Now on Author Talks: An Announcement...and a ranking

 It's time! I'm doing this early because this needs reporting and repeating. This is the video version of the grand announcement! The Murderer's Lament, coming September 2026.

Also included is a brainworm of mine that wouldn't go away until I got it out there. You know Ian Fleming's Bond books? Almost all of them have aged like milk in a hothouse. But since I ended up reading them one way or another, I decided that I'd rank them. If you like someone ripping into an author and their work, this is the video for you!

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.

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.

Looking back at my study books...

 So, I've been going through the process of getting myself an English Language and Literature degree with the Open University. Still got stuff to do (not the end of Academic year yet), but in the name of education, I needed to read through not one, not two, not three, but...FOURTEEN books. As a reader, on the one hand, that was great. But as someone who had to read Dickens during my Level 1 studies last year, I also know that some of these pieces were likely to be something I didn't enjoy and would be going on an out/charity shop pile. So I'm deciding to make use of them outside my education and post my opinions on these fourteen books I had to read through between October last and now.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: This was easy to assess. I enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the greater academic insight given into this definitive piece of Gothic literature. I'd already read through the story via audiobook, so this was an easy yes in terms of keepers. I still think most people focus far too much on the sexual elements of the story, which if you actually read the darned book play third fiddle to other themes, but it's still interesting.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth: Our first dud destined for the out pile. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure this book has fans and it's interesting to look at how it's written. But it's also a prime example of a culture I wasn't part of, and I don't mean it's Muslim Indian and Jamaican diasporas (the former actually resonated with me a lot because Batley, where I grew up, had a Muslim Indian community dating back to the Partition). I mean how White Teeth treats subjects like suicidal depression, marital relationships, Islamic radicalisation, and cultural pressure to conform. It treats them all...as jokes, ala lowbrow 90s comedies. Seriously, the opening chapter plays a suicide attempt as a joke. The 'wit' in this book either hasn't aged well, or was always in poor taste. Also the ending... Very Dickensian in the worst way.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition: I'd never encountered this poet's work, and it's not for the faint of heart. Even untangling it from the context of Plath's own struggles and tragic death which followed hard upon completing this collection, these poems aren't for the faint of heart. Self-doubt, dark pasts, familial strife, all feature as themes here. This edition also comes with Plath's reproduced type-written versions of the poems, complete with amendments to the rhyme and metre. I'm stull not sure whether I'm keeping this one, but it...has something. Just not something I'd dive into for comfort reading.

Colston Whitehead, The Colossus of New York: Another one I'd never heard of, and one I'm definitely keeping. This exploration of New York City, dated to around the same time as White Teeth, explores not from the POV of a travelogue, but more akin to a bird's eye view. As if the city itself is guiding you. And in this case, the wit of the writing has aged pretty well, and the context is deliberately ambiguous enough that you can see more than just one demographic enjoying this. This book doesn't self-isolate through being of its time, it makes itself timeless. A keeper for sure.

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads: I'm gonna say it, Wordsworth is one of the most boring and uninspiring poets I've come across. There's only one of his poems in this absolute slog of a tome, 'Michael, A Pastoral Poem', that I think even vaguely enjoyable. The book as a whole is standard, droning, and if you know anything about real rural history insultingly patronising and romantic. And don't even get me started on Wordsworth's 'Introduction', which says with fifty words what could be said with ten. Coleridge's 'Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner' is its one redeeming property, and I don't need to keep one book for one poem. Out pile.

Anne-Marie Fyfe. No Far Shore: Described by Fyfe herself as a book of 'lyric essays', this is a strange little thing and not one I expected to enjoy as much as I did. Baring one poem about a dog trapped in a harbour, I found everything enjoyable, engaging, and entertaining. There's a distinct quality to this book that's difficult to quantify beyond; it's good. Being someone who lives near the coast myself, it resonated with me strongly, and how Fyfe incorporated poetic elements into her prose was something else. Keeping this.

Patricia Grace, Potiki: A story I didn't know I needed in my life. I've had some mild contact with Maori culture through pop culture influence, but this in-depth piece of work from someone within the Pākehā (colonial white-Maori) population was truly eye-opening. There's a fine dance along the line between low fantasy and social history, immersing you into the culture. It also has a strong anti-colonial message, and ultimately a hopeful message. A keeper for sure.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure: This doesn't need much space. It's just the notorious problem play in an academic edition with a massive introduction and footnotes galore. I enjoy Measure for Measure, and this book has good reference material for writing essays and similar, so keeping it.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Gravel Heart: Again not an author I'd encountered, and once again I was impressed. It's not a read I'll go back to in a hurry, because oh boy is it a hard read. If White Teeth is the over-optimistic and jokey view of the immigrant experience, Gravel Heart is a more realistic and occasionally cynical one. The main draw for me was its examination of a broken family, familial expectations and abuse, and the outsider finding something of value in a place they're othered in. Keeping it, but not re-reading for a while.

George Orwell, Essays: You can really tell a lot about Orwell as a person from this collection of his essays. From his anti-colonial stance to the complete lack of faith or belief in any kind of governance, to the remnants of Imperialism that colour how he sees and talks about non-English groups. Many of these essays are also quite funny to read through, and led me on a bit of a rabbit hold about his life. So, yeah, keeping.

Thomas More, Utopia: This book...is such a waste of space in my shelves. I didn't connect with it. I got it a bit more after having gone through the first half of the book, not just the second fictive half as most seem to. But still, it feels more like something for academia than pleasure reading. Interesting to see how the concept of 'utopia' emerged and how different it is for a Tudor man compared to today, but... Yeah, out pile.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret: A crown jewel of sensation fiction, and one of the best books from the Victorian period I've ever read. The writing is so good, sparkling even, and the story kept me hooked even when it strayed into the stereotypes of its day. Braddon has crafted one of the great anti-heroines, and her writing has aged magnificently compared to others of her day, or even most others that came decades later. Keeper. I also got her Aurora Floyd for good measure.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden: This is a good piece of writing, no question. A classic, indeed. And I'm keeping it. But... Some parts of how the story changes during its second half really don't sit well with me. I came to this after having watched in my youth the 1993 film version, and there's a shocking amount of context they add without actually changing the narrative. They also keep Mary Lennox as the focal character, while the book basically boots her into the chorus in favour of REAL PROTAGONIST COLIN NO FOR REAL HE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTER IN THE BOOK FOR REAL WAIT COME BACK HE'S REALLY IMPORTANT. Can you tell I don't like this shift?

