Daniel Ausema's Blog, page 4

Try some Kindle Vella serials!

Spire City: Occupied has now completed its run on Kindle Vella!
It's still there for people to read--and I'm intending for it to stay available to Vella readers. But now you can read the whole novel without having to wait for new episodes to appear. I think you'll really like this one, so please do check it out!
But it's far from the only worthwhile novel being serialized there. Wendy Nikel, a fellow Codexian writer, has put together a visual with several Kindle Vella stories for readers to check out. This is intended mostly for newsletters, so if you got my newsletter last week, then you've already seen this. But I wanted to get a feel for how it would look here on my blog as well [ETA: it looks better in my preview than in the final published version because of the gaps between images that this blogging software keeps adding no matter how I tweak it...] and to make sure even people who don't (yet...) subscribe to my newsletter have a chance to see what's out there.
Be sure to check out the tips at the bottom of the image. And then go read Spire City: Occupied and the others as well!


 

New story out! "The Mirror Merchant's Tales"

My story "The Mirror Merchant's Tales" came out yesterday in Daily Science Fiction. The story was originally written for a writing prompt contest at SFFWorld where the prompt was simply "mirrors." As I mention in the author note there, it's meant to occupy a similar space to some of Lord Dunsany's evocative little tales of imaginary cities and places.

Give it a read!

AI character art!

As Spire City: Occupied continues to be serialized on Vella, I've been playing around with the AI-generated characters from Artflow. Part of what makes it fun is that I never know how it will respond to the prompts I give, though that sometimes makes it frustrating as well... So here are my favorite results I got from the prompts I fed it. Are they exactly how I pictured them as I wrote the story? No. But I like seeing how the pictures come out, and there's something about these five that fits, even so.

I've been posting them individually to a gallery album on my new Ko-fi page. You can click on each image to learn more about how that specific character came out that way.

"The Forbidden Path to Forgetting"

 

My poem "The Forbidden Path to Forgetting" has been unlocked for everyone to read! The poem was inspired by a picture of the stone labyrinth on an island off the coast of Sweden, Blå Jungfrun.

Spire City: Occupied Character: Alless

Mad science has always been a key part of the Spire City stories. Whether it's the strange textile techniques among the Neshini people far to the north in The Patterns of Cloth and Dreams or the cruel serum invented by Orgood in the original series, the technological mashups of the airships of Aopthen or the makeshift lab in the Weave where Mendat does his part to combat Orgood's infections--the science of these stories is wild and inventive, for good or evil.

As you know by now, the catalyst of Spire City: Occupied is the death of Mendat, now a couple of decades later. But he was not alone in his hidden laboratory in the Weave at the end. He had two apprentices, Alless and Sami.

Both are young, and both worship their late mentor. Alless is our point of view character for these episodes. She is young and curious and fiercely loyal. She is especially interested in mixing chemicals to create new substances, whether those end up as hair dye for the tips of her long hair or for making some elaborate contraption function. It's almost always both of them in these scenes, working together to honor the memory of Mendat and to use their own inventions to help Spire City become the safe place Mendat would have wanted it to be.

Their dynamic can be seen in this snippet from their first episode, when they manage to get into the hidden inner laboratory that Mendat had hidden even from them:

***

Weapons? Something to save the city? Alless kept turning in stunned awe.

“Burn it.” Sami was shaking his head as he took two steps toward one of the weapons. “We need to destroy this. Mendat would never want it used for this war.”

Alless grabbed his shoulder, as if it would keep him from doing anything rash. “We can't. I won't. I won't destroy a single thing Mendat created.” She pulled Sami forward until they were both touching the unfinished muzzle of the cannon. Squeezing his shoulder as if doing so could stop the tears from coming to her own eyes, she said, “Not one single thing."

***

Be sure to check out Spire City: Occupied on Vella or (if you're speedy) Curious Fictions!

Spire City: Occupied Characters: the spire singer Jensha

 The first two things I knew about Spire City when I began creating the setting was that it had beetle-drawn carriages and that it kept singers chained to the peaks of its spires. I was asked this summer where those things came from, and I couldn't pin it down. The original story was begun as part of a one-hour writing exercise, and they were simply added because they came to mind as something that would be cool. The nature of writing something is such a short time is that you can't always question what strange things pop up, you just run with it.

