A few weeks ago I started to rework some of the material in TSOFL. I had previously shared first draft material, and much of that has been changed, but I want to leave it on the site as a record of progress.

The book currently sits at just under 57,000 words, and I would guess that this is around a quarter of the story (it's going to be a big book). I've made some revisions which are purely structural - what were 10 chapters are now 25, making each a bit more digestible and each focused on a narrower point in time. I've removed a lot of the "tell" narrative and replaced it with "show", and this significantly improves the quality of the first 20-or-so chapters. More work on this will be needed later, but it's a big step up.

One of the most significant narrative reworks is that Alice being a magician is introduced more clearly and earlier in the story. Alice's admission to the University of Bologna is now linked to an in-story character, rather than the Archbishop of Paris - who was never going to feature in this story in detail. And the story starts a few days back in time, with Alice's escape from brutal imprisonment in the dungeon of the medieval Castle Bouchard, before she flees to Italy. I've included the NEW chapter two below.

As always, thoughts and comments welcome here or on socials.

II – Wednesday, 17 July 1839
 
Where the skin had rubbed away from her thumb, the rust from the manacle formed a gritty paste with her blood. It was a new, fresh smell and it would attract the rats.

​For weeks she had been force-fed on potage laced with hallucinogens. When she was unable to hold her mind together, they allowed her to speak, and by the light of the lamp they brought into the dungeon they scribbled down every word she said. They covered the floor in straw – for they did not dare free her hands – and they cleaned away whatever dripped out of her. When she had said enough, the questions stopped, and the straw went unchanged. Her thrice-daily poisonings came to an end, and the perfect dark became timeless.

The Sculptor of Frog Lane continues to be enormous fun to write and has sailed by 35,000 words this week. My instinct is that this will be slightly longer than my previous novels - all three of which were around 100k-110k.

In chapter three, John has just been made to pay for entry to the Great Exhibition to avoid being caught stealing the money he used to pay for entry to the Great Exhibition. Although the world of this novel exists in an alternative history, all the displays John visits are real and were present in 1851, including Samuel Colt, leech-powered weather prediction, and the invention of emojis.

Yes, emojis were invented before email, the internet and mobile phones. Intrigued? It's almost as if that was my plan. Read on...


III – Thursday, 1 May 1851
 
“But where does the key go?” the elderly gentleman asked, pointing to the pocket watch that lay in his palm and which he held as if it were delicate as a quail’s egg.

“Ah, monsieur! That is our innovation. If you pull gently on the stem, it moves into the first position where you can turn it to wind the watch.” The vendor’s accent was a muddle, with English being at least his third language.

“Oh my, I say, that’s a clever thing.”

“And if you pull slightly farther, you hit the second position, where using the same mechanism it is possible to change the time.”

“So there’s no key at all?” the elderly gentleman said, finally arriving at the conclusion he had been given two minutes earlier and was written on a sign above the stall – keyless pocket watches.

I've been working steadily on The Sculptor of Frog Lane for the last couple of weeks and I'm very happy with how it's been going. Chapter 2 steps further back in time by 12 years and introduces the second narrative character (there will only be two) on her flight from recent disaster in Paris to a new life in Bologna. This chapter also introduces some of the mechanisms of magic to the world, as when we meet Alice Black she is already a skilled magician.

II – July to August 1839
 
Her dress was long, black and plain. It was made of heavy wool, and it had been a great comfort in the Mont Cenis Pass when she crossed the Alps from Lyon to Turin. The Emperor had built the road so that a coach could make the journey reliably in summer, but even Napoleon could not ensure summer would reach into the mountains, and there had been cold wind and rain for the whole of her journey.
​
There was nothing she could do about the temperature of an entire mountain range, and nothing she could do about the temperature of a single carriage without becoming the subject of unwanted attention. What was necessary to cross the Alps was endurance. So she huddled in the coach between two elderly Milanese ladies to avoid being groped by the men travelling with them, and mostly succeeded.

My drawing of Connor Maxwell from The Wicker Man Preservation Society. Also my first drawing of 2025.

Here's Chapter 2 of the untitle Egyptian spy thriller. While Chapter 1 was about Gatsu and the slave child, Chapter 2 moves forward in time by about five thousand years and focuses on Maloof and his new boss. Comments very welcome.

2

​​In the years before the Rose Revolution there had been a lot of money to be made building mansions. On the airport road they sprung up in hundreds – conveniently located for people who did not really live anywhere and might need to come and go quickly.

They stood apart from the apartments – which were themselves a world of experience away from the normal accommodations of the city of Cairo and had been designed to meet foreign living standards. As in London – and many other cities besides – these luxurious homes were mostly empty; a few had never been lived in at all. They were investments for people used to owning money rather than making it.

