#oneaday Day 437: Reflecting on the Talents duology

The other night, I finished reading through Master of Fiends, Douglas Hill's sequel to Blade of the Poisoner. This is a book I've read fewer times than Blade of the Poisoner, since I didn't have my own copy of it growing up, but I remember liking it nonetheless.

Taken as a pair, Blade of the Poisoner and Master of Fiends make for some entertaining, uncomplicated and undemanding fantasy that I am pleased to report was almost as enjoyable today as it was when I was a kid. The breezy young adult-level writing makes the whole thing remarkably quick to zip through — particularly as both volumes are quite short in and of themselves — but it doesn't feel especially "dumbed down" or "childish". There's a good, dramatic tone to the narration — towards the end of Master of Fiends I found myself internally voicing the narrator as the late Tony Jay, which added immeasurably to the experience and makes me sad we'll never hear him do an audiobook reading of these — and the characters, although straightforward and somewhat archetypal, are all likable.

I realise in my past musings on these books, I haven't really talked about the details of their narratives. So here we go, then.

In Blade of the Poisoner, we're introduced to our protagonist: 12 year old Jarral, who is out hunting in the Wellwood, when he comes into contact with a veritable giantess of a woman named Archer that he has, over the years, struck up something of a friendship with. Before long, Jarral discovers that his village has been destroyed by Prince Mephtik, better known as the Poisoner, and he flees the Wellwood with Archer — or at least attempts to, though before long he and his gigantic companion are captured by Mephtik and his monstrous spiders.

During their captivity, Mephtik opts to use his "favourite toy", a magic sword known as the Tainted Blade. It is said that a single scratch from this sword is fatal, with the recipient of the wound dropping dead (or, more accurately, pretty much magically burning to death) when the moon next turns full. It is nearly a full month before the moon is next full, and Mephtik makes it clear that he intends for Jarral to be in his captivity when the time comes, so he can watch the young boy die.

He doesn't get the chance, though, because before long two more of our central heroes enter the picture after being sent to the Wellwood by the mysterious wizard Cryltaur Tabbetang (Cryl to his friends): the blind warrior Scythe, and the fifteen year old Lady Mandragorina, or Mandra for short. Between them — and through judicious use of their mental powers known as Talents, which Cryl trained them in — they manage to free Jarral and Archer, escaping from the Wellwood and getting well clear of Mephtik and his beasts before they can pursue.

There is, of course, a problem that remains, which is that Jarral has been marked by the Tainted Blade, and will thus die in a month's time unless both the Blade and its wielder are destroyed. That sure sounds like an epic quest to me! And, sure enough, things unfold pretty much as you expect — though at kind of a breakneck pace compared to some other works of fantasy fiction.

There's not a lot of getting bogged down in the details of travelling, Hobbit songs or whatever; it's remarkably soon that the party finds themselves looking upon the city of Xicanti, where Mephtik has his stronghold, and a few chapters after that where, between them, they have defeated Mephtik in a thematically appropriate manner, defeated a Greater Demon using the Tainted Blade — which, conveniently, destroyed it in the process — and decided that rather than going home to celebrate, it would probably be a good idea to go after the world's Big Bad, a "thou shalt not speak his name" evil sorcerer known variously as the Demon-Driver or, you guessed it, the Master of Fiends, particularly as said Big Bad has kidnapped Cryl and promises to keep him alive for an "eternity of torment" or some such equivalent gesture.

Master of Fiends picks up almost immediately after Blade of the Poisoner after the party's second journey is underway. All of them are still present, including Jarral, who, during the climactic battles of Blade of the Poisoner, discovered he had the extremely rare Talent of being able to summon the powerful forces of nature that are Elementals: one of the few Talents that can stand up to honest-to-goodness demons, because demons are weakened and even paralysed with fear in the sheer presence of an Elemental. However, Jarral, being just twelve years old and having had no training in his Talent, is not entirely able to control his ability to everyone's complete satisfaction, so part of the running theme of Master of Fiends is Jarral quickly having to grow up and figure things out under, at times, extreme duress.

Throughout both books, Jarral is very obviously the teenage reader's wish-fulfilment character. Despite being unremarkable and inept, he has The Most Powerful Thing, and he's also the centre of the universe so far as the narrative of Blade of the Poisoner is concerned. As a young reader, I remember feeling like I was supposed to almost "inhabit" the role of Jarral, particularly when it came to his growing feelings towards Mandra — feelings that, I would note, are shot down in flames at the end of Master of Fiends due to the age gap between the pair of them, but with a whiff of hope that when they're both "grown up" something might be able to happen between them, maybe, possibly. I recall feeling a bit put out at that part of the ending when I was younger, but looking at it now, it does make a certain amount of sense, and means that none of us had to sit through any particularly awkward pre-pubescent romance scenes.

