Too Regular In Lamplight

After a couple of relatively quiet months, October is already shaping up to be eventful.  Barely have I had time to get a post up about Prince Thief being released when a new short story comes out - which wouldn't be such a surprise if it hadn't only been accepted a week ago.

This one's called Too Regular, and it's in issue #1 of Volume #2 of recent upstart magazine Lamplight, released this week. I've been known to refer to Too Regular, unhelpfully, as my 'not a werewolf story', and that probably sums it up as well as anything, while providing no useful information at all.  It follows bar owner Monty and his least regular of regular customers, a man named Charlie who shows his face but once a month.  Actually, I've more or less given the entire story away, but I think that's okay ... the story is not the thing with this one.

Which leads me to a confession.  Too Regular is an older tale, and one that's gone through some hefty changes to get to this point.  One of my frequent mistakes in my earlier days of writing was to think that a short story was simply an idea given form: convey the idea and you've told the story, and everything else - dialogue, character, setting - is merely in service to that. This, of course, is nonsense, and Too Regular turned out to be a great illustration of that fact. The idea at its heart is a fun one, but it's probably the least interesting aspect of what's in effect a character piece: a story about loneliness and the nature and requirements of friendship.  My first draft ended by sidelining all the character drama it had built up; my rewrite added a lengthy scene that reintroduced that drama and drew it to (what I hope is) a satisfying close. It wasn't a huge addition, barely a page, but it made all the difference.

Anyway, you can find Lamplight in all e-book formats on Smashwords here and Kindle only here; print copies will also be available in the near future from Amazon.

Prince Thief Out

Prince Thief, third and final of my Tales of Easie Damasco, came out in the UK today in print, e-book and audiobook, and has been out in the US in all formats for a week or so now.

So that's that.  One trilogy finished.  And honestly, if you'd told me three years ago that I'd be in this place right now, with three novels not only written but published, I'd have gawped at you with wide-eyed incredulity, but there it is.

Here's the blurb:

Altapasaeda, capital of the Castoval, is under siege by its own King - and Easie Damasco is trapped within the city's besieged walls.  Only Mounteban has a solution to offer.  Far to the north, rebels have set a bastard prince up as a figurehead.  If our heroes could kidnap this warlord-in-the-making, he might be used as a bargaining chip to end the war on both fronts.  Yet again, Damasco finds himself roped into a desperate scheme to preserve the Castoval, and events only grow more complicated as Damasco discovers that he and the disgruntled, rebellious teenage Prince have more in common than either of them would like to admit.

But if you've read the first two then hopefully all you really need to know is that Prince Thief wraps up the story that began in Giant Thief and continued in Crown Thief: the final fates of the Castoval, of Saltlick and Estrada and Alvantes and of course the irrepressible Mr Damasco, will be decided once and for all.  It's not going to be an easy ride, not everyone is going to walk away in one piece, and by the end, nothing will ever be the same again.

Oh, and there's an exploding ship.  Just saying.

Selling Outside my Comfort Zone

What are we supposed to call non-genre fiction these days?  I refuse to go with 'literary', because that implies that books like 1984 and The Man in the High Castle aren't literary, and that's plain stupid.  Ditto for mainstream; would anyone seriously claim that Lord of the Rings or A Game of Thrones aren't mainstream?  So what does that leave?  I can't think of anything better, so let's just stay where we started and go with non-genre, even though it's barely less rubbish.

So, I mostly write genre fiction, obviously, but every so often I write non-genre fiction, and I don't know exactly why any of that is.  Partly personal preference, of course, partly because I know certain markets a lot better than others, and partly playing to where I've always figured my strengths lie, and ... wait, no, that was my supposed to be my point.  Maybe I should be writing more non-genre fiction, because I actually seem to do quite well with it.

First there was Strive to be Happy in Flash Fiction Online, one of my first pro sales, my first award nomination, and possibly the most well received thing I've written.  Then, a long time later, FFO also took my slightly autobiographical extended-metaphor-with-swans (how does that not make you want to read it?) For Life.  And now I've sold my third stab at non-genre fiction to new publisher Bleeding Heart, for their magazine Transfusion, for the highest rate I've ever earned from a short story, cent per word.

