Omens

'... in Italy ominous prodigies had once again been widely witnessed; at Veii showers of stones were reported; at Menturnae the temple of Jupiter had been struck by lightning; and at Capua a wolf had stolen into the city and savaged one of the sentries. Most dramatically, at Frusino a hermaphrodite child was born the same size as a four-year-old. Diviners summoned from Etruria announced that the monstrous infant should be banished from Roman territory without any contact with the earth. After being placed in a box, therefore, the unfortunate child was taken out to sea and thrown overboard. The priests of Rome also decreed that three bands of nine virgins should process through the city chanting a hymn written for the occasion by the Tarentine poet ...'

Mountain Bears

Interlude II: Mountain Bears, A Sample Chapter from The White Owl

V

Mountain Bears

Where we live there are mountains. Not far from where people drive and sit in their houses eating dinner. In those same mountains are bears. They don’t come down very often. When they do they are sickly or old, or just confused. They make messes, they eat dogs, sometimes they are shot or poisoned.

There is a boy on our street who is very afraid of bears. We tell him a bear has come down from its mountain and he cries and won’t come out. We tell him it’s not a bear like that, and that we didn’t really see it anyway.

One day the boy goes to the end of the street where the back yard of a house they tore down five years ago when the boy wasn’t even a boy but some other thing - a thing that crawls and pees on itself and can’t play any games - has become a jungle.

A small one, full of trees and sometimes, we tell him, bears which have come down from the mountains. He doesn’t like it when we tell him this, even though he has learned not to be afraid. Learned that we are not always entirely truthful about these rumours.

But he’s a fat boy, perhaps because he is afraid of bears and does not join us on those walks and hikes between the town and the forest which covers up the base of the mountains like two green hands. We have baked him a pie. It’s not very good, but he eats it anyway because it is very sweet.

We don’t join him. It is too sweet for us and not very big, we explain. And there is poison in it. Not that we say anything about the poison because we’re too excited about the tracks we’ve found, about the strange markings and the ursine scent we think we’ve noticed hanging thick and heavy.

Someone’s dog is missing, but likely it ran away or was run over by a truck. We mention all this, only after he’s had the pie and is feeling sleepy and his stomach isn’t so good - but he’s sleepy most of all, and just a little bit afraid now.

You can smell it, like a memory of those piss-stained days when he wasn’t a boy but a thing that couldn’t play. We take him to the place where we saw the bits of fur and a half-chewed collar. He doesn’t want to go, but we show him.

He cries and now he has peed down his leg like a dog. We laugh though we’re sad because he knows there isn’t any bear. Just this hole in the foundations full of broken bottles and trash and used tires. But he falls down a few times, and cuts his face so we run away.

Later that night we hear the boy’s mother calling. The boy hasn’t returned for his dinner. Have we seen him? No. There’s an old man with a red pebbly nose like a strawberry that’s gone rotten and a baseball cap with a grizzly on it, putting up LOST DOG flyers.

We explain, carefully, having cleaned up all evidence of our baking, and hidden the bottles of poison where the homeless teenagers sleep in the bushes, that we haven’t.

The next week there is a story in the local paper about how a bear came down from the mountains and ate a boy. This is sad but we live near the mountains, and sometimes, bears come down and eat boys.

We could move away but then we’d miss the mountains.

The Signal

An Interlude: The Signal - A Short Story

With thanks to Berit Ellingsen for the idea.

The Signal.

The shape wanders through the night, one spectral hand held high, searching for the signal. Moans rise from the alleyway below where other ghosts have congregated. Pleas for an RT or a final like whisper forth from throats that haven't the cartilage to form words.

As Stephen lies in bed, he can hear them pacing the landing, going up and down the hallway, bony digits clicking, clicking, endlessly through the night. They've lost the signal, the one they think will lead them back to life.

But it's gone and so are they. Only static and the long grass and poplar trees which buzz with hidden insectile life.

He rolls over and tries to ignore their airy cries. It's only an afterimage, Yvonne says. A magnetized echo. Like the shadows they left behind on the walls when they blew up Hiroshima.

Only our shadows, Stephen always says, are mobile ones. They make noises, they move things.