One could probably pick many faults with both Blade of the Poisoner and Master of Fiends. We don't learn much — if anything — about the background of any of the characters, for one thing, though I actually found this didn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. The most backstory we get is when Scythe is introduced early in Blade of the Poisoner, and we discover he's been making his living using his ability to "see without sight" (and his formidable weapon-handling skills that come with it) to act as a juggler. We learn nothing about Archer, including why she is regarded as a "giantess"; similarly, we don't learn all that much about Mandra, either, just that she is from a noble background, unlike the others.

It might have been nice to learn a bit more about all the characters — particularly in an epilogue, as Master of Fiends does feel like it ends rather abruptly — but, as I say, these two books weren't really trying to be the next Lord of the Rings. They were just trying to tell an interesting, exciting and accessible story for young adults, and the many holes one can pick in their respective narratives and the overall settings don't get in the way of them achieving that goal. I came away from rereading both feeling vindicated at my longstanding fond memories of them both, and glad that I had taken the time (very little time, as it happened) to reread them as an adult.

So while they're not classics of great literature or anything, nor are they in any way the most amazing pieces of fantasy fiction you'll ever read, they were both perfectly enjoyable — and probably a good introduction to the genre for younger readers who are up to handling the more "horrifying" aspects of both narratives. Perhaps a fun exercise sometime could be to imagine what happened next for these characters, since sadly Hill, having passed away in 2007, is no longer around to do it for us.

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#oneaday Day 436: RIP my sixth form

When I originally went to secondary school, my school was known for having a good sixth form. For those unfamiliar (i.e. not British, I suspect), a sixth form is where you go for "further education" (as opposed to "higher education", which is university) after your compulsory 11 years of school in the UK. It's called sixth form as a hangover from the old method of numbering school years, where primary education didn't really have a fixed method of distinguishing year groups beyond "infants" and "juniors", and then secondary education from 11 onwards started at "first form" all the way up to "fifth form". Today, primary education starts at Reception, then goes from Y1 to Y11 as one continuous run from primary to secondary, with most secondary schools starting with Y7. While some people do refer to sixth form as "Y12 and Y13", the term "sixth form" has, for one reason or another, stuck.

Anyway, none of that is the point. The point is, my school used to be known for having good sixth form provision. It's one of the reasons I went there, as I was a bright child and it was probably a given that I was always going to stay on into post-compulsory education, and indeed I did — two years of sixth form, then four years at university. I was fortunate enough to be in a year group that was the first to take advantage of a brand new sixth form centre built (well, adapted from the former upper school dining hall) on the premises, and it was a really lovely facility. I had a wonderful time there; I enjoyed my studies, I made and solidified a number of friendships, and, as I've remarked a number of times in this blog, I think I count those two years as possibly the happiest, most content of my life.

Every so often, I like to check in on my old school. No real reason, I'm always just curious how it's doing. It never was an amazing school, outside of the sixth form provision, and it's certainly had its challenges over the years. What I was rather surprised to see when I took a Google Street View down to the premises was this:

(Pixelations are mine; I just don't want randos looking up my old school for whatever reason.)

I saw those doors and thought, hang on. That doesn't look right. That building used to be the pride and joy of the school campus, so why haven't they painted the doors for what looks like several decades at this point?

It's because, it seems, the sixth form that was once one of the best things about that school is no more — and, in fact, it has not been a thing since 2015. (The photo above was taken in 2016, which just goes to show how frighteningly quickly a building can start looking dilapidated and shitty.) I found this out from looking at the school's Wikipedia page — I was surprised to discover it even had a Wikipedia page — but there it was, the cold, hard facts. I followed the links to see the news and yes, it seems it's true; the "Post-16 Centre" where I had such amazing, wonderful memories, is no more.

Now, I suspect the school today has made use of this building rather than just leaving it there; there's no way for me to know short of actually going to visit it, and I haven't been there in person for probably more than 30 years at this point. I see from its prospectus and willingness to book out its various large "venues" to the community — something the school had always done, making it a true "community school" — that it has a "performing arts space" that may or may not make use of that old space. Hard to tell, really.

Regardless, I feel a bit sad about this. That sixth form centre opened with such positivity and excitement for the future, and it was genuinely exciting to be part of it. The facilities were good, there were comfortable common areas to relax and socialise, and we felt proud to be part of something new and wonderful. I was surprised and saddened to see that the dream for that space apparently hadn't lasted; the school now has no sixth form provision of its own at all, instead collaborating with another local school (a longstanding "rival" back when I was there, but now part of the same "educational partnership", whatever that means) to provide sixth form provision for both schools' students.

I don't know if all this is because sixth form numbers were on the decline, or the building wasn't cost-effective, or whatever. All I do know is that it's a shame, and I feel a bit sad. You really can't go back, but at least you always have those precious memories, I guess.

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#oneaday Day 435: Performative tediousness

As time advances ever-onwards towards my holiday and my (possibly permanent) break from social media, I find myself considering starting the whole thing early. Bluesky in particular has started showing worrying signs of the sort of passive-aggressive, performative annoyingness that plagued Twitter in the mid-2010s — this was, for me, what really set me on a path to disliking social media in general — and it's just not really fun any more.

