Fire in the Hole

 My current WIP is a bit noir, a bit mad, a rock and roller of a story that runs at breakneck speed. It's utterly different to anything I've done before, and it'll need a lot of editing once it's done. It's really fun to write though, I'm bursting with it, so I thought I'd share a sample with you.

 This is the opening of the story, in which we meet the MC Trist and his peculiar companion;


       The tall man stepped over a smouldering rug. Around him fires flickered and bodies lay on the carpet, in the chairs, one even half out of the window.

“Might have been a bit over the top,” he said.

“You do the sword, I do the fire.”

“Yes,” Trist said, looking around. “I just hadn’t expected quite that much fire.”

“They’re down, aren’t they?”

“The problem, Feng, is that not many of them are likely to get up again.”

He found a little blaze that was feeling its way towards the curtains, and stamped it out in a billow of sparks and ash. Next to it was the man in the window. Trist pulled him away. Glass crackled and fell to the floor. A shard six inches long was lodged in the man’s throat, and Trist grimaced.

Looking out, he saw the garden below was deserted. Well, not quite. A lone gardener fled for his life and vanished as Trist watched.

“Trouble?” Feng asked.

“There will be. The servants will go straight to the Watch. We’ll have company very soon.”

“We knew that would happen.”

He shrugged. “Maybe not so fast.”

“Lucky you’ve got me then,” Feng said.

Movement drew Trist’s eye. One of the slumped figures had begun to stir. A young man, hair singed and clothes sooty, his back turned. He pushed up on his hands and then froze as Trist’s blade kissed the skin under his throat.

“Had a nice rest?” Trist asked. “I’m so glad. Fresh minds find answers so quickly, don’t you think?”

The man was young, probably a few years short of twenty. A fold at the outside of his eyes, which swivelled around the room. When they fell on Feng he gave a little whimper.

“Let’s start with some easy questions,” Trist said. “What’s your name?”

“My – my name?”

“Don’t you have one?”

“Uh… Anterl.”

“Well, good evening, Anterl. I trust you’ve had a good day? Up until the last few minutes, anyway. No? Well, here’s another question. How do you like working for Margon Sleeth?”

“It’s all right,” the youth said.

“You like working for Sleeth,” Trist said. “The drug dealer. The man who brings waste and death to hundreds. You like it.”

No answer. The youth trembled.

 The scene goes on, but that's enough for now. The story seems to have more dialogue and less narrative than usual for me, which wasn't a conscious choice (well, not at first). It also has a proper anti-hero, and later a strange lot of characters, some human and some not so much. And it's really huge fun.

 Hope you liked the taster. If you see anything obviously wrong or clanky, please let me know. I reckon I can take it y'know. Come to that, let me know if you enjoyed it, the old ego could always use a stroke...

Bad for Good

 A lot of the time in Fantasy, the main character is a Good Guy. Not just good, but Good. He's the epitome of noble niceness. Like Rand in Wheel of Time, who to some extent is an avatar of the Creator himself. Or Frodo in LOTR, honourably ignoring his own fears in order to Do Good for the world. Or like pretty much any main character from David Gemmell's books, who often add to it by spouting little homilies about what it means to be Good.

 I don't think I've ever known someone as pure as that. One person in a million is awake enough for the spiritual or divine life, as Thoreau said, and he'd never met one ("How could I have looked him in the face?") People just don't work that way, not even in Hollywood - well, mostly. It doesn't ring true to me.

 I've tried to make my MC's a bit more nuanced. Kai in Blessed Land doesn't even know what good is, or what's right; he's tormented by doubts all the time. In Songs of Sorrow Calesh does know, but he's clever enough to realise that his certainty might be based on a flawed faith. But I think with the new novel that I've found an MC who's more complex, more of an anti-hero, than anyone I've written of before.

 Trist has a terrible backstory, one in which he did something awful out of rage and grief. It was revenge, though not undeserved by the victim. He then left home before retribution came, and in the years since has won the companionship of a phoenix, an intrinsically Good creature drawn to Trist because of the extremes of light and dark within him. This empathetic bond pushes Trist to do only good things, though he can sometimes be violent or cruel in pursuit of them. The greater good is what matters.

