Hûw Steer's Blog, page 37
July 31, 2019
Update – Actual Real Books!
I’ve been rather busy lately (as evidenced by my absence from this blog), but it’s for literary reasons so please forgive me.
For the last two weeks I’ve been on work experience at Penguin Children’s doing Marketing and Publicity. It’s been a lot of fun – even all the mailing. And there’s been a lot of mailing. I have learned some of the mysteries of press releases and social media, written copy, realised I’m better at Photoshop than I thought and generally made myself as useful as possible! I’m just sad I’m leaving on Friday…
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In other news, I hold in my hands a malformed lump of paper. It has many typos, and the cover is all kinds of wrong, but it exists. And that’s pretty cool.
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I’ve spent a lot of this week correcting the various issues, and I should have proper proofs in my hands by next weekend – and then I shall unleash the physical Blackbird and the Ghost on the unsuspecting world! Or maybe a bit sooner. Soon, anyhow!
July 21, 2019
One Small Step
Fifty years ago, at four in the morning, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon.
On the Moon!
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Three men rode the biggest bomb ever constructed into space. One of them (Michael Collins) sat in a tin can flying through the void at thousands of miles an hour while the other two performed a controlled crash onto a big rock with no air, no life, no nothing.
They survived. They brought bits of it home. In 1969 Apollo 11 finally did what humans had been dreaming of doing since Cicero and Lucian.
It was a giant leap. But we haven’t leapt any further, at least not ourselves. High time we changed that.
One small step…
July 18, 2019
Review – Beauty in Ruins
“full of imagination… over far too soon”
A positively glowing review of The Blackbird and the Ghost by Bob Milne at Beauty in Ruins! Check it out!
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July 15, 2019
Interview – The Voracious Bibliophile
A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Pavani Mathur at The Voracious Bibliophile, about The Blackbird and the Ghost and a few more things besides.
The interview is now live – check it out at Pavani’s blog!
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July 6, 2019
The Map Story
If you’ve been following the scattering of interviews I’ve been doing, you’ve probably already heard this story – but if you haven’t, then here, once again, is the story of how I came up with the original idea for The Blackbird and the Ghost, and the Boiling Seas in general.
Long ago in 2016, I was part of a production of The Comedy of Errors. As tends to be the case with university drama, it was a bit weird in terms of setting and presentation. For one thing, it was set in a market town in 1950s Yorkshire – and in order to bring that town to life, there was a permanent chorus of townsfolk onstage at all times. Publicans, housewives, market stallholders… we had at least four or five people in every scene wandering the background, doing normal human things to keep the stage alive.
One of them was me. I played the illustrious role of a greengrocer, and though I had a few lines at the beginning for most of the play I was sat idle at my stall until the plot called for one or more of us to react. We of the chorus played cards, read, chatted silently… and I brought along a sketchbook. Now I’m no artist, but I like to scrawl occasionally – and one day (I forget whether it was in rehearsal or actually at some point during Act 2), during a particularly long monologue, I started drawing a map of some islands. And when I was finished, I thought it looked pretty good – and a few ideas started bouncing around my head…
[image error]Redrawn in ink, but otherwise exactly as the original.
From the map itself you wouldn’t know there was anything special about the world, but I was already thinking away. Maybe it was the play that did it – The Comedy of Errors opens with a shipwreck, it’s filled with inversions and subversions of expectations – I think that bled over into my thoughts while I was drawing this map, and so I ended up with not just a map but a couple of pages of notes on this inverted ocean and all its myriad perils. The coldharbours, the scholars at the Lantern, the terrifying sealife and the deadly ruins – and a few plot points that I haven’t actually delved into just yet – all of it came from this map, and those few days in February sat eating fruit while Shakespeare happened ten feet to my right.
Bonus Question: If you can tell me where I got the idea for the name ‘Port Malice’… I don’t know, you can have the book for free or something!
June 29, 2019
SPFBO – Thousand Scars Interview
The redoubtable Michael Baker over at The Thousand Scar’s Muse has taken on the hefty task of interviewing as many entrants to the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off as he can – and next on his long list is yours truly!
Check out the interview here – Michael threw me some interesting questions which hopefully make for interesting reading!
June 26, 2019
Review: Retribution Falls/The Black Lung Captain
Given I’ve been reading so much lately – and been trying to scrape together reviews for The Blackbird and the Ghost – I thought I might as well give book reviews a try myself! I’ll try and post these with some semblance of regularity – I’ve got a lot of books to talk about!
A lot of these are, I’m afraid, going to be older releases, but I’ll try and put my finger vaguely near the pulse of new fiction eventually…
Retribution Falls/The Black Lung Captain
By Chris Wooding
Everyone loves some lovable rogues. They’re all over the fantasy and sci-fi genres, so much so that the trope can sometimes get a bit repetitive – there are only so many Han Solos that a body can take. But Chris Wooding’s Ketty Jay series breaks the mould in a simple, but effective way: when we first meet our rogues in Retribution Falls, they’re anything but lovable. They are in fact, to put it succinctly, a bunch of utter bastards.
