David Gillon

My technothriller WIP has been pretty much stalled ever since Russia invaded Ukraine because the plot is heavily drone dependent and I needed a better feel of where drone and counter-drone technology was going as a result, to make sure the narrative doesn't turn suddenly obsolete. It occurred to me the other day that I pretty much have that, so I've been noodling at it again for the last few days.

One change I was considering making whenever I returned to it was to shift a major secondary character who's Deaf from getting by on her own with lipreading and a cochlear implant to using a sign language interpreter -- which probably already made professional sense as she's a DA and needs to be certain she isn't missing anything when she's in court. So I sat down to do that on Friday, and it actually went a lot faster than I anticipated, while still being a fairly big edit job. It's an interesting exercise because it makes you think much more about where everyone is standing during a conversation, especially when you throw in that she's also lip-reading where she can. And it also changes more intimate scenes (she's the protagonist's wife) as having a conversation while spooned up against each other isn't really practical if you need to see hands and lips. On top of which doing it in the dark is just out. Equally you can't just send her off to show someone around the family home, if she can't actually hold a conversation with them, so viewpoint character/protagonist suddenly became an important part of that little excursion.

By coincidence I came across the trailer for Marvel's upcoming Echo this weekend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFUKnherhuw , in which the only person to speak is Wilson Fisk/Kingpin/a very bulked up Vincent d'Onofrio as Maya Lopez/Echo/Alaqua Cox is Deaf and uses ASL and is too busy kicking ass in the trailer (never mind she's also an amputee) to stop and sign. But there's an interesting piece here and here where director Sydney Freeland talks about changing the way they might otherwise have framed shots to accommodate the fact they're being signed.

Last night, 12:30-ish:  

Yawn, I could really do with an early night.

Oh, I completely forgot that story idea I had last night (ie Wednesday), I'll just open up a Word file and note down the title, that'll be enough to remind me.

3745 word (and five hours) later ....

Dad was released from hospital tonight and is happily ensconced back in his room at the care home. They've actually been talking about releasing him since weekend before last, but the microbiology department kept arguing for more tests to be really, absolutely, totally sure he was rid of the infections - we're talking belt, braces, piece of string and half-a-dozen safety pins. Monday his doctors finally told them no, he wasn't having an MRI because it just isn't practical to try and give him one (he won't stay still) and they were going to release him, but then found his potassium was low, so it's taken two days to get that back to normal. On the one hand it means he had an extra week of IV antibiotics to be really sure the bugs are gone, on the other it's been exhausting for the family. Fingers crossed for things getting back to normal.

Writing progress on Disruptive Technology ground to a halt while this was going on. I picked it up again in the last couple of days and hit 25kwords last night. The break was sort of useful as it let me come at the opening chapters again after a slight break, and I decided to somewhat rejig how my protagonist handles things. I think either way works, but this one is slightly better paced for easing the reader into her life. It was quite a small change, but ended up needing a lot of rewriting. This is an example of how my writing process works, I do too much planning to be a pure pantser, but I loop back on myself to rewrite stuff time after time as the writing process reveals deeper character motivations or plot points that need addressing. I don't think it would be too different if I was plotting it out in detail, though I'm currently trying to decide whether I've written myself into a corner where the only sensible options require my protagonist to brief the attorney general, and possibly the president, which is much higher up the tree of government than I'd planned, but with the degree of disruption I just imposed, it's looking awfully like it's necessary and realistic. I'd planned that disruption, but when you delve into the details of how it would play out, the reality starts to dictate where your story can go.

Seriously, WTF is My Government Doing?

A Brexit no deal scenario was voted down last night, which almost certainly means Parliament voting to request an extension to Article 50 later today. But meantime, three senior Tories, including IDS, who is a one time leader of the party, apparently flew to Poland to lobby the Polish government to oppose extending Article 50. So that's lobbying a foreign power to oppose the expressed will of Parliament. I'm going to need someone to explain to me how that isn't treason. And while IDS was in Poland, Farage was telling the EU parliament to do the same, and the seriously shady Arron Banks was apparently lobbying the Italian fascists of the Northern League to do the same. The story.

