Releasing July 30: Lost Station Circé

It's happened. It's here. After a nerve-wracking wait, I have a date. Lost Station Circé, the second entry in my Cluster Cycle series, is releasing in July 30 on hardcover and ebook format. Links may take extra time to come up unfortunately due to my publisher being overwhelmed with stuff, and the recent worldwide IT outage can't have helped with the digital store fronts.

A Voyage For Fortune Leads Them to the Heart of Fear.

In the desolate reaches of the Cluster, aboard the weary cargo ship Benbow, a disparate crew drifts through a meager existence. Among them are the brooding Captain Solet, the smirking Syndac, amiable Sudu, ambitious Alkmeney, enigmatic Livesey, and Lenore and Faarax, a Feles and her human ward sworn to kill each other.

Their monotonous routine is shattered when fate delivers to them a mysterious datacube containing the coordinates to a hidden fortune. Igniting a covert mission to investigate, the crew embarks on a perilous journey to the very edge of the galaxy, where an ancient space habitat holds the promise of unimaginable wealth.

However, as they venture beyond the boundaries of known space, they encounter not only the treachery of rival factions but also startling revelations about their own pasts. Facing both their deepest fears and darkest desires, the crew of the Benbow must come together to unravel the mystery of the ancient space habitat before it consumes them all.

Following in the tradition of sci-fi luminaries like Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, Thomas Wrightson walks the fine line between space opera and horror with authority. Strap in tight, Lost Station Circé is a thrill-a-minute voyage into the depths of space and terror the likes of which you won't soon forget.

Below is the final cover art and an episode of my podcast featuring a preview of one exciting event in the story, and I'll hopefully be able to do other things related to it in the future. Life's a lot right now, for everyone, and if anyone wants to pick up either Starborn Vendetta or Lost Station Circé, then they're in for a great ride in a genre I love, inspired by classic stories given a modern twist.

Updates, mid-2024 edition

Hi. So, this is a relatively quick post/update for how things are going, and my plans going forward. Also, I know there has been...a lot going in the past several days. In fact, just last evening something happened which is likely to push this post into the void. But damn it, I'm still gonna post this!

First things is that while the next entry in my Cluster Cycle series, Lost Station Circe, is still scheduled for July, there is still no date. My publisher Roan & Weatherford is snowed under with stuff at this moment, and doing their best to catch up. There was also some ID stuff that appears to be taking its sweet time. Hopefully I'll have the date ready and able to be released. It's basically ready. Also coming in the future are two interviews, one in the nearer future and one in a few months, which were a lot of fun to do. I'm also definitely booked to go to BristolCon again this year. Its first two-day event, which should be either fun, exhausting, or hopefully both.

In my personal life, I've been very busy with Open University studies, not putting all eggs into one basket, but also coping with some home difficulties related to illness and rediscovering my work-life balance after a prolonged period where multiple issues and illnesses were coming one on top of the other since roughly September 2023. A long time, to say the least. I also created a tier list video this week looking at the characters of my favourite video game series, Drakengard/Nier. That was fun, and is allowing me to get to grips with a new and much better open source editing software.

So, what to look forward to? Well, there are three more Cluster Cycle novels to come after Lost Station Circe, which given the current release timing should be coming over the next three years roughly. These are all provisional titles, but I can tell you this much about them.

* The Murderer's Burden (working title): A sci-fi detective novel inspired by the Golden Age authors of the genre.

* Sphear of Lament (working title): A first contact story with some H. G. Wells inspiration.

* Ancient Earth Explorers (working title): A concluding storyline, set against the backdrop of a gay romance.

I hope these leave you with some anticipation. Edits are still to be made on all three above, and as I've said the titles aren't final by any means. If you want to find out what happened before Lost Station Circe, then you can get the previous book Starborn Vendetta...anywhere that sells books.

Meet...wait, who are you supposed to be again?

 This blog post has been brought to you by...me! My next book, Lost Station Circe, is releasing in July. This very month (sorry I've still got no date beyond that, my publisher is very busy). The first one, Starborn Vendetta, is available now from anywhere that sells books.

