Category Archives: Auckland Allies

May 20

Pick up Auckland Allies complete boxed set

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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.)

Jul 28

What if I respected this character?

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Concluding (I think) my blog posts reflecting on my recently completed Auckland Allies series (see earlier entries here and here), I want to discuss something I learned about writing characters who aren’t my usual.

I don’t know why a portion of my brain is dedicated to emulating a competent, capable, pragmatic mid-twenties woman, but those are the protagonists I tend to default to writing (despite being a man in my mid-fifties). They’re also the protagonists I most enjoy reading about, by no coincidence. Still, if you can only write one way, it’s probably time to do a writing exercise, unless you’re selling a ton of books by writing that one way. Maybe even then.

I didn’t straight-up set out to do a writing exercise when I introduced some non-typical (for me) characters into Auckland Allies, though. They just kind of turned up, and then I asked myself a key question about them, which made all the difference: What if I respected this character?

I’m thinking specifically of two characters: Kat, the middle-aged owner of the New Age shop, and Chelsea, the non-genre-savvy young woman (mid-twenties, yes) who finds herself in an urban fantasy she is poorly equipped to navigate when she’s bitten by a werewolf.

Kat has been around since the first book. I believe she’s in the first chapter, though without a speaking part at that point. The New Age shop she owns has offices over it, which two of the characters rent from her. It’s based on an organic shop in the suburb of Grey Lynn where I sublet offices briefly when I practiced hypnotherapy; there was a group of natural-health practitioners who worked out of the space above the shop. Initially, Kat was a bit of a caricature, or rather a highly recognisable type if you’ve spent much time around New Agey people. Somewhat vague, relentlessly positive, always speaking in a specific jargon that reinforces her own view of the world and excludes any other, and (as one of the characters puts it) capable of believing anything, as long as there’s no evidence.

In the final book, though, Kat – or rather, the way the characters see Kat – undergoes a transformation. Avoiding spoilers: she stands up to someone, in her own calm, sweet way, but firmly defining her boundaries, and it also becomes clear that her many years of New Age practice were developing something powerful in her all along.

Chelsea appears, unnamed and with no lines, in the fourth book, and in the fifth and final book becomes an initially unlikely addition to the cast. Her parents are doctors, they live in Remuera (one of Auckland’s more expensive suburbs, which has a lot of doctors in it), she went to a private school, and she works in nearby Newmarket, where she sells clothes to other “Remuera girls” (her words). She reads little beyond magazines, preferring to spend her leisure time watching the kind of reality shows that are optimized for interpersonal drama; she has never watched even the most popular science fiction and fantasy franchises (LOTR, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, the Marvel movies, Star Trek, Star Wars). Tara, always ready with the snark, observes that she spends too much time on hair, clothes, and makeup to try to distract attention from the fact that she has an ordinary face. She isn’t particularly quick on the uptake, either.

It would be all too easy to drop in a character like Chelsea and make her the butt of jokes, or dismiss her as superficial and worthless. Instead, I wondered: what if I respected her? And what if a couple of my characters – the brilliant Lynn and the uber-geeky Mark – respected her too, against the odds?

Well, as it turns out, what happens is that Chelsea turns out to be brave, good-hearted, loyal, and emotionally intelligent, and discovers that her lifelong goal of fitting in somewhere may be fulfilled by a highly unlikely crew of people with whom you’d think she had nothing in common. Because characters have layers.

I enjoy putting a bit of comedy into my writing, so I’ve made a bit of a project lately of reading “classic” comic novels. A lot of them show us shallow, self-important people with small lives and invite us to laugh at them. But one of my great role models for comic writing (and writing in general), Terry Pratchett, didn’t do that, at least not after his early books. He showed us people with small lives who longed for them to be larger, and who we loved watching as they fought and struggled and often pratfell their way towards that goal, and the goal of making the world a better place for everyone.

“Diversity” has become trendy in SFF lately, to the point that more than a few books seem to be giving lip service to it by throwing in a few protagonists who aren’t the old default (white, straight, male) and then carrying on to tell the same story they would have told in any case. Which is one way to assert that “normal” and “unremarkable” include a lot more identities than they used to, for sure. But in a world where Twitter and Facebook try to sort us into islands for the convenience of their advertisers, and then encourage us to fight with the people on the other islands, what I think is that we need a few more books in which we see characters who are not like us – the authors or the readers – in many different ways. Not just the usual identity labels, but other ways too. Characters who we nevertheless begin by treating with respect, and see where that gets us.

I think it will get us to some interesting and worthwhile places.