Recent Reading:

Thunderbird Falls, C E Murphy (Walker Papers Book 2, or 3)

Newbie shaman and beat cop Joanne Walker (aka Siobhan Walkingstick) has been slacking off on learning the metaphysical side of her new powers, but then she discovers a body in the University of Washington showers after a fencing lesson, and the case turns out to involve her more intimately than she could ever have imagined. The dead woman was the Mother of a coven, and they want Jo to take her place, which given no one knows Jo was a teenage mother pretty much confirms they're the real deal. The weather is still badly out of whack after Jo's defeat of Cernunnos in book one and the coven claim to have a way to fix that, by teaming up with an ancient spirit warrior. Jo wants advice on how to proceed, but Coyote is MIA, and then her partner/father figure Gary the seventy-something taxi driver has a heart attack that puts him in the hospital, so it's just as well someone had answered her 'please teach me' on the metaphysical version of craigslist. Well, probably.

I was quite impressed by this, it's rare for someone to have their protagonist screw up quite so emphatically, but Jo pulls through in the end, though Lake Washington may never be the same again. What's irritating, and hinted at by the 'Book 2, or 3' above, is that the narrative keeps referencing a story that happens between book 1 and this one, and apparently it's not published in the main series, but in a multi-author collection of novellas, which isn't linked from Murphy's author page on Amazon as far as I can see. I only found out about it by going and looking in her Wikipedia entry.

Coyote Dreams, C E Murphy (Walker Papers Book 3, or 4)

It's a fortnight on from the events of Thunderbird Falls, the day after the Fourth of July, and large chunks of Seattle PD appear to be having a duvet day. Jo would be happier having a duvet day, having gotten thoroughly blitzed at the North Precinct picnic, but she just woke up to find a strange man in her bed, and neither of them quite remember what happened last night. To make matters worse, she's rapidly joined for breakfast by Gary, and then by a six-year-old and her mother she promised a tour of the precinct, and forgot, plus her fencing coach Phoebe (on the phone), who is so pissed that Jo forgot her lesson that she is insisting on taking her clubbing later. To make the morning perfect, she then finds her boss at the door. Captain Michael Morrison's mission is more serious, Jo's friend Detective Billy Holliday is comatose in the hospital for unknown reasons, and never mind his strict adherence to logic, if one of his people is down then he wants the only healer in the department to see what she can do. To make things worse, Morrison's appearance completes the circle on why Jo ended up in bed with a strange man, because she saw Morrison hanging out with a strange woman at the picnic, which drove her UST for him into overdrive and led to her drinking most of a quart of whiskey. And it turns out that her one night stand, Mark Bragg, is Morrison's new girlfriend's brother (twin brother, it eventually turns out). So hey, double date from hell.

Things escalate as more and more of the department falls under the influence of the sleeping sickness, and worse, when Jo tries to contact Coyote, she finds him trapped by the same power, and maybe dead. With her Coyote unavailable casting about for help drags ger into what is almost a retconning of her teenage years. Apparently Coyote isn't a new factor in her life, he first appeared to her when she had her first period, but kept that memory for her sleeping mind, because waking-Jo was a little shit who couldn't be trusted with that kind of power. As if that wasn't enough extra pressure, junior-Jo was a little shit because she's a newly created soul, and hasn't had aeons of reincarnation to learn how to handle that kind of power. And she needs that kind of power because the Great Spirit has a job for her at some point in the future. So no pressure then, negotiate the rapids of your UST with your boss wanting to rip the face off his new girlfriend, figure out where the relationship with hellbitch's brother is going, save all your friends from the sleeping sickness, and prep for it by facing off with your teenage self in a way you're fairly certain is going to ruin her life.

I'm not sure whether this is a retconning so much as a uniquely unreliable narrator, but it's pretty well handled and it does make Jo's backstory make more sense. And the ultimate stakes bigger. On the downside there are still multiple references to the missing story.

