Mycroft Mysteries, Case #3, Part 2
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #3, Part 1
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #2, Part 4
“Was it hard to get into her phone?” Jude asked, perching in the back seat, resting his knees on the back of Sparrow’s chair. The car rumbled through the snow, which fell in quiet little whorls.
Do It Tomorrow – The Temptation Of The Novel
Writing a novel, a piece at a time, over a year, was an interesting challenge, but it had a nice little side effect where if I didn’t want to write much one week, I could instead do outlining and notes, push that off to after the publish date, and produce a section of story that was smaller, simpler, more indulgent. It helped the story gather momentum.
With the Mycroft stories, which are short, I can’t really do that. Tomorrow’s piece has to wrap up the second case. It has to. I don’t get to push that off until later and instead fill tonight’s piece. It’s just an interesting different gear of discipline.
Carcer’s Christmas Eve
Talking with Hoodiejoy today reminded me of this little story from the last Christmas City of Heroes had, just after the game was shuttered. It’s a story about what one character, Carceri, did, and it featured his friends. I’m putting it here because this is basically an enormous tweet.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #2, Part 3
Big wide halls, thick red carpets and all the effort a building made in two thousand and five could put to look like it’d been standing since the sixteen hundreds didn’t hide things from Tally. Of course, Tally wasn’t using eyes to see – holding a smartphone in hand, browsing wireless information. The whole estate was built with Old World Charm, which seemed to mean terrible wireless access. There was wi-fi, sure, but it was bad, bad enough that it dipped in hallways and only seemed to improve when Tally approached an actual access point.
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #2, Part 2
Outside, beautiful and lush greenery didn’t whirl past because it had all died. Instead, sticks of barren black and a cloud of heavy white, featureless but for the occasional jutting stick or utility post, flew on by, less like the New England greenery and more a magical wonderland that looked suspiciously like someone had piled a rather large amount of cocaine outside. The outside of the car yielded no relief for the mind, but the inside had its own problems.
“God, do we have to listen to this?” Eris groused.
“Sparrow’s driving, so Sparrow chooses.” Jude murmured from the back seat.
Eris squirmed around in her seat, holding the shoulder of the chair so she could look over into the back seat at Jude. “It’s Taylor Swift,” she said, waving one hand. “Taylor. Swift.”
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #2, Part 1
“Ms Mycroft does not see visitors.”
Has Disconnected ()
Rando Identification Guide
We’re all familiar with randos – uninvited assholes brigading into our conversations in shared communal spaces. Randos exist in a whole range of contexts. They are sometimes in real spaces, but more often than not, randos are enabled by online spaces, places where they can be independent of their actions, and those consequences. Randos can often be harmless, but they do represent a drain on your time and resources. Try to bear this in mind if you ever go out of your way to identify and define the randos in your environment.
For the purpose of this discussion I will be using the word ‘he’ to describe all Randos. Note this is not an absolute gender thing, I am sure there are people who do not use ‘he’ who could be randos. But every rando I’ve dealt with has been a he. Which is I’m sure, just coincidence.
Ayn Rando: Well, he says, I don’t see why I should have to do things for other people. What’s courtesy and kindness do for me?
Marlon Rando: Insists on offering you his time, which you, of course, do not want. This does not seem to perturb him. This is an offer you can’t refuse.
Rando Calrissian: Seems to be your friend. May even have some signals to indicate camaraderie. Then he’ll tag the conversation into some complete dickhead and suddenly you’re off to the races.
Rando Lee: Starts a conversation and is quite obnoxious, only to disappear around the fifth or sixth response. The account is deleted. They are never seen again.
Rando Munroe: Doesn’t seem to have any opinions of his own, but really likes quoting XKCD comics that tangentially relate to what you’re talking about. Ha ha, yes, someone is wrong on the internet, yes.
Rando Newman: You can tell there’s a cohesion there to their thoughts and arguments, but they’re just stating them in this pointless, stilted way that just doesn’t have any useful or meaningful connection to what you’re saying.
Rando Paul: Like the Ayn Rando, but thinks the real reason you don’t agree with him is because you haven’t heard all the evidence.
