Hûw Steer's Blog, page 9

A Particular Set of Skills

I would like to have a very particular set of skills. But for now, I’ve just been giving those skills to my protagonists instead.

I went axe throwing yesterday, which was rather entertaining, even if I can see why it never really caught on in the olden days (why lob your weapon in the general direction of the enemy and hope the right end hits them when you can just walk a bit closer?). I was of course spectacularly bad at it, but it was fun, and it approaches a slightly different skill that I’ve always wanted to learn: the slightly more practical and much cooler ability to throw knives. It’s been on my list for ages, as utterly impractical as it is and as more niche it will be to learn… but one day I’ll be flipping knives around the place like darts.

Another thing I’ve always wanted to be able to do is pick locks, which is a somewhat more achievable talent, as well as being more practical if I ever lock myself out of my house, for instance. I have secured some practice locks from a friend, so if I actually get around to obtaining the necessary tools then I can get cracking.

It was when I put these things together in my head that I realised that what I want, essentially, is to be a fantasy rogue. I want to throw knives, crack open doors, learn to fence properly. I want to be as cool as, to have the talents of, my favourite two fantasy rogues, Tal and Lily Wenlock from the Boiling Seas. In the absence of having these actual abilities myself I have imparted them to my characters – I can do a bit of vicarious Cool Stuff through their adventures. It’s a lot easier, and rather fun too.

But I’m going to have to learn the rest of these skills one day – or at least try them out. Just like I’ve been wandering around my house while wearing my new gauntlets so I can understand what heavy armour feels like, I want to test out the other skills I throw at my characters. Axe throwing was a good step, but I realise even as I write this post that I’ve been working on one Wenlock skill in my free time without even realising: climbing. Those of you who’ve read Nightingale’s Sword will know that there’s a fair bit of scaling of walls and rocks, and there’ll be more in Boiling Seas 3. No self-respecting rogue skimps on the ability to scale a fence or crack open a high window, after all. But I’ve been climbing regularly for a couple of years now, so I can actually write a difficult climb with the experience needed to make it vaguely realistic.

Writing is a learning process in itself: I’m always finding new ways to wield words. But it can be a learning process in so many other ways, too, and the learning, I find, is one of the most fun parts.

So lockpicks next, and I’ll be able to actually understand what pins and tumblers really are. Then I should really look into fencing, and maybe my fight scenes will get a bit better…

Or at the very least, I’ll have a good time.

Small Steps

When I need something to write, when the Big Ideas aren’t quite flowing and I just need to get words on paper, I have a default. I have a theme that I return to, over and over again. It fits like a glove… or in this case, a boot.

There are many settings, there are many plots that occasionally evolve. But there is always, at the core, someone walking.

I pick up in media res and set a character walking. I usually don’t bother naming them, I just set them off. I almost never have a destination in mind, a purpose for the journey, and sometimes my fresh protagonist doesn’t either. They’re just going, step by step, mile by mile. They are alone, normally, save for the occasional bird or other miscellaneous bit of wildlife: alone with their thoughts, and with the wind, and with whatever terrain they’re crossing.

This is the bit that varies, according to my mood, or my idling imagination, or occasionally from whatever I’ve been reading or watching of late. I’ve done deserts, I’ve done mountains, I’ve done space – and perhaps most importantly I’ve started with fields, though those last two stories took on a little more life of their own. You never know where a story’s going to take you – and I do mean you – after all. But this is also one of the most important bits, really: the environment, the place which the unnamed protagonist is passing through, and the place that my idling imagination can warm itself up through describing. It’s the sort of writing that I love doing but there is so often not enough space and time for in my published works: you do, at some point, have to get to the plot. But lavishing detail on every rock, every patch of lichen, the whistling of the wind or the heat of the sand… it’s relaxing. If reading is escapism then writing is too, and I find few things more escapist than immersing myself in describing a foreign environment from bowed head to striding food.

It started as a wish to walk in the fields of home again. The plot came knocking at the pub door some time later.

