Two Things of Note: Hunter's Game released, and The Sound of the Dark gets reviewed at Strange Horizons...

Two things of note happened this week.

One is the release of my new novel, Hunter's Game; this is my first tie-in novel, set in the universe of the Sniper Elite video game. Set in the dying days of the American Civil War, it centres on Hunter, a young but battle-scarred Union Army sniper, on a mission to stop a trainload of weapons that could change the course of the conflict. A mission that also becomes deeply personal, as the train is under the command of Colonel Grauermann - her former CO and mentor before he defected to the Confederacy, leaving Hunter to die.

It's a short, sweet novel, about 50,000 words, packed with tension and action - and, I hope, as dark and twisty as you'd hope for from me. I'm proud of it, anyway! You can buy it here.

The second thing is a new review of The Sound of the Dark, my third novel under my Daniel Church byline, from Shannon Fay over at Strange Horizons:

"Some of the descriptions of what Cally experiences are so vivid and

awful they actually made me shudder. The turn the book takes is all the more thrilling for how out of left field it is, which is why I’m trying to be as vague as possible here to protect the premise.... It’s also a rare case where the story doesn’t deflate once all is revealed. Here the horror is so well done that it can make the reader wonder if they have been cursed—whether being exposed even secondhand to the tapes has inflicted on them the same contagion with which the characters are plagued."

"I'd highly recommend it," Shannon concludes - and who am I to argue with a reviewer who clear has such good taste? :) You can read her review here.

See you soon, and thanks, as always, for your awesome support.

Simon x

A Belated Hornblowing

As regular readers of this blog (both of them) will know, each December I usually post a round-up of the work I've had published for the first time that year. Partly so I can pop my head up and take a look at what has been achieved - and, yes, to show what work of mine is eligible for any awards that are going.

Anyway, for various reasons I wasn't in a great place at the back end of last year, so I didn't get round to doing such a post. So here, belatedly, it is now.

Novels

The Sound of the Dark (as by 'Daniel Church) Angry Robot Books.

Short Stories:  

'The Witch of November' in Nightmare Abbey 8, ed. Tom English.

'The Last Train' in Nightmare Abbey 9, ed. Tom English.

'Polodski's Bride in The Joining, ed. Jacob Steven Mohr   

'Nightwatch' (as by 'Daniel Church') in King's River Life Magazine. (Read free HERE.)

'My Soul To Keep' on Patreon. (Read free HERE.)

I wrote one novel last year - my first tie-in book, in fact! - which I think is slated for 2027. Details will be made available in due course. I started and abandoned various novel-length projects; this year will be hopefully be the year of finishing some!  

Interview: Stewart Hotston talks Project Hanuman!

Stewart Hotston, in his own words: "I’m a short and long fiction writer repped by John Baker at Bell Lomax Moreton. I am also one of the co-owners of Flow State Games which runs (among other games) Curious Pastimes, one of the UK’s biggest fest larps with c.1500 players at our main events. I spend a lot of time writing for that and it’s one of my joys in life – I believe that anyone who’s played video games or D&D would love LARP.

My stories are about odd situations that are bigger than the people in them. They’re typically Sci Fi, Fantasy and often quite weird. They’re about changing the world and realising that we can all have a part in that. My non-fiction tends to be about these very same subjects." 

Stewart's very kindly agreed to talk to me about his new novel, Project Hanuman, which was released yesterday by Angry Robot. Read on...

1) So, what’s new from you?

Project Hanuman! It’s a new space opera but also a retelling of how Hanuman lost his powers. It’s set within a utopian civilisation called the Arcology who span much of the galaxy but live mostly online. It’s not too much of a spoiler (welcome to chapter 1) to say they get destroyed at the beginning and the rest of the story is about a group of survivors trying to wrestle with what’s happened.

 2) How did it come about?

I’ve been wanting to write a space opera for a long time but I’ve never quite figured out the story. Part of the reason for that is I wanted to bring the experience of a far off galactic civilisation up to date – using the most cutting edge physics. Thing is, there’s a lot of physics out there that most people haven’t ever heard of and much of it is so counter-intuitive that writing about it could feel entirely alienating in a bad way.

After my BFS and Subjective Chaos nominated novella, The Entropy of Loss from NewCon Press, seemed to find a great audience I started to think I had a way forward – which was to concentrate on just how strange the idea of information is within mathematics and modern physics.

3) Tell us about the process of how you created it.

The thing about hard science is that it’s hard. Popular science books have to flatten and simplify it – if for no other reason than the language of these things is mathematics and if you can’t speak that much of what modern physics has to say about the universe is beyond reasonable reach.

You obviously can’t write that on the page and expect anyone to be interested or for it to make for a thrilling story. I can imagine people thinking, oh, this is ‘hard science’ and switching off immediately as it not being for them. That’s the furthest thing from what I want to achieve.

Fortunately for me I’ve been long enthralled by the story of Hanuman, spiritual child of Vayu the wind god. There are many stories about how Hanuman lost his powers but they all centre on someone needing to learn how to control their power – not in the sense of flying better but in the sense of power without control is dangerous to everyone around us.

This was my way in – a fantastic story about a powerful being reduced to nothing and having to learn about responsibility from the ground up.

4) What was your favourite part of the process?

Figuring out the main characters. Prab and Kercher (together with Hanuman). Prab was my everybody, the ordinary person thrust into astonishing events. Kercher’s my reject, the one who is torn about the system they’re supposed to save.  

As always, a great story has to be driven by the characters not the setting.

5) What was the toughest part of it?