Rando Savage (Macho Man variety): Doesn’t seem to have anything to say except Oh Yeaaahh. Harmless and in its own way, kinda charming.
Rando Savage (DC variety): Jesus christ, where did this asshole come from? Believes in neanderthal population dynamics, and ‘it’s just biology,’ he’s convinced he’s the superior human because he’s embracing ideas that haven’t been useful since the development of agriculture.
Rando von Winkle: What year is it? Where are we? What’s ‘third wave’ feminism, even? Somehow this Rando wants to talk about current events or recent history without having an awareness of anything that’s happened at all in easily either of your lifetimes.
William Rando Hearst: Convinced he is the real source of news, wishes to inform you about current events as he understands them. Especially in speciality fields like science or videogame journalism where you may, in fact, be quite confident and familiar. Still, without his valuable insight, how would you ever know that Videogame A is better than Videogame B even though you weren’t talking about either of them?
These are not all the kind of Randos you might encounter! There are quite a lot of randos out there in the world. Be sure to document any that you spot, and maybe you’ll find a totally brand new type of rando*!
* You won’t, these tired chore behaviours are representative of a very limited set of social parameters.
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #1, Part 4
“I hate driving these things.” Sparrow grumbled. “If Ms Mycroft was going to pay for rent a special car for a job, couldn’t she have gotten somethin’ nice?”
The car was white, with a charming green and red stripe by the rear door, for visibility. It was also a few rounded edges away from being nothing so complex as a rounded metal crate. Sparrow’s own ride had had a nice deep back seat, at least when the driver’s was pulled forward as far as it could go, and Jude had enjoyed the extra foot room.
“I’m not a big fan of them either,” Jude noted, unwrapping a fabric pile on his lap which clinked slightly. “But this is how Ms Mycroft wants things done and I know better than to expect better results ignoring her.”
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #1, Part 3
Sparrow unconsciously brought his arms in by his side as he stood behind Jude. Hands bunched up into fists, he tried to suppress a quiet squeak of worry. Clearing his throat, he made to speak, but somewhere between voice and brain, the words turned into a long, soft, “Oh noooo.”
Jude turned slightly, putting one arm back so he could brush against Sparrow’s side. Big calming hand came down over Sparrow’s shoulder. “’Scuse me, gentlemen,”
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #1, Part 2
Sundown Car Repair was ten blocks from the Mycroft Manor. With snow on the streets, the walk took the better part of an hour, which was not helped by all the people who were not Jude having such a loose relationship to space and time. It was snowing, which at least meant nobody stood in the street gaggling around before Christmas displays. Jude was a figure in a green greatcoat outlined against white streets and pale grey building faces. When he crossed the street, too many drivers thought maybe they could save a few seconds by acting as if they weren’t going to stop, which availed them nothing.
A Writing Tip: Colour Values
If you read my blog, chances are you read my twitter feed, and if you read my twitter feed, odds are you have considered yourself creative and/or are involved in some sort of creative endeavour. Worldbuilding is part of that – and gosh, don’t we love our worldbuilding? Here’s a thought for the next time you build a setting, a culture, a group of people who even have a common slang.
There’s an assumption that is heavily built into white culture, which I honestly didn’t notice a few days ago, but it comes with some pretty obvious ramifications. Simply put, it associates the colour white with goodness. We have ‘dark’ as bad and ‘white’ as good. If your culture still looks to white as good and less-white as bad, then you’re inheriting a simple part of our world. Workmanlike, it can do the job, but worldbuilding is often best done when we set aside existing assumptions and try to make places different and interesting.
Here are some white things that should scare the shit out of people:
- Snow cover
- Lightning strikes
- Skeletons
- Icebergs
- Salty deserts
- Several types of bug
Here are some dark things that should be venerated as meaningful in a culture:
- Rich earth
- Cool nights out of the sun
- Coal
- Cast-iron tools
- Deep water, from whence you can fish well
- Safe caves and places away from the elements
We have all our cultural baggage and we bring that into our world building. Look at where a culture might exist if they are, oh, say, scared shitless of winter and heavily value dark caves. Or a culture that has cast-iron tools as important enough to pass on as heirlooms and hates the idea of being stuck out on salt flats under the sun in the middle of the day.