After an earlier post on ensemble casts, a comment from fellow author Stephen Cox got me thinking about a problem with ensemble casts I didn't even think of when I created that post. Emblematic, considering how many points there are about...large casts. Pardon me for mentioning the tainted name of Harry Potter, but it is an example that can help demonstrate something quickly. We get introduced to A LOT of characters in its first book alone, ten or twenty beyond what might be called the core cast. Just imagine if over half of them had never been developed further, which is almost what happens. It suffers somewhat from that problem where characters are just names, except when the story suddenly needs them not to be. Here begins what might be the ensemble cast's crippling blow: too many named characters in the kitchen.

Not every grand arcing saga needs a huge cast of characters, and not all large casts are equal, especially when it comes to an ensemble where each of them technically is supposed to have enough screen time to develop as their own people. There are plenty of examples I've either seen for myself (Firefly, Blast of Tempest) or heard about (Leverage) that succeed in developing an ensemble. But what about those that just...fumble it? Not to take too easy a potshot, but while it focuses largely on its two leads, Avatar seems technically to be attempting an ensemble between its human and alien factions. It's certainly got the runtime for an ensemble film. But outside...five characters, the other ten or so are very underdeveloped. I know there are deeper core problems with the story of Avatar, but this is one that could have made the story more digestible and enjoyable. And from what I've heard, the sequels aren't fixing the problem. Contrast it with a similar us-versus-them film Tora! Tora! Tora!, which with a noticeably shorter runtime manages to tell a compelling and heartbreaking two-sided narrative around the entry of Japan into World War II with the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

Video games are easier to forgive in this regard, as you play as one person in a medium still holding a stigma of 'story not important', so underdevelopment is less of an issue. But I shall compare two of my favourite games with ensemble casts, many of which get roughly equal amounts of screen time outside the main cast, and may come across as shallow if the player doesn't follow their optional content. Nier: Automata has one of my favourite casts, especially when you go through their side quests, but some remain underdeveloped, specifically the Commander and Anemone. They are introduced as key players, but we get little to nothing in terms of solid story and development compared to the Operators, Pascal, or Adam and Eve. And they play just as big a role in the story as the Operators, Pascal, or Adam and Eve. Meanwhile Mass Effect has an entire trilogy's worth of space to deal with its characters, and many characters move onto different things after the game where they are introduced (assuming they survive, ala Urdnot Wrex). But it suffers from a "tell, don't show" approach to its characters and world building that can REALLY drag things down, and its DLC characters show clear signs of having less attention given to them through resource issues.

I didn't want to use a bad example above, but contrast two good ones. Ensembles are difficult to get right, and it's very easy for characters to fall by the wayside. Either through forgetfulness, or necessity. Sometimes casts grow so large (insert any long-running shonen anime here) that it becomes borderline impossible to keep track of everything. You can come back and think "Wait, what, who were you again?" Good writing can compensate for that, but not always.

Now for the point where I talk about my book Lost Station Circe, where I employ an ensemble cast. And I ran into a problem straight away. Because of how the story was going, my initial core cast of seven with roughly equal screentime exploded into one of somewhere above twelve, which was stretching my ability to create a compelling story for them. I had to make some tough choices, and some that initially had a longer and more defined role needed to be scaled back to allow for fuller focus on others. It's still not perfect (IMO perfection is an unobtainable abstract so looking for it is a fool's errand), but it was either that, or the story was going to get hopelessly confusing and some of the parts I felt were essential to the story would need to be cut for time.

So...this is a thing. Following something up based on someone else's comment. Apologies if it's a little odd, unusual, not quite as polished as it might be but it's more about writing what I feel than some of my other blog posts. I also hope it's enjoyable, and that it makes you think about how a cast is written. Not ensemble fits into a story, but then not every story needs an ensemble. If you try to squeeze an ensemble where it doesn't fit, you get...well, great difficulty remembering who the heck this or that character is supposed to be. No matter how engaging the writing, it was very difficult remembering why I should be caring about Parvati Patel.

