I give you... The Age of Rust

The Lord of the Rings. A Song of Ice and Fire. The Chronicles of Amber.

Every fantasy setting has a name. Those are some of the greats. The Age of Rust is mine... it's greatness is yet to be determined.

It's not something I planned to do or worry about for a long, long time. Write the fucking book has been my new mantra, and for all intents and purposes, that's what I've been doing. And yet, there it was. Unexpected, unasked for, but there.

Maybe its a working title. Maybe it's the real deal. Maybe its the "marketing" part of my brain putting its two cents into this particular creative endeavour. Whatever it is, I like the way it sounds, and the images it conjures.

I credit my friend Tom Clancy with planting the suggestion that the concept of rust would fit well in a fantasy story with heavy steampunk elements. He just sent me an email one day with the idea that bad guys in a steampunk world should worship something called "rust". He hadn't thought it out any more than that, and it's good, becuase I'm not using that idea exactly. I do thank him from the bottom of my heart though, for dropping that little pearl in my lap.

I love what rust represents, what it stands for. Decay and disuse. Poor maintenance. Slow death for the great works of man. Its very evocative to me. My novel takes place during the twilight years of a great empire. Old and decadent and rotten to the core. It's a world of machines, mages and madmen, and while nobody worships rust, everyone serves it, in their own way.


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Work continues apace. Chapter 3 is put to bed, and chapter 4 is soon to follow. Chapter 3 is very short, which is the sort of thing that used to worry me in my younger days. But, that was before I knew the rules about chapter length. There aren't any, really. A teacher once told me that a chapter is as long as it needs to be. Crazy talk, I thought. There must be some kind of rule, some kind of formula, like x words times y pages = fucking awesome writing.

Turns out its not that simple. I mean its still simple. Just a different kind of simple. I've come to realize each chapter is like a scene in a play, or a movie. Some are long, some are short. If you make a long one short, it will seem rushed. If you stretch a short one out, it will drag. There's no way to know until you're writing the damn thing.