Scene Analysis – Winterwood

This was first written for Tiffani Angus’ blog when she was teaching creative writing and publishing. Story interspersed with my comments in bold italic.

The Rowankind Trilogy, out now.

This first scene pretty much sprang into my mind fully formed. When I started to write I didn’t know the details and I didn’t know where it was going, but I had a solid impression of a young woman standing in the shadows of her dying mother’s bedroom, filled with resentment for something that happened in the past. I wasn’t even sure of the time period. It could have been anything from medieval to Victorian. After a lot of thought I settled on 1800, towards the end of the Enlightenment period, and in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. George III is on the throne (and suffering occasional bouts of madness), America has gained its independence, at some cost, and Napoleon is raging across the continent.

The setting is Plymouth, which is somewhere I haven’t been for a long time, but as a child/teen I went to Devon for family holidays. I remember Sutton Pool and the walls of the Citadel quite vividly. It’s become so much busier, now, of course. Sutton Pool is a crowded marina (you can see it all on Google Earth) but it still maps beautifully on to old plans of Plymouth streets. This is where the Mayflower sailed from.

If you want to read the whole scene straight through without comments before you look at the annotations, go here.

Or simply, read on…

The stuffy bedroom stank of sickness with an underlying taint of old lady, stale urine and unwashed clothes, poorly disguised with attar of roses. I’d never thought to return to Plymouth, to the house I’d once called home; a house with memories so bitter that I’d tried to scour them from my mind with salt water and blood.

Had something in my own magic drawn me back? I didn’t know why it should, though it still had the capacity to surprise me. I could control it at sea, but on land it gnawed at my insides. Even here, less than a mile from the harbour, power pulsed through my veins, heating my blood. I needed to take ship soon before I lost control.

I added the second paragraph later during the editing process because I realised I needed to put magic on the table right at the beginning of the book.

Little wonder that I’d felt no need to return home since eloping with Will.

Just dropping in a little teaser about the past. The important reveal comes later.

My ears adjusted to the muffled street sounds, my eyes to the curtained gloom. I began to pick out familiar shapes in the shadows, each one bringing back a memory and all of them painful.

She has such vivid recollections of an unhappy childhood. She was suddenly replaced in her parents’ affections by a brother. The longed-for BOY. The heavy dark wood furniture is brooding and oppressive. I wanted the reader to taste that room, the bitterness, the old-lady staleness, the wooden furniture.

The dressing table with its monstrously carved lion mask and paw feet was where I had once sat and experimented with my mother’s face powder and patches, earning a beating with the back of a hairbrush for the mess.

The tall bed–a mountain to a small child–upon which I had first seen the tiny, shawl-wrapped form of my brother, Philip, the new son and heir, pride and joy, in my mother’s arms.

And there was the ornate screen I’d once hidden behind, trapped accidentally in some small mischief, to witness a larger mischief when my mother took Larien, our rowankind bondsman, to her lonely bed. I hadn’t known, then, what was happening beneath the covers, but I’d instinctively known that I shouldn’t be a witness, so I’d swallowed my puzzlement and kept silent.

No explanation yet, but the rowankind bondservants are wrapped tightly into the main plot line. I needed to drop them in here and expand on them later. We will meet Larien again, later in the book.

Now, the heaped covers on that same bed stirred and shifted.

“Philip?” Her voice trembled and her hand fluttered to her breast. “Am I dreaming?”

Even after all this time, her mother still thinks of the brother first.

My stomach churned and my magic flared. I swallowed hard, pushed it down and did my best to keep my voice low and level. “No, Mother, it’s me.”

“Rossalinde? Good God! Dressed like a man! You never had a sense of decorum.”

So now we get the name and the information that Rossalinde is in man’s clothing, and that she’s comfortable dressing that way. I hope I slipped that in without hitting it with a brick. NOTE I avoided the trap of Ross seeing herself in the mirror on the dressing table and describing herself.

It wasn’t a question of decorum. It was my armour. I wore the persona as well as the clothes.

“Don’t just stand there, come closer.” My mother beckoned me into the gloom. “Help me up.”

She had no expectation that I would disobey, so I didn’t. I put my right arm under hers and my left arm round her frail shoulders and eased her into a sitting position, hearing her sharp indrawn gasp as I moved her. I plumped up pillows, stepped back and turned away, needing the distance.

Ross immediately slips back into being the obedient daughter and then realises that she doesn’t have to any more, so she grabs a little personal space. I wanted to show that Ross’ relationship with her mother is multi-dimensional. She still wishes that things were different.

I twitched the curtain back from the sash window an inch or two to check that the street outside was still empty, listening hard for any sound of disturbance in the normality of Twiling Avenue–a disturbance that might indicate a hue and cry heading in my direction. I’d crept into the house via a back entrance through the next door neighbour’s shrubbery. The hedge surrounding the house across the street rippled as if a bird had fled its shelter. I waited to see if there was any further movement, but there wasn’t. So far there was nothing beyond the faint cries of the vendors in the market two streets over and the raucous clamour of the wheeling gulls.

‘Hue and cry’ I was going for slightly more archaic language and this would have been current at the time. Twiling Avenue is invented, but it’s on the very edge of the town in a place where there could have been a fine Georgian house. I’ve used maps of Plymouth at the time to chart Ross’ later progress through the town.

Satisfied that I was safe for now, I turned back to find my mother had closed her eyes for a moment. She snatched a series of shallow breaths before she gave one long sigh. Opening her eyes again she regarded me long and steady. “Life as a pirate’s whore certainly seems to suit you.”

And now we know that Ross is in danger, a fugitive, and half suspects this is a trap. She’s taken a big risk coming back to her family home. Her mother is full of bitterness too. If she wants reconciliation, she’s certainly not going to admit it.

“Yes, Mother.” Pirate’s whore! I pressed my lips together. It wasn’t worth arguing. She was wrong on both counts, pirate and whore. As privateers we cruised under Letters of Marque from Mad King George for prizes of French merchantmen, Bonaparte’s supply vessels. As to the whore part, Will and I had married almost seven years ago.

Another mention of Will. This also sets the timescale. Ross and her mother have not seen each other for seven years.

“So you finally risked your neck to come and say good-bye. I wondered how long it would take. You’re almost too late.”

I didn’t answer.

“Oh, come on, girl, don’t beat about the bush. My belly’s swollen tight as a football. This damn growth is sucking the life out of me. Does it make you happy to see me like this? Do you think I deserve it?”

I shook my head, only half sure I meant it. Damn her! She still had me where it hurt. I’d come to dance on her grave and found it empty.

I really liked this phrase. ‘I’d come to dance on her grave and found it empty.’ Sorry for being smug.

“What’s the matter?”

I waited for Cat got your tongue? but it didn’t come.

An echo of previous arguments.

“Give me some light, girl.”

I went to open the curtains.

“No, keep the day away. Lamp light’s kinder.”

I could have brightened the room with magic, but magic–specifically my use of it–had driven a wedge between us. She had wanted a world of safety and comfort with the only serious concerns being those of fashion and taste, acceptable manners and suitable suitors. Instead she’d been faced with my unacceptable talents.

I begin to peel back the layers of their mother/daughter relationship. Magic is one of the causes of their estrangement (in addition to the elopement with Will.)

I struck a phosphor match from the inlaid silver box on the table, lifted the lamp glass and lit the wick. It guttered and smoked like cheap penny whale oil. My mother’s standards were slipping.

This foreshadows her mother’s later revelation that the money has run out.

I took a deep breath… then, to show that she didn’t have complete control of the proceedings, I flopped down into the chair beside the bed, trying to look more casual than I felt.

Her iron grey hair was not many shades lighter than when I’d last seen her, seven years ago. Her skin was pale and translucent, but still unblemished. She’d always had good skin, my mother; still tight at fifty, as mine would probably be if the wind and the salt didn’t ruin it, or if the Mysterium didn’t hang me for a witch first.

She’s still trying to maintain both an emotional and a physical distance, but she can’t resist studying her mother’s features. And we get a little teaser about why she’s in danger. The Mysterium hangs witches. (Or at least, unregistered ones.)

She caught me studying her. “You really didn’t expect to see me alive, did you?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t known what to expect.

“But you came all the same.”

“I had to.” I still wasn’t sure why.

There is a solid magical reason, but we don’t find out until much later in the book. Ross’ mother knows, but she’s not going to let on. This is just a tiny bit of foreshadowing.

“Yes, you did.” She smirked. “Did you think to pick over my bones and see what I’d left you in my will?”

No, old woman, to confront you one last time and see if you still have the same effect on me. I cleared my throat. “I don’t want your money.”

“Good, because I have none.” She pushed herself forward off her pillows with one elbow. “Every last penny from your father’s investments has gone to pay the bills. I’ve had to sell the plate and my jewellery, such as it was. All that’s left is show. This disease has saved me from the workhouse.” She sank back. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”

“I won’t… because I’m not.”

Leaving had been the best thing I’d ever done. Life with Will had been infinitely more tender than it had ever been at home. I didn’t regret a minute of it. I wished there had been more.

So where is Will now? I’m laying groundwork for the reveal.

The harridan regarded me through half-closed eyes. “Have I got any by-blow grandchildren I should know about?”

“No.” There had been one, born early, but the little mite had not lasted beyond his second day. She didn’t need to know that.

“Not up to it, is he, this Redbeard of yours? Or have you unmanned him with your witchcraft?”

I ignored her taunts. “What do you want, forgiveness? Reconciliation?”

“What do I want?” She screwed her face up in the semblance of a laugh, but it turned to a grimace.

“You nearly got us killed, Mother, or have you conveniently forgotten?”

“That murdering thief took what was mine.”

That would be the ship she was talking about, not me.

Her mother was more annoyed that Ross and Will took the vessel that was supposed to have been Ross’ dowry, than she was about Ross running off.

“That murdering thief, as you put it, saved my life.”

And my soul and my sanity, but I didn’t tell her that. He’d taught me to be a man by day and a woman by night, to use a sword and pistol and to captain a ship. He’d been my love, my strength and my mentor. Since his death I’d been Captain Redbeard Tremayne in his stead–three years a privateer captain in my own right.

“Is he with you now?”

“He’s always with me.”

That wasn’t a lie. Will’s ghost showed up at the most unlikely times, sometimes as nothing more than a whisper on the wind.

So Ross’ happy-ever-after was short lived, but here I introduce Will’s ghost who is a major character in what becomes a love triangle later in the book. We don’t actually meet Will’s ghost until the next chapter, but he’s a jealous ghost and also slightly ambivalent. Ghosts don’t always have the same goal in death as they did in life.

“So you only came to gloat and to see what was left.”

“I don’t want anything of yours. I never did.”

“Oh, don’t worry, what’s coming to you is not mine. I’m only passing it on… one final obligation to the past.” Her voice, still sharp, caught in her throat and she coughed.

“Do you want a drink?” I asked, suddenly seeing her as a lonely and sick old woman.

“I want nothing from you.” She screwed up her eyes. Her hand went to her belly. I could only stand by while she struggled against whatever pain wracked her body.

Ross might be ready for reconciliation if her mother gave the slightest opportunity, but her mother isn’t going to relent.

Finally she spoke again. “In the chest at the foot of the bed, below the sheet.”

I knelt and ran my fingers across it. It had been my father’s first sea-chest, oak with a tarnished brass binding. I let my fingers linger over his initials burnt into the top. He’d been an absentee father, always away on one long voyage after another, but I’d loved his homecomings: the feel of his scratchy beard on my cheek as he hugged me, the smell of sea salt and pipe tobacco.

I pulled open the catch and lifted the lid.

“Don’t disturb things. Feel beneath the left hand edge.”

I slid my hand under the folded linen. My fingers touched something smooth and cool. I felt the snap and fizz of magic and jerked back, but it was too late, the thing, whatever it was, had already tasted me. Damn my mother. What had she done?

This is the inciting incident. The box is massively important to the story.

I drew the object out to look and found it to be a small, polished, wooden box, not much deeper than my thumb. I’d never seen its like before, but I knew winterwood when I saw it, and knew full well what it was. The grain held a rainbow from the gold of oak, to the rich red of mahogany, shot through with ebony hues. It sat comfortably in the palm of my hand, so finely crafted it was almost seamless.

My magic rose up to meet it.

I tried the lid. “It’s locked. Is this some kind of riddle?”

She had an odd expression on her face. “Your inheritance.”

“How does it open? What’s inside it?”

“That’s for you to find out. I never wanted any of it.”

My head was full of questions. My mother hated magic, even the sleight of hand tricks of street illusionists. How could this be any inheritance of mine? Yet, I felt that it was.

Mother deliberately tricked Ross into touching the object. It shows she knows more about magic than she’s ever let on, but Ross doesn’t realise this at the time. This kicks off the whole story.

I turned the box around in my hands. There was something trapped inside that wanted its freedom. No point in asking if anyone had tried to saw it open. You don’t work ensorcelled winterwood with human tools.

Wrapping both hands around the box, I could feel it was alive with promise. It didn’t seem to have a taint of the black about it, but it didn’t have to be dark magic to be dangerous.

I shuddered. “I don’t want it.”

Instant rejection of the ‘call to adventure’ if you subscribe to ‘The Hero’s Journey.’

“It’s yours now. You’ve touched it. I’ve never handled it without gloves.”

“Where did it come from?”

She shook her head. “Family.”

“Neither you nor Father ever mentioned family, not even my grandparents.”

“Long gone, all of them. Gone and forgotten.”

“I don’t even know their names.”

“And better that way. We left all that behind us. We started afresh, your father and I, making our own place in society. It wasn’t easy even in this tarry-trousers town. Your ancestors companied with royalty, you know, though much good it did them in the end. You’re a lady, Rossalinde, not a hoyden.” She winced, but whether from the memories or the pain I couldn’t tell. “That blasted thing is all that’s left of the past. It followed me, but it’s too much to… ” Her voice tailed off, then she rallied. “I wasn’t having any of it. It’s your responsibility now. I meant to give it to you when you came of age.” She narrowed her eyes and glared at me. “How old are you, anyway?”

‘hoyden’ I tried to use words in keeping with the century without losing the immediate appeal of contemporary dialogue. You tread a fine line when writing about the past, so I tried to keep the dialogue free from contemporary words with a light sprinkling of words that feel period-appropriate.

I was lean and hard from life at sea. You didn’t go soft in my line of work. “I’m not yet five and twenty, Mother.” I held up the box and stared at it. “What if I can’t open it?”

“I suppose you’ll have to pass it on to the next generation.”

“There won’t be a next generation.”

She shrugged and waved me away with one hand.

“Give it to Philip.” I held it out to her, but she shrank back from it and her eyes moistened at my brother’s name. What had he been up to now? Likely he was the one who’d spent all her money. I hadn’t seen Philip for seven years, but I doubted he’d reformed in that time. He’d been a sweet babe, but had grown into a spoilt brat, manipulative and selfish, and last I saw he was carrying his boyhood traits into adolescence, turning into an opportunist with a slippery tongue.

“Always to the firstborn. But you’re behind the times, girl. Philip’s dead. Dead these last seven months.” Her voice broke on the last words.

“Dead?” I must have sounded stupid, but an early death was the last thing I’d envisioned for Philip.

The grievances I’d held against him for years melted away in an instant. All I could think of was the child who’d followed me round begging that I give him a horsey ride, or told him a story.

“How?”

“A duel. In London. A matter of honour was the way it was written to me.”

 “Oh.” It was such an ineffectual thing to say, but right at that moment I didn’t really know how I felt. Had Philip actually developed a sense of honour as he grew? Was there a better side to my brother that I’d never seen? I hoped so.

Ross would like to think the best of Philip. This foreshadows something that happens later in the book when Philip reappears, not dead after all, and she gives him the benefit of the doubt, which is a bad move.

“Is that all you can say? You didn’t deserve a brother. You never had any love for him.”

I let that go. It wasn’t true.

“I thought you might have changed.”

My mother’s words startled me and I realised my mind had wandered into the past. Stay sharp. This might yet be a trap, some petty revenge for the wrongs she perceived that I heaped on her: loss of wealth, loss of station; loss of son. Next she’d be blaming me for the loss of my father, though only the sea was to blame for that.

“That’s all I’ve got for you.” She turned away from me. “It’s done. Now, get out.”

“Mother I–“

“I’m ready for my medicine.”

Probably laudanum. She’s about to take an overdose. She’s done what she needed to do – pass on the box – and now she welcomes a quick death rather than a slow and painful one from cancer.

I knew it would be the last time I’d see her. I wanted to say how sorry I was. Sorry for ruining her life; sorry for Philip’s death. I wanted to take her frail body in my arms and hold her like I could never remember her holding me, but there was nothing between us except bitterness. Even dying, there was no forgiveness.

Even as she thinks this, she knows it will never happen.

I turned and walked out, not looking back.

I wrote this scene to find out what was happening, who my protagonist was and what major factors were going to shape the action. It’s largely survived intact through all the edits. What do we know about Rossalinde at the end of this scene?

She’s not yet 25. She eloped 7 years ago with Will Tremayne. They were together for 4 years before he died, and since then she’s dressed in men’s clothes and taken his place as captain of their privateer ship. As privateers they have letters or marque from the crown. She’s pretty obviously a strong woman, but in this scene she’s vulnerable. She has magic and the Mysterium will hang her if they catch her. (We don’t yet know what the Mysterium is.) She’s worried that this visit to her mother’s deathbed is a trap and that she’s been followed.

Ross and Will had a child, but he did not live, and Ross doesn’t envidage remarrying.

Ross had a brother called Philip. She resented him as a child, when he replaced her in her parents’ affections. She might have cared for him, but he turned into a spoiled brat. And now he’s dead, which jolts her, as she never expected him to die young.

Ross would accept reconciliation if her mother was open to it, but the old woman is going to hold on to her grievances until the bitter end. She has one last duty to discharge, to pass on the box made of ensorcelled wood.

Both the Mysterium and a rowankind bondsman have been mentioned but not explained. The rowankind was named as Larien. All are vital to the future plot.

By the time I finished writing this the whole story had coalesced in my mind – maybe not the detail, but I knew what the main plot was, and how it would end.

You can buy my books from Amazon on both sides of the Atlantic. In North America it’s also available on Kindle and as ebooks from Barnes and Noble, and from good independent bookstores. Buy books, make an author very happy.

Corwen Silverwolf Speaks

Corwen Speaks:

Denby Hall, September 1803
I don’t usually get the opportunity to say much. It’s not that I’m henpecked, you understand, but—well—my author is female and she lets my beloved, Rossalinde, tell the story. So it’s nice, for once, to be able to speak for myself rather than letting my actions speak for me. This is the first entry in my journal. There is much to tell, and I hope that our children will one day read it and understand.

Let’s get the important bit out of the way first. I’m Corwen Deverell and I’m a wolf shapechanger—not a werewolf! I sometimes have to make that very clear to people. I’m not moon-called, which means if you’re with me when I change into my wolf, I’m not going to tear out your throat and crunch your bones. Please don’t get the wrong idea. I can, but I won’t. No, that’s all right, don’t apologise. I didn’t know the difference between a werewolf and a shapechanger at first, either. I was, after all, only nine when I made my debut change.

That initial change was brutal. It hurt, oh, how it hurt. My family didn’t take it well, however my mother understood once she’d spoken to her sister and found out that it ran in her family. It had skipped two generations so no one had thought to warn her. My father, unfortunately, never got over it. He thought I was doing it to taunt him, and that I could simply stop being a shapechanger whenever I wished. To a certain extent I can—now—but as a child, the changes were involuntary. He decided to beat it out of me until one night when I was about twelve or thirteen. I’d been out running on four feet—there may have been a lamb involved, I’m not proud of that—and I crept into the house via the back door, naked, muddy and bloody. 

Father had been waiting for me all night, and he had a cane in his hand that he kept swishing against his boot. He cornered me in the hallway. By that time changing was easy and quick, so I allowed my wolf to let him know that beating me was inappropriate. What can I say? I was at that snarly age. I didn’t bite him, but he suddenly saw the wisdom of leaving me alone.

Let’s skip over a few years. My father wouldn’t send me to university, though I did have a kind and understanding tutor, and access to my father’s extensive library containing more books on science than philosophy. I was eighteen when I left my siblings to their normal life. My older brother, Jonathan, had come home from Cambridge with new-fangled ideas about agriculture, and my father’s biggest interest was our woollen mill. He was thinking about getting one of those fancy new steam engines made by Mr. Boulton and Mr. Watt. My twin brother, Freddie, who hadn’t shown any wolf-tendencies at all, was at Oxford, and my little sister, Lily, still a child, was the apple of our father’s eye. They were a normal—if privileged—happy family, much better off without me. So I found a place for myself with the Lady of the Forest and the Green Man, good people once you get to know them.

That’s when I first saw Ross. She was on the run, a pirate’s widow with a price on her head for a murder that she wasn’t responsible for. It’s a long story, and Ross told much of it in Winterwood. The Lady asked me to guide Ross and her two companions out of the forest safely to the Bideford road. Even dressed in man’s array. I could see how beautiful she was. I’m always surprised that people don’t immediately spot Ross’ gender. She always looks feminine to me. Ross thought I was simply a trained wolf, of course, but right then I wanted to chase her down and eat her. Hmm, eat may not be quite the right word to use in this context, but it’s all I’m going to say. I was a civilised wolf, just as I’m a civilised man, so I let her go on her way, not without regret.

She didn’t even recognise me the next time we met. There was no reason why she should, of course. I was in human form then. The Lady had seen things coming that neither Ross nor I suspected, but as a precaution she sent me to be Ross’ watch-wolf. Ross didn’t take too kindly to that. It took a while for her to trust me, but when she did, we… Well, actually we didn’t, not right away. There was a problem. Ross wasn’t disinterested in sex, and by that time she was starting to see my worth. She was a widow, dammit, not a blushing virgin. It was her widowhood that was the problem. Her late husband, William Tremayne, was still hanging around. It’s hard enough to compete with another man for the woman you’ve come to love, but when your competition is a ghost, and a much-loved, much-missed ghost at that, it’s almost impossible. I mean, how are you ever going to live up to the memories of a perfect man? Yes, I know Will Tremayne wasn’t perfect, but he was in Ross’ head.