​In Egypt, buying a home would have been unusual until the late twentieth century. By tradition, a great patriarch would purchase a square of land and he and his sons would build the family home. As his sons grew up and married, they would construct their own homes over the first, so each large family might in the space of two generations erect its own tower block. The practice began in mud brick and was continued in concrete and steel. Such family homes were easy to spot; their flat roofs were marked by clusters of rebar rods rising into the air in expectation of the next home and the next generation.

I mentioned previously that I was working on another project at the same time - alongside my Egyptian spy thriller. This one is set mostly in London in 1851 around alternative history events following on from the Great Exhibition. While it begins very real world and normal, it will eventually switch into a steampunk fantasy. I've included the full text of the draft first chapter below. Comments welcome, and if you want to read more in future, please follow on dfpiii.bsky.social or x.com/dfpiii. Or both. I'll post updates to both. 

I – Thursday, 1 May 1851
 
Charlie found the body first thing and ran up the City Road to get a copper. The other boys waited on the tow path because they had nothing better to do, but soon decided they were guarding the body and made a game of it.

The Regent’s Canal was black and still, and the man floated face down, just below the surface. He had white hair, a long black coat, and his trousers were neatly rolled up to his knees, as if he’d planned to dip himself into the canal only that far.

“What do you think happened to his feet?” asked Aidan. 

“Must have been wearing very fancy shoes,” said John.

“You wouldn’t cut off a man’s feet to steal his shoes.”

​“Of course not,” said John, but with consideration he added, “not unless they were very fancy, and he had tied the laces very tight.”

I've been working on a book on-and-off since before I wrote The Wicker Man Preservation Society. The core idea is to tell a "spy story" in multiple timelines set in both the ancient period five thousand years ago and the near future, moving between those time periods. I thought I'd share the first chapter.

If you like this and want to know more if/when this goes anywhere, follow me on socials for more news in future on x.com/dfpiii and dfpiii.bsky.social.

1

“This symbol makes the mmm sound,” said Gatsu. The papyrus scroll lay across his knees and he pointed at the hieroglyph with a finger that was crooked with age.

“It looks like an owl,” said the boy. He knelt, sitting on his heels in the dirt in front of the old priest, and read the symbols upside down.

“It is an owl,” said Gatsu. “The owl makes the mmm sound.”

“But an owl makes an ooo sound. Why is the mmm sound an owl when an owl does not make an mmm sound?”

“Gods!” Gatsu said and lifted his ancient face to the newborn sun. “How can I teach such a curious boy?

I first played (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager, and one of the main differences between the D&D I play as an adult and what I played back then is description. “Inside the room are six orcs. Roll initiative.” This is pretty close to the adventures run, and participated in, by a teenage murder hobo.

I recently started running a low combat, high mystery campaign set in real world Victorian England in 1851. As the tea parlours and opium dens of smog-ridden London contain - so far - zero orcs, it’s made me reflect on how much has to be done through description. I’ve created some rules for myself as I plan and deliver each session, and I thought I’d share my rules in case they’re useful to anyone else.

DFP’s rules for descriptions

1. Description must serve a purpose
2. Description should always use multiple senses
3. Description should not override player autonomy
4. The overall effect of description should convey activity which occurs separately from the players

Description must serve a purpose
For me, there are four good purposes for description: to provide information; to establish tone and create character; to provide opportunities for interaction; and to deliberately deceive.

Providing information is probably the easiest of these and needs to preempt the obvious player questions. Is there anything trying to kill me? Is there anything here I can have sex with? Is there any treasure I can steal? How big is this orc sex dungeon and what equipment do they have? Is it obvious that what’s going on is consensual? And so on.

Game Master’s love to use description to set tone and develop character. Whether it’s the warm and welcoming halfling tavern at the end of the adventure, the warm and welcoming ancient black dragon they slew, or the warm and welcoming sphere of annihilation they looted from it’s hoard - we all know description matters, but not all descriptions are equal.

Good descriptors of tone and character are about what your players can perceive about the world, not what your players feel about the world. You probably thought “warm and welcoming” was a pretty bad description for a sphere of annihilation, but fine for a halfling tavern. And when you thought that, you were wrong. It’s a bad description for all three of those examples - even the ancient black dragon.

Let’s assume what we want our players to experience is a warm and welcoming tavern. Instead of saying warm, we could mention a large fire burning in the hearth. Easy. Instead of saying welcoming, we could have a tavern patron shout “Norm!” as our characters enter - providing one or all of them are called Norman, or something similar. Why is this better? Because now our players have a better shared concept of the world, and that improves their ability to interact with each other and with that world. You’ve probably heard this concept described as “show, don’t tell” in writing. While it’s most commonly quoted in relation to character dialogue, it’s also true of objects, places, appearances, etc.