Hûw Steer's Blog, page 4

Read The Book – The Owl in the Labyrinth, June 5th 2025

Let’s get one thing out of the way first:

“We’re stuck in the middle of the Boiling Seas,” Tal said, “surrounded by soldiers, at the mercy of a tyrant and one of the most powerful magicians in the world. We’ve got no weapons, no friends, and no way out.”
“Exactly,” said Lily. “It’s going to be so much fun.”

Tal, Max and Lily might have sailed the deadly Boiling Seas, explored their mysterious islands, even flown through their steamy skies – but they’ve never ventured underneath them. Until now.

Because Max is trapped, surrounded by the very secrets she and her friends have been hunting – but while she unravels the mystery of the Scrolls, Tal and Lily are more concerned with getting her back alive.

It’s only a journey into the most inhospitable environment on the planet: an ocean of boiling water, floored with molten rock and filled with steel-scaled sea serpents. And it’s not like the most powerful man on the Seas is trying to seize their secrets for himself at the same time.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve spent the last few months getting this novel in order. I’ve formatted and reformatted and edited and tweaked. I’ve reached out to people with advance copies, I’ve posted promo, I’ve designed covers, I’ve uploaded manuscripts. And I looked, last week, at my drafts on KDP. I realised that, apart from publicity, I’d done just about everything. And then I looked at the calendar, and wondered why the 5th of June was ringing a bell.

Almost 6 years ago, on the 5th of June 2019, I released The Blackbird and the Ghost. And since the book was ready, and since I knew that I’d always be annoyed with myself if I missed the opportunity… I thought ‘what the hell’, and hit the pre-order button.

The Owl in the Labyrinth will be released on Thursday the 5th of June 2025.

And you can actually order it now, if you like, at least digitally: the pre-orders are entirely live and presumably working, given I’ve had to cancel multiple purchases of my own work while trying to copy the links. And unlike The Blackbird and the Ghost, the actual physical book will also release on the 5th. And, whoo boy. It’s a big one.

I am, as they say, in awe at the size of this lad. This absolute unit of a book is almost as long as The Blackbird and the Ghost and Nightingale’s Sword put together; it is bigger than two Blackbirds by a good margin. I knew that in terms of word count, obviously, but it’s another thing to actually see it. And hold it. I need a bigger bookshelf for my own work now. So if you want a Very Large Book then please: follow those links, and pre-order/wait until Thursday and get a copy.

‘But Hûw,’ I hear you cry, ‘I never actually read the first two books in the series!’ Then this piece of information will be very helpful: as of Wednesday the 4th, the ebooks of both The Blackbird and the Ghost and Nightingale’s Sword will be available for FREE. (Until Sunday the 8th.) This means you can have the entire Boiling Seas trilogy for the price of one book – and if you read fast enough, you can pick up books 1 and 2 on Wednesday and be finished in time to start The Owl in the Labyrinth by the time it actually comes out!

It’s a bit surreal, honestly. Obviously it’s not taken exactly 6 years to create this trilogy – it took a while to write Blackbird in the first place, after all – but for those of you, dear readers, who have actually read Blackbird and Nightingale it’s a nice bit of circularity. And I think back to who I was 6 years ago, and my mind boggles. Never mind who I was 9 years ago when I first started writing this series. The Hûw Steer of 2019 was barely out of university, still looking for a proper job, only recently in possession of a beard, even. 6 years on… and I still feel like I haven’t grown up, despite the fact that I’m married, that I have new friends, that I’ve travelled the world, that I’ve led a fair bit of life.

It feels particularly strange looking back at Tal Wenlock, 9 years after first writing him. I wrote him as a few years older than me; now he’s a few years younger. The journey I sent him on, and Max, and Lily, hasn’t been that long for them, for all that they’ve crammed an awful lot of adventure into it. But it has for me. I love this trio dearly. I love writing them. I hope that some of you, and some of the rest of the world, might enjoy reading them. I think that’s why I write, really: so I can share these worlds and words I love with other people. I tell stories. If you’ve ever listened, thank you.

So yeah. In summation: free books Wednesday, new book Thursday. Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it.

Owl Update #3: The Proof

Well, that took far too long. But then it always does, every bloody time I have to format a paperback.