Isabel Allende, The Stories of Eva Luna: My very first exposure to South American literature, and also my first dip into what has been called 'fantasy realism'. And I couldn't have struck a better first time. Written in a Scheherazade-style narrative of loosely-connected short stories, this book hooked me hard and wouldn't let go. I was lost in its stories of love, connection, innocence, and the subtle magic of reality. A keeper for sure.

And that's it. Fourteen books, fourteen opinions, and only three definitively going on the out pile. Quite an achievement. Here's to reading for pleasure and for learning, and to not hating books after needing to study them.

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.

The Angry House -- Its Author's Behind the Scenes

 At the invitation of Alternative Stories's Chris Gregory, I've created this behind-the-scenes article-come-production diary for 'The Angry House', an audio play in the horror genre that I wrote for the Pen to Print Awards. You've got the opening section of this story from several months ago, when The Angry House won their Audio Play Competition, with the most significant part of the award being that the play would be produced by Alternative Stories, an audio production company that you may know for Emily Inkpen's Dex Legacy project. I was sort of acting as an assistant for Chris, as well as having input as the original play's writer. I initially thought "eh, split into two articles", then I decided "nah, do a longer article after it's been recorded". That recording date was Monday 20th October 2025.

One thing that I was expecting, but turned out to be both more or less harrowing overall, was the edits that came after the script won the award. Just because it won doesn't mean it was perfect. For one thing, because of the script's inspirations in late 19th to early 20th Century pieces, I needed to update the language to be less formal and--by modern standards--stilted. After that came scheduling meetings, and after that a full hour and a half dedicated to just going through the script with Chris, reading through it, checking for anything I'd missed on a first pass, trimming out some bits that were maybe a bit too 90s. Because the play is set in 1999.

After that, there was the casting, and on my end that included listening to reels as they came in and once everyone had auditioned who would audition, it was time to make the choice. Two of the actors were the only ones to audition for those parts, and thank goodness because they were very good for those roles. The other two were a choice between four or five a piece, and it was a bit of a process narrowing it down to the final choice. We only needed four actors for the roles, as I'd deliberately wrote it to be a small cast, and I was able to get two of the actors to double up roles.

Then, on this last Monday, there was the table read. For those who've seen behind-the-scenes stuff from television or film productions, a table read is basically a run-through of the script so people can get a feel for it. In this case, it was a virtual table-read with some scenes done out of order to accommodate for one member of cast that needed to head off in a hurry. It was also a little longer than expected, as I had added some extra bits at Chris's suggestion for one of the cast members who initially had just one scene. Oh yes, the cast. What a cast it is, all Alternative Studios alumni and with notable CVs in their own right. The recordings well done by the time this goes up so I don't think it should be a bother to reveal them. The cast is;

*Charlie Richards as Harry Wells -- An actor who among other things worked on Emily Inkpen's Dex Legacy as Ren Dex, and also appeared in a recent production of The Play That Goes Wrong.

*Marie-Claire Wood as Agnes Wells -- An actor with range, with credits across multiple Alternative Story productions, feature films, television and classical theatre.

*David Monteith as Gerald Fairly -- A voice and mo-cap actor who has done extensive voice-over work across podcast, films and video games. To some he is Minister Rizet from Emily Inkpen's Wasteland, to others Neueirus from Metaphor re Fantazio or a number of voices in Baldur's Gate 3.

*Sarah Golding as Samantha Gregory -- Creator of Quirky Voices, a versatile actress with too many credits to roll off. Just...so many.

The table read went surprisingly well, and it was still a little odd hearing my words out loud from someone's lips other than mine. Or with the cast of actors I've got as simulacra in my head to bring them to life. I was braced for rough reads, fumbles, awkward moments. There weren't many, just a couple of edits that needed to be made; one based on a suggestion, and one that was a genuine mistake. There was also the question of accent, which was mostly RP (received pronunciation), but there was one Devon accent needed and some question about the kind of RP to be used. I also had to account for the fact that the actors were doing it virtually over a Zoom meetings call, so...not ideal. It wasn't a studio environment with specially-designed microphones and a sound-proof space. There were also a couple of casual interactions that were just funny and broke the ice a bit.

With that cast, and joined by the production crew including Chris and myself, we gathered together at Orpheus Studios in London. After, of course, slightly losing my way. Cities always do that, it's always one door further back or further on than I think it must be. The rest of this article is more in the line of a journal or diary. So...enjoy.

(The events of the day during recording start at time codes.)

Cast and Crew at Tea

10:30-ish; At the studio. At this moment, the actors are warming up. The likes of "pepperoni macaroni" and lip burbles are emanating from the green room. I struggle not to burst into unseemly fits of laughter. The sound engineer Richard Campbell is setting up, and the studio is preparing to enter into the realm of "oh help I'm really going to be listening to my dialogue being recorded". The set-up is a large soundproof room with four mics and two booths. The first scene recorded is Scene 3, with Charlie and David. Marie-Claire is a little late, due to other commitments. Edits were required due to some issues related to repetition of some phrases or some odd wording.

11:02: Marie-Claire has manifested during the second take. The takes are going quite well so far, with some adjustments and talk with the actors to get the right tone for scenes. After a time between scenes where we chatted in the green room, we dived into the first scene. Some stumbles, but otherwise some good chemistry appearing to help get the scene on point with the different character interactions. Always important. Golding also doubled-up the voice of another bit part, which was a huge help. After the scene was completed, we completed some isolated parts for a smaller part that book-ended some scenes. Genuinely moving.

12:15: The beginning of another session with lots of stuff. A scene with a lot of dialogue, including some bits of humour that I was afraid would sound better on the page. Turns out, they sound great. It sounds strange in a way, without the sound effects or anything else, but there is a feeling of it coming together. Also, some questions about pronunciations. And then....LUNCH! (or rather, lunch, which wasn't that great in my case, because eating out for me is like spinning a semi-rigged roulette wheel)

Sound engineer
Richard "Orpheus" Campbell.
Image courtesy of
Chris Gregory,
Alternative Stories.

14:11: Back onto scene recording, an emotional scene now and struggling to keep my head straight after the phenomenon of lunch. This one needed some more fine tuning for the script, specifically some word choices so that the actors could have the dialogue flow better. This bit is really showing how much smaller inflections and additions from the actors can make the scene fully come alive. Also the scene in particular is a pretty pivotal and emotional one, so we needed to do an extra take to get as much of it down as possible. And then David had to do some extra bits for a smaller part.