There are aspects of Bluesky I do like. The "nuclear block", which prevents anyone seeing the specific posts you're replying to or quoting when you blocked the original poster, remains the platform's best feature, and is a good — albeit imperfect — solution to dogpiling. But dogpiling still goes on, because there are other ways of doing that.

But the passive aggressive thing, known in a past life as "subtweeting", where you post something obviously intended for the attention of a specific person, but one that you're not replying to explicitly, has seen a marked uptick recently. You know the sort of thing, posts that start "If you think [not-particularly contentious opinion, like thinking trans people should have rights], then just unfollow me now" or "When someone says [exceedingly obvious and hyper-specific red flag that clearly someone has mentioned in the last ten minutes], that tells you everything you need to know about that person" — posts that are intended to wind up a very specific person, but in a "not touching, can't get mad" sort of way; posts that encourage a "well, if you think this might be about you, you might be the problem" sort of attitude.

Look, I'm not saying we shouldn't confront hateful bigotry when it comes up. Particularly these days, when the significant progress we've made over the course of the last decade in terms of tolerance and acceptance with regard to race, gender and sexuality appears to be coming undone at a frighteningly rapid rate. But there are better ways to do it than posting passive-aggressive statements into the void. If you want to have an argument with someone, just go ahead and fucking have the argument. It might make you feel better for five minutes, until you realise how much time and energy you have wasted trying to change the mind of someone else on the Internet.

Or you could do something yourself that is more positive. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that. Calling someone bouncing off the walls going "I HATE THE JEWS" a "Nazi" is not suddenly going to make them go "shit, I am? I am, aren't I? Thank you for setting me straight". Setting a good example yourself, meanwhile, up to and including getting involved in activism if you feel strongly enough about the issue in question, is a much more productive use of everyone's time. It won't stop the Nazis being Nazis, but if there's one thing several decades of Internet discourse should tell you at this point, it's that very little will.

One technique I've found extremely useful in training myself out of getting into annoying situations online is that if I see something which, for one reason or another, angers me, I will fully type out an indignant reply, look at it for a moment, take ten seconds to think "do I actually want to post this? Is the potential fallout from posting this worth it?" and then, more often than not, delete it, because the answer to both questions is inevitably "no". Just recently, this has been happening with such frequency that I find myself asking a follow-up question: "do I really still want to be part of this community, if situations like this keep arising?" And the answer there, too, is often turning out to be "no".

This is the thinking behind my great "unplug" in early September. I'm going to disconnect completely from all forms of "discourse" online for the duration of my holiday. I'm still going to keep my phone with me, of course, and I will do things like keep up to date on the news and suchlike with RSS, but social media and any sort of "open" chat (read: Discord) is off the table for me.

I'm just glad I've never got involved with TikTok. My overwhelming feeling from my thankfully limited exposure to TikTok is that TikTok is hell for this sort of performative crap, except now you have to see someone yelling things into their phone camera instead of posting indignant text messages. And TikTok never ends. God, what a fucking nightmare proposition.

I realise this entire post could itself be seen as performative and passive-aggressive. But, frankly, this is my own website, and I'm not pushing this out into the wider world in the hope some very specific person is going to see it. I'm just writing it for myself. And possibly my cat, who has been cuddling my leg for the entire time I've been writing this. I hope you enjoyed it, Patti.

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#oneaday Day 434: The battle to re-enable comments

A while back, I disabled comments for old posts, because I was getting a few unpleasant people trawling through past posts and being kind of a dick. Now that appears to mostly be a thing of the past, I have, on multiple occasions, attempted to re-enable comments on old posts, only to find myself running into a brick wall.

I tried turning off the "automatically close comments on posts older than [x] days" setting in the WordPress dashboard. I tried turning off the same setting in the Bluehost plugin (which, while I'm no longer using Bluehost, was still active on my site to do stuff like caching and auto-updates). I tried batch processing all my old posts in the WordPress Dashboard and checking "Allow Comments" on them. I tried doing posts individually. Nothing seemed to work — posts older than a month were getting their comments closed, even though I had, seemingly, turned off everything that should be doing that.

I spent a bit of time tinkering in the Dashboard earlier today in an attempt to try and fix this once and for all. And the only thing I found that worked was to set the "close comments older than [x] days" figure in WordPress' settings to 999999 days, or just shy of 2,740 years. A smaller figure would have probably worked, but I wanted to use one that I wouldn't have to update in my lifetime. I will note that changing this setting is what worked despite the "close comments older than [x] days" checkbox being unticked. So apparently something, somewhere, had got its knickers in a twist and was still closing comments after 28 days, even though all the relevant settings on the back end had been set firmly to "no, please do not do that".

So there you go. If you want to go back through my old posts and leave comments on them, you can now do that. The only thing I would say about that is to please remember that this blog has been up and running in one form or another (though not always at this URL) for 17 years, and I am not the same person now that I was when I first started it, nor am I the same person I might have been at the time you take offence at something I wrote at some point in the last 17 years. Times change, attitudes change, opinions change. I don't think I have changed all that much in my core beliefs — I've always been left-leaning and sex-positive with little patience for bullying — but my willingness to wade into the mud of the Internet and actually fight is seriously diminished these days. Today, I just want a quiet life, to be perfectly honest.

