Hûw Steer's Blog, page 7

Wandering Skyrim

Skyrim is a game that comes ready-packed with things to do. Hundreds of quests, hundreds of locations; dozens of wars to win and thousands of monsters to destroy. You, the player, have critical tasks from the very beginning of the game, and each one leads to more questlines and objectives. The main quest is very nicely laid out, actually, as it takes you pretty much all over the map and thus brings you into the area of most of the major side-quests. Off to Riften to find a bloke in some sewers? Oh look, I’ve got to walk past the Thieves’ Guild to do so. Need to consult some wizards about this magic scroll? I sure hope the College of Winterhold isn’t looking for help with some archaeology when I drop by.

The game does a good job of introducing you organically to all the myriad things it has to offer, and on my original playthrough of the game – which began in 2011 and has spanned many years since, including all the DLCS and leading me to get the Platinum trophy on PS3 for all the (base-game) achievements* – you’d best believe I did all of them. The game encourages you to get stuck in to all these sub-stories as you go.

Alternatively, you could just… not do any of that. You can wander the land and just do what you like, with no pressure, no obligation. You can just be, in a land that, despite being coded in 2011, is still a beautiful place.

That’s what I’m doing now, anyway. And by the Nine Divines, it’s relaxing.

I apologise, incidentally, for the quality of these ‘screenshots’, but I play Skyrim as the Divines intended: on my original PS3 disc from 2011, on my original PS3, with its complete lack of screenshot functionality and controllers that don’t work unless you plug them in.

It had been many years since I last picked up Skyrim when I started this playthrough a few months ago. Originally it was just a bit of fun: I vaguely recreated my DnD character, Sir Geoffrey, because several of the other players were doing the same in the far more modern Baldur’s Gate 3. For variety’s sake I decided to do less sneaking and much less magic than my original playthrough and focusing on swordplay, like Geof; I fought a few dragons, started some questlines, and then…

And then I just started vibing, for want of a better term.

As I played this character I was also watching the excellent videos of AnyAustin on YouTube, who when he’s not conducting employment censuses of the main cities of Skyrim makes videos about bits of the world that you’d never otherwise think about. About where all the rivers in Skyrim flow from; about the poor-quality woodworking; about the strange little places in-between all those huge set-piece cities and ruins with a strange little beauty all of their own.

And as I watched these videos and then played the game myself, I found myself slowing down. I started ignoring the big plot hooks, the major questlines. I started walking more, instead of fast-travelling absolutely everywhere. I thought about what Geof might actually want out of his life in Skyrim. I stopped playing the game so much and started living in the world.

Yes, Erandur, you are in the photo.

Instead of only following quest markers I look around, see cool stuff and just head on over there. That ruin looks interesting – never mind my actual objective, let’s go explore that! I bought a house in Solitude, the capital of Skyrim, because I’d never really lived there before in any of my playthroughs and there were so many new people to get to know. (And also because the fantasy of home-ownership is far more achievable when I can magically transmute iron into gold.) Because I’m off in a different part of the map I’m running into quests I’d almost forgotten about and really appreciating the effort put into them. Never mind the Dark Brotherhood: the Bard’s College is where it’s at! Why would I want to run around fighting dragons when I can hang out at a little festival, drinking spiced wine and listening to poetry?

(And, of course, listening to the beautiful soundtrack. The main theme is obviously incredible; one does not simply hit ‘Load Game’ before sitting on the main menu for 5 minutes and listening to it in full; but the incidental tracks provide wonderful ambience. Visit a tavern and you can ask the bards to play for you, diegetically!)

Obviously I am still running around fighting dragons, because that’s what the game is for, but not because of questlines that make me do so. I’m just wandering around and exploring for the joy of it, and in doing so I’m finding the places and little stories that often go forgotten in the shadow of the big ‘main’ quests into which much more development time was poured. Like Frostflow Lighthouse, a self-contained quest that you can only start by happening to stumble across the lighthouse itself and with a story told entirely through a few written notes and by the environment itself – a story that is genuinely tragic and superbly constructed.

