This post, I’ll remember to not leave the placeholder “XX” in the subject line.

… I hope.

Halfwhisker, draft 1… I’m declaring done. Strictly speaking, I haven’t fully written my way to the end of the book, but I have the outline written out, and I’m just done with draft 1. Been hammering my head against this for the better part of a year, letting the discovery writer in me go wild, and it’s time for the editor and revisor to come in and instill some order into this chaos—which should make actualizing a satisfying conclusion much easier, once all the ducks I’ve procured out of the aether have been put in a row.

That does mean I will be setting down Halfwhisker for a month or so while I work on other projects (such as the Inner Demon audiobook), in the hope that when I get back to it I will be able do so with newfound energy and enthusiasm.

Also, I have to put a cap on the scope of this project at some point, or I’ll never finish it.

But, as I mentioned Inner Demon, I would like to share another picture of how the cover is going. Eve (the artist) told me this is “pre-rendering,” and also before lots of specific details that I requested—yes, it is unfinished. And I still think it looks really good.

As important as it is for Gnyphe (“knife”), our protagonist, to look good and draw eyes—she is on the cover, after all—for whatever reason I’m most thrilled of all to see Kraw and Tactan realized visually. (Perhaps my greater love for the creatures I’ve made, over the humans, is part of what made writing about intelligent mice so appealing to me.)

Very excited for how this will turn out.

Bloggyness Review—Chloe’s Kingdom

Have you ever read a science fiction novel and thought to yourself, “This is pretty good… but I wish the word burrito were at least 20% of the word count?”

If so, then Chloe’s Kingdom (Gregory Michael) will keep you full and satisfied, my friends. It’s a sci-fi heist novel featuring, as the blurb describes, “six motivated thieves” looking to rob some corrupted government officials and, at least for two of them, get their lives back in the process.

There’s also a raccoon named Mojito. He’s one of the thieves. No, he doesn’t talk; he’s just a raccoon. And he’s a delight.

Here’s the gist of things, before I get into spoileriffic details: I happily recommend reading this book. It’s fast-paced (in part because of chapters that rarely are longer than two actual pages), it has engaging characters that you feel for, it has an interesting sci-fi setting, and the heist so often used to advertise the novel is well-executed, if a less-significant aspect of the story than I had expected. (I felt like the book is a successful example of promising one thing, then delivering something else, but the something else was better, so I was happy.)

Readers giving Chloe’s Kingdom a try should be warned that it has a sequel coming out soon. This is not a warning to not try the book out. It’s understandable that the bad examples of authors like GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss have left a lot of fiction readers gun shy to unfinished series, but new authors need support, otherwise they will never have the resources necessary to fill out their back catalogue and finish a series. No, I share this detail to set proper expectations: while this book has a satisfying conclusion for a first-of, it is not a complete story in and of itself, as it sets up for something much bigger.

As a final non-spoilery note: I personally found the beginning of the book just a little slow, and certain elements of the narrative a bit too obvious or stereotypical—at least, initially. If you find yourself having similar thoughts, know there are some twists at the end of the story that may have you completely rethinking said elements (in a very good way). (I also still enjoyed the story enough to keep reading anyway, otherwise I would not have ended up discovering said twists.)

Now, on with things. In Chloe’s Kingdom, Chloe and her friends live in the Kingdom—a colony ship that has been floating among the stars for generations, looking for a new planet to deposit the remnants of humanity. The Kingdom is a very interesting setting because, as might be expected in space, it is very finite: there’s nothing outside it but the endless void. All right, that’s not a trait any other spaceship wouldn’t have, but, unlike most colony ships, the Kingdom is also significantly smaller than I would have expected. Most people know most everyone else, or at least have loosely heard of them, and many critical jobs within the Kingdom—such as police work—are only handled by a single person. Makes getting away with crime a lot harder when all of your neighbors immediately recognize you and there’s not really anywhere to run away to! The Kingdom is also made up of several distinct habitats that are distinct from each other, despite being in relatively close proximity, which orbit around the “Core” (both an engine and proxy sun for the Kingdom).