But the walking is key. The travel, the journey, is key. Just describing a place isn’t enough to scratch the creative itch for me. I need that sense of progress, of motion. Whatever weary traveller I’ve sketched must be travelling, no matter how much they, or I, might want to stay in the little clearing in the woods I’ve just drawn up, with its fragrant wildflowers and birdsong.

There’s probably a much stronger creative metaphor or insight in here somewhere, but their progress is my progress, for all that these stories often go pretty much nowhere. To break myself out of a creative rut I spin my wheels by not spinning my wheels, by making someone else get moving… anywhere, really. And it works. My brain gets moving right alongside my nameless protagonists, and I merrily switch over to my main projects with my creativity nicely refreshed.

To all those nameless people who still languish in the middle of the desert, or high on some mountainside, I salute you. I do finish most of these rambling tales but there are a good few left undone, as there are plenty of other, more focused works that I’ve never finished. But those nameless wanderers are special. Their task is simple, but vital. They journey so my mind can too.

What Is Sci-Fi, Anyway?

Different people have different opinions on what constitutes ‘real’ science-fiction. This is inherently absolutely fine – there are a lot of stories out there and they’re all going to hit differently. But what’s been rattling around my head for a while is that not all of these definitions are actually defining the same thing.

I should probably explain that.

Back when I wrote my dissertations on the history of sci-fi, I considered a few definitions of the genre before picking my favourite, which was coincidentally a definition that made Lucian’s True History count as science-fiction. Handy, given that if that wasn’t the case I wouldn’t have been able to write the essay. (Or Ad Luna.) Essentially the problem as I encountered it was this: does science fiction have to be about ‘science’? Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove thought so: their Trillion Year Spree cites Frankenstein as being “the first real novel of science fiction”[1] – anything earlier is “pure fantasy”.[2] This is the science-centric version: sci-fi that doesn’t rely on the progress of science, on some kind of critique of the progress of technology, isn’t sci-fi. It’s just… well, ‘fi’.

But I didn’t like this definition – it always seemed too narrow, too exclusive, and too focused on specific content than on theme. Darko Suvin’s definition – the idea of ‘cognitive estrangement’, of showing the reader a world that is in some way different and forces them to reflect on their own world – is more appealing. [3] This for me is what sci-fi is all about: tweaking something about the world and exploring all the changes and fallout from that tweak. What if we could build perfect humanoid robots that could be walking among us right now? Blade Runner. What if censorship went so far that we started burning all books? Fahrenheit 451. This definition makes sci-fi all about ‘what-ifs’, and that for me is far more important than the actual presence of ‘science’.

Just because your sci-fi story features some sort of future science doesn’t mean it’s really about that science. The other half of the debate is ‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ sci-fi; stories that hinge around the exact and factual mechanics of the Big Science Thing versus stories that don’t really care and would rather explore the world more generally instead.

But the thing is that neither of the above definitions has to be wrong… because they’re actually talking about slightly different things. Suvin’s ‘cognitive estrangement’ doesn’t just apply to stories that we’d consider sci-fi, after all. There are plenty of fantasy stories that do the same thing: present a world very similar to our own but with the addition of some novum – the Different Thing – that completely changes how the world works. The Temeraire books, for instance: they’re indisputably fantasy, but fundamentally they’re set in a recognisable 1800s world, just with the addition of dragons, and all the societal changes that entails. They’re not sci-fi – but they fit Suvin’s definition anyway.

Is Ad Luna science-fiction? Some competition judges have said yes, some have said no. Definitions are weird.

And the True History, too. There is not a drop of science in Lucian’s satire, but it’s all about those novums – an enlightened Lunar society, but they’re all male! An island of trees, but alive! And all of these things reflect in some way on contemporary Greco-Roman society. So too Star Trek, the spiritual descendant of the True History: yes, it’s in space, yes, it’s dealing with representations of racism or Communism but through a distorted, fictional lens… but for all the technobabble and future tech, it’s not really about science, is it? It’s so fantastical as to be divorced from most modern understanding of technology and science. And you’d never say that Star Trek isn’t science-fiction.