15:24: Next was a very long two-hander between Sarah and Charlie. It's a long and narratively-important scene, and also one with some pretty intense content. Sarah is a great actress, and Charlie was coping very well with a pretty chunky sequence. And yet more pronunciation. Also some small adjustments needed, one in particular at Charlie's suggestion. It's the one that went the best at the table read last Monday, so as expected this went fairly smoothly.

16:24: After a tea break once the scene was completed, we headed into another scene that was a three-hander. It seemed to go fine overall, although the names of some of the characters did somehow derail a performance or two--plus the banter--into the cursed realm of She-Who-Will-Not-Be-Named-Ever-More. Overall, it's been going well. Only two scenes left to go; the two final ones obviously.

16:44: The penultimate scene, which has a prolonged period of one person both narrating a scene and being part of it, and this one went so incredibly smoothly. The only one that didn't need three takes, only two. And this was the one scene at the table read we didn't have the time and facilities to go through in full. Moving forward, we hit the final scene, where all the actors came together to perform in one crescendo. We were all feeling a little tired and quite relieved. I got the chance to set the opening fear factor of the scene (on a scale of 1 to 10, a solid 6). The first run went well, although there was some adjustment to tone and wording needed. That seems to be the running theme. Once the big scene was completed, and a b-roll for the final section was recorded, we moved onto Charlie's final narration. He got it first take essentially, but we took a second for the sake of safety.

Recording wrapped up bang on 17:30.

There was of course a nice post-wrapping meet-up at a local pub, where I spent some time with them hearing stories and enjoying the vibes, but I'm not usually someone who stays out late. And I needed food. So I regretfully bowed out, but not because I didn't want to stick around despite being with this small collection of people since around 10 AM that day. It's no exaggeration to say I loved my time during this recording, working with these actors, and I look forward to both the rest of the production cycle, and potentially working with these cast and crew on something again. If the opportunity ever arises.

Lessons I've learned during this session that I shall take forward.

*I have an ear for general mood, but Chris beats me hands down when it comes to particular inflections and line-to-line needs.

*I have a knack of creating complicated sentences and long stretches of dialogue that can easily trip actors up, but that they also love getting used to.

*I must prepare to clarify pronunciations for words that I might think "Really? That needed clarification?"

*Editing on the fly is a necessity up to even this stage when everything's recorded.

*Adlibs aren't dead, and in fact can and will pop up in unexpected places to often enlivening effect.

*Actors in the green room and the pub, and the recording box, have a filthy sense of humour. More please.

*It's never one and done, even if the first take was so good it might as well be. A second is always taken. Sometimes it can run to 4+, or bits of a scene may be re-recorded in isolation.

*Having visited London three times in ten months for various reason, I'm decided: I don't like London that much compared to Oxford or Bristol. I just don't vibe with it.

*I really love being part of a diverse group of people, be that based on ethnicity, background or sexuality.

Thanks to everyone. And here's to the next phase, for all of us.

Cast and writer after recording; 17:40, 20 October 2025, Orpheus Studio in London. From left to right; Sarah Golding, David Monteith, Thomas Wrightson (me), Charlie Richards, Marie-Claire Wood. Image courtesy of Chris Gregory, Alternative Stories.

Oh lord, I really wrote that...

"Nobody's perfect." It's a very common phrase. It's a joke, an excuse, a trope and a cliché. But it's also an unfortunate, literal fact. Personally, I dislike perfection. I think of it only as an unobtainable abstract. Leaders creating a "perfect" society, creatives striving for that "perfect" project, people trying to lead "perfect" lives. Aiming for perfection is an easy recipe for inferiority complexes.

At the same time, maybe try not to make colossal mistakes which undermine what you're trying to do. Let's start this off with what triggered these thoughts. The use of the word "female" as a noun. It's actively insulting, especially today, and it makes reading some pieces of fiction more difficult unless you put in a metric tone of cultural relativism or some hefty world-building that explains why they aren't using some other noun to describe an entire gender. This is present in Mass Effect because obviously 'woman' can't be applied to non-human non-male members of a society, right? Except when the writers slip and do use that, and wouldn't translation devices approximate for humans so that genders would be described using their own words--and I'll save this for November.

The mainspring is that Emily Inkpen made a point about men who use "female" as a noun. I assume in their everyday speech and writing. She, with impressive restraint, told them to get off her feed and unfollow her as she didn't have the time. I thoroughly understand, using "female" as a noun is just insulting. But then, a penny dropped. I have read some older literature, and as was raised during a recent discussion for an in-progress project related to this event here, I let some of my archaic inspiration leak into how the characters were talking. And I checked: had I used "female" as a noun? And...well, the results were slightly mixed. More usually I realised I'd been using the word "female" as an adjective, but sometimes it did seemingly slip. I haven't checked to see whether I was doing it to help characterise the person in the writing, but regardless the point stands.

For those who don't get what I've been going on about, let me define noun and adjective as simply as I can, as I'm by no means an expert in the technical side of language. A noun is a word used to refer to something, that being an object or a named person or a location in a sentence. So "noun went to noun" or "have you seen noun". There is the further distinction between common and proper nouns. For proper nouns, think of all the esoteric terminology in fantasy and sci-fi. Meanwhile, an adjective is a word which defines a noun, so "an adjective noun" or "out with that adjective noun", or even "noun, adjective, did this three times".

This was something else Emily Inkpen brought up on a reply through one of her socials, where she was pretty angry at the people trying to defend the use of "female" as a noun, probably without realising that the examples being used were technically "female" being used as an adjective. As in "a female voice", or a "female creature". In the Cluster Cycle, I was faced with the unenviable task of creating three other distinctly not-human species for humans to interact with, and I didn't want to use the terms "man" and "woman" to refer to their traditional genders. Mostly because to me, those words are strongly linked with the word "human".

Now, to deliberately use "female" as a noun is insulting and degrading. One might use it in a character's dialogue to signal as such. One shouldn't use it willy-nilly in their own speech, or their prose description, or whatever else. So when I came across those points, I felt more than a little embarrassed. I'll have to be extra careful going forward, because I know I might end up slipping again. I might write something unintentionally insulting and belittling. And today, with many people on a hair trigger, I need to be more aware of that.

