Basilisk Street Issue 5

Here's the final issue of Basilisk Street!

This one's... a bit of a mess. I tried to fit too much in, too quickly, without giving things time to breathe. I included too much just because I thought it was cool. (I apparently thought sword canes were cool at that point? Eesh.) I didn't stick the landing exceptionally well, imho- not least because I was clearly wanting to continue it as a series from there. (I don't think it is the worst thing ever, of course, but it far from lives up to my current standards.)

Apart from the technical writing weaknesses present in Basilisk Street, the biggest issue is just a lack of anything substantive to really say about the ideas it explores. Even if I maintain many of the same interests today, I've taken the time to really think more about them, to develop thoughtful arguments on the themes. I don't just write about superweapons because they're cool, I write about them because I have something to say about WMDs and geopolitics now. Back then... well, I thought I did. I was, to be honest, a fairly milquetoast Obama-era liberal with a much more limited understanding of history, science, politics... most everything. I have changed a LOT in the last decade.

And lord knows, the world didn't need any more secret government agency comics in the early 2010s.

Still, it's an interesting artifact from my writing journey. It was the first long-form work of fiction I ever actually finished, and you can very clearly see a lot of my still present interests in more embryonic form. Superweapons (including linguistic weaponry), multiverses and multiversal organizations, etc, etc. There are a couple of minor ideas I still plan on re-using or further exploring from it, but they are fairly minor. Honestly, if a new writer sent me this, I'd have lots of feedback and suggestions, but I wouldn't think it was terrible.

The cheeky bad translation gag with the post-apocalyptic nomads still makes me giggle, too.

Anyhow, I'd love to hear your thoughts, if anyone's made it this far! And I hope you enjoyed getting a glimpse at my early writing process!

Next month, I'll share Broken Earth, a later writing artifact of my writing career, one from right around the time Mage Errant was taking off! This one includes actual art too!