I just wanted to stick my head up and let everyone know that I am still alive and writing, even though it’s more than a year since Mister Bucket for Assembly was published. In fact, there’s a lot more on the way from the Gryphon Clerks; nearly a quarter of a million words.

You may remember that I’ve moved from self-publishing the Gryphon Clerks series to a small press, Digital Fiction, based in Canada. That’s going well, but they’re a very small press with a surprisingly large number of authors, and things have got a bit backed up temporarily.

Also, my development editor, who I’ve worked with for years and learned a lot from, has had to give up editing because of life circumstances. Those same circumstances led to a delay in the completion of the sequel to Mister Bucket for Assembly, which is entitled Illustrated Gnome News, and is currently in Digital Fiction’s queue for publication.

It’s my longest yet, at 115,000 words; it needed to be long to fit in five plots (mystery, romance, coming of age, saving the family business, and justice for the oppressed) and multiple viewpoint characters. I’m very happy with it, and I think readers will enjoy it too. Here’s the blurb:

They may be putting out a newspaper, but there are some things they don’t want becoming news.

The Illustrated Gnome News is the only newspaper serving the newly emancipated gnome community, but there are days when Ladle, the paper’s overworked editor, thinks that’s because nobody else is stupid enough to try to run one. She walks a delicate line between not scaring off all their advertisers and still putting out a paper that stands for a better future for all gnomes – including those gnomes who don’t match up to traditional ideas of what’s proper.

One of these is her friend Loom, the first gnome woman to qualify as an engineer. But Loom has a secret that would shock conventional gnomes even more than that, and must somehow find a way to pursue her own happiness amidst the wider struggle to turn gnome emancipation into true freedom.

Content advisory: This book depicts a romantic and sexual relationship between two women (without explicit scenes).

While I was waiting for my editor’s notes on IGN, I wasn’t idle. One of the minor characters in Illustrated Gnome News is a keen young man who wants to be a Realm Agent (think FBI, with appropriate adjustments for technology and society). He ended up starring in the next book, Capital Crimes, which is also in Digital’s queue.

I hired a new editor for Capital Crimes, the talented, celebrated, and award-winning Karen Conlin, who told me repeatedly that she all-caps LOVED it. She’d never read any of my books before, and found it entirely comprehensible, so I can tell you that it’s a good place to start the series; it’s the first of a sub-series of books about the Realm Agents, in more of a mystery/thriller style. Here’s its blurb:

A brilliant engineer and a daring agent uncover a plot that strikes at the foundations of their society.

The new capital of the human realm of Koslin delights in the latest technology, and the emancipated gnomes who build and maintain it.

Precision, one of the first gnome women to qualify as an engineer, and her almost-brother Piston, the first gnome to join the elite Realm Agents, uncover a plot to subvert the infrastructure of the city, steal its technology, and crash the economy. To thwart it, they must enter the place a gnome fears most: an unreformed dwarfhold, where gnomes are still bonded servants.

A steampunk fantasy techno-thriller.

Also! Back when I was revising Mister Bucket for Assembly, my editor quite rightly suggested that I should take out about 30,000 words about what was going on in the lives of the humans, since it didn’t have any direct impact on the main plot. I kept those 30,000 words, though, and (with a bit of revision) they will form a new novella, initially exclusive to my mailing list, though I may release it more widely later on. It’s entitled Hope Persists, and includes some important changes for Rosie, the Clever Man, Hope and Patient, tying up some threads from Hope and the Patient Man.

All of this is coming in the future, at dates yet to be announced, but there’s one Gryphon Clerks story that’s newly available now. (Strictly speaking, it’s previously been published in a couple of anthologies that hardly anyone bought, brought out by a publisher who’s now vanished off the face of the earth; so it might as well be new.) It’s a short piece called “Intrusion,” which takes place during Hope and the Clever Man – the other side of the incident in which the dwarves take over the farspeakers to broadcast anti-gnome propaganda. The reason I’m re-releasing it now is because it’s relevant to events in Capital Crimes, in which the two main characters resurface.

I’ve added it to my Tales of the Gryphon Clerks collection, which is a benefit for joining my mailing list. That’s also where you can be sure to hear about release dates for the other pieces I mention above, so if you’re a GC fan, make sure you’re subscribed.

My fifth Gryphon Clerks novel, originally scheduled for last December, is finally out!

Most of the delay was because I needed to disentangle a few irrelevant storylines that were choking up the main plot; I’ll probably publish those as a novella at some point, since they deal with characters that fans will be familiar with from the Hope books. The Gryphon Clerks series tends to have stories in it that overlap in time and tangentially connect through shared characters and events, and this will be another example.

Now is a good opportunity, in fact, to reflect on the series, where it’s been, and where it’s going next.

I’m finding that the books are tending to come in pairs. Although published first and fourth respectively, Realmgolds and Beastheads form a pair, since they both deal with roughly the same time period: what’s known in the later books as the Unification War. The second and third books, Hope and the Clever Man and Hope and the Patient Man, are obviously a pair too, showing the struggles of the brilliant young mage Hope as she deals with the consequences of some bad decisions (one of which is hers). Part of the first book occurs during the Unification War too, linking it to the first pair.