Summary: 30 Days of Pride

Over the past thirty days of June, AKA Pride Month including today, I've been sending out posts on my socials. Once per day, I've highlighted an author who falls somewhere within the LGBTQIA+ spectrum (goodness, so many letters). I did my best to cover both genders, incorporate ethnic diversity, and as wide a range of spectrums 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, including today's post, for your perusal so you won't have to go back through my social media posts.

***

1: Tej Turner, starting contemporary we have a travel blogger and modern epic fantasy author who recently completed his Avatars of Blood trilogy.

2: Sylvia Townsend Warner: a somewhat private and forgotten figure known for several works including Lolly Willowes, The Corner That Held Them, and (my introduction to her) Kingdoms of Elfin.

3: Samuel R. Delany: While his fiction didn't grab me, I must respect the man. He created some foundational pieces of science fiction, then transitioned into other fiction up to and including an autobiographical graphic novel about meeting his future husband.

4: Virginia Wolfe: While a tragic character, Wolfe's contributions to fiction are deservedly celebrated. Among other works she wrote Orlando, which is basically the life and exploits of an immortal (mystically) trans woman, and is one of my favourite books.

5: Christopher Isherwood: While best known today as the inspiration for the famous musical Cabaret, Isherwood's work covers much more than his Berlin stories, including the novel A Single Man, and the influential memoir Christopher And His Kind.

6: Xiran Jay Zhao, another modern author, a Chinese-Canadian who uses their home culture as inspiration for their work. Their current works are Iron Widow, first in a sci-fi series inspired by the life and deeds of Wu Zetien, and the contemporary fantasy Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor.

7: Claude Cahun, while best remembered for her collage art and photography, was also a writer and formed part of the French avant-garde scene with their partner Marcel Moore. She also risked her life in occupied France as part of the Resistance against the Nazi occupation.

8: Jacqueline Wilson, an author I barely knew until I began researching this video. Then I found out something which sent me briefly into blue-screen. She created Tracey Beaker, among many other classic children's writings.

9: E. M. Forster, best known for A Passage to India and A Room With A View. But most significantly, he created Maurice, which when originally written was one of the few LGBT romances with a happy ending.

10: Virgil, one of the oldest selected, from an era where casual bisexuality was almost expected in some circles. While best known for the Aeneid (basically Roman-themed Odyssey fan fiction written for the emperor Augustus), Virgil also composed love poems relating to both men and women in his Eclogues.

11: Rebecca Sugar, someone who to many a modern demographic needs little to no introduction. She cut her teeth on Adventure Time, and created Steven Universe.

12: Sappho, potentially the earliest. Tragically little survives of her work, but what remains to us is some of the most evocative lyric poetry ever written. And their contents is readily understood when her full name Sapphor of Lesbos gave us two words for the ages.

13: Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, not perhaps very well known to the Western world compared to other authors on this list, but worthy of note. She is also an activist who helped overturn Puerto Rico's same-sex marriage ban.

14: Ljuba Prenner, a man who not only helped found the Slovene school of detective fiction, but opened a law practise which helped defend a number of people targeted by the state, eventually winning renown and respect.

15: Larry Duplechan, part of the wave of post-Stonewall LGBT writers who emerged and found success. He is best remembered for his character of Ray Rousseau, first featured in Eight Days a Week.

16: ND Stevenson, a creator who has seen recent popular acclaim, though their work has been out for a number of years. While also responsible for the rebooted queer-friendly She-Ra, Stevenson also wrote the graphic novel Nimona. Nuff said.

17: Tamsyn Muir, once again going into modern times, is a relatively recent arrival. Her Lock Tomb series began in 2019 with the science fantasy novel Gideon the Ninth, beginning a tale of necromancy and scheming that has continued for three novels and counting.

18: Neon Yang, another new writer focusing on speculative fiction whose primary work is the Tensorate universe, a series of stories which began in 2017 with The Black Tides of Heaven.

19: Aphra Behn, another oldie but goldie. While neglected for centuries after her death, and somewhat during her life, Behn not only formed part of the theatre revival of the 1660s, but together with a number of other women wrote some of the earliest true novels.

