SF
/Fantasy writer, Graeme K Talboys
interviewed
by Roger Simian & Sarahjane Swan
Graeme Talboys
and I first began discussing science fiction, experimental literature
and the possibilities of self publishing 10 years ago when we were
both studying creative writing through the Open University. As long
as I've known him, he's been penning wonderful left-field
science-fiction, deeply inspired by the New Worlds authors of the
1960s: Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss etc. Moorcock is a
fan and Talboys has even added a new heroine, Charlie Cornelius, to
English Assassin Jerry Cornelius's Multiverse. Talboys juggles
composing his Charlie Chronicles with penning the ongoing fantasy
series, Shadow in the Storm, starring the thief and heroine, Jeniche,
which is published by HarperVoyager (an imprint of HarperCollins).
Outside of fiction, Graeme Talboys has numerous published works on
subjects as diverse as Druidry, Museums, and Drama Games. - RS
Would you mind
briefly talking us through your fictional books: the characters,
genres, influences and any links you see between each of them? Who
are Charlie Cornelius and Jeniche Lusor Remai, Thief of Jhilnagar? Do
their worlds intersect in any ways?
All my fantasy books
inhabit the same universe, although given that they also range across
the multiverse that is a little ambiguous. It would be safer to say
that the lives of the characters intersect. My first fantasy was
Wealden Hill, set in Sussex in the 1880s, about the
experiences of Roland Henty. The Henty family turn up in the
Cornelius books. Charlie Cornelius makes an appearance in the Jeniche
novels. Charlie and Jeniche will play a part in a future series I am
planning. I have a feeling that Jeniche may drop back in time and
turn up in Charlie’s world.
So who are all these
people? Roland Henty was a soldier returned from The Afghan Wars
seeking peace in a teaching post in a Sussex village. Peace is the
last thing he finds as he discovers his unusual ancestry.
Charlie Cornelius is
the child of… well, we know her mother is Catherine Cornelius and
that is all I will say on the matter. If you know the history of the
Cornelius family you will be aware of how exceedingly complex it is.
Born in Kashmir on 6 March 1968, at the age of 7 she is taken back to
London in 1931 (told you it was complicated). There, she is taken in
by her Nan, Gertrude Cornell. Not long after the start of the Blitz,
she loses what family she had and begins to live alone in the ruins.
Given Charlie’s
background, it is no wonder that her relationship with time and the
many worlds of the multiverse is relaxed and one she does not at
first understand. Despite the ability to move into alternative
Londons, many of them with nightmare qualities, she is rooted in the
here and now and must face the hardships of life alone. She must also
face the predator that stalks the blacked out streets, especially
when he threatens a new found friend.
Charlie is eventually
adopted by the Simmons family who run a travelling funfair and more
episodes of her life will be revealed. The Simmons family (related to
the Hentys) have an adventurer of their own in their ancestry as
anyone who has read H G Wells will know.
And Jeniche Lusor Remai
will be born a thousand years from now in a country called Antar
where she will be raised on her own by an old woman in a strange
building. Unhappy, she eventually runs away and ends up in the
neighbouring country of Makamba, settling in the city of the same
name and living a precarious life as a thief.
Her world has grown in
the ruins of a cataclysm so all-encompassing, little record remains
of the civilizations that existed before the event they call the
Evanescence. Life is fairly comfortable for her until the day she
enters a house to steal jewellery. There she encounters not the
riches she expected but empty rooms and a tall woman who hands her an
amulet.
Not long afterwards she
is arrested and whilst languishing in prison the city is invaded by
Occassan troops. She escapes jail, retrieves her stash (including the
amulet), and makes plans to escape to somewhere quieter. In the
process she finds herself acting as guide to a group of monks and
nuns from the distant land of Tundur, helping them find a way home.
Also in their group is a stranger called Alltud.
Nothing goes as she
plans, not least because the Occassans seem to be interested in the
small group, hunting them as they make their way into the mountains.
And so begins the adventures of Jeniche, the places she visits, the
people she meets, the long battle with the Occassans, who are
obsessed with her and the amulet.
So, with Michael
Moorcock’s blessing you have added Charlie Cornelius to the
pantheon of Jerry Cornelius, the English Assassin, and his clan. How
did you find your way to Charlie as a character? Did she arrive fully
formed from your imagination or did you have to construct her, like a
Frankenstein’s Monster, pieced together from elements of
individuals you’ve known in real life or from previous fictions?
Charlotte Jennifer
Grace Cornelius first appeared in a short story titled “…the
price is worth it.”, a meditation on the impact of conflict and
disaster on children. I had long wanted to write a Jerry Cornelius
short story in the style of the originals and the opportunity
presented itself in 2006 when I took the Open University’s first
Creative Writing course. One of the assignments was for a short story
of 2,000 words. It seemed a perfect match, not least because I had
been re-reading the Cornelius stories and novels at the time.
Within Moorcock’s
work there are several hints that a child of Jerry or his sister
Catherine exists. I ran with that idea and how Jerry might react. For
all the complexities and nihilism of his character, I believe that he
would have done exactly as I wrote – search the time streams for a
safe passage through the years for the child and encode this in a way
the mother could use. Of course, where Jerry is concerned, plans
rarely run smoothly.
That was the extent of
Charlie’s existence. A bump. But another short story was called for
during the course and I wrote, originally, about a single mother
living in London at the beginning of the Second World War deciding
not to let her child be evacuated. Part of the story grew out of
conversations with my mother who lived in London throughout most of
the war (her father was a fireman).
As it stood, the story
was complete, but to me it had no depth. In searching for that extra
layer, it occurred to me that perhaps this child of eight years of
age could well be the same as yet to be born child in “…the
price is worth it.”. After a quick rewrite, I had the depth I
was looking for. As a short story, that depth may not be obvious to a
reader, but I am certain that when an author taps into such deep
wells, it resonates in their work.
And once the child was
born, I couldn’t leave it there. Even if no one else cared, I
wanted to know how Charlie got to London in 1939 as an eight year old
when she was born in Jhilnagar in 1968. That, I knew was going to be
a long and complicated journey and that I intended to have fun
retracing it.
Indeed, once she
existed, Charlie insisted that her story was written. At first it was
going to be a single novel. That soon went by the board. So much
happened to her between 1939 and 1944, that it needed a book of its
own.
