I’ll withhold the ‘Happy New Years’ until we have some actual empirical evidence to work from, until then I’ll say welcome back and I hope you had a safe seasonal period. I know I haven’t done a ‘Year in Review’ (or blogging much at all) but the biggest thing to happen to me this year has been getting Rendered Flesh picked up by Level Up Publishing, and I have been talking about that and will be talking about that and so that leads us to this blog entry.

The success of a story hinges upon it’s ability to immerse and entertain the reader, regardless genre or format. Preserving that immersion is a key aspect of story-telling, the audience will further suspend their disbelief for a story they are fully immersed with. Of course a story is made up of various elements; plot, characters, prose and dialogue and, if any one of these aspects falter or break your audience’s immersion then you start on a slippery slope. Firstly you have to re-establish the immersion and second, the audience remembers each and every time they were dislocated from the story and, every time it happens, it gets harder to win them back.

Today I’m going to discuss dialogue, the content and the presentation of such and, while there is no 100% guaranteed way to win over everybody I’m going to try and help you avoid some of the commonest stumbling blocks.

Whether it’s witty, back-and-forth banter, an emotional plea, or a heart-wrenching monologue, character dialogue is one of the driving forces to the vast majority of story-telling. While there are some phenomenal examples of stories told minus dialogue that’s a different discussion and one I might come back to later in these blogs. So, one of the most important aspects of writing dialogue is to establish a character’s mode of speech, make it distinct and clear so that, should all prose be removed, the audience would still have a good idea of who was speaking. This can be through accents, colloquialisms, catchphrases or, more easily, a mix of all three.

Writing accents, that is using phonetic spellings for specific regional dialects, isn’t a difficult thing. Many examples exist so it’s easy enough to research, take for example ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ by Barry Hines. Likewise for a character whose primary language isn’t English a smattering of their native dialect (well researched so as not to break a native speakers immersion) can remind the reader of an accent. The important thing is that they don’t become a parody or stereotype through their mode of speech. It’s easy to write an East-London rude-boi or Essex ‘gangsta’, throw in a bunch of uses of ‘innit’ and ‘bruv’ but, if you want the audience to take the character seriously you don’t want them so much focused on the words being used as what those words say.

Colloquialisms differ, country to country and region to region so it’s quite easy to select a few choice ones for a character to mark them apart. From contractions like ‘ain’t’, or ‘gonna’ to the distinct differences between regional uses of ‘Go bananas’ wherein it can mean cut-loose, go crazy, or get angry. If you’re writing outside of your native language resist the urge to go to Google Translate and turn a saying that you know well into another language. Save a few very universal and well-knows sayings it’s doubtful it will turn out as you expect. The difference there isn’t just language, it’s down to national identity and experience. Often a well researched saying or colloquialism translated properly can liven up a text too, rather than re-using those sayings that we are all so familiar with. The important part is to keep it distinct, to one or two characters. Over-use can lead to confusion and that will break immersion.

Giving a character a catchphrase is a sure way to make them memorable, but you want it to be for the right reasons. I remember the B-Movie horror ‘Deep Rising’ 1998, an enjoyable romp except! Whenever the characters resolved the immediate situation and moved on to the next ‘problem’ the hero would say “What now?” Every. Single. Time. As catchphrases go it’s not even that strong and the movie is proof that, simple repetition does not a catchphrase make. That said, a line delivered once isn’t a catchphrase either (unless it’s very good) and, more-so that other dialogue, a catchphrase has to be carefully crafted, short and punchy. There’s a list of famous catchphrases from UK and US T.V. shows on Wikipedia for you to check out.

Of course, no matter how good the dialogue the manner of delivery can affect the audiences immersion too. My new editor Conor pointed out a compositional tick that I’ve developed. Now, I have no qualifications in literature or creative writing beyond the GCSE level (aside from a lot of reading) and that’s okay, but it does mean I’ve fallen into a particular trap. In school we are taught to try and vary our uses of ‘said’, in my case that has gone so far as to mean that I try to avoid using it at all. I also tend to try to avoid ‘replied’ as well and it’s the sheer effort I go to to avoid these words that draws notice and could be immersion breaking for the reader. It’s something I’m working on.

I also tend, when a line includes dialogue, to open with the dialogue and, unless it impacts directly on the dialogue, follow with an action or descriptive. However, there are other ways to do this if you find it features in your work too. In any sentence involving dialogue the indicator (an included action or descriptor for clarity of emotion/action) can be placed either at the beginning, in the middle of at the end. To borrow the examples Conor gave me;

1. I said, ‘we don’t even know what day it is outside.’ – Wherein the indicator is ‘I said’.

2. ‘We don’t even know,’ I raised my foot to push the table to the side, ‘what day it is outside.’ – Wherein the indicator is the action.

3. ‘We don’t even know what day it is outside,’ I shook my head in dismay. – Wherein the indicator is the action.

Variety is key. You can run these variations in sequence, although the likelihood is that the manuscript will, itself throw in a little variation from time to time, or approach it however you see fit. You can pick up any work by your favourite author and look at how they go about varying the structure of dialogue. If an exchange goes on for a few lines you can drop indicators, you don’t have to use them on every line once an order of speech has been established but, in that case, you lose the visual aspect, the ‘minds-eye’ picture of events so it’s good to throw in some gestures, tone-of-voice etc.

So, at the end of the day, it can be said that great dialogue is a very good start but it doesn’t stand on its own with a discerning audience. How something is said is almost always as important as what is actually being said and, in the instance of the written word, how it’s presented is as important in conveying the true meaning of your character’s words.

With that in mind I wish you all well for the new year and hope your writing hours are productive. Stay safe.

As I may have said (a couple of times, I’ll ask that you forgive me, I’m excited) thanks to Conor Kostick at Level Up Publishing my Zombie Apocalypse LitRPG is lurking in the shadows of pre-pub, ready to leap out and devour your brains! However, before it hits shelves and screens there is a lot of work to be done. I’ve covered editing in brief before in regards to my own contract work on RPG’s but, while those mere ten-thousand-word cantrips come with their own challenges, this is a fully blown hundred-thousand word manuscript and the task of editing can be…. challenging.

First-off let me say that, while I know it’s a trope for writers to have little to no formal qualifications in English, I really don’t. I received good grades in my GCSE’s but, beyond that, I have little relevant book learning on the subject (other than the learning that comes from reading). My relationship to grammar is strained and my initial use of punctuation has been described as ‘loading it into a scatter-gun and firing it at the page,’ I thank Athena that I was wise enough to surround myself with people more intellectual than I.

Back in the early days writing Camelot 2050, letting go of a section was difficult. I would write, reread, fret and rewrite ad nauseam. I must have gone over the prologue dozens of times, and that was pre-editing! However, as the project really got rolling I learned to let go, to stop second-guessing myself and just ‘get it down’ and, once it was done it needed editing and proof reading. Back in the ‘before’ I’d handed my pages tremulously to my mother but, I’d not learned to take constructive criticism at that point and that just slowed the project further. Once Black Knight was done and into edit I had to find someone to fix my many and varied errors of spelling, continuity and grammar. It is to my good fortune that my partner has a degree in law (for navigating the complexities of language), a shared enthusiasm for fiction and a voracious capacity for books (I swear, new books are lucky to last more than a couple of days!).

Still, even then our editing process, though rigorous to our minds, was fairly cursory when compared to the realities of the industry process. Between myself and my live-in editor we performed two grammar and continuity edits before the manuscript even went away to Level Up. Now, an important thing to remember when you get notes from an editor is this. They want your book to succeed. They’re not offering their feedback for fun, if they see an opportunity to improve the book, they will tell you. My editor for Level Up, Conor, is a historian and published and acclaimed author in his own right so I would be at the least remiss to ignore his advice (at worst I would simply be arrogant). But Conor knows his business, he knows how to give feedback and he knows the audience for LitRPG. So we go, back and forth, with notes and feedback, both creative and mechanical. We had a Zoom chat about the finale and I can’t tell you how exciting it is for a self-pub author to finally say, ‘I’ve got a meeting with my editor’ and not be making a joke about my cat.

Of course, it being the job to raise a manuscript to its highest potential, the editor has to highlight areas the readership might find as ‘lacking’ or that spoil the flow of story or dialogue, and it is human nature, sometimes, to fixate on the ‘bad’. No matter the praise it’s far easier sometimes to get hung up on the ‘criticism’. I spent five years training as a therapist, we practiced the ‘sharing sandwich’ (know in many workplaces as the ‘shit sandwich’). In addressing a perceived ‘negative’ you bracket it with positives, encouragement or highlighting the ‘good’, I know it, I’ve done it in a therapeutic setting and I recognise it when it comes my way. Of course, knowing that your knee-jerk reaction to feedback might be to resist (and this is a lesson I learned from my contract work) it’s important to take a breath, step back, maybe give it a little time, and then re-approach both the feedback, and the work.

Rendered Flesh is now in edit four as we approach Christmas and, this being a full manuscript, it is becoming a bit of a slog. This latest sequence of edits is centered around the dialogue, not so much the body, but the flow and the way it is presented to the reader, looking at the flow between the dialogue and surrounding prose and smoothing it into something that flows organically and, I tell you, it takes a lot of work to make these things ‘flow organically’. But this is where a ‘good’ manuscript becomes a ‘great’ manuscript and it’s also where many of us fall into traps like lethargy, self-doubt and the old ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ trap. Reading someone else’s work half a dozen times might bring you increasing joy as you notice the details you missed the first time around, reading your own stuff can be more akin to your mum showing baby photo’s to your friends accompanied by suitably embarrassing stories. But, here’s the most important thing to remember, whether you’re doing self-pub or have attracted a publisher. You’ve seen the spark, it’s what prompted you to write. Somewhere down the line someone else has seen it too, you’ve shown it to someone you trust and they’ve affirmed what you already knew. Your story has an audience out there waiting for it, they might not know it yet but you do. You might temporarily forget, throw down your pen in disgust but you know and can remember that what you’re doing is going to be great. It might take four edits, it might take fifty (although I truly hope it doesn’t) but you’ll get there, in the end.

A BloodBowl short story by David Cartwright

      ‘Ow’d dey do it?’

Gobnik Skab wondered, shaking his big green head as the goblin sat astride the cooling engine block of an out-sized chainsaw. The ‘Dwarf-Dicer 550’, gave off little ‘plink’s and ‘ting’s as it cooled on the still-sacred turf of the backwater stadium.

‘Ow’d da sneaky ‘uman gitz do it?’ the goblin fanatic pondered to himself again.

Sticking a yellowed claw into a bat-wing ear, the gobbo wiggled it around, tongue lolling from between cracked and stained teeth. BloodBowl players as a whole weren’t renowned as deep thinkers, goblins even less so and goblin fanatics least of all, but as the mists of his fungus-fuelled haze cleared, Gobnik slipped the claw into his mouth, rolling the contents around on his tongue, and thought hard.

Coach Naggletoof was dead and the humans had done it, but with Mork as his witness, Gobnik couldn’t figure out how.

Naggletoof had been a legend once. There was a time the coach had been a rising star as a chainsaw-wielding fanatic himself. Some even billed him as the next Blackwart. He’d survived two whole seasons with the Fungus-Side Thievin’ Gitz and then retired to coach the team amid rumours of Nobbler himself issuing a bounty should Naggletoof take to the field again. Even Gobnik could count the number of goblins who survived their careers to retire on his gnarled and calloused fingers, the ones he hadn’t lost to the Dwarf-Dicer in any case.

It might not be the Chaos Cup or the Spike! Magazine Open Tournament but the sub-division the Gitz inhabited (largely to make up numbers) still fed teams and players up to the higher leagues. They might only be of passing interest to the most dedicated followers of the sport but still Gobnik had something like pride for his team (even if no half-decent ball’n’chain gitz would come within a league of ‘em) deep in his shrivelled-up goblin heart. Until now only the local fans really paid any attention to the scrabbling goblin team, but this!

Nuffle knew that this mystery was bound to go down in the history books of the great and sacred game of Blood Bowl.

A team coach murdered on the pitch in full view of the crowd by an unseen assassin employed by the opposition  was the stuff of legends. Gobnik had certainly never heard of the like in his long career, well… not outside the dark elf or skaven leagues anyway.

The fanatic counted himself a veteran. He’d played nearly half a full season under Coach Naggletoof’s tender guidance and most gobbos didn’t survive their first match. The goblin reached up to rub an ear, still throbbing from a savage clip the coach had given it before the game.

He recalled the day when, as a scrawny young goblin obsessed with all things Blood Bowl, he’d scraped together enough teef for a ticket. For weeks he’d lurked in alleys behind Orc bars, snatching up scattered tusks right out from beneath the hulking brutes as they fought. If he thought he could get away with it he’d slipped them from pockets and pouches of the drunken lugs who lay in the alleys passed out, or put the dark byways to more noisome uses. 