I can take a small comfort in the fact that when double-checking, I found that I generally used both "male" and "female" as adjectives, which seems acceptable. I don't know if there's been any update on that, because not only are cultural taboos changing at lightspeed these days, but English is an inherently difficult language because it's both extremely gendered and gender-neutral enough that it causes problems. It's not like French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and dozens of other languages where gender is baked into words and grammar.

All I can do is remember that before it became an excuse and a cliché, the phrase "Nobody's perfect" had a real meaning. And while I can't be perfect, I can try not to be an insensitive author.

Summary: 30 Days of Pride #2

Over the past thirty days of June, AKA Pride Month, I've been sending out posts on my socials. Once per day, I've highlighted a creative--be they writer, poet, composers or artist--who falls somewhere within the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. I did my best to cover several genders, incorporate ethnic diversity, and as wide a range of the spectrum as possible. You can read this post if you want to know more about how I put this stuff together and drew my lines so it was doable. Now, I'm going to give you my complete list for posterity and ease of reading.

1: Angela Morley, a British composer, prolific but slightly forgotten today. From classic British radio to film and television, perhaps Morley's most enduring work is the soundtrack for the classic 1978 animated film Watership Down.

2: J. C. Leyendecker, an illustrator famous in America's interwar period for his commercial illustrations. From the covers of Colliers to famous advertisements for men's apparel, Leyendecker was a major artistic force in his country.

3: Zanele Muholi, a photographic artist who has been using their medium to portray, document and confront the queer experience within the black communities of South Africa and beyond.

4: Yuhki Kamatani, a mangaka and illustrator who is a more recent arrival. While maybe best known for their debut manga Nabari no Ou, perhaps their most notable work is the highly inclusive manga Our Dreams at Dusk.

5: Jeannette Ng, a fantasy author originally from Hong Kong who is just as famous for her novel Under the Pendulum Sun as she is for her acceptance speech for her what-is-now Astounding Award for Best New Writer. She got it renamed with a speech.

6: Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist who has been consistently pushing for truth and inclusivity in both countries, no matter the risks.

7: Francis Poulenc, a French composer who was active in the first half of the 20th Century. His body of work is large and varied, from ballet and opera to songs and orchestral pieces.

8: Ethel Smyth, another composer, this time from Britain, and one disregarded in her day due to her gender. She also campaigned actively for women's suffrage during the 1910s, and was eventually awarded a damehood.

9: Cyril Wong, a poet, orator and literary critic who has also stood up and out as a prominent gay rights activist in his native Singapore.

10: Alan Ball, an American screenwriter whose body of work might surprise. From Six Feet Under and American Beauty to True Blood, Ball can be credited with some interesting pieces of fiction.

11: Audre Lorde, another American writer whose work encompassed a large field. I think the best summation of her comes in her own words: "a Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet". Read her full piece, it's amazing.

12: Vikram Seth, a British-Indian author and poet. While he has a number of other works to his name, many will know him for the novel A Suitable Boy. I might also recommend An Equal Music.

13: Juliana Huxtable, a multitalanted individual from America if there ever was one. Writer, artist, composer, DJ, and rights activist for black and LGBTQ communities. Plenty more to say, but I've run out of space.

14: Manuel Puig, a Mexican writer who created inclusive and confrontational fiction at a time when his country wasn't kind to LGBTQ groups. Broadway goers may know him for the original book for Kiss of the Spider Woman.

15: Gabriel J. Martín, an American writer and psychologist who has made their career out of helping, in person or through writing, people suffering from the pressures created by intolerance of LGBTQ groups.

16: Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese-American poet, essayist, and novellist. His debut novel is the episelatory semi-autobiographical On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Warning, it gets harsh.

17: Ambrosia Tønnesen, a Norwegian sculptor regarded as a pioneer in her field in Norway as rather than a hobby, she made a living from her busts and figurines.

18: Abdellah Taïa, a Mocorran writer and filmmaker who has created relatable and unambiguous queer characters for the Arab world, a feat in and of itself even today.

19: Maddy Thorson, a game designer and writer from Canada who is best known for her work on the platformer Celeste, inspired by her own experiences coming out as a trans woman.

20: F. W. Murnau, one of the defining directors that codified--at least in pop culture--both German Expressionist cinema and later horror. His best known creation--Nosferatu.

21: Rune Naito, perhaps not well known today, but a pioneer in Japanese art in the later 20th Century. He both contributed to the gay magazine Bakazoku, and is credited as a pioneer of the kawaii art style.

22: Lesya Ukrainka, one of the best-known writers on Ukraine's literary tradition, famous for her poetry and also known for her activism on behalf of women and of Ukrainian independence from Russia.

23: Alla Nazimova, a Russian expat probably best known in pop culture as the definitive Salome in the 1922 silent film. She was also a well-regarded pseudonymous screenwriter and producer of early adaptations of Trotsky and Ibsen.

24: Joe Orton, a British playwright who had a short and controversial period of fame before his untimely death. His work included biting black comedy and openly gay characters prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK.

25: R. O. Kwon, "a recent name at last" I hear some of you cry. Originally from South Korea, Kown has made her mark as a writer to watch with just two novels: The Incendiaries and Exhibit.

26: Murathan Mungen, a Turkish writer who has worked on stage plays, short stories and poems alongside branching into music. He is also something of a figurehead for the Turkish gay rights movement.

27: Nibedita Sen, born in Kolkata, and a writer who has won multiple major awards for her speculative fiction, focusing on short stories and anthologies.

28: Akwaeke Emezi, another recent writer, this time from Nigeria. She has written across numerous genres, but is perhaps best known at the moment for The Death of Vivek Oji.

29: Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, a writer probably better known in her local academia than in the mainstream West. A scholar of Maori culture and an activist for lesbian rights in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

30: Ryan Sallans, another academic, this time from America. Sallans has built his career on writing, speaking, and advocating for LGBTQ rights.

Now, among the honourable mentions and potential candidates, there were...a lot. Frankly too many. I wanted to limit myself strictly to those for whom definitive evidence beyond their work was included. That's why I didn't include Shakespeare last time, and why I didn't include two female poets who might otherwise qualify--Emily Dickinson and Wu Zao. There were also plenty of others that seem to be included on lists of LGBTQIA+ figures, but didn't have any substantial commentary or reliably cited evidence. I know that may seem restrictive and pedantic, but I'm of the opinion that we should be true to history unless it's deviating in a number of other ways (looking at you, Our Flag Means Death, don't get me started on its complete abandonment of history)

In these times, when queer rights are once more under vicious attack--intentional or not--from exclusionary and discriminatory laws and governments, it's important to remember these people. Creatives old and new who stood outside the Western heterosexual norm that's been enforced for over two centuries. Our past is littered with both triumph and tragedy, and there's still a road to travel to reach acceptance and tolerance being the widespread norm rather than what they sometimes are, legally-enclosed exceptions. I hope you find inspiration in at least some of these people I've highlighted.

