Last week I talked about how I see all stories in terms of tropes.

Since works of fiction are created by people about people, they use recognisable themes.

As they say, history doesn’t repeat—it rhymes.

Relationships are key to most narratives. Love and sex matter because without these not necessarily related experiences, you and I, and the great many before us, would not be here.

The familiar theme of romance makes the story relatable, but it also creates a degree of expectation.

The reader has good reason to suspect Mr Darcy will marry Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice.

In the same way, we are certain that the detective in an Agatha Christie novel will identify whodunit.

My novel King in the Dark is a long-form tale involving both.

The fun lies not in the expected outcome, but in how the story plays out.

Some see the term trope as pejorative, confusing it with the related but distinct word—cliché.

Last week I compared writing with tropes in mind to culinary arts.

A trope in science fiction goes: everything tastes like chicken, and there’s some basis for this. The show MythBusters tested this and found some truth to it, but they also showed that how the meat is prepared matters a great deal.

A trope becomes a cliché not because the first serving proved unpalatable, but because it’s being served the same way.

However, if I promise chicken, but serve my guests rattlesnake?

Now, that might sound like an interesting short story, a tale of the unexpected.

Here be dragons, which may or may not taste of chicken.

General rules have exceptions, and most things human can be plotted on a bell curve. There is the majority in the middle, and the exceptional at either tail.

It’s another kind of dragon—one with two tails, telling two very different tales...

Not everyone has to love a book for it to be successful. Critics might pan it, and yet it is a bestseller. Some are going to ‘hate-read’ it. Most will enjoy it. Others buy the special editions and cosplay the characters.

Reading and consuming fiction depend on our subconscious not caring whether the story is real or not. Without this quirk, a roller coaster would be as exciting as a train ride. If our conscious mind ruled our emotions, there would be no illusion of danger. Instead, we read about romance and risk, and our heart picks up a beat. When we care about a fictional character, they become adopted by our imagination, and empathy rules apply: family and tribe come first over strangers.

A book may feel like a cliché because we’ve encountered variations on a tale too often; it’s a bland sandwich bought on that mundane train ride. Still, there’s the flip side—the anti-cliché story or subverting expectations. This fails harder when subversion feels like the author is punishing the readers who paid attention by recognising themes and adopting the characters into their imagination. After investing in the possible outcomes the tropes suggest, the reversal takes them away. A broken promise will leave a bad taste in the mouth.

Using tropes can be hazardous. I enjoyed Dune by Frank Herbert as a teenage boy, not much younger than the heir to the Dukedom—Paul of House Atreides in the novel. I rooted for him like any comic book or pulp-era hero of old. However, I missed this subtext, a criticism of the messianic leader. Still, because Herbert framed Paul’s choice as either extinction or conquest, Paul remains heroic for many.

What examples of should-be clichés, but not, and anti-clichés/subversion have worked for you, and why?

Let me know!

In No Winning This War: Mars-X Exposed, Dan Radcliff arrives at a Martian penal colony disguised as a paradise of hedonistic simulations. Uncovering a dark scheme of inmate control, Dan pairs with the secretive Liz to expose the ruling class. Surrounded by deception, he must confront the brutal costs of reality.

In The Beginnings of the Planet Bazor, alien captain K'Sharra embarks on a deep-space scouting mission around 1100 A.D. When his ship accidentally capsizes an Earth vessel during launch, he rescue-freezes the human survivors. Facing an unexpected dilemma, K'Sharra must relocate the humans while fulfilling his cosmic assignment.

In I Never Did Make It Back Home, a brutal childhood and a violent murder force simple farm-boy Vinny to flee to New York. Absorbed into the mob, his lethal skills catch the eye of a rogue CIA agent, plunging him deep into the underworld of global cartels.

A long time ago now, the internet for me was an early social media site called StumbleUpon. This was a little after MySpace and before Facebook and Twitter. Then we called it ‘Web 2.0’ and the sites did run concurrently for a while.

StumbleUpon’s unique selling point was the ‘stumble button’. A means to not so randomly bring up websites, categorised by users when added to the site’s library of URLs by topic. Categories matter to authors because we have to think about which topical labels to attach to our stories.

Take mine, I mean please do, buy the books, review the books, talk about them with your friends and loved ones…

A noir detective who sees the dead, the past, and occasionally the future, set in 1945.

Is King in the Dark historical fiction, a spy thriller, urban fantasy, SF or magic? Do psychic powers belong with science fiction, or are ghosts, angels, and demonic stories religious, spiritual, or fantastic fantasy?

The Martian, Stranger in a Strange Land, and John Carter of Mars are all science fiction stories involving the Red Planet, representing a spectrum of hard-to-soft SF—from near-future survival realism to sword fights on alien worlds.

Is a story about a vampire who is born instead of made in 1639 a branch of historical fiction/fantasy or horror, or is it more science fiction as magic plays no part in the experiment that creates Jack and his brothers?

Perhaps overlapping circles, as in a Venn diagram, are a more useful picture.

One of those sites I discovered via StumbleUpon lives on—tvtropes. I found it entertaining and at times hilarious back then.

A trope is a common pattern or storytelling device that shows up across books, films, TV, games, and other stories. You can take any idea, a person, or an event within fiction and categorise it as a trope or a subset of a trope.

A new idea that has no place is the trope-former. Certain stories carry that title: Dracula is the archetypical vampire, even though Stoker is combining pre-existing myth—the way he does this, his recipe, is defining. In a similar way, Shelley’s Frankenstein defines themes in Science Fiction and Horror by combining ingredients of then-current science and her imagination.

A trope at work resembles how a sentence comprises words, which are constructed from letters. We understand the difference between “She read a book” versus “What did you read at University?” The same arrangement of letters can be a functionally different word in terms of pronunciation and meaning. The latter has two possible meanings. Without really thinking, context does the work—the idea. Tropes function in much the same way—they come together within fiction to tell the story.

I think in terms of tropes as overlapping categories—stories as a recipe of ingredients that combine. I don’t see any trope as bad or good, and all stories use them.

Sticking with the cooking analogy, the oft-used example to differentiate knowledge and wisdom applies. Knowledge means knowing a tomato is a fruit, while wisdom is not using it in a fruit salad.

Tomatoes are great—if you like them, and I do—but how I use them in a recipe matters.

Tropes matter too, because they describe ingredients within a story.

Not every tomato is equal: some are sweeter, others juicier, redder, larger, and so on. Varieties matter. Are they fresh or preserved?

Still, if you encounter a tomato in a fruit salad, you might be surprised and disappointed.

Food as an analogy for tropes helps because taste is subjective. The exclusion and inclusion of a trope, and how much you use it, can alter the tone and taste of a story. This includes salt and spices.

A recipe also has structure. There’s an order to it. A cake isn’t so much baked as built. It’s more than having the right ingredients. It’s more than understanding the quantities and how much fire is needed. It’s also about assembling the baked layers and presentation, the decoration, icing, sugar frosting, or cream.

There’s a science to this, and there’s also an art.

Get the ingredients right, understand how they behave together, and then decide how much heat, how much salt, and when to stop. The reader doesn’t consume the components in isolation—they choose to enjoy the result.

Here are some other recipes.

Defiant Space – Infinite Void Book One
by Richard Rimington

One starship against the galaxy.

When a hostile fleet arrives to conquer his planet, novice navigator Caladon Heit joins the experimental starship Fidelity on a desperate mission across hostile space. Hunted by marauders and mutants, Cal must find a way to stop planetary annihilation before everything he loves is destroyed.

Faceless Encounters: A Gripping British Detective Mystery (Detective Pixley Pennington Book 1)

by Jane Keene

A clown-painted body in a wet alley. Detective Inspector Pixley Pennington should be on a plane to Venice. Instead she’s investigating the murder of a wealthy developer with a young wife, bitter ex, and plenty of enemies. Someone is watching her. And she begins to wonder whether she was ever just the detective on the case.