Jul 22

Writing a First-Person Ensemble Cast: What I Learned

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve just finished my Auckland Allies urban fantasy series. One of the more unusual decisions I made with that series was to have an ensemble cast, but give them a rotating first-person point of view. I thought I’d take the opportunity of finishing the series to reflect on why I did that, how it worked, and what I learned.

Why?

First of all, why would I do such a nonstandard thing?

It was mainly a philosophical decision. Urban fantasy, at least the kind I write, has noir in its ancestry – very visibly in a series like the Dresden Files, where the main character starts out as a down-on-his-luck private investigator/wizard for hire. Part of the feel of noir is conveyed by the strong, often slangy or bantering, wry first-person voice of the protagonist, and that’s more or less the case in a lot of UF as well, not just Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, but Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson, Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville, and a number of others less well known.

I didn’t want to lose the immediacy, the voice, and the immersion in the situation that the first-person point of view provides. But I also wanted to have an ensemble cast.

All of the urban fantasies I’ve just referenced have a strong team backing the protagonist, but it’s always a case of a lead and a supporting cast. That’s in part, I think, an American thing. I wanted Auckland Allies to have a very New Zealand feel: a bit underpowered (in contrast to, say, the raw, unsubtle power of a Harry Dresden, always blowing things up and setting them on fire), a bit improvised, making up for lack of resources through ingenuity, and with a more egalitarian approach to teamwork.

I remember a manager I had a few years back whose approach to team meetings was to set up a roster for who would lead each meeting and rotate it around all of us equally (including himself). That always struck me as a particularly Kiwi way of approaching leadership, and I wanted to reflect it in the way the Auckland Allies worked. Their American member, Lynn, is occasionally sarcastic about how they have no clear leadership structure, but it works because each of them brings something to the team, knows what they bring and how to work with the others’ strengths, and defers to whoever has the best idea at the time.

Because that left me without a single protagonist, but with a cast of multiple protagonists (eventually five, though I started out with three), I chose to rotate through their first-person viewpoints, based on whoever had the highest stakes or was doing the most important stuff at the time.

How Did It Work?

Any nonstandard approach to point of view is not going to work for everyone, and a complaint I had from an early reader of the first book was that because I was rotating point-of-view characters pretty much every chapter, it didn’t give her time to immerse properly in one character before she was dropped into the next. I addressed that in later books by keeping the same POV for a while, unless there was a strong reason to switch quickly (such as when the climax was approaching and I wanted to build tension).

I did also have at least one complaint that the voices weren’t distinct enough, even though I took some pains to make them distinct. Perhaps I was too subtle, at least for that person. My approach was to give free rein (or, at least, freer than normal rein) to my natural tendency to write sentences that are too long using words that are too fancy when writing Sally, who the others think talks too much; to deliberately write shorter sentences for snarky, aggressive Tara; and to put in a lot more slang when writing Sparx. Later, when Dan and Lynn joined the cast, I gave Dan an unmarked, mostly factual tone matching his bland persona, and was careful to use American phrasing and spelling for the Boston-born Lynn.

I also, early on, decided that Tara’s characteristic emotion was anger, Sparx’s was fear, and Sally’s was sadness, though that third one didn’t end up coming through much. That also helped to distinguish them by their reactions to the same situation.

The real strength of the first-person ensemble, though, I discovered, was when the cast were thinking about each other.

When you have an ensemble cast, and you’re in their various viewpoints (whether first-person or close third), one of the obvious fun things you can do is look at the same events from different perspectives. I do that a couple of times, carefully phrasing the dialog slightly differently in each iteration to emphasize that no narrator is truly reliable. But another less obvious fun thing is to contrast how they see themselves with how others see them.

To the others, Tara is just rude. But when you see into her viewpoint, you see how angry she is, and why, and you also start to see her gain at-first-grudging respect for the other members of her team. The snark is still there, but it’s more often kept inside.

To Tara, Sparx is an annoying nerd. But in Sparx’s viewpoint, you see how anxious he is all the time, and how he tries to offset that by joking around and pretending not to take things seriously, and referencing his beloved pop culture touchstones.

To Tara, again, Sally initially seems like a “cupcake,” a bit of a princess, attention-seeking and shallow. To Dan, she seems flighty and unreliable. But from the inside, you see her struggles, and how seriously she takes them, and how genuinely she wants to help other people.

Dan – ah, Dan. Everyone else sees his white-knight persona, his bland accountant hairstyle and clothes, his insistence on following the rules, and thinks of him as a bit of a dry stick. But from the inside, you can see his bad choices, and how he regrets them, and how he keeps making some of them anyway.

