And another 2,000+ words written today. How many times should I repeat this before you all get bored with it? Anyway, I’ve now reached the stage where I’ve got nine sections, or episodes of the story, chronologically ordered in a large lump of text 17,000 or so words long over 26 pages. I also have a contents list which details what I have, with one brief line describing each section. (I use this list to keep track of the story. I then copy it when I’ve finished and convert it first into a long synopsis, then that into a short synopsis, then that into cover blurbs)

Now it’s time to start deciding how I’m going to structure the book. Usually I divide up what I’ve written into about ten pages per chapter, but in this case I might be working slightly differently, in fact more like I did with Brass Man. A lot of what I am writing now is, essentially, backstory. I’m considering making these sections into ‘retroacts’ to start off each chapter, or to insert where relevant in the current story as reveals. This backstory also comes from two perspectives, so there will also be opportunities, in those reveals, to show stark contrasts.

So far as I plan, the story itself begins during the prador/human war (that backstory), then continues just after the events on Masada in The Technician. So far. Maybe I’ll end up just writing my way through to that point, I’m certainly enjoying myself at the moment. And maybe you’ll end up with more than one book.

Here’s a recent interview with me conducted by Douglas R Cobb. I’m probably repeating a lot of stuff considering how many of these I’ve done.

Different SF writers have different names for their interstellar civilization. Ian M Banks has the Culture, Star trek has the Federation and the Dominion, empires and kingdoms have been used too. The Polity was my own particular take on this. I wanted something big, sprawling and complicated in which I could set just about any SF story. Its inception was in numerous short stories where similar technology might be used, similar alien life, agents, characters and gradually grew almost like a crystal forming. Runcible gates where a hat-tip to the ansible, but grew into a science whose nomenclature evolved from the poem The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear (a tachyon, for example, is called ‘pea-green’). I wanted my Polity linked up by spaceships and instantaneous matter transmission and the runcible gates are the latter, giving people the ability to step across light-years in an instant.

So I think to myself I’ll call the main character David Spear (second name chosen because of that cool character in Band of Brothers) then I wonder: haven’t I used David before? Of course I have – David McCrooger in Hilldiggers – so I need a rethink. In a piece I wrote off the cuff, prior to starting Penny Royal, I used a Scandinavian name and, glancing at it again, I thought yes, something like that. The first one to pop into my head was Thorvald, and I decided to do a search on it. Now, bearing in mind that this is about the black AI Penny Royal, a monster (sort of), it was interesting to come up with this is relation to the name Thorvald:

Thorvald the slayer of Nidhogg

Then a search of Nidhogg comes up with:

In Norse myth, Nidhogg (“tearer of corpses”) is a monstrous serpent that gnaws almost perpetually at the deepest root of the World Tree Yggdrasil, threatening to destroy it.

Also:

(Malice Striker, often anglicized Nidhogg)

And thus the imagination feeds.