So what am I getting at? Essentially, over the years, we as a literary society have managed to hopelessly overlap and confuse two linked but different genres: science-fiction, which is about reflecting and critiquing our world through some technological or scientific novum, and speculative fiction, which is about reflecting and critiquing our world through any kind of novum. When most people say ‘science fiction’ – including myself – what we actually mean is ‘speculative fiction’, the broader genre to which sci-fi belongs. Much fantasy is speculative fiction; pretty much all sci-fi is speculative fiction; and plenty of other stories which don’t quite feel right as either of the above can be speculative fiction too. It’s in the name: speculative fiction, speculating about how a world would change with those little twists and tweaks.

But because there’s so much science-fiction and because it’s the most obvious carrier of the spec-fic torch, the names and definitions have blurred. Basically all sci-fi is spec-fic, but not all spec-fic is sci-fi – there’s just so much sci-fi that it’s very easy to think of it as being the whole genre instead of just a part of it. And this is why the oft-repeated argument of ‘is this real sci-fi’ exists at all. Take Star Wars. Hardcore sci-fi fans, those who want the science to be hard, front and centre, of their stories, would say Star Wars isn’t sci-fi. But, cry legions of other fans, it’s in space and it’s full of lasers, FTL and robots: of course it’s sci-fi. The former are arguing about science fiction – the latter about speculative fiction. They’re both right – but they’re applying the same name to two slightly different genres. ‘Space fantasy’, which is probably a more accurate description of what most Star Wars stories are, is speculative fiction, but it doesn’t fit a tighter definition of science fiction.

This is obviously a hopelessly lost cause at this point. We’re all so used to applying the term ‘science fiction’ to the umbrella of ‘speculative fiction’ that it’s just ingrained in out lexicons now. But I think it’s worth pointing out. There is room for everything in the wider spec-fic umbrella, if we all play nicely… and as long as we can all agree what we’re actually talking about.

[1] Aldiss, Brian & Wingrove, David, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (House of Stratus, 2001),  p.36

[2] Aldiss & Wingrove, p.57

[3] Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (Yale University Press, 1979), p.10

The Armoured Dream

As a fantasy author, I feel it is my solemn duty to collect as many prop weapons and assorted paraphernalia as possible. Throughout my life I have succeeded in this fairly well: after a slow graduation from (but never full abandonment of) wooden swords and the like, I strode straight to the local medieval fair on the day I turned 18 and bought a sword. It currently lives at my parents’ house, having so far sliced only birthday cake. It hangs, in fact, above a full-face helmet, which is definitely too big for me but does at least go over my head, unlike the comedically tiny Roman helmet on my history bookshelf. On our windowsill sit twice as many replica flintlocks as anyone could physically hold. A spear hangs above my bookshelf. And this is to say nothing of the bits of Roman marble, ancient coins, hats and cloaks that lurk in interesting corners and in prop boxes.

I have worn only one of these helmets to a party. You can probably guess which one.

But I’ve always wanted a suit of armour. Even though it’s impractically heavy to wear and bulky to store, even though I prefer most of my fantasy heroes to be lightly armoured and light on their feet… it’s a suit of armour. I crave endless layers of plate and mail. I desire nothing more than to clank my way around the house and probably fall through the floor from the sheer weight of metal. I want to nearly blind myself with a visored helmet and comedically walk into doorframes. (And let’s be honest, I want to pretend to be one of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Sentinels from Ironclads et al.)

I do not have the need for a suit of armour. I do not have the space for a suit of armour. I do not have the money for a suit of armour.

Well. Not a whole one.

Of all the things you expect to be donated to a children’s charity toyshop – and I have found some very strange things in boxes of LEGO over the years – you don’t expect plate gauntlets. Proper, heavy, steel plate gauntlets. They’re too big for me, and I’ve got big hands. Could I justify the expense? Not really. Did I desperately need a pair of really silly gloves? Absolutely.

Can you roll dice in plate gauntlets? Apparently yes – I got an 18, which is better than I roll bare-handed!

