Get Inspired: Week 5

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

What they don't tell you about biometrics (Get Inspired, week 5)

My boss was lying on the floor. Not a problem in and of itself; given the layers of security on this station, it should be reasonably unlikely that anyone who didn't know her would be in a position to report her to the powers that be.

The pool of blood and the missing hand, on the other hand, were problems, and unfortunately they were all mine.

I rechecked my helmet display, admiring the clueless series of green reads. Whatever or whoever was in here collecting body parts was apparently something completely outside our security program's experience. It seemed like a lot to expect that my heads-up display wouldn't be equally clueless if my mystery guest decided to add my head to their collection.

Happily, unlike my very ex-boss, neither my head, my hands, or anything else I need to do my job are vital to getting into anything important. I'm a firm believer in the first rule of biometrics: never use a part for identification you can't do without. I slid out of my boss's office, heading for the only thing on this station worth this much trouble, carrying the largest bit of my own personal collection out and ready for use.

My name is Shayanna Willow Anstrim, because three of my parental units were dancers. I chose the Special Forces, instead.

Believe it or not, this snippet showed up in my head by way of my job. I work for a financial institution, and there's currently a lot of noise about biometric identification being the wave of the future. The largest part of the enthusiasm sounds rather like 'because there's no way some idiot can forget their own fingerprint'.

The flipside to that is, to my sci-fi inclined mind, that the future of the annoying bastards who currently only hack files for passwords, birth dates or PINs, will likely at some point progress to hacking fingers, or eyeballs, or whatever else secures something they want badly enough.

Get inspired: Week 4

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

I'll take Death over the Tower any day (Get Inspired, week 4)

My living room windows blew in, less than a second after I hit the deck under my table.

Sadly, this kind of thing happens often enough that my reaction is reflexive. The howling and the light show, those were new.

I should stop reading the Tarot. I tell myself this often - almost as often as I read the damn things. The problem is, I have to wonder, if I didn't read the cards...who's to say the same crap wouldn't still happen, but without any warning?

I'm Maurice Ferland. I read the Tarot. I also listen to the dead (try and get a word in edgeways and you'll see why I put it that way), know enough about herbs to sound convincing, and can draw really cool shit with coloured chalk. Because I'm...who I am, these things are a little more effective for me than the other gris-gris totin', rum-drinkin', chicken-frightenin' types you can find taking easy money off tourists.

They say my grandmother sold her soul to the Devil, but frankly, I doubt it. A devil, maybe. The Devil has nearly as many layers of flunkies between him and the public as the President, and I doubt grand-mère would have had the patience. Still. I wish the old bastard a good morning every time I turn over his card...just in case.

So where did this come from?

Spending my formative years in a well-run boarding school ensured that I made the acquaintance of the Tarot, ouija boards, and almost anything else that was forbidden by the school rules on a regular basis, and the Tarot have always struck me as a goldmine for an author looking for trouble to get into. Pick a card, and you have the germ of a story right there.

Get Inspired: Week 3

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

Immortality doesn't mean you'll live forever...(Get Inspired, week 3)

The peaches of immortality ripen only once in every three thousand years. If you find and eat one, you're guaranteed near-immortality. Not unnaturally, the business interests whom I represent would like the opportunity to acquire some. Imagine Hollywood able to buy everlasting good looks? Hell, we could buy some more property. Mars, maybe.

I took another look through my scope, and sighed. Why do people always imagine that immortality means that they're invulnerable as well? Of course, I would never threaten to shoot the Jade Emperor, but this guy wasn't him. Not the Heavenly Grandfather, and most definitely not one of the Three Pure Ones. If he were, the apparent age of the scantily-dressed schoolgirl in his lap would've disqualified him on the spot. This guy, I wouldn't have any qualms about threatening, although not actually carrying through might be tough.

I spent a moment meditating. Fine. I spent a moment remembering how much I stood to make by not shooting the old pervert. Ancient pervert, if the rumours I'd spent the last few years chasing were slightly more accurate than the last ten or twenty times. About 2,983 years old, to be precise. My little pep talk motivated me to fold up my shooting perch and drop down to street-level like a good girl, rather than leaving brain particles ingrained in the wall behind him that someone would have to clean up.

