Hûw Steer's Blog, page 27

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.

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.