But more than that, I’m finding those little moments that AnyAustin has been showcasing so well. I’m appreciating the small elements of design that make games like Skyrim feel so rich and vibrant even if you don’t consciously notice them. Like the fact that every house in Solitude has a different fireplace design to the rest of the cities; being made of stone they can have proper ovens in their kitchens. (It’s also really annoying because the devs forgot to put actual game-usable cooking pots in any of them, but that’s by the by.) Like the amount of detail put into the many hundreds of books in the game – some of which are actually quite good reads. The satisfaction of filling a bookcase in Proudspire Manor is just as nice as filling one in my actual house. Better, even; virtual books don’t take up any physical space.

Every time I play this game, I end up having to buy multiple houses just so I can have more bookshelves to store all the books I pick up.

The way that more hawks spawn in the sky around Solitude because you’re up in the mountains and that’s where they live. The way that different areas of the game have different flowers growing because of the climates. The way that taking a stock interior and just hanging some moss off the beams and knocking over a table can make the atmosphere feel so very different. Meeting wandering traders on the road. A broken sword at the foot of an abandoned shrine.

This little archway in Solitude. I just like it.

Games like Skyrim give the player agency. Not by making the story and the world bend because of your choices – there’s a little of that but not much – but by simply opening up the world before you and saying, ‘do anything you want’. And while it might imply that ‘anything’ is one of the myriad fully-written plots and subplots that the game is stuffed with, it doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to fight dragons. You can just pick flowers and watch the sunset. And that’s nice.

*I need to max out the Vampire Lord and Werewolf perk trees and build 2 more houses, and that’s it for the DLCs, too.

What Have I Been Doing: August 2024 Edition

Hello again. Got married, had a lovely time, now I’m back.

Yes, it was a fantastic wedding; we are now extremely broke and extremely happy, and our house is full of decorations, cards and lawn games that we haven’t figured out what to do with yet. An extraordinarily nerdy affair all round. I’ve been wearing my ring on a cord around my neck while at work so I don’t scratch it to death on LEGO, and every time I do so the Black Riders’ theme begins to play in my head.

So now that’s all finished, what have I missed – and what’s next? Creatively, I mean. You don’t need to hear about all the admin we’ve still got to polish off.

In the middle of what were, until the excellent wedding bit, some of the most stressful few weeks of my life, a few things happened, and I shall go through them now.

Ad Luna did very well indeed in the latest Narratess sale – more than 300 copies, which is mad and fantastic. If you were one of those 300 people, hello! Hope you enjoy the book. Sales like these are incredibly important for indie authors everywhere just for getting more books in more people’s hands and more reviews on people’s back covers. (So please drop a review or a rating if you have the time!)

Nextly, a competition occurred. The second SFINCS – the Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Contest – has begun, and I’ve thrown my hat into the ring with The Singer. I’m up against some stiff competition… by which I mean my reading list has grown dramatically with a bunch of my rival entrants, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. If nothing else I’m in very good company.

I have also been sending a manuscript or two around various agents, and for the first time ever I actually had a response that wasn’t a form rejection. It was, in fact, a request to read the whole book! Before you get too excited the agent then rejected the book, but having actually read it they were able to give me some comprehensive feedback and suggestions for improvement, and an open invitation to resubmit an updated version of the manuscript. So overall, almost as good as I could have hoped for.

I’m going to do that rewrite, I think. I’ve got a lot more material for an unfinished part 2 that could be worked in and ideas on how to address some of the other problems. But I’m not going to do that just yet, because I’ve got something else that demands my attention.

WHAT ABOUT THE OWL IN THE BLOODY LABYRINTH?

I haven’t done much on the second draft/edit/rewrite/wrangling of Boiling Seas 3 in recent weeks, because I have, in fairness, been quite busy. But now I am in fact married, it’s back to the grindstone. I have a lighter workload for the next few weeks so I’m going to use that time to knuckle down and make some proper progress if I can. There’s still a lot to do to get this book in fully readable shape. Am I certain it’ll be done by the end of the year? No. Am I confident that it’ll at least be nearly done? Sure! I intend to take a week off work completely at some point in the next couple of months and do nothing but write, if needs be.

So it’s back to work on that edit this week, and we’ll see where we go from there.

WHAT ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE?

