BLACKOUT WIP update
I’ve got a finished first draft — about 210k words, or roughly 550–600 pages at 6"x9". Supernatural, cyber-noir-ish.
By far the longest novel I’ve written. The first chapter or two are a slow burn, but the rest is tightly plotted. I’m figuring another 6–12 months of rewrites before it’s editor-ready. The blocks are in place; they just need to be filed down and fitted together.
That’s where things stand.
Lately I’ve been circling the worldbuilding again, so I wanted to share where my head’s at — and a few references that keep coming up.
Most of BLACKOUT takes place in a version of Hong Kong in the 2050s.
The timeline’s deliberately accelerated for diegetic reasons: space elevator, solar and fusion revolutions, etc. But it also serves a structural purpose — it lets older characters plausibly remember the U.S./E.U. post-war order. That memory bridge ties back to our own moment, and the transition that was already clear when I started building this world in 2020–21.
By the 2050s, the axis of power has shifted toward Asia and the South China Sea. Europe still holds a few industrial strongholds — a softer fracture than the U.S., which more or less replayed the eastern/western Rome split. China, meanwhile, is straining under superpower weight. Rapid tech development hasn’t offset climate chaos. The CCP still governs the “Special Administrative Region,” but attention has shifted toward Beijing and Wuhan, leaving Hong Kong nominally more autonomous.
I hadn’t planned to even get into geopolitics in this post, but that’s how the writing process goes — once I’m in a novel, I have to write my way out. Until then, all roads lead back to The Project.
On the research front: I’m not chasing something No One Has Ever Done Before. As a matter of style, I’ve always embraced the fact that “creation” is at least 50% remixing on some level, but for this project especially, the objective is a work of genre-fiction, or at least my version of it.
So much of it draws from stead, often well-worn sources — Kowloon Walled City as a perennial cyberpunk seed, and so on.
One book that stuck early was Cities Without Ground. Its analysis of Hong Kong’s multi-level, grade-separated infrastructure — stairwells, walkways, footbridges — just clicked. I even used some of the diagrams as maps in the RPG spinoff. Same with old Kowloon photos. They’ve been anchors.
Kowloon’s peak was the ’70s–’80s. In my 2050s, Hong Kong has already weathered its “high tide” — the littoral flooding and creeping sea rise of the 2030s that pushed parts of the city onto boats — followed by seawalls and reclamation projects in the ’40s.
What didn’t come back was everything below ground level (and in some places, above it). Transportation norms had already shifted. So in this setting, the “walled city” is subterranean: an interstitial palimpsest held together by loose clan networks, bilge rigs, aquaponics systems, and patched-in utilities. Less megastructure, more maintained ruin. The Barrens.
Like the historical Kowloon, it’s easy to romanticize. I’m not trying to. But in some ways, it’s still preferable to the corporate enclaves — Central, Happy Valley, and the rest of the megacorp archipelago.
And yes, this should go without saying, but: it’s fiction. There are also space vampires.
Stories only ever show what’s in the shot. The rest of the world holds shape off-frame — supporting weight and tension whether you’re looking at it or not. I don’t mind spending a page now and then building that scaffolding; it’s one of the things I love about novels, and one of the things I wish hadn’t fallen out of favor. That said, this isn’t Lord of the Rings. It’s not even Tales From When I Had a Face.
Part of the challenge for me has been moving toward a story that’s mostly — not entirely — less inward-focused. Less about the psyches the main characters inhabit in a kind of vision-quest structure, and more about what they’re doing in the world.