Other Reading

Amazon is having a sale of Kindle military history stuff, and the chance to pick up books that normally go for c£30 for £1:20 was too much to resist. I ended up buying 8 books (so far), I'm not certain how much I saved, but probably comfortably over a hundred, possibly two. A couple are duplicates of books I already have in hardback, but they're books I reference a lot, so £1:20 for searchable text and access when I'm up in Durham is well worth it. Of the others, five were on my 'buy when you get a chance' list, and only one was an impulse purchase. I think that was quite restrained of me ;)

Currently Writing

Things have been a bit complicated, with trying to both rewrite the first chapter of Graveyard Shift in different PoV for submission to Disabled People Destroy Fantasy as a short story, while keeping up my momentum on Disruptive Technology. In practise I stalled out on both, but then managed to restart myself. Graveyard Shift came together in two sessions, with a week in between them, and progress got much faster when I realized that switching PoV means switching a lot of things the story focuses on, because even if the characters are friends and partners, what they're immediately concerned with differs. That's currently in final editing, having been cut from 6800 words to 5750.

Disruptive Technology I set aside until I had a complete draft of Graveyard Shift, but I'm now back at it, with the manuscript standing at 23700 words. I had a breakthrough yesterday and realised what my mid-point of the novel has to be, which helps a lot with balance and structure. I was worried earlier in the week that it was getting too talky, so I took a look at what was going on and managed to shift some scenes around, which has helped. I may need to look at some police procedurals to see how they balance this kind of thing, where the investigation is just getting started and people are feeling their way without strong leads to follow. Unfortunately it's not the kind of investigation where you can wander quaint villages encountering interesting witnesses.

Things researched since last time: Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, C-RAM systems - that's Counter Rockets, Artillery and Mortars, who has them post Iraq/Afghanistan, how many major airports there are in the US, layout of LAX, flight times to LAX from both SeaTac and DC, where my characters could fly into if LAX is shut.

Currently Reading

I stalled on the Bujold novella, wanted something light and readable, so went back to C E Murphy's Urban Shaman/Walker Papers series, which I've previously read the first two of.

Urban Shaman, C E Murphy.

Joanne Walker is flying back into Seattle after spending the past three months with her dying, estranged mother. Looking out of the window on final approach, she sees a woman on the point of being attacked, so hares out of the airport, grabbing the first taxi she finds, and Gary, its driver, who's 73, bored, and built like a linebacker. They find the woman, Marie, hiding from her attacker, and take her to a diner to hear her story, at which point the Wild Hunt turn up outside, and Marie reveals 1) she's a banshee, and 2) Jo's about to die. This does in fact happen, though not without Jo managing to walk up the sword that's impaling her and stick a knife in Cernunnos, head of the Hunt. This is when things turn really strange, with Jo, who has been denying her half-Cherokee heritage since she was 18, meeting Coyote, and being talked through healing herself, using the metaphor that she's a car, as she's a mechanic.

And she's not just a mechanic, she's a mechanic for Seattle PD. Or at least she was until she went AWOL for three months. And as Precinct Captain Michael Morrison delights in pointing out, he hired her replacement 10 weeks ago. But that doesn't mean she's out of a job, because a blatantly contrived set of circumstances mean she was sent through Police Academy when she took the mechanic's job, so Morrison is busting her from being a mechanic to being a police officer. HQ won't let him sack her directly, because she's good for their diversity stats, but he's convinced she'll quit.

Unfortunately for his plans (and their mutual sexual tension), Jo doesn't have much quit in her, so the first thing she does is hook up with Gary and head over to Marie's. Only to find her dead, latest victim of a serial killer stalking Seattle. The last thing the thoroughly rational Morrison wants to accept is that there's a supernatural serial killer on the loose, but Jo's death and revival was caught on CCTV, and his best hope of stopping an escalating murder spree may be his least qualified patrol officer, who's equally unqualified as the shaman people now keep insisting she obviously is.

It's thoroughly enjoyable, Jo's a strong, flawed character and Gary's a delight, but there are a few areas where the author seems to be pressing a little heavily on the scales of probability, particularly the whoops, now you're a cop, here's your badge thing. The feel of Seattle is also a bit iffy, strong at the end, but absent a lot in the middle.