If you have wanted to leave a comment on something older than the last 28 days and have found yourself unable to do so — sorry! I have been trying to fix the problem and it wasn't until the above last-ditch "I wonder if this works" attempt actually worked that I've been able to sort it out good and proper!

So yeah. Come say hello in the comments if you feel like it. Or not. I'll be here either way.

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#oneaday Day 433: Point of impact

Burnout is one of those things that I'm not entirely sure is completely 100% recognised and accepted as an actual medical "thing", but it's certainly accepted as being a phenomenon that exists. I have been feeling kind of shitty lately, so I thought I would self-assess against the symptoms of burnout listed by the charity Mental Health UK:

Feeling tired or exhausted most of the time – yep
Reoccurring insomnia and sleep disturbances – yep
Frequent headaches – nope, occasional ones but probably a "normal" amount
Muscle or joint pain – yep, but I suspect that's more down to general unfitness
Gastrointestinal problems, such as feeling sick or loss of appetite – nope, but I have kind of the opposite problem, where eating becomes a coping mechanism
Frequent illness due to lowered immunity – nope, actually, I haven't been properly "ill" for quite a while
Issues breathing – occasionally, though with the current heatwave I'm not sure this is a representative sample
Feeling helpless, trapped and/or defeated – oh hell yes
Self-doubt, feeling a failure or worthless – abso-fricking-lutely
Feeling detached and alone in the world – most definitely
Feeling overwhelmed – yes indeedy
Feeling demotivated, having a cynical/negative outlook – yessir
Loss of interest and enjoyment – in some areas, yes; in others, not so much
Persistent feelings of dread, worry and anxiety – yes, very much
Procrastinating and taking longer to complete things – yep
Difficulty concentrating – depends what I'm doing, but at work, definitely
Decreased output and productivity – yes, both at work and on personal projects
Becoming isolated and withdrawing from people, responsibilities etc. – very much so
Reliant on food, drugs or alcohol to cope – no to alcohol and drugs, food is better than it has been in the past, but not great
Irritable and short-tempered, likely to ha- FUCK OFF
Increased tardiness, being late for work and/or higher absenteeism – I find it difficult to get up and running first thing in the morning, but once I'm settled in I'm fine

So that's… hang on (counts)… 18 out of 21 symptoms if I count all the "maybes" and "sometimeses" as "yes". That… doesn't seem great, does it? Should probably do something about that, maybe. I mean, I'm going on holiday soon, and I think that's going to help — and my plans to mostly disappear entirely from the Internet for the duration of that holiday (with the exception of this blog, which I intend to continue updating) will probably help, too (aside from the "feelings of isolation" thing). But there's still a good few weeks to go before I have made it to that holiday, and right now it's feeling like it's quite a long way off.

And the trouble with burnout, if you've never experienced it, is that it makes all the things you're already worrying about feel approximately a billion times worse, and, in the process, makes it feel like a truly Herculean effort to actually reach out to someone who might be able to help with matters, because it also creates an intense sense of fear and mistrust towards… well, almost everyone, really.

Chief among my worries right now is a concern about my work. Without going into specifics for now, there's an aspect of my job that I really don't enjoy, and which I would absolutely love to be able to give up, but since I have been muddling through with it up until now (and feeling the most potent sense of impostor syndrome in the process) I feel like it might look a bit strange to just bring it up now. And so I haven't. But by not doing so, it feels like it just sort of festers inside me, dragging me down and making me feel more and more burnt out the more I worry about it.

The sensible solution is probably, of course, to bring it up with my immediate superior, who is a thoroughly nice and understanding sort of person. But the prospect of that carries with it its own "fears" — I don't want to seem like I'm letting anyone down, more than anything, and by admitting that I'm finding something difficult to cope with, I feel like that's exactly what I'm doing. Realistically speaking, burning myself out until I'm little more than a charred husk in an office chair is probably letting people down more in the long-term, but still. It is scary. We live in exceedingly uncertain times in the business I'm in, and for the most part, I like the job I do and do not want to do anything which might jeopardise that.

Anyway, as I say, I don't want to say too much on specifics, because the details are conversations I need to have with the appropriate people, not splurge onto the Internet. And besides, it's not the only thing that is contributing to my current condition; frustration at the general state of the world, feeling completely and utterly isolated from friends, plus my overall physical and mental wellbeing are all contributing factors, too.

But I think it's pretty safe to say that I am indeed suffering from burnout, and my impending holiday is something I am very much looking forward to as a result.

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#oneaday Day 432: My Girlfriend's Not Here Today

I haven't read any manga for a while, so after Amazon recommended a new-ish series called My Girlfriend's Not Here Today and showed off some excitingly racy cover art, I decided to jump into my second yuri manga series about cheating.

