An Author's perspective on an Eclipse

 On 12 August 2026, something happened. A total solar eclipse passed over the region of Europe for the first time since 1999, and the majority of the UK were within the range of its near-complete coverage. Totality wasn't visible from here, only from the Atlantic and later from Spain. And I decided I would pay active attention to what was going on, since I really didn't in 1999.

Also, speaking of eclipses in 1999, you may want to check out my radio play The Angry House which is set during the week leading up to it.

I'd seen people talking about eclipses, but this was the first time I'd be paying full attention to its clear and visible effects. Needless to say, my writer's brain was taking feverish notes during the whole process. There is something special about being present for this kind of event, an astronomical (literally) event that shows both the speed of the universe and the impact it can have on the environment, and on one's self. Red of Overly Sarcastic Productions has gone into far greater detail about eclipses with her videos on two total solar eclipses that happened in North America in 2023 and 2024.

If there's one thing that really hits home when looking at the effects of even a partial eclipse, it's how the light and warmth are impacted. Genuinely, on a day where a heat wave was gripping the UK, the drop in temperature was palpable. And while the light was fairly normal at around 18:45, by 19:00 things looked dimmer. At the height of the eclipse, the light level was roughly equivalent to an autumnal sunset.

And more than that, the birds were going nuts. That's something which caught me off guard. As the light dimmed, the birds started behaving as if it were one or two hours later than it was in terms of light levels. The eclipse, even if it wasn't total, was throwing off the habits of animals which were guided by light levels. It was unsettling on a deep level, as I knew that this strange behaviour had a reason that was far beyond our control. It was a movement of our satellite to pass across the Sun. The shadows were also acting strangely by comparison, all with fuzzy outlines and low definition compared to the stark lines that I'd been seeing throughout most of the hot, sunny, practically cloudless day.

I didn't see the disc through eclipse glasses, but instead through a home-rigged system: two bits of paper with a pin-hole through one of them. It was quite something to see the disc of the sun with the moon's shadow creeping across it. I did end up catching a momentary glimpse of the eclipse itself by accident, when I was turning round and got into the sun's path. And my eyes had the split second impression of the moon's shadow passing over it. It was a fascinating thing to see in person, and it's brought me up close and personal to an aspect of why eclipses were so significant.

Just throw yourself back, if you can, into the mind of someone who doesn't fully grasp the mechanics of an eclipse yet, even though the rough outlines of how eclipses work was essentially sussed out in Aryabhata in the 5th Century CE.

Suppose that someone, either the average person or someone who just hasn't studied that aspect of the sky, haven't even sussed about the nature of the moon and the sun, certainly not from our modern perspective. In that instance, the moon has disrupted the normal flow of day and night. The light dims and changes to become a sunset orange which alters how our eyes perceive the colours around us, the sun's warmth diminishes, animals are behaving oddly, the shadows taking on a shifting perspective at their edges.

Such a thing would be magical, frightening, perhaps momentous. Eclipses as special events or even ceremonial occasions are nothing new. They were seen as mythological battles, portents of great change, messages from a deity or deities. While lunar eclipses -- aka "Blood Moons" -- are very frequent and delightfully spooky, a solar eclipse feels like it has some real weight behind it. A sense of enormity and significance that in those moments on 12 August made me feel small. It put things into perspective, as the UK was cast into partial shadow by something that was happening hundreds of thousands of miles above us.

I've had a similar feeling of wonder before. During a trip out to an event in the mountains, it was a beautifully clear night and there was a telescope set up. I was able to see Jupiter and its moons, the rings of Saturn, and even faintly Uranus and Neptune before the Moon rose and blotted out all but the brighter stars in the sky. But this was different, it felt more tangible. The other planets are much further away, much less tangible to me. It's that feeling of immediacy that I had during the Eclipse which is precious. Those twenty or so minutes during which the world darkened, the heat lessened, and the birds went wild.

That's the stuff history remembers. That's the stuff stories are made of.

Now on Author Talks: The Novelisation

 

Another month, another Author Talks episode. This time, I go on for roughly twenty minutes on the subject of the novelisation. After listening to a novelisation of a Paul Temple serial and becoming interested in how it both matched and deviated, I decided to actually dig into it. Here's to novelisations, perhaps the most underappreciated example of the literary art; turning the story of one medium into another.

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My Anime Life: Isekai Office Worker

If there are two terms it's probably expected most anime fans should know, it's "Boy's Love" and "Isekai". Apologies, but this explanation is needed to ground the show I'm talking about today.

Boy's Love, often called yaoi in the West though that's actually a pejorative term in Japan, is a genre of fiction that focuses on romantic relationships between men. This genre is primarily though not exclusively written by women, and generally isn't aimed explicitly at an LGBT audience. They're often set in modern day, and lean towards having some bleak themes, problematic content when it comes to consent, and no concrete resolution. Meanwhile Isekai, which translates to 'different world', is a Japanese subgenre of portal fantasy with usually extremely long titles where someone from one world is transported into another by some form of explosion or high-velocity impact, usually ours into a fantasy realm with weirdly gamey rules, but sometimes it's the other way round. A number of Isekai are serious in tone, but most are at least very light-hearted if not outright comedies or satire. Suffice to say, I'm wary of both genres. One thing in common with anime adaptations of both Boy's Love and Isekai is...the budget often isn't there, and the writing can get a bit pedestrian as most are based on prose light novels where a lot of characterisation is in the prose text.

Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter (yes that's its real title) is a 2026 anime created by Studio Deen, based on a light novel series written by Yatsuki Wakatsu that falls firmly within both genres. And surprisingly, despite suffering from many issues that plague both isekai and boy's love, I enjoyed it.

The story has chronically overworked workaholic office worker (talk about cyclical phrasing) Seiichirou Kondou dragged along with teenager Yua Shiraishi into another world; Yua was summoned as a "holy maiden" to save the kingdom from corrupting miasma, while Seiichirou is there by mistake and quickly becomes ill from the world's omnipresent magic. Enter knight commander Aresh Indolark, who finding Seiichirou near death is forced to take...intimate steps to prevent him from dying. Cue a somewhat cockeyed love story with emotional confusion to varying degrees on both sides.

