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Partial Eclipse of My Writing Schedule

Posting since it’s been a minute since my previous spree of relatively high-frequency updates. Everything is still underway–a new Apiarist excerpt is forthcoming (hopefully within the week), and editing for $20,000 Under the Sea is hopefully nearing its conclusion. However, travel to see the recent eclipse, while absolutely worthwhile, has put a kink in my content pipeline that I’m only now beginning to sort out. I hope you all are well and that you spent an appropriate minimum of time staring directly into the sun in the past week and a half.

“The Apiarist” Excerpt 3: A Lesson on Free Magic

“I do so hate these commencement speeches, but our mission can get so muddled in all the regimens and pageantry and Sacristi; especially out here, so far from Kol…”

It was customary, the Knight Captain had explained, that each new class of recruits receive its first training in Kol’s sacred art from the visiting Magnia that year. It was a great honor, and exposure to the Magni was otherwise highly limited. Command of the Blood Knights mixed only tepidly with the ranks of the Migni Kolai, the World City’s administrators and functionaries, and promotion to civilian office from the Blood Knight rank and file was vanishingly rare. And it was almost unheard of that any of these should join the company of the Magni, the Blood God’s high priests. Kol’s leaders, for the most part, were born rather than made. So to be close to a Magnia, to have her attention, was not to be squandered.

Even at the time, though, I was under little illusion as to how practical the instruction would be. The chapterhouse’s senior squires had already put us through remedial arms training, and I was well familiar with how foundational any introduction to a martial art would have to be. And of course, we had little time: Magnia Livia was important, and we, plainly, were not.

This impression proved only partially correct. I did not learn to call the Blood that day–that would be a process of slow growth over decades, as it was for nearly every recruit–but the pith she did dispense was more impactful than all the tutelage I would soon receive from lesser teachers. She began with a demonstration:

“As I’m sure you all know,” she said, unsheathing a razor, “the armament our God wields is blood, and the strength by which he wields it is violence.” She cut a deep line from her elbow to her wrist and turned her palm upward. Solid, sharp tendrils of blood erupted from the wound. She continued:

“Both violence and blood exist within all of us which is both blah blah blah and blegh blegh blegh…”

Rolling her eyes, she shook her arm, and the writhing tendrils collapsed in a wet cascade, which seeped back up into her arm as she turned to us.

“You will learn how to do that with a lot of practice, and you’ll learn the apologetics and justifications–probably with a bit less practice. But all of that–the weapons and discipline–is what we use to maintain our strength. None of it is, by itself, going to tell you what it’s for, and the lot of you are going to be damned miserable excuses for knights if you can’t grasp why the Blood God sent us out here in the first place!

“To that point,” she said, “consider a bit of heresy.”

Once again, she drew her razor from her elbow to her wrist, but this time, instead of a roiling scourge of blood, a blast of flame surged from the wound, engulfing her arm and prompting more than one of us to stagger backward at the sudden wave of heat. And then, just as suddenly, the flame extinguished, and her flesh knit itself back together.

“The Blood God decreed Free Magic, so we mustn’t forget that the arts of the pyromancer, the Greyskin, the beastman–all are like to ours. Free Magic means that never again shall a tyrant claim control over the potential that lies within us. That is the legacy the Blood Knights are meant to protect. We do not cultivate strength for its own sake, we don’t imitate our God out of vanity, and we certainly don’t become strong so we can bully the weak. You are protectors, and it will serve you to learn a thing or two about what you aim to protect!”

“The Apiarist” Excerpt 2: Fear of Bees

My father kept bees, and it terrified me. Perhaps it was some shameful regard I had for him manifesting in how I saw the creatures. He did not care for me, and he showed me little more than disdain throughout my childhood. He barely spoke to me, though the harsh glares and the terse dismissals hurt far more keenly than the sting of the switch when he had the servants discipline me for indolence or insolence or whichever transgression he decided must have brought me into the room with him in that moment. It was my being there, I now understand, which was my true sin. The wound still aches occasionally. I still think it cruel that a father should so resent his son’s presence, though I’ve come to understand his reasons better.

In any event, my terror at his diminutive livestock was certainly not empirical. I never earned their ire, and they never stung me, but I maintain it was quite rational.