I like yuri stories, and I don't mind admitting that at least part of the reason is due to, shall we say, baser instincts. But I also just like the general tone and vibe that stories which focus entirely on girls have. As anyone who has explored various subdivisions of Japanese popular media will know, there are certain conventions in play when it comes to particular categories of story. They're not completely universal, of course — that would probably be boring after a while — but it's not unusual to find yuri/girls' love stories about interpersonal drama and cheating, while yaoi/boys' love, in my limited experience, often tends to delve into darker themes like abuse, emotional manipulation and even violence.

I must confess, at this point, that yaoi is a bit of a black spot in my overall knowledge, hence the generalisation above, but I'm not against the idea of exploring it; there are a lot of very well-regarded yaoi visual novels that I'm very curious to investigate at some point, for example.

Yuri, meanwhile, I have a bit more experience with. In the video game/visual novel space, I've particularly enjoyed the Nurse Love series, which consists of two tonally very different girls' love games, ostensibly about the careers of young and trainee nurses, but which go to some… interesting places in certain of their routes. I can also highly recommend the incredible SeaBed, which is just a beautiful masterpiece of writing generally that just happens to be yuri at its core.

In the manga space, meanwhile, I read through all of the delightfully sweet Our Teachers are Dating! and Netsuzou Trap (NTR for short, because why hide it?) a while back and enjoyed all of those (and doubtless a few others I've forgotten) a lot.

Anyway, My Girlfriend's Not Here Today has an intriguing premise. We have a pre-established girl-girl relationship between main protagonist Yuni and her volleyball enthusiast partner, Nanase. Yuni is frustrated with Nanase because Nanase seems to care more about volleyball than about her — and, on top of that, she refuses to show any signs of affection in public or acknowledge their relationship to anyone. Yuni, being a teenage girl in the 2020s, naturally takes to her "vent" account online to complain about her situation, and ends up getting noticed by the mysterious, quiet honour student Fuuko — who, it turns out, is quite the scheming, manipulative little succubus, and someone who has been watching Yuni's vent account for quite some time.

Frustrated with Nanase, Yuni hesitantly confides in Fuuko, who very quickly becomes attached to Yuni. Things come to a head in the first volume when the pair duck into a private room at an Internet café to discuss things and end up sharing a passionate kiss after Yuni believes Nanase had forgotten their six-month anniversary. Naturally, she immediately regrets this — particularly when Nanase phones her, better late than never — but also finds that she can't stop thinking about Fuuko. While she believes she loves Nanase, her growing frustration with the seemingly growing distance between her makes the contrast with the passionate, impulsive Fuuko all the more apparent — and it's clear Yuni finds that attractive, despite herself.

What I've found interesting about My Girlfriend's Not Here Today so far after reading two volumes is how definitively "2020s" it feels. Some manga feels like it deliberately places its setting in an idealised alternate reality where people still talk to one another face-to-face and smartphones were never invented — wouldn't that be fun? — but it's a core part of My Girlfriend's Not Here Today's identity to include thoroughly modern concepts such as a "vent account" and related matters, such as young people's tendency to overshare things online without necessarily considering the long-term consequences.

There's a great tense of tension between Yuni and Fuuko, who obviously have a lot of chemistry with one another. Fuuko in particular is presented as striking an excellent balance between terrifying yandere and someone who has quite legitimate reasons for feeling and acting the way she does, and Yuni's frustration at her inability to communicate effectively with her supposed partner is very much a story for the ages.

I particularly love the way the art is presented, especially in the early parts of the first volume. Fuuko is initially drawn in an almost ethereal, ghost-like style, which can perhaps be interpreted as Yuni gradually coming to "notice" her more, with her attention having been firmly devoted to Nanase up until this point. She's presented as a delicate beauty, yet her behaviour subverts the expectations one might initially have based on her appearance, and, although she is, at times, an overbearing, even aggressive instigator of the illicit relationship between her and Yuni, she also clearly has flaws and weaknesses that I suspect will continue to be exposed and explored as the story proceeds.

I'm not sure why I'm drawn to stories like this. Having been on the receiving end of cheating multiple times in my life, one would think that I would not care to seek out such things in my entertainment. But the fact is, situations that often get boiled down to "cheating" are often complex, volatile affairs — and that makes for thoroughly interesting, compelling stories about interpersonal relationships. For some reason that is something that many yuri authors in particular find themselves drawn to, and, honestly, I'm here for it.

I've enjoyed the first two volumes of My Girlfriend's Not Here Today a great deal so far. I look forward to reading the rest.

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#oneaday Day 430: Poisonous fantasy

So I picked up Blade of the Poisoner last night, as offensive as the Kindle version's cover is to me, and started to read it. As predicted, it is pleasantly easy to read, and the fact that each chapter is less than five minutes "long" at the speed I read means that I suspect I'm probably going to power right through this in short order. As noted yesterday, though, that's no bad thing; sometimes it's nice just to read something that stimulates the imagination a bit without challenging the more "technical" parts of your brain too much.

