Category Archives: Announcements

May 20

Pick up Auckland Allies complete boxed set

Posted on by

I’ve released an Auckland Allies complete boxed set on both Amazon and Draft2Digital (which distributes to everyone who isn’t Amazon, including libraries). I decided to take all the Auckland Allies books out of KDP Select, Amazon’s exclusive subscription-based distribution, because you only really get borrows there if you play Amazon’s silly game and pay them for placement in search results, and I refuse to do that. This means that I can now put it “wide” across all of the distributors.

I’ve also entered it into the Indie Author Project‘s annual contest, which also includes distribution to libraries (probably many of the same libraries as Draft2Digital, but quite possibly some different ones as well). Given the number of entries they get, I don’t have high expectations of a win, but you never know; I think it’s a good piece of work, and maybe they will too. I’ve also entered The Rediscovery of Hardlac, my latest Gryphon Clerks novel, because why not?

My plan is to apply for a BookBub promotion for the boxed set, which will involve discounting it, but the price I have it at is already less than the cost of the individual books added together. So if you haven’t read Auckland Allies, or have only read one or two of the books, and you’d like to get the whole set at once, this is your opportunity. It’s a fun, adventurous urban fantasy series with my trademark ensemble cast, set in my hometown, and I’m very fond of it. I hope you’ll like it too.

(Amazon links are affiliate links.)

Jan 05

2023 Best Books List

Posted on by

Over on my review blog, I’ve just put up my tenth(!) annual Best of the Year list, analyzing and summarizing my reading for 2023 and highlighting my highest recommendations. It’s been a big year for reading, partly because I got Covid and spent several days in bed; 102 books, of which 88 made my recommended list.

Big thanks to my friend Steve, who gave me his old Kobo when he upgraded, enabling me to borrow ebooks from my local library system.

Aug 08

The Well-Presented Manuscript, 2022 Edition

Posted on by

I’ve just released the third edition of The Well-Presented Manuscript: Just What You Need to Know to Make Your Fiction Look Professional (link is to the book’s website, which also functions as a draft/taster for it).

I originally wrote The Well-Presented Manuscript because I could tell, based on the number of authors I saw making simple errors in their prose mechanics, that there was a need for a straightforward guide to give them the instruction that their schools had clearly not provided, or at least not provided effectively. (I recently read a book by an English teacher with an MFA in creative writing who made a number of very basic mistakes in punctuation and vocabulary, so what chance do his students have?) As I’ve continued to read and review books from a wide range of authors and publishers, I’ve gained a clearer view of exactly which issues are the most common, and found a few more that I’d not seen before or hadn’t thought through completely. Hence the new (third) edition.

Compared with the 2020 edition, the 2022 edition is 40% longer, and the popular Commonly Confused Words section has grown by more than a third. (Not sure if you mean diffuse or defuse, crevasse or crevice, gambit, gamut, or gauntlet? We have you covered.)

It’s now based on an analysis of more than 25,000 errors in close to a thousand books from publishers of all sizes: self, small, medium and large. It includes new sections on American versus British English, whether “alright” is all right, “lay” versus “lie,” and the use of singular “they”.

Other sections have been thoroughly revised and expanded, and there’s yet more advice on improving your comma usage in specific circumstances.

Everything is still directed at improving the working fiction writer’s grasp of mechanics and usage, so that your prose reads smoothly and your readers can immerse themselves in your story.

The Well-Presented Manuscript featured in Kevin J. Anderson’s NaNoWriMo bundle for 2020, which is why I brought out the second edition that year, and if you got it in that bundle, you will not get an automatic update with the new edition. If you’ve previously bought it somewhere else, you may well get the update for free – synch your device and see. It will depend on the outlet’s specific policies.

If you don’t get the update automatically, it’s only $3.49 USD, and I think well worth it. If it helps you discover even one thing you’re getting wrong and correct it, my job is done.

Jul 20

Auckland Allies series is complete!

Posted on by

With the publication of Book 5, Memorial Museum*, I’ve now completed my Auckland Allies series. I’m not promising anything one way or the other about a sequel series; all I’ll say is that, for now, the story is complete.

Time, then, to reflect back on what I enjoyed about writing it, the decisions I made, and what I’ve learned.