As for next year? Well, if I'm still around, who knows? Maybe some mythological role models for people across the spectrum. See you then!

Year So Far: June 2024

So, in what's becoming a minor habit, I sum up stuff that's been going on for me in the first half of 2025, which has been...a year. For a lot of people. So here are the things I've been doing or managed to achieve. Think of it as something that everyone can read and think "Huh, I guess we can do something even in 2025."

Completed dev edits on my third book: My third Cluster Cycle book, The Murderer's Lament, has completed its development edits and is back with my publisher Roan & Weatherford. This was an...interesting one, since it's a murder mystery and I was expecting it to be picked to pieces, but instead most of it was more about tone and delivery proper punch, or eliminating redundancies with characters or exposition. It was fun to do, and gave me more confidence in the series going forward. Still gotta get through the last two, and who knows what'll happen with them.

Started the new series of Author Talks: More details here, but it's been fun and challenging creating a fully-scripted, more professional series of my one-person podcast, choosing a topic or piece of fiction to discuss each month between May and November this year.

Got some stuff done around the house and garden: After last year brought a cascade of upsets, setbacks and illnesses (culminating in five back-to-back flus one of which became pneumonia), I've actually been able to properly help with parts of the garden. Getting the vegetable area sort of prepped and usable, netting up our fruit bushes, bringing other parts of our large area under control again.

Decided to take a rest, didn't go as planned: Last year, I went to BristolCon and had a blast, but I realised I needed to take a year off that event at least for my love and enjoyment of it to still be present. You know, like needing to take a break from a food you really like so you can still enjoy it. I know I disappointed several people, but it was either that, or I wasn't going to enjoy it. But things happened, and it's not going to be as complete a rest as I imagined.

Found full comfort with my sexuality: I'd realised it fully and openly last year, but now I'm truly comfortable with the fact that I'm bisexual. It can be difficult to become comfortable, even for someone like me who doesn't have any hangups of LGBTQIA+ communities. Heck, I've got multiple family members who fall within that spectrum, and a wider family as a whole who is accepting in the best way. But...still took some time to realise about half of my fictional crushes were truly on men, and that I have certain types. It's made my bristling feelings about still-pervasive bisexual stereotypes even sharper, but that's a story for another time.

Got shortlisted for an award: This is EXTREMELY recent, nothing may come of it, and I don't think I can say which award yet (don't know the protocol for it), but I actually got shortlisted for something and I've been invited down to the ceremony next month. First awards ceremony of any kind I'll have attended in that capacity, which is insane.

Played a couple of really neat games: I know that sounds exceptionally trivial, but for me games are a part of my life and entertainment, and also part of my media/story intact. First, Baldur's Gate 3. For a long time I've wanted to have my own time with it, but my last Larian experience put me off their products...just, in toto. But I gave it a shot, and I actually completed it. Wrote a whole blog post about it. And I've decided to do a second playthrough and try to take it easier and not let it impact my work...as much. Hopefully. Seriously it's a real time sink. Second was Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland, which was a delightfully cozy if deceptively deep experience that informed something that I'll detail further down.

Reduced my news intake: That may be misleading, but it's more along the lines of "Get my news from reliable and undramatic sources, and don't stress over them too much." The world right now is terrible. The United States' current leadership is attempting regress the country at record speed, the people of the Near East are suffering en masse at the hands of their governments, and Ukraine is still partially occupied and in the middle of a war. So I needed to filter some stuff out, stop checking certain sites, but also not cut myself off from everything. It was for the sake of my mental health, and I think it's working.

Started a new fantasy project: Trust me, I've got LOADS of stuff in the pipeline with my publisher, maybe too much, but I wanted to write something that would distract me from the everything everywhere all at once going on right now. And I decided on a cosy fantasy inspired by the chill vibes of Atelier Lulua and the rest of its series. The music of Atelier has been one of my go-to writing aids for this project alongside the soundtrack for Frierin: Beyond Journey's End. The premise is a practitioner of "transmutation" (an art combining "magia" with real-world aspects of alchemy) teaching an unlikely apprentice as part of a challenge. Also, I named my lead Khemia. She's a dragon. And I didn't realise until yesterday that I named her after a part of the Greek origin of the term alchemy: khēmía.

Perhaps started a sci-fi project: This one's still a little wobbly, but I also wanted it to be lighter in message if not in outright tone. This one is set in a possible alternate history 1912 where alien species arrived on Earth thirty years before and are well into the process of integrating, granting humans new technology and exposing them to a wider range of social norms. As for why I chose 1912? Well, it's part of the belle epoch of Europe, a time of great change in other parts of the world and...something else happened that maybe can be used to differentiate this timeline from our own.

Aaaand that's it. I hope you enjoyed this summary, found some measure of encouragement that things can be done, and that you will press on and find comfort and courage. Deep down, I do think we can survive these times. It's just difficult to see the end of the tunnel when blocked by obese bodies or overinflated egos.

Author Talks S3 E2: My Writing Journey

 It's all in the title, and all for your enjoyment and cringe. The next episode of my one-person podcast Author Talks is now live, and it's very different from what I've done before. It's a 50-ish minute summary of my writing journey with both extracts of my earlier work (yikes...) and a preview of my upcoming Cluster Cycle book The Murderer's Lament (yay!). The episode is available on YouTube and Spotify, so if you can put up with my narration and some musical interludes/background music that seemed appropriate, then do enjoy. No-one shall expose my early cringe...as I've already done it myself!

(Note: Due to this blog's...quirks, I've needed to create text-based links for both versions.)

YouTube version

Spotify version

Coming up: My second 30 Days of Pride

 Last year, I did a thing. On each day of June (aka Pride Month), for thirty days, I highlighted a creator of fiction--principally writers/novellists but that varied a little here and there--who was confirmed to be on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. This year, I've decided to do it again. Only this time, I'm going to be a little broader. I'm going to include authors (but not the same authors that were featured in either the social media posts or the round-up blog post at year's end), and composers and artists and others I feel a worth trumpeting in a month of variety that (despite what Google might want you to think) is very much real and very much still important.