This story walks a fine tonal line between comedic exploration of a Japanese office worker's habits and financial knowhow transplanted into a low-tech fantasy kingdom, and some actually serious story beats surrounding how Yua and Seiichirou were dragged from their world against their will and how factionalism is holding the country back from meaningful change. I'd say it falls more on the side of being a romantic comedy, but it strikes a balance fairly well. Albeit it still has things that irritate me like the fantasy world's clothing being a blatant slapping together of late 18th Century Europe and modern day Japan, which... How does that work exactly?

As with any romance, the two leads are important, and I was surprisingly invested in Seiichiro and Aresh as characters. They're like oil and water, but they somehow get along. Although this is also where some problematic stuff rears its head as Aresh turns from being attentive to outright possessive at several points, making Seiichirou and by extension me uncomfortable. Aresh has trouble sorting out his feelings since he innately mistrusts this 'otherworlder' who wasn't supposed to be there. A positive I found is that the conflict within Seiichirou about the romance doesn't seem focused internalised homophobia, but is more to do with this being a foreign world and maybe never having experienced this kind of love before; also how they initiated their relationship was Aresh needing to "make love" to Seiichirou to normalise him to some type of magic to stop him dying. Yes, that's the story's excuse for the initiating bedroom fun times, although Aresh was careful to ask Seiichirou's permission before doing it, so that's a plus.

Under most circumstances I'd count this anime as a guilty pleasure and not bother writing in this series about it. What tipped it over the edge was that the dub is very good. The English script turns a lot of the more pedestrian parts of the story into something quite enjoyable, mostly because the Japanese script's humour gets repetitive. The variations in Seiichirou and Aresh's banter are a lot more pronounced in English, and this is one of the few times I'd say the Japanese track is weaker than the English one.

This isn't a series where I score or recommend different anime explicitly, but I do show my opinions. And in my opinion, I found Isekai Office Worker enjoyable, but not exactly ground-breaking. It has the same flaws as many other boy's love and isekai titles, but the way it blends them together combined with its tonal balance and a great dub mean that, for the first time in a long time, I actually enjoyed a boy's love story.

Now on Author Talks, Writing Queer

 It's that time again! This time, using my previous posts that I published during Pride Month, I've recorded a longish episode dealing with my origins, growth and early (current) career as a bisexual writer or queer-infused fiction. I admit, this episode was thrown together in a bit of a hurry due to my originally-planned episode falling spectacularly flat and needing major surgery. Plus life and heatwaves interfering with things. So here you are. I hope you enjoy.

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And if you want to read my original posts during or after this (there are some necessary differences), here they are linked for you!

Writing Queer 1: unpromising beginnings

Writing Queer 2: My early fictional attempts.

Writing Queer 3: Editor’s Feedback and Real Life

 Writing Queer 4: Some Tips and Tricks

Writing Queer 3: Editor's Feedback and Real Life

 We hit the third post this Pride Month, where I delve into my seemingly both slow and fast journey through the world of "well, I'm writing queer characters now so I need to do it well/properly". I've previously chronicled my own internal journey and my early fictional stumbles. Now I'd like to go more detailed and nitty-gritty. This time, through the story of writing the book that got me to publication, I'll show I had to confront a final odd hurdle within myself and push back at that little bit of myself that was still stuck in the past.

Be warned, this article will contain references to and discussion of a storyline that involves assault and its associated trauma. There will also be spoilers for one of my books.

My debut novel, Starborn Vendetta, is in broad strokes a reimagining of story elements from Count of Monte Cristo, Faust and Macbeth. But in particular, there was a character who starts off the story and forms a core part of how things progress. That character is Gaspard Atarex, a member of the Feles people in the Cluster who starts off as a guard within Prison Station d'If, where protagonist Mercedes Solari is sent. Within the first chapter, I wanted to show Gaspard as bitter, hollowed out by his duties, detached from any real passion. He is gay, has a preference for human males, and due to the prison environment has an outlet without needing another person. When Mercedes appears, her magnetic personality awakens a wish to protect her from the vindictive warden, and the only way he can do that is through someone he loathes.

The root of that became another character, a Feles prisoner dubbed Echo. Later in the story, it is revealed that Echo found Gaspard trying to help prisoners, which would've gotten him into huge trouble, and blackmailed him into a relationship. Echo is a predator, plain and simple, and Gaspard is his victim. Things happen, the d'If is exploded, and both Gaspard and Echo survive. Echo tracks down Gaspard and essentially stalks him. At the end of their combined story, Echo is killed by another character. But here's the kicker; in the original draft of the story, Gaspard never resolved this core issue and...kinda made...peace with Echo? I'm getting embarrassed remembering it.

I see that this may be interpreted as a form of internalised homophobia. We'll come back to that, but I will say it reflects a passive acceptance of behaviours and ideas of redemption that not only queer media, but other media had been pushing for decades by this point. The Beauty and the Beast trope taken to one of its logical extremes, the deeply toxic "it's okay, they're fixable" or "see there was good there" attitude which is unacceptable in real life. The odd thing is that when I was writing it, I didn't think of it in terms of them both being men. I wanted a character suffering from that kind of trauma, and either could easily have been gender-swapped. Equally the fact that Gaspard was gay didn't feel like a factor related to this, just an aspect of how Gaspard was in the world.

My editor at the time called this conclusion out immediately, saying that Echo's actions didn't merit any kind of forgiveness. They didn't ask me to do a gender flip, but they did say I needed to show this wasn't a good thing, which I hadn't originally due to how dark my original tone was. I looked through, and had to agree with their stance. I'd gone through some more writing by this time, and some more media and real-life encounters that reshaped my ideas.

The most basic change I made was that I removed any forgiveness Gaspard originally met out to Echo. Instead he very actively broke away, and when Echo died, he declares that he hates him and doesn't forgive or forget. Gaspard's emotions are still confused and he's still traumatised, but he is on the path to breaking away from that and finding a life beyond that. I also rewrote some bits to show that Gaspard's emotions towards Echo were extremely confused, influenced by being placed in a vulnerable position and taken advantage of; at his core he hates Echo, but some part of him believes Echo's statements that he actually desires the connection. I did further research into the accounts and treatment of sexual abuse victims during this rewrite (I know, I should've done that from the first), and incorporated some of that into his personality and actions. I'd like to think I managed to make him a more nuanced figure in the final draft which made it to publication.