Finally he’d collected enough for a ticket to come watch the Gitz play, even bought himself a team jersey to boot. At the height of the match, with fully a third of the Gitz lineout stomped to bloody paste, the knives had come out, literally, and the referee had awarded a foul against the goblins. With an outraged bellow, the troll supporter next to him had looked around for a convenient projectile to throw, finally snatching up Gobnik and hurling him at the ref. Looking back, that giant filthy paw had been the hand of fate.

Scrambling to his feet, he’d scurried desperately away from the oncoming wall of the dwarf opposition’s drive. The Kharack B’osh Brewers had been visiting the Gitz field, their furious charge all bristling beards and brass-studded boots. In blind panic, Gobnik had run straight into the Gitz dugout. It was there that his soon-to-be coach, mentor and ‘friend’ (if goblins had such things) had looked down on the cowering fan and seen something. Maybe the roughly-formed guts of a potential star, maybe a soft focus reminder of the young gobbo hopeful he himself had once been, or maybe he’d just mistaken him for another one of the ever-changing substitutes. With a malicious glimmer in his eye, Snaggletoof had thrust the Dwarf-Dicer into Gobnik’s hands and punted him back onto the pitch, yelling at him to “Take sum’ve da beardy gitz wiv ya!”

Now the coach was dead, and somehow the humans had done it, with Gobnik’s own chainsaw. Sure the saw was old, it’s paintwork faded and flaking, sure it’s engine rattled alarmingly and it needed the occasional boot to get it started, but it was his. Naggletoog had give it ‘im that first game and he’d done his best to keep it going. He’d fed it with fermented squig fuel when it ran out, lovingly bashed it with a hammer when it played up and lubed it, match to match, with as much opposition blood as he could. Looking up from the saw, he surveyed the ground. The match was over, the crowd still cheering the result from the rickety stands, but the goblin fanatic was still trying to piece together the mind-boggling mystery of Naggletoof’s death

‘Ow did da sneaky ‘umie gitz done it?’

The Steingart Sentinels had come to the Gitz ratty ground on the edge of the Black Mountains, the humans trying to intimidate the gobbos with their swanky armour and even an actual sponsor. Truth be told, they’d done it when they showed up for the match. It was a late season game, the top of the division still hotly contested, and the Gitz were right in their accustomed place, narrowly avoiding relegation above a gang of snotlings who’d been put up to it on the promise of a good feed, and an undead team who couldn’t afford a full-time necromancer.

It was late in the second half. Coach Naggletoof had called a ‘timeout’, an obscure regulation Gobnik had never heard of. The referee hadn’t heard of it either, but with the Gitz troll glaring hungrily down at him, he’d allowed it and the teams had hurried back to their dugouts.

Naggletoof had actually given the team less of a chewing out in the dugout than usual. By a combination of guts, guile and falling over in front of the humie’s and tripping ‘em, the Gitz had held the sentinels to a no-score draw. The wiry old goblin had frothed at the mouth, glaring at them out of his lopsided, squinting eyes and twisting his old knit cap in his claws. The coach jumped up and down and stamping and hollering, but this time, rather than lambasting the surviving team members he was actually chittering about scoring, maybe even winning.

The position wasn’t hopeless, even Gobnik could see that. The chainsaw fanatic could count as high as six and he knew that if twice six Gitz were on the pitch the whistle blew. He knew that if there were three six Gitz in the dugout the ref’d have words. Here and now three Gitz were in six pieces in the ‘Bitz’ box, six more were staring up at stars in the apothecary box, and six-plus-one were sitting here at the coach’s rant (Naggletoof insisted the three Gitz under the bench outside didn’t count).

Out on the pitch the sun cast the mountains in their namesake deep shadows and the crowd cheered the battered gobbos just in case the flagging team decided to retreat to the changing room to hide, but Naggletoof’s words had sparked an unfamiliar sensation, in Gobnik’s brain at least. He felt bigger, somehow stronger, had he known it he’d have recognised determination and maybe even pride in his team.

The ref watched the lineup. As the official, an Estalian maybe (all humans looked the same to Gobnik), turned his back, the Gitz used a pre-whistle play they called ‘The Ol’ Switcheroo’. Gobnik’s mate Skabiez was a professional ‘place filler’. The team employed them to wear the same number as the fanatic and take the pitch in his place while Gobnik hid with his chainsaw under the bench with the rest of the illicit extra team-members. Before the whistle blew, when the ref wasn’t watching, Gobnik would hoist the Dwarf-Dicer, dashing onto the pitch and they’d quickly swap places. It might not win matches but, at the very least the goblins’ audacity always got a laugh from the crowd.

Back on the pitch the Fungus-Side Gitz were receiving and, as the whistle blew, the shiny human kicker shaded their eyes, took two quick steps and launched the ball deep into the Gitz half.

The play from the gobbo team was a complex but well-practised maneuver Naggletoof had dubbed, ‘Da Lob’. Gobnik and the rest of the Gitz front line had to hold the opposition just long enough for the team’s receiver, Nikkit, to get the ball and scramble to Eadfuz the troll. Eadfuz was then supposed to throw Nikkit over the Sentinels’ line so the goblin could run in the down. In theory it was an ingenious play, there was no-way Naggletoof had stolen the idea from previous, more famous goblin teams at all. In reality, while most of the team knew the drill well, ‘most of the team’ didn’t include Nikkit and Eadfuz. Nikkit was a new signing and, in practice, Eadfuz kept eating the receivers he was supposed to throw (which was why Nikkit was a new signing). Maybe the reason behind it was that Eadfuz was a river troll. The stinking creature played for rotten fish, since the Gitz coffers wouldn’t stretch to the upkeep of a more traditional rock troll. It wasn’t that the massive, toad-like beast was dumber than its mountain dwelling counterparts, just more malicious. A fact confirmed by the sly leer on its face every time the practice runs ended with a massive, cavernous ‘belch!’. 

None of this made any difference to Grobnik. The whistle blew and the heavy thud of boot to leather sounded, as the fanatic, shielded from view by a miscellaneous teammate wearing number six (Gobnik had stopped learning their names until they survived their second match), pulled the chord of the ‘Dicer and gripped the throttle tight. The chainsaw roared to life. Rising from his secretive crouch, he watched yellow teeth fly as the ‘umie blocker on the midline kicked number six in his grinning green face. The blocker’s furious scowl turned to a look of wide-eyed fear as Gobnik hurdled the falling goblin, employing Naggletoof’s ingenious chainsaw tactic number two, ‘Da Side-to-Side’.  He swung with all his tiny might and the saw took the blocker off at the knee. The human screamed and fell, clutching his brand new stump, but Gobnik was already scanning for his next victim. 

To his left, number three had been hoisted up by his stick-like neck, employing the brilliant delaying tactic of letting the ‘umie lineman punch him repeatedly in the face.

On his right, number seven was scrabbling away on his haunches as another ‘umie leapt at the little green-skin. With astonishing team spirit, and presence of twisted mind, Gobnik brought the throbbing, heavy engine block down on the human’s head and watched for a second in satisfaction, as number seven recovered their composure and leapt on the stricken lineman, biting, scratching and gouging at the flailing player in text-book goblin style.

He risked a glance back. ‘Eadfuz was staring blankly at Nikkit, the river troll clearly trying to encourage some thought or recollection from it’s stagnant brain.  Nikkit, ball clasped to his pigeon chest, bounced and waved at the dull amber eyes, gesticulating frantically down the pitch.  

Gobnik watched in blank-faced horror as the troll reached down with a long, sinewy arm, its fingers tipped with talons longer than the goblin’s massive nose, to grasp Nikkit and raise the goblin up for inspection. A pale green tongue traced hungrily over flaccid, pale lips that dripped with saliva before a spark of recognition fired off in the huge eyes. Eadfuz frowned toward the Sentinel’s endzone, then wound back it’s arm and threw.

Stunned, Gobnik watched Nikkit arc through the air, howling. The fanatic’s gaze nearly brought his face right into the incoming fist of a human blitzer, charging toward him from the back field. The fanatic squeaked in fear and flinched, bringing the Dwarf-Dicer up instinctively. A loud, gong-like sound rang out, accompanied by the crack of splintering bones, and the human spat a string of oaths as he clutched at his wrist, fingers splayed to new and interesting angles as he danced in a pain-stricken circle. Gobnik took the opportunity to employ Naggletoof’s essential chainsaw tactic number one, the ‘Up-and-Down’, raking the human who went from swearing to screaming in the space of a heartbeat.

Checking around for the referee, Gobnik saw number five, the conjoined mutant transfer from up near the Chaos Wastes. Pikit N’eetit had proved an invaluable signing, tasked as they were with distracting the referee with whatever shenanigans their co-operative brains could devise. The weird part, Gobnik reflected, was that, even joined together as they were, they weren’t even related.

Upfield in the Sentinel’s half, Nikkit was scrambling desperately to-and-fro as shiny human gauntlets reached for the slippery little gobbo. The viscous coating of slime had been one of the unconsidered, bonus side-effects of getting so close to a river troll. With uncharacteristic courage, Gobnik raised his chainsaw high like the gleaming sword of a hero of old and, screaming a high, thready battlecry, he charged.

Fending off the Sentinel’s thrower with Naggletoof’s essential tactic number three, the ‘Pokey-Pokey,’ he ran straight into Nikkit, shoving the panicking ball-carrier away out of the advancing ‘umie net and on toward the endzone. Now surrounded, Gobnik wound himself up for the coach’s brilliant, genius, secret weapon play. 

This was where Naggletoof’s ingenuity really showed. One hot and lazy afternoon, as the pair skived off practice and ate toads on the riverside, Naggletoof had turned to the younger goblin. ‘Wot ‘appenz,’ the old gobbo had confided cryptically ‘when a chainsaw git, playz like a ball’n’chain git?’, and he’d tapped his nose knowingly.

With the Sentinel’s glowering back-field stalking ever closer, Gobnik licked dry, cracked lips.  Gouts of foul smoke belched from the chainsaw as he revved the engine to new heights of mechanical fury and heaved the Dwarf-Dicer in a great arc, spinning and spinning as hard as he could. He’d admit afterwards that, once the saw got moving, the main difficulty was holding on to it, but at the time he clung to the weapon, howling in equal parts fear and desperation. The engine roared in concert with the fanatic as the weight of the spinning machine threatened to rip his spindly arms from their sockets. The field became a blur for the fanatic as humans and goblins alike screamed, panicking and running from the unpredictable path of the whirling steel-toothed dervish. In the eye of the storm of choking dust and exhaust, Gobnik thought he saw the flash of a striped jersey diving for cover. A big-eared, yellow-toothed and strangely familiar green skinned head sailed through his field of vision trailing dark green blood. He whipped around the Sentinel’s half, dicing and dismembering, with no more control over his passage than Eadfuz had over his digestive impulses. His world a candy cane vision of dust, smoke and blood, and his brain scrambled with the gut wrenching fear of the vicious spinning blades, he whipped around in wild, screaming abandon.

A great shower of sparks told him he’d collided with the goalposts and, lowering the saw to the ground he chewed a great furrow in the brittle yellow grass, ploughing to a halt in a rank cloud of dust and squig-fuel smoke.

Panting and swaying, the confused fanatic surveyed the trail of destruction. From the pitch, moans and wails of agony arose from brutalized players, human and gobbo alike, but the stands were silent for a moment before they exploded into cheers. 

It slowly dawned that the fans were cheering for him, cheering for Gobnik Skab, their voices hammering the dizzy goblin like the hails of thrown rocks he’d endured as a youngster.

Nearby his dazed and confused eyes spotted the decapitated body of Nikkit, the gobbo’s elongated brown head sitting just over the line.

Wait, that wasn’t Nikkit’s head. Nikkit’s head had bigger ears and was way over there in the hands of the human coach who stared down at it in pale-faced horror. The thing on the ground was something else, something important.

There was something he was supposed to do, but his thoughts wouldn’t come together as he staggered from side-to-side, the stadium swimming around him. Back at midfield, Eadfuz was picking up severed limbs, leisurely eating them, savouring the morsels almost delicately. Goblins staggered through the dust stirred up by the whirling fanatic, chased by the few remaining upright humans. Closer to him, three humans, their shining blue and silver pads glittering in the late afternoon sunlight, raised themselves from the dusty turf, coughing and spitting. Coming together one pointed, first at Gobnik and then at the ball.

The ball, that was what it was. The ball, the game, the score!

The humans roared and charged, their cries muffled by the roaring crowd. The fans in the stands might be cheering for Gobnik, but the trio of charging humie’s wanted to break every bone in his fragile goblin body and sell them off as souvenirs. The only thing that could save his little green hide now was the whistle.

Staring down three-to-one odds with no teammates to throw under the trampling boots, Gobnik gripped the handle of his chainsaw. On wings of uncompromising cowardice, the fanatic leapt toward the ball. Time flowed like cave-fungus treacle as he sailed toward it, the ‘umie’s charge coming closer and closer. Images of gobbo players, their bodies crushed to a thin green paste under the bronze-shod boots of the Brewers in that first match, flashed through his panicked mind as the ball came closer, ever closer.