20: Djuna Barnes, a name that may not immediately ring bells, but in her time she was a prominent novelist and illustrator of the modernist movement. She is perhaps best known today for her semi-autobiographical lesbian-themed novel Nightwood.

21: C. L. Clark, returning to modern times. Clark launched onto the scene with The Unbroken, the first in a planned series and a fantastical take on colonialism in an LGBT-friendly universe.

22: Nicole Dennis-Benn, once more a recent addition whose debut Here Comes the Sun in 2016. A modern feminist writer, her work has focused on social issues in Jamaica, including the LGBTQIA+ experience.

23: Joseph Chianakas, a small plug here as he's with my publisher, but only by coincidence. Getting his start in independent horror stories, hist most recent work is the coming-of-age sports romance Singlets and Secrets.

24: James Howe, someone I didn't know about until recently. Primarily writing in the childrens and young adult market, he created Bunnacula, a rabbit vampire. Who sucks the juice from vegetables. Classic.

25: Ellen Kushner, a fantasy writer who came onto the scene in the 1990s, who began her career as a radio host and presenter. Her work includes Thomas the Rhymer, a take on the mythology of the fae, and the Riverside series.

26: R. B. Lemberg, someone with a triple whammy for inclusion on this list: queer, bigender, autistic. Also created an entire fictional universe, the Birdverse, in which many of their stories and poems take place.

27: Elias Jahshan, a journalist and writer who has been a strong advocate for equal rights in Palastine, and helped publicise LGBT literature in the Arab world through the anthology This Arab is Queer.

28: Mary Renault, another older author whose work spans from contemporary LGBT romance, to historical and myth-inspired pieces including her Alexander trilogy and The King Must Die, a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. She was also among the white figures who spoke out against apartheid in her native South Africa.

29: Ally Wilkes, yet another recent arrival, this time focusing on the historical horror genre through her two novels All the White Spaces and Where the Dead Wait, both novels set in the isolation of polar expeditions.

30: Sarah Waters, a fellow Welsh author, whose work has focused on historical and crime novels with lesbian leads. One of her most notable works is Fingersmith, which was adapted into the Korean film The Handmaiden.

***

Bear in mind, THIS IS NOT A DEFINITIVE LIST. There are hundreds of authors, past and present, that I couldn't include. There are also some I debated including due to...reasons. I'll lists some of these mentions off here.

Two that I wanted to include but felt couldn't be are Juana Inés de la Cruz and Gladys Mitchell. There is strong circumstantial evidence of their sexuality, and their writing is worthy of praise, but there is no definitive statements regarding them, particularly Mitchell as she was pretty private. Noel Coward, James Baldwin, Radclyff Hall and Oscar Wilde are relegated to honourable mentions because of the need to keep the list diverse. Plus the combined facts that they were just too easy, and in two instances just too tragic.

I was strongly tempted to include a mangaka from the BL genre in Japan, but most of the stuff created by actual gay mangaka like Gengoroh Tagame, Tarutoru Kou or Takeshi Matsu is often VERY NSFW and aimed at a particular market that doesn't often have much story content compared to others in this list, so look up at your own risk. Including Janet Mock was again tempting, but she's best known for non-fiction. I struggled with Yair Qedar due to the current world situation, but while he has been cautious in his statements, he doesn’t appear to actively support the current Israeli regime, so I feel more comfortable including him as an honourable mention within the non-fiction area. Similarly, Alice Walker was a near-inclusion, but her apparent antisemitic views both in her public speech and parts of her work have shunted her down to the bottom of the hon mentions section. And then only a hair’s breadth away from being cut altogether.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this summary of 30 Days of Pride. Here's to further years of rainbow diversity in life, in fiction, and in everything.

Meet the Ensemble

Characters. They are the backbone of any story. Whether Joyce’s Ulysses, or the epics of Tolkien and Martin, or the most realist and modernist of novels that make you want to curl up and think about how we live in a society, it’s borderline impossible to write a story without at least one character. It’s relatively easy for many to write about the singular first-person narrator’s path through life, or a love story with two or three people, or some conflict of one versus either another one or a group of many. The real challenge, and perhaps the most rewarding style for readers and writers alike, is the ensemble cast.