*Links to the books in this post are Amazon affiliate links.

From Plan to Execution

When I first started the Auckland Allies series, I wrote a post about urban fantasy worldbuilding reflecting on the choices I was making. I asked myself five questions, and the answers I chose shaped the series in, I think, satisfactory ways.

1. Out, or Maskerade?

In other words, do people in general know that magic exists, or not? I decided for this one that, initially at least, they did not, since that gave me a significant change I could make if I wanted to, whereas deciding that the existence of magic was publicly known from the start left me no room to go from there to a world where it wasn’t. (Barring memory modification on a massive scale.)

This was a good decision in several ways. Most notably, it led me to create the Guardians, a group whose entire mission was keeping the Secret of magic’s existence from the mundanes. This made them into secondary antagonists (particularly in the last book), as the Allies had to navigate around, or outright oppose, their agenda. To up the ante, I made the main representatives of the Guardians that the Allies encounter Australian, adding the sibling-like rivalry between New Zealand and Australia into the mix. And the Guardians formed part of the backstory of one of my main characters, Dan, who had trained to become one, but left disillusioned.

2. New, or Always There?

This decision was between magic that’s always been around versus magic that’s newly emerged through some apocalyptic event. I decided on “always been around,” in part because I wanted to introduce some elements of secret history and reference traditional magic systems like Goetia and Enochian. I always had the idea, though, that magic was not fully understood, that traditional magic was trial-and-error like traditional medicine, and that the application of science to magic would potentially enable my characters to gain an edge. This led to the invention of a secret manuscript by Sir Isaac Newton (who, historically, spent about as much effort on alchemy and speculative theology as he did on physics) that gave key clues to how magic worked, and with the addition of the character of Lynn, a mathematician and physicist, I had the edge I was looking for. My characters were always planned to be relatively low-powered, a metaphor of sorts for New Zealand itself, and in order to make it plausible that they kept winning against more powerful and better-resourced enemies, I had to give them an advantage through the application of ingenuity that their enemies (old-fashioned and blinkered in their thinking) couldn’t replicate.

This also, as I noted in my original post, enabled me to develop how magic worked in the course of the series, rather than be stuck with a static magic system, and to use previous failures or challenges as a stimulus to develop new solutions. I love a clever, innovative solution, and this approach gave me plenty of scope for them.

3. What Supernaturals Exist?

Rather than populate my books with more flavours of fae, vampires, shifters, undead and what not than Ben & Jerry’s has ice cream, I initially set out to just have human magic-users. I did note in my original post that I wanted to explore the idea of angels and demons, that I wanted to have a character–Dan, as it turned out–who had a particular theory about what they were (complex spells with an AI-like interface, rather than actual beings), which might or might not be correct. This enabled me to set up a situation in which several characters disagreed about how magic worked, which I think is realistic, and enabled me to explore the theme of working together even though you disagree.

I also noted that I wasn’t ruling out lycanthropes–who wouldn’t be shapeshifters; the transformation would be mental, because a physical transformation was more magic than I was planning on. I did, indeed, introduce such lycanthropes in Book 4, Wolf Park.

What I didn’t initially plan on was ghosts, which come into Book 2, Ghost Bridge. I put a bit of sciencebabble around what they were, but they’re basically what you think of when you think of ghosts (though Dan, fussy as always, insists that that’s a reductive way of looking at them).

4. Training or Genetics?

Whenever you put magic in your book, you need to think about (or, at least, I think you ought to think about) whether it is inherent or learned. The inherited ability to do magic creates a haves-and-have-nots scenario, as in Harry Potter, and an inherent elitism. This is a dynamic with a lot of potential for storytelling and conflict, so I went with it.

Genetics (at least, for anything complex) also tends to work on a power law, where a few people have a lot of the feature, a larger number of people have a little, and there’s a steep drop-off. I wanted to feature people on the lower part of the power curve, using their limited power creatively.

In the last couple of books, I did something to subvert the “magic is something you’re born with or without” setup, which I won’t go into in depth because it’s a spoiler. But I couldn’t have done that without creating the setup in the first place.