“Stay away from the hives,” Mother would warn me when I ventured into the yard while Father was away. “If you bother them, they will sting you.”
She frequently mentioned the servant who, when I was very young, toppled a hive by accident and perished thereafter in agony. I worried that if the creatures were as irritable as Father, even catching sight of those ominous, thrumming boxes would put me in danger. But I know there was something more. I would encounter lone bees and wasps hovering about the flowers in front of our house, and though I took the same care with these solitary specimens, I felt none of the visceral fear in approaching them that I did in the apiary. A bee was just a creature to me. Like me, in a way, with needs and fears and priorities. But the buzz–the swarm–was something else. All of those needs, all of those fears, all of those bodies. It was chaos. It was too much.

“The Apiarist” Excerpt 1: Magnia Livia

I’ve begun writing a long story/short novella in the Piraeus-headspace (like the Halia and Dreamfish pieces, except way longer and way more tangential), and I’ll be posting the mostly-unedited segments here. Highly unfinished and likely not at all in the order they’ll be for the finished product, but hopefully good reading.

The one who visited the chapterhouse that season was named Livia–Magnia Livia, the Knight Captain enforced, for failure to address the Magni by their proper title was punishable by Sacristi. She arrived in Piraeus, as was traditional for Kolai dignitaries, in a palanquin suspended on barbed handles carried by chanting acolytes–the Order of the Blades of Kol, temporarily bereft of their deific wielder–steps perfectly synchronized, immaculate, precise control belied by mania stitched in bloodshot eyes. I remember finding it at once appropriate and deeply unnatural. I saw in it a reflection of the rules and ritual of the chapterhouse–though perhaps I was merely part of the mirror image–in turn a careful mold to the deliberate equities and geometries of Piraeus itself, though this was an irony I would not realize until much later.

But in their hymns and mutilations I could sense a current connecting them, focusing them in burning passion toward horrifyingly singular end. I did not know why the feeling was familiar to me, nor why I found it so perverse, but I was possessed of many misconceptions back then. So was the Knight Captain, it turned out.

Prior to the Magnia’s arrival, the Knights had sorted us according to their impressions of our magical aptitude, toward vocations of knight, servant, or squire as our capabilities allowed, but even then, in the “Era of Free Magic”, certain forms of mana were repellant enough that cultural awareness of them all but vanished with distance from the World City. The Blood Knight chapterhouse in Piraeus thus had minimal record of the mana currents that existed in the microsensory networks of swarms, they did not look for those currents in their recruits, and they had little ability to find them even if they were so inclined. But this was part of the reason the Magni supervised the recruiting process.

I was surprised to find that Magnia Livia showed little regard to the stiff sort of ritual espoused by the Blood God’s other faithful. Far from the Knight Captain’s stone-faced severity–an attitude I had come to understand as the invariable face of the Kolai–Livia was warm, mirthful, middle-aged and slightly overweight, but effusively energetic. Upon her first tour of the chapterhouse, she loudly bemoaned the asceticism of the squires’ quarters, the kitchens’ stores of spices, the frequency with which Sacristi was exacted from the servants:

“‘It is not suffering for which we care,’” she said, quoting Kolai scripture. “Stop this at once, Captain.”

I found it odd at the time that the Knight Captain was willing to suffer such admonishment from a bureaucrat, but I was naive. I later learned that Livia could have eviscerated him with a gesture were she truly displeased–a prowess I saw for myself in the Dereliction when she slaughtered a militia of over 300 before the Lady of the Flies overwhelmed her. And it proved I would owe far more of my fate to Livia than the Knight Captain. It seemed I had potential of which I was unaware, and she recognized it immediately.
“You’ve misjudged these ones,” she remarked to him, patting me and two other would-be squires on the head. And with that single gesture she altered my destiny. No longer was I to be a foot soldier to an institution that bound the world by code, by a paradigm of sense to match its chaos. I was to be a leader of that institution, and I was to discover all the degrees of deeply unsustainable freedom it allowed itself.

Winter is Ending

I’m having to bunt here since writing on the latest preview chapter for One Wing, One Eye is going slowly. But it will be done soon (hopefully by my next post), and in the meantime, I am very much still alive.

Content here over the next year is going to be a little tricky. Editing on $20,000 Under the Sea will mean that a fair portion of my output isn’t going to show up here (until the release of the book), and my new job is cutting into my writing time substantially. That said, I intend to find a way to make it work. In the meantime, thank you to all of you for reading and following. I hope you are doing well and that your winter ends soon.

Curtains Rising and Intelligent Wailing

Holiday pressures and life changes do often make it difficult to maintain post schedules for longform work, so I want to fill the gap today with a hybrid of housekeeping and history.