Gobnik hit the ground with a ‘whuff!’ of expelled breath, curling up with a shriek of fear, expecting at any moment to be assailed by the savage studs of the humans but they never came.

The shrill three-blast call of the whistle sounded Gobnik’s salvation and he realised he could feel the smooth, slightly sticky, skin of the ball under his outstretched claws. He clambered unsteadily to his feet, ball in hand, as the human players tailed off their death-sentence dash, growling and swearing oaths in their anger.

Dazed, Gobnik raised the ball high in slightly confused hope. The crowds’ cheering reached new heights as the ref held up flat palms to signal that the dying seconds’ touchdown was good.

     Sitting in the aftermath, with the crowds filing and fighting their way noisily to the exits for an aftermatch pint, Gobnik thought hard. He’d definitely had the Dwarf-Dicer in his paws as he’d celebrated the touchdown. He’d held the trembling engine high as he ran down the pitch to his teammates to celebrate the win. Coach Naggletoof had given him a reluctant nod, as of one equal to another, and Gobnik had thrown the shining, spinning saw high in celebration, turning away from the coach to raise his outsized green fists to the fans in triumph.

Somewhere in that moment, in revenge for their epic beating by the vastly superior gobbo team, somehow right then, one of the sneaky ‘uman gitz had taken the saw. They must’ve taken the saw and killed Naggletoof because, when he turned around, the twitching green body of the coach lay there, bisected neatly by the Dwarf-Dicer 550 that sat, throbbing innocently, in the turf between the leaking pieces.

’Ow did da sneaky ‘uman gitz do it?’ he thought to himself once more.

I’ve mentioned writing exercises in the past and the sites offering examples or lists are many and varied. Of course, as aids to improve your writing, variety is no bad thing at all. To first glance they seem a little arbitrary, a little random but, having now looked around at some of the suggestions out there I can see the structure in these exercises, the ‘subjects’ as it were. In no particular order they mostly seem to fall into the following categories.

Descriptive – the want you to focus on a sense or sensation, touch, taste or smell, pain or pleasure. They want you to explore the words and ways that you can describe feelings or objects. These exercises promote your exploration and use of adjectives, adverbs, gerunds and verbiage.

Dialogue – I’ve seen the ‘Write a scene using only dialogue’ tool a few times now, read a couple too. It’s a very useful tool in developing distinctive manners of speech for your principles and participants. It also helps you to cut down on the ‘he said, she said, they said’ to keep your dialogue popping!

Thought Exercises – Some sites recommend writing letters to your younger self or rewriting stories that you’ve heard or scenes from other works. In considering how you would present these scenes and stories, how you’d talk to your adolescent self, these exercises invite you to think more deeply about your work, the ‘how’s’ and ‘why’s’, what’s the best way to say something or depict something.

Prompts – A writing prompt is a word or phrase that you are invited to spin a story around. Sometimes they’re presented as ‘Two-Sentence’ stories or have to be completed in the length of a Tweet. These are ‘refreshers’, good ways to step away from work that has you stuck or hung up and revitalise your thought processes. The prompts with length constrictions are good ways to practice getting more meaning into fewer words. I doubt many of us struggle with being florid, poetic of wordy but I know I have had problems with delivering precise, concise statements and it might surprise some people to know just how much effort goes into making characters laconic and witty.

So, with those in mind I’m going to do a quick writing exercise my self below. The task is to take a common-use phrase and write a 20-minute stream-of-thought with different ‘spin’ on it. And that phrase is;

‘Just a Minute’

‘Just a minute’, but it’s not just a minute is it? It’s never been ‘just a minute’. It’s more than a unit of time, it’s a measure of your life, and not just yours, but everyone’s. That minute encompasses the whole scope of existence, life and death, seen and unseen. If a tree falls in the forest and no-one’s there to hear it it may or may-not make a sound but, in the span of a minute it has fallen. A minute is and emotional eternity, more than enough time to tumble from the heights of joy or rise from the miasma of misery. In less than a minute you suffer utter disappointment, have your heart broken of feel your world fall apart around you.

And that all-encompassing, omnipresent minute is never the same for any two people. ‘Just a minute’, a ‘Just’ minute? Has there ever been a ‘Just Minute’? A moment in time where everyone got what they deserved? Where the good rejoiced in unison and the bad cried out in dismay? I doubt it very much because the minute has no emotion for you, for me for them. It has no capacity to care, to show malice or mercy, it simply is but what it isn’t ever is ‘Just a Minute’.

It’s life, death, the spin of the solar-system and the roar of the universe, it is, as they say, relative. Every minute is a tragically fleeting second for those standing around the deathbed, a interminable eternity for the kid waiting for the update to load. It’s a lost moment, a last chance, a final stand for victory of defeat and, once it’s gone you’ll never get that same minute back. It can’t be hoarded, but it can be treasured, it can’t be earned but it can be well-spent. In the grand scheme that minute might seem minute but in the hear and now it is everything that is important.

It’s not ‘just a minute’, it never has been and the sooner we realise that, the better use we’ll make of them all.

It’s long been the case that literature, theatre and cinema have retold the stories of those who achieved great things. From Caesar to Boudicca, Lincoln and Gandhi, by the hand of William Shakespeare, Blind Harry or even their own autobiographies, their stories are brought to us to uplift and inspire, but why do we ever-increasingly romanticise the lives of historical individuals who were, in fact, more villain than hero? What is the purpose behind telling fairy-tales that gloss over acts of inhumane cruelty just to bolster the reputation of people long dead?

The film Braveheart (Mel Gibson 1995) is often held up as an example of Hollywood riding rough-shod over historical fact. Everything from the sequence of events to the costume and imagery has been picked apart as the story was written around number of real historical battles and events that were themselves brought forward or pushed back to serve Gibson’s story-telling purpose (between Braveheart and The Patriot, Gibson’s anti-British leaning taking a close second to his anti-semitic ones) but what about his portrayal of Wallace himself? The main source of information about the Scots revolutionary comes from a poem accredited to Blind Harry which, in itself, has probably been embellished in the telling. So the question remains, was Wallace a noble freedom fighter or, as is occasionally suggested, a cattle thief masquerading as a hero, like Robin Hood minus the ‘giving to the poor’? I can’t answer that myself but, there are more recent figures that I can comment on. For me, although it might be more or less historically accurate, if I want to watch a film about Scottish resistance to English despotism, I’ll watch Rob Roy, the Liam Neeson film directed by Michael Caton-Jones in the same year.

Great Leaders are often figures for dramatic representation. Despite its ongoing swing toward neo-fascism the US still (outwardly) hold Abraham Lincoln in high regard. The man lived and breathed freedom and the rights of the individual, regardless of colour or creed. Currently the show Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda 2013) is enjoying great acclaim for its fresh, modern style, employing rap and black actors and culture elements to take the audience through the events of the American war of independence from the view of the titular figure Alexander Hamilton. That being the case, George Washington is a key figure. A man who, in some of his own writings, professed to hold anti-slavery sentiments way before Lincoln, but who, in fact, owned in excess of one-hundred slaves as part of the Mount Vernon holdings. There is still discussion over whether Washington took sexual advantage of any of those slaves but it is known that, while he emancipated some of the Mount Vernon slaves (in his Will and conditional upon the death of his wife) he never challenged the legal precedent that held around half of those slaves as part of the Custis Estate, those owned by his wife’s family. They were bequeathed to her children upon her death.

Another supposed ‘Great Leader’ is Winston Churchill. Recently portrayed by Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour (2017) and by John Lithgow in The Crown (2016), Churchill is regarded as a bombastic figure of iron-hard resolve, who replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in the face of the outbreak of World War II. He’s thought of as a hero, the right man in the right place at the right time. What’s less often discussed is his racism, misogyny and ableism as represented by his support of eugenics. Churchill seized foodstuffs from India to support the war effort leading to the deaths of anywhere between 2-3 million people from starvation. A hard choice in a hard time? Not for a man who described the Indian people as “a beastly people with a beastly religion”, views held from his time in-country during the Boer War. Churchill, for all his support of a united Europe, also supported the ‘improvement of the British breed’ by segregation, racial and social hierarchies, chemical and medical sterilisation of the ‘feeble-minded’ and eugenics. He stated that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph” and to my mind, as I delve deeper into the man and his character, seemed to be mostly distinguished from his most notable opponent (Hitler) only by his choice of ethnic target and the opportunity of his situation.

Stepping away from political figures, it’s time to call out a historical figure for whom I hold a deep-seated disdain. Known to the United States at large as ‘Uncle Walt’ and the founder of an entertainment juggernaut that holds a controlling share, not only in the industry at large, but over what we see and hear. A commercial monolith, influencing what we think and how we’re expected to act, pre-packaging our societal ideals to fall in line with their rampantly consumerism-driven business plan, my audience I bring you, Walt. Fucking. Disney.

It galls me that, in 2013, for the movie Saving Mr Banks (A story of the conflict between Disney and Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers) Disney is depicted by an actor I hold in some esteem, Tom Hanks (I have similar feelings about both Gary Oldman and John Lithgow as Churchill and Robert Carlyle as Hitler in Rise of Evil). The fact that Hanks went on to star in the 2019 film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a biographical feature about entertainer ‘Mr’ Fred Rogers, proves that a single, talented performer can as easily portray a devil as an angel.

It’s interesting that, as much as the kindly persona of ‘Uncle Walt’ persists, the view of him as a despotic monster still gains traction. The Guardian article The cruel reality of Disney’s world by Paul Harris sits at complete odds with Disney’s biographical Wikipedia page that states; “Disney was a shy, self-deprecating and insecure man in private but adopted a warm and outgoing public persona.” Nevertheless, Walter Elias Disney is documented as being a tyrant to both his family and his staff. A man of near fundamentalist right-wing views against Communists in the days when they were being persecuted by Hitler, before Stalin corrupted Lenin’s vision, and a reputed anti-semitic, it’s commented that, as well as being unable to even draw his ‘most beloved creation’ Mickey Mouse, Disney wasn’t even responsible for his company’s meteoric financial success. That acclaim ought to fall to his brother and co-founder of the Disney animation studio, Roy O. Disney, a man whom Walt regularly berated in public. I recall an account, the source of which I cannot recall but I have found references to, of a couple of Disney’s animators becoming so embittered with Walt that they made a short porno of Mickey and Mini, sneaking it into the ‘for approval’ stack of the studio’s latest cartoons for Walt to view in the on-site showroom or ‘sweatbox’. The story I heard goes that, rather than become enraged, Walt professed delight, praising the work and ingenuity of the animators. He encouraged the artists to step forward and take credit, promising recognition, etc,etc. The story loses some credibility as the animators *do* step forward and, of course, Disney fires them on the spot and has them essentially run out of town on a rail. It’s not so much the persistence of these kind of stories but the stubborn insistence from some corners that nothing of the kind was true that, when held alongside the corporation’s rampant profiteering (there’s a reason Robin Williams didn’t voice the Genie in ‘Return of Jafar’) that lend these stories some credence.

Personally I see theatre and movies as such a viable source for disseminating factual history, that the very idea of bastardising or corrupting it in the name of ‘Drama’ seems wrong. U-571 (2000) might be a more exciting account of the allies’ breakthrough with the Enigma code than The Imitation Game (2014) but it is also flagrantly manufactured, no more real than Overlord (2018). But when that untruth goes beyond the events, into the people and makes fairy tales out of monsters and heroes out of villains, then isn’t it doing us, the audience, a greater disservice? I want more shows about Boudicca, Shaka Zulu. I want The Insider (1999) but I want to see these people as real, flawed and relatable. Into the Spider-verse (2018) carried the message ‘anyone can wear the mask, anyone can be the hero’, but surely some people, despite what they are perceived to have achieved, don’t deserve that recognition.

Move over Walt, Mr Rogers is coming through.

Addendum – In my effervescent rage to get to Disney I neglected possibly the fuzziest fairytale of the modern age. It’s a modern musical drama smash that, by all rights, ought to have started life on Broadway before hitting the silver screen but, while a stage show is being touted, Covid has gotten in the way. I’d say it’s an act of historical fantacism worthy of his countryman Mel Gibson, but Mel was born in New York unlike Hugh Jackman who was *actually* born in Sydney, Australia. Yes it’s Greatest Showman (2017) and it’s another travesty. Far from being a hero who ‘uplifted’ people seen as outcast, as different, P.T. Barnum was a trickster, conman and a huckster. Indeed his first foray into show business was to buy the ‘lease’ on an aged black woman, Joice Heth, who was being displayed and touted as George Washington’s former nurse (which would, incidentally, have made her 161 years old at the time). Let me repeat that, he bought a lease on a human being, the right to display and earn profit at her expense, despite slavery being illegal in the state of Pennsylvania at that time. If that wasn’t enough he made anonymous, false reports of the woman being a ‘cunningly constructed automaton’ and, upon her death, hosted a pay-per-view autopsy of her remains. Barnum made a living displaying fraudulent exhibits like the Fiji Mermaid (half a mummified monkey stitched to a fish) alongside those people whom he took abject advantage of, those people he dubbed ‘curiosities’ and ‘freaks’. Barnums shows straddled the American Civil War and and attempt at a political career in its wake. He tried to drum up support by showing contrition for the slaves he owned and whipped before the war and the story of Heth began to change a little at a time. All this predates the Barnum and Bailey circus about which ‘Greatest Showman‘ claims to tell the tale but Barnums business model, extorting money from the masses by exploiting a number of individuals society didn’t care about, want or understand, stayed the same. The very idea of portraying the man as a ‘champion’ of those people is not just an act of pulling the wool over the audiences eyes worthy of Barnum himself but a great disservice to the people he exploited during his career although, in light of what’s going on in America, in light of the rise of awareness of the Tulsa massacre and the ongoing racial divisions of ‘The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave’, it is, at the least, fitting.