Doesn't matter, is her reply. Like everything else, they're just fading. Another season, I bet you, and they'll be gone. Rust and ruin, like all the rest. Soon we won't even notice them.

I'm not so sure. There are so many. So many still searching for the signal.

Shush, little one. Be quiet and rest. We've got to keep moving now that the well is gone off. We'll pack the vans in the morning. There's not enough fodder around here to keep the horses alive through winter anyhow.

I know, I just wish someone could tell them - could turn them off. Especially at night, Stephen says trying hard not to look.

They will, dove, she says, softer now. Over time they'll ...fade out. It's just that their implants were self-sustaining. It takes a long time for that to wind down. They've a lot of half-lives still to go through, poor things. I bet they didn't guess they'd spend their lives in the loop and still be just as disconnected at the end.

Stephen doesn't say anything more. In the closet there is a luminescent presence hunched over a broken desk, eyes that are just deeper pits locked on something that isn't there. Not for them, or anyone else. A paw moves rapidly back and forth, leaving tiny trails of light that cling to the rotten wood as if they were insects.

I just wish they'd rest sometimes, at night. His voice has grown heavy with sleep despite his claim to never close his eyes when they're around.

Poor dove, I know. But they didn't rest much then, why should they now?

Closing his eyes Stephen thinks for a moment that he can hear a humming coming from the closet, from the street below, from the dead wires on which only crows and starlings move back and forth anymore. But that's just a phantom, his imagination he knows.

Because there's a part of him, of all of us Yvonne has told him, that keeps searching for the signal even if we've never known it before. In time that too will fade, she says, and leave the world quiet once more.

Just the insects you and me, little dove, and the starlings and the crows.

The Rainy Season

In the trickle whole and immaculate is the flood.

Woe To The Vanquished!

When the Romans extended their kingdom into Europe and later into the Levant and North Africa, they did not expand into a vacuum. In these areas existed complex, sophisticated societies with roads, trade, coinage, language, and cultures easily their match in terms of civilizing values - in truth, many exceeded the militaristic, patriarchal, plutocracy of Rome.

When the legions had finished their work nearly half a millennia later, filling coffers with Celtic riches, slaves and trade purloined from Punic cities, and the spoils of the ancient Near Eastern lands of the Levant, Persia and great Egypt - the Mediterranean world had been rendered into a Latin desert. Subservient to and dependent on Rome with its centralized industry and governance, culturally embedded in the victors' systematic re-writing of local and Roman history to reflect Rome's aggressive imperial triumph, it stood indeed transformed.

In admittedly oversimplified terms, it was the uprooting of a wide variety of native systems for the sake of a dominant monoculture. So long as the efficient distribution network of the empire could be maintained, the desolation made by Rome could be kept fertile. But this was in many ways an artificial and alien system compared to the more indigenous ones which it had replaced. Once this collapsed, shaken to its base and forced to retract by the influx of Germanic warriors crossing over into the empire in the West, and the Arab explosion in the East, those formerly independent regions were left in perilous condition.

And it was not the gradual return of Romanesque civilization after the dark period of early medievalism and late antiquity, but the slow re-efflorecence of native, localized cultures who had long been suppressed, which saw the transformation of these lands from a wilderness into pockets of production again. Of course, by now, the greatest damage was irreversible: the wholesale destruction of narrative by Roman and even earlier, Greek writers. So while the descendants of the Caesars would no longer be the rulers of these lands, the ideological stamp of Rome would be harder to shake.

Any progress, any organizing tendency would henceforth be seen as a return to Roman values, despite or even in the face of, evidence that local tribes and local customs were in truth in ascendence. These would be endlessly reinterpreted through the greatest lasting victory of Rome: that civilization itself in the West and along its margins, was Roman.

So we reach a point today where the rise and fall of modern "empires" must be couched in terms of their relationship with and emulation of Rome and its enemies. And despite the clearer picture which has emerged of a historical European and Mediterranean world that was far more complex, vibrant, and indeed often more civilized by the standards we hold now, before the hegemony of Rome.

But if that is the lasting victory of the Romans, it is made no less glorious by its entirely fictional nature. We see the same trend with its self-proclaimed successors. And live in a present where the most powerful legacy of the imperial age of the modern West now that its commercial, political and military influence is in decline, is its continued domination of global narrative. A narrative in which human rights, progress, enlightenment, freedom, and indeed, civilization itself, is seen through a Western framing.