The Lady of the Forests had sent me to do a job, or rather to ensure that Ross did what was needful to free the rowankind from servitude, but the nearer we got to knowing what that was, the less I liked it. This thing that Ross had to do could suck the life right out of her. For a while I thought she might refuse to do it. There were issues other than her personal safety, and she wondered for a time whether doing it was the right thing to do. I had no doubts that she would do it if she thought it was right. She wasn’t lacking in courage, but part of me hoped that she would decide it was too big a step to take. It could do more harm than good. I hoped that in the weighing up of potential consequences, she would decide against it, but she didn’t, and all I could do was to support her as she stripped power from herself and her siblings to right a wrong that had been done two hundred years earlier.

You’re still reading this, so you’ve realised that Ross didn’t die, or I’d have been running round the forest howling at the moon by now.

We had a brief chance at a happy-ever-after, but that didn’t last. With the rowankind freed, it seemed that Ross had opened the gate for a lot of other magical creatures to find their way into the world. First we were called to deal with a kelpie who’d been eating children in Devon.

If that had been all, we could probably have gone back to our happy-ever-after, but that wasn’t all. We were called back to Yorkshire, to my family home. Yes, I know I said I was never going to go back, but things had changed, and until my sister Lily wrote I didn’t know any of it. My brother Jonathan had died. The number of times I’d been near to death because of some injury—protecting Ross isn’t without its hazards, so it’s lucky that I heal quickly—and yet Jonathan, always healthy and never in trouble for anything, had succumbed to a burst appendix. Our father had had an apoplectic fit at Jonathan’s funeral, and my twin, Freddie, just when he should have been taking charge of the family, had ducked out and run off to London to enjoy the season with his disreputable friends, rakes all of them, leaving Lily, herself now capable of changing to a black wolf, to shoulder the family burdens alone.

Anyhow, I won’t go into all that, Ross has told that story in Silverwolf. And yes, despite everything we married. I never thought I’d marry. I mean, looking for a wife is difficult enough, but when you need one who won’t mind if her children turn into cubs one day, you can’t just turn up to the next assembly and pick a young lady out for her looks or her graceful dancing. (And believe me that’s all that’s ever on show as the proud mamas show off their featherbrained daughters in the hopes of a good match.) Ross accepts me for what I am. That’s one more reason that I love her.

Ross was there to back me up when my twin brother, Freddie, made his wolf-change late and couldn’t live with either his wolf or himself. And on top of that, the Fae landed us both with an impossible task and dire consequences if we failed to do it. You are here, reading this, so you know we did not fail, but the story of how we succeeded is written in Rowankind.

Did I say that Ross is beautiful, and brave, and resourceful? I probably did. So, if I’ve started to repeat myself I shall put down the quill, blow out the candle and go to bed. Ross should have warmed it by now and with any luck she won’t be asleep yet.

If you want to catch up with all this from Ross’ point of view, the stories are here in the books of the Rowankind:

Sequels are Difficult

Crossways: Book Two in the Psi-Tech series.

When my agent upped my initial offer from DAW from one book to a three-book-deal, my contract was for Winterwood, Empire of Dust (both complete) and an untitled sequel to Empire. I’d sold it on a loose one-page synopsis, and though I had ideas about where I wanted the story to go, I didn’t have the whole thing plotted out. I had a year to work on it. If that seems like a long time, it isn’t. Empire is a long book, 173,000 words, so I was aiming for something in the region of 150,000 to 170,000 for Book Two. That’s a lot of words.

This book eventually became Crossways, and ended up at 172,000 words. I didn’t need to beat it into submission to arrive at the final word count. It happened quite naturally.

This is the cover copy.

Crossways

What starts as a hunt for survivors turns into a battle for survival.

Ben Benjamin, psi-tech Navigator, and Cara Carlinni, Telepath, can never go home again. To the Trust and Alphacorp alike they are wanted criminals. Murder, terrorism, armed insurrection, hijacking, grand theft and kidnapping are just the top of a long list of charges they’ll face if they’re caught.

So they’d better not get caught.

These are the people who defied the megacorporations and saved a colony by selling the platinum mining rights and relocating ten thousand colonists somewhere safe, and they’re not saying where that is.

They take refuge on crimelord-run Crossways Station with the remnants of their team of renegade psi-techs and the Solar Wind, their state of the art jump-drive ship. They’ve made a promise to find a missing boatload of settlers and to do that Ben and Cara have to confront old enemies.

Alphacorp and the Trust; separate they are dangerous, united they are unstoppable. They want to silence Ben and Cara more than they want to upstage each other. If they have to get rid of Crossways in order to do it, they can live with that. In fact, this might be the excuse they’ve been looking for.

But something new is stirring in the cold depths of foldspace: aliens from another dimension or simply hallucinations? What are the repercussions for psi-tech Navigators who fly the Folds on gut instinct?

At the time I started writing it, I didn’t have a contract for a third book in the Psi-tech sequence, but as I was getting towards the end, I emailed my editor and asked whether I should round off the story at the end of Book Two or should I leave some threads for a third book. Unofficially she said it was looking like a trilogy to her. Whew! I don’r like books that end on a cliffhanger, but there was enough story to move on to Book Three.

I had several false starts. Did I start with my main characters, Ben and Cara and the renegade psi-techs, or did I start with one of the main antagonists, Crowder? I decided on Crowder as that gave me backstory in a few paragraphs. He only has a short scene before we switch to Ben and Cara. The main focus is on them all the way through, together and separately. I knew there were set pieces I wanted, but I also had to build the world of Crossways space station, its criminal underworld and its leader, Garrick, who has big ideas. Into that world I inserted Ben, Cara and the Free Company (their renegade psi-techs). And then there were the interdimensional aliens in foldspace – two different species, one benign and one definitely not.

My editor asked me for cover suggestions well before I’d finished the book, so I gave her a description of Crossways space station. When I saw the artwork from Stephan Martiniere it was so beautifully detailed, that I was able to change some of my descriptions to fit in with the illustration. This is the artwork for the cover.

This time, I built on the style sheet for Empire and made it into the style sheet for the triliogy. More on style sheets in another post.

My Debut Novel – What I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known Before Publication

My first book, Empire of Dust, a space opera, came out in October 2014. I was excited, pleased and nervous all at the same time. A week or so before publication my author copies arrived, all packed up is a big shipping box. I can’t begin to tell you how delighted I was to get them – so delighted I gave them their very own bookshelf.

The book slipped out without a launch. For one month went into the Locus best sellers list of February 2015, based on the figures from November 2024. Then it disappeared from there, never to be seen again. It got some good reviews, especially in Publishers’ Weekly (and I’m pleased to say, no real stinkers even on Amazon).

“Bedford builds a taut story around the dangers of a new world…. Readers who crave high adventure and tense plots will enjoy this voyage into the future.“- Publishers’ Weekly

“The skill of this book lies in Bedford’s ability to seamlessly combine intrigue-heavy, multi-viewpoint plotting with human stories featuring characters you care about – a rare feat in this genre.” – Jaine Fenn (Tales from the Garrett)

There were things I wish I’d known in advance.

Even if you’re published by a major traditional publisher you still need to work like hell to push your book.

It was only when my second book, Crossways, came out and DAW put me in contact with my publicist at PenguinRandomHouse, that I realised I must have had a publicist for Empire of Dust, but I’d never been introduced, and I hadn’t known to ask. A publicist sends out review copies, arranges interviews and possible guest blogs – mostly before publication day. A marketing person largely sees to promotion after publication. Sad to say, few publishing houses will spend a lot on advertising (magazines and online) unless you’re Mercedes Lackey or Patrick Rothfuss. In fact, advertising seems to increase with your sales figures. Does advertising improve your visibility, or does your visibility encourage your publisher to advertise? Those of us with books slithering out into the world almost unannounced and unadvertised are convinced that advertising would increase our sales figures if only there was a budget for it. Sadly, after seven books unadvertised, I still don’t know the answer to that one.

I was a bit slow on the uptake when my first book came out, but subsequently I’ve used the following to get word out of new books

• Website – check
• Mailing list – check
• Blog – check
• Blog-swaps with other authors – check
• Twitter – check
• Facebook – check
• Instagram – check

I avoid posting things which only say ‘buy my book’. I add value to my posts – writing tips, interest pieces, news of other people’s books, books I’ve enjoyed reading, writing news. I promote my own books alongside other people’s, of course, but I try to do it subtly.

Note: TikTok didn’t exist when my first book came out and I confess that I still haven’t used it, but I’m getting better at Instagram, though I’ve now dropped X – formerly known as Twitter.

Though DAW has always given me a say in my cover illustrations, I haven’t had any input into the cover design. I bitterly regret not saying something when my second psi-tech novel (Crossways) looked nothing like the first in cover design, even though the cover illustrations were by the same artist (Stephan Martiniere) and the cover designs for all three were by G-Force Design. The third book (Nimbus) looked as though it was part of the same trilogy as Crossways, but sadly Empire of Dust looks as if it has been orphaned by the unified design of the other two. Also, with hindsight, I would have given the first book in the trilogy a one-word title – probably Psi-Tech. What do you think?

My Rowankind fantasy trilogy is much better coordinated, though the typeface has been changed between the first book and the other two. The illustrator is Larry Rostant and the cover design for all three books is once again by G-Force Design. I love the cover illustrations.

I enjoyed writing the trilogies, but I decided my next project would be a standalone. It’s a historical fantasy set in an analogue of the Baltic States. It came out in January 2022.

All these things are not rocket science, but things you learn by experience. I’m still learning. And while i’m learning, I’m working on two very different projects. More soon.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Oscar Wilde ‘Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.’

I Got a Publishing Deal – What Happened Next.

See last week’s blog for what went before…

The goal I’d always struggled for was within my grasp. I’d got an agent – the lovely Amy Boggs of the Donald Maass Agency in New York – and I’d been offered a three-book deal by Sheila Gilbert of DAW. I signed the contract, got half the advance on signing (it wasn’t huge, believe me, but at least it was an advance) Sheila told me that even though they’d bought Winterwood first, it wasn’t necessarily the first book they’d publish. In fact, they had a gap in their publication schedule for a science fiction title earlier than for a fantasy, so my space opera, Empire of Dust, would come out in 2014, wheras if they brought out  Winterwood first, it would not come out until 2015.

Sheila Gilbert

So Empire of Dust became my debut novel. My first agent had recommended I cut the wordcount. It had originally been much longer, but it was only 123,000 words when Sheila bought it. Her editing method is to phone up and talk, talk, talk, while I scribble frantic notes. She doesn’t tell me what to write, she just tells me what needs fixing and then lets me fix it. In this case, a lot of the things she mentioned were things I’d cut during the savage hacking process my first agent had asked for. I’d saved all the cut stuff, of course, and though I couldn’t use the excised scenes word for word, they gave me a starting point for my additions. Back in went a sub-plot and more character development (especially for the antagonists) until both Sheila and I were happy with it.

Because I was very new to the publishing game there were a few things I didn’t understand. Although slightly more than a year between the offer and the publication date seemed like a long time to me, it’s not long in publishing terms.

Sheila very kindly asked me to pick out a couple of pivotal scenes for the purposes of giving the cover artist, the fabulously talented Stephan Martiniere some inspiration for the cover illustration. I was lucky, publishers often do the cover without referring to the author. The cover mock-up was very close to the one that finally made it to print. I only made one suggestion and that was, of my two characters, Ben was small and in the background while Cara was upfront. Since Ben is black I thought this might be commented on, so the size ratio was altered. The two characters have more-or-less equal prominence in the story.

The illustrator doesn’t typeset the cover. The first version I saw used a completely different font to the one that made it to press, but I was happy with the finished cover. More than happy!

Two covers for Empire of Dust. Left is the first version, right is the finished version.

I delivered my final draft in what I thought was good time, but I didn’t get the copy edits to check. In all honesty I didn’t realise how time was slipping though my fingers (and DAW’s) or I would have chased it up. Eventually I got the page proofs and was told that I’d have to OK the copy edits and do the page proofs in one pass – and I only had a week to do it. Eeep! And it arrived on the Wednesday morning as I was setting off for Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention) in London and not due home until Monday night. I guess they thought it would be a good time to send the page proofs to me while Sheila and Betsy, DAW’s two main editors, were out of the office – at Worldcon. They should have known I’d be there, too because meeting Sheila was already on my calendar (and hers I suppose). Anyhow, I called them up and got a four-day extension. I went to Worldcon, met Sheila and Betsy in persons, got taken out to dinner several times, went to the DAW dinner on Saturday night with a load of other DAW authors (should that be DAWthors?), and completely missed seeing the Hugo Awards presentation which, I’m told, David Tennant turned up to because Dr Who was nominated that year.

I returned home from Worldcon to my first experience of American copy editing. My manuscript looked as if the copy editor had taken a bucket of commas and upended it over the pages. Why do Americans use commas so much more than Brits? Yes, their commas are correctly placed according to the Chicago Manual of Style, but oh, so numerous. I managed to get some of them taken out, especially where the placement had actually changed the meaning of a sentence, but eventually we came to a compromise and (mostly) left them in except for within dialogue where the additional commas really changed characters’ voices.

This is when I learned about style sheets. The copy editor kindly sent the copy they’d made. A style sheet is a doxument where you note down the correct spelling of names for people and places, any made-up terms and their plurals, or whether you’ve hyphenated words such as psi-tech or not. It doesn’t matter which you do, as long as you’re consistent. I didn’t have a style sheet to send with my manuscript, but I’ve made one for every book I’ve done since then.

Once the page proofs were done, that was it. The book went out of my hands and into production.

Next week – My Debut Novel – What I Wish I’d Known Before publication

My Publishing Journey

I started writing my first novel when I was fifteen, longhand in an old school notebook. I didn’t have a typewriter in those days. It was long before personal computers, and anyway, I couldn’t type.

My characters were thinly disguised versions of my favourite pop stars. It was set in a near future dystopia (eat your heart out Hunger Games and Divergent) where everyone had to have ‘proper jobs’ and gigging in pubs for cash-in-hand wasn’t proper enough, so my band was on the run. (Long before McCartney’s Band on the Run was a thing.) The world should be very relieved that I never got beyond Chapter Six. But even if I had finished it, I wouldn’t have had a clue how to sell it to a publisher. I didn’t even know what a literary agent was.

Fast forward a few years. Married with kids I was part of a babysitting circle, and I used to love sitting for one particular family because their kids were always in bed when I arrived and never woke up. I had a whole evening to myself while my own kids (who rarely went to bed at a decent time) annoyed the hell out of their dad while he tried to do his prep for the next day at school. My babysitting gave me a whole evening – four sweet hours – to work on my book. (Still longhand on a lined pad.)

Fast forward another couple of years… a friend lent me her Amstrad PCW while she was away nursing her sick mum. I still couldn’t touch-type (I still can’t) but I got quite fast at hunt-and-pack keyboard work and – lo – I finished my first book by writing late into the night after the rest of the household had gone to bed.

Cutting a long story very short I found an agent on the recommendation of Anne McCaffrey via a good friend. Thus began several disappointing years as Agent #1 failed to sell my book, though she got a we-nearly-bought-this from HarperCollins. I parted from that agent for reasons I won’t go into here, and it took me quite a while (think years not months) to find another. I kept writing, of course, and by this time had four or five finished books, My new agent worked with me on Winterwood and then began to submit it. With three or four refusals she suddenly decided to get out of agenting and I was left with a book that my ex-agent considered publishable, but with only a few major publishers who hadn’t yet seen it.

I knew DAW was one of those. My time at the Milford SF Writers’ Conference had introduced me to many writers and one very kindly introduced me to her editor, Sheila Gilbert, at DAW. I sent out a load of letters to prospective agents, but in the meantime sent my manuscript to Sheila. This was May 2013. I got some interest from agents but no real offers. I knew these things take time, so I wasn’t panicking. It would either happen or it wouldn’t.

Sheila Gilbert collecting her Hugo for Best Editor, Longform

Then one evening in July I came back home from a shopping trip to find an email from Sheila at DAW saying ‘I want to buy your book, when can I call you?’

Let me say that again:
‘I want to buy your book, when can I call you?’

I started to tap out a reply saying I would be in the following day when I realised that we’re five hours ahead of New York, so though it was 6.00 p.m. here, it would only just be after lunch over there. I quickly changed my email and said, ‘I’m in now.’

The phone rang almost immediately, and indeed, Sheila did want to buy Winterwood. Then she said those wonderful words that every fledgeling writer wants to hear, ‘What else have you got?’

During all this time, I’d kept writing, of course, so I sent her Empire of Dust, a space opera that could either stand alone or lead into a trilogy.

Then I danced around the house with a big silly grin on my face. I really did. And, believe me, I don’t normally indulge in spontaneous dancing..

Anyhow, one thing leads to another. I’d spent several months submitting to agents and with a deal on the table, now was the time to take advantage. I emailed my top ten agents, some in the UK and some in the USA, and said that I’d had an offer from DAW and if they were interested could they please get back to me within a week. Within a week I’d had five and a half offers of representation. The half was from a young agent who was very keen but was travelling and wouldn’t be able to make a decision within a week. So I began to talk, one by one to the five agents. Suddenly I went from being the writer an agent could safely ignore, to being the real deal.

Empire of Dust – Cover

Now I was spoilt for choice. There were two British agents and three American ones. There was nothing to choose between them, I got on really well with two of the American agents, another not so well. Of the two British agents one sounded very ‘public school’, too posh for me, probably, and the other was a bit pushy – not necessarily a bad thing in an agent. The one I clicked with was Amy Boggs from the Donald Maass Agency in New York. She was just the right kind of enthusiastic. So that was settled.

Amy upped DAW’s book offer to a three-book deal for Winterwood, Empire of Dust and a sequel to Empire, sold on a single sheet synopsis, and not yet written or even started. I had work to do.

It was as if all my Christmasses had come at once.

What happened next? That’s a story for next week.

My 2023 reading

A fair amount of my reading this year was via Audible audiobooks. I like to read myself to sleep at night but my other half is disturbed by light, even kindle-light when it’s switched on to white text on a black background. So audiobooks are the obvious compromise. I bought one of those sports headbands with wifi speakers, and it’s very comfortable when lying in bed. Though with audiobooks I often listen to something I’ve read before, so a fair few of my 2023 books were re-reads (or re-listens).

Most of my reading is fantasy or science fiction, though my guilty pleasure is Regency romance, so you’ll find a few historicals scattered through this list. Standout new reads? Peter McLean’s War for the Rose Throne, starting with Priest of Bones. I galloped through all four volumes quicktime. I liked Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, though I haven’t been tempted to the second in the series yet. I will, sometime in the new year. John Scalzi’s Starter Villain was fun. Jodi Taylor’s new books, of course. They’re a buy on publication for me. I read The Good, the Bad and the History, and I expect to read Christmas Pie when it drops on Christmas Day. Lois McMaster Bujold, of course, is always worth a re-read or a re-listen.

I should mention six books written by friends and much enjoyed: Liz Williams’ Salt on the Midnight Fire, Jade Linwood’s Charming, David Gullen’s The Blackhart Blades, Trip Galey’s A Market of Dreams and Destiny, and Juliet E McKenna’s two very different books, The Cleaving and The Green Man’s Quarry.

You can read my full reviews here on my Dreamwidth blog: https://jacey.dreamwidth.org/

1. Lois McMaster Bujold: Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance – Vorkisiverse #18 Audiobook
2. Dennis E Taylor: For We Are Many – Bobiverse #2
3. Sebastien de Castell: Knights’ Shadow – Greatcoats #2 Audiobook
4. Ian McDonald: Luna – New Moon – Luna #1
5. Juliet E McKenna: Thief’s Gamble – Einarinn #1
6. T Kingfisher: What Moves the Dead
7. Anne Lyle: The Dead Dragon Job
8. Peter McLean: Priest of Bones – War for the Rose Throne #1
9. Juliet E McKenna: The Cleaving
10. Lily Harlem: Lyon at the Altar – The Lyons’ Den Connected World
11. Julia Quinn (and others): The Lady Most Willing
12. Sebastien de Castell: The Malevolent Seven
13. Peter McLean: Priest of Lies – War for the Rose Throne #2
14. Tade Thompson: Far From the Light of Heaven
15. Peter McLean: Priest of Gallows – War for the Rose Throne #3
16. Peter McLean: Priest of Crowns – War for the Rose Throne #4
17. Lex Croucher: Gwen and Art are Not in Love
18. Elizabeth W Watkins: The Reluctant Baronet
19. W.A. Simpson: Tarotmancer
20. C. J. Archer: The Librarian of Crooked Lane
21. Rebecca Yarros: Fourth Wing – Empyrian #1
22. John Scalzi: Starter Villain – Audiobook
23. Patricia Briggs: Soul Taken – Mercy Thompson #13
24. Mat Osman: The Ghost Theatre
25. Jodi Taylor: The Good, the Bad and the History – Chronicles of St Mary’s #14
26. Liz Williams: Salt on the Midnight Fire – Fallow Sisters #4
27. Becky Chambers: A Closed and Common Orbit – Audiobook
28. Brent Weeks: Night Angel Nemesis – Night Angel #4
29. Zoe G Galloway: The Royal Matchmaking Competition
30. Paul Cornell: Human Nature – A Dr Who New Adventures Novel. – Audiobook
31. Ben Aaronovitch: Amongst Our Weapons – Rivers of London #9 – Audiobook
32. Pierce Brown: Red Rising – Red Rising #1 – Audiobook
33. Ursula LeGuin: The Lathe of Heaven – Audiobook
34. Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman: Good Omens – Audiobook
35. Karen Traviss: Hard Contact – Star Wars Republic Commando #1
36. Trip Galey: A Market of Dreams and Destiny
37. V.E.Schwab: Gallant – Audiobook
38. David Gullen: The Blackhart Blades
39. Molly Harper: How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf – Naked Werewolf #1 – Audiobook
40. Jade Linwood: Charming
41. Kari Sperring: The Book of Gaheris – An Arthurian Tale
42. T. Kingfisher: Thornhedge
43. John Scalzi: Agent to the Stars – Audiobook
44. Hannah Nicole Maehrer: Assistant to the Villain
45. Genevieve Cogman: The Dark Archive – Invisible Library #7 – Audiobook
46. Audrey Harrison: An Inconvenient Ward.
47. T. Kingfisher: Illuminations
48. Martha Wells: Compulsory – Murderbot Diaries 0.5 – Audiobook
49. Martin Duffy: Peg Leg Gus – Audiobook
50. Juliet E McKenna: The Green Man’s Quarry – Green Man #6
51. Lois McMaster Bujold: The Warrior’s Apprentice – Vorkosiverse #3 – Audiobook
52. Patrick Stewart: Making it So – A Memoir – Audiobook
53. Jodi Taylor: White Silence – Elizabeth cage #1 Audiobook
54. Jodi Taylor: Dark Light – Elizabeth Cage #2 Audiobook
55. Jodi Taylor: Long Shadows – Elizabeth Cage #3 Audiobook
56. C.S. Forester: Lieutenant Hornblower – Audiobook
57. C.S. Forester: Hornblower and the Hotspur – Audiobook
58. Jim Butcher: Grave Peril – Dresden Files #3 – Audiobook
59. Diana Wynne Jones: House of Many Ways – Howl’s Moving Castle #3 – Audiobook
60. Martha Wells: Exit Strategy – Murderbot Diaries #4 – Audiobook
61. M.R James: The Tractate Middoth – Audiobook
62. John Gwynne: Better to Live than to Die – Audiobook
63. Jasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair – Thursday Next #1 – Audiobook
64. Elizabeth Moon: Sheepfarmer’s Daughter – Paksenarrion #1
65. Lois McMaster Bujold: Mirror Dance – Vorkosiverse – Audiobook
66. George R.R. Martin: Fevre Dream – Audiobook
67. Ellis Peters: Monk’s Hood – Cadfael Chronicles #3 – Audiobook
68. Ellis Peters: The Virgin in the Ice – Cadfael Chronicles #6 – Audiobook
69. Ellis Peters: Dead Man’s Ransom – Cadfael – Audiobook
70. Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall – Audiobook
71. Jodi Taylor: Santa Grint – Time Police — Audiobook
72. Jonathan Gash: The Judas Pair – Lovejoy #1 — Audiobook
73. Marshall Ryan Maresca: The Quarrygate Gambit – Streets of Maradaine #4
74. Jodi Taylor: Christmas Pie – St Mary’s Short
75. Tom Holt: The Eight Reindeer of the Apocalypse

What to get for the writer in your life this holiday season

Gifts That Cost Nothing!
The best gift for your writer-friends, or for your favourite writer is… a review. By you. Review their book (or books)  on Amazon, on Goodreads, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, on your own blog, on Mastodon, on Bluesky or whatever social media you subscribe to. Shout out about books that you like. It makes a difference. It really helps writers to reach a bigger audience. And we love it. We love you for it.