To most of the team, Lynn is the smart one, with advanced degrees in mathematics and physics. But in her viewpoint, you see her, too, making choices she regrets because she didn’t think things through. And to Dan, her ex-boyfriend, she’s someone to be protected, a role she rejects thoroughly – sometimes too thoroughly for her own good.

Part of what a first-person (or very tight third-person) ensemble cast gives you is this ability to contrast the surface presentation of your characters with their deeper layers. And sometimes the other characters will notice when someone changes, or will come to see below the surface, and sometimes they won’t.

The other thing that an ensemble cast gives you is the opportunity for push and pull, for conflict and disagreement, for reciprocated and unreciprocated attraction, in multiple combinations. Each member of my five-member cast has a different relationship with each of the other four; that’s a total of ten relationships, each of which can have its own dynamic and its own arc and cycle, intersecting with the arcs of the individual characters. And it’s a total of 20 perceptions of other people, each of which can be more or less accurate. Because that wasn’t what my books were mainly about – they had powerful external threats to deal with, after all – I only scratched the surface of the possibilities, but it was enough to alert me to how rich a setup like this can potentially be. I do have a long-parked idea for another ill-assorted group, assigned to do important research in my Gryphon Clerks setting, and that would offer all kinds of opportunities to drive the story out of the dynamics of the group itself as well as the external pressures on them.

I enjoy ensemble casts. Auckland Allies isn’t my only use of them; Beastheads and Illustrated Gnome News, from the Gryphon Clerks series, both have multiple protagonists. They’re definitely more work to wrangle than a single protagonist and their supporting cast, but there’s a good reward in there for the author who’s prepared to take it on and make the most of the opportunities an ensemble cast affords.

Jul 20

Auckland Allies series is complete!

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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

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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.

Nov 16

Letting Characters Be Themselves

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My wife and I have been watching the ITV Sherlock Holmes adaptations that were made between 1984 and 1994. We’ve watched them slightly out of order, because a few of them are longer and we left those to the weekends, so the last one for us was the final episode of the 1993 series. They didn’t end up adapting all of the stories; Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes, unfortunately died in 1994. But towards the end, the “adaptations” became less and less faithful to the originals, with more and more interpolated new material created by the writers from whole cloth.

I’m not sure why writers do this. It seldom works, because apparently it’s extraordinarily difficult for a writer to add to another writer’s work without distorting it out of all recognition (looking at you, Peter Jackson). In the case of the episode we watched at the weekend, “The Eligible Bachelor,” it was based on two different (unrelated) Holmes stories, but more than half of it was completely new material. That new material gave Holmes mystical theories; actual premonitory dreams; a scene where he put his arms around a woman to comfort her with no evidence of awkwardness; and a mention by Watson that Holmes very much admired the same woman’s mental abilities. It also had Watson betraying his Hippocratic oath (leaving an injured man, albeit a villain who Watson himself had injured while rescuing a lady, to be killed by a leopard). And it gave the rescued lady a cliched too-stupid-to-live scene where she went alone to confront a man who she knew had killed at least one woman before, without having told anyone – including her highly capable husband – where she was going, for no good in-story reason.

Holmes fanfic is the oldest fanfic, or so I’ve heard, and there’s a lot of it. A surprising amount of it – and I include the often enjoyable but occasionally clunky series Elementary in this – gives us an out-of-character Holmes of one kind or another. He’s kinder, more empathetic, more humane, romantically involved (often with Watson, fanfic being what it is), emotionally vulnerable… all the things that classic Holmes, Conan Doyle’s Holmes, is not.

I recently read not quite half of Dave Eggers’ The Every. I stopped because the humour, while well done, was too dark for me, and the story both dystopian (which is never to my taste) and deeply pessimistic about both technology and humanity (which is very much not where I am philosophically). One minor scene in the book, which is set in a successor to the current tech giants which has implausibly gained a monopoly over social media, search, e-commerce, publishing, the making of smart devices and basically everything else, involves a project in which people rewrite (by committee) classic novels. Research has shown the instigator of this terrible idea that there are certain spots where a lot of people stop reading these novels, often because they don’t like something a character does. So the characters are rewritten to be more likeable, more in line with current social mores. Less problematic.

In an atmosphere where it sometimes seems that anybody not conforming exactly to whatever this week’s orthodoxy is will be torn apart by a mob on Twitter, I can see how an author would fear this as an outcome. But the impulse, as the Sherlock Holmes episode from 1993 shows, is not new. We’re always inclined to want to revise characters to either be less flawed or else flawed in a way that’s more congenial, or at least understandable, to us. The Holmes of Elementary, for example, is a recovering drug addict (picking up on mentions in the original Doyle stories of Holmes’ use of heroin and cocaine while bored from having no good cases), has superficial sexual relationships, doesn’t get on with his father or his brother, and occasionally screws over his friends because he thinks he knows better than them. Modern audiences, especially American audiences (the show is set mostly in present-day New York, though Holmes is still English) presumably find this more relatable than the emotionally distant, erratically brilliant, relentlessly analytical Holmes of Doyle. The British modernization, Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch, is closer to that Holmes, giving us a Holmes who is, probably, non-neurotypical.