(Incidentally the first time I read this I ended up having to rename a character in Graveyard Shift because Jo's birth name was actually Siobhan, and I had a character called Siobhan Murphy, based out of SPD's North Precinct, just like Jo is in the Walker Papers, which was taking annoying coincidence a bit far).

I haven't written every day over the last week, there've been a couple of days when I was too tired to really think straight, but even those had notes or the odd sentence scribbled down. The Disruptive Technologies manuscript now sits at 16,000 words, up 5000 words from six days ago. I'm having to do a lot of thinking about locations and background and general plot stuff, because that's something that I really need to get right now, otherwise it'll mean a lot of rework later. I'm slightly concerned that the last two chapters have come in at about 1200 words each,  that's definitely on the low side for a 100k target with around a 20 chapter target - realistically the chapter target is likely to vary a little, there's an amorphous lump of investigation in the middle that I'll need to resolve as I get closer to it, but not so much as to drop the words per chapter target down to under 2k.

A couple of things that have taken ridiculous amounts of time to research: working out which agency leads anti-terrorism investigations in the US (answer FBI, despite DHS, and a whole bunch of other agencies, having anti-terrorism responsibilities), and where Seattle PD's Criminal Investigation Bureau works out of (still not answered that one, may have to read a Seattle cop's memoirs to work it out - SPD, your website is worse than it was three years ago!).

The weather seems to be turning a little wilder, if still on the mild side for the time of year, I may have timed my return South just right. It's extremely unusual to spend Christmas up here without snow on the ground at any point (I suppose we did have the icefall from Storm Deidre, but that came and went in just a few hours).

I've finished the first draft of Disruptive Technologies, which ultimately came in at about 9200 words. With A Leg to Stand On at 3500, that means I've written the better part of 13,000 words over the holidays (and heavily edited another 6000 more) and takes the number of short stories completed in the last 12 months up to 3, with another significantly reworked. I've never been a prolific short fiction writer, so that may well be my highest annual total. And it may not be finished yet. I'm still not sure how serious I'm going to  be about completing Phantom Leg, but it crept up to 450 words last night, I have a plan for it, it's interesting to write out of my comfort zone (it's technically YA) and it all works as character background whether finished or not. First priority back home is going to be some research to back up the drone stuff in Disruptive Technologies. I have the background to bullshit convincingly, but I should check my facts. And then I need to sit down and seriously consider whether it will work even better at novel length.

Recent Reading:

The Furthest Station, Ben Aaronovitch. A spate of people being harassed by ghosts on the Metropolitan Line takes PC Peter Grant, his oppo Sergeant Jaget Kumar of the British Transport Police, and Peter's teenage cousin Abigail, the Folly's one girl youth auxiliary, out to the wilds of suburbia, where there are junior genius loci to be encountered, and kidnap victims to be rescued. Not bad, but I felt overpriced at £4.99 for an ebook novella, when there plenty of full novels going for the same price point, And I'm not paying £8.99 for the other series novella nor £9.99 for the latest novel. I'll wait until the ebooks drop to a more reasonable price. Though I may pick up the graphic novels now the comics have been compiled into single volumes.

A comment I forgot to make when reviewing the rest of the series, Aaronovitch is meticulous in explicitly labeling white characters as white,not leaving us to assume that's the default, and everyone gets the same level of facial description, whatever their ethnicity.. I'm slightly less impressed by his insistence on Peter using the 'Me and' construction, which even if Peter grew up using I don't think he'd be universal about after six years with the Met. A mix of "Me and X", and "X and I", would seem more convincing to me (and less irritating), A possibly irritating development in the novella are footnotes marked "Note for Reynolds" explaining various British-isms - possibly the American readership has been struggling.

 *Reynolds is the Dana Sculley lookalike FBI agent Peter's encountered in a couple of the books.

It was interesting to watch the first episode of Manhunt last night (a new crime drama recreating a prominent London murder case), and realise what a good job Aaronovitch has done within the series of showing how a  murder enquiry starts up and works.

Next up, The Mortal Word, Genevieve Cogman, the next in the Invisible Library series, though I'd better find something else as well, or I'll run out of things to read on the train..
 