In the former theater, I’ve been blessed by/suffered with a number of developments. I’ve completed the handwritten manuscript for $20,000 Under the Sea, and you can expect the final two chapters to be posted here in the coming weeks. My writing process is to do first-round editing as I’m transcribing my handwritten work into a digital format, and those final two chapters are chonky, so bear with me as I’m getting everything in. Once it’s up here, I intend to initiate beta-reading and second/third-round editing, and you, as readers, have until that process is done (or near done) to read it here before I hide it like I did with Three and Two and Two and the material that went into Promises for a Worse Tomorrow. That said, if you are interested in beta reading, please reach out to me at slhlocrian@saltpoweredllc.com. I am not being choosy with who is allowed to offer me feedback (though I may be choosy about what feedback I listen to). The only qualification I ask for is interest in reading through the manuscript and providing me with your opinion (ideally with a minimal amount of follow-up required from me).

The beta-reading/editing phase for $20,000 Under the Sea will likely be longer than for my previous two books. This is because I’ve recently started a job, and my dedicated writing/editing time has been quartered. On the flipside, lack of uncertainty regarding my ability to survive in the hellscape of capitalism really has been a breath of fresh air, so motivation is in higher supply now at the very least.

Now for history. As my access to illustration for my work is currently limited, I’m looking at a more graphic-design-centric approach for covers/graphics/materials for $20,000 Under the Sea. In particular, I’m hoping to leverage the theme of historical photographs with which I’ve been adorning my recent Whom Emperors Have Served posts. Chief among the questions for cover design for the book is how one might use historical photographs to depict (or at least reference) the Nicholas. Fortunately, in the early days of submarine navigation, vehicle designs–likely the same ones the inspired Jules Verne–were wild.

In particular, see the Intelligent Whale, depicted at the top of this post. It was an experimental craft built during the American Civil War, sold to the U.S. Navy in 1869, tested (disastrously) once, and then condemned in 1872. Various sources indicate that the total number of people drowned in testing the sub may be as high as 42. Between the aggressively silly design and its outright unreliability, it feels…appropriate that it might be a stand-in for Captain Kneecap’s inimitable trash sub.

For a less exceptional inventor or navigator, the design may in fact be an inexpensive conveyance beneath the waves. Whether that’s desirable, of course, depends on how badly you ever want to make it back to the surface.

Top photo courtesy of chinfo.navy.mil

Autopsies and Roadmaps

The roads are made out of flesh or something.

Summer has been busy, which, in its way, has been a good thing. Still, it’s been havoc on my writing schedule, and the relative absence of volume on this blog the past few months is some testament to that. Rae and Leland have been similarly occupied, so our art pipeline has been more or less paused until later this month. For my own working cadence, I’m not sure when I’ll be fully back online, but I’m thinking that the beginning of September isn’t a bad guess. For now, this post will be a little bit about everything, but we can start by going backwards.

Notes on the LaSein Account is now done, and, taken together, it makes a decent epistolic story. For future readers’ convenience, I’ll probably post it in its entirety, along with a number of other organizational updates to the blog/Patreon, but for the writing process, it was definitely important at the time that it be in a serial format. As I’ve mentioned numerous times, Part 5 of the Sevenfold Gyre has been extremely difficult to write, and not all of that has been due to my schedule. When I started that series, I was working to make it at least somewhat literary, but subsequent entries have diverged. That they’ve each been written in different styles is kind of intentional (and definitely acceptable),but they have been trending toward less artistry, and I was hoping with the upcoming chapter to change that. Between that and the introduction of characters that I’ve been avoiding talking about here up until now, the result was a lot of stress and not a lot of movement, and while I can say Part 5 is almost done now, I’ve needed to walk away and come back a number of times throughout the process. LaSein was, in essence, an excuse to walk away.

I feel like the experiment was pretty successful. The quality of writing wasn’t great; keeping myself sharp almost certainly means writing more than an intermittent page, but on first pass, I think it’s good enough to be editable. It fleshes out a portion of the War Torn/Rale story that I’ve been wanting to get in writing for some time, and, topically, it sets up a good transition into Part 5. I’ll probably use it in the book.

