Christopher McKitterick

So here I am again, pulling out notes and past writings and assorted research materials, organizing my thoughts and thinking about worldbuilding. 

Guess that didn’t take long. It’s been just over a week since Vision of Alliance’s launch spluttered and crashed, in spite of me doing advance work that included an absolutely marvelous blurb from a writer and friend whose work I respect. Just under a week since I decided that nope, I’m not going to continue with drafting the Goddess’s Vision trilogy, even though I have a somewhat solid outline and 15,000-some words into the second book. 

Sometimes the Universe needs to clobber me with a clue-by-four. Let’s just say that this trilogy has been a real struggle for me and…well…someday I might pick it back up. Or not. I’m not going to let it suck 2026 down the drain, though. Major relief washed over me when I made that decision, which tells me that it was the right choice to make. 

Meanwhile. I’ve been poking at the concept of a SFF/Western crossover for some years now. A big chunk of the Martinieres was about letting me play in that world in a more contemporary/near future setting. However, I’ve been wanting to do more with alternate histories and how could things have gone differently and perhaps better with regard to European expansion into the Pacific Northwest. 

The history of the region where I grew up is deep in my heritage, at least as far as such things go. My mother’s family was among the early Oregon settlers but, unlike the ancestors of a number of other settler descendants I’ve known over the years, they didn’t seem to aspire to fame or notoriety, even at a local, “old family,” level. I like to joke that they deliberately sought out obscurity. There are several family stories claiming good relationships with the Modoc and Klamath peoples—all fairly obscure connections, of course. Hard to say what the truth of it is, and I’m really not in a good position to prove it one way or the other. 

However, I find myself wanting to tell stories in the nineteenth century Oregon Country setting. I suppose it’s something vaguely similar to what John Steinbeck was trying to do with East of Eden (to be honest, I had a high school teacher get me hooked on Steinbeck so he’s been an influence on me for a long time). I’m not as ambitious as Steinbeck, though he has inspired my desire to write about the country where I’ve lived. The land is a living, vibrant character of its own in Steinbeck’s Salinas novels. I’ve found myself drawn to Pacific Northwest writers who evoke that same deep love and knowledge of the land, both realistic and fantastic alike. Ivan Doig. Molly Gloss. Ken Kesey. Mary Emerick. H. L. Davis. A host of others, and…the queen of them all, Ursula K. Le Guin. 

My perspective on writing in this land and this setting isn’t about historical realism. There’s lots of that about. Nor am I particularly interested in writing a historical romance. Science fiction and fantasy is the world I like to play in when I’m writing, and…I had several ideas on tap whispering that it was their turn to come out and play. 

These ideas don’t slot nicely into categories of “Weird West,” “alternate history,” or “steampunk.” Oh, there are elements of all three categories in the two major ideas I have but the notions don’t fit into any one of them. As a result, I’m calling it all “neoWestern fantasy.” The story I’ve picked to work on is set in the world of my Bearing Witness novella, with something malevolent attacking the multiverse at roughly the same time and place in each universe’s history, around the mid-nineteenth century in North America, and the characters are rallying to protect the multiverse’s last refuge, Kalosin, against the baddies. Time travel gets involved because the baddies want to homogenize all the universes in their image, and they are from the far future. One of the characters is a nineteenth century person abducted from her world at a very young age and conditioned to be a time cop for the baddies due to her skill with languages. Then…she finds out the truth and flees to Kalosin. 

Sounds more complicated than it really is, but I’m still building that world. There’s going to be a lot there because I may end up fleshing out some short stories to get a deeper understanding of this particular world. Lots of backstory present, and some of it may well appear in different books. I have a loose idea of what the story is going to be—but where I start it will be what needs to emerge as I rough out my plans and research over the next month. I may start at the beginning…or not. 

In any case, off I go on another worldbuilding adventure. We’ll see where it takes me. I’m planning to share the journey of this novel on an irregular basis, but hoping to shoot for weekly updates. At the moment, it has the working title of Vortex Worlds. But whether that becomes a book title or a series title…remains to be seen. 

(Will the Martinieres sneak into this series, given that it’s a multiverse and by all logic they’d be part of it? Probably not. Oh, Etienne might make a cameo appearance but the Vortex is not the same thing at all.) 

Anyway, right now I’m promoting a bundle on Itch that features several of my women characters with agency. If you haven’t read my work before, it’s a good introduction to several of my series. $18.90 for ten books, or 50% off of individual books. Check it out!

https://itch.io/s/181380/joyces-womens-history-month-special-sampler

Sunday book summaries are my casual log of what I’ve been reading this week. These are not formal reviews. They’re more my reactions and musings as taken from my journal when I complete the reading, and at times will contain notes about how they influence my thoughts on what I’m writing. 

This one has a couple of weeks’ worth of reading, so again…”periodic.” 

Here we go again. Part of March once again looks like it is going to be hectic, so…I may be writing these summaries every couple of weeks or so. Nonetheless, reading is happening. 