Short stories are also on my mind, as I’m coming to the end of one which I’ve quite enjoyed. It’s sort of a sequel to another one that’s going round magazine submissions at the moment, and if and when one of them ever comes out I’ll do a post here explaining where what is actually a very old idea of mine came from. But I’m trying in general to keep an eye on submission windows and get things rolling on the short front. As I mentioned earlier, I’m broke, and both my creative heart and empty wallet would be delighted to see some more of my shorter works in print.

And speaking of that, to round things off, you can read one of my previously published stories for free, right now! Because I got distracted by wedding stuff I completely missed that this had actually come out a month or two ago, but: Grimdark Magazine have created a sampler issue, packed with stories they think they best represent their delightfully gritty publication. To my surprise, they thought my The Only Cure was one of those stories – and so it’s in there. If you didn’t catch it the first time around in Grimdark Magazine #25, you can sign up to their mailing list (free) and you’ll be sent the (also free) sampler magazine!

So there we are. Lots to do and increasingly little time to do it in; isn’t that always the way? Let’s see how I go, shall we?

On Speeches

Firstly: if you’re reading this and it’s still the 26th or 27th of August, Ad Luna is free right now in the Narratess Indie Sale. Get it. Get it now. And get a bunch of other SF&F books too.

I am currently faced with the biggest writing challenge of my life. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve written a dozen books or more, countless stories, millions of words. I’ve described alien worlds beyond imagining and tried to delve into the heart of human emotion. I’ve written for children, I’ve written for adults. I’ve done some poetry, which you will probably never see, and I’ve even written comedy, which if you have seen, I implore you to forget.

All of that – all those stories, all those characters, all that effort – pales in comparison to the fact that, this week, I have to write my own wedding speech.

After over a year of it being ‘months away’, suddenly I’m getting married this week. In a week from the time of writing we’ll be clearing up the venue after the wedding. My front room is full of boxes of stuff, a not-insignificant portion of which is silly hats; I have a lovely new suit whose shirt I really need to iron and whose shoes I will let my father polish because he’s much better at it than me. I have a fiancée sitting in the next room right now! I’ve had a fiancée for some time, in fairness; that part I’ve had a while to get used to. She’s very nice. We have a venue, we have food, we have Legal Stuff, we have music.

And at some point in the day I have to talk.

I thank the gods that we decided not to write our own vows, because I’m fairly sure I’m going to forget my own name when we’re up in front of the registrars, let alone be able to deliver something so personal under that much pressure. The speeches, at least, will all be delivered when our audience is replete with excellent food and wine and thus generally inclined to cheer at pretty much anything, which takes the pressure off a bit. A bit.

There’s something of a formula to follow, of course. Between me and my at-that-point-wife we have to thank everyone, and we’ve divided the list already between ourselves. One of the most useful things I learned from comedy was to keep it short, so I’ve only got to fill about 5-8 minutes, and thanks should fill up a chunk of that. But then… I have to talk about some other stuff. Mostly my wife, I imagine, which shouldn’t be hard. We’ve been together for coming up on a decade and we do quite like each other, so I’ve both got a lot of material to draw on and it’s all reasonably positive.

But can I think of what to write? Can I hell.

I’ve done this sort of thing before… just not for me. I’ve done emotional speeches of all kinds for all sorts of characters in all sorts of stories. I’ve even dipped a toe into romance from time to time! (In fact I’ve nicked dialogue for some upcoming stuff from what I said when I proposed. Not because it was a smooth line. Definitely not that.) But when it comes to writing it for myself? To expressing my feelings about my fiancée to anyone other than my fiancée herself?

I am not very often lost for words. I’ve written a lot of them. But these feel like fairly important ones to get right.

No pressure, eh?

Also, this time next week I will genuinely be clearing up after the wedding, so no blog: I’m going to be busy enough that day. Normal service will resume on the 8th of September.

Narratess Indie Sale 24-26th August

Once again, Many Indie Books are on sale; once again, one of mine lurks among them like some chittering demon. It’s Ad Luna this time. It’s free.

Look at all these books! Look at how many you could get! Do it. Buy books. Do it now.

(Ad Luna is also sneakily free until Tuesday the 27th too because why not.)

A Darkness Returns – So Does The Riftwar

(Also a brief review of ‘King of Ashes’)

Over a year ago, I made this observation:

Hang on.

An Interview with Raymond E. Feist (The Fantasy Review), February 7th, 2023

Feist: “Writers rarely retire unless circumstances require them too. I’m working on the 1st book of the DragonWar Saga, A Darkness Returns.”