Reading back through this, I'm thinking "What the hell?!". And maybe you've got similar reactions. I wrote Starborn Vendetta during a pretty dark period of my life. My maternal grandparents where in the final stages of their lives, my father unknown to me was also dying and only had months left, and I was struggling with other things in my family and coming to grips with my own mental health and identity. This included not being embarrassed by my tastes in media, finding my own style of clothing, and asserting myself as an individual within the family.

Prior to the revisions, several things happened. First, my father died a few months after I finished writing the initial draft of Starborn Vendetta, which required something of a mental reset for myself. Second, I became more fully aware of how many queer people were actually within my own family, which opened me up to the realisation that what I was writing needed to be respectful not just for nebulous others I hadn't yet encountered, but people within my own family.

So going forward, I was. By the time the dev edits for Starborn Vendetta came in, I'd already written or part-written the next two entries in the Cluster Cycle and it brought me face to face with elements of how I might've ended up writing elements of the next few books. Suffice to say, there was course correction, and that correction was necessary. Since then, I've always been very careful in whether or not to consider incorporating that kind of story, and what I should be researching when portraying it in a respectful and empowering manner.

For more information on the kind of pitfalls I half-fell into or nearly fell into, see Emily Inkpen's article "Writing Sexual Assault - Things to Remember".

So where do we go from here? I've talked for the past weeks about my writing journey relating to queer characters. Next week, the final Sunday of Pride Month, I'll be giving what have become my guiding principles for when I include and write queer characters. Until then, stay fabulous, stay safe, and if you're writing a story based around assault or trauma, remember to do your research. And sometimes, there can be no forgiveness.

Writing Queer 2: My early fictional attempts.

 Last week, I looked back my early exposure to queerness before I came to accept my own bisexuality. This week, I'm looking at my early attempts at writing queer characters. I won't bore you with many, since I didn't really attempt anything like that for a long time.

Many of my first attempts came from the first extremely long story I wrote, and something I initially attempted to self-publish. That was The Leviathan Chronicle, a story set within a heavily-fictionalised version of the Crusades in a separate world, where two opposing supernatural factions (the Seraphim and the Powers) used humans marked by their power to fight the holy war as a proxy conflict. And out of the five lead characters, three had some level of queerness relating to their stories or personality.

To briefly summarise; the titular character Leviathan was intersex/gender queer, and standing as an outsider to the conflict. The other two were Elathan, a spy who loses his lover Paimon and is revived after being executed once found out; and Mastema, one of the faction leaders who suffers from trauma due to a certain kind of abuse from his father. All of them live to the story's end, don't worry, but...let's just say I wasn't being very tactful with how certain aspects of their stories were handled excepting Leviathan. It goes without saying, this was my angsty era, and I was working through some stuff in my mind at that time that needed a dark outlet. The fourth lead was Astarte, a woman driven by revenge to the exclusion of all else. But I hardly consider my need to be dark that as an excuse.

Basically, because of some elements of my media exposure at the time, many of my stories were and are tragic in tone. Not completely depressing, but still tragic. A different story, which was written as a tragedy from the outset following eight reincarnated people in a fantastical Medieval Europe, had a central subplot where one was reincarnated as twins, with another seeing the surviving twin as her soulmate when he in this incarnation is gay. He survives right to the end, and isn't persecuted because of his sexuality, but the fact that the female lead isn't able to rekindle his initial incarnation's love for her is the main issue in the story. I don't want to dwell on this longer than necessary, mostly because I feel queasy knots of embarrassment twisting round me when I think about my early writing, plus this is a story I'll likely never revisit. But it's still worth mentioning, because it sums up something I was doing at the time; I wasn't being violent to LGBTQIA+ characters, but I wasn't exactly putting them in happy scenarios.

I think you can see through these examples that I was going through a stage of...how do I put this? Standard angsty storytelling? War, suffering, religious questioning, the tragedy of reincarnation, all that stuff. That didn't always focus down to specifically queer issues, but I'm sure people will see how queer characters can be magnets for them. I know this from personal experience writing. It wasn't until my earlier experiences of less problematic relationships that my own writing began to change. As I said last time, I was a sheltered type, and I was also shy of asking about those subjects with anyone close to me.

I also lacked emotional maturity. I hadn't known truly deep emotion, either for real people or fictional characters. I hadn't cried at media in any form. It took that kind of emotional connection for me to think "I want to create something that moves people and even saddens them without falling into the usual traps I'm seeing in popular media." There's enough sadness in the world of people on the spectrum, and while those are valid experiences, I wanted to create experiences that weren't built on heartbreak and abuse, tainted by sorrowful memories. I want experiences that are built in simple love, innocent happiness, the kind of thing straight love stories have held onto like vices for decades. Things are changing for the better, especially when you take a step back and look at the broader range of stories outside the narrow mainstream bubble, but there's still steps to take. And I'd like to live and see a day when both counterculture and mainstream can exist side by side, as equals.

So how did I get past this hang-up that I've outlined in both struggle and result? How did I manage to create worlds and universes that I was able to write more realistic and less tragic examples of the wonderful spectrum of existence? Well, you'll find out next week.

Writing Queer 1: unpromising beginnings

 The first of my four Pride Month posts, and it's on a personal note. It's how I began experiencing, and then writing, queer characters and story themes. I may have become relatively well immersed in that side of my writing these days, but it took some time and a few dud starts.

Coming to terms with my own bisexuality was a longish process, but in hindsight that feels like nothing compared to my journey getting myself to properly representing people in the modern world, where diversity of gender and sexual identity is something that is important to acknowledge. I've still got some way to go, and things have continued to get either better or worse depending where you live. But here's how things started. Beginning with...my own external experience of queerness.

