Hûw Steer's Blog, page 8

Sequel Shorts

The thing about short stories is that they are, by their nature, self-contained.

Good short stories, or at least the kind of short stories that people will read and therefore the kind that stand a chance of someone wanting to publish them, are complete. They’re a whole plot crammed into a short word count, with beginning, middle, ending, characters – the whole shebang. You can pick up an anthology or magazine and get the full story experience from each featured author.

And unless you’re publishing your own anthology, this is necessary. Readers of a literary magazine or anthology are, as a general rule, going to see this one example of your work and that’s it. Your work needs to stand alone and stand alone well: no big dangling threads, no unsatisfying conclusions. It’s not an extract of a larger work, it’s a work in its own right – and as such it almost always needs to be a complete, one-off experience.

Well. Almost always.

I’m not talking about authors like Andrzej Sapkowski, who slot all their short stories together and turn them into full novels, or those who put together whole anthologies of their own, semi-related works. I’m talking about just writing a sequel. A second short story in the same universe as a previously published one, following the same characters or the same environment. It doesn’t get done often these days, and for the core good reason that if you write a follow-up story and get it published, there is no guarantee any reader will have read the first one.

In your own anthology or publication, that’s not a problem – the first instalment can simply be placed on the preceding page. If you’re a regular writer for a more specialist publication, like White Dwarf or the Black Library in general, then your odds are better too: your audience is going to be more specialist and more likely to have read earlier instalments too. But even then, you can’t just write a sequel in the way one might write a sequel book. If you write ‘Book 2’ on the spine then people are going to look for Book 1 first. If it’s a standalone short, they’re far less likely to know – especially if this is their first dip into your universe.

To mention Warhammer 40k again: Dan Abnett has written many a short story for his Inquisition series, short adventures set between the main books, and he writes them exactly how this sort of story should be written: completely standalone. If you’re already a fan of the series then you’ll get much more out of them, because you’ll know what’s going on – but there are only one or two I can think of that wouldn’t make sense, by and large, as somebody’s first read. (And those ones were written specifically for omnibus editions of the books to fill in gaps, so that’s excusable.) You can pick up ‘Missing In Action’ or ‘Backcloth for a Crown Additional’ and just enjoy them as space detective stories in their own right, no matter which of the several anthologies they’re printed in you’ve bought. They tie into a larger narrative but without needing the rest of that narrative to work.

But if, like me, you lack the degree of support that one of the Black Library’s star authors has to work with – if you’re beholden to individual submissions to individual magazines, if you’re on your own – then how does one write a sequel or expansion to an existing short story?

For the most part, you don’t. And if you do, you approach things very carefully. I cannot assume that anyone has read my previous work. I have to assume the opposite, in fact. Pretty much everything I write – with the exception of deliberately marketed series stuff like the Boiling Seas – has to be a gateway into my writing. It must stand on its own and do so well if I want to have a hope of enticing a reader to pick up something else I’ve written. Which I do, very much. That’s half the point of doing any of this.

So when I have several actually quite good ideas for a sequel to a story I’ve already written – which I have – I’m going to have to go about writing them properly. Even if they are sequels in terms of plot, they can’t be sequels that rely on reading the first story. They need their own hooks, their own complete plots from start to finish. If a character shows up for a second time then they need their own full introduction within the story, or at least one that doesn’t rely on reading the last one. A little reference here and there is fine – but they can’t be essential.

But of course I can’t just rehash the same introductions as before, because if a reader who has read the previous story comes along, I need to provide them with a fresh experience. I can’t restate all the same technobabble that’s already been established – I need new ways to approach the older things. I have to balance accessibility for new readers with innovation for the old ones.

Even if one of these stories were to end up in the same publication as the previous instalment, there’s no guarantee anyone will remember the first one, especially how long ago it will have been published. If they even get published. But there’s never any sense wasting time worrying about that when I could be spending that time writing.

In short: writing a sequel short like this is a massive challenge, with perhaps even less guarantee of success than writing already has.