I know I haven’t blogged for a while. The realities of limited creativity under Covid and the stresses of a house move are to blame but now! I’m back and I have news, BIG news. Now, you might be looking at the article title and thinking ‘Dave, I understand three of those four words. What the heck is LitRPG?’ Well, I’ll tell you.

The chances are you’ve come across one of the inspirations for LitRPG and not even realised it. You probably remember The Matrix (1999), maybe you’re familiar with Sword Art Online (the Light Novel ran 2002 to 2008 and A1 Pictures released the animation 2012, it has since received wider recognition via Netflix) or ever the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon series (1983). Well each of these share and have contributed to LitRPG or ‘Literary Role Playing Game’, that is, a narrative centred around players within a game. For the most part the players are trapped in the game world, it’s an alien experiment or maybe a punishment programme. In some instances it’s life and death, sometimes you get extra lives, whether death ingame equates death in real life… usually yes. There has to be threat but the level does vary. So you’re following the story of a player, usually in a high-stakes game simulation, gottit? Good.

Anyway, as recently as last year I’d never hear the phrase ‘LitRPG’ myself (and I count myself something of a geek) let alone thought I would write one. I’ve written several times my experiences at Dublin Worldcon as a trader and panellist. I’ve talked about the networking opportunities of big conventions well, now I can share a little more detail about what you can achieve from such shows from personal experience and don’t worry, we’ll get to the Zombie Horror LitRPG soon.

I was lucky enough, on the second day of the Con, to be relocated to a front and centre table of the Trade hall (another trader had failed to attend and I lucked out by being chosen to replace them). On that same block were two independent publishers one of which was LevelUp Publishing. During the ebb and flow of actual trading traders themselve often pass the time chatting and so it was that I ended up asking Conor Kostick what in the world a LitRPG was. Dublin Worldcon was spread over five days, there were plenty of lulls in the flow of visitors to the trade hall as attendee’s took in the many wonderful panels that were going on so I had plenty of time to look into LitRPG and something occurred to me. Although the number of titles was steadily growing the genre seemed split into two sections, Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Now, I’m a gamer too, I’ve played titles ranging from FPS to RTS to Survival Horror, I’m a big fan of Zombie games and I couldn’t see any titles that feature zombie survival during my perfunctory searches so, since Conor (as commissions editor) was actively pursuing new writers, titles and concepts I voiced the idea of a Zombie Apocalypse LitRPG.

I thought about writing a zombie horror but, with the explosion of the genre to mainstream popularity over the past decade or more I didn’t feel there was anything ‘new’ I could add. I couldn’t see myself bringing anything to the genre that hadn’t been done already, until I talked to Conor about LitRPG. We discussed the possibilities, hashed out some rough ideas over coffee during the course of the Convention. Conor himself came up with the fantastic idea of lacing the narrative with quotes from famous Nihilists, one of which in particular I hope will end up on the cover or in the blurb. And so we parted ways at the end of Worldcon with my head buzzing with new possibilities.

It’s been just over a year in writing. I’ve delved into the tropes, forms and traditions of zombie horror, from the realities of weapons and tactics to the framework of politics and social commentary and, having finished the first draft, I sent it off to Conor at LevelUp. It is with great enthusiasm that I can say that LevelUp have asked to publish the presently titled Rendered Flesh and I’m working, under Conor’s guidance, on the edits and revisions that will elevate the first draft to a manuscript ready for publishing and distribution to the hungry masses.

The time seems right for a bit of a zombie resurgence and, on the back of the popularity of Ready Player One (Novel 2011, Film 2018), maybe a Zombie Horror LitRPG will sink its teeth into the audience’s imagination.

A Camelot 2050 Short-Story by David Cartwright

Engine purring, the Lamborghini traced the evening roads of Istanbul. The golden sunlight of the late spring evening cast cool shadows across the city streets between the tall modern buildings, as the luxury sports car wove along the busy roads. Glass and steel shimmered, interspersed with red-tiled rooves and the deep greens of the city parks, all alongside the intricate plaster patterns and rich colours of the scattered Mosque spires. 

Leaving the city and sliding easily through the domestic traffic outside Demirci, the driver opened the throttle under the azure sky as they headed for the Yavuz Sultan Bridge. The evening sun glittered on the water below and the sports car howled in joy at being given its head. Leaving the main roads behind and letting the car settle once more into its dulcet purr, the driver took a road headed for the coast near Iriva as the setting sun finally kissed the horizon behind them.

The soft sound of tyres on asphalt became the harsh crackle of gravel as the car swung off the road and through the wrought iron gates of a walled estate. It joined a short queue of similar luxury vehicles, waiting in the circular drive for the uniformed valets to take the cars for parking. An ornamental marble fountain sent sparkling cascades of water into the air, underlit by shifting colour lamps. A soft breeze stirred the branches of the Turkish oaks and fig trees that lined the drive, but the wind was warm and smelled of spices and seawater

The house at the end of the drive was impressive, but not so sprawling as many of the old manors of Europe. The Ottomans liked to impress, but they didn’t tend to entertain the sheer extravagances of the old European nobility. Three stories of pale cream plaster, south-facing with high ceilings and large, multi-paned windows looked out toward the green lawn and gate. To the east, a short way across the gravel was the garage (joined by a subterranean tunnel for security, according to the building plans) and to the west, close to the manor was a private hammam, or bathhouse. An impressive setup, but not overtly ostentatious.

Mother Superior Bethane Sciarra, Commander in the Holy Templar Order and agent of the Vatican, let the simple thrill of the drive ease out of her, and mentally reviewed the mission dossier in her head. If the rumours were true (and the Vatican Security Council had gone to great lengths to verify them) the Ottoman Intelligence Agency had pulled off a serious coup as far as the wider security community was concerned.

They’d supposedly pulled intel out of Russia.

That vast country had been an intelligence black hole for centuries. Oh agents went in, occasionally a few reports came out, but never much of substance and they soon dried up. None of the agents ever returned. But somehow, if rumour were true, the OIA had a report of significant value and, like any agency worthy of the name, they had done all they could to keep it to themselves. But word had leaked.

Of course they denied it; any mention of it and they clammed up immediately. The Ottomans weren’t an enemy, but they weren’t exactly friends either and, if Bethane had to guess, they were holding the information as future leverage in some high stakes diplomatic discussion. The agency who managed to get a copy for themselves was going to gain some serious kudos in the community, and the VSC intended to be that agency.

The politics aside, Bethane’s mission was to gain access to and copy the data. An in and out job; minimal ‘contact’ (in the sense of out-and-out violence in any case), which is why she was attending a party. The house owner and host for tonight, one Ekrem Macit Kartal, was outwardly known as a developer and successful architect. Unknown to him (hopefully anyway, as far as Bethane was concerned) the Vatican had cracked his cover as an operative and handler for the OIA and the initial recipient of the report she needed. Using an established cover as a representative of an investor company, Bethane would use the cover of the party to gain entry to the house, then infiltrate Ekrem’s office (second floor, north-west corner) and his computer to copy the drive.

Bethane had argued for a simple night-insertion, a stealth op to gain entry, but the Deacons of the VSC, especially Deacon Aurelia, had opted for using the cover of the party. Kartal was celebrating winning a sizeable contract, so instead of just their charge and his immediate staff, the twelve security guards that patrolled the house and grounds would have to watch over Kartal, his three hundred guests and sixty servers, cooks and entertainers. Of course there would be thirty of them instead of just twelve, but the Deacons thought the ratio would allow for an easier operation. That meant a detailed cover story and at least an hour of mindless conversation with other investors.

Not that Bethane didn’t have support of her own. Her operations coordinator had hacked into the house security feeds. Two agents were on station outside the gates (far enough away as to avoid suspicion, but close enough to respond if required) and another two held position just offshore in a dinghy for the same reason. They even had a plant in the security detail for the night. Bethane briefly considered the movies she had seen where a dashing agent would walk into such a situation alone, and shook her head with suppressed mirth.

The car in front of her moved and she pulled up to the valet station.

“VT Control,” she spoke quietly, her implanted throat mic picking up the words and sending them to her operations officer. “Confirm surveillance access, over.”

“Control confirms VT Alpha,” the steady voice of her operational support officer fed back. “Got you on the villa cameras, no problems.”

A young man opened the door for her and, reaching for her clutch purse, she stepped out of the low car’s driver seat. At least she didn’t have to worry about swanning around in some ridiculous cocktail dress. Out of respect for her hosts’ beliefs, she wore a modest but flatteringly cut suit jacket with loose callot pants in copper satin and a full headscarf in patterned marina blue. The headscarf covered her military grade comms unit, but that was disguised as a commercial hands-free earpiece for just such an operation. It also covered her close-cropped hair, which was rather more distinct and Bethane was thankful. She hated wearing wigs on these kind of ops.

Bethane smiled her thanks to the valet and strolled up the steps to the manor door, taking note of the security guards on either side. Pale grey suits, expensive and well cut, couldn’t quite hide the slight bulge of shoulder holsters on each man. She suppressed a grimace. She had known they would be armed, but it didn’t make her feel better about her own lack of weaponry. There was a metal detector discretely framing the door, but the team had anticipated its presence and so she wasn’t carrying anything overtly offensive or that contained more that a small trace of metal. Presenting her clutch to the guard for a cursory inspection she stepped through the detector and waited a moment before the man gave a brief nod and handed it back to her.

“VT Control, this is VT Alpha. I’m in,” she spoke softly and stepped into the main hall, smiling as she accepting a champagne flute from a proffered tray as she passed. The hall was tall, wide and brightly lit, no convenient shadows or heavy curtains to hide behind. The twin staircases up to the second floor were especially open, no concealment opportunities at all there. But that wasn’t the goal right now. Once all the guests had all arrived, they and the servers ought to move out into the gardens where the main party was occurring, and that would be her window.

Bethane swept the hall with her gaze, passed between the curving stairs and out the back of the mansion and into the gardens. The oncoming night was darkening the sky, but the emerging stars had been supplemented by soft strings of lights over the pristine green garden. The hubbub of quiet conversations was backed by a string quartet and grand piano accompaniment, the musicians stationed on a low stage just off to Bethane’s left. Running the length of the lawn, a series of long pavilions housed a bar, buffet and even a small crew of chefs laboured over hot plates searing fish and vegetables, prepared lahmacun or rolled dolma fresh for the guests.

Stepping down into the crowd she addressed her com. “VT Control, this is VT Alpha starting perimeter assessment.”

“Got you, VT Alpha,” the calm voice of her controller came back. “Following you on cams.”

Bethane worked her way around the edge of the assembled guests, trying to get a feel for any potential threats to the mission. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d stumbled across fellow operators with the same objective or, more commonly, the direct opposite intent. She was at the far end of the garden from the house when her earpiece chirruped.

“VT Alpha, we might have a problem.”

“Where?” Bethane kept her voice low as she smiled to a well dressed diplomat who’d raised a glass in her direction.

“Just coming to the top of the back steps now, take a look,” the controller instructed.

Turning her head that way, Bethane had cause to pause in her sweep. The man at the top of the steps was head and shoulders taller than anyone else in attendance. His white hair cascaded down an immaculate charcoal grey suit which bore a coloured flash on the breast.

Bethane recognised him from a dossier she’d read some time ago, one that should have had no bearing on the current mission. Sir Jerome Greyson, Knight of the Round Table and Duke of Oxford, adjusted a crisp white shirt cuff and descended the steps to the grass with all the predatory grace of a tiger.

“What in God’s name is he doing here?” Bethane sighed, expertly maintaining her smile despite her feelings.

“He’s a late addition to the guest list, that’s for sure,” control sounded tense. “Might be here to invest himself? How do you want to proceed, Actual, scrub the mission or go ahead as planned?”

Bethane only hesitated a moment. “We proceed, once this intel gets to their central office we’ll have no chance of laying our hands on it.”

“Then we better do it quickly. As a senior knight there’s a chance he’s aware of your status beyond an officer of the Templar Guard, do not engage him at all.”

“I’ll do my best, control,” Bethane replied uncertainly.

