Weekly Update - 8/20/25

I hadn't really intended to start something new, but this is the danger you get when you're talking with other creative friends. People can plant ideas in your brain, and it just digs in like a tick beneath the skin. One of my close friends was bemoaning to me how futuristic gameshow stories like "The Running Man," "Battle: Royale" and "The Hunger Games" don't have any sex in them, and how they often fall into very familiar tropes of good beats evil, where a noble soul and a good heart will get you through pretty much any problem.

But what if it didn't?

When I started scribbling rough ideas for what turned into the first chapter of the new Kingmaker story I started, I knew I wanted three key things. First and foremost, I wanted a protagonist with some seriously flexible morals, one willing to rack up a pretty sizable body count to keep his skin intact. Second, I didn't want to fall into a handful of the big, common tropes that stories like this often do. (I didn't want a person trying to push a particular player to win or lose; I wanted ratings and crowd popularity to drive the whole damn thing. I didn't want to see the game itself falling apart, or people turning against the game. And I didn't want contestants to be playing reluctantly - everyone in the game is in it to win it.) Third, and most importantly, if this was going to be a sci-fi 'bread and circus' show, it needed to have the three things Tom Stoppard's Player insists on for stories - blood, lust and rhetoric.

So if you're hoping to see the protagonist of Kingmaker bring down the system, it ain't that kinda story. (I think the person Alastair is closest to in fiction might be Amos from "The Expanse," so if you know, you know.) You could argue there's just as much "Love Island" or even "Big Brother" in "Kingmaker" as there is the more traditional literary inspirations. I want to lean into the viewers at home angle a bunch, and to show how popularity in these things can be both good and bad. At various points in the story, Alastair may be a hero, a villain, a heel, a foil, show off main character energy and may blend into the background. Kingmaker is, in many ways, a story about weaponized "reality" television after a hundred and fifty years or so of getting better at it. It should be fun. And I made it quite clear in the story - the computers are in charge. We just live in their world now.

I'm still working on new chapters of QTUM and QTSS to get to their commissioners (which alpha readers will see next month) and hopefully I'll be getting back to Brewster's Brood for Saturday or Sunday, but we'll see. I have a lot of writing to get done, and I wasn't expecting Kingmaker to just hop into my brain and to refuse to leave until I put some of it onto paper. And over the weekend, I'll do a very short "You Decide!" poll for those at that tier, and literally every story I have that isn't a commissioned one (or, y'know QT2) will be on there, for what I write for the last slot of the month. I'm not quite back up to pace yet, but we're getting there, and I'm a lot closer than I was after the chaos of July. I do have a small trip coming in September, but that's less than a week, and I'll try my damnedest to get us back towards our regular schedule again.

Oh! And Real-Life Eric (aka my actual flatmate) spent some time with me last Friday looking at my dying bed problem, and we took apart the bed and rebuilt it, and since we did, it's holding up like a charm and I've been sleeping fantastically. (Turns out there were a couple of fastener joints missing, and he put in some replacements that are doing the job.) As I've learned, my friends are infinitely more handy with tools than I am, and if I can convince them to help me fix something physical, they'll get it done no problem. I was getting ready to have to buy a new bed, and instead, a couple of bucks for some screws, bolts and fasteners, and we're back in business. It's good to have handy friends.

Public stuff coming in the near future - 8/23 - Pack 16; 8/30 - Captains' Days 5; 9/6 - QT2:i7; 9/13 - QT2:36, NS 13; 9/20 - Merlin's Gift 1.

That's it for me. The heat's rolling in tomorrow so I'm gonna lay low, stay cool and drink loads of ice water. Take care of yourselves. You gotta be good to you before you can expect anyone else to be.