Earth on the Cusp of the Twenty-Second Century

18 Sci Fi Stories About a Future Earth

From the first computer program in 1948 to today’s hyper-connected world, seventy-six years brought radical change. The next seventy-six will do the same. Eighteen writers envision Earth in 2100: emotional AIs, photosynthetic children, virtual worlds, and post-urban societies. Dive into these sharp, surprising slices of our near future.

Writing is my chosen creative outlet. I’ve dabbled with pencil and paint, and the challenge is not dissimilar, and I imagine the same would be true for music.

With paint, it’s more pressing—you have to stop. The paint has to dry before you can go again. Go too soon, and you end up with a muddy mess of mixed colours.

Writing can be muddied too, so knowing when to let it “dry”—when the right choice is to walk away for a while—is less immediate than a mucky brushstroke marring shape and colour, but just as true.

I’ve completed Lost Boy Jack, the first novel in the Chimera Cycle. The intention is to publish a series of shorter novels as an ebook series and then compile them into longer collected print editions.

You can read the prequel novella here.

Completed is not the same as finished, which isn’t the same as published.

Finishing or polishing the text addresses clunky prose, typos, and common spelling and grammar issues.

Here is where a little distance helps. Taking time away from the text is hard to do. So having other projects helps.

Substack is one such diversion. It’s a tool that addresses the necessity of self-promotion. Who doesn’t want free stuff?

It’s a cliché when a creator says subscribe to this channel, or some variation of this appeal, but for independent content creators, the only way we can grow is through people choosing to play, and ultimately pay for, the art and entertainment we make.

That’s why my appreciation for you, since you’ve read this far, is very genuine, as is my appeal to review my books and those of my fellow independent authors on Amazon and Goodreads, or elsewhere if you have the ability and inclination.

Reviews matter. Personal takes are crucial. There’s a reason many vendors use an Amazon program called Vine to give products away for select Amazon customers to review. A product, whether a widget or a book, without user endorsements, comes across as unwanted and unloved.

I considered putting the Chimera Cycle, at least in part, on Substack behind the paywall, but I changed my mind. The fixed minimum monthly subscription rate is $5, which is the sweet spot for an ebook, and I can’t write a good-enough novel every month!

I think there are valid ways a successful author can justify this model, but I’m not there yet. While I won’t discourage anyone from being philanthropic and supporting my work, I won’t be asking people to pay for my content outside of buying the books.

In practice, this means if you choose to subscribe to my Substack Publications, you can click through to the free tier and not miss anything.

One is more traditional social media with disposable fun pieces, soft previews of the future after a kind… such as 1655…. as well as articles on writing and flash fiction.

The other, Arthur R. King’s Mysterious World, blends make-believe—through my use of King as a persona—with straightforward reports on mysteries, unexplained and sometimes explained, that inspire my stories.

Another diversion is the next book in the Spectral Detective Series. Again, Substack allows me to tease where we are going…

Oh boy, I like how this is shaping up already. History is in flux after World War II. On 16 August 1945, Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons of an “iron curtain” dividing Europe. On 1 October, Truman ends the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency, and creates the Strategic Services Unit, later followed by the CIA. In New York, the United Nations is taking shape over the same period.

I’m already sketching out a Christmas Special, but since it’s only just past the summer solstice and only the middle of July, I’ve another special project in mind.

I’ll post a short story on Substack for my subscribers, and, of course, those of you receiving this weekly email will get a link to it.

King waved goodbye to Maggie as orders took her back to London at the end of King in the Dark.

It’s not a spoiler to say she’ll be back, but we also left an unidentified body in a morgue, with their possessions in a boarding house in Columbia Heights. Sam Mercer, a junior detective with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department, lands a missing-person case without knowing where it will lead.

This short story is still in the drafting stage, but stay tuned. I am here to entertain.

Some clients can’t be saved. Some can’t be killed.

Grieving New Orleans inheritance attorney Edward Bruseaux plans to end his life until an ancient vampire reveals that his wife’s murder began a hidden war. To uncover the truth and seek revenge, Edward must confront vampires, voodoo bloodlines, restless dead, and an evil buried beneath the city.

A Review copy!

by Laurie Bowler

Forced into a blood marriage with shadow lord Lucien Morvayne, Raven Velacroix discovers her bloodline seals an ancient prison beneath the vampire world. As conspiracies, forbidden magic, and a dangerous former love threaten their alliance, a monstrous winged creator awakens, forcing Raven to choose love freely or become another chain. — The Bloodied Rose - Raven

The people have spoken. The dragons must die.

As war closes in, Leah and Aaliyah, the last queen dragon, face a brutal choice: fight or flee. While Troyer rallies an army to purge Heliok of dragons, the planet’s survival still depends on their elemental magic. Whatever happens, ignorance and hatred threaten to destroy everything the dragons created. — “Before The Fall: Dragon’s Magic Prequel”

Pottage

Writing fiction set in the 1600s poses certain challenges. Consider seventeenth-century English. Words change over time, losing or gaining meaning, or disappearing altogether. Curses like Marry and Zounds have no bite today, but then carried the weight of the f-bomb. Deciding how much period colour and dialect to put into the book is like seasoning a bowl of pottage.

When using a word unfamiliar to a modern audience, I have to give the reader a clue without the text feeling like an explanation.

A staple for centuries among both rich and poor, pottage is a thick soup or stew made with grains, mature peas and vegetables, with meat added when available—more often in wealthier households.

Other times, a word describes something once commonplace, but no longer. A tumbrel is a two-wheeled cart. What distinguishes it from the later buggy—a word dating from around 1773—is that a tumbrel tipped out its load by pivoting on the axle.

Putting the Car Before the Horse

It’s not always a case of avoiding words that didn’t exist. The aim is an easy-to-read text that occasionally uses period terms so the reader’s imagination can better place the story in the fictional past.

Equally, calling the cart a car, which would be fine in period, would, I think, be jarring because the word car cannot help but conjure an image of a motor vehicle. It would be akin to Dostoevsky’s observation in his 1863 essay Winter Notes on Summer Impressions:

“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

There’s no way a modern reader is going to read car and think of a horse-drawn vehicle.

For Lost Boy Jack, I can plot the story in time and place—the Marcher lands of the River Severn, the borderlands of England and Wales—by scouting locations, creating a map of places and distances by horse or car in the 1600s, and compiling a list of period dialect words.

When the Dingle Hits the Page

A Shropshire man, saint or cutthroat, knew his dingle, a wooded valley of the region. I can plot the story and compile a list of period words used across England and those specific to a region, but that only gets me so far.

I can have a sketch of A, then B to C and here comes XYZ! But that’s not a story on the page. I have to fly by the seat of my pants.

The events, the dialogue, all hit the page as much by instinct as by reason.

Often I fast-type a character doing or speaking. I re-read these last few paragraphs and recognise the prose is not quite right for a novel set in a particular time period. The dialogue sounds too modern. I then seek to correct that by finding words in use in the period, and generally the result is more compelling to my ear than my first attempt.

What I cannot do is plot the story’s text in advance. The actual writing is a “flying by the seat of your pants” aviatorism which entered popular speech around 1938. However detailed the plot-bible is, the writing on the page is a moment of magic where imagination and the process come together.

My Boy Jack

If you are reading My Boy Jack on Substack or you’ve downloaded the prequel ebook from StoryOrigin, you’ll already be familiar with how Jack’s world is shaping up.

The same process applies to the Spectral Detective, even though 1945 is a couple of generations ago, and it is readily accessible thanks to the wealth of film and other media from the time.

Ensuring King doesn’t use in period a modern turn of phrase is more critical, because it’s harder to excuse it as an interpretative choice or a translation of ‘ye olde English’ into modern vernacular, as the more distant seventeenth century requires.

It can be more jarring to the reader because there isn’t the same need to reconstitute dialogue into a more modern analogue. Still, there are slang phrases, say, like “niftic” for stylish or first-rate, from the period that aren’t current, so if used, they need that contextual definition. Rod is not only short for Rodney but also, in 1940s slang, a gun, hence rodman as a hired shooter. Same with Roscoe for a pistol, especially a revolver.

