#flotsamposting

So, I've begun posting some of Flotsam Dreaming online, and it's a story that I've been working on for a little while now. Think Blades in the Dark meets Waterworld.

We focus on a gang of criminal mages, constantly broke and on the run from the law. When a mysterious benefactor turns up in town with an impossible job for a ridiculous price, they leap at the opportunity, and attempt to pull off the heist of the century.

While we start off from the perspective of Hypacra, a humanoid salamander, we'll slowly see the rest of the gang in a rotating perspective, ensemble cast style.

It's part heist adventure about a bunch of shitty mages doing crime, but also part speculative fantasy about what life on a floating city (the namesake, Flotsam) on the open sea would be like. How do its extreme infrastructural challenges shape its society? What does life on the open seas look like? How did we even get here?

I'm just about a quarter done with it, and will be posting chapters up on Sufficient Velocity weekly (or at least until I run out of backlog)

Now that I'm about a third done with writing this, I want to pin it so more people can see what I've been writing lately.

Flotsam Dreaming is a fantasy heist story set on a massive floating city on the seas starring a gang of mages out to steal a big fucking tree, and I'm posting it chapter by chapter up at the link above.

What's it got? It's got everything. Crime. Salamanders. Vampires. Weasels. A billion canals. State-sanctioned piracy. Terra-engineering to create floating islands. The maritime economics of an independent city-state. And of course, magic.

Chapters will come out kinda whenever they're done at a super inconsistent rate, but I'm chipping away at it, and I've been having a blast writing this thing.

cons of having an outline done: i know exactly how much left I need to write

(I'll be tagging all my posting about this project on this blog under the tag #flotsamposting)

It's probably a good time for me to start talking about Flotsam Dreaming, a piece of original fiction I've been working on for the past 4 months, mostly because I'm like 3 planning documents and 30+k words and many many chapters in, and i think I'm in a place where i feel confident enough in what i have to talk about it in public. (the actual writing isn't public juuuuust yet, i would like to have a little more in the tank before i start releasing my chapters somewhere)

So, what's it about? Flotsam Dreaming is a fantasy heist story about a gaggle of the worst mages you know living on a floating city on the seas committing crimes. It's also about how societies change and shift in the wake of world altering events, how individuals position themselves amongst those societies, and how economics grind dreams into dust.

But all that isn't important just yet. Let's meet our first character!

Flotsam, the Floating City of Mages

Wait, the city's a character?

Yeah, it is. Flotsam is the core of the setting of our story, and it's an interesting place to be.

Flotsam's story begins about a century before the narrative present when a gang of court mages, sick of service to a kingdom they don't particularly feel loyal to, steal a massive warship, rename it the Grand Larceny, and flee the nation. When they discover that no other country will take them in and risk starting a war, they predictably turn to piracy to keep themselves alive.

The piracy thing goes pretty well, and now they can start thinking bigger. Their first few permanent home bases get discovered and destroyed, so their leader turns to magic to a new idea: a floating home base that can literally sail away from trouble when it comes looking for them. Using some clever horticulture, they begin cultivating tidehearts, a mangrove tree that can produce waterproof wood, and off to the races they go to build their new base.

Time passes and the base gets built, starting as just a large raft and an anchor. But as the pirate-mages get busy, the base starts to change. It begins growing in size and scope as more runaway mages hear about this mythical place and risk their lives to escape there. Suddenly it's not a base, its a small town, and that town just gets bigger and bigger.

By the time we hit the narrative present, Flotsam is a full-blown city, with multiple districts built from floating platforms, scores of guilds that provide essential services to its residents, fleets full of mercenary mages for hire, and an actual government, the Nest Council, who tries to keep the whole place running.

Using its unique traits and reputation, it builds an economy on trade and magical exports, but is ultimately still extremely reliant on mainland nations for food and building materials, which have become very happy to pay for the unique services that only Flotsam can provide.

In the narrative present, the city's just coming up on its Centennial anniversary. A hundred years is a long time for a city to make it while facing some very real economic and logistical challenges. There's real cause for celebration!

Which is why it's the perfect time for everything to start going wrong.