More Star Citizen related art, just because.
I wrote this piece for terribleminds, because my last piece was 1000 words too long for this week’s space opera challenge. This piece sticks with Barium, but is set many years after the previous one. At least ten years after it. In case you’re confused by the multiple names, Bury’em = Barium = Barry, and Casi = Cesium. Enjoy!
Gorgeous artwork by George Hull, for the game Star Citizen
I didn’t write the following bit of space drama with the above image in mind, but it’s a beautiful fit anyway. What follows is another piece of “middle grade” fiction, one that holds true to the more classically action-adventure oriented stories that I usually like to tell. Enjoy!
(Note: There’s now a great deal of other Barium Deep material here. This is the edited version of this same post, and this is the collection of other posts linked to Barium Deep.)
Remember how I mentioned being dissatisfied with my work on Wednesday? As you might gather from the title, I wrote another 500 word piece rather than use either of those two. I am, as ever, somewhat dissatisfied, but I still like this one. It’s… fun. And somewhat painfully reminiscent of my childhood. Enjoy.
Part of my homework for this week was to write a “two page” character intro for an engaging Middle Grade character. I dislike “pages” as a measure of length when I’m writing, since I don’t use Word and see no reason to change that, but that translates to roughly 500 words. Of course, I wrote one and wasn’t satisfied, so now I have two that I’m not totally satisfied with. I feel like they do a better job of introducing conflict and drama than they do of introducing a particular character, if only because I have little tolerance for writing an opening scene that doesn’t start something.
In any case, here’s two Middle Grade scenes presented back-to-back, with no real relation between the two. Oh, yes, and one of them is actually about Jerome from my Elven Progenitors setting. Enjoy!
It’s been a while since I read any S.M. Stirling, and I picked this one up more on a whim than anything else. I’d gotten tired of the most recent spate of Change novels, probably because of a disconnect between my expectations and what Stirling was delivering. I wanted Stirling to write an active story about a smaller group of characters, with palpable progress in the plot achieved in the course of each book. Stirling did create that progress but it was far slower than I’d hoped for, and he spent more time focused on the milieu of the story rather than advancing the story that I wanted to see resolved. In fact, after the first trilogy the pace of progress slowed precipitously, until it was almost a crawl.
The Golden Princess doesn’t change that pattern. What did change was my expectations of what I’d find in reading the book. And I have to say: reading these books as milieu fiction, as much about the world in which they take place as they are about any of the characters, is far more fun and rewarding than reading them with expectations of tight and fast plot. Definitely worth starting up the series again.
This brings me back to my terribleminds flash fiction habit. This week, our prompt was to use a character someone had created last week and write up to 2000 words about them. By my count, I’ve got 1847 below the fold. The character I used is inspired by the post here, by Pleasant Street. I say inspired because, while I use features of the character Pleasant Street created, I largely do away with the setting that they made to go along with her… not because I didn’t like it (I did), but because my ideas took me in a different direction. I hope that you like it, and I especially hope that Pleasant Street is able to appreciate it. Enjoy.
Today I have the beginning to a sequel for you, a continuation of the story I started in Rum Luck (rough draft of that story can be found here). If you like Andre and Jerome, you’re in for a treat. It does end rather abruptly, but there’ll probably be more soon. Read on, and enjoy!
Like it says in the title, this week’s flash fiction challenge is to create characters and convey them in 250 words or less. I’ve had a few knocking around in my head recently, and I decided to let two of them out. I’ve already written stories about both of them before, which you can find (amongst others) right here.
This update is totally last minute, born of a recognition that I forgot to make my usual post today. In fact, by my clock, I’m already four minutes too late. I did spend a goodly portion of my day traveling, but… yeah.
Fortunately, I have some awesome news to share. Do you remember the time that I mentioned wanting to write a Tintin flowchart (way back in January)? I just shared the underlying aim, of writing a new era’s Tintin comics, with one of my friends. They responded by spending fifteen minutes drawing a picture of female Tintin with Snowy, striding along in her trench coat. It looked really good. They were really excited and want to talk with me about this project. So now I’m really excited too. Hell, I just busted out a big goofy smile for no particular reason. No, not true, it’s for a very particular reason; this project is something that someone else wants to work on with me!
I’m not writing this to tell you that you should expect something soon. I’m writing this to tell you that some day, maybe a few years from now, I’ll have another post to tell you about how awesome this thing I’m working on is, and how anxious I am about making it worth your time. But I think that maybe, just maybe, I’ll be telling you that because I have some good old Tintin-esque glorious adventure for you to feast your eyes on. I’m really excited about this.
I wish I’d heard of this book years ago. I think it’s incredibly important, and I wish that it weren’t. Why?
It is so easy, as a white man, to think that you understand troubles that others face, to think that you have read and spoken enough about a given issue to feel like you know more or less what’s going on, and why people feel and think the ways that they do. In many cases, you have to actively search out conflicting points of view and other narratives in order to prove otherwise, and why would you bother doing that when you don’t know about them in the first place? Why bother when you think that you’ve already got a good grasp on things?
In Lion’s Blood, Steven Barnes takes a fundamentally simple concept and uses it to explore a number of things… it’s quite simply a good and fun (if painful at times) book. But the reason that I think it’s important and wish that it weren’t is that it confronts head on that feeling of complacent surety, the comfort of thinking that you know enough about historical (and modern) problems and don’t have to look deeper to examine your own place, your own implicit beliefs.
Lion’s Blood posits a world in which Africa rose to prominence, rather than Europe. A world in which the slaves working the fields of the New World are white, taken from their tribal villages to work the fields of rich Muslim landowners. Steven Barnes tells a familiar tale here, with a narrative that feels comfortably close to our expectations, but it’s one in which all the cultural and ethnic trappings have been inverted from our standard expectations. And somehow that inversion was enough to shake me out of my “ah yes, this story again” complacency. Better yet, it drove home yet again the violence done to people through the institution of slavery, and (I think) might help to wake some up to the systematic oppression which slavery engenders in a society. And, of course, it tells an excellent story, one well worth reading.
Look. I don’t want to ruin this book for you, so I’ll put it like this: this book is sad, tragic, and uplifting; this book is a marvelous adventure story; this book reminds you of why our current society is so screwed up in so many ways, as we deal with the toxic legacies and variably covert attempts to continue the oppressive power struggle at the heart of slavery. I’m deeply impressed. I want my own alternate history to be as good as this book is.
P.s. I found Lion’s Blood on this recommended list of books by writers of color. I intend to go back and find more to read, and would suggest that you do the same.
Fistful of Wits 