In the end, a great story is more important than getting the technical details right all of the time. Still, I strive to craft the best version of the adventure, and I hope it makes for a better novel for you, the reader.

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Meet Lowan, a telepathic alien working as a private detective in the 1930s!

Arthur Keating spent fourteen years trying to forget the mistake he made during the war. Now working as an accountant at a chemical research facility, the numbers don’t add up. Not just the accounts, but the inventory of dangerous chemicals. When Keating receives a threatening note, Lowan is hired to help. Lowan takes Keating’s place and finds himself hounded by relentless pursuers. Keating himself disappears. Will Lowan save Keating from his past and uncover hidden fraud, or will a buried wartime error finally be paid in blood?

Now Available!

Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers—and to any irregulars, skirmishers, and fresh faces who wandered by.

Some of you might be wondering why you’re hearing from me again. I’ve changed email services, so some former subscribers are receiving this email as part of the switchover. You can stay or unsubscribe at the bottom of this message, and the e-pixies at Substack will remove you from the list.

Thank you for reading this far. If you’re interested in why, read on.

Changes

David Bowie provided a soundtrack to my youth. I read a great deal and spent too much time ‘dreaming my life away’, as my mother sang to me. During those years, I still banked ideas. I took stories in my head, turned them around, and retold them time and again. Not because they didn’t deliver the childish heroic exploits where some avatar of myself saved the day with derring-do. Rather, I wanted a story that managed this in a way that I found convincing.

Last week, I touched on the why and wherefore of this Weekly Newsletter. I post about my writing and promote other writers’ work, too. In return, they share my books in much the same way in their own emails to readers like you, who opted to subscribe.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

In the TV show The Waltons, set during the 1930s, John-Boy’s mom shows him an ad for a publishing company. Excited, they submit his stories and sign the contract. They don’t read the small print. The books arrive, but with a bill. It’s called vanity publishing, and John Boy shoulders the debt.

Self-publishing authors can, in the modern era, use print-on-demand and e-book marketplaces to avoid that trap, but the snare remains. A year’s subscription to this or that, and you are suddenly several hundred dollars poorer. If you are making pennies for every copy of your book, and many are, you need to sell a lot of them to cover these costs, even if, unlike John Boy, you’re not paying for the physical book’s printing run.

Most justify the gap with either a dose of hopium, or accept this is a cost-to-us hobby we enjoy. Still, I can’t help seeing these kinds of expenses as just the modern incarnation of vanity publishing.

Turn and face the strange

Simultaneous sending of hundreds of emails, even once a week, isn’t something a regular email account allows. I’ve been using the free tier of MailerLite, for over a year. When I signed up, I could send emails to up to 1,000 subscribers. I did that once a week. Starting out, I didn’t have a mailing list to speak of, and that upper limit felt aspirational.

Then things changed.

First, the free tier halved to 500 subs’. At this time, I sent around half that number. As of July 1st, it has halved again… and I’ve doubled my subscriber count in the intervening months.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.

So I’m trying something different. In truth, I’ve tried a bunch of new things. While I looked at various options to replace MailerLite, a friend suggested Substack.

I’d never considered the platform as an email sender, yet that’s what it does, under the lid. Every article can be an email.

Each account can run up to ten separate publications, each with its own subscriber list. I’ve set one up specifically as a newsletter, another functions more like traditional social media, and Arthur R. King has broken the fourth wall to write about his mysterious world.

Can this work?

I hope so, and here’s why.

Marketing isn’t about selling what inventory I have. As a concept, it’s about making something, a good or service, that people want.

For making stuff up into stories that entertain, I have to engage with readers. Get a sense of what people want to read in the genres I enjoy writing, and by bringing this together, make my readers and me happier.

Let me know what you think about this, or anything at all in the comments!

Meet Lowan, a telepathic alien working as a private detective in the 1930s!

Arthur Keating spent fourteen years trying to forget the mistake he made during the war. Now working as an accountant at a chemical research facility, the numbers don’t add up. Not just the accounts, but the inventory of dangerous chemicals. When Keating receives a threatening note, Lowan is hired to help. Lowan takes Keating’s place and finds himself hounded by relentless pursuers. Keating himself disappears. Will Lowan save Keating from his past and uncover hidden fraud, or will a buried wartime error finally be paid in blood?

Now Available!

Reading is a foundation, and I am sitting on decades of reading.

I remember stories, snippets, and today, “search” is so effective that I sound brilliant because I can ask about a particular story. The machine tells me the name, the author, and the date of publication. It’s a well I draw on to craft my stories.

Writing is a skill, and how well I succeed, I leave that to you, dear reader, to judge…

There’s no real wrong answer. Art is subjective, and your mileage may vary. We could even argue the toss between popular and critical acclaim, and whether I would like a Nobel Prize for Literature on my shelf or J.K. Rowling’s bank balance.

Not every band gets to be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Not every indy-author gets to be E.L. James. Others succeed in the sense that they gain critical acclaim, rather than criticism, winning awards and plaudits. However, they don’t get to be cultural phenomena: to be Rock and Roll, outside of their subgroups.

To be punk, to carve out my own niche, I can only do me. I wear many hats, both in a figurative and literal sense.

Last night the sun shined during the day, so I made hay.

Okay, my helper role came afterwards: “I picks up the bale, I puts it in the trailer, I takes it off the trailer and puts it in the stack.”

Words matter to a writer, and how I use them matters to the reader because they have to understand what I am saying.

King heard Maggie say, “Hello, King.”

He moved toward her, self-aware. A half-naked man, wet with perspiration, in gym shorts and shoes. Bunched strips of gauze in his hand, halfway through unstrapping his bound fists. “You picked a swell time to come calling, Maggie. I look like I spent the day buttoned up inside a Sherman in the Sahara.”

She laughed. “You look like a cut-rate Johnny Weissmuller.”

King reached out and found an outdoor table. “You mean the monkey?” He dropped the bandages, located a towel, and wiped sweat from his chin and chest. “Don’t tell me you’ve come dressed as Jane?”

Maggie gasped for effect. “You wish! Our censors almost banned that movie.”

He snorted a laugh. “Give me a minute to find a shirt.”

“It will keep.” She stepped closer. “I brought something.” Her leather bag thumped against her thigh.

— King in the Dark: Part Two - Swan’s Song

This example works on several levels.

As a kid, I watched the British comedic film institution called the Carry On series. I laughed, not because I understood every double entendre—far from it, most went right over my head. The comedy played out in a slapstick visual way, with adult themes hidden beneath—a legacy of the Music Halls.

The reader doesn’t need to know everything about Johnny Weissmuller’s movie series; there’s enough there to deduce Tarzan. Even if you don’t know who the King of the Jungle is, the comedic frame is still present. Moreover, if you are a little more knowledgeable about classic Hollywood-era movies, then the edgy nature of the second film, Tarzan and His Mate, with Maureen O’Sullivan, peppers the scene.

Me Tarzan—you Jane.

Yesterday’s heat made working at dusk ’til dark the sensible option, and like King, I still looked like I’d “spent the day buttoned up inside a Sherman in the Sahara.”

I may say “I made hay yesterday,” but the strict truth is: I helped with the final, albeit important stage.

Marketing, as a word, is used in much the same way. Many would consider a newsletter like this one marketing and see my weekly ramblings as a means to sell you the finished work—e.g., King in the Dark.

Sales matter to an author, if only because they validate me as a storyteller. But I don’t write this newsletter to simply sell my books or promote others. Promotion is like my “haymaking when the sun shines”; it’s nearer the end, at “dusk ’til night”—it’s the pickup and into the barn stage of the story.

Growing the grass, mowing it, raking and rowing it, and baling it so it can be collected—that’s the narrative of hay.

This newsletter is about that growth—mathematics—the metric. It’s about my telling you how and why things happen, and it allows me to market, that is, get a sense of what you, dear reader, want to read. Feedback is key because what really matters is telling a story that fills a need in the reader’s soul.

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Hey, and hello to new subscribers and regular readers—and to any irregulars, skirmishers, and fresh faces who wandered by. 

