Happy New Year.Since 2011, I've tried to publish at least one book a year. In 2012 I managed two, but in 2015 didn't manage to produce any. 

There's a few reasons for this. Over the last couple of years I've started to understand how other people successfully manage their writing. Those who do best, get ahead and in part, my efforts in 2015 have been about trying to do that. 


I have a number of ongoing projects. An application for a sequel to Elite: Lave Revolution was submitted on the 4th of January 2016 to Frontier Developments and I already have some writing done on it. Chaos Reborn's official fiction has expanded significantly and with ten episodic short stories included in the game ( The Journal of the Gifted One ), plus ten more nearly finished (Journal of the Singing City) along with (possibly) a trilogy of books now planned (The first is eight thousand words from being done), there's a lot to take up my time.

In addition to this I have The Magic of Wisimir, book four in my ebook series of six, which is 20-25% complete. I've also done a complete rewrite of my urban fantasy/mythology novel - The Forever Man, which I have (literally) just completed. This is set in the town of Durrington, which features in some of the short stories I published in A Bag of Bedtime Tales (2011).

I also have The Last Tank Commander, a short story accepted for an anthology being published by Newcon Press this year. Really looking forward to working with Ian Whates and the other writers on this. I have tremendous respect for the folks I know who are involved in the project, but more announcements on that'll come from the publisher.  

I've certainly not forgotten my original Kickstarter backers too. I'm very aware of the delays on the two outstanding project items (Audio Drama and Film) and plan to get things sorted with those as soon as I can. They'll be extra things too. My plan with Kickstarter has always been to over deliver if I can. 

On top of these things I have my Ph. D. which I'm hoping to finish this year and I've now got a batch of short stories in the bank again, which is really helpful when opportunities arise. 
Fantasy Footsteps The Elite Dangerous project has allowed me the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the late Robert Holdstock, who wrote the first piece of official fiction for the original game - a novella called The Dark Wheel . 
For Elite fans who haven't read Holdstock's other work, its a treat. The Dark Wheel was an early piece from him and responded to a direct commission, whilst it holds a reverential place amidst computer game fiction for fans and stands up really well, its not his best piece by quite a stretch. If you're a lifelong Elite fan like me and haven't read his other work, you're missing out.


Both Mythago Wood and The Ragthorn are award winning stories from Robert Holdstock and these give a much better account of his genius. Both are predominantly first personal journals, but there's a variety of address and lots of very clever weaving of invented myth into real history.  The Times described him as 'Britain's best fantasist' and I think that's pretty accurate, depending on how you define the term. He won numerous awards for both and for Mythago Wood 's sequel Lavondyss .

What becomes immediately apparent from reading Holdstock is his understanding of myth and how his invented myths entice the reader's interest. Great fantasy writers get that you don't try to explain everything, instead you leave room for your readers to have their own ideas. Whilst the majority of the mythic elements from the original Elite (Generation ships, dredgers, etc.), The Dark Wheel played its part in bringing the universe to life and sowing the seeds of mystery over the origin of the Thargoids. 

This tradition has continued in Elite Dangerous with the unidentified artefacts and I hope to play my part in helping with the continuing story of Doctor Hans Walden.

The Forever Man, which I mentioned earlier, is a book I first finished writing in 2009 was supposed to be my début novel. I thought it took fantasy and modern fiction into a new direction. I'm older and wiser now and see the draft for what it was - fundamentally flawed. However, six years of writing other stories and reading as much as I can, I've been back to it and redrafted it. At the time it was influenced by Holdstock's later work and now I see more of that in the new version. Elite; Lave Revolution helped immensely with this as the story structure has become much better. I've learned more about what I'm doing and I think the new book reflects this. It'll be off to a list of literary agents next and we'll see what happens. 

