Happy one year of blogging! At least, according to this charge I received from WordPress for a yearly renewal. I suppose that will be a consistent method for remembering this blog’s birthday every year…

Also weird to think, this blog is just a few months shy of being the same age as my baby.

Anyway, in celebration of year 1 being complete, I’ve posted two chapters from The Failed Technomancer: Chapter 6 and Chapter 7! Although, if I’m being technical, the new chapters you now have are Chapters 5 and 7… I discovered that I had initially switched 6 and 5 around when uploading chapters, so if you felt the jump from Chapter 4 to 5 was sudden and jarring, that’s because I accidentally skipped a lot of stuff. It’s all fixed now.

Thanks for being here with me on this journey! I have no idea where it’s ultimately going to go, but I plan on sticking around and writing it out for as long as I can.

Bloggyness Review: Gunmetal Gods

Gunmetal Gods (Zamil Akhtar) is a grimdark fantasy novel (first in a trilogy) where two nations are engaged in a holy war—an Ottoman-like nation and a Roman-like nation. This book has received wild praise in the indie space for how imaginative and thrilling it is, as well as how it blended together a grimdark tone with fantasy cultures based on peoples not often represented in Western literature, and with Lovecraftian story elements no less. (Daniel Greene dedicated an entire video to this one book—which isn’t an outlier in the sense that he reviews a lot of books and dedicates whole videos to them, but is interesting in the sense that not a lot of independently published books get this kind of attention.)

With my own independently published book and a growing interest in that section of the industry in general, I felt pretty sheepish about how long it took my to get around to Gunmetal Gods, but I was really excited when I purchased it. I was aware that the book had a reputation for violence, but I didn’t think there would be anything that would turn me off. Unfortunately, I put the book down about 25% of the way through, and I won’t be coming back.

Gunmetal Gods has breakneck pacing and lots of twists even early on, which helped keep me hooked and interested to see if Akhtar could keep this going the entire book—and, as a fan of Lovecraft-inspired elements in stories, I wanted to figure out where that fit in. But about a quarter of the way through the book there’s a scene where a large number of women and children are murdered, and the way it was handled sat very poorly with me—honestly, I’m rather disappointed with how hard I tried to push through that disgusting scene.

A very quick tangent: I don’t think there’s such thing as a taboo topic when it comes to writing—in the sense that anything should be on the table as an option. Certain topics need to be handled with extreme care to be done well, especially sensitive ones, and just because an author can write something doesn’t mean he should, at least if his goal is to tell the best story possible and stay within the realm of palatability. But just because topics like, random example, genocide are despicable on their own doesn’t mean they can’t be used well in fiction—just look at Lord of the Rings as an example, one of the most iconic stories of all time. The orcs were, essentially, trying to genocide all humans (though it wasn’t framed that way specifically), and it made for and excellent story about good versus evil. If the orcs had just been trying to hug everyone a little too hard, the story would have been much weaker.

So back to Gunmetal Gods, I don’t think the fact that I learned women and children are being slaughtered is necessarily a strike against the book, at least on its face. Two nations that bitterly hate each other are at war, and one nation managed to invade the capital of the other—truthfully, I would find it bizarre if there weren’t a ton of civilian casualties. I would also find it bizarre if not a single person in the family of the invaded nation’s shah were killed or at least injured. After all, a big lesson of monarchy 101 is to kill all possible people with claims to the throne, otherwise you guarantee yourself another war in a few years. So the fact that I learned the shah’s harem (and children) were rounded up and killed was no surprise. If that scene had been delivered to me in another way, it would have done a lot to build my empathy toward the shah and his people and make me despise the invading nation—I might have been even more invested in the book. Instead, that scene was delivered to me directly, slowly, in great detail, even going so far as to describe little children struggling in vain as they were drowned in pools of blood while soldiers hooted and cheered. It was disturbing and excessive.

I’m sorry I said even that much, but hopefully you recoiled at what I wrote. A little excessive, maybe? In poor taste? Comes across as glorifying suffering and violence? There’s a lot of things I can say about that scene, but I’d rather leave it at this: I had a dark, dark feeling trying to read that chapter, I’m disappointed in myself that I read as much as I did, and I felt a weight off my shoulders when I decided I wasn’t finishing the book.

Gunmetal Gods had a lot of potential, but it had a few roaches that weren’t worth eating around.

Writing Updates

My progress in The Betrayed Technomancer has stalled. I’ve hit a writer’s block. Normally my strategy to overcoming a writer’s block is to just push myself through, forcing out as many words as I can until they start flowing naturally again, and it’s worked before. Unfortunately, that wasn’t happening with The Betrayed Technomancer, so I’m taking a break.

Truthfully, I was really close to deciding to leaving the trilogy behind me. I had a hard time writing The Failed Technomancer because of its dark content, and I wasn’t excited about what was coming going into The Betrayed Technomancer. I’ve had a handful of sales, but I am not aware of much of a consistent audience for my book (or much retention), so I didn’t think it would be the end of the world if I decided to shelve the project and focus on other things that made me happier. This also came after some hard talks with my wife and a good friend, which helped me visualize where I want my writing career to go.

Then a handful of people reached out and told me they loved the book and were looking forward to the sequel.

What do you do about that? I did write the book as the first in a trilogy, outlined the rest of the trilogy, published and advertised it as the first in a trilogy, and it feels to me like breaking a promise if I don’t finish.

I’m not sure leaving Robot Cannibal Apocalypse unfinished will ever sit well with me, but forcing myself through at this moment will just result in a poor book, I think. So I’m going to take it slowly, write out new pieces as I get myself excited, and work on other projects as well in the meantime. I think that’s the middle ground I needed. I needed my wife and friend to help me realize that I ought not to be a slave to my projects, but I also needed the unexpected encouragement of a few others to help me recognize that the opposite extreme, giving up, isn’t the best solution either.

I’ll keep updating you as things go along, and I will give more writing updates on my current active project as it develops, but I want to get a little more of the story written before I make too many promises.

Inner Demon is still sitting in the Baen slushpile, and, based on the timelines they gave me, probably will be until at the earliest sometime next year. I can’t help but check once a week, though, on the off chance I get lucky and an editor there started reading it.

Send-Off

Thanks again for sticking around! Have you found any books recently that you can’t finish? Why? Or, if you haven’t, what are your limits that, when crossed, put a book on your DNF list?