My awareness of LGBTQIA+ in media was...lacking, for a lot of my life. Not because I didn't have exposure or tolerance, I had both within my immediately family, but just because a lot of my awareness came from media. I wasn't much of a going out and interacting with people type for a number of reasons, so I wasn't exposed to that spectrum. I also wasn't being exposed to standard society-level homophobia, so you could say I had some advantage in that I was able to look at something without any early filter of stereotype.

I guess it's best to start with my 'awakening', even if I didn't become fully aware of my sexuality until the last few years. A lot of people in my social circle have pointed to Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weitz in 1999's The Mummy as their bisexual awakening. More power to them, but honestly Fraser isn't my type, and when I saw the film I wasn't developed enough in that direction to understand. I now realise in retrospect that my own bi awakening was with Angelina Jolie and Gerard Butler from the not-very-good 2001 film Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. I didn't know why this film was stuck in the recesses of my mind for years until recently. A: the leads' chemistry surrounding their characters' tragic rivalry made up for shortfalls in the story and script, and B: ....I found both of them physically attractive.

So...that's a start.

My first exposure to anything explicitly queer within a story was...the 1985 film Red Sonja. I've voiced my opinions on an aspect of the film, and I don't think it's very good. It's just a bog standard 1980s fantasy film based on a fantasy tradition that today feels very dated. But Red Sonja was also my first exposure to a lesbian in the form of Queen Gedrun. A pretty dodgy example, and one I didn't clock. To me it just seemed like someone who took people as servants and trophies rather than as unwilling companions. As I said, I wasn't that aware. And so we've gone from one poor movie to another, and from standard awakening to 'YIKES!' representation.

I didn't keep much of an explicit track of my awareness of LGBTQIA+ in fiction, or in real life, until I was well into my 20s. There were a few bits and pieces that surfaced, such as short films which I tended not to like as they were just depressing (finding LGBTQIA+ media that isn't depressing was like finding hen's teeth until recently). And there were some creators coming out with what I found out was called 'Word of Gay', which I've come to look slant-eyed at because... I mean, if you wanted them to be on the spectrum, just say so. Show it in a way that doesn't require you to come out from behind the curtain and address the audience in an "oh, by the way" style.

At that point, I discovered video game romances, and exploring them found several queer options. I admit that includes BioWare, as cheesy as they can be, but role-playing these characters gave me a solid sense of what I liked and didn't like. Years later as a fully awakened bisexual I played Dragon Age Inquisition, and I ended up romancing first Cassandra as a man, then Iron Bull also as a man. I also have to commend both as the most entertaining romances since they both play in good ways with genre tropes; Cassandra was played as the nervous young woman without losing her badass aspect, while Iron Bull's BDSM relationship is based firmly in reality rather than...whatever Foofta Blegh of Blegh does.

A few years after that I'd also run into...yaoi and bara. It was almost inevitable that I would do that since I enjoyed anime, and was interested in stuff beyond the obvious mainstream. For those who don't know yet, 'Yaoi' is a Western term for Boy's Love media that is often written by women and has a reputation for being slightly trashy, while 'Bara' is a subset of Japanese manga that is primarily written by LGBTQIA+ authors and frequently NSFW.

I admit, here and now, that my shelves are a little bare of LGBTQIA+ content. Partly because I'm terrible at finding things and need to be selective due to budget, but also because many of the experiences I get recommended are also depressing. It's been the reality for queer people for a long time, particularly the last two centuries, that being queer was dangerous or depressing or to live in an oppressed state. But when I read a story, I don't just want to be depressed, I want to laugh and be enlightened and see a vision of how the world could be.

My own experience with being queer hasn't been depressing and oppressed, I've been allowed to mature and experience myself. I now have a full awareness of my self and my sympathies, and while I have occasionally run into homophobia in this wild place called the internet, I've never felt any push to engage. I just turned quietly away, blocked, didn't even say goodbye, and walked on ignoring them. That, for me, is the sign of strength for my own queer experience. I also don't feel the need to broadcast my sexuality on a personal level, as I'm overall comfortable with who I am. I fully realise that's not a universal experience. But neither is misery.

And it's with that strange combination of isolation and personal certainty, and growing frustration of a fictional norm of heartbreak and misery over happy endings, that I truly started putting queer characters into my writing. Next week, I'm planning an exploration of my journey to writing my own brand of queer representation in my writing. Its rocky beginnings, and its currently and hopefully much smoother reality.

If you want to know more about my general writing journey, I created a podcast/video on the subject, including me reading out some of my less cringy early writing to show how my style and approach evolved. It even includes a sample of my upcoming novel The Murderer's Lament, now expected to release in 2027.

The latest Author Talks: M. R. James

 It's the first Sunday of the month, so it's the day when I release the episode of my one-person podcast Author Talks, guaranteed no AI included. This time, it's a look at an author I've recently delved into both in his fictional writing, his life, and analysis of his work. That person is M. R. James, a father of the modern folk horror and maestro of the ghost story. Not only do I look over his work and what makes his work appealing, and how aspects of him and it haven't aged that well, but I also give an abridged reading of one of his stories. That story, 'The Mezzotint', is possibly one of the best introductions to the M. R. James short story.

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Starting tomorrow: My Pride Month endeavours.

Third year in a row I've done this. A celebration of the beautiful rainbow of human experience many historians stubbornly insisted didn't exist for some odd reason and they also need therapy. For the month of June, AKA Pride Month, I decided in 2024 to highlight different people during the month's thirty days. I first focused on a mixture of novellists both old and new, then last year on other artistic groups including composers and painters. Now, for my third year, I....couldn't. I couldn't actually get anything together for either historical figures (so tragic) or mythological beings (plenty but oh boy the work). If I were completely on top of things, I would have been doing this. But I've been severely ill, and now I'm literally one day away from publishing this as I write it, so instead I'm going to do something else. Since there are four Sundays in the month this time, I'm going to be publishing a post each month. These posts will be talking about my experiences as I moved into writing queer characters in my own work.

My writing as it stands is stuffed with queer representation. The Cluster Cycle has main characters that are somewhere on the spectrum, my radio play The Angry House has a male lead, and I've written other shorter pieces that feature them. I'm also bisexual in real life, and while I'm prone towards pessimism when it comes to society, I truly feel that we can push back against the absolute BS that's happening in the world right now. We can stop this, if we just stubbornly refuse to be classed as lesser.