I have been sitting here all day – and I do mean all day – transforming The Owl in the Labyrinth from the ebook manuscript into its printable, tangible form. You’d think that in this modern day and age it wouldn’t be that difficult: document has words in, books have words in; KDP knows this, takes one, makes the other. Some transformative fiddling about in the middle to make it look right, sure, but it should be simple.

Instead, I want Microsoft to bring back Clippy, the Office Assistant, so I can throttle him to death with my bare hands. If you can even strangle a paperclip. How does that little guy breathe?

Resize the paper, change the font: fine. Remember to change the line spacing so suddenly the book is 300 pages shorter (seriously!): also fine, actually quite helpful, even. Add the table of contents and the title page. Change the size and font of the page numbers: fine, because all the sections are linked together, so changing the first one changes the lot. Its going great. So far.

Change the headers, so that it’s author name/title name repeating every other page, like my other books. Except that because each section used to have its own header – Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc. – they’re not linked together. So I click through 70 chapter headings, changing each one individually. Annoying, but at least that’s done, so now I can – what’s that? Half the page numbers have disappeared? Every other page is missing? Right. Because I’ve messed with the headers, the footers now decide to mutate. So I put those back too, and it all looks good. Great.

Then I remember that the on-page chapter numbers also need to be resized and moved. So I scroll through again, section by section, and change them all. Fine. While I’m at it, I update the table of contents so the part numbers are up to date – and the frontmatter numbering too, which is separate ‘cause I like i, ii, iii etc. for that part.

What’s that? Half the page numbers have disappeared again? Give me strength. But some fiddling puts it right. The map goes in, the ISBN goes in, and I have a ready manuscript! I feed the numbers into KDP and find out how wide the spine of the cover needs to be – aha, I think smugly, it’s a good thing I already made the cover. This will be an easy fix: just make it a bit wider. And it actually isn’t so bad, especially once I realise that the entire cover of Nightingale’s Sword is for some reason hiding underneath this one. The program starts running a lot more smoothly once it’s gone. Funny, that.

I have a cover! I have a manuscript! Up it gets loaded to KDP; a quick glance at the previewer and –

Why is there an extra blank page at page 8? That’s not in the Word document. I check. I check twice. I upload it again. It’s still there.

Ok, let’s take a blank frontmatter page out and see what happens – why are there now 707 pages, when there were 709, and I have removed one of them? And why, when I upload it to KDP, is there still an extra blank page but now in a different spot? I can’t count them properly, because this is frontmatter: the actual page numbers haven’t started yet because I already made them that way.

I remove pages, I add them, I change back and forth and every single time there is either an extra page on KDP, a mysterious phantom page on Word, or both!

It took hours, dear reader. Literally. I eventually managed to luck on a frontmatter alignment that everything liked (the book is now 705 pages long; why that worked I have no idea), and got it uploaded again. I looked at the printing costs…

Ye gods. This is a big book. I knew it was going to cost more than my other ones. But it’s a lot. I just hope it actually looks good, which I’ll hopefully find out by next weekend when my proof copy arrives.

Because it’s coming. A hard copy of The Owl in the Labyrinth will be in my hands within the week. And that is exciting enough to make all this faffing about and frustration worth it.

All I need now is people to read it. If you want to, let me know. If you want to read it early, let me know too.

(even) Strangers In Fiction

This week’s blog has some required reading. Well, listening. Or watching. Of the 6th episode of the Strangers in Fiction podcast, on which the excellent Sora Sullivan and Saffron Asteria (of the excellent Indiosyncrasy) talk about writing, and about books. And this week, among various other topics, they’re talking about my book: The Singer; my cosy fantasy novella about the magic of the countryside, and also maybe some actual magic. To summarise: they liked it. (Hooray!)

So first things first: go and listen to/watch Strangers in Fiction, because it’s very fun, and because without listening to it you may not understand what’s about to happen here. For while discussing The Singer Saffi and Sora had questions – about the story, about the writing process, about some other stuff as well.

If only there were someone who could answer all of those questions…

That’s right; I’m the literary equivalent of a reaction YouTuber now. Let’s get into it.

And yes, that is a hardback copy of The Singer in Sora’s hands; yes, you too can have one of those if you want. They do look rather nice.