A Darkness Returns.

Returns.

Well.

I’m going to need a bigger bookshelf.

Dear reader, to my incredible surprise, I was right.

It’s a new Riftwar book. Sort of. It is also, apparently, a new Firemane book, a sequel to Feist’s other fantasy trilogy that he’s spent the last few years writing in the post-Riftwar period. It’s all the characters (well, all the surviving characters) teaming up to save both worlds against a nice new Big Darkness.

Now, on the face of it, this sounds like another creator succumbing to the Disney Urge: the comic-book approach of mashing all their characters together for the sake of it and hoping that the audience will feel obliged to get onboard. But unlike Disney desperately scrambling to fix the MCU by throwing money at Robert Downey Jr. (when they could have just recast Jonathan Majors as Kang, a character whose entire schtick is that he has an endless number of different variants, and I’ll stop here before this post becomes a Marvel rant), Feist’s little multiverse doesn’t feel unreasonable. The entire point of the Riftwar, the foundational principle of that sprawling series, is that multiple worlds collide. The original trilogy and the Empire trilogy were two different series repeatedly crossing over, back in the 1980s, and the series was always about multiple worlds. So why the hell not throw in another one? Why not link the Firemane books to the Riftwar? If your seminal series is about connecting different fantasy worlds, why not connect your own?

I’m certainly willing to give it a shot. But first, of course, I’ll need to read the Firemane saga, which I began doing literally seconds after walking out of Waterstones with A Darkness Returns clutched under my arm.

A continent at uneasy peace after a huge war braces for the next big conflict. A new and ominous religion exerts its dominance; barons dream of becoming kings; assassins sharpen their blades. The last son of the destroyed Firemane line begins to learn of his heritage. And a young blacksmith finds his place in the world is a bit more complicated than he’d first thought.

That’s the first book, King of Ashes, which I just finished.

It was ok.

Don’t get me wrong: the world of Garn is well-constructed, with thought-out politics and geography, believable technological and social standards, and a nice sprinkling of cool magic stuff to spice things up. Declan the blacksmith could just make good swords… or he could make Magic Damascus Steel! Sailors could just deal with pirates… or there could be a hidden kingdom of evil merpeople waiting to abduct and enslave them!

But there’s a weird and clunkily delivered obsession with Sex and Murder and Horrible Crimes that just isn’t written with the emotional weight that it needs to be properly impactful. The prologue, setting up the end of the Big War, talks about the entire family of the defeated king being put to death, down to babies, in a way that just doesn’t feel comfortable for the writer. A disproportionate amount of the book is taken up with young Hatu – the last surviving Firemane, now a trainee assassin/rogue/whatever – having Teenage Sexual Feelings. We get it, Raymond. He’s a teenager. We don’t need three flashbacks in a row of him getting embarrassed over an erection, written in the same stilted manner.

There are a lot of aspects to this book that make me think Feist looked at how successful A Game of Thrones and that sort of grimdark fantasy was doing, thought ‘Yeah, I can do that’, and proceeded to… not do that very well. (Kingdoms at war? Political jockeying? Little magic remaining in the world, a focus on bastards, excessive sex and murder… yeah, it’s becoming more and more clear.) I appreciate the need for any author to try their hand at something different, especially after 30 books and 30+ years of the same series. But while King of Ashes definitely feels like a more mature and darker book, it also feels like bits of grimdark have just been thrown in (and poorly written) because Feist felt like they were supposed to be there.

But there’s a lot to like about this book. It’s a new, fleshed-out and thorough world, with some very strong concepts – the assassin nation of Coaltachin, the sinister Church of the One. I’m particularly enjoying the story of Declan the blacksmith: while the tendrils of the main plot are encircling him ever-tighter, his story is basically just about a young, skilled man making his way in a harsh world, and it’s very well realised. This is clearly a story that was planned as a trilogy and has only just begun, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest.

And then I can get back to Midkemia after all this time.

I’m a bit concerned that this crossover won’t work. I’m worried that blending the two worlds will either mean that the Riftwar characters get needlessly ‘grimmer’ in Feist’s currently-clunky way, or that the overall darker tone of the Firemane characters will be lost in the mix.