Mycroft Mysteries, Case #1, Part 1
“This weather, you know?”
“Hm?”
The cab’s wipers squeaked through the powder-soft shapes spreading on the windshield. Fifty miles away, there was a peak on the point that was, officially, known as the place with the worst weather in the country. That was good, it meant here in the closed in, cow-arsed streets, there was no competition about who had the worst weather, and so each drifting locale in the bitter winter snows could get about the business of really fine-tuning and hand-crafting the snowdrifts and the black ice and the slurry and flurry, while children mashed refresh buttons on local public school websites in the hopes of a snow day.
Writing New Stuff
It’s harder to write right now.
It used to be a little bit easier, back when I had this grand plan, when I knew I was building towards something. When One Stone was an idea I had, I wanted to work on it for its own sake. It was going to be a book, a novel, a full size story with characters and adventure and stuff in it and it’d be cool and fun and my friends would like it and all that.
I think part of what makes it hard to write is realising that even if every single friend I have reads my work, I will not be a successful writer. Even if all of their friends read my work, I will not be a successful writer. Maybe, maybe when we get to their friends, I’ll have sold enough stuff to make a year’s worth of work worthwhile, but chances are, not. And that’s even presuming I could sell it – which I pretty much can’t.
There’s this space writers talk about where the time between books, will this one be good enough etcetera which is all lovely whiskey-and-inkstains talks but fails to account for how long, for how long you go, without much in the way of feedback. And I don’t want to sound like some petty whiner, just like, there was something driving me last year to finish each story, to actually put something out there because I’d fooled myself into thinking that an audience was listening and if they read it, some of them would like it, and if they liked it, some of them would love it. I was driven by a desire to reveal later plot twists, to build to a character development, to show off dialogue and scenes I envisioned when I started.
I don’t have that, right now.
This … this is just the normal sadness that permeates the creative, I think. When you’re not riding the wave of hubris that says You, stranger, should care about things I care about and I will make you care about them, it’s mostly just this miserable little feeling of kicking secrets around.
But god it’s hard to write right now.
One Stone – Downloads!
How you doing, folks? Rested up? Happy? Comfy? Feeling snuggly in your Christmas Pajamas, fiddling around with the things you got for Christmas? That’s great and I am super glad of that.
If you’re a One Stone reader – or maybe wanting to be a reader, or something like that – then I have some news for you! I’ve put it together to these formats for reading:
I do not know how to install those formats on your computery-type machines, I have to trust your judgment there. But if you don’t want to do that, then you can sit tight! Because I’m working on revising One Stone, improving and tightening it up, expanding some sections, and releasing it to the Amazon and GooglePlay Book stores.
So keep an eye out for it!
One Stone, Chapter 52
When the great wheels of The Benjamin were set right again, few people talked about it. There was just that one strange day, where three hours vanished in one, and one hour stretched out to make up the difference. To most of the people of Timoritia, that’s all they’d remember, of the day that they almost had a king. Some would remember their parts in the riots, which were over taxes, or over the nobles abusing people, or over the farming collective in Parcel Street, or some such business. They’d remember throwing punches and laughing with the people they hit, two months later. They’d remember breaking business windows in the Dims, but it was all in sport.
One Stone, Chapter 51
The hoofbeats weren’t stopping, not for Marko Fiver.
The riot had been cleansing, to be honest. To be surrounded by bodies, the press of violence, to hear people shouting and yelling over the rain, to hear anger and spite and rage, even if he couldn’t find the places where words began and ended, it was a relief. It was a relief to be fighting an actual battle.
He’d lost the knife somewhere. Probably in Yull, in the general, in his f- in the man he respected. No sword by his side when he’d fled the palace, no weapon, which it seemed, had been for the best. Nobody had died in his chaotic whorl throughout the city’s lowest places in his lowest moments. The feeling of rain on his cheeks had cut lines of emphasis for the tears that followed, and nobody seemed to want to fight him when they looked him in the eyes.