20:02

Sora: “I was scared by the accent mark; I did not know how to pronounce Hûw’s name…”

Saffi: “I think it’s Welsh.”

It is indeed Welsh, though the accent tends to only make a difference if you’re saying it in a Welsh accent. Small children usually call me ‘Q’, which honestly could be worse.

22:37

Saffi: “My dad calls that ‘getting up at the crack of a sparrow’s fart,’ and I still don’t know what that means.”

Sora: “Sparrows are early morning birds… so if sparrows are farting they’re waking up for the day?”

Correct! Depending on which dictionary you look at it originates from somewhere between 1820 and 1890, probably in Yorkshire.

…I never said I was only answering questions about the book.

27:49

Saffi: “…it really encapsulates a small British village… at the time of reading this I was very homesick, and I was like ‘ah, this is nice’.”

Well I’m glad that comes across, because that was the point: The Singer is very much an idealised, fantasied-up version of the little villages where I grew up in rural Herefordshire. The fields, the churches, the pubs, the people… it’s all from my childhood. Bonus fact #1: half the background characters in this book are named for actual childhood neighbours of mine. It certainly helped them feel real to me.

30:05

Saffi: “It leaves itself open to more from that universe, I don’t know if he’ll ever do that – I assume that Hûw’s going to be listening to this –”

Correct.

Saffi: “– if you are, Hûw –”

I am.

Saffi:  “ – I would read more of this.”

I’d write it, honestly. I left things fairly open at the end of The Singer, not with a specific intention to write a sequel – like Sora says at 25:00ish,it’s an ambiguous ending and that was intentional. But just because I didn’t want to lock that story down into ending happily or sadly doesn’t mean that I’ll never go back to Quern. There’s a whole village of characters there to explore, after all, and The Singer’s only short, so most of them are sketched only briefly.

So: no plans for a sequel, but definitely not ruling it out.

32:40

Sora: “I noticed that the main character wasn’t named until he started interacting with other people, and I thought that was a really interesting touch. It was obviously an intentional choice, and I thought it did a lot to draw attention to the isolation of the main character from the rest of society…”

Saffi (at 33.54) “I do wonder if that was an intentional choice.”

Heh. Yes. Definitely intentional. Not (at least originally) because I just started writing the story before bothering to name him, and only realised when I sent Tom into town that I couldn’t just refer to him as ‘the farmer’ when half the rest of the village were also farmers. But I did leave that ambiguity at the start for a reason: Tom is a farmer (among other things), and he is a bit of a solitary man, and when he’s on his own with the dog there’s no need to think of himself as anything else. His name is part of an identity that only really exists when there are other people around.

Or something like that, anyway.

Bonus fact #2: I named Tom’s dog before I named Tom. I had a collie growing up, but Patch was a boy – but my friend Will’s collie was a lively girl named Roo. So if you ever read this, Hodgeman, yes, I did steal your dog.

33.11

Sora: “Kern? Cairn? I’m not sure how to pronounce that.”

Saffi: “In my head I pronounce it as ‘Cairn’. Whether that’s right I don’t know… Hûw, you tell us!”

Bonus fact #3: Quern was originally called Whetstone, because that’s a real bit of London and I cannot get over how much like a fantasy village it sounds. So much so that after writing The Singer and then sitting on it for ages, I proceeded to write a children’s book, The Fire Within, and call that village Whetstone too. I ended up publishing it first, so The Singer’s village name had to change to Quern. A quern-stone of course being a round stone used to hand-grind grain, like a vaguely portable mill – i.e. a vaguely fantastical-sounding farming equivalent to a whetstone/grindstone.

So how is it pronounced? In my head it’s ‘qwern’, and the Cambridge Dictionary appears to agree with me, which is convenient because I absolutely did not check until this exact moment. But I don’t mind how you say it, honestly. Coming up with wildly different pronunciations of words that don’t exist is part of the essence of reading fantasy.

34:01

Saffi: “When I asked him to do… a written interview for Indiosyncrasy, from the prompt I gave him it spurred on a few thousand word story because he couldn’t stop writing it… he just loves telling stories.”

At the time of writing ‘The Package’ is currently at 9660 words and absolutely nowhere near finished. If you’re reading this, Saffi, give me more prompts; this one alone made me dig out a character I hadn’t touched in over a decade and I’m loving it.

