Ian Patterson's Blog, page 6

Transition

A note before you continue onto the main event. This is a prequel to my debut novel, Transference. It’s available in a lot of different places, and I’d love it if you gave it a read. I put my novels up first on Substack, completely for free, because that’s the writing I’m doing. I’m releasing these as first-drafts, which means there will be errors, plot holes, and issues. Part of this is to normalize that writing is a process, and it doesn’t usually (ever) start with glorious perfection. Part of...

New Video Ad for Transference

I made some changes to my advertising approach this year, and decided that instead of supporting a mega-corporation I was going to invest in smaller platforms that I love. Absolutely no clue if it will pay off, but it is super rewarding to support a podcast I love, SFF Addicts, and get their help in making this awesome ad! It will air on their show in the coming weeks.

I wanted to share this as a reminder to support the people that are doing cool things!

Systems of Measurement in World-Building

Measurement in World-Building

During the initial drafting of Transference, one of the (many) things that stymied me was a concern over what measurement system to use. Of course, there were much bigger things to figure out, but it’s funny how those small, idiosyncratic choices can really slow you down. I even went so far as to change everything from imperial to metric in one of the revisions, to which my wife replied with a confused “ew?”, and then reverted it back in another subsequent revision.

S...

A Line is the Straightest Distance Between Two Points

Efficient, Purposeful, Direct. A sign marks your passing, it reads DO NOT CROSS in orange. Behind it, an avalanche of fallen trees cascades down the hillside. The snow, pristine and bountiful, betrayed you, and in its sudden liquefaction, that violent flow and tumult, it ate you. A year ago, I eulogized that you became one with the mountain. But I do not feel you in its breeze, I do not hear you in that sigh of wind. Only that same cold brutality of nature. I call Happy Holidays across your grea...

A response to the refutation of a mechanistic worldview

To my fellow esteemed physicists,

Life is described in the transmissions of electricity. Its macro movements are obvious to any observer, but underneath those, arcing in the liminal spaces between atoms, is the charge. The essence. That great ionic flow that cascades between our microcosms and makes us. It’s in us all, this great leveler of understanding, from which it can be seen that there is no difference between us. Not really. At our core, we are all the same.

For centuries, some scholars amo...

Glittering Blackness

As of yesterday morning, both of my new novels are out with beta readers, and there is a sudden, overwhelming lack of structure to my days. What before was an organized list of edits that needed doing, is now an anxiety-inducing freedom. It’s incredible how quickly that feeling takes over!

Like in the past, I’ll be focusing on creating daily. Some of this will be exploration of future story ideas, but I’m sure I’ll do a bit of more structured shorts too before I get sucked into the next round of...

Our Vitreous Womb by Haldane B. Doyle

If I had to pick three words to describe Our Vitreous Womb by Haldane B. Doyle, they would be: disorienting, lyrical, and slow-burning. Those each have positive and negative connotations, and I think some of both sides are shown in the book, but I enjoyed this story and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it, especially for people that enjoy discovering a world first-hand. On that note, it is one of the strangest worlds I’ve encountered in a science fiction book, absolutely uniquely original, and tha...

Never Knows Best

I got a new tattoo recently and I wrote a poem about it. It’s a scene from FLCL that’s all about the melancholy of youth ending, and it’s always been so poignant to me. Also, I’ve been writing more poetry lately, despite really having no clue what classifies as a poem, because it’s easier to fit in around working on novels, and it satisfies that same creative impulse. Let me know if you’re liking them.

And the promised update! Book 2 in the Narrator Cycle is really far along, and will be titled T...

Hunger

I’ve recently found an open mic night for literary arts that feels like a really good space for me. I didn’t realize how badly I wanted a creative group until I went. So last month I pushed myself into the discomfort zone and stood up and read, and as terrifying as it was in the moment, I think I loved it. I’m probably going to read again next month.

The challenge is that I’m knee deep in two long-form projects, neither of which lend themselves well to reading small portions of. So I read some ne...

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?”

Sometimes, I read books that make me love them for no other reason than that they make me laugh constantly. It’s a rare thing, because I normally go for more serious things that are trying to say something. Which, as I can now hear Gideon saying, makes me “a bit of a douche”.

I started on Gideon the Ninth with really no expectations, beyond knowi...