The Marquis de Leech

Harry Potter isn't even particularly broad. It's utterly focused on Hogwarts as an institution, and beyond the school and the Ministry of Magic, there's... nothing much at all. For something broad but not overly deep, C.S. Lewis' Narnia is a better fit.

I think you have to add several nuances here: Morgoth's nihilism arose because he wanted the world to be his. The world couldn't be his, therefore he wants to destroy the world. Sauron's "good" desires have evaporated by the time of The Lord of the Rings. Sauron simply wants to Rule. Why? Because he thinks himself as Ruler is, by definition, the most desirable outcome. Long ago, he might have framed it as the Ends Justify the Means. But now it's the Means are the Ends, and he's defined more by his utter cynicism than by any positive motives. It's also an interesting question as to why Sauron (the great admin and planner) decided to team up with a glorified toddler hell-bent on destruction. Saruman might be on the same path as Sauron, but he's got complexities of his own. Most notable is that he sees himself as making the best of a bad situation (Sauron will win. Let's cut a deal). He also has a weird little vendetta against Gandalf - a personality quirk of pettiness, rather than a statement about wider metaphysics. Lumping him in with Sauron is a mistake. The notion that "man is the measure of all things" is hardly modern, of course. Protagoras pre-dates Plato. And if anyone in Tolkien is a comment on Nietzsche, it is neither Sauron nor Saruman, but rather Feanor.

I think the implication is that Thucydides never got around to completing the book. Xenophon apparently starts off where Thucydides leaves off, and even tries to imitate his style. Which means the book was unfinished in Xenophon's day too.

Nearly finished Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. A Geopolitical Tragedy, in the most classical of senses. Hubris gets you every time...

Now have a publishing contract - Old Phuul will be coming out in 2024!

Oddly enough, there is actually a 1898 novella called The Wreck of the Titan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_of_the_Titan:_Or,_Futility It's not very good, and is only remembered because of the Titanic fourteen years later.

Have finished two months' worth of revisions on Old Phuul (including the addition of two extra chapters), and have resubmitted the resulting manuscript. Good to have that sorted by the end of September. In other writing news, I dusted off an unfinished short story set in the same world, and turned it into a 1000-word flash fiction piece for online magazine purposes.

Yep. The problem here isn't actually that AI will make writers redundant. It won't. The problem is that it makes it so much harder for publishers and magazines - which in turn screws over writers.

This is great, though it is only the 150 letters originally cut from the 1981 edition. A fair bit has been unearthed in the last forty years, and it would be nice if an expanded letters could take that into account.

Currently on a Jules Verne binge.

New story out with New Maps Magazine, The Dream of Florian Neame: https://www.new-maps.com/issues/SP23/

In one of those strange (and sad) examples of costs increasing, I have been notified by my publisher that copies of Wise Phuul generate a negative royalty (at current prices) when purchased via bookshops in Australia. They have sent off an email to the printer about this (several other books are in a similar predicament, generally worse), and I'm waiting on further updates, but it's definitely a sign that Times are Tough for small presses. The redeeming feature is that the publisher sells the vast majority of their books online.

Small presses tend to use un-agented submissions too, though generally they have a limited submissions window. The problem for writers here is not "they're taking our jobs!", since the quality is simply not comparable to human-written stories (AI can imitate. But it cannot explore theme like a human can). The problem is that the swamping of the magazines will mean longer turn-arounds for rejections, and potentially lower renumeration - magazines must now spend time and effort sorting the AI nonsense from real submissions.

The last three weeks have been very productive writing-wise. Four short stories done (totaling over 11,000 words between them).

Given that they remove rubbish, a joke about Lord of the Flies might be more appropriate?

Four weeks of polishing and editing have got Old Phuul down to 98,800 words - I've decided the manuscript is now decent enough for submission.

Media currently cooing about Hipkins' lack of wokeness. As though the only meaningful quality for a PM is Culture War nonsense.

It's Hipkins, of course. *Cue snark about gingers having no soul, especially this one.*

The polls only have National/ACT about five points ahead of Labour/Green. That's not 2008, much less a 1990 apocalypse. Labour are weak right now, but a win in October is not unthinkable. So far as diversity goes... one would hope that policy would actually still matter more than gender or skin colour. The portion of the population who would be excited by such things are already voting Green anyway.

On the leadership, it really hinges on whether Chris Hipkins can get the 2/3 of Labour MPs necessary. I personally do not like Hipkins, who has the persona of a smug bureaucrat, and all of Ardern's reluctance to engage with concrete policy without her fundamental good nature. The Right consider him competent, but he excites exactly no-one. If Hipkins does not get 2/3, it goes to the membership. I think they are more likely to go for Michael Wood, who is more focused on traditional economic Leftism than Ardern's more social liberal stances.

Yep. I'm contractually obliged to give IQ the first dibs. (I also keep trying to get my local library to order a copy of your Resurrection Men, but thus far to no avail). Anyway... I've completed a preliminary edit of the Old Phuul manuscript - consisting of (1) editing back through the chapters from last to first, to make sure I focus more on fixing prose and less on reading my own story, and (2) searching out usage of the word "be", to hunt down weaker sentences. "Was" and "is" are legitimate, but the verb in its "be" form is generally tougher to justify. My plan now is to let the manuscript sit for a week, and then resume editing.

Manuscript draft complete at 102,172 words. Dear god, that feels good.

Cracked 100,000 words on Old Phuul today. I'll have the manuscript finished by tomorrow, I think - then it's back to editing. I've done an awful lot of that previously, but this would be the first time with the full story laid out, beginning to end. I've also included a scene lifted from Sumerian mythology, so that's fun.

The last couple of months have been truly excellent, so far as progress on Old Phuul goes (turns out that writing on a laptop that isn't falling to pieces is a much more pleasurable experience). Manuscript now over 85,000 words... as fully rewritten from the beginning. I think I am on track to have the damned thing finished within the next month or so. Of course, this also means that Old Phuul will not be a standalone, and that Rhea's story will need to continue into another book. I am also starting to wonder if Rhea Phuul's somewhat unique personality traits - she is much more alien than her brother, in terms of psychology - will disrupt the reading experience:

New Zealand had the Arbitration Court from 1894 to the 1970s. Basically, the union would put its wage demand, the employer would put their proposal, and the Court would rule on what everyone got, industry-wide. On paper, the system was designed to prevent strikes. In practice, it started running into issues as early as 1908.