And I worry that adding in another world will take Feist’s attention away from the great setup he left at the end of Magician’s End for future Riftwar stories. I want to read about the “strange and alien life fashioned by wild magic” lurking in the bottom of the Big Crater; about Magnus guiding the worlds of Midkemia et al into a new and exciting future. I have a sinking suspicion that throwing the Firemane characters and world into the mix will mean that Feist entirely forgets about much of this setup in favour of blander Multiverse Stuff.

But at the end of the day… it’s Midkemia again. It’s Magnus, it’s Pug, it’s my favourite series continuing. Is it going to be good? Who knows. Am I going to read it? Absolutely.

Puzzles in Plain Sight

There are few things more satisfying than finding an easter egg – a hidden surprise, a secret message, something tucked away that can only be uncovered by solving a puzzle or leveraging knowledge you’ve already got. Escape rooms, videogames, even understanding oblique references in books (looking at you, Discworld) – there are many ways to do this and they’re all immensely fun to pull off.

But the ones that stick in my memory are the ones from when I was about 10: when Doctor Who was revived, and some brilliant people at the BBC decided to litter the Internet with tie-in websites crammed with little secrets.

There were a lot of these, and looking at the TARDIS Wiki I definitely don’t remember them all, but the ones I do recall have always stuck with me. In the days when just searching for something online wasn’t so ubiquitous and you had to actually figure stuff out for yourself, being rewarded for being a big nerd and remembering throwaway lines of dialogue was so very fulfilling. Because that’s what you needed to find these hidden things – not just to find the sites, but use information from the TV episodes to unlock the secrets within.

Take the UNIT website – a great impression of a fictional government website. So realistic, in fact, that it was the reason the United Nations sent the BBC a cease-and-desist order and forced them to change the organisation’s name from ‘United Nations Intelligence Taskforce’ to ‘Unified Intelligence Taskforce’ in case people got confused. Seriously.

The site had some nice in-universe information about a perfectly ordinary branch of the British military. But what about that ‘Secure Login’ button, though? If only you were listening to the Doctor during World War Three and knew what the password was…

(Actually, that password – BUFFALO – only let you do as Mickey did in the episode and fire a little Flash ballistic missile. Getting to the juicy stuff required the password BADWOLF, which was more oblique but another obvious one to try for a young viewer at the time.)

And suddenly the screen goes red, new pages unlock, and there are dozens of secret press releases, updating mission reports for every new modern Earth-based story – including all the little details that the episode skips, like the casualty reports or the cover-up efforts. In short, all the little juicy details that good worldbuilding demands, even if they never make it to the screen or page.

The Geocomtex site gave you background for the episode Dalek – and while I can’t find evidence of this I could have sworn it was where you accessed the magnificent Flash game that was ‘The Last Dalek’. (Which I can’t find a fully working archived version of online, but the Flashpoint project has it in full.) The Torchwood website gave so many teasers for this mysterious organisation ahead of the Big Reveal of Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. This was absolutely addictive for a young fan of the show, especially in the pre-streaming days when we actually had to wait an entire week for more episodes to air.

The one I remember best, though was the Cybus Industries website – the evil corporation responsible for building the parallel universe Cybermen perfectly harmless tech company with their cool new headphones and futuristic (for 2006) outlook. The archived version alas lacks the old images, but when 10-year-old me found it, it looked like this:

Ah yes, the headphones of the future.

Fictional product pages, interviews with the CEO – loads of little bits of expanded worldbuilding for the two Cyberman episodes, written just for the joy of viewers. But there was more – much more. Apparently – and because I was only 10, I missed this bit – there was a whole ARG, starting on the aforementioned ‘Defending the Earth’ site, where one was sent to ‘infiltrate’ Cybus, finding codes to unlock secret features on the site that were revealed when the actual episodes aired. I skipped this bit – but because I paid far too much attention, I remembered the appropriate codes when they were revealed on-screen, and so when prompted to enter BINARY9 on the ‘Staff Intranet’, the Airships game was revealed in all its glory.

I hacked the Intranet! I broke into the evil corp and now I’m saving the world! Yes, I’m doing it in a 2D Flash game that’s freely available to everyone, but I found the thing! This wasn’t just worldbuilding, it was interactive worldbuilding, rewarding me and all my nerd friends for paying attention to the programme we loved.

