Category Archives: Writing

A new campaign in the works…

Posted on by Henry

This post is only going to include non-spoiler material, appropriate for the opening of the game.

You (the players) are the King’s officials, expected to enforce his decisions, act in his interest, and carry out his wishes in the wider Kingdom.  Mostly drawn from the wealthy and noble classes, the King’s officers are expected to outfit themselves out of their own pocket and see to their own expenses.  There are always a few exceptions to the norm of “wealth and privilege,” since an individual’s skills and qualifications for this particular job are far more important than their bloodline, but exceptions are likely to have an interesting story for how they became one of the King’s officers without the usual entrée.  In many ways, you might think of the King’s officers as Musketeers with a little less in the way of Alexandre Dumas.

The game is set in the Kingdom of Duval, and begins with the players being sent from the capitol city of Duval to the backwater county of Mont Mondal.  Count Xavier of Mont Mondal was recently imprisoned for treason against the throne, when he broke his oath of fealty.  He was executed along with many of his closest companions, and the executions have created quite a disturbance at court.  One of his companions, the wizard Castanedra, fled back to Mont Mondal on the same night that Xavier was taken prisoner: you and your compatriots have been tasked with capturing her and returning with her in your custody.  You have also been instructed to raise the county’s levies and send them to the capitol, to join with King Mander’s other forces already mustering for war against the Kingdom of Meius to the east.

While thoughts of war on the nearby eastern border weigh heavy in everyone’s mind, how are you and your companions going to run this powerful wizard to ground and bring her back to Duval?

Other things that people from the Kingdom of Duval would know:

-Meius and Duval share a border that runs through an agriculturally rich valley.  North and south of the valley the terrain becomes increasingly hilly and mountainous, leaving only one clear passage between the two kingdoms.  While the kingdoms have a long history of trade with each other they’ve recently suffered through a series of trade disputes and feuds, and there are now frequent border raids which have further angered each side.

-Count Xavier (that’s pronounced “Sh-avier,” more or less) had a meteoric rise to match his catastrophic fall.  He was ennobled and granted County Mont Mondal a little more than ten years ago, and he and his companions were widely recognized as having done a great deal to make Mont Mondal actually livable for Duvalians.  Xavier and his companions drove out a large clutch of magical aberrations which had claimed the land as their own, and then kept the local bandits in check.  While his breaking of his vow of fealty clearly put him in the wrong, some people have even gone so far as to say that they wish the king hadn’t had Xavier and his companions executed for their treason.  Not that they’re likely to have said as much to the king.  The king, after all, is known to have a bit of a temper.

-The city of Duval is slowly being surrounded by the many thousands of soldiers who have answered their liege-lords’ calls.  The various levies have been joined by a few mercenary companies looking for work, and their spirits are high as they prepare to fight against Meius.  The king’s armies only wait for a few more levies (like those of Mont Mondal) to join them before marching against Meius in the east.

Last Days of Loneliness, a YA horror story pt. 3

Posted on by Henry

This is yet another post about the YA horror novel I’ve been working on, which I roughly outlined here.  Last time I gave you the very beginning of the story (which I’ve already altered again); this time I’m going to give you the very end of the story.  This ending will undergo further changes: I already know that I need to decide whether it makes sense to have italicized thoughts-of-the-moment within the narrative, and if I like them, decide how to alter other story sections to incorporate them holistically rather than as a last minute deal.

Here’s the action climax:

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Last Days of Loneliness, a YA horror story pt. 2

Posted on by Henry

Like I promised, I’ve got some actual text for you today.  I’m a bit late because I’ve just finished pounding through Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance, which I rather liked, but hopefully this material will make up for it.

Keep in mind that this is all still rough.  I’m not even sure that the narrator’s voice is appropriate, so whatever ends up being final may look wildly different.  With that said… I do hope you enjoy it.  Also, please do comment if you think something works particularly well, or really needs to be changed.  The beginning of the story lies after the break…

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Last Days of Loneliness, a YA horror story

Posted on by Henry

A number of years ago, one of my writer friends mentioned a story concept that she wanted to share with me.  She wondered what would come of a Lovecraft-inspired horror story in which the protagonist was a high school girl who had just recently moved to a new town.  I immediately latched onto the idea.  We spent a few hours bouncing ideas back and forth, and at the end of our brainstorm session I asked whether she would like to collaborate with me on the project.  She said yes.

I started writing material for the story, occasionally ignoring school work that I really should have been doing at the time.  I soon had a great deal of (questionably valuable) material to share with her, but she’d fallen into a work-hole and been unable to claw her way out.  She ceded the project to me, though we continued to share our thoughts on it.

