Ablahshikar · published
What is the author doing while waiting for Early Access?
Hiking, naturally. Since the build has been tossed into Valve's review queue to wait its turn, both my wrists and my eyes are getting a break. Winter is closing in on the Northern Hemisphere, so maidens and brethren, failing to hike right now would be a criminal waste of a perfectly good star. Also the developer happens to need a top-up on melatonin and vitamin D.
Allow me to recommend the reading material I have been hauling along on trains, subways, buses, and picnic mats. It is The Riddle of the Sands, originally published in 1903, though this particular copy in my hands was printed in the 1910s.
The title page reads T. NELSON & SONS, LONDON AND EDINBURGH, while the base of the spine bears the circular emblem of NELSON'S LIBRARY. Starting in 1907, Thomas Nelson and Sons rolled out their pocket-sized Sevenpenny Series, dedicated to contemporary bestsellers and literary classics. Aside from a hasty € 9- scribbled in soft pencil by a bookshop fella, the flyleaf holds an old signature dried into the paper fibers.
Over a century ago, a woman named Maud signed her name inside this little red volume about North Sea navigation and clandestine reconnaissance, her penmanship lean and upright, finished with a resolute horizontal stroke beneath her address. Modern readers hearing the phrase "spy novel" tend to picture James Bond with his cars and glamorous companions and flashy gadgets, whereas The Riddle of the Sands opens with a mountain of rigorous nautical terminology, shallow-water soundings, compass calibrations, and tidal charts. The gilt lettering along the spine, somewhat oxidized and dimmed by the decades, together with the intricate blind-stamped crest on the front board, vanished rapidly once the WW1 broke out and wartime rationing forced a wholesale downgrade in paper and bookbinding cloth. (Although graphic design for fictions and nonfictions nowadays are mostly shit minmaxxing attention, let's hope it doesn't go any shittier for whatever sin homo sapiens are bound to commit.)
Beyond the attractive technical minutiae, my biggest takeaway from the book is how drastically narrative voices can diverge depending on the protagonist. Take the famous scene where Carruthers steps down a mud-caked stair into a dinghy and lays eyes on the Dulcibella for the very first time. Under a clammy night sky he inches reluctantly down slippery stone steps overgrown with bladderwrack, clutching disgustedly at a greasy painter while Davies hurls a parcel that smacks him squarely in the chest with a shout to mind the meat. The page reeks of North Sea brine and ascetic misery. Had it been me or one of my protagonists, we would have thought the interior of the boat looked like good fun. Sure, the fittings are a bit makeshift, but what do you expect from a converted lifeboat? (I actually went through a mental roster of all the narrators I have written to date, I couldn't find a single one who would spend an entire chapter agonizing over who they are, where they are, and why on earth they agreed to board the vessel. Turns out people who enjoy complaining that much really do exist...)