I still love solving puzzles. I still love finding the little hidden things. I love writing them myself, too – and I do it a lot, even if it’s just sly references that I know only a couple of people will understand. But when a puzzle isn’t obviously a puzzle, when it’s hidden in plain sight, and when you realise that you already know the answer thanks to just doing what you already love… it’s just a wonderful feeling.

Do more of this, BBC. Kids around the world will love you for it.

Scientific Limitations of the Boiling Seas

The biggest issue I’ve encountered when building the world of this third book in the Boiling Seas is that almost nobody can tell me what boiling water looks like from the inside.

You’d think that in this age of crazy cameras and resistant materials that somebody would have thought to take a video inside a kettle – but, to date, I have only found a handful of examples. And while they do give me some information, it’s not enough. I’ve had to – shudder – make stuff up. In a fantasy book, of all places. Because The Owl and the Labyrinth requires my protagonists to just be hanging out underneath the Boiling Seas – so I need this description to be watertight in more ways than one.

And no, looking into a glass kettle is insufficient, damnit – I need to see a view from actually inside that bubbling, boiling water.

This was the first example I found, and while it does give me information, there’s a bloody egg in the way. What I do get from this, apart from notions of how my sailors need to cook their breakfast, is an insight into how those bubbles pool and move. It’s not quite like inside something carbonated, where bubbles cling to introduced objects – they’re leaping off that spoon as fast as they can even when it’s not moving. Boiling water is a dynamic place. (Good: that’s how I’d been writing it.)

From Make Sushi 1. They… mostly make sushi.

There’s also this example from a hot spring in Sri Lanka – but a hot spring is not a boiling spring, and though it showcases the constant streams of bubbles very nicely it’s just not hot enough for what I need. This cameraperson stuck their hand into the water with no ill effects – if they did the same on the Boiling Seas they’d be on their way to hospital in seconds. But again, we see these rising bubbles, this time in great columns coming from the deeper heat source somewhere down there.

From This Generation.

Hot springs are probably the closest real-world equivalent to the Boiling Seas that exist in the real world: water being heated by magma or other deep geothermal stuff, full of minerals and occasionally very much unsuited to casual swimming. But because rocks, they seldom appear to be convenient deep shafts of water – while there is footage from inside some of the geysers at Yellowstone it’s largely of wet rocks rather than an actual view of inside the water. The geysers we have easy access to are on land, and so decidedly less damp than something at the bottom of an entire boiling ocean. No pockets of ‘dry’ space down there – it’s all water, all bubbling, all the time.

But if relatively little magma can produce effects like that… how hot is the ocean floor of the Boiling Seas? How tortured is the surface of this planet? It’s a good thing most people live on islands because those plate tectonics are going to be serious. I wonder how it’ll affect people even on the mainlands, to have the seafloor in such constant flux, unveiling new chasms down to the searing magma of the planetary mantle. I gave Tal, Max and Lily a glimpse of that already, in Nightingale’s Sword. But that was under the land. Under the sea? That’s another sight entirely.

So while resources are limited I have some picture of what the underwater world of the Boiling Seas should look like. Apart from all the metal fish, of course. But the actual water I have some picture of… but not enough. Research for fantasy stories can inevitably only get one so far before you have to make stuff up – that’s the whole point of the genre – but I was surprised how little real-world info I was able to find to start things off. That’s the author’s life, though, I suppose.

If anyone reading this happens to have a kettle, a heat-resistant and waterproof camera, and spare time on their hands, I’d love to hear from you. Bit of a specific request, but you never know, eh?

The Waiting Game

Writing is a waiting game, in so many ways. You wait for ideas, you wait for artwork, you wait for readers, you wait for reviews. You wait for sales, for any indication that people have actually read what you’ve thrown out into the world.

And most of all you wait for submissions. You wait for feedback on them. You wait, often, for any indication they’ve been seen at all. And you wait a long time.

I’ve been querying my various books with literary agents for many years now. As you will no doubt have noticed from my conspicuous lack of shouting it from the rooftops, I have yet to encounter success.