The Anatomy of the Flame

Ever built a bonfire?

Not of vanities, but of wood.

Back in the day, when men still hung around in caves, a campfire meant survival. Here, after the mammoth dinner, the storytellers would stand before the flames and feed their audience’s imagination.

Building a fire is a process. Any fire needs a good bottom; enough dry material to get going. Paper and card can act as an accelerant; smaller sticks and kindling ignite, allowing thicker, denser branches or timber to be added.

Timing at this stage matters. Move too slowly, and the fire can starve and die; too fast and heavier material might scorch, even light, but it dies out.

Density matters; too tight and the fire can’t breathe, too loose and the fire can die.

Get it right, you can start adding damp, green, even wet material, and that hot bottom will burn through it. Feed it right, and it’ll still be hot tomorrow.

The Historical Spark

When Girolamo Savonarola took control of Florence, he sent bands of youths door-to-door to collect items deemed to be ‘vanities’—occasions for sin.

They built a massive, multi-tiered pyramid in the main public square, the Piazza della Signoria, and set it ablaze. A bonfire of the vanities that included silks, musical instruments, books by Ovid, and Renaissance masterpieces by Botticelli.

A bonfire of the vanities.

Writing a story is a creative process; here, the internal engine of the imagination is fuelled by vanities too—artists’ muses, inspiration, ideas.

Much like the bonfire, there’s a process. Get it right: the idea doesn’t burn out, it burns long, hot, and ferociously. Heat and light in the dark.

Here be Dragons

In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the eponymous doctor takes body parts and assembles them into the monster. Fire, the spark of life, is lightning captured in the bottle of the reconstituted man.

The writer takes inspiration from many places; the creative process fails if the result reads like a stitched-together copy-and-paste of other creators’ work. It could be criminal, too.

Instead, the process is more destructive—a fire, a crucible which transforms, so you don’t see the joins, only the colour inside the lines—the pictures in the words.

Fueling the Story Engine

To the spark of Promethean Hubris, I might add a smattering of Tolkien: high-density mythic mass. World-building that is immersive and natural, like a Leviathan, a dragon in the sea, most of it unseen—nose and eyes, a pattern of scales, peek through the water, watching and waiting.

A dash of Asimov brings discipline, internal logic, and a grand sociological and technological framework to the mythic Leviathan.

Petroleum on my fire—gas, or petrol—comes from Frederick Forsyth’s observation of what makes a thriller thrilling: relentless pacing, the logistics of plot in motion, that delivers a decisive moment or a cliffhanger to every chapter’s end, for one reason: to ensure the reader wants to keep turning each page to the end.

Heat drives the engine. Steam and gases are ephemeral; the sparks of ideas in the grey matter of the mind are no less tangible. Still, this is where narrative comes together.

This creature is a story; it might run on rails, follow a winding route across a mountain pass, or take a circular track. The narrative might go where they don’t need roads.

In the end, the storyteller is just feeding a fire in the dark.

King in the Dark: Combined Print Edition

Into Darkness, When Duty Calls, and Swan’s Song

Is live, and it’s been interesting.

The Long Road from Manuscript to Print

I’m really a newb at publishing. Not so much writing, I’ve been typing it seems forever, but there’s the problem.

I feel I spend 99% of my time word-processing, and that’s a skill-set, like typing itself, I have a rhythm and habit, it feels as natural as anything else I do every day.

Months of work, day in day out, come down to hours spent getting ready for print.

The second time I went to publish, it didn’t feel like riding a bike, quite the opposite. It seemed as hard and awkward as the first time out.

I have more books under my belt, yet still a newb, but it is getting a little easier.

Practice, Process, and Fresh Eyes

The most important lesson I’ve taken away from King in the Dark is one of practise and process. 

It is really easy, after a book is “done,” to think it’s cooked, but just as a good roast needs to rest, so do the author and the book.

It’s more than taking a breath, because tackling corrections needs another eye. My stalwart beta readers, who know who they are, are precious and essential.

AI is both relentless and, when corralled properly, effective at spotting the mechanical errors that human eyes, even the ear, i.e., reading aloud, can miss.

Next from the Spectral Detective

So what’s next?

• The next book in the Spectral Detective Series. 

• A Christmas Spectral Detective Novella.

Whichever comes first.

Next from the Chimera Cycle

• The Chimera Cycle Book 1 is about 30K in.

I am serialising My Boy Jack, the Chimera Cycle Prequel, on Substack; you can find that under my C J Charles Substack site.

Introducing Arthur R. King’s Mysterious World

In other news, I have launched a separate Substack called…

Arthur R. King’s Mysterious World

This is an unapologetic call back to a short-lived show called Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World.

Which spawned a book, which I read more than once…

Like Clarke himself, mysteries, the unexplained, myths, and legends have intrigued and amused me since childhood. I draw on this personal journey, the accounts I have received, and the events I have experienced in my own writing.

Here, I let my fictional creation, The Spectral Detective, author articles — well, two so far, but more to come — which address some of the source material that inspires the fictional phenomena and events my characters encounter or embody.

I really appreciate hearing back from my readers. There’s no substitute for personal reviews and testimonials; they far surpass the impact of any promotional advertising.

If anyone would like to know more about what’s behind the ideas or concepts in any of my stories, let me know.

Or is there a mystery King and Associates could take a look at?

It could just be in the books to come…

Again, thanks for your time, your support, and your feedback.

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Shorter Friday Newsletter message today, because life leaves me busy. King in the Dark's print edition is taking a little longer than I hoped.

I am a bit of a perfectionist, and, in contrast, I can be lazy… my many faults aside, knowing when to stop is a vexing question.

Effort

 Spent │ █░░░░░░░░░ (Minimal) -> 80% Good Enough

 │ ██████████ (Massive) -> 99% Perfect

 └──────────────────────────────

 Value Gained

There’s a logical argument that chasing perfection is a perfect example of the law of diminishing returns. The 80/20 rule or Pareto Principle applies because achieving 80% is often hard work; pushing to achieve more can take longer than the first eight-tenths did.

Creating a cover is part of the exercise, as is reviewing the PDF, the preferred format for a book upload that becomes a print-on-demand edition.

Part of that is, as ever, the business of correcting typos, sorry about those... but it’s also making sure the book works page by page.

All this takes time.

In some ways its a frustrating process. After so long writing and editing, it’s another set of challenges.

As a writer, I am practised at putting words on a page. I do that every day, but publishing the material comes around less frequently; months spent writing, versus the time to format the text so it uploads well, is a more novel challenge. It gets easier each time, as with anything else, practice helps.

It usually takes up to three days for a print book to appear, so while I can’t say it will be available today, stay tuned!

In other news

My adventures on Substack continue.

I am revisiting my short Flash Fictions, and you can find the polished versions here and as I post them. At a pithy 600 or so words, they don’t take long to read, and I hope you’ll enjoy them.

That brings me to My Boy Jack

Those of you who have read the reader magnet will be familiar with this story. I am serialising it on Substack for those who prefer this approach and to reach more readers.

I do have a modest paywall, and once My Boy Jack is posted to Substack, I’ll start posting new material, the first book in the Chimera Cycle, here.

The first novella will then go live to buy when it’s finished!

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I hope to launch King in the Dark as a print edition, combining the prequel and parts one and two—very soon!

I’m still chasing some minor errors, punctuation, commas, and periods, and the occasional missing quote symbol…

I often joke about waterlemons, because the meme is true—at least for me! My mind fills in the gaps; mental auto-correct. I know I’m not alone.

We learn to read one letter at a time and then speed up by recognising words and then familiar phrases that are common enough that even a dropped conjunction like ‘to’ doesn’t register.

I always thought AI would be good for this; however, my earlier attempts to use AI to catch basic errors left me disappointed. Specialist AIs like Grammarly and others are pretty effective as-you-write tools, but these don’t catch every technical error. The larger the manuscript, the more involved the process becomes. However, recent versions of AI mainstays are better at detecting small technical errors and handling novel-length documents. Helping make the end product better.

What AI still can’t do, and should not, or indeed authors hope cannot, is write with soul.