To begin with I had no
overall plan. Having created a character (I can feel her glaring at
me as I write that) so let me rephrase. Having made Charlie’s
acquaintance, the circumstances of her life were enough to dictate
what happened. She was the child of time-travelling adventurers
living in a war-torn city. Whilst people have stories to tell, their
lives aren’t planned. Things happen. They cope as best they can in
their own way. Which is exactly what Charlie did as a child. Whether
she tries to steer events as she gets older remains to be seen.
As Moorcock had
bequeathed Cornelius and Co to the science fictional world as public
domain archetypes, up-for-grabs modern day myths that writers were
encouraged to adopt, did you feel you had free reign to do whatever
you wanted with your creation? Or were you beholden to run your work
past Michael Moorcock first, before releasing those stories into the
world? What has his reaction been to your works based in the
Multiverse?
Yes and no. This was my
story (and that will be true in more ways than one). At the same time
I was conscious of a responsibility toward the original. I had loved
the stories from the very beginning and felt always that I should try
to be true to their spirit. Happily, the very structure of the
originals left me free to explore and use my own voice. In addition,
as they deal with archetypes (often typified by Commedia dell’Arte),
they offer a ready-made framework on which to weave a tale.
Once I had completed my
first forays into the Cornelius universe, I did not feel obliged to
run them by Mike, but I have known him for a long time and felt it
would be polite. Of course, it was an enormous boost to my ego when
he told me how much he enjoyed the first story, how I had really
captured the method and understood the point. He has also said he’s
happy with the novels, which is not only personally gratifying, but
makes the actual writing a lot easier as I feel trusted to explore
that corner of the multiverse.
Not only that, he has
endorsed my other fantasy writing, which means a great deal to me.
This is one of the greatest fantasy writers ever and he likes my
work. What’s not to smile about.
Do you feel you are
writing the Charlie stories and the Jeniche stories for two distinct
audiences or for one group with broader tastes?
I hope that, like me,
my readers would be comfortable with both writings. The characters
interact and storylines intertwine. It is true that the Jeniche books
are straightforward epic fantasies, whilst the Charlie books are much
more experimental and exploratory in their approach, but I suspect
readers will be able to delve into both worlds happily, realising
that the form of story telling is important to the story being told.
Charlie’s life is horribly fragmented by events and she lives in a
world of great complexity and the way her life is related to the
reader reflects this. Jeniche, although she lives in complicated
times, is firmly rooted in one place and time (at least in the first
seven books). The story telling is, therefore, a much more
straightforward narrative.
You were obviously a
huge fan of New Worlds magazine and the more experimental SF
work of Moorcock, JG Ballard and others. Do you have any direct links
with New Worlds or the authors associated with it? Did you submit any
work to them or to any of the other countercultural publications of
the time?
I submitted a number of
stories to New Worlds back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
They didn’t get published as I wasn’t a good enough writer in
those days. New Worlds had really high standards, but Mike
always passed my work to other editors to see if they were
interested, and it seemed a lot easier in those days to open a
dialogue with editors and writers that you didn’t know. That led to
introductions and sometimes friendships. I also submitted work
(fiction and non-fiction) to other magazines. I didn’t get much
published but I was learning all the time (not least how to cope with
rejection).
You’ve hinted that
the culture you encountered at that time, the late ‘60s, made you
who you are today, as an individual in general, and more specifically
as a writer. Is this fair to say? What drew you to the
counterculture? What did it tell you about yourself and about the
world around you? What made it so special and life-altering?
It is a very fair thing
to say. Basically, I’m just an old hippie. I went to festivals, met
some very interesting people, turned on, tuned in, although never
quite dropped out. I thought I could make a difference from the
inside through teaching. But trying to teach and write eventually
burned me out.
It’s difficult to
know what attracted me to that world at the time. Looking back you
can always find connections, but at the time that’s what all my
friends were in to and my earlier life had no doubt set up the right
conditions. As a young child I was a bit of a loner. My siblings were
seven years older than me and although it was natural that we moved
in different circles, I had the advantage of being introduced to
things ahead of time – music, books, magazines, and ideas. Even as
I was reading The Beano, The Eagle, and Look and
Learn I was reading more adult fare. My mother subscribed to the
Companion Book Club and there was always a Simenon or a Greene to dip
into. I didn’t always understand these things, but by the time I
was eleven I had an adult library card (non-fiction only, presumably
to protect me from what I was already reading at home).
From an early age I
loved science fiction and fantasy, was fascinated by tales of unusual
happenings and mysteries, ghosts, lost cities, UFOs, British myth and
legend. It was all grist to the mill of my imagination. Exposure to
more adult reading grounded this in the real world that not many
children experience.
Perhaps that is why
when I stepped into the counter cultural stream, I was happy to be
swept away. It was such a heady mix of real world concerns and the
fantastical that it seemed quite natural to me. Contemporary
depictions of that period can be distorting. A comparatively small
number of people grew their hair and adorned themselves with flowers
(although when you went to festivals like Phun City or the Isle of
Wight you could be forgiven for thinking the whole world had done
so). But those were intensely political times, a time when any- and
everything seemed possible.
Equally there was an
enormous explosion of creativity. You could try anything and there
was a community that encouraged that, helped that, nurtured that, and
which allowed you to fail. Failure was part of the process. It was
accepted. The important thing was you had tried and no-one made you
feel bad if it didn’t work. More often than not, they asked you
what you were going to do next.
I was lucky in that my
home life allowed me to flourish, my schooling was under the tutelage
(for the most part) of teachers who engaged with and encouraged me.
My school had arts festivals, and I became involved with those, with
drama, with the local folk scene. And I was doubly lucky in that I
lived close to Brighton. That meant I could get up to London easily
and partake of the vibe in and around Ladbroke Grove, witness the
early performances of Hawkwind, get to the theatre for things like
Peter Brooks’ Midsummer Night’s Dream, and still have a
town on my doorstep that was as vibrant as London, yet more intimate.
Hanging out in Bill
Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop, going to concerts at the Dome and the
Uni, mixing with all sorts of people just kept expanding my mind. And
Brighton had a whole previous generation of bohemian folk who shared
their wisdom.
It wasn’t all good.
Anyone’s teenage years have their downs as well as their ups. And
the counter culture itself was riddled with inequalities, especially
when it came to women’s rights. But on the whole it was a formative
period I am ever thankful to have experienced.
It didn’t last, of
course. Just when we thought we could change the world, the world
decided it wasn’t time and the establishment fought back. That is a
long and painful history that has been chronicled elsewhere. Yet it
left a legacy that is still at work. Groups like Friends of the Earth
and Greenpeace had their genesis at this time. Many of the young
hippies are now old hippies and still working for a better world.
