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Plans for 2025

After a short intermission (or a long one if you want to call it so), I am making a return. Things got a bit hectic there for a while, with the arrival of a new baby and associated issues with that, leaving me little time to do much, even writing. But we are over the worst of it and I even am doing some writing again.

I have plans for the year, including more updates on here and plenty of writing. I hope to keep updating stories and how they came about, as well as looking at various games and books that have influenced me.

First up is a challenge to write 52 short fiction stories over the year – 1 a week. So far in the first 4 weeks I have written 3 (2 sword and sorcery short stories and 1 historical fiction flash story), but have 7 others started.

In addition I would really actually like to release some of it and not just on the website. Some collections of the short stories that I have already written, and hopefully a novel that I have been sitting on for years – a weird noir fantasy.

So, on with the show.

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Peregrine and Blade: Eyes of the Frozen North

I can’t remember the exact details, but Eyes of the Frozen North came about from a writing prompt on a forum somewhere. It is a short piece – a vignette really – that takes Peregrine and Blade to a new part of the world, and continues on with the world building.

Really, world building never ends. There are always new lands, peoples, cultures, ideas and more to explore. And that is what makes writing fun, especially fantasy. You get to explore all of this and see where the story leads.

Sometimes, as mentioned before, the characters can run across troubles that can not be defeated. Such again is the case in this story.

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Peregrine and Blade: The City in Shadows

The first story, The City in Shadows, after the initial three took Peregrine and Blade to a new part of the world – the deserts. I like deserts, and stories and settings that take place in them, like Dune and Dark Sun. I also visit them a fair bit in my stories, but this is the first time I took Peregrine and Blade into them.

There was, once again, some DNA that came from other stories; you might be able to pick which Conan stories inspired it, in parts.

But this story sends the duo off on mercenary work for the first time, though one that didn’t quite work out, and also continued to expand more on the history of the setting, and of the world in general.

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Peregrine and Blade: Blood Upon the Sands

The third of the trio of stories written to get a feel for Peregrine and Blade and their world, Blood upon the Sands, took them far from Qaiqala for the first time, seeing them as part of a corsair crew landing upon a tropical isle in search of treasure. Conan went a-pirating so I didn’t see why they couldn’t. And treasure hunts on tropical islands are always fun.

Except it didn’t turn out that way, naturally. When I started the story I had no idea of what was to happen, because that is the way I generally write. I don’t plot or plan for the most part, but let the story – and the characters – go where they will. And this story ended up starting the world building of the setting, introducing an inhuman race from before the time of man, one that would crop up again later.

And as happens in S&S stories, the duo didn’t completely succeed in their adventure, and not for the last time. Some times the foe or situation is too dangerous, or a choice has to be made or mere bad luck prevents the heroes succeeding. It is a part of S&S that makes it feel real.

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Peregrine and Blade: The Scroll in the Tower

The first three Peregrine and Blade stories I wrote in very quick succession, with the second being The Scroll in the Tower. Sadly, my early attempts at names for the stories weren’t great; in hindsight I could have done better. It was still a learning process at the time, which was also why I wrote the first three in a rush; to get to know more of the characters and the settings.

And yes, that meant there were still cliches in the story as a result. I mean, it starts off in a tavern, with a tavern fight and a mysterious stranger approaching the heroes to undertake a quest. And it wouldn’t be the last time either.

What is does do is introduce for the first time a recurring side character, though at the time that wasn’t the plan. Bakanon, the hard done by owner of the tavern in question, was to make a number more appearances in later stories, as does his tavern, which remained unnamed for the time, and which served as a base of operations for the duo when they were present in the city. And it also introduced the Souk of the Crimson Mists, in which the tavern resided, another place oft visited, a hang out for the ne’er-do-wells of the city. A perfect home, then, for Peregrine and Blade, and for them to start – and end – their adventures in.

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Peregrine and Blade: Darkness in the Flames

Darkness in the Flames was the very first S&S story that I wrote, and one of the earliest attempts at short fiction as well. This is where it all started, around fifteen years ago. Looking back on it, I do have a fondness for the story because of that, though it does wear its DNA on its sleeve. It is a little bit cliche in parts, and its inspirations fairly obvious to see, but we all have to start somewhere.

And this is where Peregrine and Blade’s story starts. At least from a writing point of view, not a chronological one. From that point of view, it takes place much later on in their adventures.

The inspiration for the story was not the characters though – they grew through the story to take form when they had started fairly vague in my mind – but the city itself; Qaiqala. I wanted to make a memorable city and so was Qaiqala born, the pre-eminent city of the Swordlands. I know it is a fanciful place that probably couldn’t function, but nonetheless it is an interesting place, and Peregrine and Blade’s stories keep coming back to it, and the various parts of it, especially the Souk of the Crimson Mists. But more of that in later stories.

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Peregrine and Blade: The Chance of a Coin

While The Chance of a Coin shows up first on the list of Peregrine and Blade stories, it wasn’t the first written, and was more done somewhere in the middle of the current stories.

Why it shows up first is that it is more of a vignette, a very short piece of flash fiction that gives a brief introduction to the two main characters, Peregrine and Blade, and a brief insight into what they are like, and what drives them. And it still manages to tell a story.