I'm actually surprised how much of Blade of the Poisoner I'm remembering — and I don't necessarily mean the details of the story, I mean certain little turns of phrase that have, for one reason or another, stuck in my mind for many years, even without having touched this book for probably several decades at this point. There were a few in the first chapter alone: protagonist Jarral's hesitant question "Can we go and … look at the village?" after his village has been burned to the ground by the evil Prince Mephtik, and the description of the character Archer falling to the ground, "sudden blood staining her brown curls" after being lamped over the head with the butt of a crossbow. Neither of these are particularly remarkable pieces of writing, but they are, for some reason, apparently lodged in my long-term memory, and I'm sure they won't be the only ones.

Thinking about it, despite a longstanding interest in and appreciation for the genre, one thing I don't think I've ever really tried my hand at writing myself is straight-up fantasy. I've done sci-fi, I've done "real world with fantastical elements", I've done "gritty realism", but one thing I don't think I've ever done is create-your-own-world-with-its-own-rules fantasy. And, dipping into Blade of the Poisoner for the first time in a long while last night, I feel like that's something which might be fun. I'm still yet to do anything with my "Scratch Pad" creative writing site that I've set up, largely because I haven't really been struck with any sort of "inspiration" just yet. But I think this might be it: it might be time for me to have a go at fantasy, and see what happens.

Fantasy is interesting because it has a whole different set of considerations to other types of writing. By its very nature, you don't have to follow the "rules" of reality, but you are then faced with the challenge of ensuring your world is internally consistent. How does magic work, if it is present at all? What species call that world home, and how are you going to ensure none of them accidentally end up as thinly veiled racial stereotypes? What social structures are in place? How do you strike a balance between giving the baddies threatening-sounding names and ensuring they don't end up sounding like medical terminology? Is there any connection between that world and ours? Is that world an "alternate Earth", or is it a completely different planet, perhaps with its own rules?

Lots of things to consider, and establishing a setting in this way can, at times, be a really fun part of writing. It is also an easy part to get very bogged down in, so one has to find a good balance between making notes on things that are important to the story you want to tell and the setting in which you want to convey that story, and not getting carried away writing what effectively amounts to a Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook. Of course, there's also a certain amount of value in fleshing out your setting to a ridiculous degree, because that can lay the foundations for future stories you might want to tell in that setting, but one shouldn't lose sight of one's main goal. As with any type of creative project, particularly if one hasn't indulged in such things for a while, it pays to start small and see where things go from there.

So yes. I am thinking. Hard. I can't promise if and when anything will appear over on the Scratch Pad, but I'll be sure to link it here when something does. And in the meantime, perhaps just a chapter or two more of Blade of the Poisoner, you know, as inspiration…

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#oneaday Day 429: Past poisonous pleasures

After finishing Jane Eyre, I find myself pondering what I might want to read next. At the moment I am torn between wanting to keep my sufficiently "Victorian-calibrated" reading mind in practice by reading something else from the 19th century — I have several things in mind, including things that are both new and familiar to me — and wanting to read something simple, straightforward and, let's be honest, dumb.

There's a certain appeal to reading something that is well below your ability level. I'm obviously not talking about regressing to See Spot Run or suchlike, but returning to what tends to be lumped under the all-expansive "YA" (Young Adult) umbrella today offers a compelling prospect. Not only are titles from this particular part of the literary sphere easy to read, they also tend to be short, which, after ploughing through Jane Eyre (which had been formatted incorrectly on Kindle so it only displayed the amount of reading time remaining in the book rather than in your current chapter as it is supposed to) is definitely appealing.

One pair of books I'm actually quite interested to return to is Douglas Hill's Poisoner duology, which consists of Blade of the Poisoner and Master of Fiends. These were probably some of my earliest exposure to fantasy fiction, and I remember absolutely loving them as a kid. Well, more accurately, I loved Blade of the Poisoner; I never had my own copy of Master of Fiends, though I believe my friend Matthew had a copy that I borrowed on more than one occasion. I definitely read it at least once.

Blade of the Poisoner is fairly traditional, unremarkable fantasy with a touch of childish wish-fulfilment in there. The protagonist is a 12 year old boy called Jarral who, in fantasy novel tradition, grew up as a country bumpkin. Through certain misadventures, the details of which I forget, Jarral becomes marked by Prince Mephtik's magic blade; specifically, he gets a big letter "M" carved on his chest, and the nature of Mephtik's blade means that anyone given so much as a scratch with it will die on the next full moon, hence his colloquial name, "The Poisoner". You probably see where this is going.

Blade of the Poisoner does indeed go exactly where you expect it to, but that's what made it appeal to me as a kid. I enjoyed the simple, straightforward fantasy story of good versus evil, and even though I knew things were almost certainly going to be all right for the good guys by the end of proceedings, I still enjoyed reading it. Blade of the Poisoner, I recall, stood quite well by itself, but Master of Fiends was a solid sequel that raised the stakes somewhat.