Like the Romans, the West has perhaps lost the battle of empires, but won the more important struggle of narrative. Only time will show if it is capable of matching its glorious predecessor. Africa and Asia struggle even now to position their current successes within a framework of both their deep history and their more immediate past as dictated by the West. They wisely seek to reassert their independence and restore their fuller histories in the bargain.

Will the future look back to localized resurgence as a return to "Western values" or title as Westernization what has been throughout the 19th and 20th centuries a far more vibrant and global synthesis of traditions and cultures? It may be hoped that others will be more perceptive, and learn from the victory of the Romans and the collective failure of Europe and its Mediterranean littoral. For if the history of the Roman Empire is to be a guidepost, the answer will be an affirmative, at least for those of us still living the shadows of Rome.

We Winter In Darkness

Our lives are brief affairs. 

We winter in darkness. 

And see no light until spring: 

the cruelest of seasons

Excepting summer's apogee 

which is the universal herald 

of famine, pestilence, and war. 

Autumn comes and is gone 

before we have banked our fires. 

Then winter returns, and we 

are plunged into darkness 

and dying once more.

As much strangers to mildness, 

as the depths of the sea 

are to the light of the sun.

Omphalos

It is not the heart of the City which mattered, nor its brain from which commands radiated outwards, streaking along the paved roadways and brushing by broken marble colonnades - but its navel, the Omphalos, the Umbilicus Urbis, which was the same as the universe’s in miniature, or so the priests claimed, the axis mundi and seat of all its wisdom and from which the voices of the City’s many oracles descended, replete with terror, promise, and cryptic declarations.

Castaway!

There is a lot going on below the water line.  Damp seeps in, and the Invisible City absorbs it all.

I'll however be gone for a while.  Not that you'll miss the regular posts and cozy fireside chats we've all had. First off to Crete, for sun and ruins.  Then farther still to a small island off the southern coast lying like an earthen shipwreck in the Libyan sea.

We'll be back.  Gods and ferries withstanding.

Invisible City

People keep asking me what the book is about.  Well, I say, "Gaslights and Late Antiquity, Euripides and Alien Rat-People."

Gods And Monsters

While viewed through the oculus, the god had been fearsome.  Terrifying.  A tall, titan like figure, embodying chaos and darkness, striding across the storm-warped plain.  Armoured in sheets of black metal inlaid with runes and patters of silver fire which crawled like fluorescent sea-larva.  A sword or an monstrous axe, it was uncertain which of the two it might be, as not all details were made clearer by the mechanism, was strapped to its heaving back - not that it seemed to have much need of its doomsday weapon.  Eldritch fire dripped from its white hands, and bolts of violet lighting forked across the battlefield from the glowing pits of its eyes, immolating its massed foes and scattering the opposing ranks of sorcerers, witch-doctors, and armoured eight-legged, four-armed centaurs which sported their own diminutive magical riders on their backs.

Laughing as it tore out the spine of a centaur, its white-skin crinkling around its sensual lips and its black hair lifted in the field of its own thaumaturgical energies, the terminuses of its tresses braided with miniature silver skulls and swirling in the air like the heads of snakes.  It crushed a female wizard under one iron heel, her brains jetting out of the shattered orbits of her eyes as her head deformed.  Yellow sun-dogs woven from ancient spells acquired at dear price to the souls of the casters, swarmed, coal-red eyes burning above their narrow muzzles as they washed impotently around the giant’s shins, blue-flamed teeth sparking from its armour.  The god drew in its breath, sucked up the sorcerous apparitions like incense rich in human fat into its nostrils.  It spoke a Word: a chasm opened up as something obscene and maddeningly inhuman tore a rent in the clouds at its bequest, and drooped poisonous tendrils of mist and inchoate purple flashes onto the remaining forces who melted as if figures cast from wax in its elder embrace, first skin and then muscle, and then bursting internal organs, whilst the lungs of the victims and glowing nervous systems still perversely remained intact, and kept up their screaming.