I can’t wait to get started.

After all, either I find success and the standalones find their own homes and their own readers, or in a few years’ time I just slap them all together, write down the implied connective tissue to string them into one narrative, and I’ve got myself another novel. Win-win!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to once again Research some Science to see if this idea would even work…

Space for Inspiration

I’ve talked many times about how drawing on your real environment is a great way to get inspiration for storytelling. You need those experiences of the fresh wind in your hair, the sight of towering castle walls, the way light plays off a flowing river, to be able to truly capture those things in words.

So what the hell do you do when you’re writing sci-fi?

Because while we’d all like to, there are very few people who have actually been to space, who have those same lived experiences of what they would be writing about. You need other means of inspiration for subjects and settings like that. You need data. Images, footage, the sort of thing you can’t really whip up at home – even if you’re out in the back garden with a telescope, seeing distant worlds isn’t the same as setting foot on them, in the way that you can if you’re writing about more terrestrial environments. Not that terrestrial environments can’t feel alien, of course – where would science-fiction be without the gravel quarries of Wales, or the canyons of Morocco that I’ve walked, and then tweaked, myself for stories. But sometimes you need a better look, provided by better experts.

Happily for we poor SF writers, the actual scientists of the world are generous with their findings. Pretty much everything NASA finds is made public, from images to raw data. If you need specific stuff to back up an idea you’ve already had then you can peruse the photos from Hubble or the James Webb at your leisure. I’ve done this before and I’ll certainly do it again.

But if you just need general inspiration, or to get in the mood, then there’s only one place to go. APOD.

Here be dragons. Space dragons.
Protostellar Outflows in Serpens
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (NASA-JPL), Joel Green (STScI)

NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of the Day has been going since 1995, and the only thing that’s really changed about it since is the quality of the images they post. Every day, a new astronomical image or video is posted and explained in the perfect level of everyman’s detail, with external links and tangents galore. Every day, a new phenomenon, from nebulae light years away to the phases of the moon, all presented simply and effectively.

The image from the day I was born in 1995. Space telescopes have come a long way since then, haven’t they?
M1: Polarization of the Crab
Credit: Hale 5 Meter Telescope
Copyright: AATB, Caltech, David Malin, Jay Pasachoff

It’s a brilliant thing for anyone even slightly interested in space. There’s so bloody much of it, after all, that there are millions of things out there that you’ll never have seen or heard of – but APOD can bring one right to you every day. For me it’s absolutely perfect. Just taking a few minutes every morning to experience a bit of space, to let my mind be among the stars, is great. The sheer number of ideas I get from reading about these crazy celestial phenomena is even better. That nebula looks like a dragon! How do comets work? What the hell is a runaway star and how can I immediately write a story about one, please?

I might have a piece in need of trimming and wrapping up…
Zeta Oph: Runaway Star
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Spitzer Space Telescope

I first discovered APOD years ago, and while I looked at it every day, at some point I got distracted by life and it fell by the wayside. Then I found it again, and it’s become a little highlight of my morning routine. Get up, eat something, get ready to write – and, just for a few minutes, go to space.

M78 from the Euclid Space Telescope
Image Credit & License: ESA, Euclid, Euclid Consortium, NASA; Processing: J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi

All the wonders of the universe, delivered right to your eyes, a day at a time. Who can say no to that?

All the above images are the property and copyright of NASA and the credited photographers.

Analog Blog – Great Martian Railways

The “Science” of the Great Martian Railways

Story and Memory

To keep up the streak of announcements, I’ve got a reprint out this week – one of my oldest stories given new life in the latest issue of THEMA, a long-running magazine out in the States. They’re a theme-focused magazine, and when I saw ‘light and shadow’ I immediately thought of an old friend from back in university, ‘A Conversation at the End of the World’. If it qualified for ‘Light and Dark’, it should qualify for ‘Light and Shadow’, thought I – and it did. So if you fancy reading what was originally a short film idea before I realised my complete lack of cinematic talent, and seeing two old friends-turned-enemies watching the stars go out, one by one, you can.