The first Sunday of the coming month will also see the release of the second in this year's Author Talks podcast episodes, which means there will be two posts on 7 June. I'm hoping I'll be back on my feet before the end of next week, and that I'll be able to give you some extra bits and pieces through my socials. I might even have an update on my third much-delayed Cluster Cycle book, The Murderer's Lament.

But for now, here's some interesting people I found while drafting my intended list of people to show on my socials for each day of Pride Month.

The Chevalière d'Éon, a member of the French court who lived as a man for the first part of her life, then switched in both dress and gender identity to a woman for the rest of it. A spy, soldier, and successful diplomat who sadly fell foul of the French Revolution, their legacy lives on.

Zhou Wenren (or Zhou Wen or Zhou Ren), the Director of Palace Attendants during the reign of Emperor Jing of China's Han Dynasty. While the information we have is a little spotty and comes from a single source where Zhou Wenren is listed among "Male Favourites" of the Han court, it's recorded that Emperor Jing favoured Zhou Wenren above all other officials around him. And unlike many other imperial lovers, Zhou Wenren managed to live to a cushy retirement under Emperor Wu.

Michael Dillon, a Merchant Navy doctor and later Buddhist monk. While he is more commonly known as the first recorded trans man to undergo phalloplasty, his life is interesting beyond that. From his time in the Merchant Navy during WW2, to his life as a monk under the name Lobzang Jivaka, to his writing on both his own life and his experiences or Tibetan Buddhism, Dillon is a fascinating individual to research.

Philolaus of Corinth, a Corinthian lawmaker who lived during the 700 BCE. Lover of the chariot racer Diocles, the two left Corinth and settled in Thebes, staying together for the rest of their lives. Philolaus is attributed with creating laws in Thebes which allowed two adult men to remain together as a couple beyond the time when pederastic tradition insisted they parted. He can be seen as a proto-gay rights lawmaker, though we must remember the times he lived in.

Historical accounts today and in olden times are chronically underwritten when it comes to women of any kind, let alone those on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. Doesn't help that many initial English translators for non-English sources lived during a time of (if possible) even greater discrimination and phobia. But I hope you can look these few up and get some interesting information about them.

So, here's to Pride Month, starting tomorrow. And may we reclaim and enshrine for good the rights that are being slowly stripped back from us by idiotic, short-sighted, and/or prejudiced politicians and lawmakers.

New Author Talks episode; the Time Travel discussion

 Another year, another attempt to do something vaguely entertaining. I previously noted that it was planned, but things ended up being...dragged out. This time for the first episode, it's an exploration through the medium of Author Talks focuses on time travel, and its use in one particular cult series. A series I kinda liked but also kinda didn't like but then liked again then really didn't like and then appreciated for what it tried to do and-- If you want more coherent thoughts and analysis, the episode's down below. Enjoy!

YouTube version

Spotify Version

Writing as a bisexual; being the quiet one.

 Last month, it was talking about my relationship to gender. This time, writing with my own sexuality in mind in a modern world where performing sexuality is...a thing, unfortunately. This post was inspired by Emily Inkpen's own article on the topic, "Writing Queer Experiences as a Bisexual Woman". It's only within the last five years that I realised there was nothing wrong with being attracted to both men and women. I found women attractive and alluring, but then I started having the same feelings for men and wasn't processing it well internally. I wasn't acting out, I just kept it bottled up to work through. And I found that just because I liked both didn't mean I was potentially promiscuous or anything. I was just me.

I fully admit, my experience with real life is limited. Due to various factors, I don't get out a huge amount, so many of my experiences of queer representation have been through media. And on the whole, bisexual characters have it pretty rough. Either they are labelled as gay or straight if they settle with one gender or the other, or are given negative character traits such as commitment issues or some variant on classical depravity and personal issues. Truth be told, one of my upcoming stories has elements of that, which will need to be addressed during edits.

Something that I've ended up being conscious about with regards to my characters, as I tend to put both men and women in my casts, is the inevitable "shipping". Obviously "shipping" happens regardless, but it's more the tacit assumption that of course man and woman will get together. It's not a fact of life, but it's a dictate of the society we inherited from the Victorian middle class that man and woman must get together at story's end. Some of the great narratives have been permanently crippled by this pressure.

I've also found a penchant for writing a certain type of character dynamic; a duo where one is gay, the other is straight, and they aren't the same gender. Or having the only real romantic element be outside the straight zone. I used to be concerned about this kind of thing, wondering what people would think. Then I realised that I shouldn't have to care about it, and if I just wrote what I wanted to and stood my ground, that would be better. Not just for others on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, but for me. If I could write bisexuals with stable lives and characters, gay and lesbian relationships that weren't tragic or traumatic, trans and intersex characters living their best life, and asexual characters able to be who they are without being judged.

It's genuinely tricky to write about the queer experience when you haven't been that greatly immersed, having spent a lot of time online and living in an out-of-the-way part of the world where I don't know if someone being very openly queer would go down well. It helps that my usual gender presentation is very subdued male-coded, to the point I've heard some people surprised when I mentioned my orientation. But I've also learned through that and my tastes in fiction to never, ever judge someone by their external appearance. Because of that lack of stock or weight in external looks, I tend not to gravitate towards extravagant or extroverted characters. Instead, I've found myself writing people who are...just people.

That can make me feel almost guilty, combined with the fact that as a white man, I've got several engrained cultural prejudices working in my favour. Surely I have to be loud and proud, it's the expected thing, it's the norm! I say, who sets that as the norm? The more I looked, the more it felt like what started out as a genuine sign of rebellion against the establishment is now being encouraged by the establishment to act like an ID tag, and because of that I don't see people like me. I see angst and flamboyance, which is all well and good, that does happen. But it's still saddeningly rare to see.

I guess this is less about writing as a bisexual man, and more about writing as me; someone retiring, shy, a listener and writer who still likes to talk a lot, but also likes his quiet times. I'm not a party animal, I'm comfortable in my gender. I don't fit into the 'pattern' that it feels like queer romance or queer existence is still being squeezed into. I understand there's an appeal of seeing any kind of queer representation, but it's starting to feel rather one-note. I'm pleased there's increased diversity being pushed through, especially now with basic freedom of expression under attack.