One Stone, Chapter 50
The safehouse wasn’t clean per se, and it probably wouldn’t be until some royal functionary, with their proper permissions and appropriate bottles of royally-appointed bleach turned up to get the blood off the walls. There was a royally appointed cleaning product for such things – Aderyn had used some, for a school project, once. It wasn’t particularly effective – and certainly not when compared to setting evidence on fire. Still, the bodies were outside, in a pile, by the wall, and the guard had been notified about the ruckus. Soon, a cart would come, and the soldiers Calpurnia assigned the task would load the bodies onto the cart, which would inevitably take them away to be sorted out and dealt with as some other person’s problem, eventually reaching a morgue probably no worse the wear if not for the death problem. This was, after all, a good neighbourhood – dead people would probably not lose their teeth or boots on the way to a slab. Probably. Unless they were very nice boots. And maybe then, a Gorange would find Asca’s body and he could be interred appropriately in his family grave.
Nice and tidy!
One Stone, Chapter 49
Trot past the guards, look like you belong there. Rafe unslung the book from his back and pulled it up underneath his armpit, throwing his hair back over his shoulder while he went. With an alarming efficiency, people moved out of his way – pushing open doors, stepping out of his path. Always the same basic conversation snippet.
“Ah, you’re sent by-
“And that’s the book-
“Ah, that way, then. Lord Gorange is waiting for you.”
Nano Types
This year I sat down and looked at what kind of stories make good NanoWriMos. While some folk see Nanowrimo as an opportunity to burn through a practice they’ve never finished, I learned, last year, that I don’t need that. While I feel bad about missing it this year – none other than Christie Yant and Amanda Davies both encouraged me to do it – I’m still proud of what I did finish.
I think for me, a Nano is a novel that’s allowed some excuses. It can be derivative, it can be simplistic, it can be compressed. What’s important is finishing something, so it lends itself to certain kinds of stories.
I’ve never been one for The Sprawling Epic. I think you can do sprawling epics without dragging one story on endlessly, artificially trawling the same cast of characters across a huge expanse of time and space and forcing them to matter to dozens of political structures or narratives. On the other hand, a Sprawling Epic that’s made up out of short, punchy, pulpy stories? That I like. If every part of your story is worth reading then I will happily devour more and more of it. Game of Thrones? If you started reading it when it was new you’d be fifteen years later without resolution or conclusion. You’d have a very pretty, very stylish alternate history, and some folk like that (clearly), but it’s really not what I want. I want every part of a story that I read to matter.
One Nano I wanted to do this year was to take another (much bigger) story and break it down into a smaller version with a better narrative/characterisation. This was actually tripped up this year in part by the furore around HP Lovecraft and re-examining my relationship to that work. I mean, I still like it, but I think this re-examination makes it even better and gives my idea further refinement. I think this is a good format for a Nano – condensing an existing story. After all, we’re all telling stories to a structure of sorts, we might as well make sure we’re honest about it.
Another thing I thought might make a fun idea is a sequence of novellae. Four little stories, maybe about 12kish words, which were… well, I was just going to make smut. Alas, I wasn’t able to really dedicate the time – and privacy – it takes to write good, long-form smut. That, and it’s often harder to get good feedback on and refine this sort of stuff.
Finally, I was thinking of a short mystery story, which was meant to be much more about the character central to it, than it was to the story she went through. This is the hardest one for me because while she is wholly formed, smart and sharp in my mind, I cannot for the life of me tell you what she does, where she goes, or who she meets. And I barely even know her name.
One Stone, Chapter 48
Inside the church, four soldiers sat, wringing the rain out of their clothes and hair. Vince’s own hair was remarkably resistant to the rain, but poor Gael, with her long braid, she looked like she’d dived into the river. Brother Fratarelli’s seat at the head of the table was still, his hands folded, perhaps in prayer.
Leigh groused as the sound of broken glass tinkled from nearby. “Riots still going huh.”
“Where’d you think those bodies came from?” Stannisfeld asked, confused. “I mean, of course the riots are still going on.”