They’re so heavy, and cumbersome, and awkward. I can barely make a fist, let alone pick stuff up without some serious concentration. They make a very useful bit of context, in fairness, as to just how awkward it can be to wear such heavy armour, something I do often find myself wondering as I write. It’s a very useful justification, too, and one that I intend to apply retroactively to some of the various other weapons and objects cluttering my house.

I can pretend all I like these gauntlets are for research, for all that they might actually be good for it. But really, this is just the next step in the armoured dream. I suspect that what I really want to do is live in a small and extremely eclectic museum, and honestly, I can think of worse fates.

At the end of the day, these silly gloves made me happy. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Narratess Sale – 13th-15th April

The Narratess indie sale is once again upon us – and once again, I’m in it!

300+ free or discounted ebooks – including my own The Singer, for free – are available from today until the end of Monday. There are some absolute crackers on here, so do take a look.

And alongside this, somewhat… unofficially, The Blackbird and the Ghost and Ad Luna are also on sale for the duration!

There are good reads here. And if you’re reading this post and you haven’t read my books yet – well, now’s the time, eh?

Does What Really Happened Really Matter?

I’ve been reading non-fiction a bit lately – something I haven’t done in a good while, not properly. I dip into reference books and the like when I need to find a fact but I haven’t just gone through a chunk of history cover-to-cover in ages, and I felt like it was time. And it got me thinking about history, about sources, and about the key question of a lot of historical source analysis, namely: is any of this stuff even remotely true?

There is no history without sources – if we didn’t have actual records and evidence of the past, I would have a Masters degree in Guesswork. But of course the further back in time you go, as a general rule, the less concrete stuff you have to go on, and/or the more dubious the sources you do have become. It’s part of why I like ancient and medieval history so much more than modern history – the lack of knowledge, the act of interpreting what knowledge we have and drawing conclusions, is much more fun sometimes than just reading a verified eyewitness account of exactly what happened last Tuesday, as in modern history. (Not that modern history is immune to strategic reinterpretation and rewriting – look at every modern politician and how they like to selectively reinterpret the past to make themselves look good, even when there’s documentary evidence of the complete opposite.)

I will turn to ancient Rome because it’s always to hand in my mind (thank you, two degrees). There is a lot of surviving documentary evidence and contemporary-ish history from the period. Hooray! Except of course none of it is wholly reliable. Everything is written with an agenda, and while modern scholarship has adopted the pleasing convention of ‘setting out your argument and motivation at the start’, the ancients, as a rule, didn’t. We have vast numbers of letters from and to Cicero, which paint a stunning picture of the corruption of Republican Rome and the evils of the successive dictatorial Triumvirates. And we also have many letters to and from Julius Caesar, in which he derides the corrupt Republican Senate and speaks eloquently about the benefits of firm, decisive rule by one man (him). Who’s right? Who’s wrong? It’s all wonderfully subjective and that’s the whole point.

A lot happened on that little brick wall. We assume we know who said what. Do we? And does it matter?

But things go even deeper when you get into ancient historians, and the way they look at even more ancient historians. There were many people who wrote clear and decisive accounts of periods in which they lived (or usually periods a bit before when they lived but they definitely, totally, were telling the truth about). Later historians refer to them as fact. Later historians refer to those historians’ ideas, and so on and so forth. Geographers, too, are culprits of this: for every actual visit to far-off lands like Egypt and largely factual account of what they were like, there were ten people who had absolutely sailed that far themselves and seen the people with no heads and three legs that they described in lurid detail. (I’m looking at you, Herodotus. Father of History my arse.) And even the good researchers would ask questions in these new lands, be told wild myths and legends and record them as absolute truth – and usually misinterpret them a bit along the way to make them a bit more spicy for their own readers. This is how we get tales of literal barnacle geese, of beast-headed men and many-headed beasts.

