Witches and Ray-Guns

Demonscourge, the second in the Fallen Goddess series, is out now. Enjoy!

• Smashwords.
• Amazon ASIN: B0BNQZB244
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This is your chance to influence me over the next book I write!

Caveats:

• I’ll try to go with your preferences, but if I can’t make it work, I’ll switch.
• If I had a plot for the next book in an existing series, I’d be writing that, not this post. So, please don’t ask.

Okay, I have two book ideas in the works, and I can’t decide which to go with. I sort of have a preference, but I also find myself considering plot elements and world designs for both at random. Really, both are probably good, so I’ll explain them and you can let me know which you’d like to read. I know, the answer is both, but give me a push toward one or the other and it’ll get written first.

The first one is Necromance. Again. I’ve tried to get this LitRPG idea going a few times, both as pure LitRPG and isekai. I think I’ve got it worked out this time, but I’m not far into the development. Features necromancy. Is not an isekai. It’ll mostly be about what goes on in a virtual reality, online RPG, but there will be scenes in the real world with the players. It will not be heavy on the game mechanics, it’s more about actually role playing in an RPG than about becoming an uber-powered gamer.

Second one doesn’t have a name yet. Like many owners of Cyberpunk 2077, the Edgerunners anime on Netflix and then started playing the game again (too much, actually). I developed an urge to write another cyberpunk novel, but the next Tatsu plot is still eluding me, and I also wanted to do something involving a netrunner/hacker character. Tatsu is a hacker, but she has to deal with actual computer systems, not the kind of magical internet that is typical in cyberpunk. And then it struck me: why not have a magical internet? So, this is a book set in a world where there is magic of sorts, but society has developed to the point where it looks more or less like a cyberpunk/near future sort of world, rather than a classical fantasy setting. Cybernetics are replaced by what I’m currently calling golemetics; replacing body parts with artificial components, functioning through enchantment. Magic helmets let ordinary people connect to the virtual world in a way that real-world technology is probably never going to be able to manage. Real magicians are able to hack into computers powered by spirits in seconds instead of hours, and to mess with people’s golemetics in the way 2077 netrunners do with cybernetics, which is entirely unrealistic. (As an ex-programmer, I live with fantasy hacking, but it irks me. I can’t bring myself to write it. Actual magical hacking is fine, however.)

So, there you go. Which would you like to see?

Incidentally, Demonscourge, the next Fallen book will be out in December. The next one, as selected, will be available in February.

Well, it’s Halloween and I did this a couple of days ago, so here you go. What’s Halloween about a Red Riding Hood image? Check out her basket. Oh, and there’s the eyes…

The character (with a bit more hair) may be appearing in a future book, but she doesn’t usually wear this outfit. She may, at least sometimes, have those eyes.

I never did an art dump for this book. Now I have. Click on the image to see it.

Someone said in a comment that I’d never posted any Sam or Marie graphics. I checked. Can’t see any myself. So…

Click on the pic above to go to the rest of the images. This was always one of my favourite ones of Marie. Girls got legs for days.

I’m still alive!

Just wanted to say that. Writing has been hard recently for various reasons. Partially it’s that I’ve had a lot of great ideas which I couldn’t get past about 20k words. I’m now working on the next Fallen book, but I’m not sure of an exact release date, partially because a family-related thing has just come up which might delay things. Before the end of the year is about all I can promise.

Anyway, above is a graphic I made because I bought this outfit and thought it would great on Nava. And then I thought it would look great on all the Death’s Handmaiden girls. And then I thought I’d put it up here. The full-sized version is wallpaper size, if you feel you need more girls in semi-revealing dresses in your life. Why, you may ask, is Mitsuko wearing a collar. Well, it’s because she has a really long neck. I looked at the result without the collar and decided she needed something to break up that long stretch of flesh from below her boobs up to her hairline. Aesthetic decision and nothing to do with my fetish for bondage gear. Really!

Or sleep and fire. I’m not getting much of the former, so I’m watching some YouTube while I contemplate trying to get a bit more sleep. (Actually, I think it might be any sleep tonight. It’s been a bad one.)

