Shores of Night

My story Whispers in the Flame was published at this site at the start of August. The site has a poll of favourite fiction, and whilst it seems a bit cheeky... could you head over and vote please? http://www.fictionvortex.com/2013/08/readers-choice-poll-for-august-2013/

So we chatted about gaming last night, just to check where things were with the group and decided to keep playing Shadowrun and keep to our current structure - short adventures with call backs that link things together. Our Shadowrun GM has plans to spirit the group off to Europe and UCAS (not the admissions service) for a while whilst the heat dies down. I asked the players to look at the games I had on my list and they decided to play Yggdrasil, so I have a year to tilt at that windmill and build something awesome. Unsurprisingly I already have ideas about the game, its just a matter of getting everything down on paper and statted up, but that should be fun in itself. Its something I'll be doing very slowly because of my course and plotting and planning to do a PhD. So far my plans involve a mcguffin, some breathtaking scenery and as much skullduggery, monster hunting and low cunning as you can shake a stick at. Oh and much drinking of ale and mead too. 

I'm a gamer, I like dice of many different sides and colours. I like sitting around with friends to make up stuff about imaginary characters who, if they chose, could probably snap the players like twigs. I like to think that it goes hand in hand with my other pastime, writing (though the two should never be confused, I've learnt the hard way that gaming is gaming and writing is writing). As I write this I'm looking down at a year long stint as a player, because I'm not going to run a game until Autumn 2014, after the MA I'm doing is done. One of the longest serving members of the group, also a GM, has just taken a break, citing reasons of burn out. Which leaves the other GM with the dubious pleasure of a full year of running games. On the one hand that sounds like Heaven, on the other, well it's a lot of work and strife he's potentially facing. Despite my long stretch as I finish off the MA and work on my (now trilogy) of novels, I'm going to take t...

The first book of the Shadows of the Apt series, Empire of Black and Gold, is a thick brick of fiction. In many respects that's to be expected, it is a fantasy novel and in particular it's of that stripe of fantasy that's grown fatter over the past few decades. It has a relatively detailed map as you might expect if you're familiar with this sort of fiction, though the list of characters and places only appears at the start of book 2, Dragonfly Falling. I'm quite glad to see the list, because if I'm honest I did find that at times in Empire, I had trouble remembering who the various characters were, the book's so busy. As I mentioned in my review of Tchaikovsky's book of short stories, Feast and Famine, I've owned Empire of Black and Gold for a long time and it's only in the last couple of weeks that I've started reading it. Approaching it I was cautious, I'd enjoyed his voice in the short stories but I was less sure about a 611 page no...

If we were to observe the workings of the British state in the Nineteenth Century we would see much of Parliamentary culture has stayed the same. The machinery of state would be familiar, the House of Parliament, the monarch, the labyrinthine Civil Service. At the same time there are stark differences; for one thing the lack of a universal vote and a society that was trapped between anarcho capitalism on the one hand and a slavish devotion to the concept of an organic society on the other. In many respects the sweep of Victorian society can be epitomised by the idea 'a place for everyone, and everyone in their place'. A Lord remained a Lord, no matter how destitute he was, a chimney sweep remained a chimney sweep and God help you if you rebelled against that. Breeding was at the core of your worth, class was the yardstick by which you were judged, everything else being considered secondary. The concept of a welfare state had yet to emerge. The poor, where they needed ass...

The initial collection of short stories from Adrian Tchaikovsky is a treasure. Weighing in at just under 200 pages, its contents are a set of short stories from a wide array of strands of fantasy, horror and SF from across the genres; and they shine. Tchaikovsky is best known for his monster of an epic fantasy series Shadows of the Apt, a (currently) nine book series of bricks charting an immense struggle in a steampunk influenced fantasy world, with a lot of insect influences (to my shame I have only just starting reading the first book of the series, despite being so late to get started, I'm very much enjoying it). Feast and Famine doesn't have the ambitious vision of Shadows of the Apt, but to be honest, it doesn't need it. There's enough here to keep the reader interested and the short stories provide slices, worlds that whirl in to entertain before they're gone again. As you might expect there is a Shadows of the Apt story in Feast and Famine, but the bu...

I first discovered Steampunk as a community, or subculture, a few years ago, when a friend suggested we go to the Asylum, the annual convention held in the picturesque surroundings of Lincoln’s castle and the area around it. We had a really good time, met lots of lovely people and became friends with a lot, if not most of them. The community’s offered me opportunities for expression, for my writing to be published and other things. Sure I may not enjoy the Asylum as much as I did that first year but that’s largely to do with the fact that I find it a bit overwhelming (and a lot of the time the panels I attend feel like déjà vu – but that’s much more to do with the fact that I’ve sat in on a lot of panels about getting published and writing; really there’s little wisdom that can be imparted from them after the first few). It’s a community that’s full of energy, full of ideas brimming up and a strong ‘do it yourself’ ethos. On the books front, I appear to be in the minority in that...