“Now, I think, would be an opportune time to employ the lasso,” said Thylasses.  “While the god-head is distracted by its enjoyment of the spectacle.”

“Yes, magister,” replied the short brown khiropean, and flicked one of the many levers with its arm-wing.  There was relatively little noise, a slight click, and a muted humming from the ovoids, then all crowded forward to view the silver mirror of the oculus which had first gone matte and now cleared.

Appearing just over the god’s armoured right shoulder, a noose of pale gossamer light dropped around its neck, tightened, and then both god and lasso disappeared from view even as the titan’s fist closed around its insubstantial substance.  There had been no fear on the destroyer’s face, as it did so, only the flicker of minor irritation.

“Ready,” said Thylasses, “we should have it now in the containment zone.”

The others suddenly fearful, hung back, and only in fits and starts dared to approach the flat metal platform where the magister waited.  On its dull zinc surface, a strange being was crouched, the lasso still around its neck - hunchbacked, lank white hair falling in greasy clumps across its corpse white skin.  Thin as an malnourished child, or a convict diminished by years of slave labour in the gas mines, it quivered with confused rage.  Rags and flat pieces of bone were its only clothing, while a twisted stick, with a knapped flint point, banged against its pustulant shoulders.

Thylasses frowned.  The god leaped up, drool spiraling down from its slack bottom lip and with a groan sprang at the magister’s throat, a crudely shaped stone in its hand.

Before it could clear the platform, one of the guardians stepped forward and with a chop of the blade of its palm, brought the god crashing to its knees.  Picking up the fallen stone, he bashed the god’s head in with the rock.

It whimpered once, and then rolled onto its pale belly and expired, eyes that once feasted on the suffering of millions and to the lamentation of worlds, clouding over.  Its last laboured breath forever stilled, they looked up at the finder’s own with the luster of clay marbles.

“Tartarus take it,” said Sevius, “so that’s a god, is it?”

“Pitiful, really,” replied the magister, “but I thought you should see it, all the same.  In its own realm it is a monster, a devourer of universes but here, in the ruling reality of the City - we have revealed it for what it is.  A beast, barely sentient, the product of infantile desires admixed and bloated by the worship of feeble imaginations.”

“Not very pretty,” said the finder and stepped back away from the dead god.  A pair of servants dragged it by its heels from the platform and the magister and his winged assistant turned their attentions to the larger of the black ovoids, which had misted over with ice.

“No,” said the magister, watching the khiropean chip away at the hoarfrost, “they never are.”

* * * *

- Excerpt from Book IV, Hidden Universe

The Triumph of Myth

What of the content of the tragedies? Perhaps the most significant fact is that the subjects are almost always mythological. The only surviving exception is Aeschylus' Persians, though we know of a few others in the early period. The Persians commemorates the victory of the Greeks in the recent war against Xerxes, king of Persia, and in particular the battles of Salamis, which had taken place only eight years earlier. But this exception in a way proves the rule, for the play is not set in Greece, but at the Persian court, presenting the subject from the Persian viewpoint.  Nor is it mere jingoism: the themes is almost mythologized, raised to a grander and more heroic plane. No individual Greek is named or singled out for praise: the emphasis falls rather on the arrogant folly of a deluded king, who has led his people to defeat. There is, as always in tragedy, a supernatural element: the ghost of Xerxes' father, summoned back to earth, pronounces stern judgement on his son's rash ambition. In the rest of the tragic corpus, the dramatists use myth to distance their stories in time, and so give them universality*. Instead of setting their actors the task of impersonating living generals or politicians confronting contemporary crises, the tragedians, like Homer, show us men and women who are remote from us in their circumstances, yet vividly like us and real in their hopes, fears, and desires.

Secondly, Greek Tragedy is civic in emphasis: its plots, that is, deal with kings and rulers, disputes and dilemmas which have vital implications for the state as a whole.  If Oedipus cannot find the murderer of Laius, the plague which is already devastating Thebes will destroy it. If Odysseus and Neoptolemus cannot recover Philoctetes and his bow, Troy will not fall. Consequently tragedy normally deals with men and women of high status - monarchs and royal families, tyrants and mighty heroes. Characters of lower rank generally have smaller parts. As we shall se, however, this is one area in which Euripides showed himself an innovator: 'I made tragedy more democratic,' he is made to say in the satirical treatment of tragedy in Aristophanes' Frogs, produced after his death.