From a personal point
of view, it was the opening of the mind and learning to look at the
world with different eyes, learning to be critical in a positive way,
not being afraid to experiment, the music, the camaraderie, the
feeling of belonging to an anarchic movement in which being a bit odd
was a redeeming feature.
Do you miss that
era? The Charlie Cornelius stories seem haunted by a kind of
dislocated melancholy and nostalgia for a freer, more open time.
I do. I realise that
that’s as much a nostalgia for the carefree time of childhood. I
grew up in a loving family. That too wasn’t without its ups and
downs, but I felt secure, loved, and trusted. In turn I did little to
abuse that. There wasn’t much in the way of drugs (mostly because I
didn’t see the point – the mind has plenty of wonderful things to
explore without messing with it). I did nip off to festivals a bit
further afield that my parents would not have been happy about, but
that was the extent of my rebelliousness at home.
That aside, I miss the
flowering of creativity, the anarchic vibrancy of the time. I know a
lot goes on now in ways we couldn’t have imagined back then, but it
seems far more disjointed, individuals and small groups rather than a
whole, loose-knit culture.
Students don’t
protest any more because the old centres of political ferment were
closed down and these days students are loaded with debt. Back then,
you could scrape by on the dole, find a cheap hovel to share with
others, do casual work to put more than beans on toast on the table
and not worry about being harassed by Social Security. You had the
chance to write your novel, rehearse your band, make your art. Even
if you later put on a suit and got a job, you had the opportunity to
get that out of your system. You could say you’d tried.
Now everything seems to
be driven by committees and money, where those who decide on who gets
a grant or a spot at the festival belong to a very small coterie of
folk who are rarely practising artists. Or it is all about instant
fame from the TV. Or it is a professional career via a BA and MA in
some creative subject that squeezes you into an academic box in order
that you can be assessed to an arbitrary standard and strips away any
truly innovative approach. I won’t condemn such courses outright as
they are better than nothing. But only just.
Or maybe I’m just an
old fogey shaking one fist at the modern world whilst clutching a
copy of Kropotkin in the other.
Can you still see
any whispers or traces of the philosophies and creativity of the 60s
and 70s here in the 21st century?
Everywhere. Like the
Big Bang can be heard if you know where to look, the echoes of that
explosion still resound. I mentioned Friends of the Earth and
Greenpeace before. They and many other green organisations were born
back then. I went drinking with Robert Hunter when he was in the UK,
and we talked about this, about whether counter cultural movements
inevitably disappear under the weight of both reactionary forces and
their own move from anarchic structure to more corporate
organisation. We never did decide. But that initial blossoming still
provides inspiration. There are still people travelling and living
off grid, building little houses in obscure places and living quietly
without leaving a footprint in the sands of time. And ideas are also
still alive. Modern technology has allowed music, film making, art,
animation, and writing and publishing to take place in a way not seen
before. And as I also said before, it is only that they do not take
place within an overarching counter-cultural atmosphere that we don’t
hear more about them. Even with the internet it is much more
difficult to find these endeavours than it was in the ‘60s, much
more difficult to connect them.
The current zeitgeist is a much more
tenuous spirit, perhaps because it is so much more widely spread and
because there is now so much background noise. That migration of folk
to centres, and in those centres to rooms where people would sit,
talk, listen to music together, come up with ideas, and put those
ideas into action no longer takes place in ‘western’ culture.
In your novel, Thin
Reflections, we are introduced to Charlie’s childhood in the
war-torn London of WWII. Much as JG Ballard’s earliest experiences
in the chaos of Japanese occupied Shanghai directly influenced his
fictional disasters and dystopias, Charlie’s childhood in a
Blitz-ravaged London seem to echo in her unsettled, adulthood as a
rootless Temporal Adventurer. In what ways have the landscapes of
your earliest memories resonated through your life and fiction? I
gather that your early childhood was urban but that you were at some
point introduced to a more rural existence in East Sussex?
That’s a really
interesting question – the dichotomy of urban and rural. I was born
in London and lived there for the first five years of my life. We
then lived in Norwich before moving to Sussex. That was a gradual
drift from urban to rural (and I now live in a small Scottish
village, so the journey is almost complete). Despite leaving London
at an early age I still have very distinct memories and, having
family there, we always went back. And that side of the family were
deeply rooted in London and were, of course, living there through
WWII. My maternal grandfather was a fireman who experienced the Blitz
at its sharpest end.
As a small child, my
mother would take me all over the place, going to parks and museums,
visiting aunts and cousins – almost as if she wanted to imbue me
with as much experience of that world as possible. It is these
memories, fragmented as they are, that are a foundation to my visions
of the world – parks and old buildings, railway bridges, tube
trains and buses, the roof garden of Derry and Toms – plus that
feeling that a city must be walked and explored. That was clearly
embedded in me when we moved to Norwich. As a child in the late 50s
and early 60s, I had a huge amount of freedom. I would walk the city
streets, visit the museums and libraries, play in the still existing
bomb sites, ride the bike my brother had made for me out of bits of
other bikes. Freewheeling and anarchic, and still finding plenty of
time to read comics and books, scribble my own stories.
This carried on into
life in Sussex where rural scenery was thrown into the mix. I found
walking the countryside (or riding my bike) just as absorbing as
wandering about in Brighton. In some senses you had to. About half my
friends lived in relatively remote villages, the rest being spread
out in the same coastal sprawl where I lived. It was nothing to get
on my bike and cycle thirty miles to get to a party, crash for the
weekend and cycle home. But my restlessness was just as likely to be
solitary, exploring on the beach or walking on the downs.
You cannot be that
immersed in your environment without it shaping who you are. My
writing draws heavily on these landscapes. And it doesn’t really
stop with childhood. I went to college in Birmingham, so there is
another urban landscape, one that is coloured by my emerging adult
awareness. The college buildings are also deeply embedded in my
psyche. They often turn up in Charlie’s world (and play a role in
other story ideas I hope to develop). They represent a growing
awareness of the world as well as being a place that sits, like so
much of what I write about, in liminal space.
The same happened when
I started teaching. I lived in a flat in a long modern, complex that
was a retreat from the stresses of teaching and has also become
embedded in my psyche. More so as the whole complex has since been
demolished, existing now only in memory and a few photographs. And,
of course, in my writings.