5. How Does Magic Work?

This is a question I continued to explore throughout the series, but I started out with “human minds mesh with something quantum [waves hands vaguely] and produce physical effects” and built from there. One of my main characters was an electromancer, who could use his very minimal level of power to move electrons and his training as an electronics engineer to make that extremely useful, in a fun alternative to the Dresden Files setup where magic and technology don’t play well together. I kept things mostly vague, meaning I could bring in new possibilities if they would be cool for the plot, but also kept the power low-level unless the characters were willing to pay a cost. At a couple of points, I have Steampunk Sally use her deep connection to the city to produce effects that she couldn’t produce alone (that’s her in giant illusory form on the cover of Unsafe Harbour).

I tried to make sure that the characters weren’t using magic to solve their problems; they were using intelligence and courage and teamwork to solve their problems, and that involved magical effects.

The Role of the City

I did mention, early in my planning post, that part of the reason I wanted to write an urban fantasy was that it would be enjoyably different to use real-world settings instead of ones I made up from scratch. What I didn’t anticipate was how much that would influence the story.

I’ve reflected elseblog on how the real-world locations gave me ideas for blocking and action that I wouldn’t have otherwise come up with. What I hadn’t anticipated, though, was how much of a celebration of Auckland the books would become, and how the story would unfold in a way that couldn’t have been done in any other city in the world.

The first book, Auckland Allies, kicked this off when the antagonists decided to anchor a magical summoning pentacle to five of the city’s extinct volcanoes. Not many world cities have 50 or so volcanic sites scattered about, so right there this was a distinctly Auckland story.

Book 2, Ghost Bridge, is even more so. The bridge of the title, Grafton Bridge, is a city landmark, but the important part is that it has the hospital near one end, a luxury hotel at the other, and a cemetery right next to (and in fact partly under) it. There’s also a statue of Zealandia, the personified spirit of New Zealand, nearby. The cemetery includes a mass grave, right next to the bridge, for Catholics whose original graves were removed as part of putting through a motorway in the 1960s, and buses run regularly on a loop that includes the bridge. All of these real-world facts play into the story, which wouldn’t be possible without them.

Book 3, Unsafe Harbour, celebrates the beautiful Auckland Harbour; it could have worked in other harbour cities, I suppose, but the details would have been different. Likewise, Book 4, Wolf Park, features several iconic locations which would have broad parallels in other cities, but the exact details are distinctively Auckland. Book 5, Memorial Museum, pulls it all together and incidentally celebrates the city’s excellent museum.

Jim Butcher famously set the Dresden Files in Chicago because there was already an urban fantasy series set in the other city he was considering (Cleveland, from memory), not because he had any connection to Chicago at all. He didn’t even visit it until he was well into writing the series, and notoriously gets some details wrong. I wanted to use Auckland in a much more intentional way.

People sometimes talk about cities almost being characters in fantasy novels, and I did that very nearly literally at one point, with Sally embodying Auckland in the form of Zealandia. Even apart from that, though, Auckland as a setting is definitely front and centre in the series.

What I Learned

First of all, I learned that I really enjoy writing fiction set in the city where I’ve lived all my life, and featuring people who share my culture. I sometimes roll my eyes a bit at people who get all overly excited about books that, while lacking in important features like plot, characterization, storytelling, and basic writing mechanics, are full of “representation”. But reflecting on my experience of writing Auckland Allies, I think I get a hint of why they’re excited (though I still think they’re too excited, and that the books are lacking in those other ways).

I learned that using a pre-existing setting, rather than building one from scratch, can add to a story in ways that are unpredictable, because it’s an externally imposed constraint. Constraints make good art. Not that I’m going to stop making up settings from scratch, but I might consider using more pre-existing things as inspiration that I have to work around. I also learned quite a bit about my city and its history (and other bits of history, too) in the course of researching for the books.

I learned that I love making overt pop-culture references and jokes, something else I miss when writing in a secondary world. Sparx the electromancer was my main vehicle for these, though Sally and Lynn also contributed. I made sure that Sparx’s fell a bit flat sometimes with the other characters, as part of his characterization.

I learned a few things about working with an ensemble cast, too, which I plan to share in a separate post.

What’s Next?

As I said at the start of this post, I’m not going to promise anything about what’s next. I’m notoriously bad at following through on such plans, for one thing. Also, like many writers since the start of the pandemic, I’m feeling stuck, not sure how to write anymore now that global events have knocked our mental model of the world spinning off its axis.

