Andrew Hindle's Blog

Boy howdy.

Well, I suspected this was going to be a big one (at least by the time I got into it I did), but it’s finished at last. It came in at 138 pages, 66,812 words, which to those still paying attention means it’s a respectable novel all on its own and pretty close to Eejit in length.

My current stats:

Chapter 1: 75 pages, 38,455 words.

Chapter 2: 19 pages, 9,319 words.

Chapter 3: 63 pages, 29,483 words.

Chapter 4: 138 pages, 66,812 words.

Whole book: 295 pages, 144,069 words.

Look at that hideously poorly-planned seat-of-the-pants chapter-size skew! LOOK AT IT I TELL YOU! What is chapter 2 even? It’s a prologue for chapter 4 is what it is.

And chapter 4 (of 9) really is basically a book in its own right. As I joke in the metrics-caption here and mentioned in my earlier post a bit, I’m alternating A-plot and B-plot in odd and even chapters for the first half of this book, and in chapter 5 (of 9) I should be reuniting the split party (but maybe not). What that means is that chapter 2 (of 9) and chapter 4 (of 9) are all one plot thread, so I might technically be able to take some stuff out of 4 and add it to 2 to make them all more even…

But I’m not sure if I want to. There are plot points and pacing issues that this layout helps with. I just didn’t intend chapter 4 (of 9) to be so large. I think I was actually concerned I wouldn’t find enough content to fit in there. I think I said the B-plot was thin in comparison to the A-plot.

Well, it fattened up nicely. When I realised my B-plot was essentially a whole-arse DnD party and quest, complete with weird new characters and some pretty outrageous adventure and action sequences, it just took on a life of its own.

I feel I’m past the halfway point now even if I do have five chapters left to write – I doubt they’re going to be this long, and may not even be as long as their current projected lengths (which if I recall correctly was a guess based on an average of chapters 1 – 3? Yeah, I’ve kind of blown that up…). But I have long since accepted the fact that whenever I say “the next bit’s going to be shorter and more difficult to write” I turn around a month later and look at the giant pile of bullplop I just made and go “well dang.”

I can’t wait for you “all” to read it!

That was all a bit heavy, how about a little mood-lightener? Let’s talk about Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.

I had previously played a lot of Animal Crossing (New Horizons), and in fact it has been six years since that blog post. Feels like longer. That was Toon’s big non-tomato-sauce-related entrance to the Hatstand, that was.

Anyway, it was a fun game and Wump put me up to it. Tomodachi Life is another one that Wump had heard about and seen streamers playing, and so bought it one day and is now mildly hyperfixated on it. It’s a lot like Animal Crossing, only instead of having a single avatar and a bunch of cute little animals running around on an island owned by raccoons, you are a sort of disembodied controlling intelligence and all the characters are ones you make. They’re called ‘Mii’s, for reasons that escape me. You create them, give them a look and personality, then let them loose to interact with each other and do basic life-stuff. Essentially, it’s Animal Crossing meets Sims in a kind of social simulator game.

Wump promptly created themselves, their boyfriend, our immediate family and then started to make a whole range of fictional and TV characters (Winx girls, My Little Ponies, and so on … they’re all roughly humanoid, the customisation is not too wild, but you can have up to 70 dudes on your little island). Hatboy and Mrs. Hatboy promptly started talking about The Wheel of Time (you can give your characters catchphrases, interests, pet sayings, sentence-closers and other quirks as they level up, and all of the actions and phrases in the lexicon start to cross-pollinate in very amusing ways), and then fell in love.

Let’s see if the video works. Okay, it seems to work, so there you go. Yeah, that’s me. I bet you’re wondering how I got into this hamster onesie situation.

What I decided to do with my island (after naming myself Mer), was recreate all my favourite characters from my literary urverse.

I started with Çrom Skelliglyph, opting to leave him with no birthday or aging mechanic but lock him at somewhere in his early 40s. The age slot can go up to 150 years which makes a lot of my non-human characters difficult as well, but I figured what the heck. Skell can be the age he usually appears to be. My initial plan was to leave him on the island all alone and see what happened to his mental state, but it turned out there wasn’t much you could do until you added more people and got things moving. Obviously, next I added Drago Barducci.

Pictured here a bit later in the game, between Sally-Forth-Fully-Armed and Glomulus Cratch. The size slider was also a bit restrictive, so I settled for “humans way down one end of the size track, Molranoids at the other, and Barducci closer to Molranoid than human on account of he’s a giant motherfucker”.

I’m pleased at how much he came out looking like Mister Garibaldi from Babylon 5, that was always kind of how I pictured him (although a ludicrously CGI-size-enhanced The Rock would also be funny in a TC / movie adaptation).

Drago and Skell got along pretty well. Next came Z-Lin Clue, and her sentence-opening pet phrase “FFS”. And I gave everyone the closest I could find (so far) to AstroCorps greys.

As you can see, I gave her a Mister Goggles.

