Book #8 of The Last Kingdom series, The Empty Throne returns to form after what I felt was a bit of a mid-series lull in The Pagan Lord, the previous installment.
This book started with a point-of-view section of Uhtred, the younger, the son of the Uhtred who carries the series to this point. I really enjoyed this glimpse into the mind of the young man who is trying to follow in his father’s footsteps as a warrior and a future lord.
Uhtred, the elder is older now, wounded, but wiser. Some of the bitterness of the previous story has fallen away, and Uhtred is starting to truly recognize his own limitations. In one battle sequence, Uhtred recognizes to himself, and the reader, that in his younger years he would have been one of the fierce young warriors in the fray of the fighting, but he stays back to be a leadership presence for his, knowing that his wound would make him a liability in the thick of the fighting.
This story focused quite a lot on Uhtred’s relationship with his children, Uhtred and Stiorra, and Aethelstan, the (non-)bastard son of Edward. While Uhtred’s regard for Aethelstan as an adopted son has become clear over the last few stories, his mentorship of whom he believes is a future king is on full display here.
This shift in tone is greatly welcome for a character whose brash decision-making was becoming tiresome, for the other characters, and for the reader. Uhtred is still confident, daring, and courageous, but he seems to have truly come into lordship not just as a warrior, but as a leader, and that transformation continues to be fascinating.
I’m also quite intrigued by the introduction of Sigtryggr. His character on The Last Kingdom TV series was a frightening and admirable, and I look forward to seeing how his character, and the Norse threat overall, develop going forward.
I was never out on this series, but I took a break after the last book. Now, I’m fully back in.
Another wonderful modern fairytale by Neil Gaiman. At this point, I have no excuse whatsoever for not poring through every single story that Gaiman has ever written, because each story feels impactful and poignant.
I listened to the full-cast production of The Graveyard Book on Audible. I’m used to Gaiman narrating his own stories and being a fantastic storyteller. The full-cast production of The Graveyard Book is stellar; each voice actor brings nuance and feeling to their character(s), and the voicing brings real life to the scenes in a way I normally do not expect from audiobooks.
This story follows a boy who was raised in a graveyard after his family were murdered when he was a toddler, and eventually learns how to survive in the world outside. The boy, Bod, short for Nobody Owens, also must ultimately learn about the man who killed his family.
Gaiman writes primarily from the boy’s perspective, and Bod’s narrative voice grows naturally as he ages, a credit to Gaiman’s writing, and the voice actor’s work. Bod develops a close if curious relationship with his guardian, a not-quite-human-being named Silas who has an uncanny ability to fade into the shadows. Silas does not express the usual paternal emotions for his charge, but throughout the book, the emotional bond Bod has with Silas, and the other residents of his graveyard, are unshakable.
Yet again, Gaiman masterfully inserts pieces of folklore into his story to make it feel supernatural and mysterious and familiar all at once.
This is the third Neil Gaiman story I’ve read, and he is quickly bounding to the top of my favorite authors list. I cannot rave about this story enough, so I’ll stop myself before this gets out of hand.
Audible recently offered The Wrong One as part of some kind of sale. I’ll always give free books a shot, and I could definitely not say no to a novella by Dervla McTiernan.
I’ve read the first couple installments of McTiernan’s more well-known Cormac Reilly series, following a Dublin-born detective trying to figure out his career in Galway as he solves often strange cases.
McTiernan’s crime stories always have a slow burning build, usually following multiple characters, until the threads twist into an intense third act. It may sound formulaic, but the characters are always well-developed, and the twists are enough to put a reader off-kilter.
So, I went into The Wrong One expecting to be hooked from the start. Admittedly, I was not. The Wrong One uses two voice actors to narrate the respective point-of-view narrators in the story, and I was not a fan of the first narrator. I’ll go into a little more detail below, in a section marked for spoilers.
This first narrator had an odd inflection to his voice that irked me. The second narrator was good, fitting for a teenaged boy who thinks he knows everything.
Despite my issues with one of the narrators (and the character they were playing), the story’s tension ramped up rapidly with a looming realization and twist that only McTiernan can deliver with such fluidity and emotional weight. I ended up enjoying this story quite a lot. Now I just want to go read more Cormac Reilly stories.