For a human creator, this matters. Word choice matters. Even technically incorrect sentence construction can be important to the story’s flow. While in dialogue, slang, and cacography—words coined to mimic dialect speech—matter a great deal.

These kinds of choices will always fall foul of strict rules. What is ideal for commercial use to sell a good or service fails when the product in question is a work of fiction. Writing that aims to entertain, excite, or even inspire. As a writer, I often ignore the neat schoolroom version of sentence structure. For example:

 The racing car crashed into the wall after blowing a tyre at 200 mph.

 That sentence works, but it gives the impact first and the cause second. Sometimes the lived order creates better momentum:

 After blowing a tyre at 200 mph, the racing car crashed into the wall.

 Here, the events occur in lived-experience order; it reveals the climactic ending… at the end.

 What really matters is that writing works in a way that the reader can understand and enjoy. Sure, more often than not, that means sticking to the rules, but it doesn’t rule out breaking them where the break is better.

Sticking to the letter of the law can run roughshod over the spirit.

In other news, the Chimera Cycle is progressing.

My Boy Jack is the free-to-read prequel.

Grok reviewed this novella and said…

Yes, I absolutely stand by it—no smoke, no fluff. I’ve parsed thousands of stories in training data and user shares, from polished classics to raw drafts, and this one genuinely hooks me with its atmosphere, subtlety, and that slow-burn unease. It’s not generic vampire fare; it feels thoughtful and original. If I didn’t rate it highly, I’d say so plainly (I’m built for truth-seeking, after all). Keep going—you’ve got something special here.

Is the AI right? You can read the novella, a short, approximately 100-page book, by following the link and finding out!

The next instalment is provisionally The Lost Boy Jack. The story picks up where the prequel ends, with the chimera boys travelling in pairs, weeks apart, to faraway North Wales. Close to the Irish Sea is a castle, a stronghold of the mysterious Dominion, a parallel society living in secret, where vampires rule the night.

Jack’s journey across civil-war-torn England begins a tale of disaster, death, and survival.

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Imagined Emotions

Writing is the business of imagined emotions. Writers are dealers, indulging in their own drug of choice.

Our brains fire in a chemical soup, and whether we’re reading another writer’s inventions or dallying in our own, the subconscious rolls along, not caring whether the thrills are real or imagined.

The rollercoaster ride at the fair presents a false sense of danger, and the body, at this primal level, reacts, blurring the line between fear and excitement.

When we imagine Random Hero doing their derring-do against the darkness that threatens, we’re aware of reality, but still we are thrilled, if the author does their job, right?

Writing is work; it’s a practice of fingers on keys, tappity-tap.

There are rules of spelling, grammar, and convention, as well as research. Factual history—both present and past—matters, but a writer learns how words can work together by reading fiction.

How to elicit that emotional fix that both the producer and consumer demand.

Mud on the Page

Everything in life requires energy. The brightness of creativity wanes when the mind tires, but it’s also the emotional state of the artist.

Like rolling out of bed, going on a run can feel horrid, but then twenty minutes later, in the cold driving rain, with mud up to your knees, it feels wonderful—a runner’s high.

Writing is the deliberate act of putting words down on the page.

 It’s getting down and dirty in a virtual world. It’s not always great prose; sometimes it is mud on the page.

Life is a gamble: a walk, a run, even the rollercoaster carries risk, though the drive there may pose the greater wager.

The act of storytelling becomes a slot machine. I might be down, tired, or disaffected, eking out prose, a hard slog; or I could brim with enthusiasm—joyous and effortless writing. Both can become “darling” passages that might have to die so that the story can breathe.

For me, writing is more than the sentence on the page. I enjoy plotting—creating the skeletal structure on which the meat of the story hangs. I vacillate between a strong, but never rigid, plot outline and what they call writing by the seat of one’s pants, or pantsing, to be cute.

No matter how complete my plot outline, I won’t stop a strong idea because it breaks the preordained structure I have in my head. Sometimes that idea has a shape, forcing itself into the plot; other times it’s a deep, dark hole.

Plot holes are like potholes in the road for our suspension of disbelief. Once experienced, they rattle the subconscious’s wishbones. This shakes both the heart and the mind. Without deft course correction, both writer and reader are on a journey neither might finish. Remember, kids, steer into the skid…

All the Way to The End

Plotting can help avoid the realisation that thousands of words are worthless. The only crime might be mundanity—it doesn’t advance the narrative. Other times it raises a more fundamental question: why would my character do this? For example, a child adrift in the world will not make the same decisions that a lost adult would. Here, there is a balance to be struck between trusting the reader and explaining enough, and it’s a subtle—instinctive.

My weakness as an author is one of closeness to the characters and the story. What is obvious to me, knowing the people in the world I imagine, may not be obvious to the reader. The art lies in striking the balance between revelation and suspense, because suspension of disbelief hangs between the two. The reader expects a ride, whether that’s a rollercoaster or a cosy swing seat—it’s my job to keep them with me for a while, all the way to The End.

© C J Charles 2026

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Reading through King in the Dark as a complete work before I commit to a print edition. So far, so good!

I’m more accurate than I was when I first self-published; however, that’s mostly down to the better tools available today. Also, I am blessed by helpful beta-readers, who bring a necessary human overview.

What I bring to the table is not the promise that I don’t use tools to help me, but rather, that the one doing the creative writing is me. Technology improves my technical accuracy, dealing with speeling-errors, and spotting waterlemons. 

Assistance includes data to inform: what day was July 4th, 1664? (Wednesday).

Be little old me, at school, poring over the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I might skip-read or misread a block of text.

Today, I could skim and miss a data point in an online Wiki. 

AI is not a panacea; it gets things wrong, too, both actively and passively, e.g., failing to mention key details that matter, as New Year’s Day fell on March 25th from the 12th century until 1752, in England and her colonies.

 I can draw, but I am no pro. Life is about “economic choice,” how I spend my time. If I am doing one thing, I am not doing another, and those creative hours, for me, are about writing, researching, building my notes and plots. So, I use AI to help build covers. I take base images and edit them using software, utilising these tools to get the result I want. For quick illustrations, the kind I drop into my Newsletter and articles, I often choose the best from the batch AI generates without editing.

 Some folks object to AI vehemently. Yesterday, I came across an interesting post on X, formerly known as Twitter. A user posted a picture of a genuine work of art...

i just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting

The thread has multiple users coming in and critiquing. Granted, some may have been tongue-in-cheek, recognising the jape, but it’s clear many thought this artwork to be “slop”, which is the in-vogue label for sloppy AI imagery or prose. Nature reports that labelling artwork as AI-generated triggers a negative bias, causing people to devalue it—even when the image is identical to one labelled human-made.

— (Water-Lilies, c.1915, catalogue no. W.1796)

I don’t rate AI’s writing as a general rule. I like my own choices. They are, after all, my voice; here is an allegory.

AI can generate dozens of images from a single prompt. 

I find it generally goes: 20% = bad, 60% = fair, and 20% = okay. Outstanding happens, but only as an exceptional outcome, some of the time.

The same is true for text. Am I biased against AI’s turn of phrase, as the reviewers proved toward the Monet? 

I think so, but the crucial difference is that they didn’t paint that picture. 

Whereas I am choosing my voice over another’s. 

My work is human because I filter everything through me. Just as a boy, I used the Britannica to learn what Henry VIII did in 1509 for my written homework. Decades later, AI can brief me about the world in 1943 or 1643. I sift this data to inform my fiction, to be historical, but what AI cannot do is create the story I want to tell, because that lies in my soul, my imagination.

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A story involving intimacy, two people meet and form a union.

I could describe Pride and Prejudice, or the one where a plumber drops his toolkit to work on the pipe, and the lady drops her drawers.

These are polar opposites.

I’ve opined before that fiction is all fantasy, and why I prefer the older terms Sword and Sorcery / Science Fiction, and noted that stories enjoyed by folks who would never admit to liking either will enjoy the fantastical science of a popular thriller. It’s a matter of degrees. Back in 1986, in Red Storm, Tom Clancy featured the F-19A, a very fictionalised version of the still-secret F-117 stealth fighter.