Elementary also gives us a Watson very different from the original, and I don’t mean because she’s an Asian woman; that’s a much less significant change than making Watson a competent detective, Holmes’ equal partner in most ways, rather than his loyal muscle and occasional conscience.

Now, far be it from me to speak against fanfiction of any kind, including the kind that people get paid for. These characters belong to humankind now, and what you choose to do with them is entirely your own affair. But I am raising the question about why we have the impulse to remake iconic characters in a more relatable mould, to make them easier to understand, to make their choices more like what we would choose, even if, because of these changes, there’s a strong sense in which they are no longer that character.

When I’m writing original characters, that same impulse is there, and I have to say I yield to it a lot (I’m criticizing myself here too). I think I’m most successful when I manage to resist it, at least to a degree. I’ve recently finished drafting the last of the Auckland Allies series. The character Tara, initially prickly, angry, and rude, has an arc through the series towards liking and respecting her colleagues more and acknowledging this to them, but her inner monologue doesn’t cease to include snarky digs at them. She just doesn’t let them come out of her mouth quite so much. Sparx still fails to land his pop-culture jokes most of the time, but he’s still trying (sometimes very trying). Dan, if anything, ends the series less admirable to the reader than he was when first introduced, because we get to see some of the compromises and flaws that lurk under his white-knight persona.

Iconic characters often become iconic because they’re out of the ordinary, not just in their abilities, but because they fail to fit with the world around them in some way. It’s worth considering why our impulse is to sand the rough edges off them, to make them more acceptable (whatever that may currently mean).

Sep 30

Auckland Allies: the final chapter

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I’ve just finished the first draft of the final Auckland Allies book.

At the moment, it’s not quite 47,000 words, but I always expand when revising. And now that I check, that’s about halfway between the length of the second and third books. (The first is a bit longer, almost 55k, and the draft of the fourth book is sitting at 59k.) The total for the five-book series, in other words, will be in the region of a quarter of a million words.

They’re short; they’re pacy. I’d rather have people complain there’s not enough than too much (though so far nobody has, for the record, at least not that I’ve seen).

I’m happy with where the resolution ended up, and how I got there; I didn’t have to use any big coincidences, but drove it all with character agency. There are some cool moments along the way.

And, as I said a couple of posts ago, the door is left ajar for a follow-up series focused on the new set of characters I’ve introduced in this last book. My main characters have all had their arcs of growth and resolution, so there’s not as much potential in them anymore, but these new ones still have places they can go, if I think of any stories for them.

Plans, for what plans are ever worth: I’d like to spend my Christmas/New Year break revising the fourth and fifth books, hopefully get some beta readers (volunteers are welcome), and publish sometime in 2022.

After that… well, I’ve been thinking about the kind of books I like to write (and read). This is what I’ve come up with so far:

  • Fantasy – high magic, wizards
  • Motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation
  • BUT plot that doesn’t depend on action/violence
  • Sensawunda in the setting
  • Social change through technological change
  • Courageous, competent women
  • Kind, reliable men
  • Good intimate relationships
  • Adaptive coping
  • Ensemble casts
  • Protagonists without a lot of power in society (at least initially)
  • Humour
  • Some depth of reflection on human condition/society
  • Complex and evolving relationships

I don’t see myself writing something completely different from that. Don’t look for a dark, unrelentingly serious post-apocalyptic dystopian story of toxic relationships, maladaptive coping, and alienated slackers, set among the backstabbing nobility of a bad photocopy of Renaissance Europe, with a predictable steamy romance between repellent people, ending in inevitable tragedy, in a plot helped generously along by coincidence, convenient eavesdrops, and a prophecy in bad verse.

But I do want to lean more into the elements I’ve bolded in the list above for my future work.

Those are the parts I find hardest, of course.

Sep 20

Auckland Allies amulet design

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I just came up with this design, and wanted to share it.

It’s an abstract representation of the Auckland volcanic field as a series of triangles, the vertices being significant volcanic cones or (in two cases) craters. The Allies are going to use it to make amulets, since their power is linked to the volcanic field.

It looks to me a little like a knapped flint.