Like any artist, I
represent and interpret at the same time. My visions of the world are
fed in part by memories seen through a kaleidoscopic distorting
glass. I sometimes wonder how disturbed I might be or, more
frightening, just how straight I see the world. In the end, though,
whilst I remain aware of the sources of my imagination, I try not to
analyse it too much. It is a superstitious fear that if I pick it
apart, I won’t be able to put it back together again.
What were the first
books that really grabbed hold of you and shook up your world? How
did they attract your attention and in what ways did they change who
you were?
Oh. First loves. And a
bit of cheating because the first reading that was compulsive were
the comics I took each week. My brother’s Eagle (Dan Dare), my own
Beano and a bit later TV21 (Gerry Anderson) and Look and Learn (for
which, I later learned, Mike Moorcock wrote). Much of my juvenile
reading was non-fiction (I had a thing about castles for years) and
of the children’s fiction I read I cannot remember a single book.
In fact, I didn’t get into children’s fiction until I started
teaching. There were always plenty of adult books in the house; a lot
of my reading choices were a gift from my mother – Georges Simenon,
Graham Greene, and Margery Allingham, for example. I read a lot of
those as a youngster but didn’t fully appreciate them until I was
older. Oddly enough, the one adult book from that early period I
remember clearly was Flying Saucers Have Landed by George Adamski and
Desmond Leslie. It introduced me at an early age to alternative
realities and to people who see the world differently.
The earliest novel I
recall that grabbed my attention forcefully and has never since let
go is T H White’s The Once and Future King. I was twelve. A
teacher at my school, Bill Euston, read us The Sword in the Stone
in the weeks before he retired and advised us to seek out the other
parts. I knew the Arthurian tales well, by that time, but was
completely entranced by this madcap version. It still astonishes me
(I reread it on a fairly regular basis) what White managed – not
just in terms of storytelling (it is Bardic magic), but in the way he
subverts everything without once losing his respect for the source
material. As a piece of literature, its importance to me is matched
only by its spiritual importance. As a child I had experienced things
which, once I read White’s book, began to make sense and set me on
a path I’ll write about below.
It was also, perhaps a
gateway book. Once I’d read that I wanted more like that. And
around this time I started looking at SF&F, partly through the
pages of New Worlds magazine. When Mike Moorcock took over
editorship, it was like the doors of a whole new library being opened
– not just in the writing in the magazine, but in the discussions
had within the pages about other authors and the things you could
possibly do with words.
Then (as now) I was a
voracious and indiscriminate reader. William Burroughs or Edgar Rice
Burroughs, I didn’t care. I was fully aware of differing styles and
‘merit’, but it doesn’t matter if you are travelling first
class or in a broken down third-hand bus held together by string and
chewing gum, it’s the journey you take and the things you
experience along the way – although the best experiences are often
to be had on that broken down bus as it negotiates the back roads of
a foreign country. There are, of course, other books that not only
stand out in my own mind as important but which have, I am sure,
influenced me as a person and a writer. The brightest of these are:
Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head and Report on
Probability A; J G Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition;
Barrington J Bayley’s Soul of a Robot; Samuel Beckett’s
How It Is; John Berger’s Ways of Seeing; Jorge Luis
Borges’s Labyrinths; Albert Camus’s The Outsider;
Angela Carter’s Shadow Dance; Philip K Dick’s The Man
in the High Castle; M John Harrison’s The Pastel City;
Anna Kavan’s Ice; Mike Moorcock’s Behold The Man;
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books; Arthur Ransome’s
Swallows and Amazons; Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage
sequence; Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers; Joanna Russ’s
Picnic on Paradise; Jack Trevor Story’s The Trouble With
Harry; Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic; P
L Travers’ Mary Poppins; H G Wells’ The Time Machine;
Monique Wittig’s The Guerillas; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
And most of that is by
the time I’m 16. Add to that, as you have to, the music, the
movies, the artwork, theatre, parties, and festivals. As that would
take another ten thousand words, I’d better stop now.
When did you begin
to write yourself? Were you encouraged in this in any way: by
parents, peers, school, the culture at large? How did you learn the
skills required to be a writer?
I don’t know where it
came from but I have always loved everything about writing and books.
Pens, paper, learning cursive (which we did at school in handwriting
lessons – we weren’t allowed to use pens until we had completed
that), and just generally drawing and scribbling. It has always
seemed to me to be an act of magic. My first conscious memory of
creating my own stories is when I was seven. My parents had groceries
delivered once a week from a nearby store. Each week, my mother would
write a list in a red, Silvine cash book the grocer supplied, hand it
in to the store and on Friday evening, cardboard boxes would be
delivered in a van.
There were always spare
red books which somehow ended up in my clutches. And I would write
stories in them, illustrated every few pages. They’ve all
disappeared now, sadly as I would love to be able to see those first
steps. And it wasn’t just stories written in books. There was a lot
of world building going on in my head all the time, vignettes to
explain things I didn’t understand or which appealed to me. Every
journey back and forth from school was an adventure. Every playtime
game was an adventure. Exploring the city was both nerdy (I was
curious about everything) and an adventure.
All those stories,
along with the ones I was taking in via comics, books, cinema, and a
television with two channels – well, they had to come back out or I
think my head would have exploded. And they did. When I wasn’t out
there being a spy, landing on other planets, hunting ghosts, or
looking for treasure, I was writing. And drawing. The little red cash
books grew to exercise books and larger ledgers that turned up from
somewhere (along with pens, pencils and crayons). That, I guess, was
the only positive encouragement my parents gave. They saw what I
enjoyed and gave me the materials and the space to get on with it.
But looking back, that really was the very best encouragement of all.
No one in my family at that time was what you’d call a book worm
(and I’m not sure I ever saw my father read anything other than a
newspaper or technical journal). No one was inclined to the literary
life. On the other hand, no one ever looked down on it or discouraged
it.
School didn’t mind. I
handed in work. One Junior school teacher did place me next to the
classroom library and never once complained if I’d slipped a book
off the shelf and was reading. So, once again, it was a recognition
that what I was up to was at worst harmless and would improve my
vocabulary so I was allowed to get on with it.
It wasn’t until my
third year in Secondary school, not long after we’d moved to
Sussex, that I began to think about the actual craft of writing. My
first two years were at a school in Norwich which I loathed. As a
result of doing well in the Eleven Plus, I ended up in one school and
all my friends in another. The school I went to had pretensions,
thought it was Eton or something (despite being a state grammar
school). Bullying was rife. My mother later told me that she and dad
were happy when he got made redundant and had to find work elsewhere
as it got me away from that place.