Seeing such an old story of mine back in print made me equal parts nostalgic and self-evaluative. I’ve got quite a few stories out in the world now, in publications big and small, British and American and Australian. I like them all. I definitely like some better than others. The latest, Great Martian Railways, is definitely among my favourites, for reasons I went into last week. It’s one of those with a genuine emotional connection for me – in this case trains – which a fair few of my stories have in very different ways. The Only Cure is based on a bit of history homework I did in about 2008, and so stays close to my heart – The Scar is essentially a vision of Todra Gorge, the sight of which will always be indelibly etched on my mind as a hidden wonder of the world.

I look at my submission tracker, and the pleasingly tall stack of bricks that are my published stories, and it’s like peering into my own memories.

Robot Mechanic holds my laptop power cable when necessary. Lego is a useful thing to have around.

And then there are the many, many more stories that are in need of editing, and those bold ones right now out waiting for judgement. Some of them have been submitted many, many times, and I’m sure they’ll be submitted many more. I have some of my favourite work in that pile, and I still hope that one day it’ll find a home, if I can find a suitable magazine to which I’ve not already submitted it.

It’s an unpredictable game, this writing lark. I can write something that I think is the best thing I’ve ever put on paper, and it can languish on my hard drive for years – or I can write something that I think is, for me, a solid mid-tier piece and have it snapped up instantly. All art is subjective, of course, but that fact is seldom hammered home as effectively as when I add another rejection to my list of submissions. As I’ve said before, though, you’ve just got to keep trying. It’s taken me years to build up the modest portfolio I have. It’ll take years more before it’s really worth singing about.

But of all the stories I’ve done, published and unpublished, my favourite might still be the first. Or at least my first proper paid story, The Vigil of Talos, from way back in 2018. It’s not a particularly complex story. It’s got a very big robot punching things in it, which was generously deemed to still be on-theme for the Making Monsters anthology and its compendium of reimagined classical myths. But it’s also about fantasy becoming reality, about seeing an idle dream suddenly brought to life, about a quiet desire being fulfilled. What it’s about for me, looking back, is about being a writer. It’s about seeing my work in print for one of the first times, it’s about realising that I could, maybe, actually make something of myself in this arena. When I see that book on my shelf it reminds me of that moment of acceptance, literal and metaphorical.

It reminds me of where I started, and that I really should keep going.

All my stories are available… somewhere. Some will take more work to find than others, some are just up on this blog, their original publishings having long since faded away. Perhaps more of them will be reprinted, some day, and be properly available once again. But if you feel like reading them, you can. You might feel the same way I felt writing them, if you’re lucky.

New Story – Great Martian Railways

I like trains.

I’ve always liked trains. Steam trains, of course: none of this newfangled diesel and electric business, with the exceptions of the Really Fast and Floaty ones, because they still feel like science-fiction even though they’ve been around for years. But there’s always been something about those iron behemoths that’s fascinated me. The sheer physicality of steam engines is just a wonder to behold: pistons and wheels and gears as big as your head, all grinding together in slow and steady harmony. No electronics, no computers, nothing delicateat all: just fire burning and metal meeting and becoming wondrous motion.

80151 at the Bluebell Railway last year.

I’d have been a great Victorian industrialist. Give me a stovepipe hat and I’d be building bridges and laying rails within the hour.

I adore this sort of analogue technology, as readers of this blog will probably already know. For all that modern science has made things smaller, faster, more efficient, there’s a beauty to the old-fashioned physical mechanism that cannot be surpassed. And just because it’s physical doesn’t mean it can’t be small too! I can sit and watch the clockwork of my pocketwatch for ages.