Yes, geese did grow on trees in the Middle Ages. Topographia Hibernica (c. 1188) – British Library

In short, this is how we end up with fantasy. Because in these cracks between the facts, in these mad histories and made-up stories, there are wonders to behold. Adventures that never happened, kings who never ruled, battles that were never fought, gods who were never worshipped. They are talked about as absolutely true all over the place. Maybe people believed in these stories – maybe not. But they were passed down anyway. It took scholars and historians of many later generations to sort the rubbish from the fact – that’s their job, after all, and they are still, in fact, doing it. Until the invention of the time machine, they’ll always be doing it.

And some of these stories will turn out to be really useful allegories for actual real events, or politically motivated, or give some other great insight into ancient culture. And maybe those interpretations will be right – or maybe they’ll be argued, and dismissed, and cast aside as the sort of footnotes that, two thousand years from now, historians will argue over as they try to interpret our culture.

But they make for great stories, regardless. People have been seeing that for thousands of years. Since, and likely before, Lucian, for instance, who took all of what was then the modern field of history and geography, said ‘I can make up better rubbish than this,’ and did. And even in his explicitly made-up work we can find nuggets of truth and insight into the culture of his time. I did. It was an honour to do it, and to reinterpret his reinterpretations as something modern readers could enjoy too.

So the question about history doesn’t have to be ‘is this true’. It can be ‘does it matter’. And it can also be ‘how can I have fun with it?’ Because you can have a lot of fun with it, if you don’t take it too seriously.

Be it understood, then, that I am writing about things which I have neither seen nor had to do with nor learned from others – which, in fact, do not exist at all and, in the nature of things, cannot exist. Therefore my readers should on no account believe in them.

– Lucian of Samosata, The True History

Fantasy Shorts

I am ill today, so forgive something a bit rambly. But it is about writing and all that.

I had a realisation the other day. I was looking at my roster of short stories and despairing lightly, because I’ve largely run out of decent ones that are written and not yet published. On the one hand: great, I’ve got a nice stack of published stories! But I want to keep that up, which means I need more material. I’ve got a bit, though it needs a lot of editing. I’ve had a few decent SF ideas lately, too, but in the writing they sort of fizzled out. I need to go back to those and give them another go.

Fantasy, though, is a less tapped market for me in terms of short pieces. Plenty of books, yes, but only two published shorts. I think speculative fiction lends itself better to shorter forms, in fairness: you turn up with a Weird Concept, flesh it out a bit but not too much, and you’re golden. Fantasy, while still speculative, is a bit less conceptual, or at least it is when I write it. I end up focusing a bit more on characters, on how the people are interacting with an odd world rather than how the world is affecting people.

But I haven’t had any ideas for fantasy shorts in ages. I have a bunch of ideas for long fantasy pieces, but they’re going to be hefty beasts indeed. There’s only so much worldbuilding you can fit into a short story, which is why SF works better if you’re hinging everything around One Weird Thing. With fantasy you usually need to let things breathe.

Unless you’ve got a good character in your back pocket. Unless you’ve got a strong hero to work with, someone who can carry a story on their own. A character with depth, someone you’ve spent a very long time exploring. Someone who you’ve actually already been writing a bunch of short pieces for to fill in gaps – oh, I see, it’s going to be my DnD character, isn’t it. Yep, it’s Sir Geoffrey alright.

Even Hansard’s had an upgrade now!

Because I’ve been Sir Geoffrey for some time now. I know how he thinks, I know how he reacts, I know what he’ll do when I drop him into a suitably madcap situation. Even though I’m dialling back some character development and setting this/these shorts before the campaign I’ve been playing, I still know him so very well. I’ve jumped back in his timeline already to just flesh out his character on a whim and keep our DM happy. (There are few things more affirming than having such a good DM, such a good storyteller, tell you that your own storytelling is top-notch.)

And let’s be honest, Sir Geof is a fun and silly enough character to just work. Down-on-his-luck knight riding around on his manservant’s shoulders? Somewhat traumatised, arrogant coward now trying very hard to be the hero he’s always pretended to be? It’s got legs, I reckon.

If nothing else, I really enjoy writing Sir Geoffrey. So even if these stories never see the published light of day, it’ll be a good time. And at the end of the day, I’m doing this because I love it.