Thirdly, complementing and often conflicting with the political dimension, the family is regularly the focus for tragic action. Part of the lasting power of Greek drama lies in the vividness with which it  presents extreme love and (still more) intense hatred within the family: matricide, parricide, fratricide, adultery and jealousy, even incest and other forbidden passions. Duty to family and duty to the state may come into conflict: can Agamemnon bring himself to abandon the expedition against Troy, or must he take the terrible decision to sacrifice his daughter for a fair wind? Loyalty to kin is central to Antigone; conflicting obligations to different members of the family create many of the dilemmas in the Oresteia. The list could easily be extended. 

- Richard Rutherford, Introduction to Euripides, The Bacchae And Other Plays 

*emphasis mine.

The Power of Utopias/The Power of Fantasies

The power of books has diminished. Once, they could move the world, but I think now an author is doing well if she or he moves a few copies – and manages to penetrate the fug of modern life in their readers’ minds at the same time.

To tell a good story, to entertain is all very worthy but good books should always do more. They don’t need to preach, but they should engage with greater principles, or at the very least, continue a dialogue that stretches back to (and in the case of fantasy I’d argue, even before) the written word.

Myth, dream, hopes, fears, the irrational, and the fantastical can all be powerful tools in the hands of a skilled writer. From the Greek dramatists to the likes of Borges and Calvino, the inventive retelling of our story, the human one, is important. What we tell each other even if outwardly just to entertain, tells us in turn much about who we are, who we’ve been, and where we are going. SF doesn’t have a monopoly on the future, just as literary fiction doesn’t hold the rights to telling meaningful stories about the past/present. Good fantasy can blend in elements of all three.

It can also allow us to play, without the restraints of a rational, understood world limiting those horizons. Play in writing as in life, is important, both as a liberator and a goad to inspire creativity. When well used, it can free us from the self-applied shackles that day to day routines can often forge. Set alongside humour, it can be not just a tool to elevate a story, but a balm for the weary mind.

All worthwhile things in my opinion. This is not to say that novels can’t still be important. And there's a fair point raised regarding their potential impact when you consider works of non-fiction.

But compare our present age to those antiquated years when few people had any books in their possession, or when a book could break entirely new religious/cultural/philosophical ground, and was often couched as fiction rather than a strict work of didaction for this very reason. I think the age of this sort of impact has passed, or at least diminished, the novel’s previous role in this regard co-opted by other more immediate forms of media. Or perhaps it is simply harder to see, against the huge background of chatter created by an increasingly literate society.

This is not a bad thing, just a change. The novel survives, even if its role is harder now to pinpoint.

E.

Heroic Journeys

Nothing happens while you live. The settings changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked onto days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless, monotonous addition. Now and then you do a partial sum: you say: I’ve been traveling for three years, I’ve been at Bouville for three years. There isn’t any end either: you never leave a woman, a friend, a town in one go. . . . That’s living. But  when you tell about life; everything changes; only it’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be such things as true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way. You appear to begin at the beginning: “It was a fine autumn evening in 1922. I was a solicitor’s clerk at Maromme”. And in fact you have begun at the end. It is there, invisible and present, and it is the end that gives to words the pomp and value of a beginning. “I was out walking. I had left the village without noticing, I was thinking about money troubles.” This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the fellow was absorbed, morose, miles away from an adventure, in exactly the sort of mood in which you let events go by without seeing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His morose mood, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions, and the story goes on in the reverse . . . And we have the impression that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the fellow was walking in a darkness devoid of portents, a night which offered him its monotonous riches pell-mell, and he had made no choice.

Enemies of Alien Mind

Hear us, you gods perfect in power;

Hear us, sovereign gods and goddesses,

Protectors of our country’s bulwarks:

Do not betray our city

Thus in the labour of battle

To enemies of alien mind

Seven Against the City

And cut its throat, and caught the blood in a black shield,

And dipped their fingers in bull’s gore, and swore an oath

In the dread name of Cruelty, of bloodthirsty Terror,

… to annihilate the city

***

 Of a cannibal Sphinx, pivoted ingeniously, 

And made to move.  And under her she carries a man

Pyramidal Equations And The Dreams of Cities

Civilization is a pyramid scheme.  The benefits of which may be said to be (and sometimes even are) universal, but most percolate to the top ensuring that civilizations uphold the investment and support of their elites.