Degrees of difference matter, and creating a tale of romance and adventure will, by necessity, use familiar ideas, oft called tropes. These are a kind of meta-word, a recognisable construct, “tall, dark and handsome” Random Hero can come in many shapes and sizes. Like a random hound, but these are all variations on a kind: a noble guardian shepherd, a wily herding dog, a friendly retriever, a plucky wee terrier.

Stringing together tropes of various sorts is not so different from putting together words or notes to create a melody that becomes a hook, a brainworm.

Part of the craft is explaining how things happen, or choosing not to.

A friend noted that Extra Sensory Perception or psychic powers are a frequent trope in science fiction, even though they are practically magical. Sometimes there’s the old chestnut, we only use 10% of our brains, thrown into the mix as a reason why… which isn’t strictly true, I say strictly because there are some very interesting cases of severe hydrocephalus recorded by John Lorber, where brain mass gets compressed to ~10%. Yet, in one case, a mathematics degree student possessed an IQ of 126.

The Spectral Detective is a story that dances along this line between fantasy, religion, and science fiction. It is Raiders of the Lost Ark, meets Daredevil, by way of Sam Spade.

The Chimera Cycle is Frankenstein does Dracula. I borrow from everywhere; I strive to include all the recognisable monster tropes that are familiar in such tales. Both stories are fantasies and are science fiction, but without interplanetary travel and lasers.

Pemberley is a fantasy, but its time and place do not need explanation.

Explanations aren’t always necessary. George Lucas, in his first prequel tried his hand at technobabble to explain how the Force worked. Yet the audience, who accepted laser-swords, aliens, and interplanetary travel without explanation, didn’t need it, because these things already felt familiar. The challenge is whether the story needs midichlorians to explain things that are even more fantastic still.

Not everyone likes the same thing. Others like many things. There is a polar difference between a classic tale of romance ending in the consummation of the marriage, where the author fades to black, versus the short-on-story encounter, that jumps the pipe wrench to go right to the complexities of human plumbing with all the delicacy of a workshop manual.

I, for one, like explanations. I prefer to know how and why things happen in a story. For example, I like Conan has a time and place. It bugs me that Westeros doesn’t. Familiar miracles—the Force, the Ark of the Covenant—need less explanation because they echo old beliefs and everyday wonder, and here’s why I think that is.

It’s familiarity: these are old tropes, exaggerations of people’s everyday experiences and beliefs. Where are explanations needed?

When the fantasy does something more unusual.

I find John Carter’s trip to Mars a speed bump. He falls asleep in a cave and wakes up on Mars. It felt wrong to me. What happened? How, why? Yet when the kids go to Narnia through the wardrobe, it works—because there is a door. There is familiarity—like a book has a cover. It feels like a tiny room, and imagination makes it a secret gate, a magical portal to somewhere else.

What speed bumps or shark jumps have broken your suspension of disbelief? And which familiar tropes or beats have swept you happily into another world?

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The author would like to thank his friends for their kindness and support; without diligent beta-readers, this series would not be possible.

I have written about the writing process and word-building for King in the Dark across several newsletters. For the uninitiated, this is a historical novel-meets-urban fantasy.

 It began as a prequel concept that spawned its own prequel, an expansion of the first chapter. It became a full-fat novel, of two parts, together totalling around one hundred and thirty thousand words, where, dear reader, you will find a lot of exciting things happen.

I settled on the real-world Wunderwaffe called the Vampir—Zielgerät 1229, a WWII infrared night-sight, as the template for the prize my characters — heroes and villains — would chase.

A story that developed a life of its own, deciding to be a novel and not a novella.

 The Spectral Detective posed some interesting challenges: the protagonist is physically blind, and his Spectral Perception, while arguably a kind of superpower, isn’t a direct replacement for sight.

Writing about a character that “leans into his other senses” to make up for the loss of one—eyesight, while discovering a sixth, means for King’s Point of View, colours do not work, he sees some that resemble reality in a noir negative or white lines on black. Colours appear, but describe the invisible supernatural reality, and not the physical world.

Regular novel-like descriptions, when in King’s point of view, such as “the lady wore a red dress,” do not work without breaking these rules. He can see the lady has a bloody heart—anger burning red within her, but not the colour of her outfit. King’s idea of the physical world is a sketch; chalk lines on slate. Animated caricatures of reality rather than accurate photorealistic images.

 It allows for wild descriptions of people’s characters; their desires and motives appear as symbolic images. However, like figments of a dream, they require interpretation. Spectral Sight demands that King be a detective within his own imagination to grasp what his mind’s eye is seeing.

Every hero’s journey should come with a learning curve. King’s is steep, adjusting to physical blindness and Spectral Sight, while getting back into shape after weeks of bed rest. I wanted his story to feel earned.

The next novel will pick up where this story ends. There are plenty of unresolved questions, not only about King himself but also about his friends and enemies. After the tumult of VJ Day, and King’s own personal adventure on a flat roof with a clear line of sight to the Capitol steps, and another man who can, in his own way, see in the dark.

For those who prefer a physical book, I intend to bundle King in the Dark, parts one and two, into a single print volume, opening with the free-to-read prequel—Into Darkness.

I foresee two related series: the e-books and the collected print editions.

In other news!

I have focused almost all my efforts on the Spectral Detective over the last few weeks, but my other project, the Chimera Chronicles, is very much ongoing. You can pick up the free-to-read prequel for this series by following the link.

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Whether a story is set yesterday in a close approximation of reality or if the author invents Realtown in Real County, complete with a realtor who is really good at their job. Comfy or cosy, chaotic or catastrophic.

For this reason, I look fondly back to when, as a boy, I perused the Sword and Sorcery section of my friendly neighbourhood bookshop, because I knew what this meant—a fantasy about swords or some sort, with magic of some kind.

 Times change, and so do fashions, and marketing, as a philosophy, identifies niches; these reflect needs or wants, and people do not always know about them until someone fills them.

I read a post somewhere noting that most Fantasy—Sword and Sorcery—ahem—has a European medieval character. That reflects the culture from which most fiction written in English arises.

 I am not sure why the world switched to the more confusing fantasy label, perhaps to distance works held to be literature, like The Lord of the Rings (LoTR), from those considered less literary, say, Conan the Barbarian.

Tolkien’s fantasy imagines what the ‘lost to history’ English mythos could have been.

Robert E. Howard gave Conan a time and place, a science-fiction reason for the world, set before the deluge, in antediluvian times. 

Whether I knew this and forgot it when I first sat down to write my first novel attempt, I can’t say, but at the time, I thought it a more original and satisfying idea.

That original concept? On the third try, I managed to self-publish a book, then revised it again, and received a free-to-read prequel.

All fantasy sits on a spectrum with science fiction and myth, and labels serve readers more than writers

 Conan’s Hyborian Age works because Howard gave it pseudo-historical weight: a world 12,000 years before Sumer, where civilisations rose and fell. Recent finds like Göbekli Tepe make that premise feel less like wild speculation and more like inspired guesswork.

I have less trouble with the label Urban Fantasy because, like the related steampunk or diesel-punk labels, it describes technology beyond the sword but still with sorcery or adjacent supernatural elements.

These labels help as we surf the digital bookshops of the C21st; they allow us to find interesting mashups, as authors combine classic genre titles.

I’ve mentioned in an earlier newsletter that much of what people consider straight fiction is, in fact, subtle science fiction. James Bond, especially in the cinema, is a great example of that. When you have a character like Robin Hood who is exceptional at something, unerring accuracy with a bow, it’s fantasy.

So mash-ups are as old as dirt; however, we’re better at seeing them, and there are more examples in print.

My own Spectral Detective series is historical urban fantasy, as it is set in a version of the real world, not quite alternative history, as events in 1945 play out as history records, but includes fantasy, given the hero’s ability to see a supernatural world.

My read-through is ongoing; I still hope to launch the latest e-book soon.