Steve D
Spoiler section with some further thoughts…
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Alright, so I didn’t like the first narrator, playing Simon, had an inflection that made him sound emotionally vacant and like a know-it-all from the start, making him virtually unlikable. Then, as the story progressed, it becomes clear that Simon is more than full of himself — even delusional — about his advances towards Clara and her obvious (to everyone but him) complete disinterest in him. Then, his pathetic delusions became overbearing, then possessive, then manipulative, and then, holy shit it was him the whole time! Great twist. I’m telling myself that the strange voice-acting of the character was completely intentional to throw the reader off-balance from the start. Totally worked.
The shortest month of the year is through, and I half-heartedly wish I had a few more days. It’s been a good month overall, I just had a lull in the middle.
But an ending is also a beginning, and I’m pleased that a new month is starting.
Last Month’s Goals
Complete my first round of revisions on Uprooted, The Herb Witch Tales #1.
Read three books.
Exercise at least three times a week.
Complete first round of revisions on Uprooted?
No. I’ve gotten about halfway through my draft. This is the primary lull I mentioned above. I just didn’t sit down enough nights to read through my story. Sometimes revisions, just like writing, is about number of sessions as much as productivity per session.
The good news is that halfway through, I like this story. The pacing is a little disorienting at first, which is intentional, and I can feel it slowing down into its middle rhythm. This first revision pass-through is about the overall flow, so feeling through those ebbs and flows is a good sign of how readers might engage with the story.
This revision process is also highlighting likely next steps for me. I think I want to complete this read-through of Uprooted, focused on overall flow and only obvious edits, and then read through again to trace scene placement and length.
Examining the scene placement and length per scene will help me determine whether particular scenes are unbalanced against others, or where natural breaks in the narrative occur. I wrote this story into ten chapters, but do the chapter breaks make sense? Are they too long? Because this is a novella, I’m starting to think that I should have more numerous but shorter chapters to help make the story more digestible.
I just want to validate that idea with a second read-through.
Once I have a good handle on the overall narrative flow and the scene breakdown of Uprooted, I’ll switch gears and follow the same process for New Earth, allowing me to ensure that the two stories make sense together as well as independently.
Read three books?
No, but I read two and started a third. I also made more progress on A Memory of Light. I got stuck on a longer nonfiction book, Dawn of the Code War, which is a bit of an oral history of the FBI’s, and the US’s, initial foray into cyber attacks. Really interesting read, but not the type of thing I can power through in a weekend.
I’m currently reading a short thriller, The Wrong One, by Dervla McTiernan. I’ve read a few of her Cormac Reilly books, so I did not hesitate to pick up this short story on Audible.
Next, I’m looking for some fantasy / historical fiction. Might be going back to Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom series… I’m on book eight.
Exercise three times per week?
YES at least in the back half of the month. I finally bit the bullet and paid for a workout app program thing. I chose Asana Rebel, since they had a one-year subscription deal and I kept seeing their ads. (Your Instagram marketing campaign worked on me, Asana Rebel! Curse you!)
I started with their intro program and am moving onto full yoga sets. It’s not terribly difficult for me to find 10-15 minutes of exercise time in a day. 20-30 minute sessions will be tougher. I’m thinking I’ll intersperse their yoga sessions with resistance training and… dare I say it? Sprinting.
I’m not into running, although I’ve been told I’m built like a runner. I’m not interested in long-distance running, but sprinting to build leg strength sounds okay. I just need to figure out what that type of workout looks like.
Asana Rebel is nice, because they push notifications to you about a weekly goal — mine is three workouts per week — and quiz you on your mood and what types of exercises may help you in the moment. At the moment, I like the structure it provides. I just need to be disciplined in building on top of it, so that’s what March will be about.
Goals for March
Revisions for Uprooted, The Herb Witch Tales #1. I need to complete my first read-through focused on narrative flow and pacing.
Then I need to complete a second read-through to reverse engineer scene structure and chapter layout.