There are some very cool mechanics in the game (and I’m not talking about Zeegon, although he’s pretty cool too). While the phrases you can give your characters are generally quite short, you can mess with them in the pronunciation setting (oh boy, did both ‘Çrom’ and ‘Rakmanmorion’ give me trouble … not that I made a Rakmanmorion). For example I gave General Moral Decay (Alcohol) the saying “BHDGI”, which is pronounced “but humans don’t get it” which makes a lot of what he says funny by default.

Also, as shown above, you can customise or straight-up draw a variety of objects, including pets and clothing, for your characters. Mister Goggles has never failed to bring a smile to my digital Trampsters’ faces. It’s still somewhat limited, but very fun. With it, I was able to face-paint some scars on Janya’s Mii.

She also has some excellent catchphrases.

See?

Your characters more or less make up their own minds who they want to talk to, be friends with, and start relationships with. You can customise their genders, pronouns (separately!), and dating preferences (including “not interested”), which is all a far cry from Animal Crossing and its annoying “long hair means feminine coded avatar” restriction.

I did let Cratch and Decay become friends in the end.

It was also very funny to find that Cratch’s personality coding made him into a happy optimist (hence the bright yellow starter-house). He’s still creepy though (no pun intended). And I did the best I could with making a Molranoid head for Decay, it still ended up looking a bit nosferatu-ey. I may go in and face-paint up his ears into a better pair, once I’m a bit more familiar. And as you can see, his name would not fit in the field but the characters say it just right, I assure you.

Next was one of my bigger challenges: Thord.

A blank grey head and a bit of creative face paint makes a humanoid but pretty solid aki’Drednanth.

I also made Waffa, Contro, Janus and (as previously mentioned) Sally, but getting pictures from the Switch to the blog is still a bit of a pain in this the Year of our Lord 2026, so I didn’t take too many. Anyway here’s Zeegon ‘Pretty Balls’ Pendraegg.

I gave him a garage as soon as I could customise the houses. Furthermore, I made four basic metal cabin types: crew standard, officer standard, brig, and refrigerator unit. And customised a standard AstroCorps modular floor-plate for each one (ASTROCORPS MOD STNDRD CREW QUARTERS FLOOR TYPE 001).

And of course I created Zeegon a space weasel.

Boonie ended up being shared around to a lot of the characters, so now I’m finding him everywhere. Which is kind of nice. He was the ship’s weasel.

As you can see from some of these shots, the island started out pretty generic but I was able to make it dead square, cover it entirely in steel plate, and convert most of the buildings to soulless modules (with nice custom interiors, except for the floors for regulation reasons), to give “Cursèd Playground Island” the right vibe.

Coming up next, I made another brig unit next to Cratch’s place, and created The Artist.

Again this is pronounced more like “a person composed of pure slowly-dissolving cosmic nullity” but you get the gist.

It is pure confirmation bias, of course, but it is funny how the characters all seem to just say the most perfect things (that you’ve written for them, but still!). Here’s Janus Whye.

I don’t know why he would say that, what a weird thing for him to say for no reason.

Once I got to the end of my main run of Final Fall of Man characters, I branched out into Always Night characters too. I was getting more confident with the face painting and character creation process.

Private Padûls, obviously. I later gave him a top hat, then later still a bowler hat and a big sword.

Padûls and Janus hit it off almost immediately, possibly while Janus was trying desperately to give Padûls some much-needed therapy.

You can also give them nicknames for each other when they become friends, which is still a bit of a work in progress and the punctuation needs tweaking, but it’s very fun.

I gave Thord a very expensive freezer suit (until such time as I can customise something better, it is just plate mail) and Decay a funny T-shirt that reads “some of my best friends are humans”, and they became friends very quickly. She also connected with Skell over Drednanth stuff.

Humans are squishy!

I added a third brig cell, and created Horatio Bunzo.

Had a lot of fun making him too, but not sure where I’m going to head with the character. His personality seems spot on to me.

Anyway, I could go on and on about this, but I guess I’ve already jabbered enough. It’s a fun game, if you have the characters to populate it. And lord knows I have that.

The game has a group photo feature as well and you can insert characters of your choice into a given setting. So much fun (also one of the only pics I took of Contro but I absolutely fucking nailed him, even if I do say so myself).

Left to right: Skell, Decay, Waffa, Janya, Thord, Contro, Cratch, Sally.

Highly recommended.

I’ve been a bit out of contact for a while because things have been messy (literally). I was considering writing another book – a sequel to Arsebook, maybe, entitled Arsebook II: The Chronic-ills of Hernia … but in the end I decided there wasn’t enough material and I didn’t want there to be enough material, and besides, I don’t have enough social media presence anymore to really carry a book in the comments and messages of support – which I still received, and gratefully, but only from a few very select sources. They know who they are.

So, in the meantime, here’s a quick summary.

A few years ago, I started to notice what the doctors call a parastomal hernia developing. That is, a hernia around my front-butt. See, while a regular hernia (to my understanding) is a bit of intestine pushing out through the abdominal muscles or elsewhere in the torso (they can also be groinal) this one was pushing out around the hole that had been intentionally made in my gut so the front-butt could exist. So, in short, there was intestine that wasn’t meant to be there, as well as the bit that was meant to be there.