This one's particularly amazing because I was convinced that this little slice of lives, titled A Shadow Play, was going to be a tough sell.  I've been talking about it being non-genre, but it is sort of fantastical: two life stories, one real and one imagined - though perhaps it's not quite that simple - told in a little over 800 words.  It's kind of abstract, downbeat, weird and overambitious and not much like anything else I've done.  All of which, of course, are reasons I'm proud of it, but it's a foolish writer who expects editors to share their predilections!

Fortunately in this instance Bleeding Heart did, and not only that but they work fast: A Shadow Play is due out in the second issue of Transfusion next month.

All That News I Don't Have

I said when I put up my last post that I didn't have any writing news, and then realised straight away that I actually have loads of writing news.  It's just that none of it is really the kind of stuff that I'd normally blog about.  Still, saying I have no news implies I haven't been up to much, and that's the exact opposite of the truth.  So I thought I might as well set the record straight, even if I was the one who unstraightened it in the first place.

First up, there's the novella that I've been working on since around the start of June, and hope to finish soon.  I've never had much desire to write a novella before, but I had an idea that was too small for a novel and way too big for a short story, and I needed a project to sink my teeth into for a few months, to keep myself busy until ... well, until the massive thing that's happening next month, that I should probably keep quiet about until then, in case I jinx it or something.  Anyway, the novella's currently called Patchwerk, and its best described as ... um ... kind of a Moorcockian multidimensional science-fiction / fantasy thing.  Well, maybe that's not how it's best described, but put it this way, the fact that it has about twenty-five people in it but they're all the same five characters should give you a fair idea of what it's like (and what a gigantic headache it's been to write in places!)

So there's that. And there's the second, as-yet-untitled volume of Endangered Weapon B, which I finished a few days ago and now just need to format ready for winging over to Bob.  It's fun stuff, if I do say so; we find out just why the Professor's been so interested in resurrecting the dead, just about everyone from volume 1 returns, mostly in the most absurd ways possible, and - at the risk of giving away crucial plot points - there's a bloody great, ridiculous fight at the end. Oh, and I get to parody a load more stuff, from John Carter to Bride of Frankenstein to Endangered Weapon itself.  (Thinking about it. mainly that last one.)

Then there's the planning.  Oh so much planning!  I just recently wrapped up a synopsis of what I fervently hope will be my next novel, and that's with my agent John Berlyne right now, waiting on his feedback.  There's my ongoing figuring-out of how to nail down War For Funland, the book I wrote a first draft of between Giant Thief and Crown Thief and would really like to write a second draft of one of these days.  There's the third novel that's at the mostly-in-my-head stage.  There's the new comic series that Bob Molesworth and I are hoping to put together, which I'm sketching out bit by bit, with a view to getting a synopsis together in the next month or two.  There are short story ideas piling up, there's the film script I've been plotting for a couple of years now...

That might sound like a lot, and it probably is, but from my point of view this is no bad thing. For all the love I have for Damasco and his world, one of the hardest aspects of writing Crown Thief and Prince Thief was how much they dominated my writing time, to the exclusion of all else.  I'm always happier with a few different projects on the go, and I'm happiest when those projects are as different from each other as realistically possible.  So, right now, when I have a dozen things in the pipeline and none of them are the least bit similar to each other ... well, that's an okay place to be in.

Game Ramble: Journey

I've been getting interested recently in what seem to be known as Art Games, a loose genre of video
games that are trying to break out from some of the form's traditional limitations and achieve the kind of thing that you'd expect of an art form more than a work designed solely to entertain.  It's a fine line of course, and you'd have to be blind to miss the artistry that goes into almost any game these days, but I still find the whole thing intriguing.  The facet that's really caught my attention, though, is what this might mean for video game narrative, an area in which the burgeoning medium has undeniably often tended to let itself down.

The story of Journey, stripped to its bare bones, is actually no great shakes.  It is in fact, as the title hints, the traditional hero's journey; that is, it draws on the concept of an archetypal hero and narrative structure that mythologist Joseph Campbell famously identified as underlying much of world mythology.  The game's director, Jenova Chen, states this explicitly in the "making of" documentary included on the collector's edition, and there's even a diagram mapping Campbell's hypothetical stages to the game's levels.

So as core narratives go, Journey's isn't particularly interesting of in and of itself, especially considering that a great many video game plots conform to Campbell's model.  What is interesting is that Journey chooses to flesh out this skeleton by abandoning so many of the traditional tools of storytelling.  Nothing is spoken in any recognisable language.  The player character's design allows for only the simplest expressions.  There are other humanoid characters, but they never speak.  There are non-humanoid creatures, but they communicate, as the player character does, through tonal, whale-like noises.  You encounter glyph-like, symbolic drawings and it's possible to piece together continuity and history from these, but there's no actual text anywhere in the game besides the title and credits.