But the big machines are something else. Steam engines and their ultimate expression: the locomotive, the steam train, yet another staple of my childhood that’s never gone away. I have ridden steam trains across the land – well, mostly various bits of Wales and a few other places – throughout my life, in a carriage and occasionally in the engine itself. Even with such limited exposure to the inner workings of these magnificent machines I’ve always been absolutely captivated by them: these beasts of a bygone era, which might have been out-evolved but are still working, still running, sometimes centuries after they were made.

Fenchurch here is 151 years old and still going, at the Bluebell Railway.

You’re not going to see a modern electric train still in working order 100 years from now, I reckon – but the old steam engines will probably still be going even then. They were built to last. They endure, not just physically but in the hearts and minds of small children and large children across the world.

And they will endure into the future. Or at least they will if I have anything to say about it. Which, in the pages of the latest issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, I have.

I’m on the bloody cover!

Great Martian Railways is about brand-new problems with very old solutions. The problem is getting around on a human-colonised Mars. The solution is, of course, a nuclear-powered steam train. If we can get to the moon on a rocket with less RAM than a modern fridge, we can get across Mars with a modern, but ultimately very old-fashioned machine.

It’s about the same stubborn practicality that brought us the age of steam – the same tenacity that humanity has always shown and always will show. It’s about tackling problems head-on, with a really big spanner and a silly hat. Because what will we be, when we get to Mars, but the same pioneers and visionaries as people like Brunel were all those years ago?

You can read Great Martian Railways in the July/August issue of Analog. You can read an extract on their website right now, in fact! It’s illustrated, it’s in print, and it’s fun.

Nuclear steam trains on Mars. It might be one of the best ideas I’ve ever come up with.

Analog updates its site with every new issue, so for posterity’s sake here’s an archive link for future readers of this post.

The Boiling Seas: The Owl in the Labyrinth

The Blackbird and the Ghost is 5 years old. Nightingale’s Sword is almost 3. It’s about time for another Boiling Seas book, don’t you think?

The current version of the cover, by me, and featuring photos by Aaron Burden, Sarah Lee, Neom and Zachary Spears on Unsplash.

It goes without saying, but this post is definitely going to spoil bits of Nightingale’s Sword, so if you haven’t read that book yet, pause and do so right now.

Tal, Max and Lily have sailed across the deadly Boiling Seas. They’ve explored every inch of their mysterious islands. They’ve even flown high through the steamy skies above them. But they’ve never ventured underneath the Seas… until now. Because Max is trapped, leagues beneath the scalding waves in an impossible house of secrets, and she’s not getting out without help. She’ll have to unravel the mystery of the Scrolls and the Seas while Tal and Lily figure out how to rescue her.

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, and won’t let a little thing like ‘friendship’ stand in his way.

A race against time, against authority, and against the world itself. Tal, Max and Lily couldn’t be happier.

The Owl in the Labyrinth concludes the Boiling Seas trilogy with a trip to the only part of this world we haven’t yet visited: underneath the actual Seas themselves. I’ve been off-handedly mentioning metal monsters and flying fish for 5 years now, and it’s finally time to meet them up close! I don’t want to spoil the whole book, but it’s been a very interesting challenge getting my protagonists down there safely…

Max is of course the Owl – she needed a bird name to go with the rest of my little flock, and it had to be a clever one. As for the Labyrinth… well, you’ll have to wait and see.

There are lots of loose ends to tie up here, and I might even get to most of them. Who made the ancient scrolls that have driven the plot of this whole trilogy? What are they even for? Who lurks in the mysterious Panopticon at the heart of Port Malice? How will Max escape the Boiling Seas themselves – and how can Tal and Lily keep from each other’s throats without her?

All these and more might be answered in The Owl in the Labyrinth. Probably.

I’m sure there are more effective ways to do these reveals – a bit at a time, getting hype on other sites, all that jazz – but I’m bad at marketing, it’s the 5th birthday of book 1, and when am I going to get a more satisfying reveal time than that? It feels like I’ve been sitting on this reveal for too long, anyway.