So that’s that. Thank you so much to Saffi and Sora for taking a punt on The Singer; I’m very glad you liked it and very grateful that you talked about it. Please, dear readers, check out the rest of Strangers in Fiction, which you can get in all the podcast places; have a browse through the Indiosyncrasy site for all your indie book needs; have a read of Sora’s work-in-progress book Interdimensional Bachelorette. These are lovely people doing and writing lovely things for the indie writing community. They’re great.

And check out The Singer, if you like. This lot liked it. You might too.

Owl Editing #2 – Maps

Right: I was ill this week and stuck at home, which meant that I really didn’t have an excuse to not get any editing done. I did also have work to do, alas, largely of a literary bent but not directly on my own manuscript. More editing, more proofing, just not mine.

But I got it done. I finished the edit list for The Owl in the Labyrinth, at least for now: I want to run a few bits past my ever-suffering proofreaders to see if I have in fact managed to properly do what I’ve intended. I have expanded the ending, with an extra chapter and a half or so of breathing-room before the grand finale. I have gone back and seeded just a few extra hints at one ending reveal, just to make sure you, dear readers, might see it coming, or at least won’t feel like it came out of nowhere when it does. I have reviewed some fight scenes, I have added some gods.

I have run out of words to finesse for the moment, which unfortunately means I have to move on to the next vital step. I want to get an eBook version of the book ready and formatted so I can send it out to whatever mad handful of reviewers have either already read the first two Boiling Seas books or are willing to take on an entire trilogy. I expect this to be a fairly small number of people, but that’s all fine with me. (If you are one of these people, or would like to be, please drop me a line!) But to do that, I need three things:

A finalised manuscript – which is almost thereA front cover – which was actually done well in advance for onceThe map at the start

This means that I, writer extraordinaire, must draw the map. This presents a problem, because I am not very good at drawing… well, anything, really. And the place that, for this book, I actually need to map is not exactly conventional. It’s a location. It’s just got absolutely none of the other conventional features of a map, like coastlines, or settlements, or hills. On the one hand, I’m rubbish at drawing these; on the other I’ve still got to draw the other stuff that goes in their places, which might be significantly harder. And I’ve got to make it both look hand-drawn and not look like I hand-drew it, and still be clear enough to read and understand – and I need to do all this, and add in enough detail for the map to be useful, without actually spoiling some significant portions of the book. I’m resigned to doing so very slightly, because if I just left off all the interesting stuff then it would be the world’s more boring and useless map, and it’s not like I’m going to explain what all these weird little annotations mean – you’ll have to read on and find out – but there are whole sections of this map that I simply cannot draw yet at all, lest I give a big chunk of the game away.

Am I overthinking this? Probably. Most people will likely glance once at the map and never again. But I still want it to be there, and I still want it to look good. I regret not doing a map for Nightingale’s Sword; maybe I’ll go back and add one in to a future edition some day. This is the end of the trilogy, though. I want all the fantasy bells and whistles I can squeeze in, and that means this weird, not-really-a-map-at-all map. And I’ve got to do it.

Because maps are important, even if they are just set-dressing. They give that sense of reality, of this being a real world that’s really lived in, with real places and real geography. Fantasy is full of strange new worlds, and having those visual guides to even the smallest sliver of those worlds has always been a thing of great immersion for me. I love a map. I love the idea of this map, even if that may not translate to paper.

So I’d better rough up a few more drafts to see if it’s going to work.

Owl Editing: Update #1

May the Fourth be with you all.

My writing brain is tired, so this is now an Owl in the Labyrinth progress report, because I have in fact spent most of the day doing edits on The Owl in the Labyrinth. The number of notes in my proofreading doc that are now highlighted in green is becoming more and more satisfying: for one thing, I’ve fixed all of the actual spelling and grammar mistakes, of which there were fewer than I’d feared. I’m well into the meat of the proper feedback, which is largely fourfold.