Interact on your favourite writer’s blog or Instagram or Facebook etc. Writing is a solitary occupation, so It’s nice to think that there are people out there who care enough to chat. Or write your favourite author a fan letter or a fan email. You can usually find an email address on their web page.

Gifts That Don’t Cost Much – and You Give Them to Yourself.
Enjoyed a book by an author, but not got round to buying the sequel yet (or the second and third books in a trilogy)? Go and buy them from your local independent bookstore or order them from Barnes and Noble, Abe Books or Amazon, or wherever good books are sold. Yes, you’re buying a present for yourself, but you’re also helping the writer in your life’s sales figures (which helps them to get their next publishing deal.. And when you have your new books, don’t forget to review them. Double value!

But if You Really Must…
Chocolate. Writers like chocolate… and probably coffee, too. They like nice notebooks, and nice pens.

Some of us are fountain pen geeks, too, so fancy inks are always nice. Try Cult Pens in the UK or Jet Pens in North America. One of my favourite little pocket pens in the Pilot Petit which is almost indistinguishable from the Papermate Mini which are 3 for £3.61 on Amazon. Honestly, for the price they are amazing. You can spend hundreds of pounds on a good pen, but you can also get very decent pens ridiculously cheap. If your giftee likes something a bit chunkier than a mini pen, Jinhao pens start from about £5. How they can do decent quality pens at that price, I just don’t know – but they do. Rather than buying new cartridges, I wash them out and refill them with bottled ink in in a huge variety of colours. A blunt craft syringe helps with this. There are loads to choose from on Amazon, and Cult Pens do a great range of Diamine inks in small (30 ml) bottles.

Books
Yes, writers are readers, too, but unless we’ve dropped big hints about something specific, we might already have the latest books by our favourite authors. So, book tokens or Amazon vouchers are useful, or subscriptions to Audible audio books might be a good idea.

Ko-Fi or Similar
You can subscribe to some writers for the price of buying them a coffee every month. This gives then a subscription income which helps them to keep writing through the lean times. Subscribers get exclusive gifts of digital downloads or short stories – which aren’t available to non-subscribers. I don’t do this, but some of my writer friends do. It’s always worth checking out your favourite writer’s website to see if they do.

Whatever you decide to buy for yourself or for the writer in your life, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a happy and prosperous New Year.

Milford SF Writers’ Week

On 16th September I’m heading off to North Wales for a week of workshopping stories and novels with 14 other published science fiction and fantasy writers. We all submit up to 10,000 words in one or two pieces in advance and during the week we hold formal critique sessions in the afternoons. We use what has come to be known as the Milford Method which was devised by Milford’s founders way back in Milford Pennsylvania in 1956. (Milford was brought to the UK in 1972 by James Blish and he brought the Milford Method with him.)

We send out our submissions by email two to four weeks in advance of the event to give everyone time to do the reading in advance. (To do it all in one week would be too heavy a workload, though it has been done.)

The formal crit sessions go like this. Everyone gets the opportnity to speak uninterrupted for up to four minutes – the timer goes off after three minutes to give you time to wrap up neatly. During this time the person being critiqued has to sit quietly, usually making frantic notes. When everyone has had their say the person being critiqued has uninterrupted right of reply which is followed by a general discussion of the piece. Itworks well and gives the opportunity for even the shyest voice to be heard.

All critiques are supposed to be constructive. They are fair, sometimes even tough, but all designed to make the piece better. Ad hominem attacks and undue nastiness is strictly discouraged. In all the years I’ve been attending Milford (since 1998) there’s never been a problem with hurtful critiques, though I understand that way back in the 1980s there were harsh critiques from a few writers who were described to me as ‘duelling paranoias’. We’ve never had that during our tenure and the current committee (I am secretary) would have a ‘quiet word’ with anyone who tried it.

Our venue this year is Trigonos in Nantlle, just a few miles south of Caernarfon, within sight of Mount Snowdon. This is the view from our critique room.

We’ll be live blogging from Milford during the week of 16th – 23rd September on our Milford blog here: https://milfordsfwriters.wordpress.com/

Read more about Milford here:http://www.milfordsf.co.uk/

Plan ahea…

My friend Jim, Anderson just wrote a piece on the efficiency of shelves and it brought an anecdote to mind.

Way way back in the mists of time when I was a baby librarian in Barnsley, (Yorkshire), we had a new library built and had to move the whole of the Victorian central library (lending library, reference, local history, children’s library (my department) and stacks – including bound volumes of newspapers going back over 150 years). The town council was too mean to get in professional removers, so they allocated vans and drivers, but it was the responsibility of the staff to get the books to and from the front doors of the old and new buildings, Oh joy!

We had only 2 weeks of library closure. We encouraged our borrowers to take unlimited books from the old library and to return them to the new, but that was barely the tip of the iceberg. The remaining stock was moved in just five days by the (mostly) female staff. We had portable shelves made, so that books went on in their alphabetical or Dewey order so they could be unpacked still in order at the other end. And then we had a week to get the books shelved, ordered and lick the new library (and new computerised lending system) into shape before opening to the public again. That worked fairly well. Shelves are brilliant… except …

The architects had told us that all the new book bays were one metre in width, so 5 shelves to a bay. We’d worked out the meterage of shelving and knew we’d be fine… except …when we got to the new building, which most of us had not been inside, some of the shelving bays were considerably less than a metre wide. Some barely 60 cms. We didn’t have enough shelving in the new library to accommodate all the books from the old one.

It’s called ‘Plan ahea…’

I don’t have one photo of the inside of the old library. It was all built-in, dark wood shelving in solid oak, but this was the outside front of the building. My children’s library was in the two big rooms behind the five arched windows immediately above the three shops to the left of the front door. On the right of the front door, next to the Singer sewing machine shop was Albert Hirst’s pork butchers. They made award winning pork pies and the best roast pork and stuffing sandwiches.

The Magic of Titles

I’m on Karen Traviss’ mailing list and her latest missive dropped today. I like Karen. She’s an ex-journalist, down to earth, prolific, and writes some excellent SF, whether it’s a franchise novel or an original. If you’ve never read any of her books, you could do a lot worse than explore her many titles, whether you start with her Star Wars Republic Commando books (Hard Contact is the first) or her original Wes’Har series starting with City of Pearl.

Anyhow Karen’s current blog is about getting titles right and it set me thinking. A lot of writers can write a novel of 100,000 words, but when it comes to deciding on the title we come up with nothing.

I still wish I could have found a snappy title for the first book of my Psi-Tech trilogy. I ended up with Empire of Dust for the first book while the second and third were called Crossways and Nimbus, respectively. I’m happy with Crossways and Nimbus, but with hindsight I wish I’d had a single word title for the first book, too, or maybe just called it Psi-Tech.

I also wish that the first book looked more in keeping with the second and third, but I didn’t have an overview of what the trilogy might look like – that’s a publisher decision. I love Stephan Martiniere’s artwork, though. The cover art is separate to the book design.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

By the time my Rowankind trilogy came out I was getting the hang of it and, in order, the three books are Winterwood, Silverwolf and Rowankind. Yes I like one-word titles. Though these three books do look related it would have been nice if the text had matched on all three. Again, a publisher-decision. Cover art by Larry Rostant. Incidentally the cover model Larry used is Caroline Ford who recently appeared in Carnival Row, seasons 1 and 2. (An Amazon original.)

My most recent (standalone) book went through a multitude of working titles before I settled on The Amber Crown. For a year or two it languished in my files as The Baltic Novel while I thought about a title. Earlier titles that I tried out included: The Long Game, and Spider on the Web, both of which worked in the context of the story, but neither really sounded like a historical fantasy. The Amber Crown gave it both a historical flavour and also a geographic location, whereas The Long Game, or Spider on the Web could have been titles of a modern mystery story.

I have a couple of back-burner books that are written, but I’ve never been able to settle on good titles. They read like fantasies, but there’s a science-fictional rationale behind them. The setting is a human society on a ‘lost’ planet and they are in the same universe as my Psi-Tech trilogy, but many hundred years in the future. Like the Psi-Tech trilogy they feature telepaths, but there’s not a spaceship in sight.

I’m currently working on two YA fantasies and I think I’ve got the titles right. The Midnight Rose is based on the Tam Lin ballad, and it’s got romance and peril. It’s set partly in our world and partly in Faerie. It’s aimed at the older end of YA. Whereas Your Horse Sees Dead People, is about magic and horses and is aimed at the younger end of YA. I’ve already got a title for a sequel: A Head Full of magic Stuff. Now I need something to tie them together. I’m intending them to be a duology, but there might be more at some future date. Should I have a sub-title and if so, what? Maybe my main character’s name—A Tivoli de Winter Novel, 1 and 2. What do you think?

Seriously, what do you think?

Karen’s piece has a link to a very useful article by Jeff Somers, on How to Write a Superb Book Title, Subtitle, and Series Name. It set me thinking.

Using a Word Cloud to Highlight Overused Words

First posted onJanuary 15, 2019 by Jacey Bedford

Wordle used to be a web-based utility, a web toy that allowed you to paste in a piece of writing to make a word cloud. The more frequently a word appeared in your text, the bigger it appeared in the word cloud. Yes, it’s a pretty utility, but also massively useful for a writer. We all tend to have words that we overuse, but we don’t always recognise them. Cut and paste your text into Wordle and your overused words stand out like a rhinoceros in a flock of sheep. Frequently used common words like ‘the’, ‘and’, or ‘but’ don’t show up, of course.

Wordle is a Java applet. Because web design and technology moves on, the online Wordle web toy no longer works for most people, so the Wordle folks have offered a desktop version for both Windows and Mac. You can download it here http://www.wordle.net/. I’m running Win7pro and it works just fine for me.

Other word cloud apps are available.

Here’s an example from a story I’m working on. I have 18000 words so far.
I copied and pasted the whole story and this is the Wordle it produced.

It’s OK if a proper noun, your main character’s name for instance (Semmeri in this case), comes out as one of your biggest words, but as you can see, the rhinoceros in this flock of sheep is the word ‘back’. Cringing at my own foibles, I went through my piece, searching for the word ‘back’. In some cases I cut it completely without making a difference to the sentence.

Example:
Semmeri walked back up to the camp.
versus
Semmeri walked up to the camp.

In other cases I could replace it with a better word.

After I’d gone through each iteration of the word ‘back’ my Wordle looked like this.

Now the rhino in the flock of sheep was the word ‘one.’ So I tamed that. My next Wordle looked like this.

I wasn’t too worried about the word ‘boy’ because one of my main characters doesn’t have a name to begin with and is simply referred to as ‘the boy’, so I checked ‘like’ next. I couldn’t reduce it too much, but I tamed it, and this is my final Wordle.

Of course, you can easily use Wordle as writing displacement, so don’t get obsessive. I don’t suggest using Wordle until you have a substantial amount of finished words. If you’re working on a novel, maybe use it after 20,000 words to see which of your words are tending towards overuse. That way you can be aware as you’re writing. Then use Wordle again at the end, when your book is finished. I suggest using it after your content edit, but before your copy edit. It will help with your final polish.

Happy wordling.

Cutting Overused and Filler Words

I’ve finished another edit of my Tam-Lin novel, The Midnight Rose. It’s almost ready to send off to my agent, so I’ve spent a few days cutting specific words, i.e. fillers that take up space without contributing to the meaning of a sentence.

There are words which authors overuse, (we all do it) and it’s a good idea to make a list of your personal overused words – we all have them. My worst offender is just. Wherever it appears, there’s a more than even chance that if I cut it, it will make no difference to the meaning of the sentence.

Can you just put that over there for me?
Can you put that over there for me?

Other words which might be problematic include: that, very, really, feel, seem, move, went, walk, think, and my own personal annoying filler-words, back and down.

He sat down on the chair.
He sat on the chair..

The Green Man bowed and faded back into the wood.
The Green Man bowed and faded into the wood.

I cut close to 1000 words from my 77,000 word manuscript, (just) by going through and deleting words (that) I didn’t need. See what I did there?

Weak Verbs

Sometimes your writing needs ordinary everyday words, but at other times you can replace a weak verb with a stronger one, especially if you’ve used an adverb. Ran fast can become raced. Spoke softly can become whispered. But beware of changing a simple word for something that jars within the context of your piece. In my Tam-Lin book, my main character is eighteen-year-old Jenny. It would be ludicrous to swap the word walk for perambulate because it simply would not suit her voice.

Remember, you don’t want your story to sound as though you’ve written it with a thesaurus at your elbow. It needs to sound natural, especially in genre fiction. Personally I don’t like the words to stand in front of the story. I want the reader to think, ‘Oooh what’s going to happen next?’ rather than, ‘That was a clever juxtoposition of tintinnabulation and aerodynamic.‘

The Deaded Was

And then there’s the dreaded was. Many times, you use it and, like the words and and the (and to a certain extent said as a speech tag) it’s one of those words that can be invisible. But it’s also a marker for passive voice, which all writing manuals tell you to avoid. However sometimes you need passive voice because turning the verb active changes the meaning of a sentence slightly.

The door was closed – indicates that the door was already closed when the narrator arrived.
The door closed – indicates that the door actively closed while the narrator was present. Which one you use depends on the work you want the sentence to do.

There are no hard and fast rules, but cutting overused and empty words will strengthen your writing. Go to it!

Retreating

I’m at the Milford Writers’ Retreat in North Wales again. This will be the fourth retreat that Milford has run and I look forward to it each year. It’s a week of tranquility with no domestic duties or distractions. We’re at Trigonos an the Nantlle valley, on the edge of Snowdonia. You can see Snowdon up the valley, though it’s often obscured by cloud. This week, so far, we’ve had lovely weather and Snowdon has been visible most days. I took this photo from my bedroom window early on Sunday morning with some kind of cloud inversion sitting like cotton wool below Snowdon’s peak.

We have a great bunch of people (12 in total) most of whom I know from previous Milfords. Two have never been to Milford before, but we’re very open to newcomers, and not at all cliquey.

I spent the first three days finishing an edit on my Tam Lin book, called The Midnight Rose. I think it’s now ready to send to my agent. Yesterday I went into Caernarfon with Liz, Lee, Gaie and Russel for a mooch around the shops and a coffee. Liz drove us back trough the Llanberis Pass as Lee has come all the way from Vancouver, and hasn’t seen the North Wales scenery before.

Yesterday afternoon I started work on editing my YA novel, Your Horse Sees Dead People. It’s been on a back burner while I worked on Midnight Rose, but I’m actually finding it’s better than I thought. It needed a new beginning, just an intro, really, and I suspect I’ll have some work to do on the ending, but the middle bit is progressing quite well, so far. It’s often good to leave a gap between writing and going back and reading again. You can get too close to a project. In this case I’ve left over a year, so I’m reading it as a reader, not as a writer, and it makes a huge difference.

Ah, but while I’m working I keep getting distracted. There’s a huge wych elm tree outside my window, and there’s a squirrel stuffing its face with the papery seed pods. It might even be a progression of squirrels, though I never see more than one at once.

Yes, I know squirrels are really only bushy-tailed tree rats, but they push my ‘cute’ button.

Okay… back to my editing…

Eclectic Dreams

Milford is Launching Eclectic Dreams at Eastercon – Friday 7th April 2023 at 4.30 p.m..

It’s a fundraising anthology and all profits will go towards Milford’s Writers of Colour Bursary which enables two self-identifying writers of colour (from anywhere in the world) to attend Milford science fiction and fantasy writers conference, for a week in September.

All you good people who are going to Eastercon should head to the launch of Eclectic Dreams, This features some excellent stories (all workshopped at various Milford Conferences) by Tiffani Angus, Ben Jeapes, David Langford, Jacey Bedford, Val Nolan,Cherith Baldry, Nick Moulton,Victor Ocampo, Guy T Martland, Al Robertson and JW Anderson

Plus a previously unpublished story by NEIL GAIMAN who attended Milford in 1985.and very kindly donated a story to support the bursary.

If you’re not attending Eastercon you can buy the anthology here.

More about Milford here

Milford’s Bursary writers for 2023 are
Neon Yang, UK, and Akotowaa Ofori, Ghana.

Movies for the first quarter of the year

My cinebuddy, H, and I try to go to the cinema every Tuesday, during the day when it’s quiet. The Showcase cinema in Batley is not the nearest cinema, but it’s one of those posh ones which has electric recliner seats and plenty of room between the rows. Comfy and quiet, what more could a film fan want? We haven’t managed to go every week – and missed most of March due to Covid – but these are the films we’ve seen so far this year/

The Amazing Maurice
An animation of the Terry Pratchett book. It was OK but not spectacular.

Empire of Light
Not our usual type of film, but we took a chance. Set in a cinema on the south coast in the 1950s. Olivia Colman is superb. Colin Firth plays sleazily against type. Sweet and disturbing in equal measure.

Otto
Grumpy old man gets less grumpy and dies in the end. Tom Hanks is always wortth watching.

Living
Grumpy old man gets less grumpy and dies in the end. This time with Bill Nighy. Worth watching.

Puss in Boots #2
Cleverly done. Sweet and funny. Maybe not quite as good as the first one.

Ant Man: Quantumania
Engaging and well worth a look.

What’s Love Got to Do With It?
A young British Pakistani man decides on an arranged marriage (assisted marriage) like his parents had. His next door neighbour and long-time best friend (played by Lily James who seems to be in nearly every Brit film they make these days) wants to make a documentary about it so she follows the process. It works out just like you expect it to. Sweet.

Shazam, Fury of the Gods
Just like the first Shazam movie this was engaging and hit all the right notes. Billy (alias Shazam) and his superhero friends go up against the daughters of Atlas, a trio of gods reawakened and intent on destroying our world. Surprisingly good.

Retreating to Gladstone’s Library

During the first weekend in March, I went on a weekend writing retreat run by Shona Kinsella of the British Fantasy Society. The venue was Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, North Wales. Yes, THAT Gladstone – William Ewart Gladstone, politician and longest serving Prime Minister. Gladstone commissioned the library so that his collection of 30,000 books would be accessible to anyone. His core subjects were theology, history and literature, and his books can still be seen in the History Room. The library is a magnificent, purpose-built, Victorian Gothic building, begun in 1889. The building, designed by John Douglas, was officially opened in 1902, and the residential wing was opened in 1906.

Yes, that’s right, RESIDENTIAL. This is the only residential library in the UK. The library itself is free to use and accommodation costs are kept as low as possible to enable students, researchers and writers to use the excellent facilities. They do scholarships and bursaries, and also have a writer in residence programme.

I turned up on Day 1 (Friday) early enough to have lunch in the Food for Thought café. Though official check-in wasn’t until 2.00, they let me check in early and Sam carried my bag upstairs for me. (Thanks, Sam.) I had single occupancy of a double room and though the mattress was a bit firm for my back (I’m a bit like the princess with the pea!) the room was lovely with tea/coffee making facilities, , plenty of space and a very nice bathroom with a big shower. I had a great view to the front of the building.

There were twelve of us altogether, and though I didn’t know any of the others personally at the beginning of the weekend, it was a great group that gelled instantly. We worked during the day, and after dinner, decamped to the comfy common room. I’m not sure if we were more raucous than other groups, but we didn’t seem to offend anyone, so that was OK

As for working…. The library itself is pin-drop silent. There are tables and chairs, some central, some tucked into alcoves, some on the mezzanine accessed by a tricky Victorian staircase. Being surrounded by so many books concentrates the mind wonderfully. The only limit to work periods is provided by how much battery life your laptop has and how long your bladder can hold out. I worked in my cosy room for most of Friday, in the library for most of Saturday and in the comfy common room for most of Sunday. And in that time, I finished an edit which I’d been trying to work on for months.

