💌Hanlon’s Reader #2: September Newsletter

"... it'll be dark soon and they mostly come at night. Mostly." 👾 🌃🚸🌃 👾

Sep 27, 2023

^📅Monthly Update: September 2023

In early September, I posted the conclusion of Strange Harvest and last Thursday 9/21 marked the beginning of the continuation story Larval Haze. It’s called Part I: Safe and Warm and Dry.

If you haven’t read Strange Harvest, you can start here:

📗 Read Strange Harvest

For you wild cards out there, just jump right in to the sequel I guess:

📗 Read Larval Haze

I’m really excited to continue this arc, as gruesome as it’s become. It’s about transformative discovery, the limits of human endurance, and perseverance in the face of unknown terrors…

It’s also a lot about nature. What things might be like on another planet similar to ours, teeming with life and all its obscure oddities. How we might interact with lifeforms so different from ourselves, and yet following similar rules of nature. It seems to make sense that if conditions on another planet out there are similar enough to ours, the rules that govern survival in the wild would be largely the same.

This whole arc with the wasps and octopiders is inspired by an excellent series of books called Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I listened to the audiobook versions of Children of Time and Children of Ruin narrated by Mel Hudson.

If the quality of what I’ve written here in my universe is anywhere near the same cosmic ballpark as this series, I would be over the moon. 🌝

🔃 In Progress:

As you can see on the Content Calendar, Strange Harvest: Larval Haze continues throughout September and concludes in November. I’ve still been using Google Docs to write in, which has been working well alongside my artisanal handmade GSheets word-counter system. 🤓

There’s something about tracking my wordcount this way that helps motivate me—seeing everything from a high level so I can have a visual representation of my progress. Back when I wrote The Star Pirate’s Folly, I had a big paper calendar on my wall right beside my writing desk. I’d check off each day and mark my wordcount there with a red fine-point Sharpie.

Anyway, it’s working!! I’ve written 10k words / 40 pages of new content since August. It’s been mostly evenings, nights, and weekends. I am NOT a morning person, but I admire those who can maintain consciousness during the early hours. 🌞

Currently I’m writing Part V of Larval Haze and figuring out how to launch paid content on Substack (more on that below).

❗❗ Upcoming:

Since most of Strange Harvest was already written, I posted it at two parts per week except for the first and last parts. With Larval Haze, I’m still writing the majority of this thing so I’ll be posting one part per week. There will be another ten parts—originally I was going to continue the count from Part X: Sentinel onto Part XI, but thought it might be confusing given the serialized format here.

Here’s what I’m planning for:

Strange Harvest
Strange Harvest: Larval Haze
Strange Harvest: Under the Dome (working title)

Once these are completed, I want to compile them together and have it professionally edited into something I can sell on Amazon, but also keep available here on Substack. I still need to make some decisions around how to handle paid subscriptions, but my plan is always to have new, free content available weekly.

The minimum amount for Paid Subscriptions on Substack is $5 / month, and for that you’d get access to read everything I’ve published. Over time as I add content, that value will improve and paid subscribers will be able to read whatever they want from me right here on Substack.

Author’s note: my plans have changed on Paid Subs here due to Substack’s refusal to address open hate speech on the platform

If readers want to pay for a month, read everything they want, and stop paying, I absolutely consider that a win. 💚

🎁 Bonus Content:

Let’s talk universe stuff. 🌌

I’m really leaning into the “speculative” part of speculative science fiction. But if I make a rule, I want to stick with it and make it persistent. I’m trying to at least make things consistent even if they probably break the laws of physics, like nullsteel. What if there was a metal that wasn’t affected by gravity? Something we haven’t discovered yet? How would we use it?

My idea is that this undiscovered element came into being after a primordial object passed through dark matter, transformed into this new substance, and later impacted Surface during the planet’s formation in an event similar to the Earth and our moon, creating veins of “nullified” materials throughout the planet.

Out at the edges, where the last sweeping tendrils of stars in our spiral galaxy meet the true shores of the universe, dark matter is the “scaffolding” which contains and gives structure to all things.

Probably. It’s confusing, I’m not claiming to even fully understand it, but some people do, one of them is named Dr. Angela Collier and she made a great video about it on her YouTube channel: ▶ dark matter is not a theory

Back to our fictional material: imagine a bar of gold. Put it in a box made of nullsteel, and it weighs nothing. Something like this would probably revolutionize logistics, transport, space travel, and basically everything else. But since it doesn’t obey the typical rules of the universe it’s very hard to find, especially in Earth’s corner of the galaxy. On Surface, it’s all throughout the planet.

It’s just interesting to think about how this would all work.

Or all these creatures on Surface—my basic idea is blending Earth-like species, like the octopiders and the reptilian elements in the lotus wasps. But with the lotus wasps in particular, they’re based on real honey-producing Mexican Honey Wasps:

That, plus the phenomenon of “mad honey” made by a particular species of honeybee in Nepal. There’s a Vice video about it that goes into more, uh, graphic detail.

Stuff all these ideas into a powered armor suit, and you’ve got Strange Harvest.

Be well,

James Hanlon

9/27/23

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