In the place of spoken or written language, then, Journey exploits some familiar alternatives - visual design, music, design cues - and uses them exceptionally well.  But it also does some things that are more subtle and hard to define.  It achieves much by offering small hints and leaving the rest to the player's imagination, a technique more common to books than gaming or its closest cousin cinema.  And it achieves even more by tapping into subconscious desires and fears: the heart-stopping feeling of flying, a section lit and decorated as though it were underwater and frequent moments of sliding almost helplessly down banks of sand are uncanny and powerfully dreamlike.

In fact, those words pretty much sum up what Journey's about.  It's impossible to describe quite how it all comes together in practice, except to say that the experience is much like trying to make sense of an extraordinarily vivid dream.  Most of your brain just sort of goes along with it intuitively, experiencing things in simple, emotional terms, while a small part throws up wild theories to try and make wider sense of what's going on.  And all of this relies on being experienced, on the act and the very notion of play.  Because so many of its narrative beats are emotional and because that emotion relies on player interaction, Journey creates a narrative that you can only intuit full meaning from by physically and intellectually engaging with it.

That, in my experience, is something new to storytelling, at least on this scale and with this level of success.  And it's not often that any medium offers a genuinely novel experience, or discovers new ways of telling stories, so I should surely finish by recommending that if you have a PS3 and haven't yet played Journey, you really should.  That said, it isn't perfect and, to my mind, it doesn't entirely succeed; there's a tension between the need to tell a story and the need to be a game that leaves some of the most interesting, and also some of the most basic, aspects of the narrative left flailing.  The very end, for me, was particularly disappointing from a story point of view.  But since I can't go into that without spoilers, I'll settle for saying instead that the fact that I'm still annoyed by it days afterwards is almost a recommendation in itself; I struggle to think of any other game that's frustrated me so much on narrative merit alone.  And the fact that I know I'll play through again, even knowing what's waiting, is testament to what a powerful, fascinating experience Journey delivers.

Ill-Met at Midnight in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Lovely, lovely Beneath Ceaseless Skies cover art

I've said it before, but one of the best things about being a genre writer is surely the way that utterly bizarre blog post titles just seem to generate themselves.

Anyway.

One of the other nicest things about being a genre writer was receiving a blurb for Giant Thief from Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose Shadows of the Apt series I'm hugely fond of, comparing it to the works of none other than the mighty Fritz Leiber.  As fantastic a compliment as that was, though, I've never been entirely sure that Giant Thief lives up to it.  (Although, in fairness to Adrian, it's probably a closer comparison than anyone else has made.)  Thing is, I hadn't actually read any Leiber at the time I wrote Giant Thief, and so he wasn't - as he would come to be - one of my all-time favourite Fantasy authors.  What similarities there are are purely coincidental, or else were absorbed through intermediaries; there's a fair bit of the Gray Mouser in Damasco, for example, but I suspect it was contracted via Pratchett's blundering wizard Rincewind, another protagonist who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to flee from whatever plot he's found himself mixed up in.

Ill-Met at Midnight, on the other hand, the story I have out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies this week, is me blatantly pastiching Leiber.  Heck, the title is an obvious reference.  The city of Cold Harbour, elegant, rotten and riddled with licensed murder, has plenty in common with that greatest of all cities Lankhmar.  My "hero" Otranto, assassin extraordinaire, is definitely Leiberesque: sharp-tongued, highly competent, and yet driven by the winds of his own eccentricities.  It's the story of a weird and dangerous world full of weird and dangerous individuals, and I think that description about sums up all of Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.

I'm happy admitting all this: originality is a wonderful thing and something to strive for, but sometimes I think it's okay to play around in the shadows of your heroes.  It was great fun to write Ill-Met, to cut loose with world-building aspects and to have a go at that kind of lurid, exaggerated, extravagant Fantasy, something I'm not sure you see so much of these days.  So much fun, in fact, that I suspect I'll return to Otranto and Cold Harbour one of these days.

You can read Ill-Met at Midnight and its companion story, Henry Szabranski's The Clay Farima, or buy the issue that contains them, here ... or, if you didn't mind waiting ,you can listen to Ill-Met in podcast in a month's time.