Art from 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

What do people, be they authors or readers, mean when they talk about an “ensemble cast”? Ensemble as a term can apply to groups of people (musical ensemble), or groups of objects such as buildings (an industrial ensemble). In fiction, it tends to refer to a group of characters that gets roughly the same amount of focus each across a story. The frequency of the ensemble depends on the medium. In film, where focusing on one character is easier, ensembles tend to be the subject of grand scope titles, or smaller independent productions. Ernest Mathijs in his essay ‘Referential acting and the ensemble cast’ argues that ensembles are an important tool for eliciting emotion in film, and applies the term both the groups of protagonists, or monster swarms such as zombies and vampires.

In television, the ensemble is almost required in many contexts, particularly sitcoms. Think of Friends or Cheers, where even with a debatable “main” character or couple, there was a large cast of primary characters who got roughly equal screentime. Video games naturally skew away from ensembles as their design places narrative focus on one character, the playable lead. Only in a few, like the Mass Effect series, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim or Final Fantasy XIII, do we get roughly equal focus on a large cast. And even these examples tend to have representative characters: Mass Effect may be an ensemble, but Shepherd’s the star attraction.

For ensemble casts, books are paradoxically easier and harder. Easier because there is less creative and functional restriction than there are for film, television and video games. The imagination is limitless, and so are the number of characters one can put into a story. But that strength is also a weakness. The imagination is limitless, but writing skill isn’t even in the best writers. Creating one, two or three characters and a number of smaller side characters is easier than giving each character the time they deserve, especially if you’re doing it in a single book. For instance, the Bartimaeus trilogy thrives on the development of a small core cast.

This contrasting ease and difficulty means that, if the writer can’t juggle so many different characters, there are going to be those who fall by the wayside. Or, worse still, if for some reason the cast isn’t downsized, the whole comes across as underwritten. There are exceptions and workarounds. A series following the same characters, as in films and especially television and video games, can afford to spread itself out. Sometimes, unusually, shallow characters or a lack of development and explanation can be a stylistic choice. There’s also the gnarly question of whether the antagonist can count as part of an ensemble.

There is also a natural preference to go for the trials of a single character. Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series is all about one man’s urban magical adventures, and it works as that. People can have limited storage space in stories for names and events, my sister being one of them, and keeping track of more than three to five characters can be tricky to say the least. I know people who have trouble keeping track of the characters of Dune and Foundation and other great series with more than one lead character. Including me TBH.

So, like the best essays, I can’t just leave it without some opinions. Can you write good ensembles? Yes, take a stab at writing a large cast with depth without letting too many of them drop, and don’t be afraid if that’s not the way you go naturally. Must you? I’d question there being a dictate to write in a way you’re not comfortable with, as it always produces subpar work. Can villains be part of an ensemble? Maybe, but they’re a bit of a wildcard.

And as a coda, the thing which drew me to this topic in the first place. It was during the first stage edits of my upcoming book Lost Station Circe. I have to be a bit vague with some of this, because—to quote our lady of non-linearity River Song—“spoilers”.

The story started with a small group of characters, two or three, as I’d done with my debut Starborn Vendetta. But as I looked through the cast during the writing and editing process, a tight-knit seven person crew aboard the rundown cargo ship Benbow, my views began to shift. I saw them less as side characters, and more as characters in their own right. I pushed this further in the edits, and by the time it was going through line edits towards release, I had a cast of seven individual characters that, I hoped, were developed and believable.

If you reached this point, thank you for reading. And I hope you either enjoy some of the stories I mentioned, or encourage you to seek them out.

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.

Audio Preview: Lost Station Circe

Apologies for last week's lack of content, but stuff happened. But this week, I've got something. A new short episode of "Author Talks" with some update stuff, but more importantly...an exclusive audio preview of Lost Station Circe, the second book in the Cluster Cycle series, the cover of which you can find here. It's available on Spotify and YouTube, links down below.

Spotify Link here. Blogger doesn't do embedding for Spotify.