Yay! Result. I will be back!

Happy Valentines

I don’t write romances, but all my books have an element of romance because – hey – humans are human and that means there’s going to be some attraction.

In Empire of Dust, the first volume in my Psi-Tech space-opera trilogy, Cara Carlinni meets Reska (Ben) Benjamin in the first chapter. They have unwise sex which is not a great way to start a relationship, but despite that, their course is set, largely due to Ben seeing something in Cara that he doesn’t want to lose, and Cara seeing an opportunity to shake off the bad guys trying to kill her. They spend most of the rest of the book getting over their bad beginning and learning to trust each other. Of course, that’s just the romance sub-plot. On top of that there’s interstellar corporate skulduggery, a villain from Cara’s past and one from Ben’s present, a crime boss who turns out to be an ally, and a fundamentalist leader who does all the wrong things for the best of reasons. Cara and Ben stick together throughout the rest of the trilogy (Crossways and Nimbus) during space battles and their aftermath and a strange new threat from Foldspace that will change the way human colonisation of the galaxy progresses.

My Rowankind trilogy is set in 1800 to 1802. George III is bonkers and Napoleon is hammering on the door. In Winterwood, Silverwolf and Rowankind (in that order) the romance is more forward, though Ross, my cross-dressing privateer captain is still in love with the ghost of her late husband when she meets wolf-shape-changer (please don’t call him a werewolf) Corwen. He’s handsome and competent and she really doesn’t like him. She tries to get rid of him, but it doesn’t stick and eventually she has to make a choice between the living and the dead. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Ross is an unregistered witch and wanted for a murder she didn’t commit. Either of those crimes could get her hanged. And on top of that she’s been given a magical task she doesn’t want. It could save a part elven race from slavery, or it could destroy the country in a wave of riots and retribution. In Silverwolf we see more of Corwen’s background and his family, including his shape-changing brother who tries to deny his magic. There’s fallout from the ending of the first book; magical creatures have escaped into the real world and must be dealt with one way or another. The third book, Rowankind,  brings the strands together and sees Corwen and Ross together trying to tackle the king and Parliament for the emancipation of the magical races.

My latest book, The Amber Crown is set in a much-altered version of the Baltic States close to the early 1600s. It was described by one reviewer as a romance, but it’s really not. It’s told from the point of view of three separate characters, Valdas, the disgraced bodyguard of the murdered king, Mirza, a Landstrider witch who is given a task by said murdered king’s ghost, and Lind, the assassin who started the whole sorry mess in the first place. It’s partly political thriller with supernatural elements, and partly a find-the-princess story. There is a slow-burn romance but it’s not what you might expect, and it’s not front and centre to the twisty plot. Valdas likes women, any warm willing woman can tempt him, but there is one he keeps coming back to. Mirza eventually manages to lose her virginity, but she has to forswear the company of men because – well, that would be telling. Lind has more sexual hangups than your average wardrobe, and he won’t be able to sort them out until he’s confronted his past. Expect blood magic versus natural magic. It’s twisty – I hope in a good way – and the villain is a nasty piece of work with (he thinks) a very good reason for his actions.

Hello 2023

Family plans were interrupted when our grandkids came down with a tummy bug and were unable to travel so 2023 didn’t start out so well for either us or them, but on 6th January my mum, Joan Lockyer, celebrated her 98th birthday and we were able to skype with kids, their spouses and children. No one threw up, so that was a win.

Mum’s fast losing her short-term memory, but she can still tell the tale of riding back home from a dance in the next village on the bonnet of her friend’s father’s milk float – in such a dense fog she had to call out where they were in relation to the wall. No lights, of course as it was during the Second World War blackout

She was quite a stunner in her youth.

So, birthday over, it’s time to work. I’m currently editing my first YA book, The Midnight Rose, based on the Tam Lin traditional ballad (as collected by Francis James Child in the middle to late 1800s). It’s a tale of captured knights, a vengeful fairy queen, a determined heroine, and the question of who is to be sacrificed to Hell at the end of seven years. I’ve added a few twists without taking it too far from the original story, and I’ve set it in the present day. Too heavy for YA? Maybe. We’ll see what my usual publisher says. I’m just writing it at the moment. Where it fits in the market is not for me to speculate (yet).

I first heard the ballad on an old Fairport Convention album, in the days when the late Sandy Denny took lead vocals. Powerful stuff. Have a listen.

Happy New Year.

My 2022 Reading

I’ve blogged all my reading (and listening) over on my other blog at Dreamwidth https://jacey.dreamwidth.org/ so if you want detailed reviews, please go check it out. Several of these books were absorbed via Audible, especially the Lois McMaster Bujolds, Terry Pratchetts, Diana Wynne Joneses, and T Kingfishers, which were all re-reads, as were some of the Jodi Taylors. Yes, I admit to doing a lot of comfort reading in 2022. It seemed like a good idea given all the external news. (But I’m not going to get into politics here.)

This list is mostly fiction. I tend not to include much non-fiction reading because if I’m reading for research I don’t tend to read from cover to cover in a linear fashion. There are three exceptions.

Standout fiction includes (not counting the re-reads) several books by John Scalzi – in particular The Kaiju Preservation Society. I loved tMartha Wells’ Murderbot books (thanks for the recommendation, Tina Anghelatos). At long last, I managed to read Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, which was excellent. There were some new Jodi Taylors, A Catalogue of Catastrophe (St Mary’s), About Time, and Santa Grint (Time Police), which are always on my pre-order list I read the second Naomi Novik: Scholomance book (The Last Graduate) which was very enjoyable. I finished the last two Janitors of the Post Apocalypse by Jim C Hines. I’d like to include a special mention for Sebastien de Castell;s Tales of the Greatcoats – a collection of short stories about the Greatcoats, which is a sequence that I love. I must mention Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, a first contact story with a difference. oh, and I almost forgot Dennis E Taylor’s We are Legion (We are Bob), the first book in the Bobiverse.

Three writer friends had new books out this year. Liz Williams (Embertide), Juliet E. McKenna (Green Man’s Gift), and Karen Traviss (Mother Death.) Embertide and Green Man’s Gift are set in rural England, Mother Death in a post apocalyptic Earth, and colony world. All very different, all worth reading.

Marshall Ryan Maresca is last but not least. I’ve read a couple of his Maradaine books before, but The Holver Alley Crew is particularly engaging.

I’ve probably missed some that I should be giving special mentions to. Go and read my reviews if you want more. Here’s the full list;

1. Scalzi, John: Fuzzy Nation
2. Lois McMaster Bujold: Paladin of Souls – Five Gods #2
3. Simon Beaufort: Deadly Inheritance – Sir Geoffrey Mappestone #6
4. Genevieve Cogman The Untold Story – Invisible Library #8
5. Una McCormac: Star Trek Picard: The Last Best Hope
6. Terry Pratchett: Mort – Discworld #4
7. S J Bennett: The Windsor Knot
8. Terry Pratchett: Night Watch – Discworld #29
9. Terry Pratchett: Equal Rites – Discworld #3
10. Jacey Bedford: The Amber Crown
11. Adrian Tchaikovsky: Elder Race
12. Sebastien de Castell: Tales of the Greatcoats – Greatcoats #5
13. John Scalzi: The Dispatcher – The Dispatcher #1
14. John Scalzi: Murder by Other Means – The Dispatcher #2
15. Terry Pratchett: Wyrd Sisters – Discworld #6
16. Meagan Spooner: Sherwood
17. Peng Shepherd: The Cartographers
18. Sean Lusk: The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudsley
19. Anna Harrington: A Relentless Rake
20. John Scalzi: The Kaiju Preservation Society
21. Jodi Taylor: A Catalogue of Catastrophe – St Mary’s #13
22. Lianne Dillsworth: Theatre of Marvels
23. Elizabeth Vaughan: Warprize – Chronicles of the Warprize #1
24. Bernard Cornwell: The Winter King – Warlord Chronicles #1
25. Olivie Blake: The Atlas Six – Alexandrian Society #1
26. Davies, Russell T and Cook, Benjamin: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter
27. Martha Wells: Artificial Condition – Murderbot Diaries #2
28. Sophie Irwin: A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting
29. Guy Gavriel Kay: Tigana
30. Ed McDonald: Daughter of Redwinter – Redwinter Chronicles #1
31. Amy Rose Bennett: Up all Night with a Good Duke
32. T. Kingfisher: Nettle and Bone
33. Lavie Tidhar: The Escapement
34. Brandon Sanderson: Dawnshard – Stormlight Archive Novella
35. Sophia Holloway: Kingscastle
36. Diana Wynne Jones: Deep Secret – Magids #1
37. Diana Wynne Jones: The Merlin Conspiracy – Magids #2
38. Lois McMaster Bujold: Warrior’s Apprentice – Vorkosigan #3
39. Lois McMaster Bujold: Barrayar: Vorkosigan #2
40. Lois McMaster Bujold: The Vor game – Vorkosigan #5
41. Lois McMaster Bujold: Shards of Honour – Vorkosigan #1
42. Lois McMaster Bujold: Cetaganda – Vorkosigan
43. Lois McMaster Bujold: Komarr – Vorkosigan
44. Lois McMaster Bujold: Brothers in Arjms – Vorkosigan
45. Lois McMaster Bujold: Diplomatic Immunity – Vorkosigan
46. Lois McMaster Bujold: Borders of Infinity – Vorkosigan
47. Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary
48. Dennis E Taylor: We are Legion (We are Bob)
49. Lois McMaster Bujold: A Civil Campaign
50. Lois McMaster Bujold: Winterfair Gifts – Vorkosigan
51. Lois McMaster Bujold: Cryoburn – Vorkosigan
52. Ash Bishop: Intergalactic Exterminators Inc.
53. Jodi Ellen Malpas: One Night with the Duke – Belmore Square #1
54. Naomi Novik: The Last Graduate – Scholomance #2
55. Martha Wells: Rogue Protocol – Murderbot #3
56. Sebastien de Castell: The Fox and the Bowman
57. Liz Williams: Embertide – Fallow Sisters #3
58. Jess Kidd: The Night Ship
59. Terry Pratchett: Guards Guards – Discworld #8
60. Terry Pratchett: Small Gods – Discworld #11
61. Terry Pratchett: Soul Music – Discworld #16
62. Terry Pratchett: The Truth – Discworld #25
63. Karen Traviss: Mother Death – Nomad #2
64. Elizabeth Chadwick: The Conquest
65. Juliet E McKenna: The Green Man’s Gift – Green Man #5
66. Jim C Hines: Terminal Uprising – Janitors of the Post-Apocalypse #2
67. T. Kingfisher: Paladin’s Strength – Saint of Steel #2 Audiobook
68. C.S.Forester: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower– Hornblower #1 Audiobook
69. T. Kingfisher: Paladin’s Grace – Saint of Steel #1 Audiobook
70. Lindsey Davis: Falco, the Complete BBC Radio Collection Audiobook
71. Jim C Hines: Terminal Peace – Janitors of the Post Apocalypse #3
72. Jodi Taylor: About Time – Time Police #4
73. Jodi Taylor: A Catalogue of Catastrophe – St Mary’s #13
74. Jodi Taylor: The Toast of Time – St Mary’s 12.5 – Audiobook
75. Jodi Taylor: About Time – Time Police #4 – Audiobook
76. Lois McMaster Bujold: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen – Vorkosiverse #17
77. Kevin Hearne: Carniepunk: The Demon Barker of Wheat Street – Iron Druid #4.4 Audiobook
78. T. KingfisherL Clockwork Boys
79. T. Kingfisher: The Wonder Engine
80. Jennifer Paxton: The Story of Medieval England from King Arthur to the Tudor Congest – Great Courses Series
81. Tanya Huff: Into the Broken Lands
82. Sarah Page: Mrs Wickham
83. T. Kingfisher: Swordheart
84. Jason Fung: The Obesity Code
85. Paul Cornell: The Witches of Lychford
86. Gilly Cooper: Riders
87. Jodi Taylor: The Very First Damn Thing – St Mary’s
88. Jodi Taylor: Santa Grint – Time Police short
89. Marshall Ryan Maresca: The Holver Alley Crew – Streets of Maradaine
90. Meredith Bond: Princess on the Run.

And don’t forget that I had a new book out in 2022 – The Amber Crown, which is eligible for all kinds of 2022 nominations – not that I’m hinting or anything.

That’s it until next year. Happy New Year to all. May 2023 be better for the whole world in general and for Ukraine in particular.

LAST TRAIN – Wishing you well for Christmas with a creepy little ghost story.

It’s a freezing cold station on Christmas Eve. The platform is deserted, the ticket hall closed. My breath puffs clouds into the air in the flickering glare from the overhead light.

I glance at the clock. Ten-fifteen. The last train is due at any moment.

Tick. Ten sixteen.

I stamp my feet, but they’re numb. All of me is numb.

Tick. Ten seventeen.

I shove my hands into my pockets. All I want is to get home to you.

Pop. The farthest light dies at the north end of the platform.

Tick. Ten eighteen.

Can I smell cinnamon? My insides ache for a hot drink, but the Costa closed hours ago. Damn.

The cinnamon lingers. I imagine my fingers wrapped around a glass of mulled wine, spicy and warm. In my mind I see you sip yours and smile. Your hair is haloed briefly in candle light.

I miss you so much.

Tick. Ten nineteen.

Pop. Another overhead flickers and dies.

Pop. Another.

Cascade failure. The darkness creeps towards me light by light.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

The overheads on the opposite platform succumb. How long before they all go?

Tick. Ten twenty.

I wish I was home already, my arms round your waist, breathing in the scent of your hair.

Tick. Ten twenty-one.

A boot sole scuffs on concrete. I turn. A stooped figure shuffles on to the platform from the car park gate and stands, leaning on a cane, wheezing.

“Train’s late.” My attempt at conversation falls flat.

Pop. The overhead at the south end of the platform fails.

Pop. The next one.

Pop.

Now I’m standing in the last pool of light.

Tick. Ten twenty-two.

“Do you think we’ve missed it?” I ask.

The stranger laughs. It sounds like a death rattle.

Far along the track I see a pinpoint of light.

I grin, flushed with relief. I’ll be home soon.

Soon.

I can’t wait.

The light grows bigger.

And bigger.

In a billow of steam the train pulls into the station. It makes no sound. A single door in front of me opens and a sickly yellow light spills out. I step forward at the same time as the old man.

He turns. I see his face. His skin is parchment over bone, his eyes empty sockets. A single maggot wriggles from the cavity that was his nose.

I gulp and step back. “After you, sir.”

He hobbles aboard and beckons.

I don’t think so.

Another desiccated face stares out from the carriage window. It’s you. A tear rolls down your cheek.

A whistle blows. I hear a faint, “All aboard.”

Heart pounding, I hesitate for too long. The door slams in my face and the silent train pulls away. The overhead lights bloom again, yellow as chrysanthemums.

It’s a freezing cold station on Christmas Eve. The platform is deserted, the ticket hall closed. My breath puffs clouds into the air in the flicker from the overhead light.

Stations are all the same. I feel as though I’ve been here a thousand times before.

I glance at the clock. Ten-fifteen. The last train is due at any moment.

(c) Jacey Bedford

Science Fiction and fantasy: when Germany seems farther way than Alpha Centauri or Narnia – a guest blog by Ju Honisch

Thanking Jacey for her kind invitation to write a guest blog entry I would like to tell you a little about German (language) SFF literature. This does not claim to be in any way complete, of course.

We have quite a large number of German (Austrian, Swiss etc.) writers in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and assorted subgenres. Internationally, you will, however, never come across the large majority of books produced in German.

Whereas many English novels get translated and published in German, only very few German books find their way into the English book market, mostly those few which became huge bestsellers in German, like e.g. Frank Schätzing (The Swarm) or Michael Ende (The Neverending Story).

To be honest, we writers of German fiction sometimes find it just a tiny little bit aggravating to be crowded out by this vast English language book market. But then I, too, read more books in English than in German. So I suppose I am in no position to complain.

Since the situation is not likely to change, some of us have started to self-publish our books in English – German contracts permitting. Of course, we employ native speaker editors. We feel we should at least make an effort to give the international readership a chance to take a look at what we have to offer. Maybe it would make a nice change?

In the SF and alternate history sector it Dirk van den Boom comes to mind whose books (a Prussian steam warship of the 1900s gets lost in the Roman Empire) are available in English through his own and his small press publisher’s efforts.

The lucky pros who recently made it: Bernhard Hennen succeeded in getting some of his multi-volume “Elfen” saga published in English. Markus Heitz also got a small selection of his novels onto the English market. Wolfgang Hohlbein managed to find a school book publisher who published some of his books in easy English for those school kids who would rather read about dragons than about the “Catcher in the Rye”. Cornelia Funke evaded the problem by being a US resident and thus perceived as a native speaker.

I wrote my early novels in English first and then – when I had finally grasped the fact that I would not be able to sell them to the English market – translated them into German and got them published by German publishers. The English manuscripts have been sitting on my computer for years and only when Covid started sweeping across the world I was reminded of this “mortality thingy” and thought it would be a shame to have those novels rot in a file. Morbid, I know. But then I am German.

So my historical fantasy series “Steam Age Quest” is out in English – with the last novel still being edited. The novels are stand-alone adventures, so even if the last one is not out yet, the others can be read without coming up against a cliff-hanger.

The books are set in the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Austrian Empire from 1865 to 1867: This is the period in which King Ludwig II started building all those wonderful castles in Bavaria, while in Austria a rather unruly Empress Elisabeth struggled with Imperial etiquette and more often than not ignored it. In Germany and Austria these monarchs are as famous as maybe Queen Victoria in England: they set a framework of a romanticized historical era known (at least superficially) to pretty much everyone. They are, however, only the stage setting for my characters.

I grew up in Bavaria, know Austria quite well, and I also hold a university degree in history. Choosing this period and location therefore came natural.

Of course, I also just can’t resist intrepid heroes and heroines struggling against fate, monsters, misunderstandings, magic and sometimes temptation. The characters in my books may be evil or good, or at least trying to be the latter ‑ with varying degrees of success.

“The Fey” or “na Daoine Maithe” are the universal terms for every non-human monster or supernatural critter that haunts reality in the here and now or intrudes from different planes of existence. The educated class of the era believes neither in their existence nor in otherworldly locations. The preceding Age of Enlightenment has eliminated a lot of “superstition” and so magic is seen to be sordid or simply a fraud and best not mentioned in polite society. Much easier to close your eyes and think of… steam power.

Most steampunk or historical fantasy stories tend to take place in London. But as much as I love London it seemed already a little crowded with adventurers and spooks of the most diverse kinds to be in need of my menagerie of monsters, men and magic.

My novels in English:

1.             Obsidian Secrets (won the Deutscher Phantastik Preis – Award)

2.             Dreams of Salt, Vol. 1 + 2

3.             Beyond the Merry-Go-Round  (came third for the Deutscher Phantastik Preis – Award)

4.             Wings of Stone (currently being edited) (won the SERAPH Award)

My novels are looooong. At cons I hand out a “weapons licence for blunt instruments of 500+ pp” bookmark to book purchasers. If you like it shorter: I also published a compilation of short stories:

Call it a Knight

If you’d like to know more about the German (language) SFF scene you can look up PAN (Phantastik Autoren Netzwerk), the German association for fantasy, science fiction and horror writers.

There will also be an international SFF convention in Berlin next year: the first MetropolCon https://www.metropolcon.eu/en/ . A con in Berlin – how about a nice little holiday?

To learn more about my books, please visit my website https://www.juhonisch.de/?lang=en

I am counting on your curiosity! In Germany it does not kill cats.

Thank you, Jacey, for hosting this blog!

Movies Move Me

I love going to the cinema. My Best Beloved? Not so much. He’s set up a home cinema in the recording studio (his domain) and prefers cinema to come to him. So my cinebuddy, H, and I go to the cinema on Tuesdays, either morning or afternoon, to see every SF and fantasy movie we can find (though not horror). We go to the Showcase, Leeds, which to confuse matters is actually closer to Batley. It’s one of the posh cinemas with fully reclining chairs and plenty of room for people to walk past even when you are fully reclined. No more having to stand up, grab your coat and handbag, and scrunch back when Mum, Dad and five kids shove past you, scattering popcorn, and muttering excuse-me-sorry-thank-you to get to the other end of the row.

But the comfort of the cinema, nice though it is, can’t make up for lacklustre movies, and that seems to be all that’s been on offer for the last few months. Maybe it’s because we’re still in the shadow cast by Covid, but there have been very few recent movies we’ve emerged from with that wow feeling. Yes, OK, maybe the Bond movie, No Time to Die, was predictably high-stakes, and the new Top Gun: Maverick was excellent, of course. There was Thor Love and Thunder in August, which I liked, but H wasn’t so keen on. The Railway Children was quite sweet – it was a slow week and there were no SF/F movies to be consumed.

I was away and then H was away through most of September, but then we were looking forward to October because Black Adam looked as though it was going to be good. Sadly, it wasn’t, though I’ve seen reviews that say the opposite. There was a lot of action – so much that it became boring. I like Dwayne Johnson, he’s got great comic timing – what a pity he wasn’t allowed to use it. Then last week we made the mistake of going to see Ticket to Paradise with George Clooney and Julia Roberts. (Yes, another slow week for SF/F. It was all horror movies for Halloween.) If you’ve seen the trailer, don’t waste your money on tickets, you’ve already seen the best bits.

Yesterday we went to see Deus. A mysterious black sphere appears in orbit around Mars and an intrepid six-person crew of explorers are sent to investigate. I have mixed feelings. Set in space, the visuals were decent. It was lovely to see Claudia Black (Farscape, Stargate) in a major role. She aced it. Sadly the plot had enough holes to drive a bus through, but though the pace was measured (a euphemism for slow) I wasn’t bored. There was an exam at the end. I had to fill in H on the plot because she fell asleep. Luckily she didn’t snore. There were only four of us in the cinema. The other couple were on the same row with a four or five seat gap between us. The chap was snuffling, sniffing and blowing his nose. Hopefully a cold, not Covid, but since lockdown I’ve not only been Covid-free, I’ve been cold and flu-free, which is marvellous. If I catch a snotty cold, I’m blaming you, Mr Snuffly-Man.