For all her training and experience, the Knight of the Round Table was a genetically enhanced and biomechanically augmented super-soldier (although, beyond his seven-foot plus height and apparent albinism, you’d scarce notice any obvious augmentations). Jerome’s ‘gifts’, built into him by the Cult of Merlin, put her at a distinct disadvantage, and, as was the nature of such covert intelligence, it was likely far from complete. God alone knew what specific abilities the Duke had within reach of a mere whim, whilst hers were largely at her fingertips, a distinct disadvantage from where Bethane sat. No, she’d have to try and avoid all contact if possible; the only way to win this facet of the game was not to play.

Surreptitiously keeping an eye on the Knight, not so difficult given his height, Bethane moved to the farthest end of the immaculate lawn, lifting a fluted glass from a passing server, and joined a knot of guests in casual conversation. Whenever Jerome moved closer, Bethane made some brief excuse and moved to a new group, orbiting the party, keeping as much distance as she could between them.

This dance led Bethane back to the stairs of the patio that backed onto the house but, as she turned to move once more, a smiling man neatly intercepted her.

“Good evening,” Ekrem Kartal smiled pleasantly at her, holding out a hand in greeting. “Welcome to my party, I hope you are finding everything to your liking?”

Bethane immediately adopted her cover persona. Inclining her head with a demure smile of her own, she took the offered hand and his lips brushed the back of her hand lightly. Bethane groaned inwardly. She’d have preferred a firm handshake herself, but the action gave her a little insight as to who she might be dealing with.

“Very much so, Mr Kartal,” she replied brightly, masking her thoughts behind her cover.

“Please, all my investors can call me Ekrem, though I do not know your name?”

“Marchesi, Vittoria Marchesi,” Bethane answered easily. “I’m here representing Toscani Holdings.”

“Ah yes,” Ekrem smiled broadly. “Your investment was most timely. The entire project might have fallen through but for your intervention.”

“We like to think we know a good opportunity when we see one.”

“Well, maybe you can help me convince this gentleman of the benefits of ongoing investment in the development?” he gestured over her shoulder and, as Bethane turned she realised too late that she’d been trapped.

Jerome loomed over her shoulder. His approach had gone completely unnoticed by the Vatican agent.

“Oh, I’m not sure there’s much I could do to sway a Knight of Camelot,” she affected the air of someone totally intimidated by the sheer presence of Jerome, lowered her gaze and tried to present herself as beneath the arrogant noble’s notice. Inwardly she cursed. Maybe Jerome had noticed her avoiding him and she’d sparked his interest herself, perhaps it was an ambush. Either way, she’d just have to play it out.

“I’d rather keep our business between ourselves, Ekrem.” The Knight’s voice was smooth, cool and only slightly aloof. “And why spoil a pleasant evening with business? There are other matters to discuss. Would you excuse us m’lady?”

With barely a glance at her, Jerome dismissed Bethane and she gratefully took the opening to slip quickly up onto the patio and away from the conversation.

“That was a close one,” control whispered in her ear.

“You’re telling me,” Bethane mumbled. “Dio santo, that was close,”

“You know that if I put that in my report, the Deacons will haul you in for a disciplinary,” the quiet voice chided her.

“My cover’s intact, they haven’t made me, yet,” Bethane reassured them in return.

“Not the close call, the blasphemy,” there was smug tone in the reply.

Bethane rolled her eyes. “Let’s just get on with this,” she grimaced.

“Alright, all the guests are in and our embedded agent is on station at the foot of the landing stairs. You’re good to go.”

“Keep an eye on Kartal and Greyson, I want to know where they are at all times.”

Bethane eased her way back into the house and walked quickly across the floor toward the security guard who should be their in-house contact.

“Oderint dum metuant,” Bethane spoke quietly.

The guard glanced around the room, now notably devoid of guests and staff. “Timor potens est motivum,” he answered smoothly and stepped aside.

The call and response phrases offered and accepted, Bethane made her way quietly and quickly up the sweeping stairs and along the landing to the second set, taking her out of sight of the main hall. Creeping across the lush carpet of the darkened corridor, she made her way to the north-west corner and Kartal’s office.

Reaching under her blouse she pulled a connection lead, carefully weighted and calibrated not to set off the metal detector, out from around her waist. Plugging a fine jack into her earpiece, she drew a nondescript security swipe card out of her clutch and fed the micro-usb plug into the magnetic strip.

“Control, ready?” she queried.

“The code scrambler is go, swipe now,” the instruction came back crisply.

Drawing the card through the door reader, Bethane held her breath as the light flickered and then turned green.

Opening the door gently, the Vatican operative moved inside like a shadow, relying solely on the ambient moonlight and the secondary glow from the exterior lighting to guide her way to the desk and its integrated computer. Stowing the card and wrapping the lead around her wrist, Bethane took her ‘Smartphone’ from her clutch. She turned the device on and placed it on the polished glass touchpad surface before activating the computer itself. As the display started to glow, Bethane turned to close the rooms’ curtains lest the light give her intrusion away.

A holo-screen projected and an icon spun as she waited patiently. A small black box appeared in the corner, and lines of code started writing themselves across it.

“How’s it going, control?” Bethane comm’ed. She wasn’t even doing the hack.

Her ‘phone’ was actually a cleverly disguised modem allowing her support agent to work a little computerised magic from the apartment that served as their base of operations back in the city itself.

“Working on the security, shouldn’t take long,” the voice in her ear reassured her calmly.

“What’s the status on Kartal and Jerome?”

“Look out the window,” control replied, a hint of irritation in the voice.

“Come on, control,” Bethane chided.

“Still together, still talking. Moving to the far end of the lawn.”

“Good, now let’s get the data and get out.”

“Working on it.”

Bethane sat and listened for any tell-tale sounds from the corridor outside whilst the screen crawled with code.

“We’re in,” control alerted her. If there were going to be any problems, they would come soon. Anyone working on sensitive or confidential information might have an app set up to tell them when their computer was active, just as a precaution, but Bethane was sure her operative could handle such things.

“No outgoing signals, searching for access restricted files.”

This was the bit Bethane had been dreading. The hack was out of her hands, nothing for her to do but wait. Not that she wasn’t trained for it, but the tension of waiting always made her restless. Moving to the window, she twitched the curtain carefully.

Down below, she quickly picked out Jerome walking with Kartal toward the hammam, away from the party and, apparently, un-regarded by the OIA operative’s domestic security.

Something nagged at her, so she let the curtain drop and went to the westward window to keep track. Kartal was walking stiffly and Jerome was very close to his host. She lost sight of them as they entered the bathhouse.

“Control?” she queried softly.

“Just cracking the codes for these encrypted files, twenty seconds,” control responded.

“Great, I’ve just seen Grayson taking Kartal into the hammam, and I think Kartal was under duress. Are there any cameras in there?”

“A couple, why?”

“Because I want to know what’s going on.”

“I’m kind of in the middle of things right here, VT Alpha,”

“Dammit control, just check the cameras’!” Bethane ordered firmly.

“There’s no-one in there,” control reported.

“Yes there is, I saw them go in,” Bethane urged and then realisation dawned. “Someone else is in the system, they’re covering Jerome’s tracks.”

“Alright just gimme a sec,” the hurried tapping of keys came over the link as Bethane waited,

“Alright, oh Jesus Mary mother of Christ!”

The outburst caught Bethane off guard. “What control, what’s happening?”

“Greyson has Kartal up against the wall, his hand is… in him!”

“What, say again, control?”

“Greyson’s hand is in Kartal’s stomach, there’s blood everywhere! Kartal seems to be talking though.”

“Okay, what’s the status of the hack?” Bethane could hear the tremor in the operative’s voice.

“Erm, I’m past the security, just verifying that the intel is here,”

“Stay on it, I’ll keep an eye out.”

Bethane’s mind raced. Aside from the fact that his actions were completely at odds with Camelot’s values, and given that someone was erasing his presence from the security feed, if Jerome was interrogating Kartal so brutally there could only be one reason for it. He was here for the same intelligence she was. As if summoned by that thought, the knight stepped into view below, wiping his bloodied hand on a towel, and his eyes turned upward to the window. Swearing to herself, Bethane dropped the curtain.

“He’s coming, get the data!”

“Alright, uploading to the device storage now, twenty seconds.”

Moving to the table, the Vatican operative pulled her scarf up over her nose and stood with her hand hovering over the device, ready to cut and run as soon as the transfer was complete. She knew it would be close. If he simply rushed the guard, Jerome would be at the door within that small window of time, so she quickly ran through alternative escape routes.

“Done!” control announced and Bethane snatched up the device and went back to the window just as the door burst inward, dragging much of the reinforced frame with it. The towering Duke of Oxford stood outlined in the faint light of the corridor.

Wrenching the window up, Bethane swung her legs over the sill and kicked off, dropping to the ground where she landed like a paratrooper, ankles together, knees folding and rolling to disperse the impact. Coming swiftly to her feet, she dropped the data storage device into her clutch and dashed towards the front courtyard. There were shouts from the other side of the house and a guard came around the corner toward her, weapon drawn.

Holding her hands defensively in front of her, Bethane drew the wire from her wrist and, as the guard came forward issuing challenges, she stepped smoothly into him. Wrapping the lead around his wrist she took control of the weapon before looping more of the length around his neck. With a complex twist of her body she turned, dragging his gun hand to his neck and spinning them back to back. She flipped the guard over her shoulder to land face down onto the gravel before he even had a chance to react, kicking him in the head to make sure he stayed there.

Jerome came striding around from the front of the house. He’d obviously meant to intercept her but the confrontation with the guard had stalled her for just a moment, now he’d cut off her primary route of escape.

Turning on her heel, Bethane made for the lawn. Confusion was starting to spread through the party guests, and the guards were clearly agitated. They must have discovered Kartal already, which was no surprise. Jerome had been less than subtle.

She was about to make her way down the lawn to the cliff exfil, use the milling party guests as cover, when a cultured voice rang out behind her.

“Stop that woman, she killed Ekrem!”

A half-dozen guards turned toward Jerome’s command, eyes following his pointing finger toward Bethane.

“God dammit,” she hissed and made for the house at a run.

Dashing through the wide open back doors of the villa, she just had time to notice their embedded agent, his neck twisted unnaturally, on the floor before two guards appeared at the front entrance, guns at the ready. Thinking on the fly, she swung toward the servants’ door, shouldering through it and sending a server and their tray crashing back down the steps towards the kitchen.

Rushing down the stairs and leaping over the stricken waiter, she swept through the bustling kitchen as cries of surprise and outrage erupted around her.

She was making for the underground passage to the garage. The kitchen deliveries came in that way, it had all been in the briefing material, and Bethane was truly glad of that. Two security guards appeared at the end of the row Bethane was muscling down, barging cooks and kitchen hands out of her way. The guards’ guns were pointed up at the ceiling so as not to accidentally shoot the staff while they struggled through the white-coated press towards her. Without breaking stride, Bethane caught up a skillet and, dragging a panicking cook out of the way, bludgeoned the first guard insensible and took the gun out of the second man’s hands with the backswing. Grabbing the startled guard’s tie she brought her knee up into his stomach and, as he folded she dragged his head into the steel countertop with a ringing ‘bang!’ and let him fall insensate to the floor.

Hearing angry voices behind her, she turned, barely looking as she threw the skillet over-arm toward her pursuers and dragged a bubbling pan of oil onto the floor.

The oil caught on the gas ring, and flames leapt in the aisle, sending the kitchen staff into a blind rush away from the blaze and back into the house.

Taking the opportunity, Bethane dashed through the door that would lead her to the underpass into the garage, her shoes ringing hollowly on the concrete as she sprinted the length of the underground corridor.

Careening through the double doors at full tilt, she just noticed that a number of the close by lights were out before she registered a slight tug, as her purse was dragged neatly out of her hand. It took her a number of strides to arrest her forward charge and spin to face the thief.

“I’ll take that, thank you,” Jerome sneered from the shadows around the doorway.

Bethane had only a moment to decide; confront a genetically-augmented super-soldier in hand-to-hand combat while other security personnel bore down upon them, or run.

The decision wasn’t a hard one, but it left a sour taste in her mouth as she turned and fled deeper into the lower level of the garage.

Finding her car was easy, and since the valets had left the key fob inside, it was unlocked and the gull-wing door opened smoothly as she slung herself into the driver’s seat.

“Control, I’ve lost the package!” she barked, pressing the ignition button and throwing the car into gear.

“Any chance you can reacquire?” control asked anxiously.

“Not a chance, that bastard Jerome has it!” Bethane snapped back, reversing the car out and dragging the wheel around as she stomped on the accelerator.

“Tell back-up unit one to stand by, I’m going to need cover.”

“Acknowledged.”

Flinging the nimble sports car around the curved ramp, Bethane piled through a group of security who, if they’d planted their feet, might’ve stayed a less disciplined driver. As it was there was no question of Bethane stopping, and the guards dove out of her path rather than be mown down, their guns barking in the night as she raced toward the front gate. The ‘crack!’ of splintering glass from the tiny rear screen signalled a lucky shot, and she twitched the wheel on pure instinct before correcting the slewing car’s course and bouncing out of the gate.

