There’s a passing reference in Undead Flight to “the new mooring tower in Upper Haupstadt,” and I was trying to visualize what that might look like for the current work in progress. Here’s Midjourney’s best shot at it:
Midjourney Monday
Category: World Building
State of the Author, Start of 2025
My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).
Continue reading “State of the Author, Start of 2025”The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger
There’s a famous quote by Alfred Hitchcock, about how (paraphrasing) a bomb going off in a scene with no buildup is surprise, while watching the buildup to a bomb going off, knowing there is a bomb about to go off, is suspense. I’ve been reading a bunch of Marie Belloc Lowndes lately, and it seems safe to say that Hilaire Belloc’s sister was a suspense writer, when she wasn’t writing flat-out soap opera. Her best-known novel is The Lodger,(1) which is available for free on Gutenberg or very cheaply on Amazon (basically you’re paying to spare yourself the hassle of getting the book into kindle by yourself).
Essentially, this is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting,(2) a former butler and his very prim second wife, who have gone into business for themselves, subletting rooms in their rental house with the understanding that they will feed the lodgers and clean up after them etc. Business has been bad, and the husband, a true-crime buff, has been distracting himself by following the exploits of a Ripper-like serial killer called the Avenger, who seems to specialize in killing formerly respectable women who’ve gone off the skids due to alcoholism(3). A young policeman acquaintance keeps Mr. Bunting supplied with all the latest news on the case, including some tidbits that he really should keep to himself. By the merest of accidents, Mrs. Bunting ends up being the one who answers the door when a gaunt, nervous gentleman shows up asking for lodgings.
Continue reading “The Novels of Marie Belloc Lowndes: The Lodger”Stupid Fan Predictions About Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey
Everybody’s buzzing about this newly announced project, so I thought I’d lay down a few markers about how I think this is going to play out. Please note, I don’t have any inside information nor do I necessarily approve of the decisions I’m describing below, this is just a few thoughts from someone who finds both the Odyssey and Nolan’s movies to be kind of interesting.
Continue reading “Stupid Fan Predictions About Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey”Hunter Healer King, Book 2 is Here!
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. First I helped Maxim kill a werewolf, then I kissed him, and then I insulted him when I found out that he was roughly twice as old as he looked. Now Maxim is about to be crowned King of the Stormcrows aboard a luxury airship, and he has invited me to attend. But this ship feels more like a cage with each passing hour: a passenger’s horse has turned up missing, a crewman has turned up dead, and before it all started, I heard noises in the cargo hold. But Maxim has a mind as sharp as my banishing dagger, and between us, we aim to put an end to whatever monster lurks aboard the ship, no matter how awkward we feel around each other right now…
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. With my coronation mere hours away, something stalks the shadows of this vessel: a monster that answers to a human being..but who? And for what purpose? Despite our recent…complications, Chloe’s courage and loyalty make her my strongest ally as I pursue our enemies, and brace for the dreadful pomp and circumstance of my own coronation. The crown of the Stormcrows may await me, but first, we have a mystery to solve – together.
State of the Author, 4Q2024
-First off, I think my books are all in Kindle Unlimited now, free to anyone with a subscription to KU. If you see any sign that they are not in KU, please let me know in the comments.
–Undead Flight (Hunter Healer King Book 2) is now in the hands of my proofreaders. Barring complications, should be ready to publish by Christmas time. Ebook cover is done; blurb is done with AI help (stay tuned, my post on the blurbing process will be out tomorrow. Print cover is dependent on my final cleanup of the manuscript to determine page length.
-Also started Hunter Healer King Book 3 by writing a fairly dark and distressing scene from the last third of the book. This is kind of suboptimal, because stitching together scenes written out of order tends to add (wo)manhours to the first draft process, but I hadn’t figured out the opening scene at that point. I don’t know when it will be released but I know that I am aiming for Christmas of 2025.
-I have had a sci-fi Pride and Prejudice retelling in development for a long time; finally got the first scene down. No projected completion date at this time. My main inspiration for this concept was, weirdly enough, Star Wars: A New Hope. If you dig deep enough into the filmographies of the supporting cast, you will find one with a Pride and Prejudice connection in his earlier career. Regrettably, the catchy working title explicitly references Star Wars, so the official title will probably be something rather sedate of the “Pride and…” format.
-New ebook covers using AI art for Shadow Captain and Spider Star are done; still need to do new paperback covers for them, and ebook/hardcover for the 2 in 1 volume for the duology. Projected release date for the 2 in 1 is first/second quarter of 2025.
-Early stages of AI art covers for the Jaiya Series and Ancestors of Jaiya series. No text layout yet. A four in one of Ancestors might come out in third quarter of 2025; a seven in one of the full metaseries might be sometime in 2026 but a lot could go sideways between now and then.
Writer PSA
Always try to collect all your notes on a particular story in one place somewhere. I was reading some books about writing mysteries, remembered a failed mystery idea(1) I had done a lot of world building for, went to look up the Scrivener file I had for it, and discovered that a). it took me an embarrassingly long time to find it because I’d named the file after a relatively trivial story element I wasn’t interested in using anymore and b). although I had successfully corralled the setting notes om scriv(2) and some general ideas on the two detectives, I did not have notes on my plot ideas.
And okay, when I did a deep dive into the notebooks I was using around the time I was brainstorming this, I found that my plot ideas were mostly pretty lame, and that was why I hadn’t taken them seriously enough to put them into Scrivener, but I would have saved myself a certain amount of trouble if I had.
(1) it was one of the iterations of the Feisty Girl/Posh Guy concept that eventually led to Wolf’s Trail, would have been maybe 3a or 4a on this list or this list.
(2) Incredibly important because I had zeroed in on, and even mapped, a tiny bit of Slovenia in an alternate post-WWI, with history on why it was previously its own principality going back several generations and including an alternate wife for a guy who saved Emperor Franz-Josef from an assassination attempt and an additional daughter for Queen Victoria.
Rings of Power: impressions of Episodes 202-203
Disclaimers: Spoilers below the cut for anything that crosses my mind, from Tolkien arcana to details from later episodes confirmed by reviewers, to the weirdest rumors about the later stages of the show.
Short summary: There’s still clunkers big and small, at a writing level, and there’s at least one major screwup in the choice of music to score a particular scene. But I enjoyed these, felt like these worked well overall, with the “earthier” 203 maybe being somewhat less good than the highly philosophical and mystical 202. I also feel like I’m getting a better sense of which first season choices in story-telling were justifiable, and which weren’t.
Continue reading “Rings of Power: impressions of Episodes 202-203”Rings of Power Rewatch: Episodes 101-103
Nothing deep to go over here, just a few general thoughts:
Continue reading “Rings of Power Rewatch: Episodes 101-103”Weird Wednesday: Worldbuilding the Empire of Noricum
My main model for Noricum, where Wolf’s Trail takes place, was the Hapsburg Empire, especially the later, more decentralized version at the end of the nineteenth century. But the more I dug into it, the more I discovered that the Hapsburg Emperor had a much more hands-on role, even in that era, than I really wanted the fictional counterparts to have. So here’s the situation with the Emperor of Noricum in the books…
Continue reading “Weird Wednesday: Worldbuilding the Empire of Noricum”
Jaglion Press 