There are others who have noted this tendency of civilization to be used as a means of subjugation.

I recommend reading Neil Faulkner's "The Decline & Fall of Roman Britain."  He states in the introduction:

"This book takes a different approach from man. It is an exercise in 'archaeology from below'. It sets out to analyse Roman Britain as a system of exploitation based on violence, in which the working majority was forced to contribute but did not benefit. It argues further that, because this majority was dispossessed of wealth and power, the weakening of the Empire under military pressure exposed the ruling class to revolt from below. As the cost of empire rose, civil society decayed, resistance to the impositions of the state escalated, and the military-bureaucratic infrastructure of the late antiquity collapsed. What followed - the subject of my new chapter 8 - was a period of relative freedom from the oppression of landlords, tax-collectors and soldiers for the mass of the population." - p. 15

While he may not go so far as to suggest that civilization itself is suspect, it is clear that Faulkner feels that it was used as a military strategy imposed in order to conquer a "wild" Britain, not a gift freely given by beneficent and naturally superior invaders.

And this is borne out I think by the Romans themselves, who were often very frank about their objectives and reasons for bringing the civilizing values of their culture to local elites and regions whom they wished to add to their empire.  Again from the same book, by way of Tacitus himself:

"Agricola [governor of Britain in 78-84] had to deal with men who, because they lived in the country and were culturally backward, were inveterate warmongers. He wanted to accustom them to peace and leisure by providing delightful distractions ... He gave personal encouragement and public assistance to the building of temples, piazzas and town-houses ... he gave the sons of aristocracy a liberal education ... they became eager to speak Latin effectively ... and the toga was everywhere to be seen ... And so they were gradually led into the demoralising vices of porticoes, baths and grand dinner parties.  The native Britons described these things as 'civilization', when in fact they were simply part of their enslavement." - p. 32 (emphasis mine)

I've always felt that the Romans knew very well that civilization was a system.  A pan Graeco-Roman system in which elites managed their wider populations and that the empire was a means of extending that system which operated internally, to those border areas and conquered territories.  And which for all the poets' and politicians' lauding of its civilizing virtues for their own sake - was first and foremost a means of forcibly governing an otherwise resistant native populace - both at home and abroad.  I think the writers of the period were very self-aware of this, and would not have found the two concepts self-contradictory.

Civilization is a tool, not necessarily a virtue, used as expertly as the sword or indeed, the plow to bring new resources and expanded peoples and territories into the economic control of the empire.  Not really all that different then from those empires of today who do much the same.

So it is that cities, especially capital ones of the type which engender empires, can become metropole sized corporations, extending their benefits and civilizing baths and porticos to a populace who are they themselves food for the rapacious needs of the walled organism - ever expanding, ever drawing in and extruding as debris and raw sewage, the bodies of those who are crushed beneath its inhuman needs. 

E.

Closer...

It's been quiet, eerily so perhaps, but all is going forward - just at a much slower pace than I would have liked.  Outside forces seem to be determined to intrude on my small, internal world, but no matter, the Invisible City absorbs them all and remains itself, inviolate and eternal.

Unchanging - if constant change itself is a sort of static state, indurate, and lasting.  I do wonder at what point editing becomes simply rewriting the entire book?

There has been a lot of chatter on the various blogs I frequent and on that most transient of mediums, Twitter, but I've not had the time to be pulled into commenting here (or there) on the topics of the moment.  Criticism, the future of publishing, ebooks, and more - but for now I must keep my eye on the smoky distant horizon.

It draws closer.  And is almost here.

E.

A Circle in the Sand

I'm still editing, pushing that wobbly rock up its sand-covered ramp.  Time blurs, the world shrinks to the single chapter in which I'm mired for days on end, and all things grind increasingly fine until the damn thing rolls back down the hill again flattening me on its way through.

And other than this, I'm just waiting.