Is the book ready to be published yet? Nope. Will it be by the end of the year? Probably. I’m very busy with my own wedding and countless other things but I am getting through this edit and it will be done. And what better way to motivate myself than revealing the title and cover and thus putting a very real clock on my own editing process? It’ll be fine. I hope.

I didn’t really expect The Blackbird and the Ghost to do well. I didn’t write it with a sequel actively in mind, for all that I left plenty of things open for one. But that little book I wrote almost 9 years ago has blossomed into something much bigger than I ever imagined. Its characters have lives of their own that I couldn’t leave unexplored, and as for the world… well, I’m finally getting to the really cool bits. Some of these ideas I wrote down almost 9 years ago and am only now getting to explore.

I’m excited. I hope a few of you are too. Let me know.

And if you’re reading this and want to start your journey on the Boiling Seas in time to be able to finish it, then grab The Blackbird and the Ghost for free until the end of today (Sunday the 9th.) It has been described, by multiple people, as a “good book.” I reckon its second sequel will be, too.

From Blackbird to Ghost – How I Wrote It

Just under 5 years ago, I started really being an author.

Wednesday the 5th of June marks the 5th birthday of The Blackbird and the Ghost – not the first book I’d written, even back then, but the first one that I thought might be worth showing the rest of the world. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing back in 2019. I still don’t. But I did it anyway.

How? Well, I’m glad you didn’t ask.

But before I start: from its birthday on Wednesday the 5th until Sunday the 9th, The Blackbird and the Ghost will be FREE in digital form to celebrate.

To talk about how I first wrote Blackbird, I have to cast my mind back a lot more than 5 years – try 9. The second term of my second year of university, grappling with medieval history and mid-rehearsal for a production of The Comedy of Errors… and for some reason, the time I chose to get cracking on not just a new novel but on my first proper short story, too. ‘A Discourse on the Prisoner’s Cinema’ was very hastily written in the History Department common room in January, probably around the time of auditions and callbacks for the aforementioned play.

On the 6th of February, so midway through the rehearsal period, I created a Word doc called ‘Dungeon Crawler’. I wrote the prologue of what is now The Blackbird and the Ghost. I think it was the first line that came to me out of nowhere – which is still one of my favourite lines I’ve written, honestly – and the rest of the tomb and the names just flowed out from there.

At some point in the intervening years I learned how to format properly, too.

Importantly, this wasn’t the Boiling Seas yet. They don’t really get mentioned in that first scene – if they do, I added them in later. Tal was here, his job and moniker were here… but not his world. Not yet. That came a week or so later, when, not just during The Comedy of Errors but onstage – probably during a dress rehearsal rather than the actual live show, but still – I opened up my sketchbook and I drew a map. This map.

I’m not actually very good at drawing, but I can just about manage a map.

For context, I wasn’t anyone important in The Comedy of Errors – just a fruit-seller with a few lines at the beginning, before I and my fellow background cast did Generally Immersive Background Things in the marketplace set around the actual plot. Playing cards, going to the pub, having pineapples stolen by small children, etc. Jotting some things down in a sketchbook was deemed perfectly acceptable, especially as my nice leatherbound sketchbook (which I need to get out again and resume my sporadic attempts to learn to draw well) fit the aesthetic very nicely.

And thanks to Danté Kim I have an actual photo of me starting the map during rehearsal! Look at that tiny beardless face.

I’m not sure I was drawing the map for my half-started story – but I soon put them together. And I started writing. Apparently, I started writing fast. I created that original Word doc on the 6th of February… and I finished it on the 18th of May. 102 days for a whole book!

No, don’t do the maths and tell me that’s only 600 words a day on average when I always write a minimum of 500 anyway. Stop it. Put that calculator down.

Having performed this monumental feat of literature… I then forgot about it for 2 years.

I had things to do: degrees to finish, comedy to write and perform, and some other books to write, too – I think I went onto those cyberpunk novellas next. I should revisit those. So ‘Dungeon Crawler’ languished on my hard drive for some time… but during that time, I became a professional author. In the sense that I got paid for writing things that were then published. And with some short stories under my belt, I belatedly realised that self-publishing was possible – reasonably simple, even, with KDP – and I wondered if I had anything that would suit.