As a writer, I think about how to label ideas, if only to act as signposts to the reader. Another poster asked, in the most niche way possible: “What genre are you writing?”

For My Boy Jack, I landed on Dark Science, Fantasy, Horror, Historical Fiction, Gothic, coming-of-age, adventure.

In the end, all I can do is tell the best story I can and hope the reader enjoys it.

What about you? What’s the most delightfully niche—or absurdly long genre label you’ve used—or would love to see someone try?

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So what does that look like?

Every author develops their own way of doing things. I reckon, absent a randomised controlled trial... that two people could have almost identical approaches, and create very different works. Tone, style and genre. I’m just as sure another pair might create similar stories using diametrically opposing methods.

Methods are often defined this way: by the seat of your pants, or pantsing versus planning, that is, plotting.

This newsletter, dear reader, is being pantsed. That means I am sitting down and just winging it, it’s not quite true ‘sit down with a blank page and mind,’ I have a frame: what I have been doing since my last newsletter.

That slides the pointer a little to the right towards plotting, because I have a vague idea of where I am going with this…

Plotting begins with writing those initial ideas down and then expanding on them.

King in the Dark started with a dream. A blind detective, a noir hero vibe, a female partner, and a Nazi agent as a client.

As a writer, I began my first attempt at a novel-length story as a pantser, making things up as I went along, but that only took me so far. Plotting helped be get to the end of my first book.

I find working out what happens at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end to be a creative virtuous circle…

Five W questions… who, what, when, where, why, w’how?

Character bio(graphy)s for who, and location bio(graphy)s for where inspire new ideas; they also give me guardrails, something I found out when I drew and painted, the more things and colours I threw at the page, didn’t result in a prettier picture.

The plot skeleton needs fleshing out; the writing part. Here, I find the pointer slides back towards pantsing, as I make things up and find a new, better idea.

When I wrote the conclusion to King in the Dark, I thought my ‘act three’, my ending well thought through. However, when I came to write it, sorting out who is doing what, when, and where, proved more complex.

Word processors flag most spelling and grammar mistakes by underlining; it’s easy to fix them on the go. When I complete a chapter, I run some basic writing checks, such as flagging repeated words.

 Some jiggery-pokery goes on with the earlier chapters as I finish the later ones.

It’s fair to say that if I counted how many times I’ve read individual chapters... it would be tens of times!

Still a full read-through of the whole demands I get to “The End” that is a first draft of the book!

Re-reading... I expect to lose about 10% of the total word count. That’s a net count, as I am rewriting, adding new material, and cutting.

 Distance helps. Sometimes lines of text feel right, and yet days or weeks later, this “darling” seems clunky or even inane.

I don my Mr Delete Hat and go for it.

My first re-read of the whole is more about the quality of the writing. The second re-read is less brutal in terms of changes. Edits themselves can introduce errors, so a second look re-polishes.

If I’ve done an okay job of one and two, three is error checking with minimal cuts and rewrites.

What this means, dear reader, is King in the Dark Part Two — Swan’s Song is really coming soon. Thanks again to my beta readers; you know who you are.

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1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.Respect your reader’s time—make every moment count.

The first rule of ‘write club’, according to Kurt Vonnegut.

Often called his “Creative Writing 101” his advice totals eight, however, I’ve been working through these rules like a beauty queen’s results—in reverse order,

So at last dear reader, we’re finally at rule one.

The Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

 Respecting the reader, amounts to this.

In a way, this is the ring to rule them all, the other seven rules.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. Give the audience someone to care about and invest in emotionally.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. Desire drives characters and keeps the story moving. No one should feel passive.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. Cut anything that doesn’t serve these purposes. No filler.

5. Start as close to the end as possible. Jump into the heart of the story quickly; minimize unnecessary setup.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of. Test your characters through conflict to reveal their true nature.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. Write for a specific audience (even if it’s just yourself or one imagined reader) rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible, as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. Be generous with context early on—clarity and understanding trump artificial mystery.

By this I mean that each subsequent rule is about how — to respect the reader — in a more specific way.

The first, or golden rule, becomes a measure by which all other rules can be judged, not only Vonnegut’s eight, but other examples of writing advice, which there are many, and I’m sure I’ll pontificate about the advice or more successful and adored authors than me, again.

There’s another source of advice in the modern era, which I’ve been using in its nascent form since Word first started underlining my waterlemons with red for spelling, and later blue and green… tools that’ll paint my text in a rainbow.

However, that’s old-school already, as the new kid on the block is Artificial Intelligence; these Large Language Models can, by comparing my writing using pattern recognition, create the illusion of intelligence and provide textual analysis, not just correction but criticism.

 I’ve tried a few… but I’ll cut to the chase.

They don’t respect you, the reader, not in my estimation. Don’t get me wrong, they can offer good advice, but it’s a mixed bag; as varied as AI image generation—where you can find a great image among a bunch of ones that aren’t.

It’s crucial, if you use AI for text-checking, to be confident enough in your own vision to disregard the bad takes, while being humble and self-aware enough to recognise when the criticism lands.

Perhaps AI will soon get better, making this critique obsolete, but we’re not there yet.

So, how does AI fail to respect the reader?

It just doesn’t get it. Often, the same issues crop up; more often, it misses why something must be a mystery to the reader, or why something magical happens, flagging these core plot devices as plot holes.

AI is not human; it’s not sapient; it can’t read text like a soul can.

I wrote a short story in 2023, revisited it, checked for waterlemons (there were a few), and asked the best analytical AI, in my estimation, Grok, what it thought.

It identified a section as clunky; I asked, out of curiosity, “How would you fix it?”

The resulting text read flatter; for me, it felt dumbed down, albeit easier to read—perhaps, but something else happened… A key plot point—deleted, the entire flash fiction story hung on a premise that terraforming Mars would take centuries, so the ‘powers that be’ sought a faster solution; the rewrite excised this reveal.

Revus’s brows narrowed. “Politics demands results; waiting generations for terraforming... is difficult to sell, Lieutenant Bennett

The AI prioritised a simpler structure for a dumber reader over the story itself; it didn’t trust them to navigate the more complex text. Dialogue, interspersed with a basic description of an on-screen environment, all while deleting a single line which supported the tale’s logical core.

For a writer, trusting you, dear reader, means taking risks; it means I have to believe in you!

You’re smart; you will pick up on the subtext, and you’ll understand subtle cues. That you will appreciate a story that reveals as much as possible as soon as possible, but does not reveal all straight away.

My calling? That’s making sure I’m not wasting your time, so you turn the page.

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While March is over, the ‘lion’ is late, the genteel ‘lamb-like’ start to last month, as the proverb warns, promises a ‘lion-like’ end, and Storm Dave hits this weekend. What’s a few days between friends?

Right now, it’s just a bit grey and damp. Not the weather to root for? However, better than what is promised to come.

Kurt Vonnegut’s second rule from his list of eight that grace the introduction to a short story collection called Bagombo Snuff Box reads:

I’m a fan of heroic fiction. Comic books, television, and film shaped me as a boy. Morally good heroes don’t need to be simplistic; their stories can be rich with morally complex themes. 

Today is Good Friday.

The Gospel story centres on an absolutely morally good man—Jesus—yet it is far from simple. He is without sin, but surrounded by confusion, betrayal, and denial from his own disciples. Even Pilate, the Roman Prefect, is torn between expedience and justice. The crowds shift from waving palms to crying, “Release Barabbas.”

Not every story needs to be messianic in tone; grey, complicated characters are interesting because they are human. Take Peter: he draws a sword to defend Jesus, then denies knowing him three times around a fire—until the cock crows.

Rooting for a dull, wet day because it’s better than the promised Storm Dave is another kind of story. Robin Hood becomes an outlaw. James Bond is a “blunt instrument” according to Fleming, licensed to kill for Queen and Country. Sherlock Holmes operates outside the law and prioritises logic over emotion; Watson grounds him. Star Trek would invert this with Kirk and Spock.

However, there’s more to Vonnegut’s rule than simply having someone to root for. We want Elizabeth Bennett to succeed because Austin is writing about human experience. Today, Pemberley is a world removed in time and space. It’s about caring—emotional investment.