I also remember being quite taken with the descriptions of the Lady Mandragorina as a kid; from what I recall, she was a pretty young woman around a similar age to Jarral (and me, when I was reading the book) and… well, there was definitely some teenage wish fulfilment going on there. These days, I suspect the formidable figure of Archer may have some appeal for me, from what I remember of her powerful thighs and suchlike.

Sorry, where was I? Oh, right. Yes. I think I might actually re-read Blade of the Poisoner (and possibly Master of Fiends also) if it's available on Kindle (it is!) and see how well it holds up to my old, jaded eyes. And then I'll jump back into some sort of Victoriana. Maybe.

Aside: The cover for the Kindle version sucks. Look at this low-effort photoshoot of a dude in an anorak in someone's back garden:

And compare, if you will, to the cover of the version I grew up with:

Yeah. C'mon. That's more like it.

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#oneaday Day 428: My home online

As I count down to deactivating all social media aside from the little bit I need for work, I find myself tinkering with this site to make it a more comfortable "home" online. After all, once I ditch Bluesky, I will have no feed- or algorithm-based social media at all, with only YouTube (which is algorithm-based, yes, but I don't really count it as "social media"), Discord and various other private chat solutions (depending on friends' preferred methods) remaining.

Honestly, at this point, I'm relishing the prospect of some peace and quiet. Bluesky was fun for a while, but it just doesn't really feel worth the effort. Absolutely no other social media whatsoever holds any appeal for me, and I long for (LONG for) the day when I can ditch the work social media accounts also, because I absolutely detest working on them.

There are plenty of people out there who, I'm sure, have made social media work for them and even have an enjoyable time scrolling their feeds. I haven't felt the same sort of joy in silliness that I did in the early days of Twitter for many years at this point; after online interactions in general sort of imploded on themselves around the Gamergate years, things were never quite the same again afterwards. They'd been building that way for a while — for me, I think the Mass Effect 3 ending "controversy" was the beginning of the end, and that was, what, 2012? — and ever since then, what little social media I've kept up and running has been for one of two reasons: fear of losing touch with people that I have only ever interacted with on social media, and the feeling of "obligation" that I had to share my work, be it personal or professional in nature.

I still fear losing touch with some people, although honestly so many people have just fallen out of my life completely over the course of the last decade or so, what's a few more at this point for an incredibly lonely middle-aged man? The people who really matter to me, I already have alternative means of getting in touch with. I have a pinned post on my Bluesky page making my intentions clear, and so far no-one has made any particular attempt to get in touch via alternative means, and thus I have to conclude that either no-one cares, or it's going to be a situation where two months down the line, someone goes looking for me, finds my account deactivated and goes "I wonder what happened to that guy?"

I'm here. I'm still here. I've always been here. And as I let go of more and more of the toxic "services" that have been poisoning my mental health for the last decade and a half, I look forward to this place (and my other sites) being my true "home" online.

You are, of course, welcome to visit, dear reader. I'll be very happy to welcome you in.

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#oneaday Day 427: Reader, I married him

I finished reading Jane Eyre last night. I can't quite remember exactly what prompted me to read it again — for it was the third time I've read it in my life, having read it once at school, once at university and a third time now — but I'm glad I did read it. I suspect it was most likely on my mind after playing, writing about and making a video about the rather fabulous adventure game, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow, which is very much steeped in the ideas of "the female Gothic" and particularly that style of literature's distinctive breed of heroine.

But I feel like it was also a bit of a challenge to myself; in recent years, all I've really read in book terms are modern English novels and serialised (translated) light novels that originated in Japan — not that there's anything wrong with either of those, but they're not exactly one might call a challenging read for the most part. And that's fine; sometimes you don't want to have to work to enjoy something.

Going back and reading literature from the past, though, is always interesting. I found with this most recent re-read of Jane Eyre that, as I expected, it took a while to get back into the swing of 19th century English. This is a particularly interesting time for the language when there is a lot that is perfectly recognisable and parsable to a modern audience — we had reached a point where most words were spelled as they are today, for example — but there are a lot of more subtle things, like structural elements, turns of phrase and the way sentences are constructed, which can be challenging to dive headlong into. Take a look at this, for example, which is technically all one sentence:

He was, in short, in his afterdinner mood; more expanded and genial, and also more self-indulgent than the frigid and rigid temper of the morning: still, he looked preciously grim, cushioning his massive head against the swelling back of his chair, and receiving the light of the fire on his granitehewn features, and in his great, dark eyes—for he had great, dark eyes, and very fine eyes, too; not without a certain change in their depths sometimes, which, if it was not softness, reminded you, at least, of that feeling.

(Jane Eyre, Chapter XIV)

I'm willing to bet that, unless you make a habit of reading 19th century literature on the regular, it probably took you a scan or two to read and fully parse that single sentence. There's nothing there that is particularly difficult in and of itself — there are no complex, archaic words to decipher, no random untranslated French phrases (which do occur elsewhere in the book) and not even any particularly complicated concepts to understand — but the sheer number of subordinate clauses, semicolons, colons, dashes and suchlike means that the sentence, as a whole, goes several "layers" deeper into nested punctuation marks than a 21st century copy editor would be altogether comfortable with.