After all, if the guy temporarily still in possession of his brain matter wanted another 3,000 years of fondling teenagers, he was going to have to pick up some supplies soon. When he did, perhaps I could persuade him to take me along. Persuasion is my business. Being part-siren helps. Carrying enough metal on my person to never be able to fly commercial often helps more.

Where did this one come from? 

Actually, the initial line came from Pawn In Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett. I'd been meaning to research that particular reference for a couple of decades, and finally got around to doing it. The underlying story of the peaches of immortality was so adaptable to a modern urban fantasy setting that I couldn't help myself.

Get inspired: week 2

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

Shakespeare's Bargain (Get Inspired, week 2)

What if Shakespeare had written the most definitive guides to demonology in existence, in iambic pentameter?

In our timeline, Shakespeare was one of the most prolific and arguably one of the most known playwrights on the planet, chronicling kings and jesters, merchants and witches. If he suffered from writer's block, it's admirably hidden, perhaps in the slower stanzas of King Richard III.

In another timeline, he ran dry after Henry VI, part III, and instead of Titus Andronicus, he vanished without traceable publication for a year and a day. During that time, he made a bargain, and today the Most Unholy Church holds a copy of it, written in blood on human parchment: Shakespeare was to complete a cycle of plays documenting the fall of Lucifer and every demon in Hell. In exchange, words would never fail him and his name would live eternally.

His first work after his absence, Res Infernalis, spawned fame, riots, and calls for his head, as word of mouth spread and crowds overwhelmed the theatres. When guards and an escort of churchmen came to take him for trial, a flash mob exploded in London, and no traces of those men were ever found to bury.

When Filius Abramalech gained Europe-wide renown, the Vatican issued a letter announcing that the English playwright had sold his soul to Satan, and called upon the faithful to send him to his master in Hell. The Pope died within hours of signing it, but crowds thronged nonetheless to see Shakespeare's next work, The Struggle of Beleth, in such numbers that thousands died in the crowds and the crows feasted for days.

Appropriately, Lucifer claimed his due after the publication of Zepar's Tryst, and Shakespeare died aged 102, in the year 1666.

This one came to mind sometime late one night in a fit of green-eyed jealousy over people who never seem to spend time staring at words on a screen that just won't settle down on the page the way they sounded in my head. What if it afflicted even the best of us, and what if writer's block changed history?

Get Inspired: week 1

First seen on the Space Trash blog.

I'm going to bite off more than I can chew, but I'm going to try and add a blog post each week in 2017. (Yeah, yeah...thanks for the cynicism, folks...).

I figured I would sit down each week and try to write a post about a story idea. Am I going to write 52 new books? Hell no. What I'm hoping is that it'll be fun, other people may get a spark from some of them, and that it'll get me thinking of something other than my usual rut.

And hey, if my attempts to get book four in the Cortii series edited and beautiful and inspiring continues to hit the skids, I may take one of my ideas and run with it to give myself a break. My brain feels like a sponge that's been left out in the Sahara at midday right now.

When the stone breaks, a flower will rise (Get Inspired, week 1)

Amaranthe's been dreaming. When you're a French teenager living in a village so small they turn the streetlights out at midnight and the nearest cinema is ten kilometres away, there isn't much else to do, but these dreams are odd. They feel too real, and they're all set in her tiny village, at a time when the time-worn stones of the old church are sharp and pale and new.

Amaranthe dreams as Pierre, at a time when Petromantalum, the place where the roads meet, was the largest settlement in the area. The small church built by holy men twenty years ago has attracted the attention of one of the old gods, woken by the Christian bells and the smell of blasphemy, and from the mountains and the forest, the rivers and the standing stones, the ancient magic is rising.

Old and young, healthy and sick are dying between one breath and the next, and the echoes of their passing murmur in men's minds, driving those left to the ragged edge of sanity. The men of the Eastern cult do nothing but pray to their singular god and call the deaths His punishment for sin.