I did, of course. I had ‘Dungeon Crawler’, which had at some point acquired the series title of ‘The Boiling Seas’, though not yet its actual novel title. Almost exactly 2 years after I started writing it, I started editing it. This seems to have been a rather perfunctory process, mostly dedicated to switching Max’s gender… which, after 5 years, I should really do another pass at just to check I didn’t miss any pronouns…

And then I set to work doing this ‘author’ thing ‘properly’. I created this website/blog. I began unravelling how KDP worked. I spent far too long making a cover with some really rubbish photo editing tools.

This isn’t all of them. It’s really not.

I tweaked. I massaged. I enlisted for the first time my long-suffering proofreaders (my dad and my friend Jack). I tweaked some more. It was a leisurely process. Back then, I hadn’t started a streak of a book every year or so. Back then, absolutely nobody knew who I was.  

At some point, I came up with a title.

And then, on the 5th of June, The Blackbird and the Ghost spread its wings and flew.

It did ok. It did far better than I’d ever realistically expected. Some people – perhaps even some of you – read it. Some people even reviewed it. It’s been in competitions – it made the semi-finals of the SPFBO, which is the best I’ve ever done in any of the SP things. It’s had one sequel, and I’m working on another.

More than 1100 people have a copy of The Blackbird and the Ghost, at the time of writing. It’s taken 5 years for that to happen, of course. But Tal Wenlock and his little witchlight have come a long way since February 2016.

I’m proud of this book. It’s not that long. It’s a bit messy. The plot isn’t the strongest even if I do like the worldbuilding an awful lot. There are typos. There are mistakes. But it’s mine. And people, by and large, seem to have liked it.

I liked it enough to keep the story going. Nightingale’s Sword is also a book I’m proud of, as – hopefully – will be its sequel, the conclusion to this completely accidental trilogy. I just didn’t want to leave those characters where they were, and they didn’t want to stay there, either. Who knows when I’ll really be done with those three birds?

Blackbird was the first book I thought was actually good enough for other people to read. It was a big step. Putting my work out there for the entire world to judge was and remains terrifying. But now, I at least know that a handful of people will probably read whatever my new ventures are. Back then… I had no safety net, beyond a few kind friends who picked up a copy. I had nothing but faith in my words.

It paid off.

5 years later, here I am editing Untitled Boiling Seas Book 3. I’m so much busier than I was back then. There’s so much less time and headspace to get stuck in. But I can still dive into that world I accidentally created back in 2016, no matter what else is going on. And soon you lot will be able to do the same.

The Blackbird and the Ghost is 5 years old. I’ve talked about its past. Next week, I think it’s about time I talked about its future.

Stay tuned.

And get a free copy next week if you haven’t already – and if you have, please tell me what you thought of Blackbird, in whatever way you choose.

Hijinks and Mild Peril

Last night I went to space.

Well, as close as one can easily get. For you see, dear reader, yesterday was probably the nerdiest day of my life, and one of the most fun. 

We began at MCM London – as , no less, for an excellent gig – and promptly headed straight off to my stag do, where after much merriment and lightsaber stage combat training, we ended up on a spaceship under a railway arch in Vauxhall. Specifically Bridge Command, which is, to put it succinctly, absolutely bloody marvellous.

Yes, that is technically the wrong uniform for this universe. Let’s say I’m on an officer exchange program, that’ll do.

I have played the Star Trek tabletop RPG before, and had a great time getting thoroughly into character as a spacefaring sailor. But as fun as rolling dice and theatre of the mind can be… they’re not an actual, fully-constructed spaceship set, with functioning consoles, exploding fuses, live actors, and space for 11 men to form a motley, but fully uniformed crew as we gave The Order.