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The Cahuac Cycle

The Cahuac Cycle is a collection of very short stories that are among the earliest I wrote. Not the very oldest, but they were written before I had started to take short fiction seriously.

They had their origins back in he late 90s from memory – I was taking part in an pbem worldbuilding game/exercise. We each made up a culture in a earth-like world, starting in the stone age just before hunter-gatherers began to settle down and each 100 years we explained what had gone on in the culture, what changes and happened and so on. Farming was discovered, plants and animals were domesticated, settlements started to appear, and so on. It didn’t last too long, maybe 20 turns in, but the culture I had developed had spread and split up and interacted with neighbouring cultures.

As part of it, I came up with a few stories as told by the people of that culture that were creation myths and legends of their people, about how things came to be, revolving around one legendary ancestor-hero named Cahuac. They were fun to write and a little bit different, a bit of worldbuilding that I later tried to fold into another project that some day might see the light of day.

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Peregrine and Blade

One of the main and largest of my short fiction stories is the Peregrine and Blade series, S&S inspired by the likes of Howard and Leibner.

The birth of the setting, the characters and the stories of Peregrine and Blade came about when I was undergoing a shift in my reading habits, having become jaded with the monster doorstopper epics that took decades to finish and were filled with needless padding.  I’d taken to reading some of the old authors, such as Robert. E Howard, Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock, who wrote on the opposite end of the scale – plenty of short stories of a pulp heroic fantasy style often called sword and sorcery.

I’d been starting to write some short stories by this stage too, so I was inspired to try out that style.  In addition I’d just read an article on some of the great cities of fantasy – places such as Lankhmar, Ankh-Morpork and Minas Tirith.  I wanted to create a memorable city like that to explore.  My first thought was to try to incorporate it into the current series of short stories I was writing, The Chronicles of the White Bull.  However I soon discarded that idea – the main character of those stories, Nhaqosa, had his own story to tell and I had no plans to have him stay in one place for any amount of time, and especially not enough to explore a great city.

So I moved on to the idea of creating a new setting for the stories.  Once that was decided I needed characters for the setting.  I decided to play with the typical pairing, which tends to be the big strong man and the smaller, smarter partner.  Instead I would make the tall one the brains while the short one would be the brawn.  I played around with the idea of making the short warrior a dwarf, but quickly discarded that – I wanted it to be a human oriented world.

I then had the idea to really mix it up – when a man and woman are the adventurers, predominantly it is the man who is the dumb muscle, and the woman the brains, and quite often the one who uses magic.  Why not reverse those roles?

Thus were born Fianna, also known as Peregrine, the wild sword-maiden, and her taller, cultured, urbane companion of the cities, Carse of the Red Blade, sometimes a rogue, assassin and dabbler in magic.

With the idea for the two characters, and a city to base them out of, I started writing.  I had no other ideas beyond that, the world, cultures, place or history.  I quickly wrote three stories – Darkness in the Flames, The Scroll in the Tower and Blood upon the Sands.  As I wrote them, the world slowly revealed itself to me. 

That was about fifteen years ago and over the next couple of years, fifteen more stories followed, with ideas for seven more before I stopped writing them, for a number of reasons.

But now with the desire to share the stories one more, it means that there will be more coming again.

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The Long and Short of It

Flash fiction, short stories, novelettes and novellas.  I’m a big fan of all forms of short fiction, both reading and writing it.  I didn’t used to be so enthusiastic about it.

Once upon a time I was an avid reader of the epic doorstopper form of fantasy, with its multiple volumes of weighty tomes and series that didn’t end.  However, the more that they didn’t end, the more I began to drift away from them.  Waiting 20+ years for the conclusion of a story I started when much younger began to wear thin.  As did the padding that became more ad more pronounced as the series went on that filled out the books solely to keep the series going.

In addition I didn’t have as much time to devote myself to such weighty series.  And so I began reading other forms of fantasy – short fiction.  The epics went unfinished – there are only a few that I have completed.  I grew to enjoy the shorter form for its sharp action, succinct stories, lack of padding and general fun of action and adventure.

These mega-epics weren’t always the way – during the days of the pulp magazines short fantasy stories were all the rage. Authors like Robert E Howard (creator of Conan of Cimmeria, Krull the Conqueror and others), Fritz Leiber (creator of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser) and others wrote short stories, novelettes and novellas. C.S.Lewis’ Narnia series are actually what would be called novellas, and the grand-daddy of the epic novels – The Lord of the Rings – is only as long as single volumes of current day series.

The more I read of them, the more I wanted to write them as well.  I had always thought I’d write those sprawling epics when I was younger, but just as my reading tastes have changed, so have my writing.  I began to write short fiction and found it much easier and fun.  While I knew making a living from short fiction was harder than novels I had found my style and wasn’t going to let that stop me.

The style of writing long and short stories is vastly different – short stories are purer. That doesn’t make them better – just that they have to be distilled down compared to novels. Those 1000 page epic need a lot of padding, casts of thousands, pages of purple prose descriptions and dozens of plots to reach that length. Short stories only have the one, simple plot for the most, and don’t have the space for long, flowery description – they have to do more with less.

It is for such reasons that I currently prefer short stories, both reading and writing them.

Over a couple of years I’ve written a large number of works of short fiction, with a whole bunch more planned.  I look forward to sharing them and hope people have as much enjoyment reading them as I did writing them.