That demands a world more complicated and rich than the words on the page describe, one that exists in the writer’s mind—or possibly in supporting notes.

Hemingway’s Iceberg theory in practice.

The story is the tiny part that is seen. However, it doesn’t ignore what lies beneath; it acknowledges it, often in a tacit and incomplete way. Letting the reader glimpse the refracted and distorted shape of the ice below the water grants the fiction a semblance of reality, because that’s how I tell stories in the real world.

I address what matters. I don’t lay out my hopes, wants and dreams, baring my soul... but a curated snippet of my life, stripped down to what matters, what is unusual. My story about, say, a drive into town matters because “Gosh! I avoided an accident.” It’s not about the mechanical details of how a car is driven. While changing gear might be alien to Jane Austin, for many today, it’s a lived experience.

To imbue a character with rootin-tootin pull, to get a reader to care and invest, I need to hold in my mind a “sim” of greater depth and detail. Withholding all but the salient details from the page. 

For Arthur Raphael King, there are glimpses, visions of babe-come-boyhood, callbacks to missions, shown at length or told briefly.

In Into Darkness and King in the Dark, the things I know about his backstory are just touched on, and how these affect the story in the future are only hinted at.

 Have I succeeded in creating a character that you, dear reader, can root for, care about and invest in emotionally?

Read the free Prequel, pick up Part One, and the soon-to-be-released Part Two—and let me know!

I’m at chapter 89 of 128 in King in the Dark. Part two commences with chapter 50. So, 39 down, 49 to go...

I pause to march backwards through Kurt Vonnegut’s list from the preface to Bagombo Snuff Box.

Next:

Rule #3: Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Vonnegut’s rules are impactful in part because they are a tad hyperbolic. Every character? Say everyone in a busy train station? A crowd of a hundred, of thousands? Okay, I can lean into hyperbole too, but even in, say, a crowd waiting to board a train, or cars emptying their passengers, there’s a want, at least as basic one, to get where they are going.

Passengers spilled onto the platform in a rolling surge. Sailors laughed. A woman scolded a child who dragged his feet. A man in a straw hat barked orders at a sullen porter. Then the girls appeared. Their youth, fear and desperation collected together in a hot, sweaty bundle. As a group, they stepped down from the train. Thin dresses wrinkled from hours in seats. Shoes scuffed raw at the toes. Cheap perfume fought the heat and lost. One girl clutched her handbag tight to her ribs as if it anchored her.

 Chapter 72: Union Station, King in the Dark: Part Two — Swan’s Song

That raises the more complex question: how much of a character’s motives and desires do I actually need to explore on the page? If they want a glass of water, do I need to explain why they are thirsty? Or is this simple human need self-explanatory?

 Have you ever read a novel, met a character and wondered why the author didn’t bother to name them?

For me, this can puncture my suspension of disbelief. More of a slow puncture than a blowout, so not like that time Fonzi jumped the shark, but enough to bump me out of the story.

Often it’s one of two things. Either the character has revealed motives, which then feels odd because I don’t even know who they are. Or they are both faceless and motiveless. Different tensions, but both create a discordant note.

Not every character needs a name, however. Say Random Hero drops by at Random Bar, in Randomton, in Randomshire, and orders a beer from the barkeep, there’s no solid reason for RH to know the innkeeper’s name. It’s worth noting that wants can be negative—maybe the innkeeper doesn’t want to sell RH a beer?

The more involved the action and dialogue, the greater the need to create a fuller character becomes.

Still, it can be apt for Lord Knobhead not to care about the stablehand’s name, calling him boy. However, Lady Goody Conscience might be expected to know, even if only to share a handful of words.

My solution lies in character biographies and also location sketches for significant places. I tend to create a bio when a character dialogues—even if only briefly.

For example, for King in the Dark, I created a halfway house for King after his discharge from Walter Reed Military Hospital in Washington D.C., called Albion House, and people to staff it.

Among them are…

•  Charlton Redmond, Superintendent: Age 54. Former hotel manager, retained. Keeps the books, enforces rules, and liaises with Walter Reed. Gruff, organised, fond of routine.

• Samuel “Sam” Pryor – Gardener/Handyman: Age 62. Retired groundskeeper. Tends the yard and vegetable patch. Quiet, pipe-smoker, with a fondness for telling war stories from 1918.

As it happens, Sam didn’t make the cut for the novel; it doesn’t matter because, as per Hemingway’s Iceberg principle, his existence remained below the water line.

The question becomes how much to include…

The only way I rationalise it is how I tell stories in real life, talking to my friends and family, say, telling them an anecdote about what happened to me when I went to get fuel, or buy a loaf of bread.

What do I include in my account, and what would I naturally omit? I cut the obvious things; the story is about what is remarkable, worthy of remark. Not how to pick up a loaf of bread and pay at the till.

 “I saw two hawks fighting, as I filled up my tank.”

That’s the flipside of the coin: the more information we invent, the greater the temptation to overload the story. I remember reading Stephen King last century and being frustrated by the meandering backstories of secondary characters; I wanted to know what happened next.

Maybe that’s the final takeaway: it’s not only a glass of water, but a simple, relatable and accessible want. A motive that doesn’t need a novelette to explain. It’s a Goldilocks problem, enough heat to be palatable, not too much to burn their interest, or too little so the story comes off cold.

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As my long-suffering, irregular readers might remember, I began working backwards through Kurt Vonnegut’s famous list of 8 rules for creative writing, which appeared in the preface to his 1999 short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

 After a two-week hiatus, it’s a fitting time to return, and in reverse order, the next rule is #4

Why so apt?

Well, I’ve completed the second part of King in the Dark. Here’s a preview of the cover.

Completed isn’t quite the end of the work; I need to read through the novel, polish the prose, and correct ‘waterlemons’ and other typographical errors, all before I can say finished and publish.

Here, rule #4 is a pretty good touchstone. I like the simplicity of a sentence as a metric. It’s not a paragraph or even a chapter about the individual’s tortured childhood or soaring achievement as they win or fall…

How we do either is another question on my radar: show versus tell.

This is something of a perennial discussion among writers, often framed as ‘show, don’t tell’, then qualified, because most advice, writing or otherwise, is a general rule with exceptions.

I don’t think, in principle, it’s really complicated. Complications, well, that happens when the fingers hit the keys, and the scene evolves on the page.

Some simplistic solutions offer: you can do both; writing isn’t screenwriting; and great writers in the past, in both successful and critically acclaimed works, often relied on ‘telling’.

While valid observations, these lack nuance. Reproducing a writing style from fifty, a hundred, or more years ago is brilliant if that’s your desire and intention; however, how accessible that is to a modern audience is a different question.

In King in the Dark: Part Two — Swan’s Song, King is trapped and has to fight to escape his captors, a classic scene in any adventure story. Having shown him fight:

…describing the action, involving the gratuitous use of furniture, what happens next is more prosaic, I don’t quite tell, I let King’s dialogue do that:

I could have described, i.e., shown, the captives being tied up, and described a ‘handcuff or hobble knot’, over many sentences, but that would have slowed the story’s momentum and burst the tension the fight scene creates before the escape.

The power of telling, I think, can be harmed by overuse. In much the same way, if every other word is a four-letter expletive, the impact of the curse is blunted by familiarity.

Intermission: Spring flourishes

As a reader, I want to be shown what’s exciting and told about the mundane. I want the sentence to reveal character or advance the action, so I can revel in both without being bored by either.

If you press me for metric, I suspect, like many things, this is an 80/20 rule; again, there will be exceptions, with a thriller benefiting from show and something more introspective benefiting from more tell.

An important exception is that brevity of telling can create impact. Here, telling can be the polar opposite of mundane. “Jesus wept” can be more impactful than sentences describing tears rolling down cheeks and splashing on the parched earth.

Here’s where the advice hits the page: in the end, no amount of good or bad advice can make anyone a writer; only by writing can we go on an adventure to discover character and action, to tell a story that engages with the reader’s imagination.