I write as a bisexual man regardless of what I look like, and write to include as much diversity as my stories and characters will allow. And I try to write about my own experience of bisexuality; the sort who's just part of the crowd, walking down the street in everyday clothes, but still able to--to appropriate a phrase--have my emotional bread buttered on both sides.

Me, Gender, and I.

 

Provocative title? Yes, but it'll make sense when you read the rest of this. Also, yes, potential trigger warning for people dealing with issues of gender identity and associated discrimination.

I decided to write about this because recently, in a context where I was just sharing something fun, I believe I was on the receiving end of what I think was indirect transphobia. I referred to a character I'd created and was playing as in Baldur's Gate 3 as a trans man. And...well, suffice to say there were some gif-based comments that made 'feelings' felt. I felt happy and bouncy, enjoying playing as this character. And I got...Obama Raised Eyebrows and Bruce Willis Look of Horrified Disgust? I don't know whether it was the phrasing or the fact I just mentioned it, but this otherwise inclusive community that I shan't name here and I'd been on the edges of for fun showed a proportion had seemingly excluded the "T" in LGBTQIA+. I've left that community, never to return.

That interaction reminded me of a part of my youth that for a long time I thought was just silly. When I was under ten years old, I once thought I might become a ballet dancer. Of course with how I've grown I'm now too tall and the wrong build. But the dancers I saw, and the characters I enjoyed most in the media I consumed, made me think something; I can best sum it up with the sentence, "Maybe I'll become a woman at some point."

At that point, I didn't know anything about biological sex, presented gender, chosen gender, questions of sexuality and gender dysmorphia, or the whole thorny issue of transgender people's right to be who they were. I was brought up in an immediate and extended family with a lot of strong-willed women, most of my fictional role models were women, and my private life didn't have any solid gender binaries forced on me. My sister and I wore similar clothes, and the only people I'd ever seen wearing skirts were complete strangers.

This initial feeling was from the 1990s, when the infamous Section 23 was still in force in the UK. You know, THAT bit of media censorship. As I grew up, I became more settled into my biological and presented gender. I did see some bits of media that played into unpleasant tropes and stereotypes including the depraved lesbian and a trans character being treated as a punchline. But I didn't know about the prejudices, so they didn't connect with the "you must find this funny" part of my brain. In fact, in the latter case, I didn't find it funny. I found the rest of the movie funny, but not that bit, because I didn't understand why it was supposed to be funny. And when I did understand years later, I still didn't find it funny.

I've now come to fully accept myself for what I am; cis male, bisexual, and while I don't broadcast my sexuality I'm also not the type to be uncomfortable around those that do. If anyone's seen me being stiff, I'm like that around everyone I don't know. It's my shyness showing. But when I get to know something, at least in a 'we know each other by sight' situation, I just see everyone as people/ Straight or queer, anywhere on the spectrum, cis or trans or fluid or neutral, we're all just people. Anyone can be great, anyone can be mean, most are just average and normal.

I'm very fortunate in that I've had an upbringing that left me without internalised homophobia. I have near relations that are on the spectrum, I myself am on the spectrum, and I've made a circle of friends and colleagues who are either within that community or completely open-minded and chill. I'm glad of that, but I think that early internal fluidity about my gender was a seed for what would grow. I used to cringe at that early idea, but now I'm just content to remember when I thought changing my gender was as simple as shapeshifting in fantasy.

All this is relevant now as the LGBTQIA+ community are coming under attack from discriminatory laws, and the world is leaning more conservative in its governorship. Also the world is inured in another time of open and brutal war, where people want stability and are more liable to lash out at groups who are seen as out of the ordinary. Which is why need to remain obvious and push back against laws that seek to belittle and hide us. This applies across the world at the moment, including the UK. Just remember those times in your youth when you had silly ideas. They can be the gateway to a tolerant and inclusive view of the world. And they may help you walk away from a community where you suddenly seen a deeply unpleasant streak of discrimination.

My new video: An analysis of Cocoon

 

I've been intending to make this video since November last year, but other stuff (including a failed project I've written about recently) got in the way. Getting this together into what I believe is my most ambitious video project to date, I hope people will enjoy this analysis of Cocoon, a 2023 puzzle video game that incorporates elements from the abstract, cosmicism, and maybe even a touch of Lem.

In this video, I not only do a rough story rundown of this game -- which features no dialogue and no text and no voice over of any kind -- along with its thematic parallels and some developer titbits on the story. This is truly an analysis, but not one that goes into extremely over-exhaustive detail on why that rock is the shape it is. This isn't one of those. It's meant to entertain, and be digestible, as well as informative.

I hope you enjoy!

Video link

The Hard Truth: Failure Happens

 So....since last month, I've been doing a thing. It's a thing that I thought would be fun and enjoyable and entertaining and all the rest of it. Instead, it's becoming wearing and frustrating and eating up time I want to spend on other things. And it's doing something much worse: it's eating up my ability to actually enjoy what I'm doing.

I'd decided to do something along the lines of a commentated Mass Effect playthrough. Me as a writer, and a fan of the series despite its many issues. And I've reached the point where I'm recording stuff from Mass Effect 3. And now it's hitting me. My mood's been growing worse, my engagement with this project is growing worse, EVERYTHING about this is making me feel worse overall. And it's not just that I'm getting little engagement with this, it's that I'm getting NO engagement. And if I'm doing that, I might as well just enjoy it in private and do stuff I know is sound.

I already created a video for my Author Talks podcast on the series, and I'm not pretty sure I should've just stopped there. I did once do a runthrough for fun of different video games, "AER: Memories of Old" and "Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy", but that was different. I had to read out dialogue, I was more engaged. This time, it's starting to feel like going through the motions. And looking back on episodes, I realise I wasn't actually SAYING anything worth saying. It wasn't very funny, it wasn't very engaging, I wasn't very emotionally invested, and there weren't that many bits and pieces that were actually talking about something. I was just tooting my own horn, which...is something I need to do as a writer. But not like that.