In Sussex I flowered. I
was still in a boys only state grammar school (which became a mixed
comprehensive at the beginning of my fifth year), but the atmosphere
was totally different. I began to enjoy school again, especially
English classes. That’s where T H White comes in. That’s where
teachers began to get me to think about how written work is
structured, how the choice of words can alter a piece. It’s also
where I made new friends my own age and was exposed to their tastes.
As I hurtled into
adolescence, the writing of stories became the writing of poetry.
Every day I would free write. Huge amounts of garbage. But it was
ingraining a habit. Write every day. And it was ingraining the notion
that your first draft, your free write, doesn’t have to be good.
It’s manure that makes the roses grow.
In that sense, I was
self-taught. I began to take bits of what I had written and I began
to work on them, find ways to improve their meaning, their flow,
their resonance. I can’t say I was that good at it, but these
things take time. And if nothing else, I was prolific. Thousands of
poems and bits of prose by the time I was eighteen.
In another sense, I was
learning from the very best teachers possible – books. Novels
poems, plays. Words. Because they were still magical and I was
beginning at that stage to get the hang of it.
Perhaps the only
drawback in later school life is that none of my contemporaries was a
writer. They were virtually all musicians. I’ll touch on this a bit
later, but it still astonishes me how much musical talent there was
around me.
It wasn’t until I got
to college I began to discuss writing with other writers. By that
stage my focus was on theatre and drama, but I was still writing
prose. In fact I’d already written a couple of novels by then (one
of which I lost on a train).
Formal training in
writing came late in the day with the Open University’s Creative
Writing courses. By that stage I was already published, but it was
non-fiction and I felt in a bit of a non-fiction groove. Working
through well designed courses and being able to bounce ideas and
general chatter around with other writers was extremely liberating,
not just in terms of writing, but in the opening up of a network of
people who have become good friends and whose support and advice over
the years has been of inestimable value.
You have a strong
interest in Druidry and the Celtic heritage. What influence, if any,
does this have on the stories you write? Is your particular strain of
science fiction and fantasy writing a continuation, in some way, of
the Celtic storytelling traditions?
We are back to T H
White. The Sword in the Stone was not just an epic piece of story
telling, it was a spiritual journey. That’s where my formal
interest in Druids and our Celtic heritage began. And what better
place? Story-telling, teaching, standing witness, keeping alive the
ideas, working for balance... these are all part of what I do. There
are many ways to accomplish these things – some obvious, some more
subtle. In the end it comes down to a view of the world, a
metaphysical stance that governs your actions. The inside of my head
is a strange place although I am extremely comfortable there. Outside
my head is even more remarkable. The world is a constant miracle,
despite the attempts of some to bring it to its knees. My work as a
Druid, my involvement in green politics and environmental causes, my
teaching, and my story-telling are all aimed at a single end. I want
people to appreciate the world in which they are privileged to live,
I want them to care for it, I want them to work in ways that lessen
our impact on and increase our joy in the world.
My non-fiction is about
specific ways in which you can better work in the world, be that
through an understanding of what it means to be human and how fragile
that existence is or by taking positive action to examine our
individual contribution. My fiction goes to some dark places to
examine bad things and show how people, be they individuals or
groups, can make a difference.
Like the Bards of old I
try to tell an exciting and engrossing story that derives from my
concerns. And I have not the slightest doubt there are elements of my
storytelling that borrow heavily from Celtic sources (like whole
books).
I’ve read that
every school day in your early teens, you would pass the Mount in
Lewes, East Sussex: an antiquated, artificially constructed chalk
mound covered in turf. This must have fired up your imagination in a
big way. You’ve also spoken about the inspiration for your first
novel Wealden Hill: an overheard pub conversation between two
wizened Sussex gents discussing a grandfather snatched away for some
time by the “fraeries”. Having grown up in an urban space, your
later encounters with the landscape and lore of East Sussex seem to
have been a rich source of inspiration to you as a writer.
I also passed the spot
every day where Virginia Woolf committed suicide, went to school and
worked in the town where Thomas Paine was an excise officer for 6
years and which had and still has a very strong tradition of
non-conformism is its widest sense. I spent a lot of time on the
Mount with friends in that eternal summer of my youth. The local folk
and folklore scene was extremely important to me. I think the most
wonderful thing was that I lived within easy reach of town and
country, both of which were steeped in culture ancient and modern.
You could walk on the downs and feel the millennia beneath your feet,
see the burial mounds and other workings of peoples whose most
advanced technology was the flint they pulled out of the chalk. From
up there you could see the setting of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s
Hill. At the same time you would be walking the paths that Virginia
Woolf followed, seeing scenes so wonderfully captured by artists like
Eric Ravilious. And there were so many in-between places, both in
town and country, and these perhaps are the ones that inform my work
the most. The little deserted rural railway halts along with the
major railway stations late at night. along with the major railway stations late at night. Places on the downs where the modern world could be seen, thickets of thorn in which it was possible
to lose oneself on a hot summer afternoon. The huge figure of the
Wilmington giant who has always been, to me, a female figure holding
wide the gates to another world. The tiny back alleys of the towns
with second-hand bookshops that were clearly connected to L-space.
Everywhere you went, there were stories to be heard and stories to be
told. And perhaps it was that contrast of urban and rural, along with
all those edge spaces, that made it all so vibrant and fed my
imagination with such a rich diet.
I had a similarly
enriching duality in my formative years. I grew up in a tough grey
housing scheme on the outskirts of Edinburgh until I was 10 and then
we moved to a village in the Scottish Borders, which had been the
hometown of Thomas the Rhymer, True Thomas of Ercildoune. Both
locations: the urban and the rural have had huge impact on my
imagination and I’ve always found myself drawn to characters like
the Arch Drood and Modern Antiquarian, Julian Cope (of The Teardrop
Explodes), who seems to simultaneously inhabit both the trippy
wilderness of ancient Warwickshire and the edgy metropolis of
Post-Punk Liverpool. Do you think you would still have been a science
fiction / fantasy writer (and, indeed, a lover of the Druid’s Way)
if you had not relocated from the city life to the country?
Oh. That’s a big
question. And true to the spirit of speculative fiction it is perhaps
the biggest ‘what-if’ question of all. It is one I have asked
many times, and I suspect that what I have become was set in train
from a very early age. My very earliest memories from when we still
lived in London are a mix of urban and rural. We lived very close to
Richmond Park. The belling of red deer during the rut is one of the
earliest sounds I can recall. Visiting the park for picnics ranks
equally with walking the city streets in my memory – from a time
when smog was a real problem, steam trains roared over bridges, and
there were still bomb sites from the war. The path I followed would
no doubt have been different, but I believe it would have been
roughly parallel to the one I did follow.