The son of a legionary and local woman, Pierre is a misfit, caught between two worlds. A generation ago, he would have joined the Legions. Now, with the might of Rome fading back into the East, there is only one way he can fight; with his mother's weapons, and the magic bequeathed to him as her son. No man is a match for the power of a god, but Pierre's sacrifice buys sanctuary for the village at the crossroads for nearly two thousand years.

When the first death strikes, a week into the autumn term, Amaranthe surrounds herself with her friends, goes shopping in the city, and convinces herself that it's poor timing. At the second, she tells herself that it's coincidence. By the third, she realises that she's the only one who knows Pierre's secret - and the only one who can stop the dying.

So...where did this idea come from?

I had a dream about, more or less, this story a few months back, and it's been bugging me ever since. I'm unlikely to ever write it; it's long step diagonally from the type of story I usually write, but the dream was so vivid I could see the carving on the roof beams and feel the rough linen of the clothes. I figured it would make a good opening for the 'Get inspired' posts.

Highlights of 2016

First seen on the Space Trash Blog.

2016 round-up

I thought that rather than making  a list of things to do next year that I know I'm not going to get to,
I'd make a list, instead, of the things I actually did in 2016.

(Da-da-da-done, rather than too-wet-to-do.)

One of the big things was the migration of my author website from my old Wix site to this one - a brand-spanking-new WordPress website. This took me about three months and involved me learning how to manage WordPress, a learning curve that nearly had me throwing my computer through a window (because, really, why the hell is building a website not plug-and-play in 2016??). My lack of patience aside, it now does look almost how I want it to look, and it seems to be reasonably discoverable. I'm told Wix's habit of including hashtags in their website addresses plays hob with SEO, which is one of the reasons I moved.

Unfortunately, something else I did, much less successful, in 2016, was hire a publicist. Technically, I hired her in 2015, but as the majority of the 6-month term for which we contracted was the first half of 2016, I'm calling it a 2016 item. Sadly, aside from costing me a great deal of money, all the lady in question did was connect me with a lot of people on Twitter before vanishing without having actually accomplished a single other of the items that the contract was for. Strangely, all websites and social media for said lady have also vanished in the time since, thus providing me the with valuable lesson of don't gamble anything more than pocket money on hiring marketers.

I also, courtesy of my office, took ten weeks of speech and voice projection training. (Why am I mentioning this here? Well, fair question. Keep reading!) It's something I'd been wanting to do for a number of years, as I'm generally either being told I don't speak loudly enough, or, conversely, that I'm speaking much too loudly and disturbing everyone around me. I figured some formal voice training would provide some much-needed context on which side of the argument were right, and which were simply assholes. It turned out to be a very interesting few weeks, in which I learnt that free diving isn't the absolute worst past hobby to have had when it comes to learning to manage and project your voice, and that sinus surgery makes me trying to engage my frontal resonators sound remarkably like Daffy Duck. (Quack.)

Unlike 2015, my book publishing for 2016 only amounted to one book, Elemental Affinity, the third in the Cortii series. I was (and am) however, as proud of it as a chicken with one egg; it took a lot of editing to make it semi-presentable, and gave me my first opportunity working with a formal set of beta readers, who provided some invaluable feedback. Said feedback resulted in me cutting about a third of the book and re-writing, but it is, I feel, a lot better than it was.

2016 was, finally, one of the rare years in which I actually went somewhere on holiday. In this case, it was Iceland, and it was awesome. I've already run off at the mouth sufficiently about that elsewhere, but suffice it to say I'm already looking forwards to a return trip.

So, overall, I checked some things off my bucket list. Plans (not to-dos, but plans) for 2017 include publishing the next in the Cortii series...and possibly, depending on how it cleans up, a novel of vampire hunters, yachts, and the Caribbean...that one's officially a maybe.

Happy new year!

Can the Cortii be called 'mercenaries'?

Define 'mercenary'.

Well, I had an interesting contention a couple of weeks back that no, they couldn't, because they undergo intensive training and have a command structure, so I thought I would look up the question and see if I'd been basing my plot on a misunderstanding of the concept of a mercenary force.