So, here are my ground rules, which are mostly the same as last year but include some extra little bits potentially.

Rule 1: The creatives in question need to be confirmed either through their own words/actions, or personal anecdotes, to be on the rainbow spectrum. That means some figures with question marks over their head will not be counted. There may be some compelling evidence surrounding these people, but there's no confirmation about it and it's still a debated topic. It similarly rules out straight creators who wrote LGBTQIA+ characters. I may well miss some creatives that could have been better included on the list, and if so I apologise. Also, if you're wondering why some are not on here, check out last year's post which is both the main 30 I chose, and some named honourable mentions.

Rule 2: I'm going to try and provide a mixture of authors/creatives from across time periods. It would be surprisingly easy to go for a lot of classic and mostly now-dead creatives, but that would be too easy. Also it would be doing a disservice to multiple current creatives. I also hope to get a descent amount of BIPOC creators into it, so it can be shown it's not just whites who fall along the spectrum.

Rule 3: Unlike last year, where I restricted the list to authors and novellists and writers and the like, this year has no such restriction, and if anything will mainly focus on creatives in other fields. But I also don't want to go for the big and obvious names. So you may think "Where's Lady Gaga?", and I say "That's too easy." I want people who may still be well known, but aren't in your face all the time. I also will still be focusing on creatives, so don't expect a huge amount of theatrical performers on the list. Again, you might ask "Where's Ian McKellan?", and to that I say, "Plenty of lists exist for theatrical and film/television performers already."

Rule 4: A short rule, but simple. Some of the added breadth means I might end up accidentally including two creators who worked on one project or all projects together. I don't want the same names to be repeated all the time. This isn't to diminish their impact, but I want diversity in subject as well as representation in gender, sexuality and nationality.

Rule 5: I will try and say positive in general, but due to the fact this will be dealing with LGBTQIA+ figures from across history, some element of sadness or tragedy will inevitably make its way in. That, for the moment, is just the reality of things. Especially in the 19th and 20th Centuries when the terms and classifications became solidified, and consequently there was a set identity to discriminate against and criminalise.

After the 30 days, specifically on 6 July, I will be publishing a blog post bringing together slightly fuller textual versions of all the creatives I talked about. I may even have some honourable mentions which either don't fully fit the criteria, or have extenuating circumstances. Like last year, this may all crash and burn. But I hope it doesn't, and that I can contribute to the visibility of demongraphics that are under renewed attack from politicians, the media, and public figures.

So, here's to Pride Month. Hopefully we don't have a war in the middle of it all.

My Favourite Women in Fiction

It's Women's History Month, and many others are far more qualified and important in talking about the women of history who stood out and continue to inspire, especially in times when social freedoms and qualities are or are attempted to be walked back by wannabe kings. But one thing I think I can comment on is the women I encountered in my life through fiction, the women who left an impression on me. These are the figures who influenced by taste towards including either female leads, or having women in prominent/dominant positions, or having a large female representation in the cast.

This list isn't comprehensive, it's meant to be scholastic, it's a day late for International Women's Day, and I'm just one bisexual white British man with opinions. I'm not the final say, and shouldn't be, and I'm not in a position to speak about minorities outside liking some characters in fiction who belong to them. I also know my taste in fiction is occasionally more mainstream than it should be. Want to know more about writing female characters from a female perspective, please check out Emily Inkpen, who is creating a series of articles on her blog about writing female characters, including the pitfalls men fall into (I admit, I've probably stumbled into them myself)

So, without further ado, my list in no particular order.

• Kathleen "Kitty" Jones: The third protagonist of Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, introduced in the second book The Golem's Eye, Kitty helped elavate this series from an enjoyable romp to a solid favourite. After seeing the oppressive control of magicians first-hand, and having the ability to negate their power somewhat, Kitty becomes a keystone in the growing conflict between magicians, their djinn slaves, and commoners. She is a standout, though I won't say how much as that's spoilers.

• Tehanu/Therru: I couldn't not put an Ursula le Guin character here, and she's amazing. A child who is taken in by Tenar after being horribly scarred by an abusive family, Tehanu's journey through her titular book at The Other Wind is one of self-actualisation and recovery from trauma. I could put her adoptive mother Tenar in here as well, but Tehanu gets extra points for also being a dragon. Even the debabably terrible Ghibli film based on le Guin's books manages to create a more than serviceable Tehanu.

• Ursula Morrow: A recent find from Gareth Powell's Future's End that was a lovely surprise. She's a great character, snappy yet not invulnerable, and dealing with several issues at once in a way that doesn't feel overly dramatic or silly. There is also the AI character Chris who presents as female, but I chose Ursula as she is the lead, and she is very much the one in control of things by the end of the story.

• Queen Elizabeth I: Yes, she's a historical figure, but the version played by Glenda Jackson in Elizabeth R is more than a little fictionalised, despite the series avoiding some of the regular traps surrounding her and Robert Dudley. Not all, but enough that isn't not egregious. As played by Jackson, Elizabeth is a presence, a forceful character at once liberated and burdened by her position as head of church and state. I find myself unconsciously comparing other fictional or fictionalised queens to this portrayal.

• Buffy Summers: An obvious pick, and again an old one. And sadly from a writer whose reputation has gone downhill in recent years following revelations about his behaviour and character. But I'll still say Buffy's someone who was part of my culture growing up, and the one I engaged with the most. Xena was also around at this time, but it was Buffy I connected with. I also saw most of the final season, which left me with a solid impression of a woman who grits her teeth and does what is necessary in the face of a seemingly impossible threat.

• Romana: Another oldie, sorry. But an oldie I adore. A Doctor Who character explicitly created as a foil and equal to the time-travelling alien, Romana (full name, Romanadvoratrelundar) is my favourite companion in the whole series. She does fall into the distressed companion trope a few times sadly, but she also has the brains and wit to not sit quietly or whimper about it. She often escapes on her own, or saves the Doctor, and having someone who can return the Doctor's technobabble shot for shot is something the recent series has...sadly lacked. The Doctor needs someone who won't stand being talked down to again.

• Yú Xiùlián and Yù Jiāolóng: I couldn't pick between these two lead women from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, probably the archtypical modern wuxia. The central emotional conflict of the film revolves around these two, the role of women in both Qing Dynasty-era and modern Chinese society, and their respective attitudes towards the men in their lives. Both are tragic in different ways, but they were also incredible examples to me of women who struggled against a system in contrasting ways: Xiùlián with calm and quiet determination, Jiāolóng through brash and open rebellion.