The plot kicks off when Mardi, a barkeep with hints of a checkered past, offers several young friends of his the opportunity to become filthy rich by stealing millions of “koin” from Blackworth and Croan—two deeply unlikable, kick-puppies-just-for-fun style of corrupted politicians. These young friends—the story’s central characters—are Chloe, Dutch, and Penny.

Chloe is perhaps the protagonist-among-protagonists of this story (her name is in the title, after all), but without actually tallying things up I’d guess she gets about as many viewpoint chapters as her friends. She, significantly, was born in the “Gardens”—the rich, affluent Kingdom habitat—but the death of her parents resulted in her living as an orphan in the “Honeycombs”—essentially the Kingdom’s ghetto. She wants to get her old life back and she’s willing to risk almost everything to make that happen. She’s smart, tough, and resourceful, and, prior to Mardi’s offer of the job of a lifetime, has spent much of her life in the Honeycombs planning and executing miniature heists for food. (Mojito is her pet, as well as partner-in-crime.)

Dutch is another Gardens character, although unlike Chloe he has spent his entire life in the Gardens. An accident as a child—the same accident that killed Chloe’s parents—cost him one of his arms (now a robotic prosthetic), and left him with a phobia of airlocks and outer space. He is largely motivated by external forces, wanting to win the love and approval of the characters around him—which makes sense, given how absent his parents are, and how cruel his brother can be. Dutch normally serves as the lookout in Chloe’s little heists, but only he can do one of the most important jobs in this giant heist, a job which will require him to brave the void.

The final of the story’s central trio, Penny ties everything together. A native Honeycombs girl, she’s beautiful, brilliant, honest, and kind—and when I say brilliant, I mean masters multiple coding languages and develops the ability to code complicated programs on the spot using multiple languages at once, all in three days levels of intelligence. She often participates in mini-heists with Chloe and Dutch to provide food of actual quality for herself and her mother, although lying and stealing makes her uncomfortable. Pretty much everyone seems to know Penny, and almost everyone who knows Penny likes her. She’s initially opposed to the big heist, but, when a mysterious explosion severely injures her mother, she finds herself in even more desperate need of the money than Chloe.

The majority of Chloe’s Kingdom is spent in the build up to the heist, as might be expected in a heist novel. You get to know the characters better. You learn about what their obstacles are, as well as some of their intended plans to overcome said obstacles. It’s fun and well-done, and very straightforward. Too straightforward, in fact, at times, which is the beginning of the small criticisms I had with Chloe’s Kingdom.

The first of those criticisms is the explosion I mentioned earlier. When Penny initially resisted the heist, I immediately knew that something needed to happen to get her back on board, and almost immediately something blew up and injured her mother, getting Penny on track with the story. It was just a little too easy, a little too… convenient.

Maybe I should have read this as suspiciously convenient. But the story needed to progress, and this serviced that role, so I read on.

The second criticism, Blackworth and Croan make several appearances in the build-up portion of the novel, very effectively filling their role of bad guys to hate. After all, Chloe and her friends can’t be the heroes of this story if they are stealing from good people! Except Blackworth and Croan initially come across as cartoonishly villainous, and somewhat silly. For example, one of their first interactions with Chloe and her friends is an encounter on the street where Blackworth bullies Penny into surrendering a burrito to him, which he immediately throws onto the ground—and then yells at a local street cleaner to hurry up and take care of. It’s a petty flex of power that felt right out of one of my two-year-old’s picture books; I almost expected Allister to start talking about how he was going to make his next few million koins by selling puppies to the circus. The implication that Blackworth and Croan orchestrated the deaths of Chloe’s parents feels less cartoony, but as a background element it doesn’t overwhelm the over-the-top aspects of their on-screen presences.

Again, maybe I should have read this as suspiciously straightforward and obvious. But, again, the story needed some villains, and this serviced the role, so on I read.

My final criticism, a critical member of the heist team is an old man named Eddie. He’s crotchety, he’s unlikable, no one really trusts him, and he’s the only member of the crew with no real personal connections to any of the others. I pretty much immediately pegged him as the link that would ruin the heist, or betray the rest of them. (Which ended up happening, but more on that later.)

