Hunted: Afterword

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A big thank you to all who have been reading HUNTED, it truly means a great deal. Thank you, also, to those who have commented, and liked, throughout the weeks, pointing out spelling or grammar errors, sharing what they enjoyed, or their surprise at events unfolding — each and every one is a joy to read and respond to.

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HUNTED WILL REMAIN FREE-TO-READ UNTIL JULY 2024. After that it will join the Paid Collection and sit alongside 7 other novellas and over 40 short stories all accessible for the low price of $8.00/£5.99 a month.

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I began thinking of SciFi Spring and HUNTED at the end of January. I considered setting the novella and One Shots all in the same world/galaxy like I had done for the Winter of Ixonia but decided against it because I always find science-fiction settings more restrictive than fantasy ones. While magic and future technology eventually become indistinguishable there exists the limitation of explanation in the type of scifi that HUNTED falls into. A technological future with a some oddities but nothing approaching magic (ala the Force). The Lost Fleet series is probably the closest I can think of, a galaxy spanning military scifi setting, though I wanted a more wild west element to space and the problem of distance provides. For instance, Varis Peak Interstellar Consortium’s failure to track Padoan even though he has a personal datapad, basically a smartphone and thus trackable, and most densely populated areas are well monitored seem at odds but how does a datapad connect to a network in deep space? Or while travelling faster-than-light? Or travelling between systems that use different standards? Suddenly something that is feasible on a single planet becomes unfeasible on a galactic scale. This scale of the galaxy, even with faster-than-light travel, means there are no shared standards, no universal ways of doing things, and all of a sudden you end up with a wild west situation. The law and some sort of “city life” we may imagine is limited to settled planets and sometimes whole systems, depending on the strength of governments/militaries etc., but beyond is untamed. Even tracking ships is difficult without shared standards, administrations, conglomerates, supra-planetary entities. These things all exist in the world of HUNTED but there’s lots of them, some of these entities are at war, others aren’t aware of each other, most have such disparate cultures that any trade or cross-pollination is almost impossible. This creates a world that’s very easy to get lost in. VPIC are hunting Padoan via his ship registration but this is patchy across the galaxy (not to mention illegal in some places). Private entities that can bridge these gaps, such as VPIC or Qing, wield a staggering amount of control and influence becoming quasi-planetary nations that rival actual nations, and for planets that have multiple nations they can be too powerful to ignore. But for all their power they can still be foiled by a meatbag with a lasrifle and a swift ship, space is just too big.

ALIENS

Are there alien species in the world of HUNTED? I have no idea, this was a question early on in worldbuilding that I postponed answering and still haven’t. There probably are but humans have also been spacefaring for tens of millennia which offers some unique worldbuilding and story opportunities for the future as well. We shall see.

SHOGUN’S RETURN

Shogun, Destroyer of Meatbags, was a blast to write, especially his duel with Ixion the Third, the imitator. While the story isn’t solely about him he did steal the show at times and certainly deserves more time on the page. HUNTED also ends with some loose ends to pull on for another story or seven so know that the combat droid extraordinaire will return.

TECHNICAL ELEMENTS

This is the first novella I set out to write specifically like a serial with an intentional cliffhanger or scene cut at the end of each chapter. It appears this worked tremendously well judging from the comments and the read rate stats SubStack conjures up for me (though I take these with a grain of salt). Writing for serialised publication is different to writing for all-in-one publication, mostly in maintaining the thread of the story week to week and making sure you, the reader, want to come back and discover more. Some books — e.g. the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown — are written with juicy bait hooked on the end of every chapter, while others are not which allows the reader to take a break from reading without that gnawing question of “what happens?”.

Chopping scenes in half and creating cliffhangers also made it easier to write. I find that I get up to speed much quicker when I stop in the middle of a scene than if I stop writing in a sensible place, like the end of a chapter or paragraph. This “live wire” jolts me into the scene and makes it much easier to continue writing, and I find more fun to read.

CHAPTER COVERS

For the chapter covers I went with a title-card instead of an illustration or painting, this was for two main reasons.

Firstly, time. Searching for a painting or illustration on the Tate website or National Gallery or any of the other myriad of digitised art collections had begun to take upwards of an hour during A Slow Ascent of Madness. Someone else’s image had to correspond to what I’d written and eventually it became impossible and so for Forlorn Hope I decided to draw my own title-cards. This took longer and in hindsight that should have been obvious but it wasn’t so I devoted Thursday’s to illustrating the chapters (when I could, some don’t have title-cards because I was away or people were visiting).

Secondly, recognition. When scrolling through the stories on ReddOscarWrites it can be difficult to see what’s what when it comes to serials and One Shots set in the same world. They each need a clear logo, again obvious in hindsight but this wasn’t necessary when I started out but with 7 novellas and a handful of connected worlds it has become so.

An advantage to the typographical title-card is I now have something to use as a cover if I ever get around to releasing these novellas as books.

In the Afterword of Forlorn Hope I said I would paint a cover for HUNTED but this was not feasible because of time and my skill. While I do draw and paint portraiture and occasionally landscapes, book covers are totally different and it will be a while before I manage to cobble one together of sufficient quality. For now I will stick with the amateur typography with a background image.

FUTURE PROJECTS

The Summer Serial is in the chapter planning phase. Tuesday One Shots will continue while Thursday fiction will slumber for a few weeks and instead there will be other things… I avoid Writing About Writing and probably do some half-baked analysis of the Tao, the Force (Star Wars), and White & Black Magic (Final Fantasy), or something about cyclical history, nature, and Dark Souls.

See you next week!

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Thanks for reading!