This is pretty common among ostomates, with as many as 75% of us getting one as time goes by. It’s coming up on 15 years since my big rearrangement, so it’s not that strange. It’s also quite survivable, although the grapefruit-sized bulge did make the poo-bags hard to apply and was obviously uncomfortable, particularly from time to time when I had constipation or gas, or had exerted myself a bit and made it push out and hurt more. Once or twice I had to lie down on the floor and push it back in and wait for the weird feeling (you know, the feeling of your guts falling out, if you know it you very much know it), and that was about the point where I started asking doctors if there was anything they could do about it.

Hernia belts were not really helping either, since to wear one was to constrict the poo-bag still more and that led to shitting all over myself even more than usual. A hole could be cut in the belt to allow the bag, but that reduced the effectiveness of the belt and still did not guarantee the poo would stay and go where it belonged. Anyway, the hernia itself was not going anywhere and was only going to get worse, not better.

I finally got a meeting with a surgeon who explained the process to me. He (with assistance from a robot, because we live in the future) would go into my abdomen, put all my intestines back behind my abs where they belonged (except for the last little tube that still goes out to become my front-butt), then install some mesh around the whole area to keep them from coming back out. There was a long waiting list for this procedure, so I was put on the list and told to get my weight down a bit and my blood pressure under control. I was at about 125 kg and 155/90 at the time, which is not good.

Weeks and months went by, and I got down to 115 kg (actually I believe I had told the doctor I was 125 kg and he’d told me to lose 5 – 10 kg, and I’d then weighed myself and found I was “only” 115 kg, so called it a day and rolled my eyes a little at the arbitrary way doctors just assumed everything bad that happened to anyone was because they’re fat, but whatever … also I was a little annoyed that I’d been given an app kind of thing to get my weight under control, when I knew that wouldn’t work and would only make me miserable and stressed, and I was a 47-year-old man and would lose weight without help if that was what I decided to do). My operation was set for sometime in April 2026. I started making arrangements at work, as far as I could without any actual fixed dates or information.

Not to spoil, but here is a view from my hospital room window, just to break up the wall of text and keep things vaguely interesting. Look at that rain (which was actually snow for a bit, because this is Finland in late spring).

As the day approached, I had a check-in with the nurse who said we’re all good, operation on the 22nd. Great, I thought, and told work. They began to make arrangements for a big up-coming project kick-off. Then, that same afternoon, the health centre called me and said nope, it’s all off, your blood pressure and other tests are a huge mess and there’s no way. Put the operation out of your mind, it’s not happening until you get squared away.

So I sighed and told work about this, and thus they decided we would kick off in April anyway, since I was not going to be away recuperating from an operation but would just be getting myself “squared away” in that time. No problem, although definitely annoying because I still had the fucking hernia. That was the only thing actually bothering me – otherwise I felt in perfect health and only had the doctors’ word that anything was wrong.

I could philosophise a little at this point, about how this is the way a whole bunch of anti-vaxxers and other “natural medicine” and “science sceptics” go down the garden path. They feel one way, the doctors tell them a bunch of stuff they don’t want to hear and otherwise flip-flop on things a lot, and they get frustrated and opt for the “common sense” solution. I’m smart and arrogant enough to think I know my own body better than a bunch of blood tests and measurements and doctors who’ve never met me before can say … and yet, I don’t fall off the far end of that plank and decide to ignore them and do whatever YouTube says I should. I listened to the doctors, because they have fucking learned this shit.

For a while, then, I upped my blood pressure medicine and lost more weight. I did this by a revolutionary process I have developed and intend to patent. I call it “eating less”.

Glib but true. And of course it only works as long as I am motivated. And (in accordance with my triangle of keeping my shit together) my motivation is utterly and inextricably linked to writing. When I don’t write, I get snacky. I get hungry. And I eat, big mounds of lunch and dinner and bowls of snacks and assorted fast food, and it might cheer me up briefly but it doesn’t actually stop me from being hungry.

So, with the endless support of Mrs. Hatboy and Wump and Toop, I made writing way more of a necessity in my daily life than I have up to this point. I know it seems like I complain about this a ton (especially to those of you who already heard most of this story), but what I mostly do is complain and then even when I get ample time to write, I have frazzled myself out with being unhappy about not writing right now, so then I fail to write when the time comes, and then I have a burger and fries. Now, I put on my headphones (a kind gift from Mr. Itkobloom of Region Free), open the google doc on my phone, and just write whenever. And it seems to be working. I don’t think I’m neglecting my family any more than I was before – I’m actually spending less time at my computer, since I only need to be there for a) work and b) checking my files for story details I can’t remember off the top of my head. But whatever. My blood pressure is down to about 125/70 and I’m down another 10 kg to about 105 kg, and intend to keep going until the doctors shut the fuck up about it. I’m not holding my breath, because they apparently say it to everyone no matter how skinny they are. But nevertheless, that’s the plan.

Right, so with that put aside, what happened next? Well, I had more tests and then I got a call from my doctor again. This was after the whole project thingy had been set in motion at work (I have Views on the work-life balance issue, but it’s somewhat relevant to this story which is why I seem way more invested than usual). The doctor said everything is looking great, no reason I can’t have my operation on the 22nd after all, who said I couldn’t? I sighed, and told work the good news – I was going to be away, probably for at least a week, right when everything was happening.