But from the beginning I was fascinated with the spire singers. Who are they? Are they a separate people group, kept in bondage? Are they recruited from the streets or elsewhere with the dominant society? There are hints in these stories that I'll leave for readers to come to their own conclusions. But the fact is that the common people on the street just don't know (and most aren't curious enough to even wonder). And even the singers don't volunteer whatever it is they might know.

So I knew I needed one of the characters of this novel to be a singer. Jensha has been on her spire for about a decade by the time the story begins. She is an observer. It's always a challenge to make a character who only observes, but I like how it adds a different view of the events of the novel--quite literally from above.

And Jensha isn't only an observer. As the novel progresses, she learns more about her own voice and how her singing effects the beetles themselves and even the events of the city as she observes them.

Because as it turns out, even a chained singer can influence the world that she sings.

Be sure to check out Spire City: Occupied on Vella or (if you're speedy) Curious Fictions!

Spire City: Occupied Characters: Keene

 

Now back to the characters of Spire City: Occupied.

Keene is...he's fun. A rugged, ragged-around-the-edges hunter who lives in a harsh landscape, the home of the great beetles that are eventually tamed and hitched to the carriages and taxis of the city. He feels very different from most of the other characters I write (here or in other books and stories).

The thing about riding beetles is they may be emblematic of Spire City, but they can't be raised near the city itself. In fact, the original books begin with a scene of Chels and Mikheen watching a train full of young beetles arriving from their distant land.

Well, Keene is on the other end of those trains. In fact he's old enough, has been at this beetle-hunting stuff long enough, that he might have been a young beetle hunter at that very time, capturing the beetles in their pupal stage so they could be trained and transported north to the city. And here he is still, some twenty-five years later.

The land where the beetles hatch is a harsh one. The Beetle Wastes are full of petrified trees, dirt crocodiles, giant dragonflies, carnivorous amphibians, and many stranger creatures that humans rarely see. It is a land of little water and what water there is likely to be deadly.

It is a land that you will get to see, through Keene's eyes, over the course of this novel.

Be sure to check out Spire City: Occupied on Vella or (if you're speedy) Curious Fictions!

"The Cities Rise Up on Legs of Lead" sold to Daily Science Fiction!

 A brief interruption of the character intros to mention that I've sold the flash fiction story "The Cities Rise Up on Legs of Lead" to Daily Science Fiction. It's a fabulist-tinted story of cities coming to life and the city-folk placing their hopes is their city's power to destroy other cities.

Spire City: Occupied Characters: Unnamed Correspondent

 

Our second character from Spire City: Occupied has no name. The correspondent is from Spire City, conscripted into the Mernan army, and reveals little else about their history or identity. 

What they do make clear is what's really happening in the war effort. The people of Spire City, those the right age to fight and fit enough (and, typically, poor enough that they can't pay their way out of it), are forced to fight for the city's occupiers. The correspondent...does not believe in this war. Scalony army, Mernan army, what does either one mean to these conscripts?

The reports sent back, presumably smuggled back to the city in ways that keep the correspondent's identity unknown, reveal the meaninglessness of the war, the ways that even those who think themselves good end up taking part in its cruelty. And the ways a moment's luck can make more difference than all the strategy or seeming superiority.

Little as we know for sure about this character, they're one of my favorite's--and I think readers will feel the same about these reports from the front lines of a senseless war.

Be sure to check out Spire City: Occupied on Vella or (if you're speedy) Curious Fictions!

Spire City: Occupied characters: Temli

I'm putting together a few posts here to introduce the main characters of Spire City: Occupied. Starting with the airship captain Temli.

Temli is a middle-aged woman who loves to fly more than anything. She owns her own small airship that she (along with her co-pilot/navigator Paelesz) uses to transport goods (legal and illegal) back and forth through Spire City. She wants nothing to do with the politics of the city, with who's in charge and what it means for the city--except for what means for her airship business.

Like her cousin, the famous inventor Mendat, she is not originally from Spire City. The people from Aopthen often stand out with their reddish hair and brown skin, a different shade from the Spire City-born. But also like him, she's lived here for decades, has learned its language and its ways. So when Mendat dies suddenly, she knows that his absence will affect everyone in the city.

And it will change her in ways she can't yet imagine.

Be sure to check out Spire City: Occupied on Vella or (if you're speedy) Curious Fictions!