Sep 17

Auckland Allies update

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It’s been a while since I talked about how Auckland Allies is going, and last time I did, I speculated that AA4 might be out in the first half of 2021.

Clearly, it’s not. That’s because I decided in the end to hold onto it while I worked on Book 5, and then go back and pull both of them together into mutual coherence and probably release them close together, because these are the two books that complete the series.

I’m pressing on through AA5, which had the working title of Museum Heist, but as it turns out will need a different title, because the more I write it, the less heisty it becomes. At the moment I’m thinking Memorial Museum, because the museum is still an important setting; the characters just don’t pull a heist there. Or maybe War Memorial. The museum in question is the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and the fact that it’s a war memorial will be relevant to the wrap-up.

I’m trying to keep the two-word titles for continuity with the rest of the series: Auckland Allies, Ghost Bridge, and Unsafe Harbour. At the moment, AA4 is Wolf Park.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to finish. I have several elements that I’ve introduced but not developed, and I’m only at 39,000 words and already bearing down on the climax, so after I’ve “finished” the first draft I’ll still have a good bit of expansion to do. It’s urban fantasy, so it should move quickly, but the best urban fantasy is also about the characters dealing with stuff that’s personal to them, and while I have a good many scenes (where things happen), I don’t have as much in the way of sequels (where the characters reflect on what happened, how it relates to their goals, and what they plan to try next). Honestly, AA4 could probably do with some more of that too.

I’ve had some plot issues, too, and still have a couple of things that I’m puzzling over as to exactly how to bring them about in a natural way that flows with the rest of the story, and how much to reveal before the climax. I do have a reasonably clear idea of what happens at and after the climax, though. Worst case, I’ll go ahead and write that and then join the pieces together afterwards.

That 39,000 words doesn’t include what I think of as the Obligatory Pigeon Scene, which I have drafted but temporarily cut out because of a change in the plot. Pigeon is the craft name of the minor practitioner who acts as a fixer and a clearing-house for rumour and information in the small but intense magical community of Auckland; he’s a scuzzy little guy who hangs out in a run-down bar. In my daydreams, where Taika Waititi makes the books into a series of films, Pigeon is his character. Each of the books includes a scene in which the Allies go and intimidate the pusillanimous Pigeon into giving them some information that they need, and this one will be no exception, though he’ll be less helpful on this occasion. For some reason, the bad guys have stopped confiding in him, maybe because he’s totally unreliable and always tells everything he knows to the Allies as soon as they look at him funny.

I’ve introduced some new characters, too, who were minor and unnamed in AA4 but in AA5 are in training to become the next generation of the Allies in what may be a follow-up series. I have no definite plans, but I’m keeping the door open. And Kat, the owner of the New Age shop, who’s been a minor character in previous books, gets to become a little more in AA5. My dream movie casting includes giving this part to my actress friend Sarah James, who I think would be excellent for it.

For various reasons (not least continuity with the earlier books), these books are still set in 2016. I am bringing to them, though, a post-2016 reflection on people’s relationship with reality and truth. The New Age believers, who have figured in supporting roles before, come more to the fore in AA5, and I’m quite explicit in saying that their relationship with facts is a problem, but that they are, at the same time, wonderful people who you’d want by your side in difficult times.

Another aspect of post-2016 sensibility is that the Guardians, an organization whose mission is to protect the Secret of the existence of magic, are throwing their weight around, but the main characters are trying to convince them that that mission is outdated. Some people (such as the New Agers) believe in magic already and will continue to do so regardless of the evidence; others won’t believe in it no matter what you show them; and those in the middle won’t (as the Guardians have traditionally feared) start suddenly burning practitioners if they discover that they exist. That’s maybe a bit naïve, since there are always people who will lash out at anyone who is different, but they’re right that the great majority of people will be cool with it.

This book is unlike the others in that most of it is the Allies attempting to be proactive in preparing for the inevitable next confrontation with the evil Ennead, rather than reacting to the Ennead’s latest attempt to take over Auckland. They face plenty of obstacles along the way, but there aren’t any magical fights until later in the book. I’m mildly concerned about that in terms of pacing, but I think in the fifth book I can get away with it, as long as there’s plenty of other conflict. And that climax ought to be worth waiting for, both as a spectacular set-piece and also since I also want to use it to call back to the first book and show how much the Allies have grown and developed.

Overall, I’m cautiously optimistic, though I’m not going to make any foolish predictions about when it’s likely to be finished. I’m starting a major new project at work soon, which may well absorb a lot of my creative energy. Meanwhile, rest assured, progress is happening, and there should eventually be a conclusion to the Allies’ story.

Feb 22

Where Next for Mike’s Writing?

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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.