 Now Trist has been called home, and of course he encounters all the bitterness of past events and his own memories. He's given every reason to commit violence for its own sake, to give as good as he gets. Whether he does so... I'm not even sure myself, yet. The book is quite noir in places, though the mood is changed by the hope and brightness of the phoenix, so it's never quite as dark as The Big Sleep, for example. But I think Trist will find that the darkness inside has never entirely gone away, whatever layers of light have been laid over it.

 This has got me thinking about myself. A lifelong loner, watching society from the outside. At a party you can find me off to the side watching other people have fun. (Typical writer, eh?) Except that 5 years ago I met Caz, and we're now married with two wonderful daughters, and I find myself...not so dark anymore.Not so gloomy. And yet there are times, moments when I'm alone, when I can still feel the old dark inside, and I know it will never quite go away.

 Write what you know, eh?

The Weird Ones

There's an advert on TV at the moment which says there are 3.5 billion women in the world, and no two are the same.

 The truth is that almost all of them are exactly the same, in every way that matters. All people are. They want the same things, dream the same dreams, eat the same foods. They fit into society as though moulded to it, which of course they are. Governments spend a lot of time and money teaching children to be good little adults, so we grow up to pay our taxes and not cause trouble. And so we're all made to be the same.

 Strangely, small societies tolerate differences better than large ones. A hunter-gatherer clan of 200 people will accept little Bobby's weird habits, because someday he might see something everyone else missed. But a nation of 65 million is harder to manage, the leaders don't want people shooting off on their own all the time, so they tell Bobby to stop it and be quiet. We're taught to conform. Fit in and don't make a fuss, right?

 But you know, the people who do make a fuss, who shoot off sideways the moment they see something interesting... those are the fun ones.

 They're the ones we write about. JK Rowling once said she stopped the Potter books because nobody wants to read about Ron, Harry and Hermione playing bingo at Hogwarts when they're 60 years old. What's interesting about that? Nobody would read the story of Anna Smith, a Hufflepuff in Harry's year who isn't mentioned because she never does anything. And the truth is we're nearly all like Anna. We're here, but we make up the ranks. The faceless extras of life, filling the background and no more unique than a sardine in a can.

 (Yes, I include myself in this. Henry David Thoreau once said only one man in a million was truly awake, and he'd never met one. Neither have I. And I think one in a billion might be a closer estimate.)

 But the most interesting of all? The ordinary person who is thrown into something big, and finds out he/she isn't ordinary after all. Like Harry Potter, who's just an ordinary wizard (yes, I know), quite talented but no genius, with nothing to make him stand out except Voldemort. These are the people we write about, or read about. They're the ones I like in life too - the wounded, the misfits, people with stories written on their faces and told in the things they do.

 Most of the time they're called the weird ones. You know, the people who make us say, "everyone's got one friend like that." But I like 'em.

 Keep not fitting in, folks. It would be boring without you.

Always be Fun

 I've had a publishing offer from a company called Olympia. They want to publish The Death of Ghosts!

Unfortunately Olympia want me to make a "contribution" to their costs. They're asking me to pay, in short, and that feels a lot like vanity publishing. Olympia have a network and they could market my book well, I'm sure, but with £2,000 or more to spend I could market it myself. I don't really see the point, so I've turned Olympia down.

 The right choice, there's no real doubt of that. But still, it feels terrible. What if nobody else offers? Ever?

 Obviously I think they will. Death of Ghosts is a good book, one which Olympia described as "well-written with an absorbing narrative, we see potential in the work." Well, if they see it, others likely will too - and if not with Death of Ghosts, they might see it with The Pyramids of Saqoma, or Isles of Eternity. And if not? Then I'll carry on publishing as an indie, building my audience inch by plodding inch, and I'll sure as hell carry on writing.

 A bump in the road. That's all.

 The important thing is too keep going. There's a saying that behind every successful author there's a failed author who didn't give up. That's the sort of glib comment which usually drives me mad, but there's truth in it. Keep writing, folks. Produce a bad book, that's fine, the gods and little fishies know I have. A bad book, if finished, is better than every unstarted novel in history. Go write it. If it stinks, who cares? You'll learn a lot and your next book will be better.

 And you'll have fun. There'll be moments of tearing out your hair, times when you can't force the words onto the page no matter how you try... but there'll also be fun. If this game is for you, if this is your calling, there will always be fun. That's what keeps you coming back until the words flow again, pouring out of your fingertips like water from a hose, and it's the best feeling there is.

 Please don't tell my wife I said that.

 Done for now. Take care squirrels.