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NEWS AND VIEWS - MAY 2021

WRITING NEWS

Still working on The White Ribbon and the Heart of the Night -- I've got it up to about 20,000 words now. Expecting to finish it around late July or maybe early August.

Then it's on to A City Burnished Silver, the final book in The Chemical Empires series, which will probably take me about seven or eight months to write. After that...well, I haven't really decided what I'm going to write after that. Another Sam Fortune story? Another Signalverse novel? Maybe that "playground noir" kiddie-detective novel I keep talking about? Here's the rough-draft opening scene of that novel, just to give you the flavor of it:
I was sitting on the bleachers reading a Batman comic and chewing on a candy cigarette when I noticed the girl looking up at me from the sidelines. She was a pretty, sparkle-shiny blonde, wearing a bedazzled jean jacket and a pink backpack with little butterflies all over it. She was looking at me kind of doubtfully, like she was trying to decide whether I was worth talking to. I didn't like the look.

"Are you Andrew?" she called up at me, all of a sudden.

"Drew for short," I said, peering at her over the comic. "Who are you?" I'd seen this girl around school, but I didn't know her name.

"Tricia," she said. "Tricia Nielsen. I want to talk to you."

"You are talking to me."

"I want to talk to you about something important."

I looked at my watch. "Recess is over in ten minutes. Better make it quick."

She climbed up the bleachers, but didn't sit down; instead, she looked around, scanning the area for other kids. "I wouldn't want anyone to see us talking," she explained snootily. "I wouldn't want anyone to think we were friends."

"I wouldn't want that either," I retorted. "What can I do for you?"

She gave my Batman comic a disgusted look. "You like Batman?"

I shrugged. "He's the world's greatest detective."

"Is that what you are? A detective?"

"I'm just a kid."

"You found that missing girl. Rebecca, right? I heard about that."

Hearing the name out loud was like having a finger jabbed in my eye. Rebecca was a bad memory. "I didn't find her," I said. "The police did. I just...pointed them in the right direction."

She studied me for a second. "What grade are you in?"

"Fifth."

"I'm in fifth, too. How old are you?"

"Ten."

"I just turned eleven," she said proudly. It was important to her to establish this hierarchy; it put me in my place. "I'm older than you."

"Congratulations. What do you want?"

She leaned in close. She smelled like a girl, like sweet shampoo and Barbie doll plastic. "I want you to find something for me," she said conspiratorially.

"What did you lose?"

"A necklace," she said. "My sister's necklace. Only I didn't really lose it. It was stolen."

And Drew proceeds to get himself mixed up in this mystery, which takes place in the late 1980's and which features all kinds of references to the kid culture of that decade. I think it would be a fun novel to write, but like I mentioned last month, I'm having a hard time with the outline, and I'm afraid it wouldn't be a very long novel, either -- probably only about 30,000 words, which would actually make it more of a novella.

So I might write this one, or I might write something else, I don't know. We'll see.

Oh, and before I forget, I also uploaded a new version of The Signal City Visitor's Guide to the Signalverse site this month. You can get it here; just scroll down to the bottom of the page. It includes fifteen or sixteen new character bios, a couple dozen shorter bios, some additions to the timeline, and some little changes to the text, in order to bring it up to date with the events of Sneak and the Shadow of Darkplanet.

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WHAT I'M READING

Here's what I've been working on this month:



I also finished reading Curtis Craddock's The Last Uncharted Sky last month, which was quite good.

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WHAT I'M PLAYING

I decided to fire up a couple of RPG's this month: Tales of Berseria and the 2004 remake of Shining Force for the GBA. I'm about ten hours into Berseria, and basically liking it -- the Tales games are like JRPG comfort food for me; they're not particularly smart or ambitious, and the mechanics are almost always the same, but they're fun, and the characters are usually engaging and endearing. (For the record, my favorite Tales games are Abyss, Vesperia, and Symphonia. Graces, Xillia, and Hearts were middle-of-the-road, and I didn't care for Zesteria at all. I think these are all the Tales games I've played.)

As for the Shining Force remake, holy crap, it's awesome. It's the game I know and love, but better -- better writing, better graphics, and better storytelling. And the recruitable characters have so much more personality! In the original game they were basically ciphers, but in this one they talk, they tell stories, they have interesting quirks. And you can learn more about them by talking to them at headquarters. In the original game, after a character was recruited, they never really said anything or did anything or contributed anything new to the plot.

Anyway, I should have picked this one up a long time ago.


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