Work in progress

So I’m back in the thick of it and loving it: working on the final edits for the serial I’ve written for Aethernet, the magazine of serial fiction.

It’s the story of colonists on an incredibly placid planet. Getting on for a century since colonisation, the biggest upheaval encountered in that time was a storm, about forty years ago. Not much of a storm, even, but it was notable because, otherwise, the place has been so welcoming.

So when a wall of storm clouds stretching from horizon to horizon approaches Edge City one morning, people are slow to catch on, and even slower to take it seriously. Even Greta Arbonne, a trained scientist researching possible reasons for the planet’s environmental placidity, can’t really grasp the devastating scale of the approaching storm until it strikes; meanwhile, runaway rebel Shenita gets caught up in the novelty and excitement of raindrops the size of her fist and winds you have to lean into just to stay on your feet. But when the storm intensifies, ripping off roofs and destroying buildings, plucking people up into the air and away… Greta and Shenita are faced with their own journeys through the devastation and the horrors of past and present.

And then there is Luther. A man who regains consciousness in the ruins of a flattened building as the storm wreaks havoc all around. A man who has woken with recollections of distant Earth when no-one on Domus could possibly have such memories. A man who could be the answer to questions neither Greta nor Shenita have yet realised they need to ask.

The stories in this serial are:

Memento 1: From Out of a Blue, Blue Sky
Memento 2: There Came a Storm
Memento 3: To End All Storms
Memento 4: A Cleansing

It’s great to be working on big SF ideas again, lovely to be writing in a form I’ve not tackled before, the serial. My first reader loved it, providing only a fairly brief list of line-edit queries. And ever since I got to work on this set of stories, my head has been buzzing with what comes next, as the story continues and becomes novel-length…