Is it true that you
grew up with Wreckless Eric? What was he like? What did he teach you
about the Rock ‘n’ Roll world?
I did. When we moved to
Sussex a pupil in my class was allotted to act as my guide for the
first few weeks to make sure I knew where all the classrooms and
toilets were and to make sure I got the right train and bus home.
That was Eric Goulden. He was given the unenviable task of
baby-sitting because he lived a bit further along the same bus route
from me (you did a great job, Eric – I never once got lost). We
ended up in different tutor groups later on, but we are still in
touch. It’s difficult to think of folk you grew up with being
internationally recognised stars – they were just kids you mucked
about with on the train, copied homework from, saw at parties.
As I mentioned earlier,
there was an astonishing amount of musical talent in the school that
was clearly going to go places. Contemporaries of mine were people
such as Andrew Ranken (Pogues), Pete Thomas (The Attractions), and my
good friend Tom Morley (Scritti Politti). Notice a theme? –
drumming was popular. And even those who did not go on to be
professional musicians still perform regularly (especially in the
folk scene). I made efforts to play bass but I have stubby arthritic
fingers and could never quite get it. Music did not lose out by my
failure. But it has always been important to me.
And if there is a
lesson to be carried away from this, it is that no matter what hype
surrounds such people, they are ordinary folk who went to
extraordinary lengths to perfect their art.
Music seems to have
been hugely important to you. Who are your Rock Gods and Goddesses?
Is there any essence of their work reflected in your books?
Oh, I could go off on
another very long list, so I’ll try to be good. As far as bands go,
Hawkwind have always been there (I’m listening to them as I write
this), the Nice, the Deviants (and later incarnations of the band and
its various members – especially Mick Farren, a great writer and a
true rock ‘n’ roller who died on stage). A lot of blues/rock from
Cream, Hendrix, Ten Years After, Groundhogs, Steamhammer, and Chicken
Shack.
A more contemplative
side can be found in the work of the incomparable Sandy Denny, with
an echo of that melancholia found also in Nick Drake. Roy Harper was
a particularly strong influence (to the point of Charlie Cornelius
novel titles deriving from his lyrics, with his permission). And to
prove I’m not stuck in the past, the Smoke Fairies are a
contemporary folk/blues outfit I love.
For more ‘progressive’
work King Crimson, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Peter Hammill, Porcupine
Tree, Van Der Graaf Generator.
I like film music as
well (most of it more than the actual films). It is ideal to write to
as it is composed specifically to hit emotional triggers. Jablonsky
and Zimmerman do this well for mainstream films. Sometimes you get a
perfect match of director and composer as with Tarkovsky and
Artemiev.
And, of course,
classical. Lush and romantic orchestral music mostly – Sibelius,
Mahler, Rachmaninov… you get the picture.
My work is riddled with
references to music and other cultural items, often obscurely, and
simply because it pleases me that something resonates with a memory
of my own. My musical tastes and the things I write are a reflection
of each other.
I gather, from
reading some of your work, that you spent part of your later
formative years in Brighton. What drew you there? Was there a strong
countercultural presence? In your short story This Side of Winter
from the Charlie Cornelius volume, Stormwrack, you describe an
underground journal, Garden of Albion. Is this inspired by a
real publication and real characters you encountered in Brighton?
When the family moved
to Sussex, Brighton became the nearest place with a choice of
bookshops, music venues, and hangouts for a growing lad like myself.
Just out of town was Sussex University, in the town itself was an Art
College of the type that got closed down or subsumed because they
tended to be hotbeds of radical thought. There were blues clubs, folk
clubs, spaces for open air concerts, and the Dome. Bookshops seemed
to line the streets. New and secondhand volumes abounded (as did LPs
– this was the almost prehistoric first vinyl age). There were
quirky shops left over from another era. And I knew them all.
One particular haunt
was the Unicorn Bookshop, owned by the poet Bill Butler. It was more
than just a bookshop. He ran a small press, and there were always
interesting people in and out – Moorcock, Ballard, William
Burroughs. It also engaged with its customers. People would talk
about books or what they had read in IT or Oz, about
concerts they’d been to. As a result of all this, the place was
also always the focus of police attention. Put hippies and a small
press together and the establishment would lash out at it on a fairly
regular basis. And just as Nasty Tales and Oz had their
obscenity trials, so too did Bill Butler for publishing Ballard.
The Unicorn Bookshop
was a fascinating place. It is no surprise it resurfaces in an
alternative form in my Cornelius books as Octopus. It seemed to me to
be the perfect place for Charlie to take refuge during those late
days of the ‘60s whilst exploring something of the social history
of the period – in particular the police/state hypocrisy of
pursuing such places for obscenity when you didn’t have to walk
very far to find photographic and film studios churning out
pornography and appearing to have the protection of the local police.
The Garden of Albion
has no direct counterpart, but it is a generic product of the
underground press of the period. Long before all the tools made
available by desktop publishing, hundreds, if not thousands, of
magazines and papers were being printed at the time – providing an
outlet for the counter cultural voice. I still have a number of
periodicals from the time, from the professional New Worlds,
and IT, to publications like Nasty Tales. Many of these
are now exceedingly fragile. They weren’t aimed at posterity. The
layouts are wonky. Photographs are often poorly reproduced. Cartoons
hastily drawn. Yet they have a vibrancy that many modern small
publications seem to lack.
How did you end up
living in Scotland? Has the new landscape and culture you find
yourself existing in had an influence on your work?
We moved here when I
took up a post at the museum in Stranraer. Within months, I fell ill
with ME and FM and eventually stepped aside from my post. Ironically,
we came here because of the promise of walking and exploring the
countryside. Prior to moving I had spent a year’s paid leave
(courtesy of a grant) researching a book on museum education and not
long after being diagnosed I was offered a publishing contract.
Writing full time seemed to be a way forward.
Despite my problems
with mobility, I have always been conscious of landscape and
fascinated not just by how it forms but also how it acts on those who
live within it – the way the psychologies of those who live in
desert regions, for example, differ from those who live in
well-watered landscapes. Even when the landscape is urban, it affects
those who live there. City dwellers have different outlooks to
village dwellers. Different cities affect people in different ways.