Behind her, the cover team staged a rather well-timed and convenient traffic collision, a box truck and high-sided van leaping out of the darkness and hitting each other just hard enough to incapacitate the vehicles, hindering any chance of pursuit and obstructing the view of the gate cameras, but not so hard as to cause significant injury to the drivers.

“Well done, control. Scrub the security system of all traces. Don’t take any chances, wipe it all and get out. I’m heading home.” She sighed as she sped toward the bridge, the city beyond and the safehouse that was her team’s rendezvous.

A week later, back in the Papal City, Bethane sat outside Deacon Aurelia’s office. Her team had expedited their return, submitted their reports and sat through a lengthy debrief going over the details of their ‘failure’ again and again and then, nothing. The intelligence wing of the Vatican had held them at arm’s length for days, and Bethane had even started wondering what sanctions were being arrayed against them when the call had come to attend the Deacon.

The secretary brought her through and opened the door to the inner office, alerting Aurelia to Bethane’s arrival.

“Come in, Agent Sciarra,” the church superior called brusquely past the young vicar.

Entering the inner office, Bethane stood stiffly, not sure what to expect. “Monsignor,” she greeted Aurelia curtly.

The details of the Deacon’s acknowledgment by the Pope were classified. It wasn’t often a Deacon was awarded the honorific, but Aurelia had been an agent of the Church herself and the title, along with her current assignment, had been her reward for some act of service years ago.

“Sit down, Agent Sciarra,” Aurelia waved vaguely toward a chair. “The details of your report raise a number of questions, and I’ll be damned if I have the answers.” The Deacon fixed Bethane with a hard-eyed glare.

“My report is complete in all aspects,” Bethane ventured, hedging her bets until she could be sure were the interview was going.

“Indeed?” the Deacon grunted. “Your report indicates that, not only is a Knight of Camelot guilty of murdering a non-hostile nation’s intelligence operative, but also that he was engaged in a covert operation of his own to secure the same data you were tasked with obtaining. So, whilst we have your report on the matter, your control agents’ scrub of the site security was so thorough we can’t validate it.”

“That is correct, Monsignor,” Bethane nodded simply.

“The story coming out of Camelot is quite different,” Aurelia stated dangerously, leaning her elbows on the desk and steepling her fingers.

“They say that, officially, whilst Duke Jerome was present, it was simply a matter of personal investment that he was pursuing. That he took no part in the ‘incident’ save to try and capture the assailant, and that they had no knowledge that Ekram Kartal was anything other than an architect and property developer.”

Bethane sat silently as the Deacon’s hard grey eyes bored into her.

“Even unofficially, and I’ve pulled in many favours these past few days to gain this insight, they don’t have any real idea either. They knew about the intelligence, of course, but they had yet to identify the recipient so, how did Jerome know?”

Bethane breathed an inward sigh of relief. The Deacon had been testing her, looking for cracks in her story, luckily Bethane had nothing to hide.

“I have no clues as to what’s going on, Monsignor,” Bethane admitted honestly. “If I had, I’d be following them up right now, but all I have is -”

“-Jerome,” Aurelia finished thoughtfully, “and even a casual surveillance of a senior Knight of the Round Table is a very risky prospect.”

“Exactly,” Bethane replied sullenly.

Taking a deep breath, Deacon Aurelia sat back in her chair, the old leather creaking gently.

“We’ll have to sit on this for now, Agent Sciarra, but rest assured, we have a new task for you, and you might be able to keep tabs on Jerome at the same time.”

“What’s the Op?” Bethane asked eagerly, relieved to be out from under the microscope of Aurelia’s scrutiny.

Aurelia drew a thin folder from her desk drawer and tossed it in front of Bethane.

“There’s a Squire, Rosalyn Taunton-Savant of Essex. We want you to get eyes on her, gauge her character and the like. All the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ are in the briefing packet. The King’s Tournament is in a few days, and you have until then to be prepped and ready.”

“Thank you, Monsignor.” Bethane stood, taking the folder and bowing as she backed toward the door. Turning to leave, the Deacon’s voice called her to a halt.

“And, Agent Sciarra?”

She turned back to her senior. “Yes Deacon?”

“Two dozen ‘Hail Mary’s’ and thirty ‘Our Lord’s’ as penance for your blasphemy on operation.” The older woman’s eyes tightened in a sly smile. “Remember, He watches us always.”

“Yes, Monsignor,” Bethane replied curtly. Control was going to pay for not omitting that little detail.

A Camelot 2050 Short Story by David Cartwright

A light drizzle fell over the York tournament grounds, but the sun still shone through the sparse cloud. His Grace, Sir Andrew Sachs-Kohlberg the Duke of York, excused himself from his guest in the host’s box and slipped out of the entrance. Descending the back steps, he circled the public stands at a brisk pace and entered the arena by the participants’ gate. The riggers were taking down the square fences of the sword arena and setting the field in preparation for a joust. At either end of the arena, huge vid screens played scenes from the day’s events in recap to keep the crowds entertained.

The Duke kept to the edge of the field and made his way to a small square marquis, decorated in the red and white of his house, near the gate. Pulling back the canvas, he ducked inside. The page who was attending the tent’s other inhabitant looked up, gulped and stood back at full attention until the Duke waved the young woman back to her task.

     “Are you ready, squire?” he asked jauntily.

John Loxley, late of the Easingwold militia, now squire to the Duke of York, looked up from his arming stool and his expression was grim.

    “Why are we doing this?” he grunted sullenly.

   “For honour, glory and the entertainment of the people. You know, the usual,” Andrew replied wryly.

      “It’s a bloody farce is what it is,” the squire shot back testily.

     The Duke folded his long arms and regarded his ‘squire’ carefully. Most knights would select their trainees young, in their early teens, to begin the training. They would be taught the ‘soft’ skills and theory, educated in the ways of honour and knightly conduct as well as the standard curriculum, but John’s case was wildly different.

   Already in his late twenties, the broad-shouldered man before him had been raised to York’s service for an act of great courage, an act that had seen him horrendously wounded in its execution. The great fire at Berkeley Castle had nearly claimed the life of Lord Berkeley’s young daughter, but for the intervention of militiaman John Loxley of the Baronet of Easingwold’s retinue. But, as was so often the way of such acts of heroism, the explosion of the castle’s magazine had wrought a terrible cost on the valiant young man.

     Sir Andrew recalled the memory easily, since he had been there, and he was still astonished that Loxley had survived his injuries. He’d been more surprised at the time to learn that Baronet Easingwold hadn’t the means for the extensive reconstruction procedures, and had only intended, upon recognising John’s heroism, to retire him on medical grounds. Such an end to his career was ill-fitting a veteran of actions in the Congo and the far-east, so the House of York had intervened on John’s behalf.

     Fourteen months, a dozen reconstructive surgeries, an extended stint of physiotherapy and a new artificial arm later, and the newest squire to York was back on his feet. But he was no longer the cheerful, exemplary soldier his service record and psych profiles described.

    He’d been stony-faced at his investiture, tight-lipped with his trauma counsellor, and barely engaged with the instructors for his theoretical lessons. But, in physical training and combat, a glimmer of the warrior he had been showed through, and so, Andrew suspected, there was still hope.

     “Squires don’t joust,” Loxley spoke evenly, dragging Andrew’s attention back to the here and now.

   “There are precedents,” the Duke shrugged, “and it’s a simple exhibition, no grave matter of honour. In fact, it’s a favour I’m doing Stafford.”

      John sucked his gunmetal-grey teeth irritably. “My gums itch,” he complained sourly.

     “Well, the doctor says the tissue has healed. There’s no visible swelling and it’s as likely to be a side-effect of anti-inflammatories as something that can be eased by them. Most likely it’s psychosomatic,” the Duke offered, not unkindly.

     “You haven’t answered my question, why are we doing this and who is this ‘Geoffrey Mayland’ kid anyway?”

     Though his voice was sullen, Andrew finally detected a trace of actual interest from John, so he indulged him.

      “Stafford’s latest squire, one Geoffrey Mayland, is a progeny. Skilled, smart and charismatic, but he tends to rest on his laurels and he’s in danger of becoming not just complacent but arrogant too. Baron Dominic wants someone to ‘knock him on his arse’, in the Baron’s own, well chosen words.”

     “Yeah? He’s also, like sixteen, so why me, and why a joust of all things?” John was rising to the bait at last.

     “Firstly,” Andrew raised a stern eyebrow. “He’s seventeen and a half and-”

     “Ah Christ! I’ve got ten years on the kid!” John protested.

  “And,” Andrew went on, holding up a hand, “has already undergone his first round of augmentations, so don’t feel you have to pull any punches,” the knight cautioned. “As for ‘why you’, it’s all about reputation. You have one, as a hero no less. That kind of psychology plays a greater part than you might think. Also you’re already a skilled combatant, and an unknown quantity as far as young Geoffrey is concerned. He has already proved himself amongst his contemporaries, so he really does need taking down a peg or two.”

     “But why a joust?” John held out his hands beseechingly. “Squires don’t joust!”

     “That’s exactly why you will,” Andrew replied, a maddening, smug little smile playing on his lips. “You’ve both had only limited experience in simulated jousts, but this will be for real. It ought to level the field in a way no other contest could.”

      Squire Loxley hunched his shoulders. “I never asked to be a bloody hero,” he spat vehemently, as if the word itself was distasteful.

     “Maybe not, but don’t underestimate the benefits of building a reputation early on.” The knight smiled. “Anyway, if it makes you feel any better, once you do this you can take a step away from the spotlight for a while, okay?”

      The arming tech held out John’s tabard, emblazoned with the stylised branding based on the coat of arms of York, her intention to help to big squire into the garment. With a derisive grunt, John stood, snatched the cloth away and draped it over his head, covering the ballistic cloth-lined carbon fibre breastplate that ought to protect him from the worst of the impending impacts.

Gesturing to the tech’, Andrew took the gorget to which his squire’s shoulder-guards would attach, and stood in front of John to fit it. It seemed slightly odd to him that he was fitting armour to someone so close to his own stature, but he had an idea of what was troubling the squire, and it was his place to do all he could to help.

      “You feel guilty, don’t you?” Andrew asked quietly, settling the armour plate and holding out his hand for the first pauldron.

       “Why should I feel guilty?” John mumbled sourly.

     “I’ve read your record; you lost comrades, friends overseas in combat. You might have dealt with it at the time, considered it ‘part of the job’, but now? Now you have to deal with a completely different kind of consequence. Maybe you think you should have died in the explosion, maybe you feel that what you did wasn’t so worthy of all this,” the knight waved a hand vaguely to encompass the tent and indicate the stadium around them. “But, much as it’s for you, it’s not entirely about you.”

      “That doesn’t make a lick of sense,” John muttered.

      Andrew finished fitting the armour and placed his hands firmly on John’s broad shoulders.

      “You served, faithfully. I know it wasn’t your choice after your father sold you into Easingwold’s services, but you made the most of it. You might have served a household, but Camelot still owes you a debt for your service. Beyond that, Camelot holds true to its values and must be seen to do so. We could have simply pensioned you off, but why? When we could help you? When we could restore you after your injuries?  You can always say ‘no’ but, I notice, you haven’t. Yet,” he finished with a slight wink.

       John raised his gaze to meet Andrew’s. “What else can I do? All I know is how to fight.”

       “Anything, everything!” Andrew chuckled. “You are beholden to no-one John, give the word and you’re released from my service. You could go back to school or, with your record, you could go into policing or personal protection. Why, you could start a security company, I’d invest in you, but for the time being you need to heal and not here,” the knight patted John’s augmetic arm, “but here,” and he tapped a finger to the squire’s temple.

        “The best way to do that I can think of is to stick to what you know.”

       John frowned a moment then reached a hand up to tug on his gorget, settling the armour more comfortably.

      “Alright, I’ll think about it.” He held out a hand for his sword belt. “In the meantime, let’s go whip this little Geoffrey bastard’s arse.”

      “Honoured guests, welcome to the York showgrounds!” the announcer’s voice boomed over the PA system. “At this time, the House of York is pleased to present an exhibition joust for your entertainment!”

        Andrew held the tent flap, awaiting John’s cue.

      “At the yellow flag, representing the House of Stafford, please give a warm round of applause for Geoffrey Mayland!”

      John winced slightly at the thundering applause the crowd raised for his opponent. It wasn’t a complete surprise, Stafford was a popular brand and those that wore its colours were always well received by the public.

       “And, at the red flag, representing the house of York, it is our great pleasure to introduce, for his first appearance, John Loxley!”

      Andrew pulled the canvas aside and John stepped out into the grey light. The nearby audience clamoured and cameras flashed, but only when Andrew revealed himself at his squire’s shoulder did the noise begin to approach the level of Geoffrey’s reception.

