It's all mummy's fault

It's The Starved Blog, March edition!

First, an introduction from a VERY special guest

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For the uninitiated, this blog features a mix of me actually trying to promote my work, (buy it here), random stupid nonsense, and semi-serious reviews of genre novels. Enjoy!

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Five tips for new writers

Writing is hard. Really hard. Hard as a bastard. Hard as rock, or a wall made of rock, or the ground (depending on local conditions), so I thought I would share my extensive knowledge gleaned from literally months of experience. Hold on to your fillings and prepare your think-meat.

Incoming!!!

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1: Find your own voice.

I can’t stress this one enough, hence it’s first on the list. All the great writers, like Dan Brown, EL James and Stephanie Meyer, have their unique style which makes them them. You might never reach those lofty literary heights, but you still need to find your voice, because unless readers believe they’re hearing from the real you, your work will come across as derivative and utterly, utterly shit. Do however, remember the following:

• never write prologues;

• always ensure your wordcount is consistent with market expectations for your genre (never more than 97.5k words for a first time novel of any genre);

• never use adverbs;

• never include scenes purely for “entertainment value” (EVERYTHING MUST CONTRIBUTE to plot, scene setting or character development);

• never portray characters from demographics other than your own (eg, murderers, ghosts, aliens, people who lived in olden times, future people, attractive people);

• the narrative must never “head hop” from one character’s point of view to another’s (after all, look what a mess Henry Fielding made of Tom Jones);

• only/never (can’t remember which) use “said” as a dialogue tag;

• choose all the bits you like best in your first draft and delete them, then take the worst bits and delete those too (if practical to do so, consider burning down your house as well and starting life anew somewhere else).

2: No one ever got murdered over mere words so smash those taboos!

There are some truths which everyone knows but nobody dares to write. You know the thing I’m talking about. No, not THAT one. I didn’t mean THAT, you dirty little boy, urgh.

But anyway, you shouldn’t be afraid to share difficult truths with the world, because if you don’t, who will? Truth withers in…the light of…something.

Also remember that far away from the dog-eat-dog real world, the internet is a safe haven where people (“netizens”) are famously courteous and happy to enter into debates in a spirit of truth-seeking through the respectful exchange of ideas. Reddit and X (formerly MySpace) are particularly good places for this. No one ever got murdered over mere words, so go for it!

3: Add an air of sophisticated mystery to your work by adding little dots and things to the letters of your name.

The USA and UK are boring as arses, but we all love those classy Europeans. Look at this:

QED.

4: You MUST have a website.

Every author, whether a worldwide best seller or an indie no-hoper like you, needs to have a website for some reason. Setting one up and maintaining it couldn’t be simpler. I won’t go into all the ins and outs here, so I’ll just share my top tip:

• If your DNS is failing to propagate, try forwarding the certificate chain (CNAME or AEG-N0G format) to the URL of someone you trust (ideally someone whose life you have saved at some point), then wait between 72 and 1024 hours for the Dark Host to manifest. Then, simply open a TXT file, type in the phone numbers of everyone you have ever met (remember the number 7 is not allowed unless followed by […]), print it out and throw it as far as you can into a DNNSL security domain control aperture. Wait for the splash, and relax.

5: Blame your parents.

Coming up with stories is hard. Taking responsibility for your fuck-ups is also hard. So why not take the easy way out? Combine your lack of imagination and accountability by exploiting the market opened up by genuinely harrowing tales of childhood abuse, and writing a shitty book in which you:

• trundle out inane stories from your life which only you would ever possibly find interesting;

• catastrophise the normal difficulties of life as some kind of profound trauma;

• diagnose your parents with BAD psychological disorders (probably narcissism and boozing) and blame them for everything;

• diagnose yourself with something or other, probably ADHD;

• make it clear that you are extremely brave and dress the whole thing up as some kind of life-affirming bullshit.

Win win!

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Why do so many ads for self-published romance novels novels look like this?

