several seminars teaching us about. I, being contrary, decided to write about Zhuge Liang instead. I got a decent mark for the essay… and then several months later, when an almost identical question appeared in our exam – but specifically about Zhuge Liang, allowing me to regurgitate my essay almost verbatim – I realised why our lecturer had tried to be so specific…

‘The Only Cure’ – Grimdark Magazine #25

I’ve mentioned this a couple of times recently, but it’s finally here for real: my new story in Grimdark Magazine #25!

Grimdark Magazine presents the darker, grittier side of fantasy and science fiction. Each quarterly issue features established and new authors to take you through their hard-bitten worlds alongside articles, reviews and interviews. Our stories are grim, our worlds are dark and our morally grey protagonists and anti-heroes light the way with bloody stories of war, betrayal and action.

FICTION:

Sacred Semantics by Nicholas EamesThe Only Cure by Hûw SteerThe Dead Man by Jack van BeynenStiff’s Standoff by Jamie EdmundsonWinter Sweet, Winter Grieve by Kaaron Warren

NON-FICTION:

An Interview with Seanan McGuire by Beth TablerCyberpunk 2077: Working for the Man to Spite the Man by Charles PhippsReview: The Stone Knife by Anna StephensMichael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone: The Anti-Conan by Anthony PercontiAn Interview with Essa Hanson by Beth TablerHow Not to Fuck Yourself Over Self-Publishing by Ben Galley

You can get Grimdark #25 at their website here. I really recommend doing so. It’s a very good read.

Lockdown: Tokyo Drift #1 – Short Stories and Long Games

Well, here we go again. Again. Getting a little bored of these lockdowns now, but at least there might be some kind of hope on the horizon this time…

In somewhat more positive news, I should have another short story out very soon (as in next week!) – and my own copy of the latest Publishers’ Prize anthology has also finally made its way to me!

Lovely cover art by Manon Wright



And a cheeky sneak preview for you…

Actual publishing of the anthology is still up in the air, I believe (and can’t have been helped by yet another lockdown…), but you can read the story on the UCL Portico site if you can’t wait.

To keep me sane during another lockdown, I have once again turned to videogames. And while I have a lot of games that I need to play (Mass Effect 3 has been waiting about 2 years, and my Steam library grows far faster than I actually finish games…), I found myself craving a bit of cyberpunk. And as I don’t have a PS5 yet, and thus can’t actually get Cyberpunk 2077, I went back to an old standby: Deus Ex – Human Revolution.

This is the first game I ever played on PS3 – a long time ago now – and it’s one of my favourite games of all time, alongside Ratchet and Clank 3 and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I’ve played it through half a dozen times, both to get all the endings and just to be in the world. It’s a gorgeous game. The environments are beautifully rendered, from the grungy underworld of Hengsha to the soaring spires of… well, Hengsha.

‘The Sky Above The Port’, from the DX:HR concept art. Seriously, if this image alone doesn’t convince you to play the game I don’t know what will.

The story is a wonderfully-constructed thing too. Unwilling Robocop Adam Jensen takes on big corporations and shadowy cabals as he tries to unravel a nesting-doll of conspiracies and plots. But grand story aside, the side-quests are just as well put-together. When there are such high stakes bubbling in the background, I ought to feel guilty when I take time out to bring down a dirty cop, or help a prostitute escape effective slavery. But you never do. The voice acting is stellar, the writing is fantastic, and every small story feels just as important as the overarching plot. That’s game writing done right.

(The game is also apparently very quick to speedrun, as Heinki just proved at this year’s Awesome Games Done Quick. If you’ve already played the game, this is well worth a watch.)

I know all these stories very well by now, of course. I’ve played every side-quest many times over, and I know exactly what’s going to happen. But even now, there are so many options to the game that despite usually picking the same or similar paths, I still find myself surprised. Yesterday, I went into a conversation mini-game – one of the earliest in the game – totally confident that I’d be able to breeze through it and convince a former colleague to let me into a police station morgue. But for the first time – ever – I messed it up. I failed. 7 or 8 playthroughs, and I’ve never done that. But now I have to find another path – and I’m really excited at the prospect. I just have to find one that doesn’t require shooting too many policemen.

I guess what I’m ultimately saying, in a roundabout and rambling way, is that even stories you think you know very well can bring you new joys when you experience them again. Give it a try.