Lost Light #25 (2018)

I had a mere 3 buttons to press… because I was the captain, and so I had 10 people to prod instead. We set off into space with a clear, simple mission, which we ended up almost completely ignoring in favour of much more immediate side-quests that popped up en route. We rescued stranded spacers, we hit a lot of asteroids, and I got to ‘diplomatically’ hang up the space-phone on sarcastic bad guys before ordering their fiery destruction. 

It was an absolutely glorious time. Everyone had their own tasks, all intersecting with each other and largely meshing together into a successful mission. We didn’t all die, which was a bonus, despite a few friendly fire incidents. Bridge Command is of course legally distinct from Star Trek but it was exactly like being in an episode of it, down to the clothes on our backs.

I’m not just writing this as a gushing review of Bridge Command, though it also is – if you like Star Trek you should absolutely have a go at this, it’s amazing – but to expand more generally on that particular brand of storytelling that is improving, or immersive, or just play, if you really want to cut to the core of it. I’m a writer: most of the stories I tell are acted out in the theatre of my own mind. I know what I want to depict – I just have to pick the words that describe it perfectly. Sometimes I even succeed. But these scenes in my head are vivid, real, and turning them into words is often very hard indeed.

DnD, and other RPG stuff like that, is another way to realise those stories. If I’m the game master then I may be writing some things down, but reacting to my players off the cuff, in character; if I’m the player, then I’m the one acting and reacting and shaping the story through my direct choices. Basically this adds an audio track to the theatre of the mind (or something of a visual if you play with miniatures, etc.). You might not choose the perfect words if you’re improvising a speech, but they are more directly your words, your actions, your choices.

And then there’s something like Bridge Command – where you’re physically running around, interacting, reacting, with a real set and tools. The theatre of the mind is now the theatre of the body, too, and it feels good. 

But I’m not saying that you can only experience the best storytelling by literally being immersed in it. These experiences are amazing fun… but all the bells and whistles, all the physical props and actors, aren’t the core reason this sort of thing is so much fun. They are so much fun, but the root of it is much simpler.

I’m an adult, now. I’m getting married and everything. I no longer spend my days running around with my friends, interesting sticks in hand, playing at being Jedi, or soldiers, or superheroes. But it’s a feeling you never truly forget, or at least that I’ve never forgotten. You, your friends, and your imaginations can build whole worlds out of a cardboard box and a couple of sticks, half an hour’s break at a time.

Because that’s what DnD is. That’s what Bridge Command is. That’s what, for all that it’s more solitary, writing is, for me. All these things, when you boil them down, are playgrounds. They’re ways to tap back into that childish joy and imagination, and to bring your friends back with you. They’re ways to forget about all the boring, serious stuff of life and just play again, which is something that I think we should all do more often.

Sitting on that starship bridge, surrounded by my friends – by some of the friends with whom I ran around the playground with those years ago – I was a kid again. And looking at their faces, I think my friends were too. 

Also, we did get to fight with lightsabers, which has never not been fun in the history of humankind.

Writing What You *Don’t* Know

I find myself faced with an interesting writing challenge over the next two weeks: writing in detail about something I’ve made up. An upcoming something, in fact.

Now obviously I do this a lot, to a lesser degree: if you read this blog at all then you’ll have seen me waxing lyrical about my inspirations and working processes for various stories and books. But this time is different. This time, I can’t just talk about the overall vibe and emotions of the story, though they will of course be important.

This time, I have to talk about… science.

Despite all the SF that I write, I am not a scientist. I am a historian. And I do still write plenty of history for work: telling the stories of real people is still very much within my wheelhouse, even this many years after I actually studied it. But that’s still telling stories, even if it’s not fiction. This will be different. This time I actually need to make some degree of sense, which means doing a lot of checking of the research that went into the original story all that time ago. I’m fairly sure that there was some scientific fact buried underneath all the other stuff. I certainly hope there was.

I’ll see how that goes, anyway: said writing won’t be directly posted here, but I will be sure to link it so you lot can read it too. But as I get started on writing this up, it makes me consider just how important I think writing like this is: not just writing fiction but writing about the writing of it.