[image error]Retribution Falls (2009)
The first scene makes this abundantly clear. When faced with the choice of rescuing one of his crew or giving up his airship, we all know what Darian Frey should do. He’s a lovable rogue – he might be a criminal but he’ll always look out for his friends! Right? Wrong. Frey doesn’t lift a finger – and though his crewman doesn’t get killed, he nurses a bitter resentment towards Frey for the rest of the book. When we meet the rest of the crew, we realise that it’s the same across the board – this lot don’t like one another, wouldn’t put their lives on the line for love nor money. They’re a bunch of misfits, but they haven’t been bonded by their adventures. They’re not friends. They don’t trust each other. They’re just people who work together.
It’s such a refreshing change of pace, and it carries on through much of the first book. The crew of the Ketty Jay basically all hate each other, only working together because they haven’t got anywhere else to go, and it’s a great, atypical dynamic that pushes the story in unexpected directions. As they lie, cheat and steal their way through the vibrant, piratical world of Wooding’s story, dodging fellow criminals and the authorities alike as they try to clear their names, Frey and his crew aren’t relying on each other – they’re trying not to shoot one another.
Of course, the crew do eventually bond as the book reaches its climax, or at least start to do so – they’re far from best friends by the time the book ends, but they’re on the way to becoming a dysfunctional family. This is much closer to the standard bunch-of-rogues trope – but the fact that we, the readers, actually get to see them come together, see them bond as the adventure progresses – and see the flaws in that bond that come back to haunt them later – makes Retribution Falls‘ narrative feel that much more realistic.
[image error]The Black Lung Captain (2010)
The Black Lung Captain begins by reminding us that the crew of the Ketty Jay might be more lovable now, but they’re still bastards, and they’re still not very good at being criminals. The first thing we see them do is fail to rob an orphanage! Then wee get to explore their new ‘family’ dynamic a lot further – and, once again refreshingly, it’s far from an unshakeable bond of trust. Two members of the crew leave in various states of anger, and though they of course come back there’s a real sense of loss. Frey, who in the first book wouldn’t have given the most malnourished of rat’s arses, is suddenly bereft, and doesn’t cope well at all. The dark secrets that don’t get questioned in Retribution Falls – with the reasoning that everyone on the crew has them, so nobody should ask – all come crashing back into focus at various points; there are manslaughters and murders, alcoholics and cowards and half-magic zombies, all in desperate need of addressing at the most inconvenient of moments. Frey is emotionally unequipped to lead a crew, let alone a family, and he’s got his own issues to deal with. The adventure is no less thrilling than before, taking the airship from the jungle to the frozen wastes – but it honestly doesn’t feel that important when set against the character drama, and that’s a great thing.
The Black Lung Captain ends on an optimistic note. The crew are together again, they’ve actually tried talking about their problems, and some of those problems have been solved, or at least acknowledged by their bearers. But there’s still the sense that the crew of the Ketty Jay still have plenty of issues to work out as they sail on to their next adventure – and I can’t wait to get onto the next book and find out what they are.
June 19, 2019
SPFBO 2019
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Quite by chance, I stumbled upon a post on /r/Fantasy the other day, and found myself at the blog of Mark Lawrence, he of Broken Empire fame – and was just in time to enter the 5th Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off!
Basically, 300 entrants have their books (all self-published fantasy, as the name suggests) split between 10 review websites. There are two rounds of judging: the first cuts the 300 down to 10, one for each site; the second sees those 10 reviewed by all 10 sites, and the most popular declared the winner. There’s no prize as such beyond publicity, but it’s a hell of a lot of publicity!
As you’ve probably guessed by this point, I entered, and The Blackbird and the Ghost was accepted! I’m to be reviewed by the folks over at the Quillery. It’s going to take a while for the actual rounds to get going (around 5 months), but the myriad other lovely authors and involved blogs are already starting to collect people for interviews and other stuff – so with a bit of luck you should see some more news related to the SPFBO soon.
Check out the competition site here – scroll down to see the other entrants, which I’m going to start looking through for future reads – and look here for the rules.
June 13, 2019
Interview with The Future Fire
I mentioned before that I’d done an interview with the lovely folks over at The Future Fire, a brilliant SF&F magazine full of delightfully weird and unique stories. I was privileged enough to be published in their Making Monsters anthology last year (and I now copy-edit for them from time to time). Now we’ve had a pleasant chat about The Blackbird and the Ghost, and some other stuff besides!
The interview is live at TFF’s blog here – give it a read!
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June 11, 2019
General Update
So, I’ve got a book out now. That’s pretty cool. Some people have bought it, too, and that’s even cooler – and I’ve even had a review, hopefully the first of many!
If you’ve read The Blackbird and the Ghost or are reading it, please do leave a review on Amazon/Goodreads/etc. – doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, every review helps the book find a place on Amazon’s many recommendation lists!
There’s not much else to tell, really. Hopefully I should soon have an interview out with the lovely Djibril at The Future Fire about the book and reading in general – watch this space!
