It’s another weekend, which means it’s time for another weekend update. In no particular order: I have a lovely week of vacation behind me and another one ahead, and enough writing in the bank to more than cover the upcoming week in which I won’t have time to write at all. There are a few things I’ll gabble about in no particular order, though.
Number one: although I have the next story planned out, I’m looking even further past that to whichever tale comes next. There are a few contenders. Number one is another Sam Hill entry, with a rather more inventive science-fictiony murder, but the limited experience I have with mystery as a genre tends to make me a bit edgy about doing that one so soon. Number two is another skypirates tale, going back a little further in history to either the Long Nines’ heyday as pirates, or to some of the backstory surrounding the formation of the gang. The oft-referenced Panama incident is something I want to hit eventually, but I’d like to give it a novel-length treatment.
There’s also my as-yet-unrevealed novel-length project, but that one’s not past the world-building phase yet, and I eventually plan to write a series of stories akin to We Sail Off To War, a chronicle of the career of officer Conan Forsythe. Natural, really, given that the setting is my Napoleonic Wars in space, and Napoleonic Wars-era naval stories breed Aubreys and Hornblowers.
Finally, a word on Nathaniel Cannon the character: as I’ve mentioned before, the skypirates setting is the outgrowth of a roleplaying game setting that never got played. Of the characters who feature in skypirates stories, only Cannon ever had a character sheet done up, whence come some of his flaws: the Glassjaw Cannon thing from Lost City of Pitu, for one, and also his propensity toward complicated plans1. I’m tempted to work up character sheets for the other major characters—less as hard-and-fast guides and more as a way to explore what sorts of flaws I think they ought to have.
1. Since it was supposed to be a Savage Worlds game, I spun my own mechanical flaw: ‘Blofeld Complex’, the compulsion to come up with plans with too many moving parts.