Names and Power

Sometimes you can get a lot out of a single word.

Or you can pack a lot into a single word, I suppose – it depends which way you’re approaching it. This is probably most evident in names, and especially in fantasy and sci-fi. When you need to append qualities to things – people, magical items, places – it always feels good to be able to get it all wrapped up in a suitable name. Maybe it’ll only reflect some qualities, maybe all of them. Maybe it’ll deliberately not reflect them. And sometimes the name or word you choose at random can end up having more meaning than you ever intended.

Let’s look at place names, and let’s look at mine. We have, in the Boiling Seas, the town of Port Malice. It’s a nice catchy name, and it has some implications. In-universe, was that always its name? (Yes.) Why name your own home something like ‘Malice’? Maybe because you’ve managed to stake a claim and scrape out a living in an inherently hostile environment, say, a boiling-hot ocean full of metal sea monsters. Maybe you call your own town ‘Malice’ out of spite and defiance at the world around you. Or maybe you’re an author only fully thinking about this name in book 3 of a trilogy, and finding serendipitous meaning in a word you picked to imply (well, basically outright state) to the reader that all is not necessarily well in this little port city.

Or Whetstone, the village where Perce lives in The Fire Within. (Or indeed Quern from The Singer, which is a type of grindstone/millstone, and definitely not hastily chosen to replace Whetstone because I forgot that I’d already used that as a town name.) A whetstone is a tool, and a tool that requires not insignificant effort to use, at that. It gives, deliberately, the impression of hard work to the reader: that the people who live in a village named for a tool are themselves going to be practical, useful, hard-working. And so the respective denizens of Whetstone and Quern are. They make their living from the land itself, two bunches of simple, practical people. Did they choose the name to fit themselves, or did the name shape them?

Names have power, after all. It’s a common trope in fantasy, to lesser and greater extents. Sometimes names have literal power over the people who have them, as in the Inheritance or Bartimaeus books – sometimes it’s more figurative, as in the classic epics like The Lord of the Rings.

When it comes to characters you often end up with titles doing the work, rather than literal names. It’s hard to take Mr Johann Goodwithasword seriously, even if he is good with a sword. But Johann of the Steel? That’s a nice succinct eponym. And the best titles, as with the best place and item names, are succinct. If you have to literally spell out that a character is the Warden of the Seven Hells, Slayer of Kings, Writer of Mediocre Love Poetry and Acceptable Gardener, it gets a bit boring. Unless, of course, you’re trying to depict an insufferable and/or arrogant bore, in which case it works rather nicely. If we look at history, you can contrast long strings of imperial Roman titles – Imperator Augustus Caesar Pontifex Maximus Romanus Eunt Domum, and all that – with the brutal simplicity of Erik the Red. I know which one of those blokes I’d rather have on my side in a scrap.

I try to tend towards the simple with my characters, though I do ignore that rule for effect. Lots of them have no titles at all; those who do develop nicknames I try to keep simple. The Blackbird, the Nightingale, all that jazz. Then you also have Sir Geoffrey du Babbage, always to be referred to by his full name by those who aren’t his friends thank you very much. But then he’s a bit of a nob, and deliberately so. But those single words can have so much more weight.

Blackbird. Quite clever, quite nimble, likes shiny things but a bit cheerier and less goth than ‘Raven’. In that case, I thought the nickname sounded cool, and worked backwards to get those traits into Tal Wenlock, its user.

And then in contrast, the sword I named last night for DnD. A magic blade, imbued with the power of a spell called Steel Wind Strike, letting the bearer strike swiftly, devastatingly and without warning. I thought this needed a name. So I did a little research, and found a hot wind, that blows down from the lee-side of a mountain to the floor below. If you’re in the lee you’re supposed to be shielded from the weather – you’re not expecting wind. And you’re certainly not expecting a warm wind to blow down from the Alps, where the word vaguely originates. A swift, unexpected wind, summarised in a single word: perfect for this Steel Wind sword.

Foehn. It’s not even a long single word. It even aspirates nicely, like the wind it describes. And to this English speaker it’s always nice to get a word with roots in another language for that extra exotic flavour.