But oh well. I went in for my operation, and it was all good. I was back up on my feet that evening, and discharged from hospital the next day. Which was good, because hospitals are where people go to fucking die. You know, unless they walk out. Which most of the time they do. But it’s still draining.

Alive!

This was where the fun started.

On the 24th, I had a low grade fever and so we hiked out to the emergency room and sat there for about four hours while various walking wounded and homeless derelicts rambled and raved around us. It was delightful. All I can say is doctors and nurses are built different and they should be better-funded. Anyway, they said I had no other real symptoms and do go home. So Mrs. Hatboy and I went home.

The next day, my front-butt was black and grey with full-blown necrosis. Back to the hospital, and they gave me a CT scan and immediately booked me in and prepped me for surgery again. I think it happened on the 26th, but I have so many different entries and tests in my calendar now it’s impossible to say (it may have been operation on the 22nd, home then emergency room and home on the 23rd, intestines dying and operation on the 24th…). The hernia mesh had come into contact with my intestine and was preventing full blood flow, which had killed my front-butt.

They sent the robot back in (fun fact: the robot’s nickname was Da Vinci), took out the mesh, then cut off the necrotic intestine and gave me a new front-butt. This time they kept me for a whole day and night longer (I was back in the same recovery ward I’d been in the first time, with a lot of the same people, some of whom were there with complications of their own after being sent home too soon), and then sent me home again. So far, I am still operational.

Yum.

I had yet one more visit to the emergency room another day later (this was Vappu, May 1st, or at least Vappu Eve April 30th) when I presented a very mild fever (Mrs. Hatboy was being abundantly cautious, and I appreciate it), but I was once again sent home. This time since it was 3am and Mrs. Hatboy was looking after the kids, I took a taxi home with a mad fucking former-Yugoslavian driver, who regaled me with stories of his battling alongside the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and eating dogs in – I want to say Albania. Anyway that was weird. It made a change from Mr. Itkobloom picking me up from the hospital, which he did on two occasions and helped me buy meds as well, since the geniuses at the emergency room had told me to leave my wallet with Mrs. Hatboy for absolutely no fucking reason … anyway I greatly appreciate his tireless help, as fun as my taxi driver buddy was.

Yum.

Now I am home, I am more or less fully-recovered, and my only problem is the defective-arse new front-butt they’ve given me is so deep-sunk in my gut I cannot actually sit in a normal chair and do normal things without the bag peeling off and shitting all over me. Which is fucking awesome because they never gave me more sick leave after my first surgery was a failure, so I go back to work on Monday.

How are you guys all going?

I’m not actually going back to writing a post a day, but I’m kind of on a bit of a roll right now (the weekend’s going to be a bit full though, so I’m getting my kicks where I can).

So I ended up writing a bit of meta-info and added a couple more drawings, and I thought what the Hell. I’ll put them on the aki’Pedia. I have to start filling that out with the Phase 3 stuff eventually, right? I know I haven’t finished writing in the Phase 1 and Phase 2 stuff, shut up. I also know I haven’t updated the Phases model with the right book titles or covers yet, shut up.

Malaks: Now on the aki’Pedia!

Enjoy! I repeat, it’s got pictures! I also self-rabbit-holed and ended up writing a little page about Elves as well, since that will help connect this phase to the wider Phase 1 and Phase 2 urverse.

No it won’t. But shut up!

Look at what a handsome boy he is!

Have I lost the ability to write proper blog post titles? Did I ever have the ability to write them? Whatever. Screw it, we’re doing this.

So, as of today I have finished chapter 3 (of 9) of The Faere Named Dredna and that brings my totals to:

Chapter 1: 75 pages, 38,455 words.

Chapter 2: 19 pages, 9,319 words.

Chapter 3: 63 pages, 29,483 words.

Whole book: 157 pages, 77,257

So it’s already a decent-sized book. But for reference, The Girl Named Hell was 675 pages, 229,174 words (the page numbers are different in the final copy though so that’s not really relevant). I suspect this second book will be smaller, but who knows?

Also, yes those chapters are very uneven! I’m writing an A plot and a B plot, and the B plot (while fun) is also considerably thinner than the A plot. That’s kind of by design, because I feel like too much of the B plot will wear the readers down, but still. It’s a big difference, and the even-numbered chapters are more by way of a bit of light relief in between the heavy stuff. Maybe that will change as we go. I don’t know what I’m going to have in chapter 4 (of 9) exactly, but if I fit in all the things I’ve scribbled in my notes it might end up being a respectable size.

But so far, with chapter 1 (of 9) and chapter 3 (of 9) being essentially short-novel length and chapter 2 (of 9) being a big short story at best, I don’t know. The average chapter length based on the current three is ~25,752 words, and if the remaining six chapters are around the same average then we will end up with a total of 180,266-and-one-third words for the whole book. Still big, but not as big as book one. And also, I’m not sure I’ll stick to those averages. The Girl Named Hell had a big opening chapter and then smaller ones. Let’s see.

