Your art is as big, as powerful, as beautiful and dangerous as you yourself are able to conceive of it as being.

– Alan Moore

The Writing

I got a second round of feedback on SYTI and thankfully it lined up with the first. I was waiting on a third, but doesn’t look like that’s coming, so I’ll get started on the next draft shortly. Current plan is to write the prequel story and roll right into rewriting the first couple of chapters of the novella (or, writing whole new opening chapters, really).

In the meantime I’ve been planning a YA novel, to be called TD here for the time being. I don’t love the name, but it’s still the best I’ve been able to come up with so far. I’m not sure if dystopian YA is “in” anymore after the Hunger Games inspired flood of it a few years back, but the focus of this book is dystopian cli-fi – a look at the world teens today might be inheriting and reasons/ways to push back against the fossil capitalist hegemony.

I hope to have an initial outline for the book by the end of this week, then work on SYTI until it’s ready to go out on sub, and then back to TD to rework the outline after I’ve had a break from it. Wish me luck.

Also, I mentioned yesterday that the TOC for Interzone #295 has been announced, including a new short story from me titled Hollywood Animals.

Nothing Here Newsletter

• [UNLOCKED] Revenge – issue 184 – 3rd July, 2022
  • by Dan Harvey, on the anti-abortion movement and Jane’s Revenge
• nothing here but biological war – issue 185 – 10th July, 2022
  • Civilisational Collapse
  • Global debt
  • Muting America
  • And more
• nothing here but deep time maintenance – issue 186 – 24th July, 2022
  • Bogong moths
  • Questions of Democracy
  • Language Model AIs
  • Mexico City Deep Time
  • And heaps more…
• [UNLOCKED] Britain is Burning – issue 187 – 31st July, 2022
  • by Dan Harvey, on climate change and collective action.

And All the Rest…

Some good news, from my twitter:

Near the start of the year when we started on a new chemotherapy program (new type of chemo, different schedule, more blood tests, etc etc) we were told that remission was extremely unlikely. The vet and oncologist made it sound like we only had a few months with her. But either medicine is complicated (nah) and/or she responded extremely well to the new program, and her recent ultrasound showed no sign of the cancer in her bowels.

It’s hard to celebrate it as much as I probably should because it’s not a cure, only a respite. But it’s enough just knowing that we have more time with her, and will hopefully be able to wind-down the treatment and related vet visits (as mentioned above, she hates the vet) so that her quality of life is improved.

I dedicated Killing Gravity to Ella because Seven was based on her. Seven is functionally (kind of) immortal because I can’t properly comprehend Ella dying. Thankfully it’s something I won’t have to comprehend for a while yet.

(But, goddamn, it took a lot of money to get to this point. Buy my books.)