The insertion of doubt

I have this habit at the start of the working day, where I read through the last couple of paragraphs from yesterday and pick at them lightly, just to get myself worked back into the warp of it.

This is how I left things yestreen:

Mr Kipling was too rigorous a patriot. He would never sanction anything so disadvantageous to us, so beneficial to our enemy.

Which there's nothing wrong with that, except it's a bit ... assertive for me. Certain of its ground. Almost without thinking, I salted it with question:

Mr Kipling was too rigorous a patriot. He would never sanction anything so probably disadvantageous to us, so apparently beneficial to our enemy.

Now that's a Brenchley sentence. Sometimes I think I overdo the hesitations - if I subjected any novel of mine to one of those thingiegrams that count the usage of individual words and display them proportionally, I suspect that "perhaps" would come out a shade too prominent - but if a character gets to trust his own judgement of the world, then where's your story?

Published!

I am delighted - if a little startled - to observe that my story "The Burial of Sir John Mawe at Cassini" has been published in the Spring 2014 issue of Subterranean magazine.

Y'all have known how much I have been muttering this last year or so about Kipling on Mars? This is where it starts. Where it all starts, this whole outrageous mash-up of Eng Lit and the British Empire and the Red Planet and me.