Nine Worlds 2013

I didn't see half as much of Nine Worlds as I would have liked.

I think the only way I could have would have time travel, or perhaps the ability to create little homunculi of myself.  Nine Worlds had a lot of programming.  And the more the weekend wore on, the more I realized that even the bits of it that at a first glance hadn't looked even remotely interesting probably were.  I wish I'd hung around the Steampunk track a little more.  Jobeda spent much of Saturday telling me how good the Geek Feminism stuff was, and I caught the end of a panel on Joss Whedon and sure enough, it was tremendous; I've been to entire Cons that contained less enthusiasm and intelligent debate than that one small, overheated room.  I completely missed the Science track, and pretty much all of that looked interesting.  I did a little better with the All the Books track, since I was in it, but I still felt like I'd barely scratched the surface.  We never even got a look in at the Board Gaming, despite that being one of the things we'd specifically planned to do.  And what I've listed there is only scratching the surface of what was on offer at Nine Worlds.

Readers!

On top of the basic impossibility of doing more than scratching that surface, I quickly discovered I wasn't feeling too well.  It turned out to be a chest infection, but over the weekend it was just a sore throat and a general feeling of crapiness, which did a good job of keeping me out of the bar and stopping me talking to a lot of the people I'd have liked to talk to - which was a lot of people.  I did manage a bit of socializing, particularly on the Sunday, and I got to give Paul Cornell a copy of Endangered Weapon B as a thank you for his brilliant introduction, which was high on my 'to do' list, but all told I spent a lot of time being frustrated that conversation equaled pain.

Francis, Benedict, Me, Den, Emma.

Then last up, and if anything even more distracting, there was the fact that I seemed to spend a large chunk of the weekend working.  Okay, doing a signing was no biggie, and I got stuck with a slot when no one was in the dealer's room, so I mainly spent that chatting with the lovely Forbidden Planet people and my old friend Flick (Hi Flick, good to see you!)  And the panel I was attending on Saturday, Gender and Sexuality in SFF, went smoothly - if unspectacularly - enough.  But those were things I've done before and are just about comfortable these days.  No, what kept me in a perpetual state of Serious Work Mode was the knowledge that I was moderating my first panel on the Sunday, and my being determined to make a decent job of it.

In truth, I perhaps got a bit carried away with my preparation.  I went in with twenty-some questions (many of which had sub-questions!), a separate page of questions for the audience and notes on my panelists, which I'd prepped during a frantic ten minutes spent at the Forbidden Planet stall.  Then I nearly lost all my notes.  Then I found out at the last minute that Benedict Jacka was ill, wasn't coming and had been replaced by someone I'd never heard of.  Then Benedict turned up, and was befuddled to discover that he wasn't expected. 

A scale model of the Nine Worlds hotel, possibly.

But minor, slightly surreal hiccups aside, it went well.  I think, possibly, that it went really well.  Certainly, I had a good time - which frankly was about the least likely outcome I expected.  I felt like we gave out a lot of valuable information, and everyone got their say.  I was fortunate enough to have four intelligent, witty and unusually polite panelists* in the shape of Benedict, Emma Newman, Den Patrick and Francis Knight.  We had some great audience questions, and one in particular that really touched me: it was something along the lines of, "say you were really shy and didn't feel up to mugging editors in the bar at Cons and all of the other things you've been advising us to?  Would it still be possible to get published?"**  That was about the only question I took myself, because - as I explained - I consider myself a basically shy person, who used to be a very shy person indeed, and yet somehow I've ended up doing things like moderating panels in front of dozens of people.  And while of course it is possible to get published without ever so much as speaking to an editor face to face, I think it's also true that confidence is a skill that can be learned like any other, and that Cons are tremendously good places to do that learning.

Which, I guess, is also my conclusion when it comes to Nine Worlds: it did what only the very best of Cons can do and created a hugely inclusive space where everyone seemed comfortable regardless of race, creed or My Little Pony costume.  It wasn't perfect***, but in its first year it was better than many established Cons, it raised the bar in a lot of ways that I hope get taken on board by the wider community, and I'm already looking forward to next year - when hopefully I'll actually get to do and see a bit more stuff.

* Seriously, this was the most polite panel ever.

** Wait, we didn't say that.  Buy drinks for, not mug.

*** Main imperfection being the extraordinarily pricy bar.  No pint of Coke on earth should cost six pounds.