The premise of Holdstock's Mythago Wood and its sequels (there are seven books in the series) is fascinating - characters manifesting out of the imaginations of others, a wood that acts as a labyrinth and doorway to the past, This kind of construction offers a multitude of possibilities and explanations, encouraging the reader to speculate and dream. The Forever Man has some similar (but different) ideas. By keeping the perspective close and a similar journey of wonder and discovery, we can relate to the characters and linger on the possibilities, long after the book is back on the shelf.

This is why the techniques of fantasy are such a good fit to world built games and fiction. Many SF writers also writer fantasy and the use of the best of both genres brings us the memorable fiction we enjoy. Things like Doctor Who, Star Wars, etc have projected scope as well as rationalised and explained scope. It is the projected (through the use of myth) that comes from reader speculation. 

You can find an example of my produced lore for Chaos Reborn here.

Its not just about invoking speculation though, it can also be about the way in which a writer can use the different genre styles. A good example of this which I read in 2015, is Adrian Tchiakovsky's Children of Time . My review for this will be available on Concatenation from the 15th of January. Adrian switched to science fiction after a long time writing fantasy, but he is very meticulous in what he does. I remember him expressing some nerves about making the change, but he really needed have worried. The resulting book is excellent and made all the more memorable by the way he incorporates the mythic and fantastic qualities he's used to in writing fantasy in a carefully researched science fiction circumstance. I'm not sure a cross over going the other way would have been as successful in its execution. 


You can also see some clever use of style switching to period and character in Gavin Smith's Age of Scorpio sequel - A Quantum Mythology . Gavin doesn't call this writing fantasy (shhh don't tell him), but its certainly wearing some of the same clothes. My review of this book is on Concatenation here.

Gavin's gone on to embrace unashamed fantasy in his short story contribution to the Newcon press Legends II anthology. My review is here.

For me, as primarily a fantasy writer who switched to SF for Elite Dangerous, it is this kind of writing that I want to be known for, the imaginative and wonder, rather than the specific and technical. I'm not as strong on the latter anyway, so that makes sense. 

Of course, its perfectly acceptable for writers to stick to SF and do really well, but lore craft and world building needs that invoking imagination quality otherwise you end up with something sterile. When you involve story, worldbuilding isn't really about simulation as some people think. Yes, sometimes having the actual answers to how things work is important, but building a world is about understanding the experience people will have when they go through it. That journey will be finite and subjective and might be through a multitude of mediums or just one. The ability to attain answers needs to reflect this, otherwise it isn't conforming to the cathartic intention, its just reading an different type of encyclopaedia.

In other words, sometimes the readers who want all the answers don't really want all the answers, because that means they've reached the end of the road and the macguffin is really a macguffin all along. 

I'm not sure someone versed only in science fiction would really do the Elite universe lore justice, particularly if they don't get how really, the things we call genres are actually modes of writing and didn't get the journey concept above. The more adaptable you can be, the more interesting your work becomes and the more nuanced you can make the projected impression of a world. That goes for flash fiction, short stories, novellas, novels, etc. Michael Brookes' experience of writing across the three genres of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror as well as his flash fiction probably helped us be on the same page for much of that process back in 2013.


I've many tabletop books of source material from a variety of fictions. Most notably, I picked up a new copy of the World of the Dark Crystal when the open competition for new fiction was launched in 2014. On re-reading it, I found the book difficult. Yes, it contained lots of lovely information about the Dark Crystal world (hence the title), but it wasn't a reference book, written to guide me and others in writing things, it was a presentation of the culture, designed to be read and admired. I can see how watchers of the film and readers of the fiction would love it as a supplement to that experience.

Of course, this is just one example. There are countless coffee table books of the same type available that cater to our need to understand more about the myths we've grown to care about.

The histories for Elite Dangerous that I (and others) wrote were written as primers for writers, but could be adapted to those kind of documents, but that's for Frontier Developments to decide on. It would be counter intuitive if they didn't intrigue the reader to explore for things in game.  

Next up, I need to finish the last couple of Singing City stories and the draft of the first Chaos Reborn novel. I'll post up more on those and other projects when I'm done.