During the same period, I’ve had several family events that discombobulated me further. I feel like I need to write something tremendously fun, as relief from the existential angst we’re all feeling, or else tremendously important, but I don’t know how to start on either one. The projects I’ve tried to start all feel a bit flat.

The good news is that I did have tremendous fun finishing the Auckland Allies series, and I think you’ll have fun reading it. The last two books are, I feel, among my best work. Whatever comes next, I’m happy with that.

Feb 16

Some Decisions

Posted on by

My mother, who’s 94, is struggling with dementia, and I have been dealing with some practicalities around that. Inevitably, it’s got me thinking about my own mortality and posterity, and making some decisions.

Neither I nor any of my three siblings have children, and my wife’s nieces and nephews are in the USA. So decision number 1 is to work towards making it a lot easier for whoever has to deal with our estates and (if necessary) our affairs while we’re alive but not competent than it’s been for me and my wife dealing with my mother’s situation. So: clearing out unwanted junk (which will be difficult, since I’m not a tidy person and neither is my wife); getting enduring powers of attorney set up; leaving information and instructions about how to deal with things in general. I should be good at that; I’ve worked in IT for 25 years, I should know how to prepare for a handover.

Decision number 2 is what to do with my literary estate (if I can use such a high-flown term). My plan here is twofold. Firstly, I’m considering starting a digital archive of background material (notes, etc.) from New Zealand writers, to which they can release their data after their deaths for the use of future researchers. My alma mater, the University of Auckland, seems like a good place to hold this. I will need to have a discussion with someone or someones there about the possibilities.

Secondly, I’m currently planning to put a clause in my will that says if the material to which I hold the copyrights has not made more than $10,000 NZD in any one of the five years prior to my death, it all goes into the public domain. That’s my best hope of preserving it, rather than having it locked up for 70 years with nobody having any real interest in keeping it available, or even in existence. Public domain books are a treasure, and they’re more likely to be read and republished (and built upon by other writers – which inevitably will mean that my characters will be used in ways I wouldn’t approve of, but there’s a downside to everything).

Decision number 3 is about how to keep my mind active after I retire from work (hopefully more than 10 years away still). Rather than do the usual middle-class middle-aged guy thing and take up golf, which I have no interest in, I plan to take up Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been watching Critical Role on YouTube, and 5th edition seems like a lot more fun than the modified 1st edition that I played with a bunch of wasters back in the 90s. It’s a reasonably complex game that involves mental arithmetic, planning, improvisation, and interacting with a group, which sounds like an ideal retirement activity. Of course, if I happen to find the right group in the meantime, I could probably carve out some time to start earlier, but for sure I want to make it a retirement activity, alongside gardening, cooking, and, of course, writing.

I’m still working on decisions about what I’ll do next in terms of writing. The immediate priority is to get the final two books of Auckland Allies out. I have my cover guy working on covers for them now, and once they’re ready to go I’m going to start rereading and annotating the earlier books so that the notes go on Goodreads. The hope is that that (along with some discounts) will drum up a bit of interest, translating to sales of books 4 and 5 when they come out. And then, probably, a box set.

I also recently reread my Hand of the Trickster books in the hope of completing that series. Meanwhile, I’m also reading some classics, many but not all of them comedic classics, to get my mind working in the direction of writing more comedy. There are enough grim and serious books. We all need a few laughs.

Feb 22

Where Next for Mike’s Writing?

Posted on by

I’ve been in a writing slump lately.

Health issues starting in November have put me out of the habit of regular writing, and I’ve not made much progress on the books I was working on. Auckland Allies 4 still needs a polish-up before it’s ready to be published, and although I’m 20,000 words into the first book in my new Arcanists setting, it’s tough going, and I’m not really feeling it. I think I’ve taken the wrong direction with it somewhere.

I’ve been questioning where my writing is going in general, in fact. I celebrated a million words of published long-form fiction last year, and just as we often reassess our lives around milestone birthdays, I feel that a milestone like that calls for some reflection.