Have I also lost the ability to do metrics?

No, I say!

No! For here are the metrics for book two, and book one for comparison! Chapters 4 (of 9) through 9 (of 9) are projections based on the average so far so I guess that will shift. And book one had a pretty wild weight distribution on the chapters too, and visible A plot and B plot differential. So I guess we’ll see. That chapter 2 (of 9) is a bit of a tiddler though.

Am I only doing this so I can eventually say “I’ve just finished chapter 7 (of 9)” and then post a picture of Jeri Ryan from Star Trek: Voyager?

No! See? I can do that whenever I like.

The pictures of Jeri Ryan from Star Trek: Voyager will continue until morale improves. I’m pretty sure morale has already improved at least among certain Hatstander demographics, but whatever.

So. Perfect, click Publish.

Let’s have a little check-in, because I thought my month was going to go differently. For a start, I thought it would be over already but apparently there is another week to go until pay day. Which is ridiculous, because February was two and a half weeks long and March has already been going on for approximately seven years.

Well, anyway. What’s new?

Nothing much. I’ve been in a waiting line for a non-life-threatening surgery (those of you who have read my first book will be delighted to hear it’s just more of the same from my absolute mad lad of a large intestine) for the better part of a year now, and was scheduled to go under the knife in April. This has now been thrown into doubt in the most Finnish Healthcare possible way, by them telling me all about it and then allowing me almost an entire day to inform my employers and customers and sort out my home schedule, then calling me back and saying “lol, no, that was a lie, we’re probably not going to do anything until you get your blood pressure and other shit sorted.”

Please note the probably there, it’s important. Never at any point is a Finnish citizen or resident to be given actual concrete information. Not because they would then have grounds to sue if that information was then overturned, but just because we’re fucking into that shit I guess.

So anyway, that’s annoying. But what can you do? Being mad makes my blood pressure higher, so.

Otherwise things are mostly good. Mrs. Hatboy is doing great in her new career as a tour guide, and Wump and Toop are doing well in school despite it being an ulcer-inducing stressful nightmare even on good days. They’re smart kids and they’ll get through it. And my own work is going nicely, which is great because holy shit, is the unemployment bad right now. And while I may not be at risk of deportation like some of my friends (thanks, right-wing fucktards in charge!), it’s just another wonderful little spike of low-key stress that we all love. Maybe I should try yoga.

I’m kidding, of course. Everything is fine as long as I get to write, and right now I am definitely getting to write!

The Cursèd Playground apparently remains my most popular book although it has gotten zero (0) reviews, and in fact my Amazon pages have been an absolute wasteland lately. Don’t care, got an amazing new set of headphones from my boy Joonatan (check out his reviews at Region Free, he’s a fucking legend) and they are perfect for sitting and writing. I’m using a google doc these days which is good for writing on phone and PC without a lot of emailing back and forth of Word docs, too.

I have finished writing book one of The War of Mortal Aggression, entitled The Girl Named Hell. Editing is mostly done too, and I am just adding some drawings for the front few pages and considering the creation of a few maps that will help the reader to get their bearings in this insane high-fantasy world.

Here is a rough sketch, just to let you know where I’m at. These are the three “varieties” of Humans in The War of Mortal Aggression series. I am once again working with evolutionary-level timelines and even my Humans are complicated enough to need a drawing, and they are one of fourteen species in this thing. I think it is fair to say that I have in fact decided to get worse.

Book two, entitled The Faere Named Dredna, is also underway and I am just finishing off chapter 3 (of 9). It’s a fucking doozy if I do say so myself. Then I have the third book still to write, and I am thinking I will finish all three before publishing the trilogy. I don’t know if that will happen this year or next year, because I dearly love this story and I am taking my time with it. Also, so far they’re shaping up to be real chonkers. Like I said though, I am using a google doc system now and each chapter is a separate doc, so I don’t have an easy way to track my word counts and total progress (beyond this “chapter 3 [of 9]” kind of shit). I haven’t really looked into it.

I also have covers for book one and book two! I may share them later. My cover artist is very eager and has pushed me into getting covers long before I usually think about them. She’ll probably start nudging me about book three soon, but I need to recover some financial sanity first. A bunch of trees being professionally felled in our yard, and a new clutch and bearing for the car, has eradicated most of my savings for the moment – and the world remains batshit insane.

You said it, Wade.

Got a ton going on lately and the coming week is going to be a lot, but I had a bit of time this morning and since I won’t have time to actually write, I figured what the heck. Why not throw up a sketch I thought up last night?

This is a rough MS Paint scribble of some comparative depths of different structures in my current book’s world. Just to show how they stack up against each other.

I didn’t put actual measurements yet, might do a proper version of this later, but just out of interest here are some key bits for you to enjoy. A lot of this doesn’t really make it into the story itself – you know, that’s why they call it worldbuilding and not plot, I guess. But you never know.

I’m not sure if the picture will be legible, it’s pretty large so if you can open it full-size it should be readable at least.

Anyway, just a bit of fun. Hoping to get some more work done this evening but it’s doubtful.