Bucket the gnome is a secondary character in the Hope books, as are Hope’s friend Briar Heathlake and the gnome leader Gizmo, and they come into their own in the first of the “gnome” books, Mister Bucket for Assembly. In the course of that book I found I needed a few more gnome characters and a newspaper, and once I had them they wanted a book of their own, which I’m now working on: Illustrated Gnome News. As I write this post, I’m probably more than halfway through the first draft, at 54,000 words. (Bucket was 92,000, and News looks like being roughly the same size.)

I actually got about 70,000 words into Bucket a couple of years ago, and was planning to finish it off during my summer break, but I got sick with a heavy cold, and then Beastheads didn’t do as well as I’d hoped, and I got a bit down about the Gryphon Clerks series in general. To give myself a change, I started the Auckland Allies series, which is quite different in setting and pace and functioned as a nice refresher; and also the Hand of the Trickster series, likewise.

Then, last year, I took another look at Bucket, and felt like it needed to be finished. The themes of an oppressed people seeking representation were, let’s say, timely, and elections were… somewhat in the news; and the book was better than I remembered. My editor, when I sent her a completed draft, agreed; she kept telling me, “This book is needed.” For some reason, she edited parts of it while out in public, and she kept chiding me for making her laugh out loud or shed tears in front of people.

Around the time I was working on Bucket again, Michael Wills approached me to ask if his small press, Digital Fiction, could take over the Gryphon Clerks series. I’d worked with Michael before – Digital Fiction had republished one of my short stories, “Something Rich and Strange,” and I’d done editing work for him as well – so I knew he was a good person to work with, trustworthy, and a better marketer than me. My response was basically “Let me think about that OK yes please.”

So far, Digital Fiction have republished Realmgolds, which is doing well under their imprint, and now Bucket is out with them too – the first of my ten published novels to be with a publisher other than myself right from its launch. The plan is that the remaining three, and future Gryphon Clerks novels, will also move across to their list.

So, what might that future look like? As a science fiction writer, I know that predicting the future is basically impossible, and that applies even when I’m talking about things I plan to do; my published novels resemble my outlines, for example, but in much the same way as Hollywood movies resemble the books they’re based on (the difference being that I make them better and more complex during the process, instead of the reverse). Be that as it may, as well as Illustrated Gnome News, there’s that novella based on offcuts from Bucket that I want to finish up and release. After that, I’m pondering whether it might be time for a couple of books featuring the Realmgolds’ Agents, an FBI-like organisation which has cropped up a few times so far in the books, and which some of the secondary characters already work for. I have one partially drafted, which is also a country-house mystery with potential to be hilarious.

There’s also The Rediscovery of Hardlac, which I have an outline for; a completely new group of characters going to a part of the setting that I haven’t fully explored yet in search of the secret of an ancient elven technology. And I have a couple more ideas that have been kicking around for a while, which you can read about on the Novels page.

(I have an outline for the fourth Auckland Allies book, too, and will probably work on that later this year or early next year.)

Meantime, Mister Bucket for Assembly is doing well on launch, hovering in the top 10 in the steampunk genre as I write. That’s an encouraging sign for the series, and for my collaboration with Digital Fiction.

I went for a walk to post a letter this morning, and I was thinking during my walk, as you do, about how I probably need to refresh my beta readers group. They originally signed on to beta read my Gryphon Clerks novels, which I’m not writing now (I won’t say I’ll never go back, but for now, I’m not writing stories in that world). I’ve noticed an understandable reduction in enthusiasm and participation from those folks, especially since I’ve been writing so much lately (and they’re all busy people). So I’m going to be looking for some new blood, people who would like to read my stuff relatively early in the production cycle and comment on what did and didn’t work.

That led on to another thought: so, how do I define what I write? The common advice from people who are making a lot of money writing is that you need to find your niche and stick to it, but so far I haven’t found it, and I find that advice boring in any case. The realm of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) is broad and diverse, and I love exploring it; I may even wander out of it someday.

So far, this is what I write, more or less in order of increasing recency:

• Nonmagical secondary-world sociological speculation, with a strong mystery component (City of Masks).
• Science fiction exploring how more-or-less plausible future technologies impact people and society (the novella Gu, and a number of recent, as yet unpublished, short stories, including “Taking Pro,” which will appear in Futuristica 2 in November this year). So far, all set on Earth rather than in space. I love space opera, but I haven’t yet written any.
• Lightly steampunked secondary-world fantasy (the Gryphon Clerks series, which, as I say, is on indefinite hiatus; one is arguably almost a romance).
• Contemporary urban fantasy with a touch of technothriller (Auckland Allies; I’ve just finished drafting the third of what looks like being a six-book series).
• A number of short stories featuring various kinds of magic users, for an eventual themed single-author collection, Makers of Magic. Some published, others not. Some are, and some aren’t, in secondary worlds. Some funny, some serious.
• Lyrical fantasy set in post-Zelaznian worlds of wonder (mostly short pieces so far, most not yet published apart from “Something Rich and Strange” and “Gatekeeper, What Toll?”; I’d put the forthcoming SF-ish fantasy novella Brother Blue in this category, too).
• Sword-and-sorcery, with humour (“Axe Stone: Dwarf Detective” and “There’s a Tattoo, But the Robes Hide It,” plus the forthcoming novella Hand of the Trickster).
• Several assorted other short stories that don’t fit any of the above (and aren’t yet published): a time travel story, a supers story, a solarpunk story set in the present day, a couple of pieces of historical fantasy set in our world.