Not that this aborted project hasn't taught me things. It's given me more of an insight into putting videos together which will be a lot of help going forward. I've found out some stuff about sound editing that I need to do.

It feels completely demoralising on one front that this project which I've put about two months of my time and effort into is just...nothing. But on the other hand, I can now enjoy going through the rest of Mass Effect 3 as a game that I have fun with. I probably won't abandon this kind of thing entirely, but it won't be for this series. It'll be for something else that I can just...enjoy doing. And talk about properly. Because that's what I like doing with you, talking or writing about things. Encouraging some kind of dialogue within your mind. And this video series wasn't doing that.

Failure is hard, mostly because we both can be judged from outside, but also because we realise that we had the responsibility to a point of realising the project probably wouldn't work. That doesn't mean don't try new things. If I hadn't tried this out, I wouldn't have known that this isn't the format I'm fitted for. I enjoy piecing things together, creating analysis videos, not walkthroughs.

And if you enjoy analysis and walkthroughs, this is a video I'm still very glad I made. And I hope to be able to create something I'm equally proud of going forward. For now, it's time to chill, destress, reclaim Mass Effect as a guilty pleasure I actually enjoy rather than dread going back to, and refocus on the important things in my life. Stay safe, stay happy, and see you again in the future.

For the Love of Words...

 NOTE: Some of the topics discussed herein may be potentially triggering. Discretion advised.

I'm pretty sure there's a percentage of people reading that title who will think I'm going to do something high and mighty. In fact, I'm talking about words and terms that have now entered common parlance that were originally coined or popularised from humble origins in works of fiction, and the joy of finding out about their origins. There's a whole episode of the PBS Studios online show Otherwords dedicated to it. Titled "Popular Words Invented by Authors", the episode covers things like 'twitter', 'chortle' 'tween', 'robot' and 'nerd'. But something the episode doesn't touch on, for understandable reason, is 'gaslight'.

In modern self-help and psychological texts (not deeply scholastic but more popular texts), 'gaslighting' is defined as a phenomenon where one party manipulates another through questioning or undermining their perception of things, creating uncertainty in the self and dependence on the abuser. Because yes, this is a form of abuse, especially when practised consciously. The terms origin is interesting and of itself. The 1938 West End play Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton portrays a criminal husband's attempts to undermine his heiress wife's sanity. While in use in some for since the 1960s, it didn't enter popular speech until the 2010s. I'm sure you can see parallels between the husband's manipulation of reality and how so much of today's mainstream media tries to sell an idea not through persuasive argument, but through manipulation of the facts.

Of course this wasn't the first portrayal in fiction of what could be called 'gaslighting'. To take a well-known example, the entire premise of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew has the playwright seemingly taking the side of the abuser in this instance, which is one of many reasons why this play is today one of the most controversial and disliked of his corpus. I certainly find it borderline unwatchable today because I'm firmly on Katherine's side in this situation. When she says "and the sky changes even as your mind", I die a little inside. She has been psychologically broken by an abusive partner, and this is supposed to be a comedy. The only way this could possibly be palatable today is if it were an elaborate two-sided game they were playing, with both parties in on the joke. But even then, it's more than questionable.

On a less dour note, something I find amusing is the amount of video game terminology that has seeped into common parlance not as cringy inside jokes, but just as something that's there. 'Game Over' (famously adlibbed by Bill Paxton in Aliens) and 'Level Up' are the two obvious ones, but I'm sure there's other things that come to mind. Of course there is the reverse. 'Grind' may have a specific meaning in games, but the term and its combination of tedium and necessity goes all the way back to when people literally did the daily grind to get enough flour for bread each day. And that's not counting the terms that make reference to pieces of fiction, like the contrast in fictional perspectives terms as "Doylist" and "Watsonian".

This comes round to why I love language, even though it can be infuriating and I thought my ongoing degree studies on English language and literature might dent my appreciation of them. It's not unique to English, but since English is my primary language in both writing and speech, I sense it strongly there. This also extends beyond language specifically and into the speculative realms, for which this episode from Overly Sarcastic Productions is an excellent brief look at how actual technology can be either predicted or completely overlooked by fiction. Or, sadly, the fact that the term "Palantir" is being used in a real-life aplication.

Take joy in language during these trying times. It's helped before. Sometimes looking up the etymology for a term can be extremely engaging and distracting.

Hindsight: It's weird.

So, recently, I've been thinking about three writers whose personalities and actions are more than reprehensible. Yet they're also important in either the development or the popularisation of certain genre aspects. I don't want to mention them by name, because I feel they get too much exposure as it is. Instead, I'll be using initials taken from their names. It won't fool everyone, but it'll be a way for me to discuss the work without giving undue exposure. It is also a chance for me to talk about something that clicked with me recently; the fact that, long before either I or the general public knew about these authors' undesirable traits, I didn't click fully with their work.

Let's start with N. N is a writer who has an intriguing imagination, and for a time was something of a darling in their genre. Now...things have changed, rightly so. But while I was recommended this writer's work for a long time, the few titles I tried just didn't resonate. The novel "N" just never resonated with me on a basic level. A different novel "AG" was similarly odd, in that everyone praised it but I just didn't like it. I also tried a collaborative novel this writer created with someone else, and again I didn't jibe. A different piece of fiction, C, was interesting to experience once but not something I wanted to return to. To be blunt, there was a background to the writing that felt off. I can't describe it any other way without being more explicit about who the writer is.

Now let's move on the next author, K. K created a very popular series that I admit was one of my early reads, something that got me into long-form stories. I experienced the first few through audiobooks with a narration that was incredible. Then I read the remaining parts of the series myself. I won't deny, it was a fun ride, and it's become apocalyptically popular. But the more I went on, the more I realised that early love for it was rooted more in the narrator's performance in the audiobook than the books themselves. Something about the writing just didn't resonate. Were they a factor in my early reading journey? Yes. Would I read K's work again? No, before I fully realised what kind of person K was, I had tried other pieces of fiction they had created, and it didn't resonate. It just seemed so...pedestrian. There wasn't a spark, a feeling of "this writing has depth".