Suspiciously straightforward, serviced the role. Gotta have twists.

But, despite my criticisms above, the first half of the story was still fun. If something is done well it doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel—in fact, I usually appreciate it when the wheels on my car work exactly as expected and don’t surprise me in any way. So I enjoyed my read-up to the story’s actual heist, and told my wife that she should read it when I was done.

I was extremely curious how this heist would turn out. After all, there was more page count left than I would have expected by the time I got to the big event, which either meant that this heist—the plan for which read as really simple on paper—would blow up much larger than I could have imagined, or the last third or so of the story was going to take me in an unexpected direction.

The latter, as it turned out. Following an age-old rule of storytelling, reliable for a good reason, the plans that the readers knew about failed, and the plans the readers didn’t know about either succeeded as intended or still got the characters closer to their goals in some way, while adding further complications. The heist itself went by briskly—just a few chapters!—and then Chloe and her friends headed toward home with their loot. (Hence why I see the heist as a smaller, less important aspect of the book than might be expected.)

This was the point where Chloe’s Kingdom utterly shocked me and proved that almost everything I had thought was a little too obvious was a red herring.

Here’s someone I didn’t mention earlier: Jubilee Callisto. When first introduced, she’s a kindly person who provides Chloe and Penny with food and rest. She has a cute nickname, “Joobs.” She’s an adult, a member of the same council that Blackworth and Croan are on, but she’s a good person standing up for the under-trodden Honeycombs. By the third or so time she got real presence in the story, I knew Gregory Michael wanted me to remember this character, so I expected she would either save the girls at the last moment or somehow be involved in their downfall. Maybe she would learn about what was going on and turn the girls in. That something was being built up was obvious, although the what and why were far less obvious than other elements of the story I thought were too straightforward.

That’s when the synthetic auto-built rug was pulled out from under the boots of my spacesuit.

Chloe and her friends were successful in their heist. They were beaten and bruised, Dutch had nearly died out in space. But they had overcome, they were reunited, and they were headed home to Mardi’s tavern to celebrate their winnings and plan their future. They had given everything they could and were about to enjoy the rewards.

That’s when Jubilee Callisto stepped out of an alleyway with Eddie and two hired thugs. She ordered the thugs to beat Chloe and Dutch unconscious, then kidnapped Penny as “insurance.” She also made a few statements that either confirmed or strongly implicated her direct involvement in the deaths of Chloe’s parents, the explosion that nearly killed Penny’s mother, and several other things besides.

Here in summary form, that might not seem like a big deal, but I was genuinely floored. I was totally right that Jubilee was a bigger part of the story than she seemed, and I was even right that she might turn on the girls—but I was so, so wrong about why, and to what level. And her revealed involvement in so many other things that happened completely recontextualized the story. Blackworth and Croan were never the real bad guys to begin with. In fact, they were being played with just as much as Chloe and her friends were.

A very good twist, Gregory Michael. A very good twist. You made things seem obvious. Even painfully obvious. You gave me red herrings that smelled so fishy I absolutely should have wondered what they were covering up, but, as this was a story by an author completely unknown to me, I just thought these were debut novel weaknesses. I was wrong. Well, actually, you let me be a lot right, but still end up twenty percent wrong, and somehow that was an even bigger shock and revelation than if I had been entirely wrong. Bravo, good sir.

Anyway. What follows Jubilee’s revelation is a lot of tense action, a lot of gathering of the troops, and a final confrontation with moments that somehow managed to shock me even further. (Leilan… Leilan! I never expected to love you! Nooooooooo!) And it all ended with a massive cliffhanger and promise for an even more exciting sequel novel.

Go read the book. It’s good. And I have every reason to believe the sequel will be just as good.

Gregory Michael Versus the Woke

Now, I don’t think that books should be judged by their author. That’s not what this section is about. But there is an element of Chloe’s Kingdom that I think is most interestingly discussed in context of events surrounding the book.