Foehn. It’s a good sword name. I look forward to saying it. I hope that the sword ends up having as much power as the name. I reckon I can swing it.

Libraries Are Neat

It is not a controversial opinion to say that libraries are pretty great. I’d be interested to know just how large a proportion of my life I’ve spent in various libraries, shamelessly plundering the shelves of every bit of fantasy and SF I could reach – and indeed how much time I’ve spent reading those books afterwards. It’s probably an awful lot.

And the great thing about libraries versus bookshops – or at least new bookshops, stocking stuff that’s either recently released or just consistently selling well – is that there’s so much there. So many older books, so many weird, niche books, so much that you wouldn’t ever see for sale new. And sure, about half the time you find a really interesting book that’s number 3 in a series without any of the other volumes there, to great frustration – but for every book like that there’s an absolute gem you stumble across. I first found the Riftwarwhen I happened across it in the adult fantasy spinner at Ludlow Library. I picked up The Colour of Magic on a whim in another library, and then the Discworld was laid out before me. So many great series, so many wonderful books, found only because I was in a space so packed with words that the weight of them warps space.

I spend less time hanging out in libraries these days. That doesn’t mean I don’t visit them – but it’s usually a stop on a longer journey, to browse a bit and then head home. And with the convenience of my reliable* old Kindle, gone are the days when my sister and I would totter out of the library with a pile of about 14 books each to take with us on our summer holidays, to the despair of the parents who had to fit them all in our packing.

When I do go to the library, though, it’s always nice. It’s especially nice to see kids happily reading, like I used to. Just the other morning I was preceded into the library by a small fleet of children on a school visit, all eagerly learning how the book return system worked. I wonder what they’re all reading. I wonder what hidden gems they might stumble across.

Maybe something like this.

I wonder if they’ll stumble across me. For, dear reader, I have managed to get a book into the library. No longer my local library, Archway Library in north London was nice enough to take The Blackbird and the Ghost way back in 2019 and actually shelve it. (Unlike my current local library, which, while excellent, took my books for review over a year ago and refuses to answer any of my emails.) Despite still working nearby I haven’t visited Archway Library in years, as it’s frustratingly open only when I am actually at work. But I popped by the other day. I saw Blackbird on the shelves in person for the first time. (I knew it was there from the catalogue, I just hadn’t laid eyes on it.) Tucked in next to Danielle Steel, ready to be read.

I’ve no idea if anyone has read it in the library. But they might. They might have already done it, in the last few days. Some unsuspecting person might have picked up Blackbird and gone ‘eh, worth a go.’ They might hate it. They might love it. But they’ll read it.

And they’ll be more likely to read something of mine if (and hopefully when, given the library has already taken Blackbird) they see an entire block of my books sitting there on the shelf. Islington Libraries now have my entire current corpus of books for approval, and with a bit of luck they’ll be as kind as they were 4 years ago and let a former local boy have a spot on their shelves. Budge up, John Steinbeck, Ad Luna is a bit of a brick.

It’s one library in one city. It’s not much. But all it takes is one curious reader. I’m not writing high literature, I’m not writing genre classics. But that doesn’t mean that someone, some day, won’t find the same joy in finding something I wrote on a library shelf as I have so many times before.

*Ok, so the Book of Theseus is in its third incarnation now, but given it’s a nearly 15-year-old model that’s not bad going.

Why We’re Here

Hey.

Yeah?

You ever wonder why we’re here?

The beginning.

It’s been a bit of a rubbish week for me for many reasons. But the news about Rooster Teeth has really capped things off.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about: if you’ve existed on the internet for any length of time in the last 21 years, you have, whether you know it or not, come across something from Rooster Teeth. Red vs Blue, one of the longest-running web series of all time; the vast corpus of gameplay videos from the late Achievement Hunter; animated shows like RWBY; hundreds of stupid comedy sketches, dozens of podcasts… the list goes on and on. They’ve been making dumb stuff on the internet longer than YouTube has existed, and what started as a few blokes playing Halo in someone’s front room turned into something so much bigger. It’s not been smooth sailing – there’s been bad content, there have been bad times, there have been some quite serious scandals. But Rooster Teeth has kept going, and the community that has built up over two decades of making stupid stuff has kept on supporting it.