First came the Deity Edit. It was pointed out that my characters had been doing a lot more casual blasphemy/‘by the gods’-ing than in the two previous books, which I attribute, in fairness, to the fact that they’re all under a lot more stress in this one. Something to do with sparring with tyrants and evading the monsters of the deep, I don’t know. Anyway, rather than leaving my pantheon/s as generic and faceless as I had before, it was time to add in some actual gods. This isn’t a book that gets heavily into religion on any level, so don’t get too excited if you like a good fantastical creation story or myths and legends, but I’m quite pleased with Vedova, widow-goddess of sailors, to whom they pray that they might actually get back home to their own spouses. (No god would ever create something as deadly and inhospitable as the Boiling Seas, goes the logic: there is no sea-god for them to worship.) A light sprinkling of acknowledged churches and some more specific iconography will do for now – though there are of course many deceased and forgotten pantheons for me to explore in future tales of the Boiling Seas and their history…

I then have some fight scenes to trim and tweak, and some extra hints to drop for one elongated plotline that I’ve resolved at the end of this book – I’ve been setting it up for a while now, but apparently some of my hints have been too subtle, as I mentioned the other week. But the main thing I have to tackle, which I’ve made excellent headway on today, is the ending. Not the drama, not the epic, climactic conclusion (which I’m quite pleased with and is, I’m informed, at least ‘good’), but the part after that. The downtime. The breathing-out after the tension is gone, the breathing-room for everyone to come to terms with what’s just happened. I already had a chunk of that on the end – no way to avoid it with so much to resolve in this trilogy-end – but apparently I need a little more.

And honestly, it’s been lovely to write so far. It’s been whole months since I last properly wrote new Boiling Seas content, and it always feels good to write scenes that allow my characters to relax. It’s relaxing in itself. This book is far too long already, sure, but another thousand words or two either way isn’t really going to change that, and I’d rather have a little too much than leave you, dear readers, unsatisfied.

Still a bit more to go on that front – another scene or two and I think it’ll be good – but I’m happy so far. It’s coming along. Soon it’ll actually be here, which is slightly nerve-wracking. It’s not every day one publishes the end of a trilogy, and I am very bad at marketing. I’m not sure how easy it’ll be to find reviewers who’ll take on a whole three books, not just one…

Wonder – A Matter of Perspective

I like having little guys around. I have done since I was a kid, and one of the great things about adulthood is that while your parents may roll their eyes or even tut disapprovingly, nobody can stop you from continuing to be a child at heart. More specifically, my parents and now my wife get to put up with my occasional, continuing project of conjuring adventures for this little fellow:

This is Takua. For those of you who, like me, were children at the turn of the century, LEGO’s Bionicle series may be familiar to you: mighty heroes questing after masks of power and fighting the forces of darkness, in the form of buildable plastic robots. An advantage of working with LEGO for a living is that I can now happily continue collecting said robots to add to the ones I had as a child, including this little guy. This particular character works as a Chronicler; he travels around his island and beyond recording stories and important events. And so before one family holiday a few years ago I had the bright idea to bring him along, because I’d been looking at some rocks on a beach and thinking that while they might be just a pile of stones to me, to something smaller they’d appear a little more dramatic.

And I think that turned out to be true.

Defying death at every step!Definitely not approximately 2 feet off the ground!

So Takua has accompanied me to various places now, where I have indulged this occasional desire to play with toy photography and to irritate whoever I’m on holiday with by slowing them down on walks. Because when you’re four inches tall, a stream is a mighty river; a weed is a colossal tree; a big rock is a towering cliff-face. A journey of a few metres is a multi-day odyssey. A bit of interesting lichen is barely worth a glance, if you’re the size of a human, but to Takua, these rust-red boulders are fascinating. These weird mushrooms we found are interesting enough to look at – but imagine if they were literally knee-high!

Scaling up these environments, transforming them in the context of Takua’s view, is immensely satisfying and fun to do. He always comes home safely from these grand adventures, of course, but it doesn’t always look like that’s going to happen. Thankfully he has a Giant Sky God to pluck him from harm’s way if necessary. And also to repeatedly put him there.

And this is, I think, at the very heart of good SF&F: looking at reality and recontextualising it. What looks normal or mundane at first glance can be turned into something weird beyond imagining with a little effort and tweaking. Look at how many props and costumes are just ordinary things rebuilt. There are levers on the bridge of the starship Enterprise that are just barcode scanners glued to a bit of wood. Qui-Gon Jinn’s Space Radio is just a razor handle. The lightsaber – one of the most iconic bits of sci-fi equipment ever created – is some bits of old camera welded together. And so too are landscapes and bits of environment.