I find any written work
that does not understand this and reflect it in the characters and
story to be psychologically two-dimensional. It is fantasy where
environment is most obviously used (although even there, writers
often get it wrong). We are, of course, treading the edges of
pathetic fallacy here in which environment is endowed with human
emotion and conduct. Yet it is impossible not to recognise this as
part of human understanding of the world. We cannot understand it in
any other way because it has shaped us and our thinking; if we tend
to ascribe or project our own emotions and motives, that is how we
function and make sense of things.
Certain stories rely
heavily on the landscape in which they are set. Thomas Hardy springs
to mind. And certainly in my more rural fantasies, the landscape is
ever present as an influencing factor. Not just in the sense that a
journey through mountains will be hard, but in the psychological
presence of mountains. Having spent time in the Alps, I know what a
weight they can place on the psyche.
The same is true of the
weather. A desert dweller will know the joy of the rainy season, no
matter how short, and be prepared for it. But to move into a region
where it rains 250 days of the year, often non-stop for weeks on end
(I’m looking at you, Scotland), is to introduce an element (excuse
the unavoidable pun) that will undoubtedly affect that character.
Of course, as a writer,
I should be able to conjure this no matter where I live, but it is so
much better to have experienced these things for yourself. In my past
I travelled a lot and have lived in both those urban and rural
settings. Even now with limited mobility I try to get out as much as
possible.
Contact with the
landscape and the objects you write about brings a veracity to your
work be it fantasy (and having worked in museums I know about armour,
swords, living in roundhouses from first-hand experience) or
contemporary urban literature.
Your earliest
published books were non-fiction. What subjects did these cover and
how did they come about? Did these help give you the discipline you
needed when turning your pen to longer fiction?
When I was a Drama
teacher, I used a lot of games in my work as warm up, and sometimes
just for fun. I collected these over the years and compiled a
collection. Spent years trying to find a publisher and eventually did
so. It was a set text in Ireland apparently for a while. But my first
published full length works were derived from my time working in
museum education.
I worked a lot with
student teachers during my time as a museum education officer as it
seemed better to train teachers how to use museums than constantly
repeat work with children. I received a substantial grant from the St
Hild and St Bede Trust to carry out research into this. Much of the
book work was done at libraries at Durham University in the mornings
and (weather permitting) I’d spend the afternoons in the botanical
gardens writing up notes and drafting parts of the book.
The intention was to
provide a comprehensive guide for student and practising teachers on
how to plan visits to museums and make best use of the resource once
there. This ended up with the snappy title of Using Museums as an
Educational Resource. It’s now in a second edition with
Routledge. The original publisher (Ashgate – since bought out by
Routledge) liked it so much they commissioned a second book. This was
written for museum education officers and was a handbook on how to
set up and run a museum education department and has the equally
snappy title of Museum Educator’s Handbook. This one is now
into a third edition and still selling. It’s not a big market, but
I’m proud of both.
Not wanting anything to
go to waste, I’m currently working on a book for writers on how to
get the best out of museums for writing research. I’ve also drafted
a much broader book on the craft of writing aimed at older teenagers
that I’ll get round to sorting out one of these days.
It must be the teacher
in me, but if I have an interest in something, I invariably write
about it to pass on what I have learned. So it was inevitable that my
interest in Druidry would lead me to write about that as well. I
co-wrote two books with a good friend of mine, Julie White. That was
a remarkable experience. I have never understood how anyone can
co-write fiction (although I am glad some can because the Strugatsky
brothers produced some of the finest science fiction ever) but
non-fiction seemed a perfect fit allowing books that covered a wider
range of knowledge and experience. I have also written on the subject
on my own and have plenty of research material piling up for future
books.
Although I had written
sustained pieces of fiction in the past, I’d only ever once reached
the kind of word counts needed for commercially viable fiction.
Publishers are wary of anything shorter than 70,000 words unless you
are well known. So, from that perspective, completing substantial
works of non-fiction meant I knew I could do it again.
However, I found that
the discipline of writing all that non-fiction had blunted my
creative edge. That’s where the Open University came to the rescue,
giving me the space in which to explore what I wanted to do with
fiction in small chunks with lots of guidance and critical input from
a lot of other wildly creative people. It didn’t take long. The
fiction had clearly been dammed up. It took one little crack and a
distinct absence of meddling Dutch boys poking their fingers where
they weren’t wanted.
Have you any
interest in writing in any other genres, e.g. Mainstream Lit or
"Tartan Noir"?
I write spy novels as
well. Some people find that odd, but all my characters live in
shadowy worlds on the borderlands and spy novels (as opposed to
shoot-em-up thrillers) have always seemed to me to be the essential
literature of the 20th and 21st century – Graham Greene, Len
Deighton, Anthony Price, Ted Allbeury, and John le Carré. What
attracts me is the fact that in the real world of intelligence you
often find ordinary people doing (mostly) ordinary things, yet their
work sits in the dark heart of contemporary politics. It is a
wonderful place in which to examine questions of morality and
survival in a world where the work and the people are deemed both
essential and pariahs at the same time.
Do you have a fairly
strict routine as a writer? How do you go about composing your prose
on a day to day basis? What keeps the words flowing? How many words
do you aim to write in a day?
I try to have a
routine, but life… well, we all have that. I much prefer to write
when everyone else is asleep. It’s not just the actual fact that
I’m less likely to be interrupted, but also the psychological
factors – I find it much easier to focus when the world is dark and
I’m in a small bubble of light with music in my ears. Sensory
deprivation makes my internal world easier to access.
Writing (in common with
other creative endeavours) involves studying the world until one
finds the ways to access the many realities beyond the mirrored
surface of everyday life. Having found doors, we are compelled to
step through, explore, and bring back reports of the people, places,
and events we have encountered. It is a complex and magical
endeavour, the hardest part of which is the last. Breaking through
into other worlds and exploring is quite common. We all daydream. So
is returning, although some never do. Creating a report takes not
only an understanding of what you have experienced, but also the
ability to communicate that to anyone willing to engage with what you
create.
The first draft of a
work is something I try to write as quickly as possible. I plan
everything. It saves work later. My plans are never rigid, but I need
to know where each chapter or section is going and how my characters
are meant to respond. Sometimes the characters and events surprise
me, but for the most part I like to have overall control.
It’s a bit like
planning a road trip. As an example, I might want to go from home to
Brighton, visiting Carlisle, York, Clun, Stroud, and Upper Dicker on
the way. What happens between those specific destinations depends on
many other factors. This allows me to know where the story is going
without having too tight control before you start. Things that are
plotted too tightly aren’t much fun to write as you’ve already
made the whole journey before you begin.