This month I decided to take part in a little indie book promotion, which saw me donating one of my many book reviews to the cause of boosting the visibility of some deserving authors. The promo is called A Month of Rain and Reads, because it’s rainy and chilly up in the northern hemisphere at least, so it’s time to curl up with a good book.

Anyway, today was my turn to give an interview! I’m also taking part in an e-book give-away but I am not sure what that’s going to look like yet. As my social media presence is very limited these days, I am happy to show up wherever I’m invited.

AMoRaR Interview – Andrew Hindle

Regulars to this blog will be shocked – shocked! – to hear I waffle on at considerable length during this ostensibly short and punchy interview. But I appreciated being included and urge you to check out some of the recommendations that are coming up as a result of this promo.

Some of the other authors being interviewed or having their books reviewed are esteemed peers of mine from the SPSFC and elsewhere. They are all most excellent.

So here’s a thing.

The year was 2015. Mrs. Hatboy and I were in Australia on holiday with Wump and Toop (they were … I want to say five and one at the time?). On this particular day, though, the kids were off with the grandparents, and it was just me and Mrs. Hatboy and a friend of ours at the old Hatboy family beach house.

Our friend was reading an article, or relating some kind of long-winded anecdote to us but I wasn’t really paying attention. I think I already knew the conclusion to the story, and I was distracted by this amazing moth that I’d spotted in the living room. It was kind of bee-formed, but even furrier and with more regular moth-wings and moth-antennae. It was striped black and purple and I’d never seen anything like it before. Oh yeah and it was about the length of my hand, which is big even by Australian standards.

Of course, this being Australia I didn’t need the bee-shape or the striped patterning to tell me it was probably dangerous, so I kept my distance as I checked it out and tried to get a picture of it. I had to interrupt my friend’s monologue to tell them and Mrs. Hatboy that this was some weird shit and they should check it out. Our friend, incidentally, was also just visiting Australia so I wouldn’t have expected her to know what type of moth it was either.

Anyway, the moth flapped around the room, pretty aimlessly, and I was trying to figure out a way of getting it back outside without being stung or bitten or having my skin assaulted by venomous burning fur-fibres (that’s a thing. Australia.). At one point I lost track of it, but then it came back. I thought I’d misjudged its size at first, because it seemed to be barely the size of a dust-mote – but then the mote settled on the wall and the moth backed out into full size again as though it was emerging end-first from a hole in the wall. Also not impossible, since all kinds of creepy crawlies can make nests inside walls. Still, it was kind of weird the way it was behaving.

I kept following it and it ended up at the windows and the glass front doors leading out onto our beach house’s front verandah. I opened the windows and door for it and it looked at me – I always liked to think it was surprise and gratitude – before flying out into the yard. Then, when it didn’t seem like it was going to fly away, I stepped out onto the verandah to watch it some more. There was a girl, maybe five or six years old, standing in our yard. Like some kind of weird fae-folk child, she was just standing there like she’d been the moth all along, and was now showing her true form. Had I heard voices while the moth was flying around our beach house? I don’t know. Probably not. But she was speaking, asking if I knew where she was, if I was going to go with her.

I tried to talk to her, find out where she had come from or what her name was, but she seemed too young or confused to have a coherent conversation with. That was when I was reminded of something, and I looked it up on my phone. Now, my phone wasn’t particularly great back in 2015 (was I still on Mopho Cake I or II? A very early smartphone anyway, maybe one I’d received from No*ia back in the day … wait, I can actually track this through the blog! I had given up Mopho Cake II in 2014, and welcomed Mopho Cake III [ironically with an autofill poem that Mr. dreameling suggested in the comments might have had A.I. involved, although he was talking about actual A.I., because we knew the difference between autofill and artificial intelligence back then] the same year, before Mopho Cake III finally met its end by BRKN archery firing squad in 2017 … but I digress), but … what was I saying? Right, my phone wasn’t that great so it took some digging for the article but I eventually found it.

So these twin girls, Poli and Poni Dwyer, had disappeared while swimming in an old quarry. And no, it hadn’t been a shark or a crocodile. There were some pictures of them that didn’t look very much like the girl out in our front yard, but there was also a grainy low-res video of the two of them at the swimming hole, splashing around and laughing. That one did look like the girl in the yard.

They’d disappeared six years previously, in 2009.

I told Mrs. Hatboy about the missing girls and when they had gone missing, and she was appropriately spooked out by it all. The creepy little girl in our yard, you see, was still the exact same age Poli and Poni had been when they’d disappeared.

I attempted to find the video again, just to confirm what I was seeing, but all I could find was a bunch of makeup-and-photoshop-enhanced Instagram pictures and a lot of mean comments about the missing girls and their parents being attention-seekers, followed by a strange ream of “A.I.” slop videos featuring an army troop sitting in front of a burned-out school bus with a battered blue robot as part of their unit.

It became clear to me that the three of us who’d actually seen the moth, and the girl in the yard, would be dismissed as hoaxers. The moth hadn’t looked real, after all. “Poli and Poni” was destined to go from a sad story of two missing girls to one of the first big fake mystery memes of the misinformation age. Enhanced and enabled with obvious “A.I.”, of course.