And so it was for me when I started re-reading Jane Eyre. I remember having this struggle when first I beheld it for (I think) A-level English Literature, and being actually quite relieved when it came up early in my university studies, as it was still fairly fresh in my mind, meaning I wouldn't have to go through the whole "calibration" process again. But it had been long enough since those university studies and today that this time around, I did have to recalibrate my mind somewhat — and I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it at first.

But, to my surprise (and delight) it happened a lot quicker than I thought it would. The thing with pre-20th century literature (heck, anything from before the mid-20th century, even) is that you kind of have to bang your head against it repeatedly until it yields enough to let you in. And when it does — because it will, eventually, given sufficient perseverance — you will be rewarded. Because as complicated as that sentence quoted above is, it's also terribly evocative. If you're the sort of person who can derive mental pictures from the words you read — and I'm aware not everyone can do that — then you probably got a pretty strong one from the above description of Mr. Edward Fairfax Rochester.

The thing that makes Jane Eyre particularly enjoyable to me is its first-person narration. You're not just listening to a disinterested narrator explaining what has happened; you are, instead, listening to a participant of the story recount and reflect on the things that happened to them. I've always been rather drawn to first-person narratives — many of my own prior creative works are written in first-person — and I suspect that Jane Eyre was one of several influences on me in that regard. For me, a first-person narrative style really allows you to get to know the protagonist of the work; it's why I resonate so well with Japanese visual novels and light novels today, I think, which are also typically written from the first-person. It gives you the sense of separation that you are not the star of the story — this is a contrast between visual novels and traditional adventure games, for example, as the latter use second-person narration — but also allows you a particularly intimate relationship with the protagonist; one that even the protagonist's closest confidantes in the narrative itself don't enjoy, in many cases.

For example, consider the relationship between Jane and Rochester in Jane Eyre. Many of their interactions between one another take the form of verbal sparring, with Jane's sharp wit matched by Rochester's sarcasm; both spend a significant portion of the novel trying to get the full measure of the other, with each concealing their true feelings for reasons that are their own. If this were presented from a disinterested outsider's perspective, we might not get the same understanding of the situation, as to someone who doesn't know at least part of what is going on, their interactions might look like genuine snippiness with one another.

In the case of us, the audience, we only get to learn the absolute truth of Jane's take on the situation, which is that part of her wants to keep Rochester at arm's length because she senses a certain degree of danger from him (which, it turns out, is not entirely unjustified) but also because she detects he enjoys their repartee. We later, of course, learn from Rochester himself that he has been playing his own little game with Jane — with certain members of high society forming his playing pieces — but without Jane's suspicions about the situation or Rochester's eventual admission, it would have been very easy to misinterpret everything.

It's interesting to contemplate the book's viewpoints on certain matters, given how society has changed since the time it was written. Jane Eyre is often cited as one of the first great feminist works, for example, and it's not hard to see why. Jane herself is a powerful figure who is, for the most part, in control of her own destiny; she learns and grows stronger from hardships and adversity, and it's only at one point in the narrative — where she flees Thornfield Hall after learning of Rochester's mad wife in the attic, then accidentally leaves her meagre worldly possessions in a coach before getting stranded on the Moors in the middle of nowhere — that we ever see her display what one might call "weakness". Even during that time, however, she's shown to have a good head on her shoulders, and makes some wise decisions that ultimately pay off, despite the indignity of collapsing on a stranger's doorstep.

The book is surprisingly scathing about religion — a fact which caused some critics to baulk at it on its original release — but it makes a solid argument. The figure of St. John Rivers, a character from the latter part of the narrative, presents an interesting challenge for Jane; up until now, she has attempted to live her life in a good, Christian sort of way, but St. John shows that one can perhaps take things in that regard a little too far — particularly once he starts proposing a loveless marriage to Jane (who, we have learned by this point, is actually his cousin) on the grounds that she would "make a good missionary's wife". Jane is having none of that shit, of course, and tells him so; even so, the fact that she does start to wonder if she might be coming around to his way of thinking by one point presents a surprisingly potent exploration of how abusive relationships work, because this crack in her resolve is the result of St. John's unrelenting dickishness towards her after her initial rejection of him. St. John is a cunt and I'm glad he died alone in India. There, I said it.

Anyway, yeah. Jane Eyre was a good read. This is, of course, something of an understatement given what a classic work of literature it is considered to be — and how it ranks highly in various "greatest books of all time" polls — but I think it's easy to forget that pre-20th century literature can just be "enjoyable" as well as "great" and "important".

I certainly enjoyed re-reading Jane Eyre. Now I have to determine whether to continue riding this wave of enthusiasm for classic literature, given that my brain has been successfully recalibrated for 19th century prose, or if I should read something for a bit of light relief. I haven't quite decided yet, but I will definitely be making more time for reading.

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