Anyhow there’s a new Knives Out/Benoit Blanc mystery due on 23rd November. The first one was good, so I guess I can suffer Daniel Craig’s American drawl if the plot is tight. The trailers promised Avatar: The Way of Water soon. Fingers crossed that there are some WOW movies coming up between now and Christmas. I’m particularly looking forward to Wakanda Forever which should be on next week.

Apocalypse Winter

Have you got a BOB? What’s in your Black Out Box? Are you prepped? This winter is already looking like another Winter of Discontent

This was the first one. On February 15, 1972, the Central Electricity Generating Board announced that many homes and businesses would be without electricity for up to nine hours a day for the foreseeable future due to the miner’s strike.

I’m old enough to just about recall those power cuts when our local library brought in huge things that looked like canons which were some kind of paraffin heater crossed with an electric fan. They were hugely inefficient and, quite frankly, stank. I honestly can’t recall what we did at home during the power cuts. I suspect we toughed it out with extra layers of clothing and flasks full of hot water for tea.

I suspect that’s what we’ll be doing again.

Except this time, I’ll be making sure my laptop is fully charged and my main work drive instantly swappable from my desktop machine. (I’ve already got a UPS unit to make sure I can close my computer safely. My kindle will be close to fully charged and also my phone (which goes on charge every night) and which I use for downloaded audiobooks (amongst other things). That should keep me going for a while.

Keeping warm. I already have some fingerless gloves which I often wear while I’m typing. With the current and projected cost of gas and electricity we’ve already cut down on the time we have our central heating on. It does an hour in the morning, an hour at lunchtime and then comes on at teatime for a few hours. I have a snuggle blanket over my knees in the office and a thick jumper on top of a thin one. (Layers are the way to go.)

Jumpers? (Sweaters to my North American friends.) Yes, I knit. Quite a useful hobby as it turns out. I don’t do anything fancy, but I can churn out a warm sweater in a few weeks if I plod through it while I’m watching something like QI on TV in the evening. If it’s a simple enough pattern I don’t need to look at my fingers while I’m knitting.

We still have a coal fire in the living room and bags of smokeless fuel in the cellar. Usually, we only light it at Christmas or when we have winter-visitors, but it’s lovely in a power-cut. Our central heating is gas-powered, but of course, the boiler requires electricity to run the timer and the impeller, so it will be coal fire or nothing in the event of an electricity outage. My mum lives next door to us, separate but connected. She is 97 and feels the cold (even when it’s not cold). Her heating is always on at about 24 degrees, way too warm for us. We’ll have to bring her into our living room and give her a quilt and a hot water bottle in the event of the power being out.

Our cooker has an electric oven, but a gas hob, so we should be able to fill hot water bottles, make tea, and boil up a stew from tinned ingredients. Not haute cuisine, but warm and filling. We also have a spare gas bottle for the barbecue, and it’s under a shelter, so we can use it throughout the winter

As a writer and reader of science fiction, some of it post apocalyptic, you’d think I’d be up to speed on what to stock in for the apocalypse.

I have a tinned food stash, not our usual fare, but it’s quick and easy. What else do I need? Water should be fine as the cold water is gravity fed, though having a few bottles wouldn’t be a bad idea. Candles, of course, preferably in safety lanterns – check. Rechargeable torches with extra power packs – check. Cheap battery-run Christmas tree lights (white, not coloured) and a glass vase to put them in for ambient light – check. First aid kit – check. I have masses of first aid stuff from painkillers and burn salves to cough medicine and dressings of all sizes. I’ve also got an emergency box labelled ‘One big bloody accident,’ as my best beloved has, more than once, come in from a DIY misadventure dripping blood. Actually, he and I are almost equal in the number of times we’ve needed the big bloody accident box. Don’t ask me to show you the gory photos.

But having said all that, when the power goes out, being cut off from the demands of everyday life can be good. When our kids were young, we had an unexpected power cut one winter evening. We huddled around the open fire in the living room, toasting bread over the hot coals (yes, we have an extendable brass toasting fork, doesn’t everyone?) and telling stories. The kids were deeply disappointed when the power came on again, and asked if we could have another power cut – soon please.

I guess you simply have to decide how to tackle a power cut. My recommendation is to settle down and enjoy it.

Digging Deep into Characters and Viewpoint

I’m currently writing a YA adventure set partly in the real world, present time, and partly in the land of faerie (not a nice place to be unless you happen to rule it or be a favourite of the one who does). One of my main characters is a schoolgirl, coming up to her eighteenth birthday. She’s quite shy and slightly envious of her best friend who attracts boys, is outspoken, and takes risks. The other main character is a young man who has been held in thrall by the Queen of Faeries for (in our world) five hundred years, but his own timeline he’s been there for only five years.

My agent’s comment is that I need to dig deeper into my characters. Originally, I wrote the whole book from Jenny’s viewpoint, but now I’ve added scenes from Tom’s. Only true love can save Tom from a gruesome fate and though he’s not trying to trick Jenny, he knows she’s his only chance and so in a sense he’s manipulative, while at the same time treading a fine line between natural attraction and coercion. There are some juicy grey-areas in their interplay.

I always try to dig deep into characters. In my most recent book, The Amber Crown, I have three main characters, each one being the hero (or heroine) of their own story. Valdas failed as the King’s bodyguard, and spends the whole of the book trying to make up for his mistake as a usurper king takes over and the whole country is plunged into unrest. Mirza can speak with the dead in the spirit world, and Valdas’s assassinated king sets her the task of helping Valdas to nurture the seen that he, the king, has sown. Lind is the assassin who killed the king, but he’s having second thoughts now that it’s way too late. All three of them have backstories that make them what they are. Mirza’s fight for acceptance amongst her people; Lind’s abusive apprenticeship at the hands of a master swordsmith; and Valdas’s upward fight through the ranks to find a family of fellow soldiers, more welcoming than the bitter family he left behind him. We learn Mirza’s story early on, but Lind is much more reticent about sharing his secrets until, in a massive confrontation, Valdas draws it out of him. Lind’s is the longest and most painful journey through the book. Does each character get wat they want by the end of the book? Probably not, but they get what they need.

Digging deep into character was probably easier in my Rowankind trilogy, (Winterwood, Silverwolf, and Rowankind) because I wrote that in first person. Digging deeply into Rossalind (Ross) Tremayne’s character from her first-person viewpoint. In the first book, she’s a young widow, captaining her own privateer sailing ship accompanied by a bunch of barely reformed pirates and the jealous ghost of her dead husband.

When I started writing my Psi-Tech trilogy (Empire of Dust, Crossways, and Nimbus) I originally planned to write it in third person point of view from Cara Carlinni’s viewpoint, but I couldn’t do that without intercutting chapters from Ben Benjamin’s viewpoint, too. I even ended up with some of the bad guy’s viewpoint. It was, in the end, the only way I could dig deep.

Ah, here’s a shovel… I’d better get digging.

It Hasn’t Gone Away.

Dear Aunt Polly,
I hope you are well.

And so began the letters we were taught to write as a child. It was boilerplate stuff. We didn’t actually care about Aunt Polly’s state of health. As children we all believed that grown-ups were immortal. We barely knew about death, let alone understood it.

Now we are returning to the polite enquiries of our childhood, but the meaning has intensified. I hope you are well means something all too real now that we are two and a half years into a pandemic. Because, believe me, even if we don’t have daily broadcasts from Downing Street giving us the latest death toll, Covid is still with us.

Statistics are hard to come by. There are no longer testing centres. The lateral flow tests are not 100% reliable. My daughter and family are currently going through their fourth or fifth bout of Covid and until today her LF test was cheerfully saying negative when she quite clearly wasn’t. The statistics are, to a certain extent, the result of self-selection. How many people have had a relatively mild case and not reported it?

These statistics are what I’ve found on the government website today.

My best beloved and I have now had all available boosters, as has my ninety-seven-year-old mum who lives with us. She’s the main reason we’ve steered clear of anything that might be a super-spreader event, and still get our groceries delivered (thanks Tesco). My son-in-law’s grandmother died from Covid early in the pandemic when a staff-member brought it into her nursing home and infected eleven elderly residents. Mary had just had her first vaccination, but it hadn’t had time to kick in. So near, yet so far.

The ghods only know what Liz Truss’s government will do about it. They have too much on their plate wrecking the economy to bother with a little thing like a global pandemic. Honestly, I despair! Apparently, they are predicting that the coming flu season will be a bad one. So get your Covid jabs and your flu jabs and stay safe. I’m happy to have any vaccination that’s available. Pneumonia, Shingles. The lot!

Last Sunday we had our first face-to-face Northwrite meeting since January 2020 Only five writers came, in person, out of a membership of twelve, and one member chose to join us on Skype rather than travel to Yorkshire from the Isle of Arran. I connected my laptop to the TV and it almost felt like he was in the room with us. So, with a total of six we critiqued all six submitted pieces, had a leisurely lunch (cooked by me), and generally enjoyed chatting face to face again. And, so far, no one has reported coming down with anything nasty. That’s a win!

So, dear reader, I really do hope you are well, and that you stay that way.

Milford 2022

I’m in North Wales in the middle of another Milford Writers’ Conference, a workshopping week for 15 science fiction and fantasy writers from all over the world. This year people have travelled from Japan, California and Nigeria, as well as from the UK. We’re just reaching the end of the week’s critiquing workload. It’s always an exhausting week, but tomorrow we get a day off, and a bunch of us are going into Caernarfon for a wander around and a pub lunch.

My own piece was critted on Wednesday, and I got some very useful feedback which I’ll be incorporating into my revisions. Critiques are always done with the intention of making the pieces better, not tearing them down. It’s not as scary as it sounds. What did I submit? The first 12,000 words of a young adult fantasy novel called The Midnight Rose which I’m really excited about.

We’re having a great time. The group has bonded very quickly. Five of the fifteen of us are newcomers but you wouldn’t guess it from the conversation.

Last night in the library was hilarious. We always manage to get some interesting snippets of conversation taken entirely out of context…

‘I just googled patriotic corset to see what you get.’

I would buy a Milford corset.’

Who doesn’t love Space Jesus?’

I’m sorry, I’ve just had three glasses of wine, my filter didn’t kick in.’

‘My unexpected noise moment was a very different scenario.’

‘Don’t poke the mathematician.’

‘Talking about aliens in swimsuits.’

And that’s not the half of it… I love this week.

While I was here my friend Steve sent me this pic as he found my latest book in the bookstore in Owen Sound, Canada. I love shelfies.

Critiquing and Milford

Milford is coming up in September, a week-long workshopping and critiquing week for fifteen published writers of speculative fiction, which covers science fiction, fantasy and horror. Those of us who are going are already sending out our pieces for critique. We can submit one or two pieces aiming for a loose total of ten thousand words (with twelve thousand being the hard cut-off point).

Our venue is Trigonos in Nantlle, North Wales, a wonderful place with its own lake frontage, set on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park.

This is the Milford Method, used by critique groups worldwide, with a few modifications.

• Milford rules allow even the shyest member’s voice to be heard.
• Constructive rather than destructive criticism is strongly encouraged. It’s the work being critiqued, not the individual authors, so no ad hominem attacks.
• The group meets in a comfortable room with chairs drawn up in a circle.
• Each participant, in rotation, spends up to four minutes (timed) giving their critique of the work at hand.
• Everyone gets the opportunity to open the critting.
• No interruption, whether by the author or anyone else, is allowed during this stage of the proceedings.
• After everyone has spoken the author gets an uninterrupted right of reply.
• This is followed by a more general discussion.
• It’s customary for the critee to scribble copious notes, but the critter normally gives the crittee a written version of their crit, anyway, or emails it afterwards.

Milford has had a lot of writers pass through its portals since it came to the UK in 1972, brought across the pond by James and Judy Blish. Anne McCaffrey was the first Milford Hon. Sec.  and attendees included Brian Aldiss and Chris Priest. Milford in the USA dates back to 1956, when it was started by Damon Knight and Judith Merril in Milford Pennsylvania. We’ve come a long way since then with hundreds of writers passing through including Alastair Reynolds, George RR Martin, Bruce Sterling, Charles Stross, Liz Williams and Neil Gaiman.

That’s the background, but what’s it all about?

Evening in the Trigonos library. Back: Georgina Kamsika, Pauline Dungate. Front: Jacey Bedford, Dolly Garland and Pete Sutton.

For starters it’s a sociable week. Writing is often a solitary occupation, and so spending a week with a bunch of like-minded people all happy to geek out on SF, writing, publishing etc. is wonderful. Mornings are your own, in the afternoons we have our crit sessions following the Milford Method (above) and after dinner we socialise in the library.

It doesn’t sound like much when you say it quickly but the core of the week is critiquing and being critiqued. In the days before email, writers used to turn up with enough copies of their work for everyone. On the Saturday evening everyone grabbed a copy of every story and the hard work began. We had to read and crit each piece, often barely ahead of the critiquing timetable. The mornings were crammed with words and more words. Now we can distribute our pieces in advance which is much more relaxed. Milford starts in just less than two weeks and I’m already halfway through the critiques. It really does make sense to do as much as you can before the week starts.

Everyone has a different way of critiquing. One friend’s first question is ‘What does the protagonist want?’ Another writer critiques with an emphasis on grammar and writing style. Yet another is looking at the philosophy of a piece, and another is weighing up its commerciality. (Is that a word?)

Critique session

Personally, I like to give a ‘first read-through’ crit. If a reader isn’t hooked on reading the first few pages of a book or a story, they aren’t going to finish reading. If they are browsing in a bookshop or online, and the first page doesn’t grab them, then they aren’t going to buy it. So… I read through and jot notes in the margin each time I come across something that trips me up, whether that’s a grammatical glitch, or a line of dialogue that’s not attributed, or something that I don’t follow.

We can all make mistakes. No matter how many times we read our own words, we miss the fact that the character has just rubbed his nose four times on the same page of dialogue, or someone has walked through the same door twice in two paragraphs. It might go deeper than that. It could be that there’s a whole page of exposition that’s pure bullshit. I recall one Milford some years ago where a writer had his priest sacrifice a cow by simply plunging a knife into its ribs. We happened to have another writer in the group who was a farmer, and his crit consisted of how to kill a cow with a long blade – in great detail.

Once I’ve done my first read through crit, I go back over the piece to look at the thing as a whole to see how it succeeds (or doesn’t) in what the writer was trying to do. I’m mostly looking at plot, characterisation, and style.

When it comes to my own piece, I look forward to getting micro and macro crits. I want to have all my little mistakes caught as well as to be challenged on ‘what was she thinking?’ or ‘not enough worldbuilding’ or ‘too much worldbuilding in one infodump.’

The thing about Milford critiques is that you get a variety of comments. Not everyone likes everything, of course, but you can be sure that critiques are aimed at making your piece better, It’s the piece being critiqued, not you personally. And at the end of the day you can use the critiques you think are helpful and ignore the others.

Roll on Milford 2022.

Saying the Unsayable

This is a blog post full of questions. I don’t have any answers. If you do, then I’m sure you’ll be right. Everyone is right from their own point of view, just like everyone is the hero of their own story.

But also, everyone has a right to disagree. Isn’t that what free speech is all about? But when does free speech become hate speech? When is something not allowed in your country? In your religion? In your opinion?

No one should be above criticism and reasoned response, but say something (write something) that someone takes exception to, and social media quickly amplifies it into a virtual mob with pitchforks.

Does that mean that writers should tiptoe around controversy? Or should they go charging headlong into the middle of it?

If you disagree with something a writer has written, that’s fine, as long as you don’t back up your disagreement with death threats and actual violence. I am horrified by the Charlie Hebdo murders and the Salman Rushdie attack, but also deeply disturbed by reports of death threats to a certain writer recently outed as a TERF. Whatever you think of a person’s personal or political stance, violence and threats of violence are not the answer.

As a writer, I worry about diversity, inclusion, and cultural appropriation. I worry about wokeness and cancel culture. I want to get it right, but there is no single definition of ‘right’. There is no safe space for writers. If someone wants to have their toes trodden on, all they need to do is stick their foot out and some writer, somewhere, will trip over it.

I write genre fiction. I am an entertainer. I’m not here to blow the lid off the latest scandal, or highlight the horrors that are happening in the world today, though I might take a sideways pop at a regime which sends women to prison for thirty-four years for the crime of using Twitter. What’s the worst that can happen? Oh, right.

My characters might or might not hold opinions which are diametrically opposed to my own liberal, leftie leanings. They are entitled to do that, and I’m entitled to let them express their beliefs as the plot requires—preferably without a mob turning up at my door.

In these flammable times, please be kind to each other.

Best-of Lists

Over on Goodreads there’s a fantasy and sci-fi celebration, each genre list contains 72 books that have ‘ruled’ the field in the last three years. I’m always wary of best-of lists. What good do they do? Sure, they promote a few books, but the vast majority of published books never get a mention.

Anything that increases awareness of science fiction and/or fantasy has to be a Good Thing, but appearing on best-of lists is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Get on one, achieve visibility, and suddenly some books by some authors become flavour of the month and are on every list that’s going. Is it really because they are better than anything else out there? There are thousands of brilliant books that are never listed.

I’m not knocking best-of lists, but I see some books on there that I’ve read and consider decent but not brilliant, while some books I’ve read are brilliant and never make the lists at all. Of the ‘72 Most Popular Fantasy Novels of the Past Three Years’ I’ve read seven, and I would only put one of those into a best-of list. Of the 72 ‘best’ Science Fiction books listed on Goodreads, I’ve read precisely two.

So here’s my Best Of list, not in any particular order.

Anything by Lois McMaster Bujold.
She writes science fiction and fantasy. The Curse of Chalion is the book I would grab as I ran screaming from a burning building. If you haven’t read it yet I envy you because I has such pleasure in discovering it for the first time. It took me a while to get around to reading her Vorkosigan series, but I was wrong to wait. Start with Cordelia’s Honour (an omnibus of Shards of Honour and Barrayar detailing the love affair between Cordelia Naismith and enemy soldier Aral Vorkosigan. Another great starting point is Warrior’s Apprentice, featuring Miles, the son of the aforementioned Aral and Cordelia, who is born stunted and frail into a militaristic society, so he has to think his way out of situations. Admittedly they are usually (but not always) situations of his own making. I’m currently re-reading all these, or rather re-listening, via Audible, and loving them (again)..

Anything by Sebastien de Castell.
In particular his Greatcoats books which feature three travelling magistrates appointed by the late king, and still trying to carry out his wishes. Falcio, Kest and Brasti are fabulous characters These four books: Traitor’s Blade, Knight’s Shadow, Saint’s Blood, and Tyrant’s Throne can be read as one long story. There’s a new short story collection out now called Tales of the Greatcoats.

Anything by T. Kingfisher.
This is the adult pen name for the beloved children’s Author Ursula Vernon. Mostly she writes fantasy though a few of her stories are on the edge of horror. Definitely in the fantasy camp is Swordheart – my favourite by a short head, though I also adore her Saint of Steel books, Starting with Paladin’s Grace. You’ve got to love a sword-wielding hero who knits his own socks.

Anything by John Scalzi
I confess I haven’t read everything by John Scalzi, but based on the fifteen books I have read or listened to, all have been highly entertaining from the six books of the Old Man’s War series, or the three books of the Interdependency, to the standalone books Fuzzy Nation, and the Kaiju Preservation Society.

Anything by Jodi Taylor.
Ms Taylor’s Chronicles of St Mary’s are about a bunch of time travelling historians documenting historical events in contemporary time. Disaster magnets all, but a nice cup of tea will often sort things out. Maddie ‘Max’ Maxwell PhD is inaugurated into St Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. The institution is chaotic and dangerous. Eccentric hardly begins to cover it. Dark, exciting and hilarious in turn, this is a real page turner and yet delivers some real laugh-out-loud moments. The first book is Just One Damned Thing After Another. They are worth reading in order. If you are an Audible fan Zara Ramm is the reader and she captures the ‘voice’ beautifully. Ms Taylor has also written a spin-off Time Police series featuring Max’s son, Matthew, and a thriller series beginning with White Silence set in the same location but with a different set of characters. I’ve enjoyed all of them.

Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus series.
This is urban fantasy, set in London and featuring mage Alex Verus who always seems to be on the wrong side of the White Council, having once been apprenticed to a dark mage. Alex is an engaging protagonist, a genuine nice guy with decent values, but as the series progresses, he has to examine his affiliations and face up to his dark past if he’s going to have any future. Comparisons with Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels are inevitable, and also with Kevin Hearne’s Atticus O’Sullivan (Iron Druid) books, but it stands up well. The series begins with Fated, and is now completed by the twelfth book, Risen.

Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duo, and her Grisha books including King of Scars.
These are magical fantasies written for the YA market all set in the same world, centred upon Ravka. Of all of these, Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom are my favourites. They are set in the ‘anything goes’ town of Ketterdam, and feature Kaz Brekker and his gang of criminals undertaking a dangerous heist. Kaz has a brilliant criminal mind but a broken soul, which makes him a fascinating character.

Scott Lynch’s Locke Lamora books
The Lies of Locke Lamora is a brilliant book. Locke is a cocky child who grows up into a cocky adult, devising elaborate schemes for his gang, the Gentleman Bastards to part the rich from their money. It’s followed by Red Seas under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves. A fourth instalment was rumoured, but it’s been almost a decade and fans are still waiting. But don’t worry, you won’t be left with a cliffhanger after Republic of Thieves, so go for it. Highly recommended.

I could go on: George R.R. Martin, Karen Traviss, Terry Pratchett. Joe Abercrombie, Patricia Briggs, Liz Williams, Ann Aguirre, Paul Cornell, Nnedi Okorafor, Lisa Shearin, Andy Weir, Rod Duncan, Tanya Huff, Genevieve Cogman, Suyi Davis Okungbowa, C.E. Murphy, just to mention a few.

Happy reading

A book to beguile the tedious hours

If you follow my blog you might recall I extolled the virtues of Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) which has a glorious rundown of Georgian/Regency slang which is invaluable for those of us writing in that period. It’s also a bit of a laugh, trotting out phrases for concepts we did not realise we needed phrases for, such as: A flying pasty is a turd wrapped in newspaper and thrown over your neighbour’s wall.) Maybe that was a thing in 1811. You can download Captain Grose from Project Gutenberg for free or buy a print copy from Amazon.

