The Return of Bob

First up, a confession: this is a rehash of a blog (remember those?) post from a few years ago, updated for new manuscripts and lore. And it deals, once again, with Bob.

Bobobobobob. Who or what is Bob?

Bob is my writing ally and trusted friend. He’s the featherweight in my corner, my secret weapon. Why? because in 2017, when I wrote the original Sister Augusta story, Mercy, and the Judge Anderson Year Two novella, Bigger Than Biggs, I found myself with a problem. I knew a fair bit about the lore of both, but that lore had plenty of holes. And those holes led to questions. 

Does a Mega-City One Judge wear socks? What does she use as a toothbrush? How does she start her bike, does it have a key, a touchpad? What about a Sister of Battle? Does her bolter have/need a safety? How does she do up her armour? What do you call an Ecclesiarchal missionary, do they have titles? And the ever-popular, do laser weapons have recoil?

I was still at FP, desperately trying to hork up five hundred words a morning before I dashed out of the house to get the train, and it was a pain in the crack to stop every five minutes and look up something else. The big stuff was apparent and I knew/could remember most of it, but it was all the little things.

So, I started calling stuff Bob. When I needed a noun that I didn’t know yet, it was Bob. Augusta spent a lot of The Bloodied Rose boarding the Bob, running along the Bob, shouting prayers of multiple Bobs, which I could come back and fill in later. In Wreck and Ruin, there was at least one Bob that sneaked past the final read-though and got picked up by the editor. The Bobs were everywhere. By the time I reached The Rose in Darkness, however, I had not only a lot more time but a spreadsheet full of useful terms (and hymns), and Bob had slunk away, somewhere to the edge of the galaxy.

With the latest MS, Bob has made a triumphant return. Without too many spoilers, there are a lot of terms that I don’t know, or that I’ll need to look up, or that simply don’t exist yet, and I’m now faced with a completed first draft that has more Bobs than I’ve seen in years.

(In hindsight, I probably should have made the term more searchable, but hey).

Yep, Bob is back. Bob is bloody everywhere. A while Bob is my friend in the short-term, though that initial scrabble, he’s now giving me the stink-eye from wa-ay too many pages.

Best I get started, I reckon!

Reading: Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, and oh my Gods, what an exquisite book. Vivid, gentle and dreamlike, flawlessly put together, and so powerfully evocative it’ll haunt you for days. Has immediately become one of my favourite reads ever, and if you haven’t read it, please, please, go and find a copy.

Watching: Been dipping into Deep Space Nine, my favourite of the Star Trek series, and am delighting (as ever) in just how good the characters are. Quark and Odo and their relationship, Garak the Cardassian ‘tailor’, and Sisko taking absolutely no shit (plus, Avery Brooks is a man who could read me the dictionary, seriously, I could listen to that voice for days).

Playing: Our D&D is on hiatus, so have finally starting Baldur’s Gate again, this time with the Dark Urge character, who (thus far) is rather uninteresting. Finding lots of stuff I’d missed, though, which is keeping my attention for a second play-through, and loving just how much fan-goodness the game and its wonderful set of NPCs have inspired.

Keep making art, people. Keep that door open to all those other worlds, whichever ones you choose to visit. This stuff matters.