I recently read a book on Roger Zelazny (link is to my review on Goodreads; it won’t be published until May) that got me thinking. Zelazny is one of my favourite authors, and a direct inspiration for some of my own fiction, including several short stories that are among my most successful and that I’m most proud of. The book outlines how he had a brilliant, award-winning early career and was hailed (rightly) as an exciting and surprising new author with great potential, and then, once he became a full-time writer, was accused of having become “too commercial” and knocking out books with not enough development to explore his ideas to the full.

That’s not how he saw it, by the way. One reason, I think, that his books are so compact is that he decided early on that he wouldn’t overwrite or overexplain, that once he’d shown the reader something he wouldn’t go on talking about it but would move on to the next thing. To me, that makes his books concentrated, rich despite their typically short length. He also talks, in an interview included in the book, about how each book he wrote experimented with something that he considered a weakness, but that he tried to put in enough of what he knew he did well that even if the experiment failed, the book itself should still be able to succeed.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about what I want to achieve with my writing. I’ve always wanted to produce something – whether books or otherwise – that will be of lasting value. A lot of the work I do in my day job is with technology that will be replaced within a few years; it’s likely, if I live a decent length of time after I retire, that none of the work I did in IT will survive me. I’ve come to terms with that recently, and decided that it can still be the case that things are worth doing even if they don’t last and aren’t remembered; they had worth at the time. (The fact that I’ve got into cooking, which is inherently short-term in its usefulness but is definitely useful while it lasts, has a lot to do with this shift in philosophy.) Nevertheless, I would like to write books that aren’t just things of the moment, that people will still be reading after I’m gone.

Now, there are a couple of different kinds of books that are “of the moment” but don’t last. One is purely commercial, what I sometimes refer to as “extruded fiction product”; produced to meet a market demand, just like thousands of other books, with nothing about it that distinguishes it or gives it longevity. The other is the kind of book that wins acclaim and awards at the time it’s published, because it captures the zeitgeist so well; but because it captures the zeitgeist so well, if it doesn’t have anything else going for it, it dates rapidly and falls out of fashion.

You only have to look at old bestseller lists and awards lists to encounter dozens of both types. I personally feel that a lot of books that are winning awards at the moment are of the second type. People are tremendously excited about them because they fit so absolutely perfectly into this moment’s (particularly US) political landscape, but when that landscape inevitably shifts, there won’t be much else to keep them in favour. It’s like what I often say about books that are marketed as humourous: if the joke falls flat, you still need to be telling a good story with well-rounded characters, not just ringmastering a trope parade with a bunch of silly names. So, for example, I think Ann Leckie’s work will endure, because even though it does mesh so strongly into current politics, it also tells a powerful story and tells it in excellent prose. Other books, which I’ll refrain from calling out by name, will be forgotten as quickly as they became celebrated, because really the only thing they have going for them is that people see themselves in them who are not used to seeing themselves in books. And, I sincerely hope, they will go on to see themselves in plenty more books that also have a lot more than that going for them, and then they’ll look back on these ones with a nostalgic pang but see, in retrospect, that they were hollow chocolate bunnies.

I’m self-published. I’m not selling a lot of books, because honestly I’m terrible at marketing and I don’t enjoy it (plus what I write is in neither the current commercial mainstream nor the current critical mainstream); but that means that I can do anything I like, pretty much. I don’t have a publishing house to tell me I can’t, and I don’t have a big, vocal fanbase demanding that I produce a specific type of book or be lambasted. That kind of freedom is dangerous – I could easily fall into self-indulgent tripe that only I like – but it’s also powerful. I can experiment. I can try new things that I might fail at. If I realize that I’ve failed, I don’t need to release it; it’s not under contract, and I won’t drop off the Amazon charts and lose a huge income if I don’t constantly release books. I don’t make my living from writing.

So I can write something I care about, something that’s difficult for me, something that resonates with universals of humanity, something that is like the books I most like myself: a propulsive plot, characters with depth who are doing the right thing against the odds, some reflection to provoke thought (without preaching), a fresh and fascinating setting.

That’s inherently hard to do. I know that not only because I’m a writer and know how hard different writing things are, but also because I’m a reviewer, and of the many books I see, only a few of them manage it. I think it’s a goal worth reaching for, though.

What I need is to figure out exactly how to do it and then execute it.

