I don’t recall which one, I think atow? It’s been a while. In general though, I have a feeling anything officially battletech is going to lean way too far into crunch, but I’d be happy to be wrong.

I haven’t looked at S&V, but BT has a much more hard sci-fi feel than SW… I’m assumed it wouldn’t be a great fit. How much does scum and villainy lean on the “space fantasy” angle?

There’s an element of that to it. The overarching villain represents a hostile monopolistic corpo in the analogy, and a continent-spanning emperor in the text, and “socialism” is going to be needed to defeat him.

I haven’t got a great elevator pitch for it yet but essentially there are a number of different ways to do magic, split by culture. I’ve passed it through a number of filters to keep it from being too much of an anvil, but several of the forms of magic are stands-in for the labour theory of value. Magicians can become very powerful by effectively stealing and monopolizing magic from a larger group of people, or they can be individually quite weak but collectively strong. The ‘socialist’ magicians have learned that they can compete a bit with the stronger magicians by collectively agreeing on someone to share their magic with, but it’s hard to keep a power structure like that when all around them are people trying to steal all their magic.

This stuff is all a backdrop to a story that’s a more standard adventure journey, but those themes do recurrently crop up and will eventually be core to some of the conflict

What I’m thinking after mulling on it since writing this is that I can probably design a simple arc in five short books for the very young, and then step into a more advanced YA arc that stands independent of those books for when the audience ages. Since I’m writing it for my kid, it should work for her. I don’t feel any particular need to publish, though if they’re good I’ll see what happens, so i’ve got a lot of freedom to play with the format.

I agree about language. I’m trying to avoid going too simple on sentence structure and word choices, but I am working on using words that are more phonics-friendly. My daughter can read and understand complex sentence structures but has troubles reading words that don’t sound out well. I’ll see how she goes with it.

I’ve got a wip pulp fantasy book about socialism that I keep getting stuck on. I’m not entirely sure why, I think in part it’s because I have a complete story arc but need to rework chunks. I write best when I’m not totally sure what’s going to happen.

I’m also starting some work on a couple YA books for my kids, one is post-apocalyptic and one is hard science fiction. Both are promising but it will depend on how much the kids engage with them, I’ll only continue if my audience is enjoying it.

Tempted to plug in, you mean?

That sounds like one of those things where you forget about it, then years later realize how fucked up it was.

There are still a lot more people on twitter.