Yes, project Gutenberg contains some gems.

And then there’s this, written in 1917:

Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases – A Practical Handbook Of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary, Commercial, Conversational, And Oratorical Terms, For The Embellishment Of Speech And Literature, And The Improvement Of The Vocabulary Of Those Persons Who Read, Write, And Speak English – by Grenville Kleiser (1868 – 1953)

Born in Toronto, Kleiser wrote a multitude of self-help books on writing and public speaking, but Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases is probably the pinnacle of his achievement I often come across inexperienced writers who seem to have swallowed a thesaurus and never use a simple word where a complicated word is available.

Grenville Kleiser

If you’re into purple prose then Kleiser is for you. If you want to remind yourself of what to avoid, I recommend taking a look at this. The introduction says: In the present volume Mr. Kleiser furnishes an additional and an exceptional aid for those who would have a mint of phrases at their command from which to draw when in need of the golden mean for expressing thought.

Useful Phrases / Significant Phrases / Felicitous Phrases / Inpressive Phrases / Prepositional Phrases / Business Phrases / Literary Expressions / Striling Similes / Conversational Phrases / Public Speaking Phrases / Miscellaneous Phrases

The title of this post is one of Kleiser’s useful phrases. Maybe some of them can be used with caution in the right place

It really comes into its own in Section 7 – Literary Expressions. Here are some gloriously effulgent examples. (See what I did there?)

• A broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his nose and lips
• A cold, hard, frosty penuriousness was his prevalent characteristic
• A cunning intellect patiently diverting every circumstance to its design
• He was quaking on the precipice of a bad bilious attack
• Her eyes were limpid and her beauty was softened by an air of indolence and languor
• Her haughty step waxed timorous and vigilant
• His gaze seemed full of unconquerable hopefulness
• How sweet and reasonable the pale shadows of those who smile from some dim corner of our memories
• In a tone of after-dinner perfunctoriness
• In requital for various acts of rudeness
• In the perpetual presence of everlasting verities
• Jealousies and animosities which pricked their sluggish blood to tingling
• Ludicrous attempts of clumsy playfulness and tawdry eloquence
• Morn, in yellow and white, came broadening out of the mountains
• Oppressed with a confused sense of cumbrous material
• She hugged the thought of her own unknown and unapplauded integrity
• Strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets
• The incoherent loquacity of a nervous patient
• The landscape ran, laughing, downhill to the sea
• The plenitude of her piquant ways
• They became increasingly turbid and phantasmagorical
• Uttering grandiose puerilities
• Softened by the solicitude of untiring and anxious love

If you go to Project Gutenberg you can download the whole of it here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18362/pg18362-images.html

Have fun.

What I did on my (not quite) holiday

In May I took a week off from real life and went to the Milford Writing Retreat in North Wales. It’s held at Trigonos, a centre for conferences, courses and retreats on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park. We hold our annual Milford SF Writers’ Conference there in September, and a retreat week in May. What’s the difference? The September conference is a critique week where 15 science fiction and fantasy writers get together to workshop works in progress. The retreat week is simply time to write, in pleasant surroundings, in the company of other writers at mealtimes and breaks. Everyone has an ensuite bedroom with a table and chair. There are also other quiet corners of the house, or in the grounds, where you can hunker down with a laptop.

Mike Lewis takes the biscuit.

This year there were ten writers, all with different work plans, some intensive, some allowing for ‘holiday’ trips out. We missed two retreats in 2020 and 2021 because of Covid, but in a previous retreat Catie Murphy set the word-count record by writing 33,000 words in a week. We decided, then, to make that a new unit of measurement – a murphy being 33,000 words. This year Mike Lewis did 57,000 words in the week, only 9,000 short of a double murphy.

My own ambitions were much more modest than Mike’s this year. I had a very productive talk with my agent on the Friday before the retreat and as a result I had a load of editing to do on my book ‘The Midnight Rose’ which is aimed at the YA/New Adult market. It’s a riff on the Tam Lin story as portrayed in the Child Ballads. It’s a story I’ve always loved, as both a story and a song. My two main characters are musicians and there’s music implicit in the story. Since I’ve lived in the music world as a professional singer with the trio, Artisan, I’ve tried to weave music thoughout the plot.

What I used to do for a living. Artisan at Winnipeg Folk Festival. L – R Hilary, Jacey and Brian.

I did one pass through the story to remove some of the domestic stuff which was not propelling the story forward, and started on adding in some extra scenes to heighten the tension. In total I only ended up with about 3,000 extra words to the total word-count, but by the time the week ended I felt as if I’d really got to grips with the story, and I’m ready to continue working on it.

The company was excellent. I knew all the writers there from various previous Milfords, and it was lovely to catch up with them at mealtimes, and after dinner in the library. Everything is very relaxed at Trigonos. We’re left on our own in the house.and 18 acres of grounds. We can stick in our rooms, inhabit the library, wander down to the lake, or go and sit in the (not so) secret graden. This was the view from my bedroom window. The taller of the two peaks in the far distance is Mount Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales.

There were distractions, of course. On Tuesday we all went out to lunch at Castell Deudraeth, in the grounds of Portmeiron (yes, that’s where The Prisoner was filmed many years ago). We met up with Jaine Fenn who has attended Milford many times, but coincidentally was staying in Portmeiron for the week. It was nice to have a good catch-up.

My other distraction was this little chap – a bushy-tailed tree rat intent on munching its way through all the seeds on the wych elm tree outside my window. Yes, I know squirrels are vermin to most people, but you’ve got to admit they’re cute. I’m not sure whether it was the same one who visited two days running. I’d like to think so.

Trigonos is the sort of place that allows you to feel as though you are outside the real world. It’s a three and a half hour drive for me, across the Pennines, past Chester and along the North Wales coast road with increasingly spectacular scenery. There’s a new Caernarfon bypass, which trims about ten minutes off the journey and avoids potential traffic jams through Caernarfon itself. As soon as you turn on to the narrow road that takes you through Penygroes towards Nantlle, you can feel the stresses of the journey start to lift.

Everyone got something out of the retreat week. Several people (including me) signed up immediately for the retreat in 2023, which means we can. go ahead and confirm the booking with Trigonos. The week is in my diary already: 14th – 21st May 2023.

The Lake at Trigonos.

Retreat writers 2022: Juliet E McKenna, Liz Williams, Mike Lewis, Kari Sperring (back), Jacey Bedford, Heather Lindsley (back) Tiffani Angus, Mark Bilsborough, David Allan, Russell Smith.

Behind the scenes – or – Why I did not write two new books during lockdown.

During lockdown I had the time/opportunity to write two novels. Did I do it? Of course not.

Why not?

I guess the reason is multi-layered and complex culminating in writerly inactivity. I didn’t exactly stop writing, but I ceased to progress. I edited instead of writing new words. The only new things I wrote were short stories for anthologies I’d been invited to write for.

Tanglefoot on stage

March 2020
In my other life I’m a music booking agent for folk, world music and Americana artists. As you can imagine, the music industry fell off a cliff when Covid hit. Performers, venues, sound and lighting techs, and agents, too, were all instantly out of work, except, of course, for those of us who were frantically trying to make the best out of the situation, by reorganising dates and work schedules. And that was twice the work for no money. (Agents don’t get paid until after the gig when the artist gets paid, so we do the work months, sometimes years, in advance of being paid for it.)

When Covid struck, I had a solo musician on tour in the UK from Canada. He’d just spent a couple of nights with us to sleep off jet-lag and collect his tour book (full details of all the gigs), then he’d headed out, by train all the way from Yorkshire to Devon, done the first two gigs on the six-week tour… and then BANG! Lockdown. The Canadian government advised citizens who needed to fly back to Canada to do so immediately or risk not being able to get in. He flew, at a vastly inflated price. (Thanks for nothing Air Canada.)

My immediate job was to try and rebook all his cancelled gigs for 2021 (because surely this pandemic would all be over by next year). Then I had to cancel and rebook tours from abroad that were supposed to be happening later in the year, and also move dates for UK artists. Of course, you’re all ahead of me. Rearranged dates from 2020 to 2021, all had to be re-rearranged into 2022, and in some cases 2023. In one specific case I rearranged tour dates three times and then the artist decided not to tour at all. Three times the work for none of the money. One agent I know was stacking shelves in a supermarket to keep the wolf from the door. Things were about as bad as they could get in the entertainment industry, and are still not back to normal (whatever Boris says) but we’re getting there. I just had a duo from Canada complete a successful tour, and my solo Canadian artist is back again and on tour as I write. Keep your fingers crossed that he remains Covid-free and has no cancellations.

So… against that backdrop… writing.

April 2020
Everyone in the publishers’ office went on to home working, so things began to slow down.

My husband and I stayed in – self isolating – because my mum, who has the granny-house-next-door was ninety-five, so we couldn’t risk her coming down with Covid. (This was before vaccinations, remember.) My daughter’s grandma-in-law caught it in her nursing home and died just as vaccines were becoming available. So we locked in, and tried to get supermarket delivery slots. I tried Sainsbury, Tesco, Asda, Ocado/Waitrose, all with limited success. Tesco was the first to get its act together. I discovered that if I sat online at midnight, in a queue of some sort, hovering over the book-a-slot icon, I could usually get a booking for four weeks hence as they released one more day. But I had to be quick, as all the slots had generally gone by twenty past midnight. On one occasion all the slots had been booked by twenty seconds past midnight. Booking the next grocery slot, and the next, and the next became a necessary obsession and took up way too much of my attention. Watching the nightly Covid statistics on the news also took up a lot of my mental energy. How many hundreds had died today; how badly affected was our own county, local authority, parish? It all took on nightmare proportions. I’m a science fiction writer. Was this the beginning of the end? Was this pandemic about to become one of apocalyptic proportions?

Did I write? Not much. I did a final edit on The Amber Crown, but didn’t write anything new.

June 2020
Things were moving forward with The Amber Crown. My agent had made some editorial suggestions, which I’d addressed. My agent and publisher were talking and I was delighted to hear that it would be coming out in either hardback or trade paperback with a mass-market paperback to follow sometime later.

October 2020
Despite not having received notes on the final edits from my editor, it was time to discuss the cover for The Amber Crown. I’m very lucky that DAW gives me some input into what kind of cover I would like, though I’m sure they’d not indulge me if I asked for something totally uncommercial. This time I asked for a graphic-type cover rather than an illustrative one, and sent an example of another book cover that I liked.  My editor agreed with my ideas – graphics covers seemed to be popular – and within weeks I had the final finished cover drop into my inbox. I LOVED it.

May 2021
With The Amber Crown written to the best of my ability, and delivered, I was hanging about waiting for editorial comments, anticipating having to make some alterations, subtractions and additions, so, somehow, I didn’t seem to be able to get my mind out of that book and into a new one.

October 2021
With publication slated for January 2022 I was still worrying about having time to address any editorial queries when I received an email to say there were no editorial issues with the book and that The Amber Crown was going through to the copy-editing stage immediately. Wow! No editorial queries! I was amazed, and possibly a little worried. I’ve always regarded the publisher’s editing phase as my safety net, and here I was on the high wire, without one. But, of course, my agent, who is vastly experienced, had already done an editorial pass, so I shouldn’t really be surprised.

November 2021
Copy-edit checks and the final proofread, came hot on the heels of each other. These are the last chance I have to make any alterations I feel necessary, though by the time the book has been designed and typeset, those changes had better be small. Done. Book out of my hands now… except, now begins the seemingly endless round of trying to get it noticed. Yes. my publisher has the use of PenguinRandomHouse publicists. I was assigned both a publicist and a marketing person, both of whom were happy to communicate. I began to write endless blog posts for a blog tour, and blog-swaps. Some were sourced by my publicist and some by me – mainly blog-swaps with authors I’ve ‘swapped’ with before. There were interviews (in writing and via Zoom).

December 2021
I asked my publicist about an online book launch. Yes, she said, they would do that for me… and then she proceeded to tell me how to do it myself. So… my book did get an online launch, thanks to fellow author, Tiffani Angus who was cajoled into ‘interviewing’ me online, straight to a Facebook video. I was very nervous of the tech stuff which was finally resolved by using a service outside of Facebook… and there I was… The Amber Crown was launched. (And, yes, I’d love you to buy it, and to write reviews, and tell your friends.)

And that, my friends, is why I didn’t write two new books during lockdown.

Happy Endings or Not?

Do stories really have happy endings?

They do if we choose to stop the tale at the point where the prince slips a golden ring on Cinderella’s finger, or where Beauty kisses the beast, or the princess kisses the frog and he is instantly transformed.

But what about the happy ever after?

I’m reminded of the closing lines of a song – The Ballad of Erica Levine by Frankie Armstrong:
And a happy ever after life is not the one they got
But they tended to be happy more often than not
You can hear the song here::https://youtu.be/oFGj_bXhZb8

Did Cinderella and Prince Charming really have a life without arguments, disagreements, silent tension with neither of them saying what they really wanted to say, in case the wrong word shatters their fragile relationship? What about illnesses or accidents? Might she have a dangerous pregnancy and deliver a stillborn child, or deliver a healthy child but suffer terribly from postpartum psychosis? Might he fall from his horse, hit his head and turn into a very different man from the one she married. (This is a theory about what happened to Henry VIII to change him from the dashing young king into the man who changed his wives more often than his socks.)

Even if the happy couple have a wonderful life together, in the end everybody dies. But that’s OK, we don’t need to put it in the story. It’s all a matter of perspective. Stop the clock on this story at the time of most hope for the future.

One of my favourite books is Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, in which Cazaril, a broken man at the beginning, rebuilds himself and in doing so rebuilds the lives of those around him. He breaks the curse, brings two nations together and (almost incidentally) gains the love of a good woman, and there the story ends. It’s a hugely satisfactory and well worth reading because though I’ve told you Cazaril succeeds, you’ll have to read the book to find out how and why. But that’s not quite the end of Cazaril because the next book set in the World of the Five Gods is Paladin of Souls which features Ista, a minor character in The Curse of Chalion, given free rein here to complete her own story. Cazaril does not appear in person, but several times Ista mentions him as being the Chancellor, successful and highly regarded. Though I’d love to read more about Cazaril, I’ll take what I can get. He lives on in my head, well and happy, doing the job he was meant to do.

Because that’s what happens to happy-ever-after characters; they live on in the reader’s head. And they live on in the writer’s head, too. I don’t know what happens to Valdas, Mirza and Lind after the end of The Amber Crown, but I’ve set each of them on a new path, redemption delivered where it was due. It’s a standalone book, not part of a series, so the rest of the story is up to the reader.

When I wrote Winterwood, I wrote it as a standalone, but with an idea that if I managed to sell it to a publisher, I had a follow-up book in mind. Ross and Corwen could have ridden off into the sunset together at the end of Winterwood, but the story hadn’t finished with them. In Silverwolf there are unforeseen consequences from Ross’ actions in Winterwood, and she and Corwen have to deal with them, which leads into the third book, Rowankind. The story came to a solid end with Rowankind, but Ross and Corwen still have a lot of living to do. I imagine they are currently tearing their hair out with an unruly brood of infant shapechangers. Will I ever write that story? Probably not, though Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Corwen’s journals get a brief mention in a YA story that I’m working on, so we know he and Ross lived to a ripe old age and were the ancestors of at least one young witch.

At the end of the Psi-Tech trilogy (Empire of Dust, Crossways, and Nimbus) the universe, or rather humankind’s place in it, is very different from the position at the beginning. I can’t tell you exactly why without spoilering it. (Is spoilering even a word?) The reason for the change is threaded throughout the trilogy and takes centre stage in the third book. I leave Ben and Cara in a secure, but very different place from the one they once imagined they would end up. Will I write more? Possibly. Two secondary characters, Max and Gen (and their daughter) get their own short story – Plenty – in Brave New Worlds, the upcoming (2022) anthology from Zombies Need Brains Press. You can order it here: https://zombies-need-brains-llc.square.site/

I don’t mind a few loose threads, but just for the record, I’m not a lover of cliffhanger endings in series. Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden books (Ill Wind etc.) drove me nuts. Each book would almost resolve and then right at the end another problem would crop up. I was reading these in real time, so I’d have to wait for the next book to be published to find out what had happened, by which time I’d forgotten where the cliffhanger left me. Now that the whole series is available to binge-read, that might not be too much of a problem.

Do endings have to be happy to be satisfying?

I don’t think they do. Heroes can die, and as long as it’s in a good cause, or a death concludes a solid redemption arc, that works for me, though I confess I prefer a happy ending of some kind. I’m trying to think of books that everyone knows as examples, and apart from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, all I can think of are TV and movies. So what do you think about the ending of the most recent Bond movie, and the ending of Game of Thrones? Have your rant in the comments section.

What I’m reading (March 2022)

You absolutely can’t write science fiction and fantasy without knowing what’s being published. It’s always better not to reinvent the wheel unless you can make your wheel very different. Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education begins a new trilogy about the Scholomance – a school for magicians – but forget about Hogwarts, this school is deadly and only the best (or luckiest) survive the everyday perils. When graduation comes, they will all be chucked in a pit with a bunch of powerful mals, hungry for flesh and for magic. Those who get out alive are deemed to have graduated.

Like everyone, I have my list of favourites – buy-on-sight authors whose books I will drop everything else to devour. This list includes: Lois McMaster Bujold, Jodi Taylor, T Kingfisher, Leigh Bardugo, Patricia Briggs etc. I’m not going to name the whole list here, and besides it’s flexible.

Sometimes I’ll rush to buy everything in one specific series by a certain author, such as Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus books, but as that series comes to an end (which it has just done with Risen) I’ll wait to see what’s next from Mr. Jacka. He’s starting a new urban fantasy series according to his web page, so I’ll certainly give it a go.

I adore Sebastien de Castell’s Greatcoats books and have just found a collection of Greatcoats short stories: Tales of the Greatcoats #1. I galloped through it, delighted to revisit some of my favourite characters.

I need to catch up with Juliet E McKenna’s back catalogue, but I’m really enjoying her Green Man books – four so far, starting with The Green Man’s Heir.

I try to read not just my favourites, but also books that are slightly out of my comfort zone. Sometimes this leads me down interesting pathways. I recently read The Windsor Knot by S.J. Bennett, book #1 in a sequence called,  Her Majesty the Queen Investigates. This is certainly not the type of book I would normally read, but it caught my attention on an Audible two for one sale and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. It’s lightweight and cosy, a whodunit in which the investigator is Queen Elizabeth II at the age of eighty-nine, going on ninety. The reading, by Samantha Bond, is superb, she captures the voice of the Queen beautifully.

Last year I found books by K.J. Charles and I quickly read my way through her Will Darling books, starting with Slippery Creatures, set in post World War I Britain. I read this because of a good review on Goodreads from someone whose opinion I trust, and I’m glad I did. It’s not my usual reading fodder, but I really enjoyed it. It’s well-paced, and the characters are complex and multi-layered. On top of the adventure and the violence there’s an emerging m/m romance (with explicit sex) that plays out alongside the adventure.

Because I blog everything I read – here on Dreamwidth [https://jacey.dreamwidth.org/] I’m registered with Netgalley [https://www.netgalley.com/] which means I can get advance reading copies of upcoming books. I usually stick to science fiction and fantasy and occasionally some Regency romance (my guilty pleasure).

I’m delighted to say that I just got an advance reading copy (ARC) of Jodi Taylor’s upcoming St Mary’s novel, A Catalogue of Catastrophe. I have this on advance order from Amazon, anyway. It’s publication date is 28^th April 2022, so I’ve got it a few weeks in advance of its release day, and I’m more than happy to review it. I’ve dropped everything else to read it, and I’m loving it so far.

I review everything I read on my own blog, on Goodreads, and usually on Amazon as well. It’s important to review and spread the word about books. I ask people to put reviews of my books on Amazon because fifty reviews (no matter how short) or more gets my book shown to more potential readers. So I do the same for others. What goes around, comes around.

So what else have I read recently? Checking back over my list of books read in 2021, I realise that I’ve read a lot of John Scalzi’s books – his Old Man’s War sequence and his Interdependency trilogy, plus standalones such as his Fuzzy Nation (a riff on H Beam Piper’s Fuzzy) and (most recently) The Kaiju Preservation Society. Plus a couple of shorter works which I think are exclusively on Audible – The Dispatcher and Murder by Other Means. I haven’t yet caught up with all Scalzi’s back catalogue, but he’s rapidly approaching my buy-on-sight list.

Of course I don’t love everything I read, and I confess that these days I’m less inclined to soldier on through something I’m not enjoying. I have a book-meets-wall file, but the least said about the books in it, the better. Sometimes it’s not about the book, it’s that it doesn’t suit my mood at the time.

When I’ve finished A Catalogue of Catastrophe, I have Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher lined up, and then perhaps David Tallerman’s The Outfit: The Absolutely True Story Of The Time Joseph Stalin Robbed a Bank for Lenin’s Revolution. As always there are too many books and too little time.

What are you reading?

Viewpoint

I’m in a Facebook writers’ group for writers of all levels. Someone asked what the POV (point of view) limit was on a traditionally published debut novel.

The answer, of course is: there isn’t one. Sometimes you find prescriptive pieces on writing offering advice to new writers, but treat them as guidelines, not commandments. Sure, you don’t want hundreds of viewpoint characters, but you need the right number to tell the story you want to tell.

First Person
I wrote the Rowankind Trilogy (Winterwood, Silverwolf, and Rowankind) in first person all the way through. Ross Tremayne, my cross-dressing female privateer captain, is my only viewpoint character. In a way it’s limiting because I couldn’t write anything that my viewpoint character didn’t know, or experience personally, but it did mean that I could really get under her skin. The second book, Silverwolf, really belongs to my other main character, Corwen, but I still tell it all from Ross’ point of view.

There isn’t necessarily a limit to first person viewpoints in a book. There could be alternating chapters from two (or more) different first person viewpoints. If I recall correctly Andre Norton did this very successfully in The Crystal Gryphon.

Second Person
Mostly you wouldn’t write a full length novel in second person, though you might get away with it in a short story. (See what I did there?)

Third Person
These days it’s more fashionable to have one or multiple tight third person viewpoints: s/he did this; s/he did that etc.Avoid changing viewpoints in the middle of a paragraph. I change my viewpoints at a scene ending, or even a chapter ending.