A crumbling archway in a forest can become a gateway to anywhere you’d like. A stream on the riverbed of a gorge in Morocco can become a mighty, surging river on a planet seared by an unforgiving sun… as it did for me in The Scar, a long story turned short story that I really must revisit and expand back into the novel it was rapidly becoming.

A tiny stream can a mighty river make.The Giant Chair of Doom, however, is a mystery that none dare explore in full…

A lighthouse can become a towering beacon of knowledge like the Lantern in the Boiling Seas. A strip of woodland can become a hostile jungle. A bit of rock two feet high can become a treacherous cliff face for a little plastic robot.

Plants are fascinating things, especially if you consider what they’d be like scaled up.

Building fictional worlds can simply be a matter of looking at the real world in a different way. And pocketing Takua for a little adventure is a great way, I find, to do just that: to see things differently, to turn the mundane into the wondrous. Anything can be amazing if you just see it differently. Then all you have to do is write about it.

To Set Up or Not to Set Up

I have come to the conclusion, having just hastily written up an RPG session that revolves around the uncovering of the Big Scheme, that writing mysteries is hard.

Not just mysteries, I should say. Foreshadowing in general can be bloody difficult. Because fundamentally, I, the writer, am in possession of all the facts: I know precisely where I want the plot to twist, exactly what I want to be revealed and when, whether it’s a romance or a con or a plot to blow up a planet. I know what’s going on. You, dear readers, or players, or whoever you are, do not. But for those reveals to be successful, for those payoffs to feel good and deserved, they have to be set up right. And that means a careful balance of not writing as much as writing.

No plot twist should come entirely out of nowhere. To paraphrase myself in a recent interview, not everything need be a Chekhov’s Gun, but if Chekov is one of your characters then you should at least establish that he’s a competent marksman. A writer should sow the seeds of what’s to come, to make these things feel earned when they get resolved… and also to reward the eagle-eyed reader who connects the dots a little early. Or indeed to throw off those who connect the wrong dots. Either’s fine with me.

In my feedback edits of The Owl in the Labyrinth, on which I am currently working, one thing that came up was a plotline that didn’t feel like it was set up fully. I had been conciously dropping hints throughout the book of how it was going to resolve – hell, I started doing so back in Nightingale’s Sword – but it seems I didn’t do so clearly enough. And that is fine, and another reason for getting good proofreaders: I am very happy to go back and tweak things, to foreshadow more heavily. It takes another set of eyes to get that balance right, sometimes. Because like I said: I know everything, but the reader does not, and so it’s very easy to go too light on the setup without realising it.

Equally, I’m trying to avoid telegraphing things too heavily: it’s just frustrating as a reader to realise exactly what’s coming and then have to wait 200 pages to actually have it confirmed. Balance is key.

And so when I’ve been pulling together this RPG session for tomorrow, I’ve been trying to strike that balance. I want my players to at least start connecting the many dots I’ve left for them. I want them to make the realisations, at least some of them. They’re the characters, after all, not just the readers – it’s their story, their mystery to unfold. And it’s even harder to find that balance of telling and implying as a result. I have seeded dialogue, I have set up clues, I have even drawn maps and left hints in those.

We’ll see what happens. But by the Golden Throne, if these idiots don’t pick up on the suspiciously named, suspiciously operating and suspiciously existing shipping company by the end of the session, someone’s getting thrown out of a window. Whether it’s in or outside of the game is up to them.

What Am I Doing: April 2025 Edition

I’m back on my usual side of the world… so what now?

Well to nobody’s surprise I have a lot of writing to do. Two major projects are set to consume me for the foreseeable future, and my return to my homeland has been accompanied by progress on the first: I have my first batch of proofreading notes for The Owl in the Labyrinth ready to peruse. I still need to prod one of my readers for their input, but it should be soon in coming, and I am assured by him that there’s not too much in error that he’s spotted.

The notes I do have are rather good, which is pleasing: as ever I have enlisted a dear old friend, giver of the best feedback a fantasy author could wish for because he does not, in fact, generally read fantasy. Or even like a lot of fantasy. So if he enjoys reading my work despite this unfortunate condition, then I know I’ve probably done a good job. And he did like this one, a lot. The Owl in the Labyrinth is, apparently, the best Boiling Seas book so far, which is very nice to hear indeed. I’ve been writing this series for a very long time, after all; it’s nice to think that I might have improved somewhat as a writer in the process.