With an outline in
front of me, I can then pound out a rough draft (aiming, usually for
three thousand words a day – a full-length novel in a month). Even
though the rough draft is going to be rough, speed is important. It
stops me getting bored with the story, it ensures I complete the
project, and it gives coherence to the story because within that time
frame you can hold all the details in your head. This is, of course,
an ideal. Some books have taken a lot longer, but this is the method
I tend to use these days.
The craft aspects, all
the editing which takes much longer than compiling the first draft,
is much more easily accomplished in silence. Me, a typescript, red
pen, notepad, thesaurus and dictionary. I love this bit just as much
as pounding out that first draft. This is where you take the rough
lump you’ve hacked out of the mines of your imagination and start
refining its shape. And this is another reason I like to get the
first draft down as quickly as possible. It means I have the whole
book in front of me to reference when I’m editing. If you try to
polish as you go, it can be a lot wasted work. You can write and
polish a perfect first chapter only to find that half way through
chapter three you need to go back and rewrite part of chapter one
because you have had an idea about a character than enriches the
story.
For me, the first edit
is reading the rough draft and making notes about all this sort of
thing, thinking about where things should be introduced, how
characters should develop, sorting out plot holes, and so on.
As for what keeps this
all going… I don’t know. I have never been stuck for ideas. I
have more than I’ll ever be able to use in my lifetime. There are
days when the brain cannot handle the current project. I used to fret
about these, which simply made the situation worse. Nowadays I have
come to accept that there are days where your daily diet of mint-choc
ice-cream gets a bit much and you need a day or two of baked
potatoes. So I switch projects and work on something else, tidy my
desk, or tackle one of the many manual jobs on my list (the bathroom
needs decorating, for example). Long before one of those is complete
I’m itching to get back to the computer.
Here at AvantKinema
we are very much interested in the zero-budget, DIY, self-publishing
ethos of the post-punk years: fanzines, home recording, indie labels
run out of bedrooms and the cartel of micro-distributors working
collectively to further the cause for everyone involved. Have you
self published any of your work, or used print-on-demand to help get
your work out there? What was your experience of this? Would you
recommend this as a possible route for writers to take?
I have done this.
Indeed, I run two small imprints (Grey House in the Woods and Monkey
Business). My published work is still a mix of traditional and
self-published, with some of it crossing over (Jeniche began life as
a self-published project and was taken up by HarperVoyager by way of
Roundfire). I have also produced e-books and use print-on-demand.
It was a lot to learn.
When I first self-published you had to send stuff to a printing firm
and to make the unit costs worthwhile, you had to have 500 or more
copies printed. It’s a huge investment in something that may never
sell. Print-on-demand means that each book printed is a bit more
expensive, but you don’t have hundreds of copies piled up in boxes
stressing you out each time you look behind the sofa.
Nowadays the process is
so simple it takes a matter of days to get your finalised piece of
work ready for electronic and paper press. And it is relatively
cheap. Even if you avoid using Amazon as your e-publisher, costs are
minimal. To set up a book for paper printing is about £70 if you do
all the work yourself.
The real problems faced
by any do-it-yourselfer are two-fold. The first is ensuring you put
out a professional product. It doesn’t matter if it is mainstream
or so far off the wall it’s in the next street, it has to be
finished to a professional standard. Now that is not always easy to
judge. It’s your work, after all. Bound to be a masterpiece. So it
helps, in the case of writers, to have beta readers – people you
trust to give you an objective assessment of the work as a whole and
(if you are extremely lucky) who will point out typos and other
errors. I have a couple of friends like this and I do the same for
them. It is why arts community is so important. And the presentation
has to be spot on as well. A properly designed cover with attractive
artwork, well set out text, and all the other things you expect of a
book.
The second problem is
selling your work. I work with a distributor in the UK (which is as
far as my p-books reach) who, for an extra small percentage, does a
lot of marketing. The books I print are never going to reach the best
seller list, but they do sell steadily and have long since paid for
themselves.
Most self-published
books that reach large audiences do so by accident or because the
authors have risked a small fortune on advertising (or who have
parents prepared to do that for them). Publishing is a risky
business, as is writing and any other creative endeavour.
There is, of course, a
lot more to it. ISBNs, getting copies to copyright libraries, paying
authors their royalties, and so on. But I have learned a lot about
writing by being involved in the other side of the business. And if I
could crack the magic that is marketing…
By contrast, what
has your experience been like with regards mainstream publishing? How
did you find your way to your agent and to HarperVoyager? What
difference have these made to your life? Do you still intend to
self-publish any works which are not quite suitable for HV? Is this
something they are happy for you to do?
Mainstream fiction publishing came as a bit of a shock. HarperVoyager had an open submissions period some years ago (when you could submit without having to have an agent) and I sent in the second Jeniche book and promptly forgot all about it. About eighteen months later I received an email asking me to phone the editor at HV. I thought it was a joke. Turned out it wasn’t. Mayhem ensued for a couple of weeks. At the end of that I had a literary agent (the wonderful Leslie Gardner) and a three book contract.
Landing a contract with a big publisher doesn’t guarantee success, of course. The Jeniche books have not sold well enough for Harper to want to buy the rest of the series. Where we go from here is yet to be decided, but my agent and I will continue to plug the first series in concert with Harper whilst looking for a home for the second series.
On the plus side, I got some fabulous covers and editors who understood the genre and read the works with an almost frightening attention to detail. Also, I get to put ‘published by HarperVoyager’ on my CV, which is no mean feat.
What will you be
working on over the next year?
There is a long list of
work to be done. The second Charlie novel needs its first draft
completed. Then I have two more Jeniche novels to be drafted, and
another to be properly plotted. That will round off the Jeniche
series. I’ll take a break then and draft up my book for writers on
how to use museums as a research resource. There will doubtless be
Charlie short stories. And I may have to drop everything if my agent
sells any of my other work. And there are other projects that will go
forward to the next stage of development (a grimepunk,
time-travelling mystery that also manages to mash up Wells and
Dickens; the outlining of a nine/ten book epic space fantasy that
charts the two thousand year history of two galactic empires that
rise, clash, and diminish; and there are the usual glimmerings of
other ideas that may, or may not develop further).
It looks ambitious, but
I lost a lot of time this year to ill health and other intrusions
from the outside world so I want to catch up a bit.
Thank you, Graeme.
