Fan of THE EXPANSE, THE MARTIAN, or BATTLESTAR GALACTICA?
If so, head to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/henryneilsen/sunward-sky-a-novel to register your interest for the Kickstarter campaign for my latest novel, SUNWARD SKY, coming Q4 2024.

I’m incredibly proud to announce that signups are now available for the novel adaptation of popular podcast Sunward Sky, the science fiction drama that first aired in 2020, born in the depths of Melbourne lockdown. People who back this new project on Kickstarter will receive a paperback book with all-new custom artwork by artist Jon Stubbington.

It’s mindblowing to think that what started as a COVID project to occupy my humming brain has now been downloaded more than 70,000 times, has a 4.5 star average on Spotify with nearly 100 ratings. It even briefly broke into the top 100 Science Fiction Podcasts on Apple in 2022. This response has blown me away, considering I have never actively promoted or advertised it, and I am extremely thankful for all the people who have listened to it.

However, I always knew the story wasn’t quite as finessed as I knew it could be. I was writing it weekly for episodic purposes and briefly revising before each recording.
With this new novel edition, it’s given me a chance to revise the plot, rework the writing, condense, tighten and improve the story. It moves faster, it’s leaner, it’s more suspenseful, and I feel it’s now become the story I knew it could have been.

When the Kickstarter hits its goal, it will be a great launchpad for the release of the standard edition next year, and I would also love to hit a stretch goal to hire a professional voice actor for a new audiobook version.
I must thank you again for your generous support, and encourage you to go to the link and register your interest in the novelisation of Sunward Sky. If you felt like telling a sci-fi fan friend or two, I’d be most grateful.
Thank you so much for first listening, and soon reading.
Henry Neilsen

This is probably the last post celebrating the downloads of Sunward Sky, but 50,000 plays is about 49,999 more than I ever thought it would get. I started writing it and releasing it more as an exercise than anything else, because I was in the middle of Lockdown.
The first season went out and you can see it went nowhere, as did the first part of the second season. I'm not sure what happened but at some point people started listening to it. Which was a bit of a shock as I'd half abandoned it.
Like, I was thinking "I should finish this, some day" but it didn't seem to matter because, like, nobody was listening to it. It was done, y'know? Who cares.
Then one day I noticed it had been listened to over 2000 times in a week, which for a podcast with no advertising...
I checked my insta, and I had a few messages from people who were asking when the story was going to be finished. One of the reviews on apple podcasts expressed their disappointment that it wasn't completed.
And suddenly I knew I had to finish it. Not at some arbitrary point in the future, but very soon. So I finished my plans for the remaining six episodes and set to work.
In the end, it made it onto the top 100 downloaded sci fi podcasts on apple podcasts one week, and it's continued to have a steady listenership ever since. Not bad for something I recorded with Ableton lite, free downloads and no professional sound treatment gear.
That said, the way it was written basically means the project was released as a first-ish draft. There are definitely things I'd like to do differently, and there is a bigger story that I'd love to tell, and more deliberately.
When this project started it was a bit of a joke. All the characters are named after cricket players, and I just wanted to write something set on a spaceship. But it became a story that, apparently, a lot of people have connected with.
So maybe, one day, maybe soon, I'll go back and polish the story I started, to hone the rough edges and work through it and turn it into a book. I think I'd like that. In the meantime, for anyone who's ever listened, thank you so much for joining me on the journey.
And if you haven't heard of my podcast, why not give it a go? I like it, and hey, it's free. What could go wrong. Keep an eye and an ear out for that updated and revised version in the future. It's Called Sunward Sky, and it's a story about doing the right thing even when the world is against you. And it's set on a spaceship. Available on all podcast platforms.

Thanks for reading, if you did.

Ok I just saw the fourth Matrix movie and I have some seriously mixed feelings it was plumbing nostalgia to attack nostalgic filmmaking at the same time as taking the absolute piss at the same time as telling a real story about social media at the same time as being kinda... Bad?

Like I genuinely don't know how to feel but I am doing a big think and it kinda feels like even doing a big think about a film like this is the kind of thing the film was making fun of.

But at the same time, it kept talking about how often things aren't about a binary, that often it's neither. Or both. Or something else entirely.

So I don't know. But I definitely had a think about it.

#movies #moviereview #thematrixresurrections

I'm working (slowly) on my next article for my newsletter (which can be found at henryneilsen.substack.com). It's partially about the fifteen minute city conspiracy theory that ran through as a sort of post-Qanon weirdness earlier this year, but it's also about the challenges that the real fifteen minute city design faces.

I'm finding it harder than most of my previous work because the conspiracy theory itself HAS no basis in reality. It's this fluid movement of ideas that constantly point at one another and then at some omnipotent, nebulous "they" that always seems out of reach. It's difficult to find a kernel to latch onto in these conspiracy theories, but I'm fascinated by how they germinate and spread.

#writing #articlewriting #research

I think my problem is that at every level I'm just... Not good at social anything.

So when I decided to do writing stuff I got on twitter, because all the stuff I read on there was "you need to have a twitter presence for books". I didn't know what to say on there. I still don't. I'm bad at engagement and I'm bad at self promotion, there's some part of my brain that calls it cringy or self-serving or (during the worst times) that my work isn't worth anyone reading anyway. So in my 4 years on twitter I amassed fewer than 500 followers because *I have no idea what to do*.

I've written two books, they're self published. I've written a podcast. I write essays about things that interest me and publish them on my Substack, but I don't have that something or other that makes people interested in what I'm reading, despite the few that do telling me that my stuff is *worth* reading.

What's more, in the history of social media I've found it's never been anything but a net negative to my mental health. Being bombarded by the horrible stuff in the world and nasty opinions by algorithms that are trained to enhance engagement to the detriment of everything else is an awful way to imbibe information, and that's just continued to get worse and worse.

So when the Twitter throttle came today I thought "You know what? This isn't worth it."

The goal of my social media presence was to try to build an audience, and it feels like for whatever reason, that hasn't worked. It's not going to work *better* while the platforms are being subjected to active sabotage, and it's not helping me to do what I really like: writing.

So I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to finish my website so I have a permanent set of contact details somewhere. I'm gonna keep writing, I'm going to improve my craft. Hell, I may post occasionally, but I'm not going to focus energy on some nebulous social media thing I don't understand. It's not working, and it's not worth it.

So I guess thanks Elon, you finally got me to realise how much time I was wasting.

#writingcommunity #writing #author #socialmedia #twitterisdead