Next and finally we reach L. L is something of a genre codifier for certain aspects of horror (yes, I'm partly spoiling here, but this one's also the oldest author and long dead). This writer had...issues. A lot of issues. Many of them extreme by the standards of their time, let alone ours. And before I knew about them, when I first encountered their writing in an abridged and somewhat sanitised form, I thought "Well I like the ideas, but this writer desperately needed a copyeditor because this prose is all over the place." As I got access to their uncensored work, and better understood where the otherwise compelling content came from, I realised that many of the aspects that are beloved are tied to that writer's now-unacceptable opinions and prejudices.

Now, because I've been comparatively oblique when talking about these writers, you may think I'm ashamed to have had them in my reading life. And that's not true. They were steps in my reading and writing journey for one reason or another, be it a style I didn't jibe with or a motivator to raise my reading ability after many long years of it being subpar due to my dyslexia.

With hindsight (title drop), I see that my instinctive initial feelings about all these writers was perhaps reflective of what they were like as people, and how they very much do not align with my beliefs. It's a strange kind of "I wondered why so-and-so didn't linger or click with me". I've had other similar reactions to certain actors, certain films, certain games. Just an instinctive repulsion. With hindsight, I can say to myself "oh yeah, so and so wasn't a nice person" or "yeah, that figures, the one who wrote this was horrible actually". But that leads to the dangerous habit of claiming foreknowledge or greater media literacy than you actually have.

This is just one person's tale of how, long before I or other people knew of the nasty deeds or opinions associated with these writers, I read their work. And on some deep level I couldn't then explain or understand, it didn't jibe.

New Video: Me on Ivalice

 So...this happened a while ago. Other stuff was going on at the same time, specifically the recent release of The Angry House. But here is something I created not long ago. My look at the development history and timeline for one of my favourite fictional worlds: the land of Ivalice, from the Final Fantasy franchise. Hope you enjoy!

Author Talks — Final 2025 episode

 It's all in the name. Today is when the eighth and final episode of this year's season of Author Talks releases. It's been a long year for me, and hopefully I'll be able to create something more next year. Also, stuff's been happening, and I go into a rough outline of that in this episode alongside something that just...caught my attention about a certain metal-faced person from a certain French adventure novel. I hope you enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas/Yule/Holiday.

YouTube link

Spotify link

My Anime Life: Zetsuen no Tempest

I hadn't intended this to be the week's post, but I came down with a nasty flu, and this was ready, so I'm doing it now.

In this newborn article series, I've already talked about The Apothecary Diaries and Blood-C. Now I'd like to highlight a series you may never have heard of at all. Zetsuen no Tempest (officially localised as Blast of Tempest) began life as a fantasy drama manga co-written by Kyo Shirodaira and Arihide Sano, and illustrated by Ren Saizaki. The same year the manga concluded, an anime television series was created by Studio Bones and adapted by Mari Okada.

The storyline is...something. The initial premise is that following the death of his adoptive sister Aika, Mahiro Fuwa finds himself allied with Hakaze Kusaribe, a member of a mage clan dedicated to the Tree of Genesis. That clan has splintered, with a large faction seeking to awaken the counterpart Tree of Exodus, which causes giant seeds to appear and wipe out nearby populations. Mahiro seeks out lead protagonist Yoshino Takegawa, a loner who was friends with himself and Fuwa. Since Fuwa was killed with magic, Yoshino and Mahiro ally with Hakaze to find Fuwa's killer, ending up caught in the plots surrounding the Tree of Genesis and its plan for the world.

That sounds like I've given away the whole plot, but I assure you I haven't. The plot takes lots of twists and turns, yet it's paced out fairly slowly. The core drama is how the three core characters--Yoshino, Mahiro and Hakaze--deal with the unfolding path of events and the truth behind the conflict of the Genesis and Exodus Trees. The magic system used here is robust and unique, with mages of the Tree of Genesis sacrificing pieces of modern technology to grant them charges of magic, which themselves have a strict limitation on what they can and can't do.

Technically the initial goal of Hakaze to retake control of her clan is resolved within the series' first half, but the plot continues well beyond that point and builds to a compelling finale that had my head spinning in a good way. There is some repetition of scenes and information here and there, especially in flashbacks, but the writing was good enough that the repetition didn't feel like a drag. Plus, with how overwhelming some of the plot can be, some reminders here and there are a good thing.

Perhaps what brought this series to mind for the next "My Anime Life" article is Overly Sarcastic Productions' Trope Talk video on "Haunting the Narrative". The character of Aika Fuwa, who is dead by the story's opening and only seen in flashback, is the definition of this trope. Her influence on the current narrative is profound, and we do get a good look at her personality and actions, but she never features in the present storyline. Her relationship with her secret lover Yoshino and adoptive brother Mahiro is complicated to say the least, and drives much of the character chemistry related to the two. She is also the sources of some humour, which can be sorely needed as this is otherwise a pretty serious and grim plot.

Last time I didn't feel the need to comment on the anime itself beyond narrative, but here I think it is appropriate. There are some parts of the story which, to be honest, can drag. I may find a verbal debate lasting two episodes interesting, but most would be bored to tears. The animation is engaging enough that some of the boring bits are tolerable, but it's the musical score by Michiru Oshima that forms the backbone of most scenes. A grand orchestral score, it's never used in the wrong place, and despite a surprisingly small number of tracks spread across twenty-four episodes I didn't get the feeling of "oh, this one again again", but instead "oh, I know what this scene is about".

My latest video -- Narrative in Video Games: An Author's Retrospective

 So, over the past year, I've been more serious about creating a multimedia presence for myself. That includes versions of my podcast episodes, game playthroughs including a long one of Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy with a restored content mod, and the new endeavors: videos that are more standalone projects which look at different bits of media I like or topics that I feel need more dedicated time and energy like using video clips. I've done Fabula Nova Crystallis, I've done the Bionicle movies, and now...video game narratives.

In this decided non-exhaustive look at narrative in video games, we go through their history, different attitudes towards them, how they are used, and some of the unique mechanics present in the interactive space. I hope it's enjoyable

YOUTUBE LINK