Anyway that was when I woke up this morning. The entire thing, including the tenth anniversary article with the exact title of this blog post, was in fact a dream.

So, I just finished reading The Elitist Supremacy, book 1 of The Elites and the Rogues series, by Niranjan. This one isn’t SPSFC related, although the author is a Friend of the Competition.

In short (*pause for laughter*), The Elitist Supremacy is a sci-fi espionage thriller with some nice interweaving of future tech and future history with human storylines. What does that mean? Well, in the distant future of 2936, people are still very much people. And having a bunch of new toys to play with doesn’t change that. It just changes the way the same old primitive dance is performed. It is nothing if not a story about the lengths people will go to in protection of those they love, whether that is a child, a partner, or … well, themselves.

Warning: There may be random spoilers throughout the rest of this review, mainly because I just don’t know how to discuss half of what happened here without spoiling something.

In 2241 an execution goes awry, and from that interesting opening we jump forward 695 years to find that humanity has gone interplanetary and is now ruled by “the State” (or “Cynfor”), and the “Elites” at its core. The Elites, led by the shadowy Cesar Thaxter, are immortals and practically indestructible, because of the thing we sort of saw happening in the prologue. It’s actually a pretty cool concept, there’s no shortage of them in this book. A lot of these immortals are sealed up in stasis prison, but the ruling class is basically above the law. And there is a Resistance, with more Elites (or “Rogues”, hence the name of the series) at its core.

This is the set-up, and a lot of the book is dedicated to establishing this in preparation for the rest of the series. The story in this book is a little bit all-over-the-place as a result, as we skip from group to group and planet to planet getting all our pieces in position. The Resistance is looking to find a safe base of operations out from under the all-seeing and all-knowing technocracy of the State, and there is a lot of manoeuvring to allow that to happen. Against this backdrop, the very human stories of love and trauma unfold quite nicely in their simplicity. Families torn apart and brought together, political and corporate intrigue, and some good old-fashioned technobabble and action sequences keep it all bubbling along nicely and give the world (worlds) good depth and texture.

Where I really had trouble was the characters.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel like the two main guys – Alexander Selwood and (by the end) Nolan Patrick – are compelling and I knew where they stood and who they were. They have backstories that demand exploration, as one would expect from (at least in Alexander’s case) immortals whose origins (or family origins, in Nolan’s case) are scattered through almost seven hundred years of future history, but they were put together well enough to make me want to explore that.

Other than those two, there was one character I was expecting to be used more. There’s this kid, Paige, with a little bit of a neurodivergent superpower that enables her to tell when someone is good or bad. That was a really interesting hook and made me remember the character … but then she appeared like one time after her intro in chapters 5 to 7, to deliver a little exposition about aliens which was the only time that was mentioned, and that was it. And yeah, I have notes about that. But okay.

The rest of the characters and their relationships, motivations and interwoven stories are extremely convoluted and it’s not helped by a lot of them having what I felt were very generic names and (if even mentioned at all) appearances. And that a lot of them have different names and identities at different points in history, as one would expect from shadowy immortals. This is at once an excellent part of the story, and a frustratingly confusing element. Sometimes it is treated as a plot revelation (to reader and characters alike), and at other times it is hard to tell if it has just appeared that way because that’s how the story is structured.

I’m just going to list a bunch of characters and the relationships I think I figured out, and put it in spoilertext in case you don’t want to know.

Marvin Griffel (2241) is Lucas Hendricks, the man who invented the immortality drug in the first place and father of Niek.Gerald Lane (2241) a hacker, is Alexander Selwood, the dude being executed at the start and is now looking after Marvin’s / Lucas’s kid Niek.Mason Davis (old world, former head of Elites) is John Patrick, Nolan’s father. Are the children of Elites also Elites? I am not sure if that was ever covered, but Niek and Nolan would qualify.Cesar Thaxter is the big bad, one of the initial Elites who started the whole thing and now runs the State. Alexander / Marvin went to him and told him about the immortality drug back in the old world.Shayla Lambert is kind of Alexander’s girlfriend for a minute there but she’s not in it long.David Flett, his (sick) wife Ellen, and their daughter Paige – the one I thought was going to be more of a thing in the story. Flett might have more to do but I was kind of at a loss about him.Kaylee Ashton is hired as a tutor for Paige. Also not really a thing. Colin Blythe is her uncle but so what? Her parents had died and she’d stolen come money from her uncle so she could get away. May also end up being more of a thing later.Carmine? No, that’s just Sergio’s car.George Savin is a rising star reporter / journalist who sniffs around at the main plot for the duration of the book, and has a thing with Alexander / Marvin late in the story.Nolan Patrick is Alexander’s assistant, he has a twin brother Dylan (a painter) and a younger sister Ashley, their dad is Mason / John, their mother Aria.Raul Beltram is also a character. His fiancé Isabel Duran is described physically (a lot of the female characters are, the males not so much for some reason) but we don’t get much insight into their story.Niek Hendricks – now Niek, I also liked. He didn’t have a huge role either but his story – as son of one character (Marvin / Lucas) required to live as ward to another character (first Ruben “uncle Ruben” Dekker, but he was a creep and Niek ended up with Alexander / Marvin) and conflicted over his place in things and with political and legal savvy beyond his years – was an interesting one. My dumb arse at least understood it.Elliott Houghton is legal counsel for McManus Corp – not really important.Sergio Martinez (67) and his assistant Kaya Richards. Sergio dies. He turns out to be Felipe Diaz, the son of Pablo Diaz, an “executed traitor” of the past … now, as to whether Pablo was an Elite and whether this means elderly and infirm Sergio (who, as stated, later dies) is evidence that Elites’ offspring don’t inherit immortality, I can’t say. I also didn’t really follow the death and whether it was actually meant to be a murder mystery or part of the plot.Then there’s Zain Baako, Amir Rahal (characterised as the son Sergio never had), Ania (head of tech security), Eva Costas (Resistance), Davu and Niki (Resistance?), the Ansari brothers Ibrahim and Hassan (Elite Defenders?) Valeria Chernova (head of Enforcers, Investigators and Defenders, also an Elite), Saito? Toshi? His dead wife Misaki, because of Mason / John?…