When I’m actually writing, I’m often not thinking consciously at all about why I’m using the words I am, why I’m constructing a character or environment in a particular way. So much is instinctual or subconscious for me. I can look back at a piece and find completely unexpected themes which I’ve accidentally been building on, even when I might have been deliberately leaning towards a different moral or outcome. It’s one of the reasons that I end up so often, in my longer works, having to go back and restructure the beginning to match what the end became: if I’m writing a piece for long enough then I have the opportunity to notice those themes starting to evolve and adjust my later words accordingly.

Storytelling is largely organic for me: I’ve talked before about how I liken it to hacking through a jungle, perhaps with a destination in mind but no precise idea what might be hiding behind the next stand of ferns. So looking back at the journey and thinking about why I made those choices, essentially analysing my own work (thank you, A-Level English Literature) is an immensely profitable thing for me as a writer. I’m never going to improve as a writer unless I can understand what made a story good.

So this article I’m writing will be a very useful one. I already think that the story in question is one of my best works. But doing this will hopefully help me understand why – and as it’s a lot more ‘factual’ than what I normally write, hopefully help me get better at incorporating actual science and all that jazz into my future stories.

It’s always a learning experience, this writing thing – whether that’s the research, or the writing itself.

What Am I Doing: May 2024 Edition

Right, it’s been a couple of months. What’s been happening?

In my life: quite a lot. The summer is the busiest time of year for me at work, given all the children running around everywhere, and my free time is rapidly becoming dominated with stuff. Concerts (!), parties, and so many weddings, including mine, for which a lot of planning is still necessary. At some point I need to write some speeches. I have ideas. Some. First I need to get the rest of my suit.

In writing: well, stuff is happening. As a result of the aforementioned Stuff Going On I’ve still been doing my relaxing Going Somewhere story just to keep my hand in while I let a bunch of different ideas simmer away in the back of my mind. I have a few loose short concepts that need fleshing out, as well as stuff for my next grimdark RPG session, because I’ve painted some cool models lately and I need an excuse to use them for something.

I’ve also kept up with agent submissions and the like, including the Angry Robot open submission window, to which I have hurled Salvage 7 in the vague hopes of someone at least reading it. We’ll see how that goes. And while I haven’t been submitting any more shorts (because I haven’t finished any), I should have some nice publication news coming soon…

As for Boiling Seas 3: the edit doth progress. I’m approaching the end of Part 1 (of 3), which shouldn’t take too much tweaking beyond cutting it down a tad… until the ending, which I intend to change quite significantly to lead into my revised plan for Part 2. That looks like it’s going to basically be a rewrite of one of the plot threads to accommodate the changed Part 1, but that’ll just become my daily writing and shouldn’t take too long. A lot of the pieces I’ll need to use are there – villain setups, evil plans, etc. – they just need moving around and recontextualising. One of my main issues with the first draft was how the actual antagonist of the story, while showing up near the start, didn’t do that much antagonising until the very end – so I’m bringing them to the forefront and letting them get some good dastardliness in early.

I have, however, invented the hoverboard, which I shall add to radios and submarines in the list of ‘modern technologies I’ve reinvented with magic’. That’ll be fun when it turns up. In the hands of my other sort-of-antagonist, who I also intend to tweak to make more of an obstacle, though not intentionally. I can’t really explain how they’re not actually evil – as actively helpful as possible, in fact – but still a problem, without spoiling a lot of story. But they’re a fun character, I must say.

Juggling all the threads of a trilogy is a tricky task. Doing so with a split POV is trickier, especially when the POVs are physically split, with different stuff going on in different locations. I’ve done ok so far, but getting the balance right is hard, and getting the recombination right is harder, when everyone’s back together and facing off against the same enemy. It should work out alright. There are just so many ideas I want to finish realising in this conclusion and only one book to do it in.

Yeah, this is going to be a bit of a brick. But if you’ve read this far already, I don’t think you’ll mind all that much.