And play Deus Ex. Seriously, it’s great.

2021: Stuff To Do (To Start With)

Now I’m not going to make a massive list of resolutions and promises that spans the entire year, because like most of us I’ve got no bloody clue what’s going to happen in the next few months, let alone the whole year. But as a new year dawns, I have a few things on my mind that I want to do creatively and with this blog throughout 2021, so I figured I should tell you lot what they are.

The big one, of course, is getting another book out. Hopefully, that book will be Untitled Second Boiling Seas Book, which as I’ve mentioned occasionally is well underway and (finally) seems to be approaching an end-point to the plot. There’s still an awful lot of cutting and other editing to be done on it, of course, but finishing the damn thing looks a lot more achievable now than it did a few months ago. So hopefully I’ll be getting that out in the summer. If not that, then something else. But another book for certain.

I’ve also got a few things I need to review. Carried Away to start with (which I will finish soon, Ethan, if you’re reading), but also some other non-book things I’ll probably want to talk about, namely The Clone Wars (once I finish it) and Star Trek: Discovery (once I start season 3 properly). Also some video-game stuff. I just played through Portal Stories: Mel over the holiday, and it was a seriously well-made thing, so expect to hear about that properly soon. I generally want to start putting a few more reviews up on this blog this year, so they’ll be a good start.

In terms of my actual writing I want to do some more short stories. As I’ve actually had a few picked up recently, I’m running low on short pieces to send around, and I’d like to write a few standalone pieces for a change.

Also, Salvage Seven. Despite the fact that I haven’t posted any more of it since February, I haven’t forgotten about it. Part/Book/Whatever 2 of the story is almost finished – I’ve just taken a long old break. So I’ll try and finish that up this year, do a bit of tweaking, and then post the next chunk of Gideon and company’s tale.

So: new book, more reviews, more shorts, and more Salvage. That’ll certainly do to start with.

Christmas Time-Warp

Forgot it was Sunday. Oops. Time flows even more weirdly at Christmas time than in… well, 2020.

I would love to write a proper update, but in truth I’ve spent the last week doing as little as physically possible: eating a lot of food, reading some books, and building a bloody massive Lego set. Thanks, parents. You still know me very well.

It’s got a 4-speed gearbox and it works and it’s so cool

I also got Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, which promises to be an intriguing read – and a delightful vintage set of comic strips.

In terms of my festive reading list, I’ve finished all the Tchaikovsky short stories (for now) – fantastic windows on the world of the Apt. I’m now a little way into Rhythm of War (having had to look up several recaps of Stormlight so far), but I intend to take a break for Carried Away at some point this week.

Otherwise that’s pretty much it. Portal Stories: Mel has also been a feature of my evenings, when I’ve not been finishing off my Deathwatch army for 40k. I also found a box is some very old Orks under my bed…

Instantaneous Photograms – General Update

Well, Christmas will be weird, it seems. Thankfully I intended to spend my time off playing videogames and eating food regardless of circumstances, so not that much has actually changed. Still a bit frazzled by it all, though, so forgive me for a short update-y post this week.

Perhaps unwisely, I have decided to venture a little further into the realm of social media, and made an Instagram. There’s not much on there right now – it’s probably just going to end up being miniature painting photos and the like, but maybe some other stuff like cover art, etc. (whenever I actually have any more of that to show). But if you want to have a look, it’s over here.

Stuff like this basically

Another review for Ad Luna has come in, from Ethan Haines, author of the Anachronist series. It’s a beefy read but well worth it. Honestly, he’s probably thought more about the genre and definitions of the book than I did.

On the front of shorter works, Shoreline of Infinity #19 is full of lovely stories, including mine, and is very much out. I’ve also done the first round of edits for my plague doctor story for Grimdark Magazine, so that’s approaching readiness very nicely indeed.

Again, apologies for the short post – I’ll try and write a few reviews this week, as I’ve been burning through the start of my festive reading list at a rate of knots and loving every bit of it.

Stay safe out there. Or in there, if you’re stuck in your house. Just general safety is advised.

Review – The Short Story Teller

A very comprehensive review of Ad Luna has been posted by Ethan Haines over at The Short Story Teller. He and I might disagree over how we define science-fiction, but given how much he liked the book (“one of the rising stars of indie fantasy and science fiction”!) I’m not going to complain at all!

Ethan, I promise I’ll start Carried Away very soon…