Like, there’s always a picture of the book in the middle and around the outside there’s curly arrows and a list of weird, super-niche tropes that feature in the book. Admittedly, you’ve probably only seen this kind of thing if you spend too much time on Facebook writers’ groups, like me, but still.

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Balls to the lot of you

I’ve tried to get people to sign up to get a free, advanced copy of my next book, Fear the Seeded Earth, in the hopes that they’ll leave a review when it’s published, but I’ve had no takers, so fuck it. Anyway, I’ve been drafting the blurb and here’s what I’ve come up with:

Fran Gera is a social worker, shackled by her past and an addiction to opiates, with a temper like a whirling pulsar. Two troubled boys are assigned to her caseload, one rebellious and street-smart, the other creative and lonely. Both damaged by rejection and trauma.

Fran doesn't know what The Blueprint from beyond Earth means, because she has little time to consider such things, and anyway, nobody knows. Nobody is allowed to know. What she does know is that a new movement is rapidly growing. People are spurning the hollow diversions of twenty-first century life to join hands, to feel the soil against their naked skin. To commune. Charities and the celebrity bandwagon-jumpers herald the dawn of a utopian environmental movement, but is it something more fantastical and sinister?

As events personal and world-changing collide, Fran must join forces with a jaded ex-terrorist and a harebrained social media edge-lord to keep the boys safe, to take them to a place of safety. They are propelled on a journey into loss, revelation and unspeakable violence.

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Reviews!

Leech by Hiron Ennes

This was right good, and also right up my alley. It’s a very gothic sort of tale about a bunch of decadent weirdos living in a dilapidated castle in some freezing, godforsaken corner of the world. There’s also steampunk vibes. The main character is a parasitic organism which takes over multiple human bodies while retaining a singular identity, sort of. Hard to explain, but it’s very cleverly done. It/he/she is deeply discomfited by the discovery of a rival parasitic organism which threatens to send everything tits up.

Writing from the point of view of a distributed intelligence is no mean feat, I would imagine, and it’s very well done, especially when things start to go awry. It was a bit confusing in places as to what the hell was going on (think stream of consciousness but with multiple consciousnesses overlapping, fighting and dissolving into each other) but the reader is rewarded with very satisfying reveals at key points.

Score: Five infested occipital lobes out of five.

The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy by Arik Kershenbaum

This is a non-fiction book. Yes, that’s right, I do read those occasionally. The title was a little bit misleading, because I expected more fun speculation about what aliens might really be like, but it’s not that, exactly. It’s actually a run down of the basics of evolution and natural selection, with the whole ‘what might aliens be like’ running through the whole thing as a kind of thematic hook. Most of the chapters basically started and ended with some stuff about aliens, with a big chunk of evolutionary theory in between.

It was well written and engaging, and I’d recommend this to any writer who fancies themselves as a purveyor of ‘hard’ sci-fi and wants to write about aliens in a plausible way.

Five appropriate scoring units out of five.

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A new story, just for you (for now)

In a rare burst of productivity I wrote a short story the other week, so I thought I’d share it with you lovelies in serialised form. I might release it as part of a short story collection at some point in the future, but for now it’s exclusive to you subscribers.

It’s called Love and and Other Bioweapons and part one of four is below. If you’d prefer to read it on a Kindle or whatever, this link will take you to a Google Drive folder where you can get it as a PDF or ePub.

Love and Other Bioweapons

1

Row upon row of eyeless larvae curled sleepily in their tiny cells on the vast nursery wall, absorbing nutrient soup through their permeable skins. Batch nineteen—those destined to join the worker caste—was a little cool, so Sci-b30 twisted a dial to increase the cell temperature by a fraction of a degree. After a moment’s consideration, she upped the proportion of phosphates in their intake mix as well. One larva, this one of the scientist caste, had turned a sickly green and oozed with mucous. It could not be saved. Sci-b30 pushed a series of buttons and the larval cell flared with light and heat. The liquid remains were sucked away through a vacuum tube.