And here are some future possibilities that don’t fit into any of the above, with an indication of the stages of planning:

• Three secondary-world, nonmagical adventure/romances (idea, rough outline, detailed outline). May or may not end up in the same world, though there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be, and it seems like a good idea.
• A probably secondary-world steampunk fantasy novel(la?) in which the magic system is such that a form of feudalism is still active, and the characters end up in rebellion against it (detailed outline).
• A space opera series with a bit of a post-cyberpunk overlay (rough series outline and setting notes).
• A mid-future novel, or maybe series, exploring a post-scarcity world (detailed, but incomplete, setting notes and first chapter; no outline).
• A mashup of noir, cyberpunk and shamanism, not sure how long (beginning written, and a rough outline which I may or may not follow).
• An expansion to novel length of the supers story I’ve already written (mentioned above), about genetically enhanced kids who have to choose whether to work for the government who raised them or against it. (Rough outline.)
• A secret school where all the kids have psychic powers of one kind or another, kind of a cross between Julian May’s Galactic Milieu setting and Sherri S. Tepper’s True Game setting, with a touch of X-Men, but probably on contemporary Earth. With sports? (Idea.)
• An urban fantasy with different kinds of psychic powers. (Idea.)
• The story of a non-neurotypical engineer (don’t call her a mad scientist!) and the superhero she loves, told in tweets, posts, emails, user manuals and specifications. (Idea.)
• A couple more time travel ideas, including one based on the paranoid delusions of a famous early-19th-century lunatic. (Ideas.)
• A straight detective novel where the murder victim is the judge on a cooking reality show contest, and the suspects are the contestants from 10 years before, at their reunion. (Idea, fairly well developed, but not to the point of outlining.)
• A comedy-thriller in which a retired female agent becomes a mentor to a young man, rescues him from a life of crime and makes him a confidential courier – and then they must both confront issues from their pasts. (Idea.)

Yeah, just call me Mister Pachinko Brain.

So what’s the constant in all of that genre diversity? Is there a core of what it means to be a Mike Reeves-McMillan story?

I hope there is, and I hope it’s this:

• In any genre, I’m more drawn to the side of it that has hope and a sense of wonder, rather than to the cynical side. Some of my SF speculations do tend to come out downbeat, but they’re not cynical, and the characters are still people you can empathise with – even as you dislike their choices and regret the consequences of those choices in a complex, difficult world. You won’t see full-blown technopessimism, dystopia, or any kind of apocalypse (or horror, or very dark fantasy) from me.
• My fantasy characters are usually admirable people who take costly action for reasons they believe in; I write “noblebright,” not “grimdark”. But they’re not squeaky-clean cardboard cutouts, either. They have their flaws and their damage to deal with, and sometimes they make the wrong call at a critical moment.
• I enjoy ensemble casts in my novels (you can’t really do an ensemble cast in a short story). They fight and bicker among themselves, but ultimately pull together for the greater good. I’ve been told I do good dialog, and that my characters have distinctive voices and seem “real”.
• Many of my characters, in all genres – I think slightly over half, definitely including protagonists – are capable, intelligent women who don’t take any crap from anyone.
• The stories may or may not have a romantic element, but when they do, the partners are admirable people who deserve each other, by which I mean that the women are not stupid and the men are not cruel. (Or vice versa, for that matter.)
• Even in stories that are not primarily humour, there’s often something to laugh at in the dialog, the characters’ fumbling attempts to come to grips with their lives, or the situation. I like to have fun writing, and believe that leads to fun reading.
• The worlds are often beautiful and filled with wonder, excitement and possibility, even if there’s also violence, conflict and risk. Grittiness and grimness do occur, but not as a prevailing tone, more as a source of contrast.
• The “what-if?” ideas are unusual, surprising, and carefully worked out. In particular, I give a lot of thought to how they would affect both individual people and society as a whole, and use that to drive the story.
• While I don’t often do beautiful language for its own sake, I do use language consciously and, I hope, skilfully. I think that’s important, since it’s the medium I work in; just as a painter needs to know how to handle paint, and a sculptor how to handle clay, a writer needs to know how to handle words. Not only is the language carefully chosen and structured, but you’ll seldom find typos, homonym errors or punctuation issues even in my first drafts.

So if you think that’s the kind of thing you’d like, and you have the time to read early drafts and give me feedback, get in touch (leave a comment, or drop an email to mike at csidemedia) and I’ll add you to my beta reading pool.

And if it’s the kind of thing you’d like but you don’t want to beta read, make sure you’re subscribed to the mailing list so you know when I publish something. There are at least three books and, I hope, several short stories coming later this year. My existing work can all be found from here.