• Catwoman: I just adore her, and if I ever get the chance, I'd love to write a Catwoman story of her just doing her own chaotic-good thing. I've got four versions that stick in my mind and are something which brings a smile to my face. The 1960s version played by three different actresses--Julie Newmar, Lee Meriweather, and the glorious Eartha Kitt--is pure unadulterated camp. Michelle Pffeifer's version from Batman Returns is certainly something, but not a favourite as she's a bit too dark. Halle Berry's 2004 version is...an acquired taste, like her film, but she's a lot of fun. And Ann Hathaway's version in the third of Nolan's Batman films is the one bright spot in a very dull film--if only she didn't have the most forced Batman romance ever.

• Adèle Blanc-Sec: I admit, I've never encountered the original comic version, only the interpretation that came from Luc Besson in his 2010s movie. Again, unfortunately, another product from a problematic creator. But I have to honestly say, I really like Adèle, portrayed with suitable verve and spunk by Louise Bourgoin. She is still feminine by the standards of her character's time, but with an added touch of devil-may-care and couldn't-give-an-F that elevates her above the standard protagonist for this kind of adventure. Not perfect, but worth a watch, and a favourite for good reasons.

• Lightning: I came to the Final Fantasy series by way of the movies, with my first game exposures being the divisive Final Fantasy XIII and the wider Fabula Nova Crystallis concept. This was once an unpopular opinion, but I really like Lightning. She's not a perfect character, but she was deliberately written that way. She's quick to anger, withdrawn, pushy, but ultimately admits and seeks to atone for her mistakes. Her evolution across three games from stoic soldier to penitent divine warrior to saviour of the world is an arc I found engaging and enjoyable.

• Zero: A character from the niche Drakengard series who...might raise eyebrows. She is a foul-mouthed ex-prostitute and criminal who is revived by mystical forces to destroy humanity. She grudgingly works against this assigned fate, though due to how the story is told, she initially comes off as a psychopath hunting down her sisters and slaughtering anyone in her way. She is also caustic at best and abusive at worst to her companions. But beneath the F-bombs and casual talk of sex, there is a real depth to her, and her attitude is one I actually really like. A refreshing breath of foul-mouthed yet good-hearted air.

• Lara Croft: I've saved her for last as I did a whole video on her and uploaded it onto my YouTube channel on her fictional birthday last month. Lara isn't perfect; she's got a lot of archaic elements attached to her character, has suffered from being created by and managed by men for a chunk of her lifetime, is highly sexualised in a lot of her marketing, and she likely doesn't reflect much of the pushes for diversity present today. But she's the one who made me fall in love with games as a story medium, and solidified my love of women in fiction. Video linked below.

A honourable mention goes to the female incarnation of Commander Shepherd. I didn't want to include this in the main list, still not sure why, but I think this for me is the definitive Shepherd. Yes, she houses several problematic American military stereotypes, but Jennifer Hale's performance and the overall writing quality lift her up to a pedestal her male counterpart can't hope to touch. Also (as shown in the image above) Nilin from Remember Me. I really like her, but there are some SERIOUS issues with her writing that constantly undermine what she was trying to be.

Writing and working for a future beyond sorrow.

Poetic title, I know. But it's the kind of thing I need to write after the events of the American election. I won't dignify the current president elect by mentioning their name (an expletive is the closest I want to get at the moment of writing). Suffice to say, they should never have gotten this far. It appears the world is going through terrible times in more ways than one. I couldn't do anything about it since I live in the UK, but seeing it happen to a country where our family has friends, where my very liberal publisher is based, makes me feel very anxious and depressed. We're going to see four more years of that certifiable person's actions in office, self-serving policies that make everyone suffer.

One might ask: What's the point of writing? But let's remember, people write things because they feel motivated to do so. I'm fortunate as the UK is--relatively speaking--all right. Not perfect, not by a long way, but still okay. There are loads of books that were the better for the writing, even when the country they came from had a vested interest in not letting such books be published. All Quiet on the Western Front released in 1929, its sequel The Road Back in 1931, both when Nazism was beginning to gain ground in Germany. Many anti-nationalist and anti-oligarch pieces of media have seen success in countries which have those institutions engrained within them, like Japan and even China. And when McCarthyism and the so-called "Lavender Scare" were gripping America, fiction was created that pushed back against that reality.

Fiction is a means to vent frustration, but it is also a means for people to see something that could be made into a reality. There are reasons why some books helped galvanise popular movements against something that had previously not seen a consistent and conscious move against it. Film makers broke the Hayes Code, writers can topple and ridicule regimes. It's not going to be easy for anyone. For the moment, a power has appeared in America that taps into the country's worst aspects. Elitist culture, ingrained sexism and xenophobia, unwillingness to change in any meaningful or radical way, a political system just as likely to be a rotting snake eating its own tail as a dragon sailing over the world.

There are possible (perhaps foolish) silver linings. Firstly, this is the second term, so the incoming president legally can't run a second time unless there's some kind of sacrilegious change to the law and constitution. Secondly, it is possible members of the incoming incumbent party will actually restrain the more idiotic decisions (not very probable, but one can hope). Thirdly, most horrifyingly, the new incumbent has a vested interest in not provoking too major a conflict with the other two oligarch-driven world powers currently in the world. Fourthly, cultures and attitudes surrounding sexuality and gender once firmly pushed to the sidelines have become accepted enough to the mainstream that there should be some level of pushback to attempts at censorship (indeed some of the most radical pieces have come out in the most conservative times). Finally, perhaps most hopefully, America managed to survive last time. And of course, it could all go to the deepest and coldest bowls of hell in a hand basket.

I won't say don't rage. You should rage, though not in a way that gets you easily demonised and shut up. There are dark years ahead, but for the sake of people I know in America, I will continue working towards my degree. I will continue writing about worlds where it's completely okay to be LGBTQIA+, to be non-White, to be any gender or gender-nonconforming, to be disabled, to be different in some way, shape, or form. Being different isn't a crime. We need to remember that for the next four years, spread the word for the next four years, try not to trap ourselves in any kind of echo chamber for the next four years. And maybe, during and even at the end of those four years, things can be changed for the better.

Image copyright: Square Enix. Source: SaGa Emerald Beyond

Life events = story ideas?