And it got big. Jokes from AH Minecraft videos ended up in Minecraft. Red vs Blue was so popular that Microsoft added a special button prompt into Halo so that characters could lower their weapons and look more natural when filmed having conversations. The characters of RWBY appeared alongside the Justice League onscreen and on-page. Superman has shared a panel with Ruby Rose!

More than twenty years of work means there are untold thousands of hours of content up there on the internet in so many genres. And it’s all being hastily archived now by a legion of fans, because it’s entirely possible that all this stuff will just disappear in less than two months. Because Rooster Teeth is, out of nowhere, being shut down by its owners, Warner Bros. It’s just… ending, like that. Everyone working there is out of a job. Every show, every podcast, all that work, is being cut off without warning.

And that, to put it mildly, sucks.

I haven’t been there since the beginning. But I’ve been watching RT content for half my life at this point. A friend told me to watch Red vs Blue, and I did. And I loved it. And then I found the sketches, and shows like Immersion. And when Achievement Hunter started experimenting with this hip new trend of ‘Let’s Play’ videos, I watched those too. Every week brought new stuff for teenage me to watch and laugh at. Every Friday I’d log in for another compilation of people playing Halo: Reach very badly and laugh along with Jack and Geoff. By the time I went off to university RWBY had me hooked; this madcap fairytale world with its absurd fight scenes and crazy worldbuilding. It was when Monty Oum, RWBY’s mastermind, died in early 2015 that I first decided to try and write every day, a decision cemented by Terry Pratchett’s death a few months later and a streak that I’ve still kept up almost a decade on. I wouldn’t be the author I am today without the people at Rooster Teeth.

Over the years my tastes changed, as did the content RT put out; I still tuned in for RWBY and a couple of podcasts, but I had other things I’d rather have been watching. But it was still always there. I still listened to the F**ckface podcast every week – just a handful of idiots talking about nothing in particular, but for the most part that same handful of idiots I’d grown up with, watching them talk about nothing in particular, or play games badly, or make dumb jokes. It was always there. It’s always been there. When I needed a laugh, or a pick-me-up, or to relax, there was always some bit of RT, old or new, that would do the trick.

One of the greatest pieces of stupid gameplay ever produced.

And soon there won’t be. And that makes me sad in a way that these words aren’t quite going to be able to convey. I didn’t expect it to last forever; nothing does; but I expected a slow decline, a graceful bowing-out as people moved on and the internet changed. And I didn’t expect it to be soon. Twenty years is a long time. But instead, all of a sudden, it’s all being ripped away. All those idiots I’ve been watching for half my life have just lost their jobs, will soon lose the rights to the things they’ve poured their own hearts and souls into. I’m worried for them. They’ve done so much for me, after all, and for so many other people.

To Warner Bros it’s just a way to claw back some cash. But something very special is being lost in the process. Something that’s been part of my life for most of it, and part of a lot of other lives too.

Nobody really knows what’s happening yet. Maybe the staff will be able to spin off their own versions of their own shows. Maybe someone will pick up the rights to the scripted content like RWBY and keep it going. Maybe the community that has grown up around Rooster Teeth over all these years will pull together and save something from the fire.

Maybe it’ll all just be gone.

I hope not. I hope that even if Rooster Teeth is dead then the people behind it can continue. I hope that the idiots I’ve grown up watching can keep being idiots for as long as they want to, and that if they want to share that stupidity with us, they can. I hope the spirit of this stupid company keeps haunting the internet and the world for a long, long time.

Now I’m going to watch two grown men laugh at people being bad at a decade-old video game. There’s nothing particularly special about this video – it’s just the one I happen to be watching next. But that’s the point. It doesn’t have to be ‘special’, it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It’s two people laughing and having a good time. And that’s enough.