And that’s fine. Without a hint of sarcasm, that’s genuinely fine. This is a long game as well as a waiting game – I know that very well. It took me years to even get a short story out, let alone a piece of longer work, and though I’ve achieved a vague level of consistency on that front in the last year or two I know it could easily be a blip. Creative recognition takes time. That’s what we all sign up for when we start this writing lark. And when something does slip through and get accepted it’s one hell of a feeling.

But agent submissions, full queries like the ones I’ve been making myself get back into sending out, are a different kind of waiting. It might take a while for a magazine editor to send back a form rejection, but they usually get there in the end. And, being short stories, the work of sending one out again to somebody else doesn’t take that long.

Agent queries are like job applications. You research who’s open for submissions, you research their tastes. If they might – might – be right for your book, then you figure out how much of it they actually want to read as a sample. You edit extracts. You put together a synopsis, a covering letter that goes into what feels like nauseating detail. You throw all of this out when you realise that their website has a submission form instead of an email address. It can take hours just to get something ready to throw in front of an agent’s eyes.

And then you sit back and wait. Sometimes for months. If you’re incredibly lucky, sometimes for days. For a form rejection, yes, but at least it’s something. Or, as has been the case for me, you wait for over a year and hear precisely nothing.

My current QueryTracker list. Blue is recent submissions, red is actual rejections, and pink is submissions so old that the website is telling me to give up hope.

Agents are busy. Of course they are. There’s a reason they all state multi-month response times, and it’s because there are a thousand people in exactly the same situation as me, with exactly the same hopes and frustrations, hurling submissions at them every day. Slush piles totter like skyscrapers on desks across the world. I understand. I sympathise. I remain frustrated beyond belief.

Because a rejection is, while disappointing, fine. It’s a conclusion, even if one you don’t want. It tells you to move on to the next attempt. Silence, on the other hand, has no closure. These unanswered submissions – and unanswered follow-ups, and follow-ups to follow-ups – sit in my emails like lead weights. I may as well have dropped my manuscript in a well: at least I’d hear a splash when it hit the bottom.

But long after any stated or reasonable window has closed, I still sit and stare and wonder. Sometimes things fall through the cracks, after all. Occasionally I’ll actually get a response, a year later, to an ancient query to that effect, and even though it’s a form rejection at least it’s got a personal apology appended to it. Never mind ‘no news is good news’ – bad news is at least news.

I keep going. I keep submitting. I add more names to the pile and wait to see what flavour of news I’ll receive. I don’t mind which, honestly. Anything will do.

But I keep going, because this is a long game and I’m in it until the end. Because that’s what writing is. That’s what stories are. They keep going until they’re finished being told, and I am certainly not finished yet.

What Am I Doing: July 2024 Edition

How much storytelling mileage can one get out of a joke? Answer: at least 6000 words and I’m probably not even halfway through yet.

I’ve had a bit of a break from Boiling Seas 3 editing for the last couple of weeks – largely because while my rewrite of one plotline is going swimmingly, I really need to insert and adjust the other half of the story before I get too far into things. Ideally I want two mini-climaxes to line up with each other for Maximum Excitement, similar to the various airship fights in Nightingale’s Sword, so I need to make sure one half isn’t too much longer than the other or I’ll have to start actively adding filler instead of just accidentally writing far too much like I normally do.

So that’s a chunk of writing and editing that I really need to dedicate a day or two to, rather than just doing it in the morning before work. First-thing writing is perfectly fine to just create, I find – I can get some really good words down, and have been doing so every day for the last… almost 10 years? Wow. But when I’m editing I need to engage my brain on a more conscious level rather than just going with the flow. And as my brain is currently engaged with wedding planning and the assorted life admin involved, I haven’t found a moment for said editing day just yet.

Therefore, Silly Story. A Silly Story which has actually gotten fairly serious in the telling, even as I work from a premise that is little more than a stupid pun. It’s fantasy, loosely, and in a departure from my normal output it’s largely a legal drama. (Despite this being the central essence of the starting joke I didn’t anticipate quite how much actual court-case I would have to write; the legal system of this story may not end up bearing up to much scrutiny. Thankfully, it’s not meant to be fair…)

It might end up a bit too contrived for proper publication but I’ll at least let you lot read it. I also started another short, but this one actually requires some thinking to make proper sense so again I’ve set it aside for now.