Navigating that line between the madness of how modern science describes the universe and creating a story in which everything feels interesting and familiar enough to have you turning the page.

6) Is there a theme running through it?

When big events dwarf us how do we find meaning, how do we make a difference when it feels like we have no power. To be honest, that feels pretty important to me right now.

7) What are you working on now?

I have a bunch of stuff coming! Next year I have a Cold War SF novel and following swiftly on its heels the first of an Epic Fantasy duology set for 2027. Alongside those will also be a light-hearted portal fantasy series also due to launch in 2027.

I'm exhausted just reading that list! Thanks so much for talking to me, Stewart, and here's hoping Project Hanuman is the first of many huge successes!   

The Lowdown with... Jeanette Ng

Jeannette Ng is originally from Hong Kong but now lives in Durham, UK. Her MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies fed into an interest in medieval and missionary theology, which in turn spawned her love for writing gothic fantasy with a theological twist. She used to sell costumes out of her garage. She runs live roleplay games and sometimes has opinions on the internet.

1. Tell us three things about yourself.
Thing #1: So when I was six, I wanted to change my name to Cinderella. I was probably just into the Disney film because of sparkles and pretty dresses, but it has since imprinted upon my soul. I still read pretty much every retelling and reimagining of the cinder girl that crosses my path.
Thing #2: My favourite saint is Thecla, who after listening to Paul preach about chastity decided to run away from her fiancé and stalk Paul instead. She then went around healing people, trailing miracles in her wake. When the authorities sentenced her to be torn apart by wild animals, the lionesses in the pit came to her aid and defended her. She self-baptised by leaping into a vat of man-eating seals (lightning came down to strike down the seals, don’t worry). Though the pendant I wear is of St Dymphna, who protects against mental illness.
I should probably also note that I’m neither actually religious nor Catholic. I’m just a medievalist who likes hagiography.
Thing #3: I write and run live role play games. The last one my ref team and I did was wuxia-inspired, which I was very proud of. I finally got to try and reenact the tropes I grew up with in Hong Kong into a roleplay game. One learns a lot when trying to pare down a culture into a page of A4 for a player to quickly digest. Also, my housemate and best friend embroidered a mantle that is worthy of the gods. It had on it all the animals of the zodiac.

2. What was the first thing you had published?
I’m not completely sure, but I think it’s 'Three Hundred Years' in Mythic Delirium. It’s free online still, and it’s a short story about a mermaid anchorite. I was rereading Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid and felt that more should be made of its religious themes. Most retellings focus on her desire for romantic love rather than an immortal soul, when she wanted both in the HCA text and one is the means to the other. If a human man were to love and marry her, the mermaid would share in his soul and thus gain one of her own. At the same time, I was reading a lot of 12thC anchorite theology as well and this motif of Christ the Bridegroom who loves you for your soul, that his love is both romantic and redemptive, all this just seems to fit together in an interesting and creepy way. So I wrote a few thousand words inspired by that.

3. Which piece of writing are you proudest of?

Anything I can finish, to be honest. I’m very good at first chapters and not so much the last few. I always say my hard drive is a graveyard of beginnings.
I am probably most proud of 'How the Tree of Wishes Gained Its Carapace of Plastic', which appears in Not So Stories, edited by David Thomas Moore. It’s based on a real wishing tree in Hong Kong that my father lives near. The gimmick was to tell the story of the tree and some regional history with the veneer of folklore and metaphor. Explain along the way why the plastic tree can be as real as one of bark and wood and sap. It’s quite short even for a short story but it’s also very personal for me.

4. …and which makes you cringe?
I know that there are those who think it’s a selling point (and I love you all), but I still regret not editing out the lyrics that I accidentally quoted in Under the Pendulum Sun. I was listening to a lot of Hamilton on loop at the time and it just happened...

5. What’s a normal writing day like?
It usually takes a lot of pottering about the house before I can settle in to write. I try to get all the chores out of the way, else I’ll feel a sudden desire to do laundry halfway through a tricky sentence. I like the quite of the night, or at least early evening, when I know there’s nothing to interrupt me. I wash my face with cold water because that tricks my brain into thinking I’m drowning and the burst of wakefulness is handy. I have a thermos of hot water and a teabag of Pu’r on hand and yeah, then I try to write.
I’ve always written at night. I started when I was at boarding school, partly because it was the longest stretch of uninterrupted time I had to myself. No one was going to need me to rescue them from daddy long legs, nor would there be an impromptu Korean romcom party that I just had to go to. I’m not sure writing in the small hours is a very good habit because it means I can be going to bed at 8am the next morning having logged several thousand words, but sadly I’m also quite set in my ways.

6. Which piece of writing should someone who’s never read you before pick up first?

I’ve only really got one novel out, so Under The Pendulum Sun is where I would steer most readers. It’s a gothic novel about some Victorian missionaries who go to fairyland. It ends very poorly for them and along the way a lot of theology gets discussed and a number of creepy things happen.
I do write things that aren’t gothic pastiche.

7. What are you working on now?
A thousand things and nothing, to be honest. I’m smack in the middle of the well-documented phenomenon known as the second book blues. I’m doing a lot of research and frankly I’m more comfortable talking about the binned projects with snappy summaries than I am of the amorphous blob of the work in progress. Borgias in Space is on hold. As is the excursion with Venetian glass blowers and mask-wearing demons. There’s a whole 50k of sleeping beauty wakes up in Napoleonic France that had to go. I mourn all of them and I’m sure they’ll get recycled in a decade or so, but for now, they can languish in the folder of doom.