At some point in the farther future, though, I’ll need to start thinking about transitions. I had originally intended this blog to be a venue for all of my writing, and I had not intended for its fiction portion to be exclusively about the War Torn/Rale project. Once I do have the necessary pieces for the manuscript of said book, I’ll likely be posting less on here throughout the editing phase. We’ll see what happens then, but I would expect just about everything else you’ve seen on here to continue in some fashion. I’ll continue with the game reviews, though generally only when I find something in games worth commenting on, and there is at least one more Dark Souls essay on the map. Feel free to comment if you have opinions on what you’d like to see more of, otherwise, thank you to those continuing to follow me on this journey. I hope you continue to enjoy.

Literary Kindness

A brief, shoddy manual and some useful reminders.

In 1948, Vladimir Nabokov accepted a position at Cornell University, teaching Russian and European literature. That same year, he wrote this piece, ostensibly material for his students (though I can find no confirmation of that inference). Go ahead and read it if you haven’t–this will essentially be a review.

My own experience with this essay goes back to high school. I read it then for class, found it completely insufferable, moved on with my life, etc., but now I’m returning to the ideas and finding them mostly correct and very relevant to the “reading” I am doing now with Dark Souls and Sekiro. This is, of course, not psychically painless. Nabokov’s tone is still aneurysmally condescending, and his organizational structures are bizarre, but he’s also One of the Most Important Writers of the 20th Century, so his thoughts are worth a looksee. Take from the piece what you will, it may not be the same list as mine, but in case it’s at all helpful to you, my thoughts are these:

The authors of the classics are smarter than you.

Okay, this isn’t actually one of Nabokov’s points, but it’s a healthy attitude to have and all but prerequisite for digesting the rest of his exegesis. A more plain way of putting it would be to say that in reading a work, you should assume that there is something there of depth. Ironically, Nabokov himself distinguishes between writers of genius and minor authors, but to assume you can tell the difference is astonishingly arrogant. Perhaps Nabokov earned his arrogance. You didn’t–be kind to those you read.

Read, then evaluate.

This is especially important for works that you’ve heard about. Everyone knows Beloved is a scathing indictment of the evils of slavery (and it totally is), but to condense it to that, to go in with those expectations sells short the loving detail (sic) with which its characters are rendered and everything else it might say about what it is to be human.

By the same token, don’t judge a book’s contents by the one who recommended it to you regardless of whether your opinion of (e.g.) Karen is positive or negative. Sure, take a recommendation as an excuse to eat some tasty, tasty typesetting, but don’t let your knowledge of the recommender’s mind preempt your own capacity to interpret art for yourself.

Fiction is generally not historically accurate.

Uh, yes. I’m a little confused as to why Nabokov finds this observation uniquely important, but it is correct, and it has some useful implications regarding the role of art. I’ve alluded to it before, but politics and art have an annoying way of getting tangled up in each other. This isn’t all bad–politics shapes life, life shapes art, why shouldn’t art sometimes be political? Things start turning sideways, though, when one uses political art from the past to synthesize political arguments today; worse: when one uses historical fiction depicting politics that might never have existed to draw conclusions about the present. If the distinction is confusing, let me put it this way: Harry Potter has nothing actionable to say about politics in the 1930s, the 1990s, or the 2010s (I have seen arguments for all three on this lovely internet). I will not accept disagreement on this point.

Attune your reading to the work and not yourself.

Nabokov is much more vehement on this “lowly kind” of imagination, which is a little funny to me. I wouldn’t begrudge someone emotional involvement in their reading material, and I suspect he wouldn’t either, not truly. Rather, I’d guess his war, as with many of these points, is against preconception. If you identify with a character in a story, if you empathize with them, that creates expectations that the author didn’t put there, and expectations cause misinterpretations and distractions.

An example from my own work: If you identify with Les Marquains in this story (and you are not a dangerous sadist), you run the risk of taking the narrative at face value and assuming that his character arc has a distinct turning point. No doubt being raped traumatized him, but he was also abused physically and psychologically his entire life. A very salient question is whether, if his grandfather never learned about his homosexuality, he wouldn’t have gone full despot-de-Sade anyway. Was he on the cusp of acceptance by the common people, a hopeful vector away from his grandfather’s authoritarian rule, or was he just playacting at peasantry? Answer that how you like, but kindness means recognizing that there is a question.

***

The rest of the essay has some ballin’ quotes (“To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth,” fuck yeah), and deals largely with the craftsman on the other side of the printing press. It’s a beautiful, if not incredibly useful, description of an author’s own responsibility to his work, but that’s appropriate. Art is a remarkably difficult thing to describe, its manufacture more difficult still, and in writing his essay, I hope you realize he was making art himself. And I hope we can agree that art has minimal mandate toward utility.