So I have those notes to do: largely a couple of pages of actual spelling mistakes and other mishaps, but some very good suggestions to improve the last act in particular and tweak my worldbuilding, all of which sound good to me and also eminently doable. Once that’s done, and the notes have met with approval… well, it’s map-drawing and formatting time, because creating a paperback always takes forever no matter how many times I do it. I think I know what I want the maps to be, which is a good start, and of course my cover is mostly done – I just need a proper blurb and to know the spine sizes and tedious things like that.

Am I committing to a release date yet? Definitely not. Am I confident it’ll be ready by the summer? Definitely.

But my actual writing time, alongside polishing off this short story (or possibly novella) I’ve accidentally started, is going to be for Salvage 7. I have excellent agent feedback to tackle – and tackling it is a big job. Not a full rewrite of what’s already there, but a lot of augmentation of it, and a lot of writing on to turn a quite short novel into a much beefier and complete piece. Once I thought of doing a trilogy, but no longer: one reasonably sized brick should do. I have an almost-completed part/book 2 to draw on, and though I suspect most of that will end up on the cutting-room floor I want to preserve the bones of it while still speeding on through to reach a proper conclusion.

It’s a big job. I intend to spend some time going back through those original drafts and re-familiarising myself with the miserable, muddy SF world I cooked up those years ago, and the unfortunate bastards with whom I populated it. The Boiling Seas is an optimistic series for the most part: Salvage 7 really isn’t, on any level. I have darlings to kill and other darlings to make suffer terribly, before the end.

It’s a daunting task, this, but I know it’ll be worth it. Salvage 7 has potential. Let’s see if I can unlock it.

And while I’m doing all this, there is another project that I need to tinker with. But this one, I’m not doing alone. And nor is it words on paper. Not just on paper, anyway. Not anymore. It might be a little while in the making… but I am rather excited by the sound of this.

An Adventure #3 – Back Again

Well, I’m back.

After so many hours of flight I have, at last, returned to my native shores, where I have spent the last few days thinking ‘huh, I guess I’ve missed out on the jet-lag’, and then promptly falling asleep at about 6.30. We are tired, and broke, and very, very happy. It has been one hell of an adventure, but there comes a point, no matter what wondrous place you’re in, no matter how incredible a time you’re having, where you find yourself daydreaming not about the exciting road ahead but of the comfort of your own bed. And now we’re back, and it is very nice to be back.

After bidding farewell to Shadowfax, our noble steed through over a thousand kilometres of driving, we spent our last few days not in the gorgeous countryside but in the bustling cities of Wellington and then Melbourne, which I believe are considered vaguely hip and or happening places to be. They were certainly very pleasant to wander around, as we bimbled through weird museums and botanical gardens and old bookshops – the latter to the point of seriously struggling to pack our cases for the flight back. There are few things as pleasant as browsing shelf after shelf of second-hand books, save doing so with someone you love.

And going to Rivendell, or what’s left of it. That too. You didn’t really think we’d go another week without donning our cloaks again, did you?

Sure, yours may be three times the size but mine is made of actual metal… I guess…

It really has been one hell of an adventure. We have explored new lands, by wheel and by foot; we have encountered strange new creatures by the dozen, from very large and feathery ones to very small and luminescent ones. We have sought out old lore and been rewarded; we have uncovered treasures new and ancient, we have performed feats of strength and skill, and we did it together. There is no better way to travel than with your loved ones, be they friends or family. I think that if you share it with the right person then any experience is rendered ten times greater.

It almost sounds worthy of a book, when I put it like that. I don’t think it quite makes that grade on its own, the story of our travels… not on its own, no, but I am an embellisher and twister of facts by profession and I’m sure I can think of something. There are certainly sights and situations from New Zealand and Australia both that I intend to work with in great detail in the future – I’ve already talked about how fascinating everything geothermal proved to be, particularly for the Boiling Seas, and the caves and cliffs and carvings dotted around these gorgeous landscapes will make excellent settings for future stories of all kinds. I may or may not have thrown together a few words already, just to get the idea out of my head and onto paper for the future. You’ll see it eventually, I can promise that. It’s not often that I behold something in reality and think with such certainty, ‘I have to use that somewhere.’