Anyway, I’ve been watching the various news broadcasts about the fires in the US. I swear I watch more news from over the Pond than from here. I have no idea where most of you live, but hopefully it’s not too close to any of the bad areas. Practically, if you do, it’s likely you won’t read this until after it’s all over.

Whatever your situation, stay safe.

Just imagine there’s a picture here of an Englishman melting into a puddle. I am not running any renders today!

I’ve even seen reports of this turning up on late night shows in the US, so I think most are aware that it’s HOT in Europe. Worse, it’s HOT in Manchester! That’s like saying the Antarctic ice cap just melted. We don’t do hot in Manchester. We do damp and overcast with potential for torrential rain.

The temperature on my garden thermometer seems to have peaked at 37.5 C. That’s 99.5 F for those who refuse to use SI units. I’ve been hotter. I went out at two pm. in summer in Scottsdale, AZ. I regretted it, but I could go back to an air conditioned hotel room (and wonder whether the people sunbathing beside the pool could actually be heard sizzling). We do not do air con in the UK. My office is at thirty degrees. I give up.

I’m having a little problem with writer’s block at the moment, and progress is slow. I’ve started at least four books and stopped again with problems about knowing where to go with them. I started another yesterday which I’m hopeful about, but today, I can’t think! I’ve written a sentence. I’ve also drawn a map because drawing pretty pictures doesn’t take as much brainpower. I may try taking my laptop down and working in the kitchen, because it’s cooler, but it’s also possible that I just give up until tomorrow.

We need to fix climate change, like yesterday.

On a side note. Well, sort of a side note. In the Fox books, most of southern Europe has been evacuated because they don’t have water to keep the population going and it’s too hot for humans to function properly. I thought I was being a bit pessimistic, to be honest. Watching the coverage of the weather and wild fires in France and Spain, I feel like one of my dire predictions is more likely than I thought. I hate it when I’m right.

When I was writing the third Fox book, DeathWeb, (and also before that) I needed a social media system to be the basis for the story. So, I invented LifeWeb, the overarching social media platform of the future. It embodied a number of the negative aspects of social media of various types I see today.

Obviously, I was basically renaming and expanding Facebook. The rationale given in the books for LifeWeb displacing ‘other companies’ was the integration of a voting application into LifeWeb which let ordinary people vote without having to use the government’s overcomplicated and opaque application. That’s why Facebook isn’t around and LifeWeb is, not to avoid trademark infringement. Honest.

And then, along came Meta and the Metaverse. Suddenly, there’s another reason LifeWeb won. (I’m ignoring the whole emphasis on NFTs thing here, but that’s another factor.) The thing is that LifeWeb focuses around AR (augmented reality) while the Metaverse is a VR (virtual reality) experience. LifeWeb adds to your experience of the real world while Metaverse is intended to replace it. VR is an aspect of Fox’s (and Tatsu’s) world, but most of your experience there comes in the form of the virtual world appearing within the real world. It’s a different strategy for implementing the next generation of internet interfaces, and there’s a lot of discussion about these days over which will become the standard. I think AR will be more common than VR. I did when I wrote the first Fox book, and I still think so. I guess we’ll see whether I’m right.

As a sort of aside, if you wan to see what I think is one of the best visualisations of the kind of world Fox and Tatsu live in, I recommend Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on Netflix. You don’t have to watch all of it, just the first episode. (I actually quite like the series, even if the ending is a bit confusing, but I may be the only one who does. It rates a 6.59 out of 10 on MyAnimeList.) You have meetings taking place in VR, and you have the rush of AR adverts Togusa brushes aside when we first meet him. More than any other visual media I’ve seen, this is the kind of thing I think of when I’m writing for Fox or Tatsu.

And now, back to reality. Which sucks. Bring on full-sensory VR!

I don’t normally recommend music. I’m not recommending music now. However, I discovered Mysara’s (from Fallen) theme tune recently and I wanted to share. Uh, the lyrics are not suitable for work, much like the lady herself.

Goddess by Jaira Burns. You can find it various places on YouTube.

• Original Video
• Blackheart Music GMV
• MRMoMMusic video
• Lyric video

I recommend the lyric video so you can see just how those lyrics really fit Mysara.

They also kind of fit Nava. And maybe a few other characters.