I would recommend avoiding scene-stealing secondary characters suddenly popping up once or twice as a viewpoint character and then never again. The main viewpoint characters should tell the story. There is no limit, but I suggest only introducing a new viewpoint character if they have a necessary perspective on the story that no one else can tell.

My first trilogy, the Psi-Tech trilogy (Empire of Dust, Crossways, and Nimbus) is in tight third with multiple viewpoints. When I was writing it I started out with one VP character, Cara, but to a certain extent she was an unreliable narrator as things had happened to affect her that she didn’t know about. I had to add in another main viewpoint character, Ben. So Cara and Ben do the heavy lifting throughout the trilogy, but I had to let the antagonist have a few viewpoint scenes throughout the whole trilogy in order to build tension.

My latest book, The Amber Crown, started out with four viewpoint characters, but it was obvious after the first few early chapters that the fourth (though I liked her) was bloating the story. So now it has three viewpoint characters in tight third. They take alternating chapters with the headings, Valdas, Mirza, and Lind, instantly telling whose viewpoint we’re in. It does mean that I’m able to tell the story from different angles. Some of the characters know things that the others don’t find out until they need to know for the sake of the story.

I didn’t set out to have three writing projects utilising different viewpoints, it just worked out that the stories wanted to tell themselves in those ways

Omniscient
Writing in omniscient viewpoint used to be very popular. These days it tends to be known as head-hopping. Every character, main or peripheral, has thoughts that hit the page.

This is a quick example:

Fred thought Lola was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He wanted to sweep her off her feet and take her home immediately. Lola thought Fred was the creepiest psycho she’d ever met. If he came any closer she’d have to pepper-spray him. PC Plod thought Lola was overreacting. Fred seemed harmless enough.

If you want to read a little more on viewpoint, Juliet McKenna’s blog piece of First Person Narrative is here on the Milford blog.

Do You Need an Editor?

Yes, you absolutely do need an editor, but when?

There’s a thread on one of the writers’ groups on Facebook as to whether you need to pay for a professional editor before you start punting your book to agents and traditional publishers. Some people are adamant that you do, but I disagree.

This is not denigrating the excellent job that a professional freelance editor can do. I can fully see the point of hiring an editor if you are self-publishing – in fact I would thoroughly recommend it – but if a traditional publisher sees promise in your book, they will buy it and then edit it. The editing process might be one pass or several. Also, if a good hands-on agent sees promise in your work they will sign you up to their agency and offer suggestions for revision before they submit it.

If you hire an editor before submitting your book to a traditional publisher, the publisher’s editor might have a very different idea of how your book should be and you could easily have to edit it again. For example: My agent (not my current one) thought my first book, Empire of Dust, was too long for a first novel at 190,000 words. She asked me to cut it down to less than 120,000. I gulped, saved the long version, and got it down to 123,000. Then I parted company with that agent and (some years later) sold the book to DAW. My editor’s suggestions ended up with me putting back in most of what my agent had asked me to take out. The finished book was 173,000 words after edits and suggestions. (DAW likes long books.)

I think it’s important here to note the difference between a developmental editor and a copy editor. Most people think an editor checks that commas are in the right place, but that’s the job of a copy-editor, and copy editing usually happens after the developmental edits. A developmental editor will tell you where your characterisation is weak, or note that you’ve thoroughly sidelined an important character for a quarter of your book, or that the ending really doesn’t work, or THAT scene needs to be beefed up, or watered down. They tend not to be prescriptive, but they ask a lot of questions and if you answer them in your text, your book is immeasurably better. My editor won a Hugo. She knows the business inside and out. She doesn’t make me change things, she makes me want to change things.

Writing can be a lonely occupation, so I can absolutely see that a first time writer wants feedback. Heck, I’ve had seven novels published and I still like feedback. While I’m in the process of writing, I get it from my writers’ groups and from a few trusted beta readers who are writers themselves.

You can go online and find groups such as Critters – http://www.critters.org/ – which is a site that has now been running for 25 years. Writers get together to review and critique each others’ work.

While I was in the process of stumbling through writing my first book, I was in a small group who passed pieces for critique around by email. There were eight of us, based around the world, Scandinavia, New Zealand, the UK and North America. We stuck together for eight years. I’m still in contact with some of them. I’d particularly like to give a shout out to James Hetley who also writes as James A Burton. He was the first of us to get a publishing deal.

I’m the secretary of Milford Writers, an annual face-to-face workshopping week for 15 published SF writers. (To qualify you need to have sold at least one short story.) The intelligent and constructive critique offered by fellow writers is invaluable, but also having to critique their pieces as well makes you a better writer because you can then apply what you’ve learned to your own writing.

I’m also part of a quarterly critique group (Northwrite) which works at the same high level. We’ve been meeting online during the pandemic, but hope to see each other in person soon. Building a core of critiquing first readers can also help, but make sure they are experienced readers if not writers. You’re not looking for pats on the back. So don’t have your Aunty Ada critique your book unless she also reviews for The Times.

And always remember that free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it. If someone says one thing, and another person says completely the opposite, you are still the author and it’s up to you to decide whether or not to make alterations.

Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Stories

My favourite short SF story ever is ‘They’re Made out of Meat’ by Terry Bisson. It was published way back in 1991, but it hasn’t aged. It’s short, less than 800 words, but it perfectly encapsulates what a short story should be. It’s a single idea, delivered succinctly and it has an original premise. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait.

I’m not a great short story writer, though I’ve had over forty published on both sides of the Atlantic. I don’t mean I write bad short stories (well, there are the ones I couldn’t sell, but I digress) I mean that my main writing thrust is novel length – and long novel length at that. I’ve often tried to pack too much into a short story, and that doesn’t work. They are not slimmed down novels, but an art form in their own right.

Sometimes you see writing advice which recommends baby writers start with short stories and then progress to novels, but I’d disagree with that because short story writing and novel writing demand different techniques. My first writing attempt, age fifteen, was a novel. It was actually a terrible post-apocalyptic novel peopled by my favourite pop stars, thinly disguised. You can be relieved that I never got beyond chapter six, and even more relieved that all trace of it is long gone. I only tell you this because even at the age of fifteen, I never considered writing short stories first, and still don’t think it’s good advice to start there. Yes, oaky, my first publication was a short story and the novel publications came much later, but I’d written three novels before I wrote my first short story.

My advice is to write what you want to write when you want to write it. If you don’t feel as though you can tackle a novel, but have story ideas that are simple enough to explore in a piece that’s 500 – 7500 words, then you might be a natural short story writer. If you have a head full of twisty plots and sub-plots, simply get stuck in to that novel.

The first short stories I wrote were very much on the 7,500 word end of that scale. I couldn’t seem to condense what I wanted to write. It’s taken me the best part of twenty years to be able to write a 500 word short-short or a 950 word story short enough to be accepted for publication in Nature Magazine.

My first short story publication came via my music connections. I used to be (and still sometimes am) one third of vocal harmony trio, Artisan. My friend Felicia Dale (of the folk/sea-shanty duo William Pint and Felicia Dale) was over from America on tour in the UK. I’d arranged their tour and they were staying with us. Felicia had been offered the opportunity to contribute a story to an anthology called Warrior Princesses, being edited for DAW by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. I didn’t think I could write a warrior princesses story until Felicia said to just treat it as a writing exercise. I emailed Annie and asked if I could submit a story for the antho, and it turned out she was an Artisan fan, so she said yes. She figured if I could entertain an audience on stage, I could probably entertain one with my writing. I actually wrote two stories and gave her a choice. One was a jokey story about a bunch of warrior princesses on a day trip to Blackpool in the 1950s, and the other was a twins-separated-at-birth story, called The Jewel of Locaria, and that was the one Annie chose. I didn’t know enough about writing to know that you can’t sell twins-separated-at-birth stories because they’ve been done to death, so hopefully I put a different slant on it, different enough for Annie to accept it. I got paid well for it, too, which is not always the case with short stories. (The other story, called Aunt Agatha’s Agency, was later bought by Liz Counihan for Scheherezade magazine in the UK.)

I’ve always done better selling short stories to anthologies rather than magazines. Out of my first six short story publications, five of them were to anthologies. Of course, if you’re going to sell short stories to magazines you’ve actually got to write them and send them out and I’m very bad at submitting shorts for publication… except…

I was at Milford Writers’ Conference in 2014 and one of the other attendees, Debs, wrote and sold masses of short stories. Her output shamed us all. At any one time she had fifty stories out on submission and her success rate was phenomenal. Her motto was ‘submit until your fingers bleed.’ So I took this to heart. My first book came out in late 2014 and I’d written the second and was waiting for editorial coimments, so I decided to take some time and send off some of the short stories I’d written but not found homes for. I determined that if they came whooshing back with a rejection, I would send them out again immediately. I had about thirty short stories and within a couple of months I’d sold fifteen of them, doubling my short story count. Debs also alerted me to the joys of being published in translation, and some of my reprints have been translated into Estonian, Catelan, Polish, Italian, and Galician. How cool is that?

Isn’t it funny that the harder you work, the luckier (and more successful) you become.

Of course, I got busy with the novels (my seventh, The Amber Crown, has just come out) and my enthusiasm for writing and sending out short stories waned along with my available time. Surprise, surprise, I sold fewer and fewer stories. In the last few years I’ve only written short stories to order, many of them for anthologies such as those published by Joshua Palmatier’s Zombies Need Brains press. In fact I’ve just finished writing my sixth one for Joshua which will come out in the summer in the Brave New Worlds anthology.

You can catch up with my short stories here.http://www.jaceybedford.co.uk/shorts.htm

So my advice to novice writers is to only write short stories if you want to. Write them as well as you can. Polish them and send them out. It will help if you read short stories so you know what’s out there already and what type of short stories are being published in specific magazines or online markets. If you read some of the magazines of e-zines that you are submitting to it helps you to assess suitability.The site for serious short story writers is Duotrope, which is a fee-paying, internet listing of over 2000 markets for fiction and poetry. Market entries are searchable by genre, pay rate and manuscript length. The other good one is Ralan which is comprehensive, but not searchable. But the one I use is the Grinder at Diabolical Plots.com The Grinder is searchable and it also logs response times, so it makes sense to send your stories to not only the highest paying markets, but also the ones that reply quickly.

You’ll also find short story markets on the web. Google and see what you come up with. Here are a couple I found.
https://publishedtodeath.blogspot.com/2021/05/list-of-science-fiction-and-fantasy.html
https://www.neonbooks.org.uk/the-big-list-of-paying-sci-fi-markets/

The best magazines pay pro-rate which at the time of writing is considered to be 5 cents a word or higher. Lower than 5c a word is semi-pro rates, and then there are magazines and websites that pay a token amount or nothing at all. If it’s a physical magazine they might pay in contributors’ copies. It’s a good idea to send your precious story to the highest paying markets first. and then work your way down the list. Some have a fast turnaround, others might take months to get back to you.

Just because you get a few rejections, don’t get disheartened. Send yiur story out again. Selling a story is often down to the luck of landing the right story on the right desk at the right time. Yours can be the best fae-in-a-spaceship story ever, but if the editor has just bought one of those, she’s not going to buy yours. Always remember the ‘money flows to the writer’ Never be tempted to pay for publication or for someone to fix your writing (unless you’re paying a professional editor to edit a book you plan to self-publish, but that’s a whole other blog post).

If you’re going to take writing seriously you might want to take a look at Heinlein’s Rules.

Good luck.

Giving it a Shove.

Word of mouth and the need for reviews.

I was commiserating with an author published by a small press who said, “Small press books without a lot of push behind them don’t get noticed.” I replied: “If it’s any consolation, traditionally published books don’t always get a lot of push either, hence all my efforts with The Amber Crown.”

And it’s true. When my first book, Empire of Dust, came out I didn’t realise how much work I needed to do. I naively thought that getting a book published was my ultimate goal, but that’s where it starts, not where it stops. I was so green I didn’t even realise that I had a publicist. She got me a decent review in Publisher’s Weekly, which was nice and it very briefly appeared at number 3 in the Locus best seller lists (paperbacks) the week it came out. Okay, it sank without trace the month after, but still it was good to see it up there.

When my second book, Crossways, came out, my publisher put me in touch with my allocated publicist at PenguinRandomHouse, Nita Basu, who was lovely, but then she moved on and the last few books have had a different publicist every time, some seemingly more effective than others. I’ve come to realise just how important social media and word of mouth is to the success of any book. I started to wake up to the idea of blog tours and interviews, and I continued through the publication of four more books, to do my best to publicise them without resorting to annoying buy-my-book posts. Though every blog/interview/tweet is, in fact a buy-my-book post, but hopefully more interesting than a mere advert. For The Amber Crown I’ve done blog posts on the historical elements, on sex, on characters, on costume, on worldbuilding, on the origins of the story…

The Amber Crown, came out on 11^th January 2022, so I started my campaign in December and am continuing it through January and February. I’ve been very grateful to my new publicist at DAW / PenguinRandomHouse, Stephanie Felty, for all her hard work. It’s the first time I’ve worked with Stephanie, but I hope it isn’t the last. She got me a spot on John Scalzi’s Big Idea blog, and I arranged to do a post for Chuck Wendig, and for others including Juliet McKenna. I’ve also done interviews (which I really like doing) and a video virtual book launch and a video interview with Joshua Palmatier of Zombies Need Brains Press. Next up I’m going to do a video reading on Facebook.

This, dear reader, is where you come in. In order to get bumped up by Amazon’s algorithms it seems that books need a minimum of fifty reviews. Once they get to that stage Amazon starts to show the book to potential readers. At the moment there are ten reviews on Amazon.co.uk and seven on Amazon.com. Reviews need only be a sentence or two – or even a word or two – it’s the number of reviews that count for the algorithms. (Though obviously you should do an honest review.) So please put something on there. This is not just for me. Review all your favourite authors in the knowledge that helping to spread the word is great for us all. I do the same for my favourite authors, too.

Talk about your favourite books. Word of mouth is wonderful. Spread the love. Thank you.

“Solid epic fantasy that understands the genre’s core appeal at the same time as offering fresh twists and perspectives. Assured and effective worldbuilding, believably complex characters.” – Juliet E McKenna

” I loved the complexity of the story and the characters, the way everything unfolded little by little and the way it was all tied together and came to a full circle.” – Pure Magic

“An elegantly told story of intrigue, steeped in detail and rich character.” – Adrian Tchaikovsky

“…a rich tale of magic, loyalty, and adventure. From the point of view of three very different characters, this novel swept me away on their separate, yet entangled, journey in the wake of the death of the King of Zavonia.” Utopia State of Mind–Review

Ciel Pierlot Answers Six Questions

1. Tell us who you are in three sentences or fewer.

I’m a smol disaster bisexual who likes cats and doesn’t like sunlight. I’m writing pretty much constantly, in between being a university student, being an artist, and playing a truly excessive amount of video games.

2. How and when did you begin writing, and what was your first published piece?

I started writing back in middle school when I decided to write bad InuYasha fanfiction after having read a bunch of stuff on Quizilla (yeah, those were my origins, feel free to shudder with me). I stopped writing for awhile in high school and then started again my first year after graduating, this time with video game fanfiction. Eventually, I moved to original stuff, and Bluebird is my very first published piece of writing!

3. What’s so special about writing speculative fiction?

For me, there’s an element of freedom to it. While all good fiction (in my opinion) needs realistic and believable characters to ground it, in SFF you can then go on to do some absolutely wild stuff around those characters. Sure, we all know that in fantasy, magic can be used to handwave things, but it’s more than just that. If you’re writing about spaceships, there’s nothing requiring you to obey actual laws of astrophysics. Even in handwave-y fantasy magic, there’s no style or brand of magic you have to adhere to. You can start with whatever completely insane premise you want and there’s nothing stopping you.

4. What life skills and experiences, other than writing, do you bring to your work?

Ciel

I think being an artist for so long has brought that to my writing. When writing a lot of scenes, I have an strong image of what they look like in my head. Not just what the characters are physically doing, but other more cinematic things, such as: what sort of dramatic lighting effects would be added, what’s the camera angle here, is this in slow motion, ect. I like to think that adds a certain something, though I’m sure that’s up for debate.

5. Tell us about your most recent publication or current writing project.

My current writing project is pseudo-victorian gothic vampires, featuring polyamory, excessive swordfights, and a really big escape room. Who knows if it’ll ever make it out into the world proper, though.

6. What’s next?

Hopefully, many more books. Apart from that, life is a mystery and who’s to say what’ll happen next.

Does it Need a Map?

I should have asked this question earlier in the process of publishing, but I left it until the last minute. The answer from the office was, ‘No. If Sheila had thought it needed a map she would have said so.’ That’s okay, then.

But The Amber Crown is situated in an analogue of the Baltic States. My country of Zavonia, has unruly neighbours, and the new king is playing politics and risking a war on two fronts. So just for my own sanity, I do have a rough map on paper as well as in my head. It’s vaguely Baltic-shaped and I’ve either changed the name of each country or used an older name.

The Baltic itself has become the Narrow Sea – and yes, if you look at my map, the Narrow Sea is narrower than the actual Baltic. That’s deliberate, it’s not just that I’m a bad cartographer.

My invented kingdom of Zavonia roughly occupies the space where Latvia and Lithuania are today. Vironia is Estonia. Sverija is Sweden, Suomija is Finland. Posenja is Prussia, Kassubia is Poland. Zavonia’s powerful neighbour, Ruthenia (Russia) has recently annexed Bieloria (Belarus). I should be careful what I write because the news is currently full of Russian troops massing on the border of Ukraine. And like the rest of the world, I’m sitting here hoping that no one does anything silly. If Ukraine was on this map it would be just south east of Bieloria.

So when King Konstantyn is killed (that’s not a spoiler, it happens on the first page) the killer could be someone close to the seat of power in Biela Miasto, or from one of the neighbouring countries. All of them, with the possible exception of Sverija, would benefit in some way from destabilizing Zavonia. Why not Sverija? Sverija’s king has recently married off his sister to Konstantyn of Zavonia. Sverija, the biggest and hungriest power on the Narrow Sea, has already annexed Suomija and has designs on Vironia.

Ruthenia is held by the Tsar and currently Bieloria is held by the Tsarina as a vassal state of Ruthenia. The Tsarina happens to be Konstantyn’s sister, so it’s not likely that she would have had her brother assassinated, but she has sons who will one day inherit Ruthenia’s territories, and Ruthenia would like a port or ports on the Narrow Sea. It’s possible that Ruthenia will take advantage of Konstantyn’s death to push through from Bieloria into Posenja, taking a narrow strip on the Zavonian/Kassubian border as a gateway to the sea.

Kassubia has been itching to take back Zavonia since the split of the Zavonian-Kassubian Commonwealth, when an earlier Duke of Zavonia seceded from the Commonwealth and declared Zavonia a kingdom in its own right.

So the political situation is complicated. There isn’t a map in the book, so here is my working map for all map-nerds like me.

The Amber Crown is published today – 11th January 2022

After what seems like an age, the Amber Crown is out today. I’d already written a first draft before I sold my first book to DAW in 2013. That sale led to six books (two trilogies), so I didn’t have time to go back to The Amber Crown until I’d finished all the books that were under contract. Once I delivered Rowankind, I dug out The Amber Crown and started a major structural edit, swapping things around, writing in extra backstory, and completely rewriting the ending.

Why is it set in the Baltic?
A few years ago I was sitting at my desk, falling down a google-shaped rabbit hole, hopping from one random factoid to another when I came across an article on the Livonian Brothers, the Teutonic Knights, and the Northern Crusades. Like most people I always thought of the Crusades as being exclusively Jerusalem-focused and featuring Saladin and Richard the Lionheart in a hot, arid landscape. But the Northern Crusades were the Christian colonisation of the pagan Baltic peoples by Catholic Christian military orders. Separate crusades came in waves from the late 12^th century through to the 14th. Until then I’d assumed that Christianity had continued to spread northwards, much as it had spread through the British islands. How wrong I was. Although I considered it, I didn’t set my book in that exact period, but one thing that stuck with me was that the Baltic lands were Christianised late and that pagan beliefs (and magic) lasted longer there. That gave me an opening, so my book is set somewhere around the 16^th century in an imaginery country, Zavonia, that’s approximately where Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are today.

Research
I researched the architecture, the clothing, the food, and tried to capture a Baltic feel, though I changed the names of the countries. Of course I’m not writing history, but I wanted the flavour of history. Verisimilitude.

They say if you are going to steal, steal from the best. I stole the Polish Winged Hussars from history, and transplanted them to my Zavonia. If you want to be amazed, look them up. These guys rode into battle with enormous wings made of eagle feathers on an iron frame strapped to their backs; the shock troops of their day.

Characters and Conflict
A story is all about conflicted characters in difficult situations, and this one has plenty of character conflict, with three main protagonists, Valdas, Mirza, and Lind. They start out separate and come together as the book progresses.

Valdas was the first character who presented himself to me. As the story starts he’s captain of the High Guard, King Konstantyn’s bodyguard. He’s a good soldier, solid and responsible. He didn’t rise to his position by being ordinary. He’s a decorated hero of the battle of Tevshenna (complete with wings) but that doesn’t help him when the king is killed and he’s accused.

Lind, the clever assassin, dispassionate and cold blooded, presented himself to me next. His thoroughly professional exterior hides a mess of a man with more hangups than your average wardrobe. I really enjoyed writing Lind. He’s the character who goes through the biggest change, from a terrible childhood to… well I can’t tell you that, you’ll have to read The Amber Crown.

So where does the magic come in? Mirza is the witch-healer of a Landstrider band of travellers. She’s tasked by the ghost of the dead king, to travel with Valdas because he doesn’t believe in magic (which is unfortunate as it turns out). There’s a dark power rising in the capital city of Biela Miasto and Mirza is the only one who can stand against it – though she can’t do it alone.

Launch Event
If you read this in time and you fancy coming along to the virtual launch event on Facebook Live, it’s at 8.00 p.m. (UK time) – that’s 3.00 p.m. in New York – on Tuesday 11th January 2022. I’ll be in conversation with Tiffani Angus and there will be a Q&A session too. You’ll find it here: https://www.facebook.com/jacey.bedford.writer If you’ve missed the actual event by the time you read this, the video will be up on Facebook and Youtube afterwards.