Fast forward a few years: after finishing my thesis, graduating, and getting back into the swing of writing for a while, I dust off my old drafts of this nascent YA horror novel and get some other people to take a look.  The drafts are, to put it figuratively, mostly made of poo.  I’m now aware of the fact that I have little idea of how to write a teenaged female narrator, which makes looking at my past struggles all the more painful.  But there are some pieces that seem like they still hold some value.  The concept and the basic story beats still seem basically solid, and the story clearly has an excellent ramp up to the climax.  Now the time has come to strip the piece down to its bare bones and tinker with it for a while.  Oh, and write a variety of new attempts at a teenaged female narrator, while reading as many pieces with teenaged female narrators as I can (preferably from the right genres).

In case you’re wondering where this is going, yes, I’ve got some material to share with you today.

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Historical Context Matters: Now With More Context

Posted on by Henry

On the 11th I posted the first of my background pieces on the Elven Progenitors setting.  Now I’ve got more material for you.

Last time I covered city names, the names of bodies of water, the basics of city-states, mother-daughter city relations, Elf-home, the Northmen, and the return of slavery.  I still need to talk about the divisions amongst the elves, the cold war, where people get their slaves, why orcs aren’t fighting everyone all the time (and whom they are fighting), the alternative flora and fauna, and maybe something about the Elven Republic.  But there’s no way I’m going to cover all that, so I’ll settle for telling you a bit more about elves.  But to whet your appetite, first, the original conceit of the setting; then a brief background on how much of the world has been explored and settled.

The original conceit of the setting, when I was first developing it with my brother for a series of quick adventures that we wanted to play (yes, it started as an RPG setting), was that we were playing in an alternate version of our own world.  While we didn’t want there to be any magic as most people would recognize it, we did decide to switch things up when it came to evolution, and I’ve used “artistic license” (i.e. unrealistic lies) to hand wave past a few of the problems which follow.  Specifically, the first sapients to evolve were what we would call elves, and they bred all of the other races of sapients in addition to making some awkward accidents along the way.  I know that this doesn’t make much sense when it comes to an evolutionary time-scale (except for the part where elves are actually long-lived enough to breed other species meaningfully), but if you’ll ignore that problem and accept that elves can effectively do magical things with breeding then I suspect you’ll enjoy what follows.

At the time of the great war, elves and their various subject races had cities in Elf-home (Africa), Europe, and western, central, and southern Asia.  A select few elves had performed extensive studies of ocean currents and hypothesized the existence of a land mass to the west of Europe, though with the outbreak of civil war they kept this knowledge secret.  They worried that access to the resources of an entirely new continent would represent a dangerously unbalancing factor in the war, and could only lead to further suffering.  They were also concerned that, if a peace settlement were achieved, the struggle to settle in the New World would re-ignite the civil war.  Therefore, unbeknownst to those fighting the great war, they repurposed a breeding project which had been sidelined by the war and used it to develop a self-replicating massive area denial bioweapon; as more of their fears about the conflict came to pass, and it seemed clear that allowing either side to spread to the New World would only exacerbate the civil war, they deployed their weapon in the New World to prevent exactly that.

Now, with that teaser out of the way, how about a little more detail…

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Coming Soon: Another Huge Background Post

Posted on by Henry

Not today, but tomorrow with a little bit of luck.  I’ve got a lot more for you, mostly dealing with elves despite the fact that they’re quite rare in my stories of the setting thus far.  It turns out that the setting is called Elven Progenitors for a good reason, and nearly all of the background politics has its basis in the conflicts of the elves.

So, look here tomorrow for more information on the setting background, and if you haven’t read my short stories you should go do that while you wait.  Here’s a link to the first background post, and here are links to Paying the Tab, Jerome Goes North, Jerome’s Tropical Vacation, A Simple Misunderstanding, and Rum Luck.  My apologies for prolonging the wait, I’ll have more for you soon.

Historical Context Matters: Strange Bedfellows

Posted on by Henry

I’ve been reading quite a bit about Ukraine recently, and marveling at how important historical context is to understanding the present.  Given that our experience of the present is interpreted through the lens of our past, if we lack the appropriate local context for a situation any outsider is likely to be confused.  Here’s a concrete example: in addition to all of the other (traumatic, disgusting, screwed-up) baggage that comes along with Nazi ideology and symbolism, for some in Ukraine those things also represent independence from the Soviet state.  Knowing that, I’m less surprised to see that those particularly toxic things are experiencing a resurgence among some subsections of the population of Ukraine.  Given the local historical context I find it frightening (but not, on reflection, surprising) to see these things coming to the fore once more.  What will come of having the bigotry, fascist tendencies, and virulent hatreds espoused by neo-nazis and their sympathizers in some way legitimated by their connection with the forces that helped to organize the Maidan, and the forces that now do Kiev’s fighting in the east?  I don’t know, but all I can say is “Ick.”

