Writing

Thanks - though I must admit it’s a very loose triangulation just based on sort of the state I wanted technology and such to be. (except the gunpowder of course) I didn’t want to have to write about people eating from trenchers and such. Due to the lack of gunpowder I’ve preserved certain weapons that otherwise would likely not be very prevalent with firearms around, but it’s not the kind of story where I go very deep in drawing attention to that, either.

So basically an 18th century vibe in terms of the culture and most forms of technology, but still using swords and the like for weapons? It immediately makes me curious about how an 19th century world would develop if gunpowder hadn't been available. Very interesting idea.

Yeah that totally makes sense. That’s a lot of words (and who knows how many more you revised/trimmed out over the years) for a solitary pursuit, I could absolutely understand wanting to do something different.

Oh yeah, it's probably 1.5 million if I include the bits that have been revised and trimmed. I had a particularly challenging plot line where I wrote and deleted and rewrote and deleted and rewrote several times, and on one occasion I removed an entire 40k word section (I kept a backup in case I changed my mind.)

I had to google that I admit - that does sound very interesting. Now with your comment about short stories I’m going, “So like a squirrel who witnesses some major historical event while going about his daily life, but has no idea of the significance it poses to humans?” Would that be the sort of thing that would qualify? I have to admit THAT is a genre I have never read.

Yep, that would totally qualify! Xenofiction covers everything that tells a story from the perspective of something that isn't human (or a near-human analogue like dwarves, elves, vampires, humanoid aliens a la Star Trek). So that could be a squirrel witnessing a major historical event while having no idea of its significance, where the purpose of the story is showing how an event of great human importance looks from the outside. And then there's stories where the whole point is to immerse oneself into the perspective of a non-human creature's own experiences (Anna Sewell's Black Beauty and Jack London's White Fang are good examples here, as stories which are focused on how the animals experience life, but also completely grounded in a sense of realism - both these books are public domain, so can be freely downloaded from Project Gutenberg), which are often events that are completely unimportant to humans.

Then there's also xenofiction that overlaps a bit with fantasy, where the non-human creatures are sapient and have their own cultures, folklore, languages, etc, while still looking at the world in a very non-human way, and the worldbuilding might include some very minor magical elements. Richard Adams' Watership Down is the go-to here, which portrays its rabbits as animals who don't have the ability to understand things the way humans do, while still giving them enough sapience that their culture and folklore is a big part of the story.

The next step beyond that are proper fantasy and sci-fi books that are written from the perspectives of dragons, aliens, etc that are very clearly and explicitly equal to humans in intelligence/sapience, while being non-human. There's not a lot of good examples where the whole book is written like this, but the chapters of the Temeraire series written from Temeraire's point of view are decent examples of how it works.

I actually find a lot of modern xenofiction a bit disappointing. There's kind of this assumption that it's a genre for kids, so while they're often violent, they're... dumbed down and sanitised in a way that stories like Black Beauty and Watership Down aren't, with the characters coming across more like 11 year old humans in furry bodies rather than beings with a completely different perspective on life. A really good xenofiction book should challenge you to feel genuine empathy in a very raw and visceral sense, with something that experiences the world in a completely different way. Black Beauty and Watership Down are absolutely brutal to read (and the latter famously had an animated adaptation in the 1970/80s that traumatised an entire generation of children because it was classified as "suitable for all ages" and it really, really isn't).

So I think I want to write something focused on non-humans, but for an adult audience and not middle grade. Probably a limited market for it, but it's what I want to read, which always seems like a good place to start when writing something!