I’ve done project work of various kinds for nearly 30 years; I’m used to figuring out how to do hard things and then executing them. The trick will be to find something that draws me in enough that I’ll stick with it through the difficult parts, because, as already noted, I don’t have to do this. Nobody’s making me.

So, concretely: I’m very close to finished with Auckland Allies 4, and I feel like it’s sound. I plan to polish that up and release it during the first half of this year.

Next after that could well be Auckland Allies 5, which will finish the series. I think I can keep up the momentum and do that; I have an ending in mind, and it’s a heist story, which I love. The characters are already full of useful complications and have clear, distinctive voices.

After that? I don’t know. I may take a different tack and tell small, intimate, psychological stories for a while. I still feel that Hope and the Patient Man is one of my best books, if not the best, even though I wrote it years ago; it’s primarily a love story, with engineering and politics going on mostly in the background. Despite my love of ensemble casts, it may be time to focus on one or two protagonists striving for something they really care about.

It’s time, in fact, for me to be a protagonist, striving against the odds for something I care about: writing good books that mean something.

I hope I can.

Oct 13

New projected series: The Institute Arcane

Posted on by

So I’ve decided to do a series set in a magic school: the Institute Arcane.

No, it won’t be another sub-par Harry Potter ripoff, such as the market is currently awash in. Honestly, it’s more Brandon Sanderson than J.K. Rowling, in the sense that there are very specific limitations built into the magic system, and those are both creative constraints for me and also key drivers and shapers of the story. (Rowling’s magic system, like her worldbuilding generally, is loose, inconsistent, whimsical, and not always fully worked out.)

This is a university, too, not a high school; it has more kinship with the school at Roke in A Wizard of Earthsea, or for that matter with Pratchett’s Unseen University, than with Hogwarts. But you can’t escape the shadow of HP whenever you write about a magical school.

Part of the overarching story for the series is that the characters are setting out to create a Great Work. Creating a magical wonder is not a thing you see too often in fantasy; usually, you’re seeing the characters questing for (occasionally, destroying or witnessing the destruction of) a wonder from earlier, mightier times.

Western fantasy has its roots in medieval and Renaissance literature, and medieval Europe was looking back on the days of Rome, when great construction projects like the aqueducts were created. To the medieval mind, these were the works of giants, inconceivable in scope; they were able to create awe-inspiring cathedrals, true, but it sometimes took generations. I assume that’s where fantasy gets the whole “works of the ancients” trope from.

I’ve worked on projects pretty much throughout my working life. When I was a book editor back in the early-to-mid 90s, each book was a project, and it took multiple people to bring it to fruition. Since then, I’ve worked on many IT projects, large and small, usually for big manufacturing businesses or public infrastructure organisations, which (like the projects themselves) are an example of many people coming together to achieve things that nobody could achieve alone. So doing a series in which a big project is the overarching plot is something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

The Great Work itself is probably going to be a system of canals, with magical currents to push the boats along. It was canals, not railways, that initially made Britain the world’s first industrial nation, creating wealth, lowering the price of goods, and accelerating the gradual shift in the balance of power in society away from people who owned land to people who owned businesses, as well as being one of the preconditions for urbanisation and everything that went with that. There were, of course, bitter fights over most of the individual canals and over the canal system in general, nor did the building of the canals go smoothly in many cases. And, as always, unprincipled people saw the opportunity to make some easy money by selling stock for something that might or might not ever exist, and if it did exist, might not make any money. So there’s plenty of conflict baked right in.

Shropshire Union Canal near Norbury Junction

When I was initially considering canals as the Great Work, I wondered if I should do something with more sensawunda, something less pragmatic and more exciting. But a canal system that revolutionises the economy is very on-brand for me.

The kind of work I do, and the kind of work done by the people I do that work for, is not spectacular. We’re not going to get prizes for it. Wikipedia would say that we, and our work, are of “questionable notability”.

But you would notice if we stopped.

I read a book a little while back by an (I assume) callow youth who portrayed, more or less incidentally to his plot, a society completely composed of elite geniuses. Missing from his conception of the world was the fact, known to us who have been around a bit longer and toured the concrete corridors behind the scenes, that no society can function just with an elite. The world works even as well as it does because millions of ordinary people turn up every day and do their unspectacular jobs, often with considerable devotion.

