Visiting the Islands

I haven’t been blogging much recently — just one post in 2017 — but I’ve had good reason.

Since late last year, I’ve been working on a shared world project with a few writerly friends, gradually developing the concept and setting, before we dived in and started to write. We’re now less than a week away from launching our project, with websites, graphics, promotional materials and other efforts all waiting to explode from hiding!

Want a little taster of what we’ve been up to?

ARCHIPELAGO is a swashbuckling historical fantasy serial — think Treasure Island and Moby Dick with a hint of Master & Commander, as filtered through George R. R. Martin on a weekly basis. The project is part collaborative and part competitive: each of the contributors enter the scenario from a different point of view, exploring the unknown until we meet in the middle, where we’ll vie for supremacy (or our characters will… but who knows what will go down when things start to get heated!).

All this will be delivered to readers in a sort of online magazine format, and the ultimate result will be a novel-length adventure that weaves together our different story strands.

My collaborators are two talented sf authors from across the pond: Canada’s Charlotte Ashley, who has featured in F&SF Magazine (most recently on the cover!), PodCastle and the Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2017, plus nominations for the Sunburst and Aurora Awards; and America’s Kurt Hunt, who doesn’t go in for all that website-having malarkey and yet still manages to land stories at the likes of Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and PodCastle. Picture me as the millstone around their necks.

We know each other via SFFWorld.com, and like me both have appeared in past SFFW anthologies: Charlotte in You Are Here and Lucky or Unlucky?, and Kurt in Ecotones.

ARCHIPELAGO is launching very soon: teaser stories will appear during May, with Year One’s weekly episodes going live from the start of June. We’ll also be running a novelty Kickstarter campaign during our promo-month to help spread the word around the crowdfunding community – and I’ll be sharing links to all that over the coming weeks!

Our logo comes courtesy of writer/designer Holly Heisey — and you can find out more about their work at http://hollyheisey.com/