Starting off with a book I forgot to add to my notes—Megan Kate Nelson’s Saving Yellowstone. While it had some interesting pieces to it about Yellowstone’s history, parts of that history have come close enough to research I’ve done for a book that I spotted areas where things either got glossed over or not discussed. Unfortunate. I suppose that reflects the reality that much of this history isn’t new to me because I’ve been to Yellowstone and read some of its history. I much preferred her The Three-Cornered War, probably in part because it isn’t an area where I’ve done a bit of reading. 

The other nonfiction I’ve read recently is Hetta Howes’s Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife. I—somewhat liked this book comparing the lives of four medieval woman—Marie de France, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan, and Margery Kempe. The history and background of what each woman’s everyday life would have looked like is excellent. However. Then Howes tried to sum it up and make this history relevant to modern feminism and…that did not work so well. I’m still not sure why. 

I’m off right now on an author reading binge, spurred by a Libby notice about a new book featuring Alexander McCall Smith (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series). As it turns out, Smith wrote a prologue for D. E. Stevenson’s loosely-woven trilogy set in England and Scotland, originally published after World War II and referring to issues from that era. After reading Vittoria Cottage, I was sufficiently enthralled to read the other two books, Music in the Hills and Winter and Rough Weather. 

These books are—well, in this era I guess one would call them a cozy read. They’re kinda sorta romance, in that relationships happen during the course of the books, but they aren’t Romance in the typical plot. Additionally, there’s a wee bit too much coincidence involving some secondary characters and their connections. But they’re a pleasant read. Smith sums up Stevenson’s work as “easy, in the sense that they are clearly written, tell an intelligible tale, and do not seek to impress the reader.” 

I’d concur with that assessment. 

But they’re a nice comfort read right now. Stevenson—Dorothy Emily Stevenson—was related to Robert Louis Stevenson and wrote a book a year for many years. These three books can be read as standalones, but there’s a clear progress. Vittoria Cottage chronicles the life of a new widow of a rather challenging man—not physically abusive but definitely psychologically abusive, and who busily kept isolating those he loved from others. Music in the Hills and Winter and Rough Weather chronicle their son’s exploration of possibly becoming the heir to a relative’s large farm, as well as his romantic endeavors, culminating in his marriage to the love of his life and their early times together. But other romances happen in these last two books which—to some degree adds up with the coincidence overload. A lost family then found, and the uniting of two couples who care for each other but kept finding obstacles to being together are just rather too tightly twined together, depending on the aftereffects of the bombing of Glasgow during World War II. On the other hand, even though I saw these events coming from a long way off, I still didn’t mind being able to figure out the connections. 

However, one piece of characterization I really, really liked was that of Mamie Johnstone. Mamie considers herself to be dull, boring, and not as smart as her sisters. But as the stories progress, we see that Mamie is an excellent observer of behavior and draws reasonably accurate conclusions about what she sees. I loved this study of the interior life of a quiet, retiring woman who is smarter than she gives herself credit for being. Stevenson pulled off a portrayal that works for me, and it’s the sort of character that can be quite difficult to do well, without falling into cliché. 

So I’m moving on to other Stevenson books, and have Listening Valley up next. 

When I was sorting and reshelving books a couple of weeks ago, I found one of my favorite Terry Pratchett Discworld books, Men at Arms. It’s an excellent book overall, but one of the things that make it stand out (not just the famous boot discussion from Vimes) is the deconstruction of the Chosen One trope. Captain Carrot is a descendant of the kings of Ankh-Morpork…and he’s not at all interested in stepping up to that role. Some might say that Carrot doesn’t know about his ancestry, but I definitely think he does. 

This is also the book where we start seeing other species appearing in the Night Watch, including one of my favorites, Angua, the werewolf. Always a nice read. 

Years ago, I had an obsession with the Inklings and tried to branch out from Tolkien and Lewis to read Charles Williams. I read most of Williams’s work, and found parts of it confusing. Well, I revisited The Greater Trumps, and…I’m just not into that sort of mystical stream-of-consciousness work anymore, if in fact I really was into it in the first place. It went on the “discard” pile. I still have a couple other Williams books, so I might give them a try once more. 

Because I’m contemplating working on a multiverse/time travel book, I picked up Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time. Weeell, the Suck Fairy didn’t hit this one too badly, all things considered, but…there were several threads that could have been used to expand the story a bit. Stereotypical characters, and I can’t help but think that a later short story set in the Spiders vs Snakes time war was much better, overall. Now I’ve gotta go dig that one out of the collection. In any case, this book is very much a product of its era. 

That’s pretty much it. Besides the Stevenson, I am reading Stephanie Burgis’s Enchanting the Fae Queen. We’ll see how that one goes. 

If you like what you’ve read, please feel free to check out my books on my website at https://www.joycereynolds-ward.com or drop a tip at my Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/joycereynoldsward