      “Give them a wave!” Andrew leaned in and growled solicitously from the corner of his mouth. With a pained smile, John raised his arm, and again the volume rose.

     “Not bad, not bad,” Andrew reassured his uncomfortable squire and led him toward the starting point. “I’d better get back to my box. Good luck, John,” he smiled and held out a hand. John reached out and gave Andrew the warriors’ wrist-clasp handshake before the knight turned and left the field, waving to the crowd the whole time.

Taking a deep breath, John turned and nodded to the attendants who manned his point. Two attended the weapons rack where his lances and spare shield were hung. Two more stood by his bike, holding his helmet and primary shield. Striding over, he grasped the handlebar of the latest incarnation Triumph Tiger which would serve as his mount for the joust. At one-hundred and eighty kilo’s dry and with just over ninety foot-pounds of torque, the bike was capable of zero to sixty in just over eleven seconds. Its high-seated enduro-styling was intended for cross-country and military use, but suited it toward jousting very well. It was a machine John was familiar with.

     He cast a glance toward the big screen which was currently showing his opponent sat astride his own bike. John recognised a Norton Commando when he saw one, but the usual Cafe-Racer style had been tweaked, the suspension bumped high and off-road tyres fitted for this joust. Still, John chuckled to himself, a clear sign of his opponents’ inexperience.

     The Norton was a fine road-bike, capable of zero to sixty in fully half the time John’s bike could achieve but, here on the woodchip and dirt floor of the arena, it’s lighter frame and lower torque would take a second or so to gain purchase, even with the knobby off-road tyres.

     John took a second to rev the growling engine, drawing the eyes of the audience and the cameras to his own position, a calculated move to annoy the poster-boy Mayland, as he beckoned for his helmet and shield. Seating his helmet and offering his arm for the mag-lock shield, John took a breath and snapped his visor down. With the cheers from the stands and the noise of the arena finally muffled, John sighed in relief.

     Holding out his hand, he received the offered lance and tightened his augmetic fingers around the shaft. Had his arm still been flesh it might have dipped to compensate for the added burden, but the bionic limb held firm, and he felt the bike dip to the right as if it meant to fall. With a slight heave, John steadied himself and drew the lance into his body to centre the weight, holding it upright to signal ‘at the ready’.

    He watched the marshal signal his opponent and made out the raised lance signalling ‘ready’. Turning toward John’s point, the marshal raised a hand again and John lifted his lance, feeling all the while that, whether he was actually ready or not was of precious little importance right now.

     The official nodded, satisfied and lowered the flag, again bearing the York crest, to signal the riders to be ready. John felt the sweat break out on his forehead and the slight nausea in his belly as he ground his titanium-alloy teeth in anticipation and twitched the throttle again.

     The crowd hushed, awaiting the signal of the flag and the commencement of the bout. Seconds stretched out until, with a final glance to either end of the quarter mile stretch, the official raised the flag and the joust was on.

     Both bikes roared and leapt forward, though John was slightly satisfied to see a tall spray of woodchip from the back of Mayland’s machine as it sought purchase. The crowd roared in approval as, surging forward, John juggled the throttle and the lance, trying to catch the cradle bars protruding from his armour to bring the shaft to bear, frustrated by his own lack of finesse. Much as he’d practiced in the VR sims, they were based on the assumption a Knight would be astride one of Camelot’s synthetic C.T.E.E.D.’s.

     The A.I. driven Cybernetic Transport Engagement and Evasion Devices were styled after horses, and fully capable of guiding themselves toward a target, leaving the knight free to wield their weapons; the motorcycle beneath him now, not so much.

     In apparent disdain of his own fumblings, his opponent seemed all too comfortable in the saddle, his lance dropping smoothly into position as the two raced toward one another for the clash. The distance decreasing and the speed ever increasing, John, grimacing with the effort, managed to seat his lance and bring it to bear at the last second as he braced for impact.

     Looks could be deceiving and, as John’s wobbling lance glanced off his opponent’s shield, Geoffrey’s lance likewise slipped on John’s midriff armour and dragged across the plates, Geoffrey struggling to retain the weapon as it swung, bouncing off the tilt rail, unbroken.

     The riders steadied their machines and carried the ungainly shafts to the far ends of the course. Turning, they each rode to their starting points as the crowd cheered and jeered in equal measure. John furrowed his brow in frustration, some of it spared for the crowd but most reserved for himself. If only he’d managed to break his lance he’d be one up but, as his old C.O. would say, ‘Ifs and buts didn’t win wars’.

     The official jogged out as the riders waited, and dropped the flag again to let the riders commence the charge.

   This time, John was more prepared for the struggle between bike and lance, and managed to gun the engine and hold the weapon in position for the strike.

    The dulled carbon tips impacted their targets and shattered with a resounding ‘Crack!’ as they were designed to do. John ‘whuffed’ as the shock of his strike ran from his arm into his shoulder and, at the same moment, the impact of Mayland’s lance on his shield threatened to tip him off his bike. They passed so quickly that he didn’t see how well he’d struck. The front wheel of his bike wobbled skittishly, and John had to drop his shattered shaft as he grabbed the handlebars with both hands and fought to stay upright, until his feet kicked out from the pegs for balance. With a sigh of relief, he brought the bike under control on the damp ground and turned smoothly at Geoffrey’s end of the run to ride back to his own starting position, kicking up a spray of chips of his own.

     As he passed the judges’ box on his return, he saw the score screens flash up the numerals. Both squires had struck, both knights had scored. He had two more lances left to change that.

His lance arm, his prosthetic, felt neither the worse for the strain nor the better. But his shoulder and chest on the left, his shield arm, was throbbing slightly from the strike. He pulled up and dropped the bike into neutral, stretching and flexing the pulsing muscles, rolling his shoulder before taking grip of the handlebar once more and signalling for a new lance.

The Mayland kid was good; he’d brought his lance into position smoothly and hit John like a truck. Glancing up at the screen, he saw the replay and winced as he watched himself jerk in the saddle but stay upright. The camera switched to show Mayland, and Loxley was gratified to see his opponent in similar straits, reeling back from John’s own blow, the bike itself rearing with the force. But Geoffrey recovered his balance and control with almost miraculous speed, riding the wheelie to the end of the tilt to the delight of the crowd.

     The kid was good, John could give him that.

     Lance in hand, he tried to come up with some plan, some tactic to overcome the young showboat but, with his limited experience of the joust, all John could think of was ‘hit him harder’. He turned his helmed head toward to Sir Andrew, seated in the York stand. Straining his eyes, he just saw the knight give him a small nod and a smile.

      ‘A good enough start then,’ John thought and blew out a shallow breath.

The competitors back at their stations, the official lowered the flag again and signalled for readiness. Both riders raised their lances, the flag flew upward and the engines howled again, higher and louder this time as they left their marks, the crowd cheering along at the spectacle.

     Finding his cradle with more surety, John tried to pick a decisive spot to strike, one that would unseat his opponent and give him a clear advantage. The bout wouldn’t be over until three lances were broken or one competitor was forced to yield, but with a scoring lead and his opponent on foot, Loxley would have a clear advantage.

     He quickly ran his tongue over his teeth as the two bikes raced toward one another, so intent on picking his point of strike that he took his eyes off the tip of Mayland’s lance.

     It happened in the blink of an eye. John raised the tip of his lance to catch the younger squire high in the chest but, apparently Mayland had seen that coming and had the augmented reflexes to deal with it. His shoulder dropped and John’s lance glanced off, unbroken while Geoffrey’s lance hit Loxley low-centre in the chest carrying him from his saddle as the bike sped away without him.

John hit the ground before he could really make out what was happening, but the thud of impact and his ungainly roll through the dirt was a clear indicator.

     Shaking off a moment of dizziness, John cursed vehemently and pushed himself back to his feet. His chest was throbbing and his lungs heaved to catch his breath. His shield was gone; the mag-lock had cut out to stop it injuring him in his fall. His sword was at his hip, but he was as unfamiliar with that as he was the joust. The crowd was on its feet, frothing at this new twist to the event.

     Mayland reached the York end of the tilt, and the tension in the air took on an electric crackle of anticipation. A knight unseated from their mount could fight on, on foot. Each house’s weapon stand held one lance ready for their opponent for just such an event. The tilt would continue until a third lance was broken or a knight (or squire in this case) was forced to yield.

      Teeth clenched, chest heaving and sweat pouring from his brow, John stood in his lane. Rage and frustration at himself and the snot-nosed, silver-spoon fed little oik sitting so serenely on his bike churned in his gut. He wanted to kill the little bastard, wanted him to hurt, wanted to watch him squirm before he died but, as he watched, the yellow-armoured squire hesitated and turned his head, lance in hand, to confer with John’s own crew.

    In a flash of realisation that cut through the haze of fury that was building, John remembered where he was and what he was doing. Mayland wasn’t riding because he wasn’t sure what was going on, because he was just a kid, and this was just a game. John blinked as he remembered, he was supposed to either draw his sword and indicate ‘ready’, or drop it to the floor to signal his surrender. He had not yet drawn the weapon, and so, Mayland wouldn’t ride.

     Taking a deep, shuddering breath and shaking his head to clear it, John reined in his spiralling anger and grinned to himself. This gave him a chance, albeit a slim one.

     He raised his head to watch until he was sure he had Mayland’s attention. The crowd had fallen silent, curiosity overcoming their enthusiasm.

      Slowly, John raised his hand and made a beckoning gesture with his fingers.

     The crowd went mad. Mayland turned toward the York staffer and spoke urgently, the staffer simply shrugged and stepped away. If Mayland refused to ride he would forfeit; if he rode down an unarmed squire he’d suffer some repercussions, maybe a reprimand, but John had signalled it, essentially taking the responsibility on himself.

     With a slight twitch of his head, Mayland raised the new lance and rode. This time straight toward John, no tilt bar to separate them, the younger squire simply rode down on his opponent, lance dipped to strike.

    The crowd’s cheering faded from John’s perception as he watched the Stafford rider race toward him with singular intensity. Blocking all distractions from his mind, he watched the Norton come on, trying to gauge its speed and watching the lance tip as it danced with the vibrations of the bike. Mayland held the lance and his elbow high, clear of his midriff and braced to strike down as he aimed it toward John’s chest.

      John shifted one foot slowly back to brace himself, bent his knees to lower his centre of balance just a little and brought up his fists in a boxer’s stance.

     That threw Mayland. John could almost feel the youth’s confusion as his opponent bobbed gently on the balls of his feet. Still, the bike came on and the crowd held its collective breath.

     As Mayland’s lance came toward him, John weaved, rolling back on his bracing leg and twisting his body away. The lance tip sailed past him and he thrust forward with all his strength, swinging his outstretched augmetic forward as hard as he could and clotheslining the youth as he passed.

     The sheer force of impact made him gasp as the linkages between his prosthetic and his bones and muscles protested the abuse, but he carried Mayland clear off the back of the Norton, arms and legs outstretched, lance and shield flying free, and threw the slight figure to the ground.

     The stands fell silent. Using his natural arm, John gripped the augmetic as it hung limp, and rolled the rebuilt shoulder just to make sure it was up to what he had planned next. He gave the stressed prosthetic a shake out before reaching down to grip his opponent. Despite Andrew’s assurances, the stricken squire seemed much smaller than John had expected. His big alloy fingers closing around the gorget and the top of his opponent’s breastplate, John hoisted the dazed youth into the air.

     Loxley prized Mayland’s faceplate from his helmet and brought the handsome young man in close.

     “Yield,” John grunted simply.

    Head lolling and eyes blinking, the Stafford squire raised his hand in surrender. “I yield,” he announced muzzily and John lowered him gently to the ground.

     The stands exploded as the judges struck Mayland’s score, and the big screen zoomed in on John who turned and, glad that his helm was hiding his sheepish expression, gave them a hesitant wave. Geoffrey was raising himself to his elbows, so John offered him a hand as the medics rushed toward them.

      The P.A. rang out. “Assembled guests, York gives you your victor. John Loxley of York!”

      Geoffrey held John’s hand high for the furiously cheering crowd before pulling the broad squire down. “That was awesome!” Geoffrey yelled into John’s ear, beaming like a child who’d just made their first stage appearance for their parents to watch.

      The pure, sincere and unabashed joy of his ‘defeated’ opponent’s expression triggered a spark in John’s overwhelmed brain and he reached up to unclasp his helmet, lifting it from his sweat-streaked brow.

       “John Loxley,” he stated simply, offering his hand.

    “Geoffrey Mayland,” the younger squire shot back, taking the offered hand and shaking it vigorously, “but my friends call me ‘Swift’!”

     The medics reached them then, and each squire was led back to their own pavilion for a preliminary medical assessment.

      Andrew entered the pavilion as a tech was doing final checks and repairs to John’s abused augmetic. The big squire’s ribs had been tightly bound by the medics, but a purple bruise was already creeping out from under the clean white bindings.

“That was phenomenal, John,” he congratulated the squire. “Well done. I must say you exceeded my expectations, well done.”

     “Thank you, my liege,” John replied, honestly grateful for the knight’s words.