Nursery chamber twelve was pleasantly warm and had that homely, oily smell about it. The lights of electronic readouts cast the room in a lambent glow, and the filtration pumps chugged their gentle, familiar rhythm. Busy workers murmured quietly to each other. Sci-b30’s eyes grew moist, the lids heavy. Her antennae drooped.

She jerked in surprise at a touch, then the fleshy petals of her mouthparts quivered in sudden pleasure; a worker plucked spore mites from the bulk of her cephalothorax, right at the back where she couldn’t reach. She arched her thick, muscular neck and made appreciative noises. The final mite released its grip on her with a soft pop, and crunched in the worker’s mouth.

Sci-b30 turned to the worker. “Expected time for next egg batch?”

“Twelve to fourteen days.”

“Why so long?”

“Queen’s ovipositor is slightly inflamed.”

“To be expected, given recent production levels. We hope her discomfort is brief.”

The worker shifted her four stilt-like legs in confusion; the concept of hope was entirely unknown to her.

“Fetch eighteen quarts of iron extract, two of potassium, half a pot of royal jelly,” Sci-b30 said.

The worker twitched her pedipalps in acknowledgement and left the nursery chamber through a tunnel in the floor, down towards the nutrient factories.

Sci-b30 was accustomed to workers failing to understand the nuance of her comments, especially when those comments made reference to more abstract concepts. She was quite aware, in fact, that she was unusual by the standards of her species. By some vagary of genetics and/or environmental factors, Sci-b30 exhibited behavioural and cognitive quirks of a type rarely found in the homogeneity of the hive. True, every sub-hive had its idiosyncrasies deriving from their shared drone-father, but even accounting for that, Sci-b30 was odd. In short, she possessed something akin to a personality.

Members of the soldier and scientist castes (especially those of sub-hive d, for some reason) often treated her a little warily, waving their ear stalks and antennae in agitation whenever she was around. Aside from some incurious bafflement, the workers treated her with the same neutrality with which they treated everything else, including their own wellbeing. The male drones were too busy competing for the Queen’s attention with feats of aeronautics to pay her any heed whatsoever. As for the overseers, there was no accounting for them.

Not for the first time, Sci-b30 succumbed to a strange attraction to the glass observation port. She wandered over and gazed out across Kheprimoon’s greatest savannah, where proto-social tripeds grazed in colossal herds. The gas giant Shui loomed in the evening sky, immortal storms racing across its surface. Silhouetted against the striations of the planet stood the clustered hemispheres of the space observation array. From the observation port, a branch of Savannah Hive could be seen curving down and away, ending in a bulbous pod: the Queen’s chamber. The pod cast a shadow over a copse of trees fifty feet below, where a feathered predator hid, observing the herd with calculating patience.

Sci-b30 was glad her people had maintained the old, slower construction methods, using the workers’ sticky brown secretions to fashion a hive that was organic and characterful. Blue Mountain Hive to the north was apparently constructed from ugly, artificial alloys, all smooth lines and sharp edges. Their dirty transportation machines coughed foulness into the air, and their soldiers even wore artificial armour plating against their very bodies.

A tang of pheromones set her antenna twitching, and was accompanied by the noise of stamping feet, heavy breathing and chittering barks behind her. She turned from the observation port. A group of fifty or more workers were clustered together, twitching in agitation. Pheromones hung heavy in the air now, and the workers’ arousal escalated rapidly. They whirled and leapt, bit and slapped each other, and squirted pale yellow mist into the air. Their vocalisations swelled until the noise was that of torrential rain on metal sheeting, and the larvae squirmed and wriggled in their cells. Sci-b30 backed off; in this state, the workers could be dangerous.

A worker clamped her pedipalps onto another’s cephalothorax and another did the same to her. More and more bodies joined, appendages penetrating flesh in a rampage of connection until the group of workers was a roiling, unified mass.

Gradually the thing stilled, quietened, and every eye, every antenna and every ear-stalk swivelled in Sci-b30’s direction. Every mouth of the great composite beast spoke in unison.

“Ah, Sci-b30, good morning! I’ve got a little job for you.”

The overseer had assembled.

See you next month!