Alice Wong (@SFDirewolf) and Nicola Griffith (@Nicolaz) have been running monthly twitter chats on disability literature. Last night's was specifically on YA fiction, with guest authors Marieke Nijkamp (@Mariekeyn - This is Where it Ends, Before I Let Go, Unbroken (editor) and the forthcoming Oracle: Rising) and Brigit Young (@BrigitYoung - Worth A Thousand Words). YA's not my main focus, but it's the first of these chats I've remembered to set a reminder for and it was an interesting chat on the problems of writing YA criplit - mostly non-disabled writers and society, and expectations that are just plain wrong. Someone put it nicely as publishers prioritizing non-disabled voices speaking for us over our own voices. The overall conclusion was we're nowhere near where we should be, but it wasn't in any way a depressing chat, more one with a lot of energy for fixing it.

Alice Wong has now collated everything together on wakelet (which is new to me) and it can be read here.

One of the members of my Pitchwars year group just tweeted a link to the announcement of  the French edition of his book*. It's a cartoon, and as far as I can tell, accurate to the plot.

Les Entremondes

*The Hotel Between, Sean Easley.

 

So I'd no sooner gotten over Disabled People Destroy SF rejecting my fiction submission, than I got a rejection for my non-fiction submission - "didn't work for me". I suspect it may have been too confrontational for their liking. Turns out two rejections in relatively quick succession seems to double up on the effects. I was expecting the self-doubt and the depression, but the anger was new. Not quite sure how to deal with these other than to keep trying and seeing if I can build up a tolerance.

Damn, I really wanted to crack that market. Well, I want to crack any market, but that one particularly mattered to me.

The depression meant I was late getting back to my sister with my input for the next meeting re Dad's care funding, which meant she ran into various issues, and ended up with the two of us on the phone to each other at half past midnight last night, which is not an ideal time for discussing the technical minutiae of the CHC Decision Support Tool (though I suspect they'll be fairly freaked just by the fact we've looked it up and run through it ourselves). It turns out there is actually something more depressing than running through a benefit assessment form for yourself - running through it for a family member who can no longer handle it themselves.

One unexpected benefit of all of this was that when I went to open up the Word file for the DST, expecting to have to use Word Online, my desktop said "Hang on while I install Office" (or words to that effect). I'd worked out a couple of weeks ago that the desktop and laptop somehow had two different Microsoft accounts with the same email address, and when MS asked which one I was trying to use managed to get the desktop logged onto the laptop account, and that seems to have made the difference the next time I tried to open an Office file. I thought I was going to have to buy an additional license for the desktop to cover it (Word Online is too slow for anything but a backup), but clearly my Office subscription either covered the desktop under the main license or included a spare license - score!

When I should have been looking at the DST I was actually playing Ark. Which turns out to be very good as a distraction, but not so good for my wrists, which are stinging through overuse. I've had this before with other games, if I cut down on the amount I've been playing then they should settle down relatively quickly (but note the 'if'). I've also taken measures to cut down what I'm doing within the game by (quite literally) pitching two thirds of my dodos over the compound wall. OTOH I've now tamed two triceratops (Tyrone and Teri), which make good pack mules. Fortunately you can leave those tied to a hitching rail near a feeding trough and ignore them until you need them. I've also tamed six parasaurolophus (-opholi? Para, Ventura, Mara, Alpha and Omega and Lara) for riding. I only intended taming a couple of parasaurs, but Mara and Lara both spawned on my doorstep and it was easier to tame them than do anything else, while Alpha and Omega turned up as Mara and Ventura's egg.  What started out as a separate barn for the dodos (their squawking was driving me up the wall) has now become a dodo barn/general hatchery. Alpha and Omega worked fine (incidentally they have a particularly evil-looking colour scheme - black scales with orange highlights on their spinal ridges), but Tyrone and Teri's egg Treo dropped dead on me shortly after hatching. I'm now working my way through my stored fertile dodo eggs, but any hatchlings without interesting colour mutations get pitched over the wall - essentially I've turned into a breeder of overgrown budgies.