I’ve had to do a lot more creative palate-cleansing with this book than I normally would, and it might be because the narrative is complex but it’s probably a lot more to do with the rest of life. I’ve got a lot on. Shorter, simpler stories sit better with my brain right now. It’s times like these that I really should look back at my children’s stories and see what else I can put together on that front… but I can’t let myself get distracted with a different book. Short stories are one thing, a whole other novel (even a novella) is quite another.

I anticipate having a lot more creative brain-space, and brain-space in general, after the end of August. Funnily enough one’s wedding takes up a lot of one’s attention. But the Boiling Seas are never far from my mind, and I just have to make sure I remember to write down all the mad little extra ideas I keep thinking of on my walks to work. That’s how I worked in magic hoverboards, after all.

And several of the extant tasks on my wedding list are literary in nature, in fairness. And I’m not even talking about my speech.

Though I should also write my speech. I really should write my speech.

Review/Ramble – Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

It may seem to you, dear readers, that I’ve been on a bit of a Mars kick for a while now, what with Great Martian Railways coming out and the many rambling posts I’ve made about it and related Stuff About Space. But there is another reason for this mild obsession, and its name is Kim Stanley Robinson.

Ok, its name is actually the Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars; three absolute doorstops of books that cover, in detail, a colonisation and terraforming of Mars over the course of centuries. This trilogy is unquestionably epic, in all senses of the word. From their landing on the Red Planet to their first settlements, to building space elevators, full multi-national colonisation and the ensuing wars between these Earthly interlopers and the descendants of the older settlers – the first native Martians – the story of Robinson’s Mars is incredible in scope.

It is simultaneously multi-generational, taking place over centuries, and not, thanks to convenient immortality treatments that arise by the end of book 1, which means we get to experience Mars through both the eyes of those born into it, newly arrived outsiders, and those First Hundred, the original, immortal settlers who see Mars change from its barren state into a world fit for humanity… or not. This is a really interesting POV approach, honestly – a bit best of both worlds in how it showcases the changing attitudes towards a changing planet. And Robinson even squeezes in a bit of ‘the impact of immortality on an ordinary human brain’ just to cap things off nicely.

These are dense books. A dozen or more POV characters, each with their own chunks of narrative – though only switching after big sections, and always interacting with the other characters along the way, so nobody feels isolated and everyone gets room to breathe and explore their viewpoint. Almost too much room, sometimes – it does lead to long sections where the more interesting plot points get parked as characters explore other aspects of Martian life – but almost invariably I then find myself annoyed as I’m torn away from their story to jump to another thread.

But the density is what makes these books so impressive, honestly – because Robinson has thought of everything. I really mean that. Though advanced tech gets things off the ground a bit quicker, every development in habitation, in terraforming, in technology, is meticulously explored. Because there are so many characters with so many specialisms we jump from intense microbiology to advanced materials science in the blink of an eye, and every aspect phenomenally well researched. Seriously – Robinson is writing about nitrogen fixing, about weather patterns, about soil composition on another bloody planet and nailing it every time.

Just about the only thing he doesn’t cover in detail is public transport. There are trains, but how do they run? How were those rails laid? Checkmate, Robinson!

Seriously, though. The technical explanations and the level of detail can get a bit daunting, but these books may as well be a future documentary waiting to happen. The sheer vision needed to imagine a world in this much detail is only matched by the vision of Robinson’s characters as they build that world for themselves. If NASA appointed Kim Stanley Robinson the head of their Mars programme I would not bat an eyelid. In everything he writes, he seems to know more than anyone else alive.

And the politics. It’s not just the science of terraforming Mars, it’s the phenomenal insight into how humanity would actually react to this – how a changing world would treat the changing of another world. There are factions, there is rampant capitalism, there are climate crises and corrupt politicians, all frighteningly real, honestly. This is not a utopian vision of a new world – it is a very realistic look at how humanity will inevitably do its best to squander the opportunity that a new Mars would bring.

I haven’t actually finished Blue Mars yet – if I wait to write this post until then it’ll be weeks away, these are big books – but I am so immersed in how this story is playing out. I wonder just how he’s going to end it. All this time, all this work, and humanity is still just taking steps towards creating a Mars they can truly live on. It’s the kind of story that doesn’t really have an ultimate ending, because it is the future, or may as well be. And all the future does is keep on changing, forever just out of our reach.