Leigh tapped her fingertips on the table, resting her elbow on the table and her chin on her hand. She was sitting on her bag, supplies forming a decent booster. “Can’t really do anything about them, can we?”
“It should wear itself out in time. Timoritians are very punctual people.” Stannisfeld said, waving a hand.
NaNoWriMo 2014
Hey, Talen, are you doing Nanowrimo this year? Oh? Oh. Oh, okay.
NanoWriMo and I have a weird relationship in that I’ve known about it for about seven years but last year was the first year I bothered to actually give it a shot. What’s more, last year was the year I was also writing another book at the same time, and writing Game Pile reviews and I was studying for my end-of-year exams, a net workload that at the time I felt would have crushed me, but which I, as it happened, retaliated by crushing it first. I wrote my entire Nano in eight days, a statistic that I will now rub in with this chart:
Now this made me feel very special and cool at the time, and that feeling lasted for maybe a few more days until I realised two things. One, that I received absolutely no special cookie for what I had done, and two, that even as much as I liked the story and as short, tropey and fun as I wanted it to be, it still had problems that I wasn’t really fixing. My first NanoWriMo did however give me a taste for what I could do if I planned ahead and had a clear, deliberate structure. While the Sixth Age of Sand is an unfocused mess of a story with only two or three highlights, I felt that Immortal Engine was a story which clearly knew what it wanted to be about and was building towards it.
I had all sorts of possible plans for Nanowrimo this year, which I felt was a really good exercise for a particular type of novel. For some folk, Nano is the urge to get off the couch and finish a novel, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem I have. While I still have a number of Nano concepts kicking around we run skidding headlong into my new problem that flows from this:
Almost Nobody Reads My Work.
I’m sorry, I know that might sound petulant but trust me it’s not. It’s not that I’m mad at people for not reading my work, it’s that I very realistically have to face that writing a novel in eight days is all people know about it. I have written a novel in eight days and there are friends of mine who couldn’t write a novel in that whole month. By finishing early I saw people flagging and despairing of my progress, people who I did not want to discourage. What I took from that, at the time, was that I should, at the very least, not be such of a showy smart-arse, while, if I wanted my stuff to be read, I was going to have to get a lot better at making sure people saw what I was doing.
Catch-22.
With that in mind I thought I’d start my NanoWrimo late. No harm in that, right? I finished I’d finish my classwork (which turned out to be very stressful and hard). Then I’d finish One Stone for the month, backlog those, and then, sometime around the 20th of the month, I’d start on my NanoWrimo and nobody would feel like I was showing off if I finished it. And if I did finish it… it would probably just be another feeling of…
‘Hey he finished a book in eight days.’
‘Hey, neat. Should we read it?’
‘Nah.’
Again, there is nothing wrong with not reading my work. I can’t stress this enough. It’s not that I resent people for not reading my work. It’s that connecting with readers is the problem I have, as a writer, right now, not an inability to finish a story.
I try to encourage everyone I know to create and it has, to some extent, had some success, but despite writing pretty much constantly for years now I find my own ability to reach readers – that is, people who want to read my stuff and not out of any emotional obligation – is embarassingly weak.
So with that in mind, I instead decided to finish One Stone. Then when I did that… maybe I’d see about giving a NanoWrimo a try. As of a few hours ago, I did that. Chapters go up normally. There are seven days left in the month. I have, this month, already written about 40k words of pure fiction. I am, in my own mind, quite done with NanoWrimo’s parameters.
But I will have a see if I produce anything else for the month. A few of these ideas, after all… are pretty fun.
Just… don’t hold your breath. We’ll see.
One Stone: Chapter 47
Kivis twirled the hook in her hand. Aderyn may have moved like a kingfisher, darting down to lampposts and gutters, but she was at least careful picking a route where Kivis could follow with a long, galloping, hook-assisted leap after her. They’d made their way half-way across the city, which was a useless measurement when the city had such a strange, wriggling border as Timoritia. There were points where the walls of the city folded inwards, points where they’d crossed the river by running along bridge towers’ parapets.