I’d best get cracking. Having avoided as many responsibilities as physically possible for the last three weeks I have to catch up on many things: I’ve been writing as normal, obviously, but there are edits to make, submissions to… submit, proofreaders to nag. There are some other projects, too, that very much require my attention – one that is particularly exciting and which I can’t mention in detail just yet, but by the gods it’s going to blow your minds, I promise.

I am home, now. I have my desk, I have my creature comforts, and all is back to normal.

But I rather suspect this isn’t the last time we’ll head out to the other side of the world. If the commute wasn’t so long we’d still be there now, I think. And if it wasn’t so expensive to do that sort of travelling. But one day, we’ll go back. That, I think, is for certain. It turns out that sometimes you do know where the road is going to whisk you off to when you set foot out of your door.

Some adventures deserve a sequel.

An Adventure #2 – The Boiling Seas

The geography of Middle-Earth New Zealand continues to surprise me. We have left Hobbiton behind and travelled across many strange landscapes. It’s all geothermal out here: sulphurous air and strange rocks and bright waters. Among other beautiful wildernesses we walked a bit of the Tongariro National Park, which contains the mighty Mount Ngauruhoe – or Mount Doom, if you’re a nerd – and while we didn’t get all the way up there we did come across a very beautiful waterfall on our travels, around which I of course scrambled like a goblin.

All the bubbling geothermal springs were giving me ideas, of course – ideas for my own little stretch of fictional hot water. The waters out in the parks roil and churn exactly as I’d imagined the Boiling Seas, though without the… particular scent of all that sulphur. (There are plenty of minerals in the Seas but I’ve always thought of them as smelling a bit more pleasant.) I took a lot of reference photos – including a couple that I reckon will probably make good future covers, with a bit of editing and the addition of some tiny boats. If nothing else, just seeing real steam rolling off these ponds was amazing.

Just look at this lovely scaled-down shoreline. This is exactly how it looks in my head.

But all the scintillating pools in the world didn’t prepare me for what we found on the shores of Lake Taupō one evening, settling down to watch the sunset.

A hot beach. A beach with hot water. Steaming, scalding-hot water. A Boiling Sea.

I HAVE FOUND THE BOILING SEASalright, it's a lake not a seaalright, it's 'very hot' not boiling But there is STEAM coming off that water and it is too hot to touch for long and it'll *do*, damnitDidn't think I'd ever see anything like what I wrote for real. Pretty special.

— Hûw Steer – Author (@huwage.bsky.social) 2025-03-26T07:34:01.412Z

Look at that steam!

…ok, it’s a lake, not a sea, albeit a very large one. Ok, it’s not actually boiling (though it is very hot, to the point of warning signs and the inability to stick your feet in for longer than a couple of seconds). But the ‘Uncomfortably Hot Lake’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, now, does it?

It’s nowhere near as visually impressive as the smaller geothermal pools. But it’s real, in a way I never thought I’d ever see as long as I lived. There is steam coming off those lapping little waves, steam from volcanic geothermal heat deep below the water – and who knows what’s down there? – actual scalding waves to hide what lies beneath. I have touched them. It hurt. But it was real.

Steam doesn’t show up well on a phone camera. It’s there. Trust me.

I wrote this world of mine as a whim. I wrote it knowing about geothermal springs, sure, but knowing of them on a small scale, at most a big pond or a small river. Lake Taupō is almost 250 square miles. It might be freshwater but it is a small sea, in essence. I never dreamed that something so large existed, was even possible. It even works in roughly the same way I wrote – old volcanic activity and hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the lakebed, spewing out minerals and heat, not on the same scale as my own fantasy but not far off.

I didn’t expect this. I knew that New Zealand would let me walk in the world of Tolkien, as it continues to do even as we draw towards the end of our journey in Wellington. I did not expect it to bring me, just for a moment, to my own world. A place I thought it would be literally impossible to ever see or experience, even really get close to. A place I thought lived solely in my own head or on my pages.

But I have now paddled in the Boiling Seas. And I wonder, now, what else is out there in the real world that I thought was impossible.