Reading up on all of that has left me thinking about the conflicts and strange bedfellows of my own fictional settings, and particularly the one that I’ve been calling Elven Progenitors (EP).  It’s not a very catchy title for a setting, I know, but it’s the only name I’ve got at the moment.  At least it’s distinct?  I don’t want to explain all of the background of the setting in one go, but I thought I should talk about some of the ways in which it differs from our own history, and some of the background politics that I may have vaguely hinted at without ever explaining.  If you’ve read any of these various stories (Paying the Tab, Jerome Goes North, Jerome’s Tropical Vacation, A Simple Misunderstanding, Rum Luck), you’ve already read something in this setting.  Exposition follows below.

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Story Backgrounds Take Time

Posted on by Henry

I seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take me to post a piece of world background for some of my stories.  It’s not like I don’t already know it, I just didn’t realize how much of it I actually wanted to share in one post, or how long it would take to write it.  I plan to have that out for you tomorrow, but for now please accept my apologies for the delay.

Arctic Rising, by Tobias Buckell

Posted on by Henry

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Tobias Buckell has made me very happy indeed.  I can’t decide whether I prefer Arctic Rising to Hurricane Fever, and I really liked Hurricane Fever (seriously, read my review).  It’s rare that I have the pleasure of reading a fast paced high-tension thriller set in a brilliantly developed near-future, let alone reading two of them back to back.  Buckell’s world-building is a tremendous draw for me.  It’s quality shines through in the ease with which he introduces the near-future to the reader; he keeps his obvious enthusiasm for the world he’s created tightly leashed, only revealing it in dribs and drabs, more often than not as an in-character rumination or observation that feels entirely appropriate.  Better yet, I didn’t find any gaping implausibilities.  I’ll admit that I didn’t take a fine-toothed comb to the books and their established background, but they hold together well enough to offer a compelling (and somewhat distressing) view of an imminent future.  If you want to treat yourself to a jaunt down “doesn’t this seem likely…” lane, and you want some hair-raising hijinks in the bargain, try either of these books.  If you don’t want to be spoiled for either book before you read it, be sure to read Arctic Rising first, though I did it in the opposite order and still enjoyed myself immensely.

Why did I enjoy it so much?  Well…

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Maelstrom, by Taylor Anderson

Posted on by Henry

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Having just finished reading Maelstrom, I’m officially downgrading this series from “potentially profoundly interesting” to “some variety of popcorn lit.”  You know, the stuff that you’ll compulsively eat without thinking too hard about it: sometimes it’s exactly what you’re looking for, but more often it’s just there and you don’t bother to stop yourself.  This series is alt-history tech-bootstrapping military fiction with a very particular set of idealized social dynamics, and as of now it doesn’t look like it will stretch beyond that.  I’m not saying that it’s bad; popcorn lit is definitionally good enough that I’ll pick it up and breeze through it simply for the pleasure of reading it, provided I’m in the right mood.  But it also hasn’t lived up to my hopes of offering more introspection on any of its various conflicts, or breaking further from its genre precedents in an interesting fashion.

I should note that it’s hard for most novels to make it past my popcorn lit category, and the category itself encompasses an almost unhelpfully wide spread of books; furthermore, I can’t pretend to be better than that myself, as I doubt any of my own short stories would qualify as anything but popcorn lit.

I won’t say that the series can’t ever be anything but popcorn lit.  Some of the future books may deliver answers to the niggling contentions I’m sharing with you here.  But thus far my hopes for what I’ll call “deeper” material have not been met.  Specifically, I want Anderson to go deeper into examining the cultural conflicts inherent between the Americans and their various allies, and I especially want him to include the perspective of Lemurians who truly don’t have specified gender roles or gender/sex expectations.  It seems like he’s introduced the Lemurians (the cat-/lemur-like creatures with whom the Americans allied in the first book) as being without specific gender roles, but when we’re treated to the perspective of a Lemurian there are a number of basic social operating assumptions that appear to be based in a society more similar to our own, one which certainly embraces a number of implicitly gender- or sex-based values.  If Anderson wants to write the human perspectives in his book with those value assumptions in place, that’s ok by me, even if I don’t like it.  But much like my love for and disappointment with the use of Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, I find it frustrating that Anderson should introduce an ostensibly gender- and sex- blind culture and then not do them the justice of writing from a gender- and sex-blind perspective.  I have to give Taylor Anderson credit for trying, and it seems like he might not be aware of how he’s failing to deliver here, but that doesn’t make it un-frustrating.

More after the break.

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