And my fiction sets out to celebrate that, in the Gryphon Clerks (not only civil servants, but engineers, doing what they do each day to make people’s lives better), and in the Auckland Allies books (underpowered magic users stepping up to defend the city because there’s nobody else).

I’ve never been poor. I’ve been short of money, but that’s different from being poor. I always had my solidly middle-class parents (both schoolteachers, plus my father made an extra income from writing sports books) to fall back on if I really needed to. My ancestors were not so prosperous; my mother’s family were all skilled tradespeople with their own small businesses in the male line, and farmers on her mother’s side, while my father’s ancestors worked as sailors, fishermen, and the like. His father drove a train, and his mother’s mother kept a boarding house near the end of the railway line (which is how they met).

So I don’t have much direct knowledge of what it’s like to be really struggling, though I do have a family background that’s relatively humble just a couple of generations back. My world is, and always has been, composed of what used to be called the “middling sort”: not wealthy, not poor. The big layer of folks in the middle of the sandwich that keep the wheels turning. And so that’s who I like to celebrate in my fiction, though I’m also planning to toss in a noblewoman in reduced circumstances and a street thief, just to mix it up.

But I’ll put them in a school for wizards, because why wouldn’t I?

Apr 21

Realm Agents 2: Underground War, and a Million Word Sale

Posted on by

I’ve heard it said that your first million words is how you learn to write. If that’s so, then I must count as a journeyman; with the publication of Underground War, the second in the Realm Agents series, I now have just over a million words of novels and novellas available on Amazon. That doesn’t count the 30,000-word novella and the 43,000 words of short fiction that are exclusively available to subscribers to my mailing list, or the 30,000 words of uncollected short fiction I’ve sold to various venues (note to self: collect that at some point).

To celebrate, I’m having a Million Words Sale. All my novels and novellas are 99c each on Amazon for a week, including the new novel. There are 15 titles, so you can buy a million words of my fiction and still have change left over out of $15 (USD). Just follow the links from the sidebar on this site.

So, what’s the new novel all about? Here’s the blurb:

Dedicated agents fight against determined adversaries who want to bring down the realm.

Much has changed in the ten years since the Unification War created the new realm of Koslin and freed the gnomes from servitude to their dwarf masters. But every change creates winners and losers, and a loose and surreptitious alliance including old-line dwarves and separatist insurgents is fighting an underground war against the realm.

Opposing them, Piston and his dedicated colleagues in the Realm Agents use the latest in magical technology to track down and oppose political corruption and attacks against vital infrastructure. But will they be able to put the pieces together before a devastating strike destroys what they are sworn to protect?

Underground War follows straight on from the first Realm Agents book, Capital Crimes, and also brings in some characters from the Gryphon Clerks books (which share the same setting): Briar the snarky lawyer, her gentleman-friend Active Hedger, and Hope the brilliant mage all make appearances, as do Bucket and Braise, the gnome politicians, and Ladle, the newspaper editor. But there’s enough backstory slipped in that if you haven’t read the earlier books, or haven’t read them in a while, you can make sense of what’s going on; all my beta readers were new to the world, and they seemed to make out fine.

Still, why not get the other books and binge-read them? They’re 99c each.

Nov 02

New Series: Realm Agents

Posted on by

Today I’m launching the first book of my new series, Realm Agents, set in the world of the Gryphon Clerks. (Amazon links in this post are affiliate links.)

I’ve decided to call it a new series, even though it features characters from earlier books and takes place in the same setting, mainly because it’s a genre shift. Really, what it is is intensifying a few elements that were already present; there have been action scenes, mysteries, and steampunk/magepunk technology in previous books, but I’m now moving them up front and calling the result a secondary-world fantasy steampunk techno-thriller.

Capital Crimes cover

In a techno-thriller, the technology itself plays a key role, and that’s definitely the case here. The first book, just released, is called Capital Crimes, and is set in the new, modern capital of Koslin: New Koslinmouth. Part of the “new series” aspect is choosing an area of the setting that I haven’t explored much before, though we did get a glimpse of it in Illustrated Gnome News. Part of the “techno-thriller” aspect is that it’s literally a new part of the setting, built with leading-edge technology as the planned capital of the newly united realm.