Dear God. So, anyway, that’s a lot, is what I’m saying. And there should maybe be some better way of contextualising it all. If not a dramatis personae, or some more memorable names or character quirks or descriptions, I don’t know. All I know is I remembered Alexander because he was the main character, and Nolan because he had interesting characteristics and was connected to the main story, and Paige and Niek because they had stuff going on, and all the rest were kind of a blur.

I liked the future history as laid out, and the technological advances we get to see. The teleportation tech, stasis tech, the A.I.s and the Nishati dimension (which was kind of related to the teleportation, teleportation had existed before but since Nishati was discovered teleportation had improved), Zhidium and DNA tracking, teleportation blockers and the various weapons they’d come up with to battle Elites … it was all very cool, and I think it should have been forefronted more. Especially as the Elites (I am using this as a shorthand for all the assorted immortal characters) had a first-hand connection to a lot of those developments and discoveries. There’s so much potential to explore there!

Oh yeah, and speaking of the A.I. assistants (the Sentients), they all have very normal names and are sometimes easy to confuse with people in the way they are referred to and talked about – again, a potentially cool idea that risked being frustrating and confusing at times. April, Miley, Quinn, June, I think Martin might also be one but it’s only mentioned once in the first chapter … Niek says he thought all Sentients were named April at one point. And the Sentients have bots, and manage teleportation and other conveniences. There’s a lot to unpack there too.

The setting is also endlessly fascinating, with interplanetary civilisation apparently made possible by teleportation but not really fully info-dumped in a way probably only I would have wanted to see. There’s Ignis, a hot and inhospitable planet with habitats … we don’t get a really good idea of what most of these worlds are like and how the systems are set up, is it a local group of systems or spread across the galaxy? Multiple galaxies? Like I say, farther systems and aliens are mentioned one time and that’s it. The Nishati dimension is used for the transportation of stuff, but the characters are planning some use of the technology that could mess Ignis up, but also aid in their transport of habitat materials and water or whatever to make the planet profitable … it’s difficult to track. There are other planets mentioned as well. Ytres, Nizhoni, Aeras, Hafi, Prith … and Earth is mentioned once in passing, as the origin world but there isn’t any clue as to whether it is now gone or where these all relate to each other.

Our setup ends on a cliffhanger as Thaxter calls Nolan and they start to make a deal about Nolan’s father. I’ve gone on way too long here, let’s take a look at the meters real quick.

Sex-o-meter

George and Alexander have one tasteful off-screen doink and that’s about it. Aside from that, and a lot of flirting and mooning and amusingly awkward don’t-they-realise-I’m-gay discomfort from Nolan, this is a pretty tame one.

I’m not sorry.

One mutually bristly yet warmly comforting cologne-scented firm-bicep’d man-kiss out of a possible five for The Elitist Supremacy.

Gore-o-meter

No gore to speak of. The spikes are a bit nasty (especially in the final scenes), the Elites are immortal so they can take a bit of damage but we don’t see much of it, and all in all I’m giving this one a mere half a flesh-gobbet out of a possible five.

WTF-o-meter

There is some good old-fashioned espionage-mystery in here, and the fuzzy line between “past” (still the future, for us) and “present” (distant future) is fascinating and I hope it’s further explored in the rest of the trilogy. And the Nishati dimension and of course the aliens are great WTF fodder. There’s just not enough of it to feed a growing boy, that’s all. A “concept of WTF as a kind of food stuffed into a nose-bag for readers to chew on” out of a possible “aliens walk into an exposition scene in a secret room in Nishati and say ‘what the fuck are you upright apes doing in our cloud storage’ in alien at the expositioning characters” for this one, if you follow my convoluted grammatical logic. And if you don’t, tough.

My Final Verdict

I didn’t spot a character named Garth in here. But I had a good time reading it and it left me thinking about a lot of stuff, so even if the character tangle left me feeling dumb, I came away with a positive vibe. Give it a try, maybe! Three stars, I say.