Read three books. Pretty straightforward. I also want to continue making good progress on A Memory of Light. I’m at the point where some narrative chips are starting to fall, and it is both dreadful and exciting.
Exercise at least three times a week. The app is making me do three workouts per week, at minimum. So that’s baseline. I also want to start adding in other forms of training, so I’m mentally aiming for 4-5 workouts per week, and I’ll see how my routine develops from there.
Creativity is tricky. Trying to be creative is even trickier.
In recent months, I’ve found myself searching for more of an outlet for my creativity. Writing stories is my first creative love, but the fact is that it comes with several limitations, some of which I may be unnecessarily imposing on myself.
I also struggle with a lot of the mental aspects of sharing my creativity with others, especially through social media. How much sharing is too much, too revealing, too damaging to my own privacy? Ideas run through my head all the time, and I feel compelled to share them with people, but I often don’t, or perhaps more often I share them in person with my wife or my friends. That type of creativity sharing can be quite cathartic, but it leaves open the question of whether, and what, and how I share my creativity beyond that limited group of people.
This very post comes out of a sense of frustration that I didn’t have something else to write about. So, I’m going to do some unpacking here and see where it takes us.
Limits on My Creativity
I mentioned above that it feels like there are limits to my creative outlet in writing stories. As soon as I wrote that, I thought that many of those limits must be self-imposed, so I’d like to examine them. In no particular order:
Not enough time
Worries over my copyright
Keeping ideas about my fantasy world-building close to the vest
Limited formats
Limited platform(s)
Five off the top of my head; not bad. That should be enough to delve into for a bit.
Not enough time
I’m not a full-time writer and likely will not be in the foreseeable future, so this limitation is partially by circumstance. However, I think it’s also due in part to the way in which I approach writing. I primarily write novels or at least short stories, and so sitting down to write 100 words doesn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.
Now, look, I fully realize that every little bit counts towards the greater goal. I get all the writing mantras. But it can be difficult to maintain that steadfastness day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month as you churn over a longer story.
Worries over copyright / protecting my ideas
I’m combining items two and three, because they feel very much related, although still different
Worries over copyright infringement is not easy to navigate, especially online, as I discussed last week. But even beyond the notion of someone stealing my work, I’m quite protective of my creative ideas, especially when it comes to my world-building universe.
With enough prompting, I can quite easily ramble about the myriad ideas I have for my fantasy universe, but I sometimes worry that speaking my ideas out loud will… release them from my mind. As if the words roll off my tongue and the ideas themselves evaporate.
Strange, I know. I’ve learned to be careful about how much I reveal about my stories, my ideas, and where I might take them, because I don’t want to lose the drive to write them down. Speaking them out loud is a form of sharing them with the world, but I know I can develop them in so much more depth and with more coherence if I write them down. So, I try to “save” my ideas for my writing, or maybe only discuss certain aspects of them, if I want to workshop them with someone I trust.
Another piece of “protecting” my ideas springs to mind.
Limited formats / platforms
I’m also combining items four and five.
I realize that there are tons of platforms out there where I can publish stories for various online communities to read. Wattpad, Tumblr, Reddit, IngramSpark, Kindle, this blog… and literally hundreds or thousands of other websites I cannot even name.
But does publishing my story in one space restrict me from another? Is a freemium story platform like Wattpad too open to exploitation of my ideas? Is there just too much damn content online for any of this to matter? I have no clue.
Creative Limits
If you couldn’t tell, I’m in the process of reassessing how I write and publish my stories. I love the idea of publishing novels, and I will continue to strive for that. But if I’m only publishing a novel once in a blue moon, then where do the rest of my ideas go? Is there somewhere else I can put them to get them into the world without feeling exposed — to copyright infringement, or loss of my ideas to the ether, or whatever else?
These questions bug me, so to this point I’ve resigned myself to the full self-publishing process with novels, novellas, or short stories, because it feels more official, and safer.
But I think I can find something else to fill the drawn-out in-between spaces — spaces in my head, in my publishing schedule, in my day-to-day schedule where smaller ideas can be nurtured and thrive. I just don’t know what yet.
Evening Satellite Publishing 