Reviews
I hope you’ll buy the book and enjoy it, and if you do it would be a tremendous help to me if you can review it, shout about it, mention it anywhere, your own blog, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Amazon, Instagram, Bookstagram. Once a book gets more than 50 reviews on Amazon it’s bumped up in the algorithms and shown to a lot more people. Your review doesn’t have to be reams of purple prose, just a few words will be fine. It’s the number of reviews that count on Amazon, not the length. Though, of course, I’ll be doubly grateful for thoughtful words.

You can buy now in dead tree version or electronic.
PenguinRandomHouse
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble
Books A Million
Bookshop.Org
Hudson Booksellers
Indiebound
Powells
Ebooks also from: Google Play Store and Kobo

Countdown to The Amber Crown – One Week to Go

Only one week to go to publication of The Amber Crown, and there’s still so much to do. I’ve been writing blog posts for John Scalzi’s Big Idea, and Chuck Wendig’s blog, plus a piece for Jean Book Nerd, Paul Weimer’s Six Books blog, Sarah Ash’s blog, Cheryl Sonnier’s blog, Mark Bilsborough’s Wyldblood Magazine, and The Nerd Daily. I’ve had lots of lovely offers from other writers to host me on my blog tour to support the new book, so I’m looking forward to writing pieces for Juliet McKenna, Nancy Jane Moore, Gail Martin, Pete Sutton, Joshua Palmatier, Jim Anderson, Russell Smith, Gaie Sebold, and Ju Honisch in Germany.

Eight down, thirteen to go.

I’m trying to write something different for each blog post, or, at least, to cover the same things in a different way. It’s much easier for me if I get a list of interview questions. I probably end up writing more in terms of word-count than I would if I wrote a straightforward blog post, but intelligent questions can spark new trains of thought, and send me off in a different direction, or maybe make me consider something I hadn’t thought of before.

I’ve also had a couple of pre-publication reviews – good ones, I’m pleased to say. This is the Publisher’s Weekly review. Also here’s a very thoughtful review from Nimue Brown on her Druid Life blog:

And Paul Weimer sent me questions for his Six Books interview.

So right now I have my head down, writing furiously about different aspects of The Amber Crown, from character studies to fashion and worldbuilding.

My blog post next week will be on publication day. If you have any questions for next week’s blog you can put them in the comments below or email them to me at jacey@jaceybedford.co.uk and I’ll try to answer them.

Also on publication day Stephanie, my publicist at DAW, is arranging an online book launch via Facebook which is likely to take place at 8.00 p.m. UK time (GMT). That’s 3.00 p.m. New York time, so work out your own timezone from that. My author facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/jacey.bedford.writer

I’ll send more information via my mailing list before the launch, so either sign up to my facebook page or join my Mailchimp author mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/ds8f2P

Anyone who joins the mailing list before Sunday 9^th January will get an exclusive sneak preview of Chapter One of The Amber Crown as a thank you.

Books Read in 2021

With the year drawing to a close, here’s my list of books read in 2021. There are 73 in total, including re-reading a couple of my own. I’d like to give a quick shout-out to T Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon, particularly for the two Saint of Steel books I read this year; also to John Scalzi for his Old Man’s War series. Special mention to Benedict Jacka for wrapping up his twelve book Alex Verus series in fine style. New to me this year was K.J. Charles’s trio of excellent Will Darling adventures which I read one after the other. Julia Quinn, author of Bridgerton which hit TV screens this year, provided some lovely fluffy Regency romances – my guilty pleasure. There were single books from some of my favourite authors: Liz Williams, Juliet E. McKenna, N.M. Browne, Sebastien de Castell, Kari Sperring, and Lois McMaster Bujold. I had a great reading year, topped off by Leigh Bardugo’s Rule of Wolves which at the very end promised another Kaz Brekker book. He’s my favourite character from the Six of Crows Duology. Here’s my full list. You can get my thoughts on these by going to my reading blog at Dreamwidth, blog. HAPPY NEW YEAR and happy reading in 2022. (Don’t forget my seventh book, The Amber Crown, is out from DAW on 11th January.)

1)    Simon R Green: The Best Thing You Can Steal

2)    Liz Williams: Blackthorn Winter

3)    Georgette Heyer: Venetia

4)    Hannah Matthewson: Witherward – Witherward #1

5)    Julia Quinn: Mr Cavendish I Presume – Two Dukes of Wyndham #2

6)    Charlotte Anne: The Unworthy Duke

7)    T. Kingfisher: The Hollow Places

8)    Julia Quinn: Dancing at Midnight – Splendid #2

9)    Julia Quinn: Minx – Splendid #3

10) Patricia Briggs: Wild Sign – Alpha and Omega #6

11) T Kingfisher: Paladin’s Strength – Saint of Steel #2

12) Julia Quinn: Everything and the Moon – Lyndon Sisters #1

13) Julia Quinn: Brighter than the Sun – Lyndon Sisters #2

14) James S.A. Corey: Leviathan Wakes – The Expanse #1

15) Ben Aaronovitch: Takes from the Folly – Rivers of London

16) Elizabeth Chadwick: The Wild Hunt – Wild Hunt #1

17) Elizabeth Chadwick: The Leopard Unleashed – Wild Hunt #3

18) A.J. Lancaster: The Lord of Stariel – Stariel #1

19) N.M. Browne: Bad Water

20) Ian Mortimer: The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain

21) Jodi Taylor: Another Time, Another Place – Chronicles of St Mary’s #12

22) Julia Quinn, Eloisa James, Connie Brockway: The Lady Most Likely – Lady Most #1

23) M. Verant: Miss Bennet’s Dragon (Jane Austen Fantasy #1)

24) K.M.Peyton: The Right Hand Man

25) John Scalzi: The Ghost Brigades – Old Man’s War 2

26) John Scalzi: The End of All Things – Old Man’s War 6

27) John Scalzi: The Last Colony – Old Man’s War 3

28) John Scalzi: Zoe’s Tale – Old Man’s War 4

29) Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

30) Lois McMaster Bujold: The Assassins of Thasalon

31) John Scalzi: The Human Division – Old Man’s War 6

32) Michelle Magorian: Goodnight Mister Tom

33) Fran Bushe: My Broken Vagina: One Woman’s Quest to Fix Her Sex Life, and Yours

34) Darcy Burke: A Rogue to Ruin – The Pretenders #3

35) K.J. Charles: Slippery Creatures – Will Darling #1

36) K.J. Charles: The Sugared Game – Will Darling #2

37) K.J Charles: Subtle Blood – Will Darling #3

38) Jacey Bedford: Crossways – Psi-Tech #2

39) Jacey Bedford: Nimbus – Psi-Tech #3

40) Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – Wayfarers #1

41) T. Kingfisher: Nine Goblins

42) Stephen Aryan: The Coward.

43) Catherynne M Valente: The Past is Red

44) Ursula Vernon: Black Dogs Part One: The House of Diamond

45) Ursula Vernon: Black Dogs Part Two: The Mountain of Iron

46) Stephanie Garber: Once Upon a Broken Heart

47) Jodi Taylor: Long Shadows – Elizabeth Cage #3

48) Sebastien de Castell: Way of the Argosi – Spellslinger #0.5

49) Burgis, Stephanie: The Raven Heir – Raven Crown #1

50) R.W.W. Greene: Twenty Five to Life

51) Juliet E McKenna: The Green Man’s Challenge – Green Man #4

52) Sabaa Tahir: An Ember in the Ashes – An Ember in the Ashes #1

53) Katherine Buel: Heart of Snow

54) Genevieve Cogman: The Secret Chapter – The Invisible Library #6

55) Sherwood Smith: The Phoenix Feather – Fledglings #1

56) Kari Sperring: The Rose Knot

57) Andre Norton & Sherwood Smith: Derelict for Trade – Solar Queen #6

58) Stephanie Burgess: Scales and Sensibility – Regency Dragons #1

59) Martha Wells: All Systems Red – Murderbot Diaries #1

60) Jodi Taylor: Saving Time – The Time Police #3

61) T Kingfisher: Paladin’s Hope – Saint of Steel #3

62) Lois McMaster Bujold: Knot of Shadows – Penric and Desdemona #11

63) Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens

64) Gaie Sebold: Bad Gods – Babylon Steel #1

65) Mary Jo Putney: Once a Laird – Rogues Redeemed

66) R J Palacio: Pony

67) Benedict Jacka: Risen – Alex Verus #12

68) T. Kingfisher: The Raven and the Reindeer.

69) Georgette Heyer: Sylvester

70) Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education

71) Leigh Bardugo: Rule of Wolves – King of Scars #2

72) Benedict Jacka: Favours – Alex Verus novella

73) Jodi Taylor: The Toast of Time

Countdown to The Amber Crown – (less than) 2 Weeks to Go

Happy New Year to all.

This is my last post for 2021 and the penultimate post leading up to The Amber Crown. If you already have it on pre-order, thank you very much. If not, you can pre-order it now (see links below).

Because I have a different deal with DAW this time, The Amber Crown is available on Kindle in the UK (unlike my other books which were only available in hard copy as American imports).

So what has the past year been like? I finished writing the Amber Crown in May after doing some structural editing, adding a few scenes and changing the ending (a bit). Then I did the obvious read through (several times) to catch awkward sentences and spelling errors.

When do you count a book as finished? I’m not sure you ever do. There simply comes a time when you say, “It’s as good as I can make it,” and so you send it off, knowing your editor will catch things that you’ve missed. Once you’ve sent it off you have to avoid thinking up new plot twists if you can. The book stays in your head though, and sometimes it won’t leave you alone.

In the summer my editor asked me what kind of cover I would like. This is really mind-blowingly wonderful because many publishers don’t let you have a say in your own cover. I said I’d like a graphic rather than an illustrative cover, and she agreed with me that graphic covers were trending at the moment. This is what came back from Bose Collins. I was gobsmacked. It exceeded my expectations. I love it.

In the autumn I got the copy-edits to approve. Shoshana Seid-Green did a really sensitive copy edit, adding and correcting punctuation etc. but nothing too invasive. Americans use a lot more commas than Brits do, but I’m getting used to that. Then came my final proof-read, after which DAW did another one, just to make sure.

And then just a few days ago, right before Christmas, a box of author copies arrived.

Happy?

You betcha.

You can place an advance order now, and from 11th January 2022 onwards, you can get a copy here…

PenguinRandomHouse
Amazon.co.uk Book/Kindle
Amazon.com Book/Kindle
Barnes & Noble Book/Nook
Books A Million
Bookshop.Org
Hudson Booksellers
Indiebound
Powells
Target
Walmart
Ebooks also from: Google Play Store and Kobo

I will very happily send you a signed bookplate via email – personalised if requested. You can contact me via my website at http://www.jaceybedford.co.uk

Countdown to The Amber Crown – Three Weeks to Go!

The Amber Crown is out on 11^th January and TODAY my author copies arrived.

Whoo-hoo.

I have so many people to thank for this book. I only wrote it. Luckily I get the opportunity to name names in the book’s acknowledgements… as follows…

This book has been a long time in the making. Though an author’s name goes on the front cover, behind the scenes many people work to bring the book into the world. I owe a huge debt to my editor, Sheila Gilbert, managing editor Joshua Starr, and all at DAW, copy editor, Shoshana Seid-Green, proofreaders and publicists. They are simply the nicest people to work with.

Also thanks to Donald Maass, my agent, whose writing advice is always excellent, and always valued.

Thank you to my beta readers and people who have addressed specific research questions, including Carl Allery, Mihaela Marija Perkovic, Sue Thomason, Martha Hubbard, and Scarlett de Courcier. Some of those research questions ended up with me taking things out of the book rather than adding them in, but that’s okay. Also to my long-time friend and band-mate, Hilary Halpin, who takes it as a personal challenge to find as many typos in my manuscript as she possibly can!

(Band? What band? See www.artisan-harmony.com if you’re curious.)

Thank you to the members of Northwrite SF who suffered through many versions of this: Gus Smith, Terry Jackman, John Moran, David Lascelles, Tina Anghelatos, Shellie Horst, Liz Sourbutt, Sue Oke, Tony Ballantyne and Cheryl Sonnier. Special thanks to Kari Sperring for helping me to find the right title.

Also thanks to attendees of Milford SF Writers’ Conference (MilfordSF.co.uk) who critiqued chunks of this at different stages of its development, from the first twinkling of an idea in 2006 to the final revisions.

More than thanks are due to my family, who put up with a lot when I’m obsessively up to my ears in a manuscript. Love you.

A huge thank-you to you for reading. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read my other novels, the Psi-Tech trilogy, and the Rowankind trilogy. Details of my books and short stories are on my website www.jaceybedford.co.uk, where you’ll also find my contact details. I’m always happy to hear from readers, writers and reviewers. I do answer all emails personally, though not always immediately. You can also follow my writing blog at jaceybedford.wordpress.com/ (here) or my twitter feed at @jaceybedford, or my facebook page: www.facebook.com/jacey.bedford.writer.

But mainly… I would really love you to sign up to my mailing list. www.jaceybedford.co.uk/contact.htm. I promise I’ll not flood your inbox with emails, but I will send news of new short stories and books.

Countdown to The Amber Crown

It’s here is just four weeks! Published by DAW on 11th January 2022 my seventh book is already getting some good reviews/previews, and I’m revving up to do a blog tour. It’s available in Trade Paperback or e-edition, with the regular sized paperback following sometime later in 2022.

I’m delighted to say that I’m getting an online book launch on 11^th January. If you want notification and details, go here to sign up to my Mailchimp mailing list, or keep an eye on my website.

Publishers Weekly calls it a ‘spellbinding fantasy,’ and says, ‘Fantasy readers will find plenty to enjoy.’

Druid Life says, ‘I always enjoy stories that make me complicit with problematic characters, and Jacey does an excellent job of persuading us to like the assassin. All of the characters are engaging, well rounded and interesting people. All of them are messy and flawed in their own ways, and driven by their own issues and obsessions. The story is compelling and nicely paced.’

I can’t believe publication is coming up so soon. I seem to have been working on this book forever. I already had a first draft completed in July 2013 when DAW bought my novels Winterwood, Empire of Dust and the still-to-be-written Crossways. Another three books followed (Silverwolf, Nimbus and Rowankind) which pretty much accounted for all my writing time between 2013 and 2018. With Rowankind delivered to DAW, I was at liberty to take another look at the book which I called ‘The Baltic Novel’ for such a long time. Even after I finished redrafting it I still didn’t have a good title until I finally hit on The Amber Crown which fitted like a glove. I adore the cover DAW has given it.

Here’s the back cover copy.

The king is dead, his queen is missing. On the amber coast, the usurper king is driving Zavonia to the brink of war. A dangerous magical power is rising up in Biela Miasto, and the only people who can set things right are a failed bodyguard, a Landstrider witch, and the assassin who set off the whole sorry chain of events.

Valdas, Captain of the High Guard, has not only failed in his duty to protect the king, but he’s been accused of the murder, and he’s on the run. He’s sworn to seek justice, but his king sets him another task from beyond the grave. Valdas doesn’t believe in magic, which is unfortunate as it turns out.

Mirza is the healer-witch of a Landstrider band, valued and feared in equal measure for her witchmark, her scolding tongue, and her ability to walk the spirit world. When she’s given a task by Valdas’ dead king, she believes that the journey she must take is one she can never return from.

Lind is the clever assassin. Yes, someone paid him to kill the king, but who is to blame, the weapon or the power behind it? Lind must face his traumatic past if he’s to have a future.

Can these three discover the real villain, find the queen, and set the rightful king on the throne before the country is overcome?

If that tickles your fancy I would love you to pre-order now.
PenguinRandomHouse
Amazon.co.uk Book/Kindle
Amazon.com Book/Kindle
Barnes & Noble Book/Nook
Books A Million
Bookshop.Org
Hudson Booksellers
Indiebound
Powells
Target
Walmart
Ebooks also from: Google Play Store and Kobo

David Barnett: Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl – for your reading pleasure

Gideon Smith, son of a Whitby fisherman from Sandsend is an aficionado of the true adventures of Captain Lucian Trigger, Hero of the British Empire, so when his father’s fishing boat is found floating, abandoned, with all the crew lost, Gideon goes looking for answers. There’s a strange creature walking the night, one that’s scarily reminiscent of a mummy described in one of Trigger’s tales, and strange goings on at Lythe Bank. He meets writer Bram Stoker, himself investigating another unexplained abandoned ship and the strange tale of a fierce black dog that came ashore. Unconvinced that Stoker’s quest (with Countess Elizabeth Bathory, Dracula’s widow) is tied to his own Gideon heads for London to seek help from the redoubtable Captain, on the way rescuing Maria, an automaton powered by pistons, but with a human brain. Once in the capital, a city of stinks, mechanical marvels and plenty of reminders that the British Empire is enormous following the failure of the American War of Independence, he and Maria seek Trigger with the dubious help from a potty-mouthed Fleet Street journalist, Bent. They are bound for disappointment, but gradually a story unfolds that draws all the separate strands together. A super, steampunky romp with vampires, mummified beasties, airships and automata that starts in Whitby, moves to London, Egypt and back to London again. Well-paced this is only the start of Gideon’s adventures due to a large dangling thread at the end.

Seanan McGuire: Every Heart a Doorway – for your reading pleasure

Nancy is sent to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children because her parents can’t cope with her. They think she has a screw loose and don’t believe that she’s been through a portal into another world, a world of the dead which has left her both changed, and longing to go back.

Nancy discovers all the students there have their own story, their own world (each one very different from the others) and their own longings to return. Miss West is, herself, a returnee, so she understands and knows that for most of the children a return to their particular world is impossible, so she teaches them how to get on with life in the only world they have.

Nancy is barely unpacked when the first murder happens. The authorities generally turn a blind eye to happenings at the school, but they can’t totally ignore a murder, and they certainly wouldn’t ignore two… or three.

It’s up to Nancy and her fellow students to catch the killer. There’s a good cast of somewhat unusual characters who don’t fit in, not only because of their fairyland experiences, but there’s some gender fluidity – a trans teen, an asexual teen, etc. Even so it doesn’t feel as though Ms McGuire is simply ticking the diversity boxes, all the characters have a part to play. I’m not entirely sure if this is aimed at YA. It would certainly be suitable for older teens, but reads well for adults, too. This is a novella, but perfect at the length it is. Very enjoyable.

Paul Cornell: Five Lychford Novellas – for your reading pleasure

I read each of these novellas as they were published. Each one stands alone, but together the five novellas make a complete story cycle.

The Witches of Lychford A neat novella set in a sleepy Gloucestershire town threatened with the coming of a supermarket. Opinion is divided as to whether it’s a good idea or not, But Judith, the town’s resident witch knows that it will be a magical disaster of epic proportions. Building a new supermarket and altering the roads around the town centre will open ancient gateways and let in evil, potentially causing the apocalypse. At the heart of the supermarket proposal is a man–if man he is–who embodies the evil. All that stands against him is a seventy-something year old witch with no friends, the local magic shop proprietor with a reputation for mental health problems, and the town’s new (female) vicar with a tragedy in her past and a crisis of faith looming over her.

The Lost Child of Lychford. The three witches of Lychford are challenged once again when a ghost child finds its way into Lizzie’s church. What does it want? When Lizzie realises that it’s the ghost of a child still happily living in Lychford she enlists the help of her two witchy friends, Judith Mawson and Autumn, the local witchcraft shop owner, to track down the significance of the apparition. They’re on a deadline. Christmas is coming and unless they can do something about a magical incursion it may never arrive. Each one of them faces a personal challenge. This is the second of Paul Cornell’s Lychford novellas and the characters continue to develop. Lovely.

A Long Day in Lychford. Lizzy, Judith and Autumn are the three resident witches of Lychford, a sleepy Gloucestershire town. It’s up to them to solve disappearances, but in the wake of Brexit Autumn is questioning her place in Lychford because of her skin colour, and Judith is struggling to keep herself together and pass on her knowledge to Lizzy and Autumn before it’s too late. When people start to go missing, our trio discover that they are being pulled across boundaries. There’s political trouble at home and trouble in the world of faerie, too. Each woman is on her own to rescue a particular group of strayed humans. Cornell managed to bring real world concerns into the magical world and the wave of anti-foreigner sentiment affects Lychford, too. A thoroughly enjoyable read, if a little uncomfortable at times as the three women’s sentiments are laid bare.

The Lights Go Out in Lychford. This is the fourth of Paul Cornell’s Lychford novellas featuring Lizzie, the Anglican vicar, Judith Mawson, elderly hedge witch and wise-woman and Autumn, her apprentice wise woman and magic-shop owner. The three of them keep Lychford free of magical threats. The not-so-sleepy village lies on a confluence between magical worlds, and threats seem to come out of nowere. Judith, always a little ‘odd’ has Alzheimers. She has moments of clarity but also moments of confusion. Her son, Shaun, who knows about his mum’s magic, is contemplating putting her in a home, but for the moment is waiting to see how things develop. When Autumn figures out that there’s a magical threat and she and Lizzie track it down to a woman named Picton who is offering ‘wishes’ with all the potential damage they can do if carried out literally.. With Judith only intermittently helpful, they think they’ve discovered what Picton is and neutralised her, but the threat much more than they thought, and might even change reality itself. In the end it’s Judith who is the key. I love these novellas. There’s a delightful interplay between the three main characters. I admit I had to brush away a tear or two at the end.

Last Stand in Lychford. With Judith gone, it’s up to Autumn (magic shop owner) and Lizzie (vicar) to save the sleepy Cotswold town of Lychford from an incursion of enemy magic which will not only destroy the town, but the universe as well. Right, then… better not muck it up, ladies. The enemy intends to destroy all borders between worlds to the detrement of the fae and the humans. Judith might be gone, but she’s certainly not forgotten, and she’s left help. There’s a new viewpoint character, Zoya, a Ukrainian immigrant single mum who has mysteriously been unaffected by the magical rain which made the townsfolk able to sense magic (which makes her wonder “why everyone here is now bugfuck crazy in the head”). Expect exploding fairies, the return of a previous antagonist, a message from beyond the grave, some gruesome deaths, and three brave women trying to save the universe. It’s a satisfying end to the Lychford cycle.