Spoilers for Heavy Ice below, in case you haven’t read it:
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Warning! F-bomb and other possibly NSFW text under the cut.
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Image of an exoplanet seen from its moon: Wikimedia Commons
One of the things I really should have done when I started all this is come up with a name for the future universe that Requite exists in, which also contains the FSSI and KinSpace and the Bind and other remnants of the Solannan Imperity and pre-Solannan colonisation. I can’t keep saying ‘A Requite Novel’ when I know that future books are going to mostly be set off Requite, if they visit it at all. (Yes, there will be a ‘rescue Idrian and Bel-Imperia and Zax I suppose’ novel, it’s in the planning process)
‘Requitiverse’ is what I call it in my head but I can’t see it on a book cover. I considered ‘Sapient Universe’ because of all the A-saps and O-saps and so on about the place, but it sounds as if I’m saying the actual universe is sapient, which is something that both I and the inhabitants of the books are agnostic on.
‘Solannaverse’ is probably the best of a bad bunch, but I have to admit that I’m kind of partial to Grueniverse…
… so I suppose I’d better write something.
Various projects are on the boil, long and short. None of them look likely to turn into a finished project any time soon, but things are moving along. I’ve started a Pinterest board of inspiration and random stuff to do with the Requite books.
Also, annual reminder that the Requite books are eligible for Yuletide (Primer on how to do Yuletide by the wonderful BlueInkedPalm here.) I don’t read other peoples’ stuff written in my worlds because I don’t want to get other people’s head-canon mixed up in my own, but I’m happy for it to be written.
I have made the executive decision that since I already had a vaguely planned-out future history for how we get from here to Requite (yes, it is all in my head, I contain multitudes) it could just as well do for the time-travel thing (provisionally entitled ‘Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny’) which I am writing at present as well. Though it does have frankly terrifying crossover possibilities, particularly since not only is Tzenni Boccamera fully capable of back-engineering a time machine, so is Lady Essex Hawkwood who has far fewer compunctions about what to do with it.
It looks like this.
Well, after a dip that I think was caused by Amazon’s rollout of Kindle Unlimited, sales seem to be picking back up again. I have no scientific answers as to why, but this Christmas I had a look at a relative’s Kindle with online lending enabled and the experience of searching the Kindle Store for a book you might read for free could be better. A lot better. This may be why Kindle online lending hasn’t taken over the world yet.
I’ve complained about Amazon’s useless categorisation system before, and over the… three years? four years? I’ve had a Kindle, it hasn’t got any better, which leads me to think that there just isn’t any money for Amazon in improving it.
I am not trying to knock people who want preppers handbooks, books about how to improve your life with mega-doses of vitamins or giving control over to the angels, any variation on BDSM with millionaires, aliens or millionaire aliens, books about conspiracies or books by people who have already had worse happen to them than the Illuminati could ever dream up.
However, I have no interest in any of these, so it would be nice if every damn category wasn’t full of them. (As for people who want erotic stories about embarrassing ‘accidents’, you pursue your dream, but do you really have to do it in the Politics and Sociology section?) My best guess is that these books are popular enough that Amazon actually makes more from people who would like a misery memoir clicking on ‘Fantasy: Arthurian’ by mistake [1] and then finding something they’d like than they lose on people whose tastes run to different genres giving up in disgust.
Anyway, it’s made me feel a lot better about not including the books in Kindle Unlimited, because I don’t think anyone would be able to find them if I did.
As far as getting new books written goes, I have to admit that 2014 has been a total washout. This year I have mostly been moving house (twice) and trying to get the house I’ve finally settled in how I want it, and my creative energies have gone on that. The rest of my time has been spent sleeping. I do now have a writing room that isn’t entirely filled with boxes, so hopefully writing will recommence some time in 2015.
Happy holidays, or happy random time off work because of other people’s cultural holidays, to you all!
[1] ‘Uncle Daddy, You Didn’t Want Me To Be Born And Then You Tried To Drown Me’ by Mordred would sell like hot cakes, I bet.
Heavy Ice