 On Monday, I had to go to a local hospital. It was nothing serious as it turned out, but it did provide me with something every author should be able to have: an eye for people. And today, I was reminded strongly of that quality when I heard/saw a small little scene play out between a nurse and someone I assume was an outpatient.

For the sake of privacy and decency, I won't reveal this person's name or gender or appearance. I will say that they had a cornucopia of medications to deal with a number of simultaneous conditions, and two people close to them were afflicted with permanently debilitating ailments: one increasing blindness, and one progressive dementia. It was sad and strange hearing those bits from them while talking to a nurse over necessary procedures that would require them to stay in the hospital overnight, and not being able to avoid hearing them since we were in the same waiting area on a quiet day in the hospital.

This isn't the first time that real-life events have stuck in my mind. Getting pseudo-lost in a shopping centre when I was less than ten years old, hearing a train refreshment steward advertising "soft drinks for the saints, hard drinks for the sinners", being briefly manhandled by a flustered hotel employee one BristolCon because he assumed I was part of a rowdy group of young men whom he had been directing away from the convention rooms. But this also applies more broadly to a recurring piece of writing advice to write what you know. Now, I've always considered that advice in part reductive, especially as you may think you know something and be completely wrong. I prefer to think of that advice as "write what you can learn about and what you're comfortable writing about".

Now, there are some authors who did nothing but use real people for inspiration. Looking at you, Ian Fleming, who stole his most famous character's name from an ornithology book and based all his female leads on this one girl he had a ding-dong with back in the day. There needs to be a line drawn between randomly plucking events and names without consideration. But it is also true that authors draw on real-life events to put in bits of their story. Sometimes events that seem wildly improbable are actually traceable back to very real events. Agatha Christie notably drew on two real-life tragedies as the basis for two of her mysteries: it's commonly accepted that the character Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side is at least inspired by actress Gene Tierney, who suffered greatly in her personal life, while her long-running play The Mousetrap was explicitly inspired on the O'Neill case, a horrifying example of domestic abuse. And lest we forget the creators of K9 from Doctor Who, with one of the writers of his debut story inspired by the recent loss of his dog in a road accident.

This is absolutely not intended as a justification for using real-life incidents in this way. I wouldn't advise it, I wouldn't want to do it myself except in a very broad way or if I was referencing them within the context of a real world/real world-adjacent setting. And even then, you wouldn't be exactly paralleling something. Juliet McKenna's Green Man's Quarry highlights some real social and judicial issues without making direct references, and Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow is more inspired by the life of female emperor We Zetien than directly paralleling her life in a sci-fi setting.

All this comes back to that story I heard. As I heard it, I freely admit my author's brain went into action. I was playing the thing out as a scene in a book, whether from my perspective as onlooker or in the person of the patient or the nurse. It was a scene I had met multiple times in more melodramatic dressings, but this one was so raw and emotive that I might've found myself taking notes on it without thinking. I already was doing in taking mental notes. Sometimes I can find myself shocked at how much my brain takes things as 'copy'. Odd phrases, incidents, scenes, weather conditions, sequences of events. There are some events that are going to make an impression no matter what. The circumstances surrounding the deaths of my father, my grandparents, a dear friend in a local singing group. Or on a lighter note, meeting my cousin's young child, getting to have a good talk with relatives, making connections and friends that persisted, seeing a place for the very first time.

There are some ideas you can take from life. But there are others you shouldn't, or at least not without suitable obfuscation. Especially so in this age of intolerance, defamation, legal actions, and extremism where people are more likely to take the violent route, be that abuse, legal destruction, or actual physical harm. And when you think about it, that self-imposed or societal restriction can in itself be inspiration for stories and characters.

So, a final question for you if you've reached this far. If you could, would you turn something from your life into a story scene? And what changes would you consciously or unconsciously make?

An early inspiration - Tomb Raider: Legend

 

Back in 2006, before I had even an inkling of what I might do for a career, I played a game that's recently seen an uptick in popularity with its release on the PlayStation Plus service. But for me, Tomb Raider: Legend is more than simple a game. More than any book or television show or great piece of movie history, it's a piece of media that helped inspire me to become a writer.

I first encountered Tomb Raider through its 2001 movie, which is okay if a little schlocky. I got Legend soon after its release, and after some frustration with its QTEs, I fell in love. Not simply with its gameplay, but with the dialogue, the story, and with Lara herself. She was unlike any character I'd ever experienced before. She was classy and confident, caring yet hard-edged, acrobatic and voluptuous without feeling particularly exploitative. Some of my favourite parts were the banter she had with her research team back at her mansion in Britain. There was some slightly forced family drama in there, but it was never on a distracting level, and Keeley Hawes's performance sold it and the rest of the journey Lara took across the world.

A chunk of the lines from this game live in my head. "I do my best thinking jumping off cliffs.", "Alistair, meet Tiwanaku. She's a lovely pre-Incan civilisation, currently in ruins.", "It's authentic enough for its age, but it's age isn't entirely authentic.", "Anyone between me and that stone dies.", "Basic etiquette: never arrive at a party empty-handed.", "Death by irony is always painful. Amateurs.", "Grand entrances are always impractical. It's what makes them grand.", "There's no distinction between stupid and charming with you, is there?", "All those satellites and computers just to perfect the science of talking to one's self.", and (in response to a villain asking if she's deaf) "I don't know, let's see. Try begging for your life like you did the last time we spoke."

What I picked out above are just me cherry-picking lines that work well in isolation. There are longer exchanges that are generally reinforce this image of a woman with attitude, and it's all done with nary a curse word. I can remember actively seeking to trigger optional in-level dialogue just to tear the two assistants chip in about something or argue over some of the scenery. Or Lara's propensity for climbing to extreme heights or going along unstable platforms while thinking nothing of it.

I remember wanting to create a character like Lara for myself. I'd always leaned towards creating stories, but this was a true catalyst. Within the next four years, I was scribbling stuff down in earnest, writing on a hand-me-down computer in the old Notepad format, then OpenOffice. Now I'm a published author using Microsoft Word to create stories and characters some might imagine puts Legend to shame. But I disagree. Nothing can shame Legend. It's a piece of history and art that's worthy of remembrance. There are reasons outside its story and characters, but those are the big ones.

For me, forever more, Lara Croft will remain this Lara Croft. Not the busty slight sociopath of the early titles. Not the rather whiny origin character of the second later reboot. But this one, a confident and sassy aristocrat who kicked ass, looked after her friends, and was able to be profound and quippy when exploring some ancient temple behind a waterfall in the depths of tropical Africa.