     “In fact, someone would like to come in and see you, if you’ll allow.”

     “Who?” John was truly puzzled. Which news outlet could possibly have the clout, or the interest in seeing him so shortly after the bout?

     “Your opponent, Geoffrey,” Andrew grinned.

     John blinked, momentarily taken aback. “Alright,” he conceded, still somewhat confused.

     Still grinning, Andrew pulled back the tent canvas and a slight, fair-haired young man in a neck-brace, sling and yellow Stafford tabard, entered the pavilion, fairly buzzing with excited energy.

     “That was amazing!” he announced without a moment’s preamble. “The way you took me off that bike? Absolutely amazing, I’m going to be sore for weeks!”

     “Surprised you’re not now, jumpin’ around like that.” The sheer exuberance of this strange meeting had John completely off-guard, but Geoff simply waved the concern away.

  “Oh not now, too many painkillers for that,” he winked and, as if just remembering himself and his station, he took a deep calming breath and blew it out slowly, beaming mischievously the whole time.

   Turning slightly, he addressed, somewhat more formally, Sir Andrew. 

   “My lord, might I congratulate you upon your squire’s victory. I have never seen such bull-headed stubbornness.”

   “It’s hardly my doing, Geoffrey. His tactics went against practically everything I’ve tried to teach him,” Andrew smirked. “But, stubborn as he is, he refused to die after the Berkeley Castle fire and refused to be bested by one as gifted as yourself, so, in this instance, I think we might count his Ox-like demeanour as a virtue.”

   Geoffrey’s eyes widened in surprise and sudden realisation as he turned to address John himself. “Berkeley Castle? Of course!”

    “You didn’t know?” John asked, surprised by Geoffrey’s ignorance.

Geoff shrugged in exaggerated embarrassment. “Let’s say I forgot, because that sounds better than admitting I was lax on my pre-bout research.”

     Andrew held up a hand for their attention. “Excuse me for a minute, I’ve things to attend to. Once again, congratulations John.” With that he left, beckoning the almost forgotten tech to follow.

     John returned his attention from the departed knight to the still grinning youth.

   “So that’s how you did it then?” he gestured smugly toward John’s augmetic. “That’s how you clotheslined me off a speeding motorcycle like swatting a fly?”

   “Would you have expected it, even if you had done your pre-bout research?” the big squire’s curiosity was getting the better of him.

    “To be totally honest? No, no I wouldn’t. No-one’s ever done anything like that before. Knights get dragged off sometimes, but that? That was one for the history books.”

    John grinned slightly. “Let that be a lesson then, even the most thorough research can’t tell you when someone’s about to do something bloody stupid.”

     “You say ‘stupid’, I say ‘inspired’.” The younger squire got a thoughtful look about him. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way,” he began cautiously, “but, as someone who uses self-deprecation on a routine basis, I can’t help but feel you were being somewhat serious there?”

     John shrugged, wincing at the discomfort the motion brought. “Maybe, what of it?”

     “Well, for someone who just made a squire’s exhibition bout the talk of the town, I’d assume you’d be pretty happy about that.” The Stafford squire looked suddenly pensive, as if he was afraid to open a line of questioning that might anger the bigger man. John interlaced his fingers and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees with a deep sigh.

     “You wouldn’t understand,” he stated simply.

     “Maybe I wouldn’t, but I can try,” Geoffrey smiled encouragingly.

     As John finished recounting the story of his service, Geoffrey listened with growing awe.

“So,” the younger squire said at last, “you’ve seen some-”

“-If you say ‘real shit’,” John cut in, “I’ll deck you all over again.” John grunted. “This ain’t a bloody movie.”

“… things.” Geoff finished apprehensively.

     “Yeah,” the older squire shrugged. “You could say that I have.”

     “And yet you still don’t think you deserve this?”

     “Maybe I don’t, who’s to say?”

Geoffrey shrugged. “Well, I’d say you do. Maybe more than any of us.”

     “What does that mean?” John frowned up at the open and honest young man.

    “Look John, I can’t really comment on PTSD or survivor guilt, but what I can empathise with is imposter syndrome. You, at the very least, have already displayed selflessness, courage and the willingness to fight to liberate others from oppression. You’re proven, John, what did I ever prove? That a young man from a wealthy and privileged background can be a talented athlete and media darling, that’s what. Should Camelot ever call on me, I have no idea what I’ll do, fight, run or hide. But, with someone like you alongside me, I know it’ll be harder for me to be a coward.”

     “You really mean that, don’t you?” John asked, a small smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

    Geoffrey blushed, just slightly. “I do,” he admitted. “Now come on, you stubborn ox, there’s a post tournament party to get ready for.”

     “Hmm,” John inclined his head thoughtfully. “‘Ox’, I like that.”

    Outside, a deep voice bellowed in frustration. “Where is that blasted boy? I’ll have ‘is hide if he doesn’t show up soon.”

      “Oh balls,” Geoff wailed. “I lost track of time, Sir Dominic is going to kill me!”

     “Don’t you worry, Swift,” John declared good-humouredly. “I’ll talk to ‘im, it’s my fault you’re late so it’s the least the Ox of York can do for ya!” and, taking Geoff firmly by the shoulder, they stepped out to face the Baron of Stafford’s ire, together.

Deadlines are meant to be broken. That was often my feeling when I worked in manufacture. Some of the company regimes I worked under seemed so blind and blinkered to the realities of the physical process, the limitations of machinery, curing times for adhesives and sealants, that their ‘deadlines’ where laughable to say the least. It’s important to remember at this point that I worked in aerospace. Every part I manufactured was destined for commercial airliners. Those parts being integral to the planes airworthiness and ultimately traceable back to me. It was me individually, rather than the company, who was responsible for the parts and the thousands of lives that would rely upon them during the aircrafts service-life and yet it was the company managers asking me to cut corners to shave time off an overdue production deadline. I refused, every time.

For many writers their work is a labor of love, a project spanning years and years without anything so gauche as a ‘deadline’. Many ‘trunk novels’ (manuscripts where writers flex and learn their voice and craft) sit unregarded, unread and unfinished. The writer returns to them after spans of days, weeks or years, endlessly rewriting or revising but never truly finishing. Indeed the whole idea of a trunk novel is to refine your style, experiment with ideas, worlds and characters. I have a trunk novel or two but they are projects that I hope, one day, to finish and publish. The thing with my trunk novels is I don’t go back again and again. Currently they sit in the ‘waiting’ pile, waiting for my full attention. In the meantime I have current and future projects so, to get to the meat of it, let’s talk about deadlines.

Of course, when you work on a paid contract a deadline is inevitable. The customer, the recipient of your work, has to have a deadline and so then, do you. It’s always important to make a note of these deadlines and you should work with every intention of meeting them. Life, however, is life and unpredictable, sometimes things do arise that challenge your ability to meet a pre-set deadline. Any project coordinator worth the title is well aware of this when they initially set the deadline so there should always be a little wiggle-room worked in should life throw it’s inevitable spanner in the works. But, and it’s an important ‘but’, never ever count on it. If you’re contracted to write piece you should always work to the goal of meeting your deadline. Any extensions granted by grace or fate should be seen as a gift.

When working on your own projects a deadlines isn’t a thing that you have to set yourself. In fact you can happily pursue your works in progress without ever setting yourself a deadline but, that being the case, when do you stop? I personally agree with the sentiment that ‘a novel is never finished’. Whenever a writer goes back to their work they will find something to tweek or change and, in that respect, the work is never ‘finished’. However, if you plan to release your works, self-published or to query, then they have to be ‘finished enough’ and a deadline is a good way to push yourself to that point. The important thing is never to flagellate yourself for failing to meet a self-imposed deadline. The idea is to encourage yourself to finish, not make yourself feel guilty if you run-over.

For myself, especially now in the COVID-19 period, I struggle to find any sense of urgency. The lack of events, face-to-face with readers has sapped my drive. I sit in a timeless miasma and, although more people are reading now, I can’t manage to kick myself into gear. I had promised myself to have finished a project, one conceived at Worldcon Dublin 2019, in time to submit within the year. When I say finished I mean written, edited no less than twice and subject to beta and sensitivity readings. While the project is well progressed it has stalled. I won’t make the deadline but knowing that should engender some forward motion toward that point.

Suffice to say that the phrase ‘deadline’ can, in fact be reimagined as ‘lifeline’. Black Knight was released, full of errors, badly laid-out and all, as a step toward getting the entire trilogy to print. With one book out I had to release two and three (there is a special circle in hell for the authors of unfinished series), I even managed a revised second edition of book one free of (most of) the errors. I imagine deadlines as lifeline for my works chances to see the light of day, reach the intended audience and find their way to success, maybe even in my lifetime.

So don’t be afraid to drop a deadline on yourself, set that goal for a finished piece and, if you don’t make it, drop it again and set a new one.

CW – Swearing (Obvs)

Today I’m throwing together the subjects of picking font styles and using swears in literature. I know they don’t immediately spring to mind as common subjects to be discussed side-by-side but, what the hell. I’m going to do it anyway.

Your choice of font can have a significant impact on whether some people can read your book, fact. If you choose to present your fantasy stories on the page in a florid, cursive font your are essentially ensuring that people with visual impairments or dyslexia cannot read your work. I grew up alongside dyslexia, my brother spent his formative years in trouble at school, accused of being ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ until he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He went on to study aerospace design in college. My partner has dyslexia, they are a business opportunities analyst in aerospace and defence. Dyslexia isn’t a measure of intelligence, it’s a condition that affects how the brain interprets written text or numbers.

Whether a reader has dyslexia or a visual impairment there are ways to help them access your work without going to the lengths of having an audio-book recorded (although, if you can, you should.) Many people who fall into these categories struggle with small or Serif fonts, that is fonts with little kicks and flairs. Times New Roman is actually a Serif font and an industry standard but it’s the easiest for those who have trouble reading to interpret, but it’s not the easiest. Sans serif fonts are easier for people with dyslexia to interpret, I used Helvetica/Calibri (one font, two names) when I set up the Camelot Trilogy. The lack of any flairs and the spacing of the characters makes for a much more comfortable reading experience. You can also download fonts designed for the purpose, Dyslexie is a new font designed to help people with dyslexia.

Sans Serif fonts might lend themselves more toward Sci-Fi stories, you might want your book to look like a fantasy as well as to read as one, but using fonts that exclude swathes of the readership hurts you as the author more than it hurts them. Also it is Ableism, and ableism is a form of prejudice and prejudice is bullshit.

So on that uneasy segue, swearing, expletives, f-bombs and more.

I swear, I write swears in my books sometimes, bad language is a part of our world and has been since the birth of language. Therefore it’s part of the myriad imagined worlds of authors throughout the ages, however there are some unconscious conventions I would like to bring into the light and some opinions I would like to offer.

There are articles and memes aplenty on how people with higher intelligence have been found to swear more, however that needn’t apply in literature. When you have time to craft your dialogue and put your meaning across with carefully chosen prose excessive swearing is neither big, nor clever. Swears should be used for emphasis, or when appropriate. Sometimes the character you’re writing comes from a background where they might swear excessively, then it becomes appropriate, it’s part of the character. It’s also dialogue, don’t swear in the descriptive or narrative prose.

Use setting appropriate swears. Now, while historical settings might allow for insults like ‘Whore-son’ or ‘Bastard’, ‘Cooze’ or similar, gender-specific derogatories are falling out of favour as well they should. When writing in fantasy there is the wonderful opportunity to use Oaths (‘By my life, I shall end yours!’) or older language (such as can be found here, courtesy of MentalFloss). Science Fiction gives you free reign to create your own, “Frack” was popular in Battlestar Galactica, “Frell” and “Yotz” in Farscape. The point is that, using someone’s genitalia as a basis for slurs and slanders is unimaginative and outdated. One of my personal favourites, an insult I’ve used to describe many an uncooperative colleague over the years, is “Blue-blazing Fuck-muppet”.

Something to realize about the conventions of swearing is the gender-inequality between some words. Penis related swears like ‘dick’, ‘cock’, and ‘balls’ are seen as much more casual, lesser swears than their vagina-related counterparts like ‘cunt’ and ‘twat’ (although twat is fast falling down the list in terms of severity in my experience). Especially in fiction there is an opportunity to address this, either ‘dick’ and ‘cunt’ get levelled off in terms of offensiveness or you invent new ways for characters to slander or challenge each other. ‘Fascist’ is a good start, if you want to refer to a characters obsession with wealth to the exclusion of the well-being of others and their inherent sense of unearned privilege, I’d suggest ‘Tory’ but that’s just me.

It’s high time to step away from swears and insults based upon, gender, race, sexual persuasion, ability or body-shape. Personally I think it’s important that we, as writers, try to be creative in all areas of our process. Expletives and insults come into play when the emotions in our books run the highest or when we’re angling for a laugh. These are the sections our readers remember and it fall to us to help society step away from judging others by the contents of their underwear and start looking more closely at the content of their character.