Or, in my case, the third. The Divine Machine wasn’t especially easy to write – the plot’s more complex than that of The Gutter Prayer, and there were some tangles that took a long time to unravel. However, the shape of it was clear, and more importantly – I had to do it. It was contracted. Now, I’m trying to work on something new.  Starting something new is easy – the first few pages always flow, as you’re just putting words to a rough concept. After that, though, the thing has to run, it has to have momentum to go on for hundreds more pages, and that means pushing it along even as you slather more words on it. It’s all too common for the thing to fall apart, or start to look ugly and ill-formed and not worth it – especially when there are other pretty gossamer ideas flitting around freely, unshackled by the brick-dust of language. In short, words are

read more The Difficult Second Novel

There will be a limited edition hardback of The Gutter Prayer. This is wonderful and unexpected. There will be an audiobook version. On one level, this is not unexpected; it’s standard practise for Orbit, I understand. However, I’ve never done anything with audiobooks before, so it’s all strange and new and exciting. The ARCs are flight to earlier reviewers and book-mavens. Exciting times.    

(Many thanks to Emily @ orbit for sending these out.)

My writing’s slowed down lately, because I’ve got too much writing to do. I’ve been a full-time writer since 2003 – but it’s been almost entirely work-for-hire in the tabletop games industry, with a few brief forays into computer game writing. It’s rare for me to take time to work on my own stuff, especially as my own stuff is generally very like the material I’m paid to write for others. On the one hand, it’s elves and conspiracies and monsters and Lovecraftiana; on the other, elves and conspiracies and monsters and Lovecraftiana and money.  The Gutter Prayer and The Divine Machine changed that equation quite considerably, but now that they’re written (edits of the latter notwithstanding), I’m back to balancing the possibility of selling another novel against the certainty of getting paid for rpg writing. I know – as dilemmas to have, it’s not a bad one. But there are only so many hours in the day, and so many hours in a

read more Speculative Fiction

Isn’t that a thing? That’s a thing.

Tolkien didn’t invent the fantasy genre, but he defined its modern incarnation. Everything is sub-Tolkien, or post-Tolkien, or a reaction to Tolkien, or consciously not-Tolkien. He’s inescapable. Of course, Tolkien’s goal wasn’t writing fantasy per se. He wanted to create a mythology for England, and a home for his invented languages. He had a genius for names, drawn from his experience with history and philology. He borrowed names from the sagas (all the names of the Dwarves – and Gandalf – are taken from the Dvergatal, the Dwarf-Tally) , or created them using his own languages, or from the rules of linguistic evolution. They work – they feel part of the world, grounded and real and plausible. And that’s hard. What do you do if you’re not Tolkien?

In the world building stakes, linear narratives have it easy. The author controls which questions are asked and answered. A character can look out the window and see a field of crops, or a factory, or a skeletal thing with the head of a bird that juggles stars, and ask any many or as few questions as the writer wishes. In a tabletop rpg, the players can demand answers from the GM- “what grows there?”, “a factory? what sort? who owns it? I thought you said this was a small fishing port?” “what the hell?” – and the GM has to answer them. Or, to put it another way – rpgs are a conversation, books are a monologue.

The one about the dragon… The one that’s Hamlet set in UCC… The one that’s about the wizard who inherits a kingdom… The one about the archaeologist who finds an alternate history… The one about the sweep who finds faerieland up the chimney… The one about the dungeon… I’m in the early stages of writing something new, which means writing a bunch of false starts and seeing which one of them works. Some get abandoned because I can’t write it yet – one of the ideas above needs me to put in the research first, so it works in context. Others I haven’t found the right voice or pacing yet – even if the idea is a viable one, the approach is wrong. Still others are just too small to sustain a novel. They’re mislabelled short stories, or adventures, or just frail notions that can’t carry anything. Once, I’d have worried about this stage. It’s not that writing beginnings is

read more Seeds on Stony Ground

“So you’ve written a novel!” “I have!” “What’s it about?” “Er…”     I’ve had that conversation innumerable times in the last few months. My instinctive response is to handwave and dodge. “Oh,” I say, “it’s a sort of steampunky fantasy novel, only there’s no steam. It’s alchemy and stuff”. Which is accurate, but it’s like saying The Lord of the Rings is about trees. It’s tree-heavy, trees play a key role in the plot, there are rather more discussions of trees than you might have in the average novel, and if you delve into the deep backstory, trees are really important. Guerdon’s alchemical weirdness is absolutely integral to The Gutter Prayer, but it’s not what the book is about, and it doesn’t convey much in an elevator pitch. “Three thieves in a fantasy city try to overthrow the corrupt master of the thieves’ guild.” Better, but it’s a little bland. “A thief finds a magical weapon and decides to use it to overthrow

read more The Elevator Pitch

The Divine Machine, Book 2 of the Black Iron Legacy, is en route through the aether to my editors at Orbit. It’s slightly longer than Book 1, and somewhat more complicated. Book 1 has five main viewpoint characters circling around a single overlapping goal, even if they don’t all agree on what they were trying to accomplish; The Divine Machine has three main viewpoint characters, each of whom has goals that intertwine with the others but aren’t precisely compatible or opposed. Oh, and all three are representatives of factions within the city, but all of them have reasons to distrust their faction and their secret alliances. And it takes place over the period of around three months, not the ten days of the first book. I have spreadsheets. They are colour-coded. Still, they burn. My process for this one went: Rough outline of a few pages, describing the rough shape of the story. First 15,000 words, to get a feel for the characters and

read more Book 2 Submitted