New Koslinmouth is home to semi-automated trams, freight pods running beneath the streets, a port for skyships using a magical navigation system, and, above all, the Realm Ledger – a huge primitive computer, running on punched cards, cogs, light, and magic, through which most of the realm’s business is transacted. (Rosie Printer comes up with the idea in the novella Hope Persists, available as a bonus to my mailing list.)

The thing about new technologies is that they can create losers as well as winners, and the losers created by the Realm Ledger – as a matter of quite deliberate policy – are the dwarves, who formerly were the people you had to deal with if you wanted to do anything related to finance, banking, or currency. Now that the realm of Koslin is in a low-key economic war with the dwarves, that couldn’t be allowed to stand. But that makes the Realm Ledger a huge target for those dwarves who are especially… direct in the way they conduct their business.

Standing against them are the courageous Realm Agents, including Agent Piston, who we first met as an eager youth in Illustrated Gnome News. Despite his gnomish heritage, he doesn’t know much about technology – that’s part of why he joined the agents – so when someone starts stealing from the freight tubes, he consults an old school friend, Precision, one of the first gnome women to become an engineer.

As the scope of the crimes they’re investigating escalates, they’re going to have to go where no gnome willingly ventures – into an unreformed dwarfhold, where gnomes are still effectively enslaved.

I believe I’ve increased the action and tension, compared with earlier books, while not losing the elements of character and setting that my current readers enjoy. I’ve also created an entry point for new readers; my new editor (who enjoyed it hugely) hadn’t read the previous Gryphon Clerks novels, but she found it easy to orient herself to the world. Think of it, if you like, as a standalone novel with bits of backstory that just happen to also be frontstory in other books.

I’ve very nearly finished the first draft of the sequel, Underground War, also set in New Koslinmouth and featuring Piston and Precision, along with other characters old and new. Briar Heathlake, my personal favourite of all the Gryphon Clerks characters, has a minor role; her gentleman-friend, Leading Agent Active, is more central. And I have reasonably well-developed ideas for a third book, this time taking place in the even higher-tech setting of the Research Institutes (established in Mister Bucket for Assembly). After that, plans are indefinite; it will partly depend on how popular the series is. I have fun writing them, and I think lots of people will have fun reading them if they find out about them – so tell your friends!

You can get Capital Crimes at Amazon; I’m putting it up initially at 99c for a short while, to get momentum at the launch. It will revert to the usual $2.99 after that, so get in quick.

Aug 04

Illustrated Gnome News is out!

Posted on by

Finally, after epic delays, Illustrated Gnome News is published.

I won’t go into the reasons why a book that involves publishing took so long to publish, except to say that some people were sick, and some people were busy, and in general it was one damn thing after another. But it’s out now.

It’s a big honking book; 115,000 words, or about 500 pages. That may have something to do with the fact that I ended up with five intermeshed plots: a romance, a mystery, saving the business, justice for the oppressed, and coming of age.

What all these plots have in common, though, is the theme of conformity and safety versus risk and authenticity. The gnomes have spent hundreds of years as essentially slaves to the dwarves, and that’s developed a powerful habit of going along and keeping your head down and not being seen to make trouble or stand out from the crowd. But the gnomes are free now, and there’s a new generation who are starting to challenge that habit, to ask why they can’t do things, why they can’t be who they know themselves to be.

Powerful forces want to put the gnomes back in their box, and reset everything back to where they were in control. Standing up to those forces – and to the expectations and prejudices of their own people – takes courage, risk, and sacrifice, and the young gnome women at the centre of Illustrated Gnome News have to fight hard for what they believe in.

I think it ends up making a compelling story. It also sets things up for the next few books, which will feature the Realm Agents, an FBI equivalent charged with protecting the realm and its people. The first, Capital Crimes, is basically finished, and I hope to bring it out before the end of 2019. I’m working on the second, Underground War, and already noodling ideas for a third, which at the moment is titled Institute Spies.

Right now, though, if you want to pick up Illustrated Gnome News, it’s exclusively available on Amazon as an ebook. (There may eventually be a paperback, though given how large it is that paperback may be a bit pricey.)

Enjoy!

(Links in this post are Amazon affiliate links.)