The house down on the ground level broke most of the rules of the homes in Timoritia. Rather than leaning against every other house, pressed into a tiny space, it had a space of around three ems around it on all sides, and a high metal fence protecting it. While the property ran up against a city wall, the wall stood far away from it, and had actual spikes jutting out from it to discourage even the birds.
One Stone: Anticipation!
I’m going to have some Words about Nanowrimo later this week but tomorrow’s a One Stone chapter! And you know how I am about those. Except you might not be!
Right now I’ve been working very hard on finishing all of One Stone. It’s almost done. Partly this is because I want to finish it and spend the rest of the year relaxing. The question I have is: If I do finish it, do you think you want to read it all, or should I still release chapters week by week?
One Stone, Chapter 46
The busy streets were not a place you wanted to be, unless you were part of that aching, roiling swell of angry people, smashing into and against one another. It was a mass of limbs and shouting, of graceless rage. It was no place for anyone who didn’t already approach life full of resentment and spite, but Ligier Rangst fit in perfectly well.
“Move it you fucking peasants,” he bellowed, raising one huge arm, elbow out, pounding and punching his way through the press of people. Bright green jacket flared behind him with every wild swing. A thoughtful man might consider how punching and kicking and fighting everyone smaller than him was slowing him down, but Ligier wasn’t really a thoughtful man.
A thoughtful man might notice the two figures in the crowd moving behind him with stout boots tied up high, work pants rolled low and knives in their hands. The push and pull of the crowd, the swell and the slack, they pulled them further away from Ligier at some points and pushed them closer together.
One Stone, Chapter 45
Timoritia’s working class as a culture tended towards a very fair view of the world, a sort of all-purpose good intention. Unfortunately in any outbreak of public violence, that intention takes on an ugly, unthinking form. The first rocks thrown hit fancy houses, but high metal fences and good brickwork meant the heave of the crowd had to find some other place to release its stress.
A hole in the rain, the cold and the discontent, gave people some focus. The gates of Westminster were high as cliffs to the raging and bellowing crowd, crashed against them moment to moment, empty yells at a crownless kingdom.
There wasn’t even a chant, no great rhyme, no reason for it. It’d started like that, at first – sure, there was something about getting paid, or a stipend, or a king? – but eventually it became about that guy who had looked at me funny and the whole brawling mass of scuffling, outraged people ramming against the limitations the city put around them.
The city could look, from the top down, like a series of pipes. Down through those channels flowed the people of Timoritia, unsure, angry, and loud. Where no general’s voice called out, they bellowed and swung and fought – an undirected mass of slow-motion violence, unsure of what even it fought for.
Continue Reading →
One Stone, Chapter 44
“So, what do you expect to see at a coronation, anyway?” Rafe asked, shuffling with his hands in his pocket, through the crowds outside of Westminster. Crowds. Why the hell were there any crowds outside the palace? Who would gather for this anyway? Some guy gets a hat?
As far as Rafe knew, he’d never been in any city in the world but Timoritia, and he was keenly aware that his limited perspective probably accepted a host of things that didn’t have to be considered normal as normal. There were still things that stood out though. Right now, for example, people were flocked over both sides of the street despite the rain, the gloomy ash-coloured clouds heaving rain down upon rank upon rank of people huddled under hastily constructed tarpaulins and awnings for The Coronation. Some part of Rafe was sure that you went inside when it rained and you left the pathways clear for people who had Things To Do.
One Stone, Chapter 43
Human spirits were only meant to endure so much, in a city like Timoritia. People could be poor and they could be cranky and they could occasionally be bristlingly drunk, but they shouldn’t have to feel afraid, properly afraid, very often. This was the philosophy of the city that Patty, or Padraig to the right people, had internalised, long ago, and he was finding himself endlessly uncomfortable with the way he kept glancing over his shoulder. There were only so many minutes in a day and now he was spending a significant number of them looking for the tips of a very big shoe to drop.
One Stone, Chapter 42
Tenner had never dealt with the military before he’d met Marko. He’d read a few adventure books, though, and travelled on the train to visit Hadrian where he’d seen craters in the ground from grenades. In his mind, he felt he held a good image of what it looked like when a grenade was thrown in the midst of a group of people.