Being British, when I'm looking for the absolute last word on the meaning of a word, I tend to head straight for the Oxford English Dictionary (this despite the fact that my father was a Cambridge man).

It turns out that the OED thinks that 'mercenary' means 'a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army'.

Well, the Cortii are certainly professional; one of the things my friend mentioned in their argument that the Cortii weren't mercenaries was the length of their initial training. They can certainly be hired, at least provided someone has the cash to meet the Cortiian Councils' expectations of payment, which, admittedly, aren't minor. The Cortii are not always, let it be noted, hired to serve in someone else's army, although that does happen not infrequently.

For a bit more clarification, I went and checked out a few more definitions. Cambridge Dictionary defines a 'mercenary' as 'a soldier who fights for any country or group that pays them'. See, I should have listened to my father and gone straight to Cambridge. That's the Cortii concept in a nutshell.

Of course, you many note that none of these definitions have touched on whether or not mercenary forces should, or should not, have a command structure, or how formal it can be before the force is automatically defined as non-mercenary. They all seem focussed on the concept of a professional in the trade of violence, available for hire.

Here's another thought to add. Current jargon is tending to prefer the term 'private military company' over 'mercenary'. Blackwater is one of the outfits commonly mentioned in this context. Private Military Companies are defined by Wikipedia as 'legally established enterprises that make a profit, by either providing services involving the potential exercise of [armed] force in a systematic way and by military means, and/or by the transfer of that potential to clients through training and other practices, such as logistics support, equipment procurement, and intelligence gathering'. Funnily enough, that seems to share a lot of criteria with 'mercenary', so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that manually-operated excavation equipment is probably still a shovel.

So, let's go digging into the history. There's a lot of interesting stories about mercenaries across multiple continents through the ages. Admittedly the general verdict is that they're bastards, but since I can't think of an instance where mercenaries went into a fight for themselves and won, it's probably also fair to say they may not have had much of a hand in writing the histories.

Historical mercenary groups: 

• Varangian Guard: As early as 911, Varangians are mentioned as fighting as mercenaries for the Byzantines, as personal bodyguards to the Byzantine Emperors. The Varangians relied on a long axe as their main weapon, although they were often also skilled swordsmen or archers.The Varangian Guard is mentioned also in Njal's Saga: "The last that was heard of him was, that he had wedded a wife there, and was captain over the Varangians, and stayed there till his death day." From Wikipedia.

• Swiss Guard: The Pontifical Swiss Guard has its origins in the 15th century. Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484) had already made an alliance with the Swiss Confederacy and built barracks in Via Pellegrino after foreseeing the possibility of recruiting Swiss mercenaries. From 1506 until 2016 there have been 35 commanders of the Swiss Guard serving 51 popes, with interruptions during 1527–1548. From Wikipedia.

• Ninja: A ninja, or shinobi, was was a covert agent or mercenary in feudal Japan.The functions of the ninja included espionage, sabotage, infiltration, assassination and guerrilla warfare. Antecedents of the ninja may have existed as early as the 14th century, and possibly in the 12th century (Heian or early Kamakura era). The first specialized training began in the mid-15th century, when certain samurai families started to focus on covert warfare, including espionage and assassination. From Wikipedia.

So, finally, I can't say that I feel the Cortii fail to meet any of the vital criteria for being defined as mercenaries. Mercenary groups throughout history have submitted to an internal command structure, whether clan-based, like the ninja, or a recognizably military-style structure such as the Swiss Guard. The Cortii are professional, by most definitions of the term, and they are available, singly or in units, for hire. They do not fight on their own behalf (well, unless attacked - oddly, there's a significant record gap on the topic of pacifist mercenary groups getting wiped out by attackers).

Ergo, having cut my teeth (exaggeration, I got my first book on historical mercenary cults in my tweens) on mercenary histories, and done some more research today on current definitions, I'm going to have to conclude that I am in fact on pretty solid ground calling the Cortii mercenaries.

(And now I'm going to go and read some of the source material from all those luvverly articles, both because it's a best practice, and because research as a sci-fi writer is just so much damn fun...)