Chloe is gay. She’s a teen character who is very attracted to the other teen female lead (Penny), and, as soon as I realized that, I immediately became extremely worried that this story was going to be ruined. Gay characters don’t inherently ruin stories with their presence, but, unfortunately, most modern gay characters feel like forced inclusions, self-inserts, and excuses for their writers to preach. It’s the way of the Woke. Years of this storytelling poison has left me at the point where I just don’t want anything associated with Wokeness to be an element in a book I read, period.

But I found this story element bizarre because Gregory Michael, to my knowledge, was the first author to show integrity of steel by standing up to the woke crowd and withdrawing from the Self-Published Science Fiction Contest (SPSCF—I described that debacle a few weeks ago) over its treatment of Devon Eriksen:

https://twitter.com/_GregoryMichael/status/1886905696572358874

Furthermore, it doesn’t take long, while scanning his X feed, to see that Gregory Michael can’t stand wokeness and isn’t shy about sharing that fact.

Well, instead of ruining his story, Gregory Michael enriched it. Chloe’s Kingdom doesn’t have a single sermon or moment of preachiness in it. Two other characters are essentially confirmed as gay, and Chloe is so clearly and consistently hinted at as gay that in my mind its as good as confirmed, but it’s handled in much the same way any straight character’s attraction would be handled: you can read it from the context, and you don’t need anything more than that. There’s nothing ham-fisted about it. Which is about the same as saying it wasn’t preachy, so maybe I’m beating a dead horse, but it was just so refreshing to get to the end of Chloe’s Kingdom and realize that Gregory Michael was an author who could write a gay character and just treat her as a person, as someone with more traits than gay, whose core identity wasn’t limited to her sexuality. It was nice that he was an author that didn’t derail his story with forced inclusion, but that such elements ultimately felt natural and logical. It was delightful to learn that such people still existed.

But to go a step further, Chloe’s Kingdom would be a weaker story without Chloe being gay—which is a good thing. The story begins with Chloe willing to sacrifice nearly everything to get her life back, but it ends with her willing to sacrifice everything to rescue Penny—despite being highly jealous of Penny’s and Dutch’s attraction to each other. Sure, maybe a similar story with comparable-though-meaningfully-different emotionality would be possible if Chloe was solely really good friends with Penny, but after reading what Gregory Michael pulled off, I wouldn’t want him to rewrite the story that way. It feels very clear to me that he had a story he wanted to tell, that Chloe’s gayness was a part of his vision (a part that he would make intentional use of), and that he worked it in very naturally and meaningfully. In fact, it’s an element of the story that wouldn’t deserve this kind of word count or excitement (particularly from a guy who isn’t interested in reading about gay attraction, even aside from the problematic Woke associations) if we lived in a sane world; but here we are, with insanities like Wisconsin trying to discontinue the use of the word “mother,” instead replacing it with “inseminated person.” In their fiscal planning, at least. For some bizarre reason.

Anyway—maybe this shouldn’t be the case, but story elements like gay characters really have to justify themselves as meaningful parts of a story because we live in a world unhealthily obsessed with sex and sexual identity, artificial conclusion, brow-beating, and sermonizing. Gregory Michael cleared the hurdle, and I wouldn’t have Chloe any other way.

I’ll stop kicking the pulped remnants of this horse.

Off the topic of Chloe, I’m glad that Gregory Michael was rewarded for his integrity and solid writing with lots of sales. Hopefully the other indie authors who stood up for free speech experienced the same. I know that, as my budget for indie novels refreshes, I plan on enjoying more of their works. (After I back the next Shadowdark Kickstarter. That got my money by default.)

Greg—can I call you Greg?—if you read this, you have a first name as a last name. I’m sure no one has ever told you that before.

Or, at least, that’s the case for your pen name, whether or not it matches your legal name. It’s why I referred to you as “Gregory Michael” this whole review, rather than just “Michael,” the idea of which felt weird. But referring to you by your whole name felt super wordy. How dare you make me make the extremely difficult decision of which option to choose.

Also, Mr. Michael, I’m really excited for The Lost Colony. Speaking as an author who takes way too long to finish his own projects: hurry up, my dude!

…

Well. That’s what I got. Subscribe and keep coming back!