But I can feel it approaching.  Something stirs and at least the neighbors have it much worse.  Old fire-bringer and his vultures, what a laugh.  And at least no one is dripping venom onto my flesh.

Now where was I?  Oh yes, back to my rock.

E.

Walking Clichés

Of late there has been discussion of tropes and clichés in fantasy.  They stand like sphinxes guarding the gates, eating the unwary.

Conversation on the topic can only lead to better writing.  It has caused me to think about their possible presence in my own novel as well.  I hope that to posses foreknowledge of the perishers, is to be sufficiently forewarned.

Clichés are not tropes.  Tropes and their execution however, can with time and mishandling, become clichés.  Clichés are never a welcome part of a good story; least of all those belonging to the fantasy genre.  To say otherwise I fear, is to misunderstand both.  

A good story can combine familiar, even mythic elements with more original fare.  A skillful writer will breathe life into the mix, leavening the comfortably familiar with the hopefully novel.  Otherwise, what you get is a flat, cliché laden confection that can only please the most undemanding of palates.

The bulk of commercial literature, in any genre, consists of this - true enough.  But what careful author or discerning reader could be fully satisfied, unless limited by their own meagre talents, with dwelling in such a literary ghetto?  One of the reasons why I think fantasy gets a bad reputation is that too many writers and readers aren't comfortable demanding more and breaking down the walls formed by low expectations.

Disliking clichés has nothing to do with hating fantasy.  Good fantasy, great fantasy, does not rely upon clichés more than any other genre of literature.  Clichés do occur in life, in dialogue, and likely enough in most authors' early drafts of their novels.  Clichés should serve as warning signs: alerting the writer to a turn on the tracks ahead that may dead-end the quality of the story being constructed.

I do not believe that clichés are ever valid story shortcuts.  By their very definition they are worn out ideas and expressions whose power has been leeched by overuse and overexposure.  If not used in a knowing, comedic way, few writers will be able to turn these base materials into gold - and even then, should be used most sparingly.

A cliché altered, a trope deconstructed, is no longer a cliché.  Or one being used as a knowing signifier to the reader saying "Ah-ha, you were expecting that - but we have given you this, instead" which is only meaningful and of value of course, if there is some meaning, some greater reason behind the reversal of expectations; a salient point to learn from the upending of the trope or the familiar scene rather than an empty flourish of craft.  Playing with clichés can be done, but it is not an unfair comparison to say it can resemble dancing above a pool filled with sharks.

That's a cliché, isn't it?  Circling fins and all.  But I'm not sure it adds anything to the sentence that I couldn't have done just as well by saying tread with care, watch your step, or is fraught with danger.  It's a playful flourish - at best.  Too many of these can weigh down a novel like rococo butter-frosting on a cake.

The element of play is present in most great novels, playing with words, playing with expectations, and playing with the vast repository of novels and stories which have gone before the one being created.  Most of the time, clichés are lead weights, false notes, missteps, and I would warn all but the most masterful of authors to treat them with the care that they require.

Else you risk a novel that is doomed to mediocrity before it is even finished - or worse still, an end product that's all frosting and no cake.

E.

Ch-ch-changes

Change is coming to Hidden Things.

The blog will soon be going dark in the way of excerpts, only to emerge more brightly lit on the other side.

I'm sending off packets for prospective agents *at this very moment* and partially as a result and partially because most of the excerpts have been rendered of interest only for archeological purposes by the long months of heavy re-writing and revising, I'll be removing access to the excerpts.

In their place a m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶t̶t̶y̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶e̶n̶t̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶r̶g̶e̶r̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶c̶e̶s̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶b̶o̶o̶k̶ bunch of images & quotes from much more famous writers will take over the space.  Fireside chats if you will, minus the fire.  Just as importantly, I'll be putting up the first s̶i̶x̶ seven chapters in PDF - complete and unabridged.  This will give a current snapshot of the book, allow for more intelligible viewing, and will be, I hope, ample compensation for the removal of the old outdated content.

Enjoy and best wishes,

E.

The Sleep of Reason

Revision on The Invisible City moves ahead goes on forever.  Hopefully I'll be seeking an agent in the next few weeks.

Enjoy,

E.

Who Will Find The Finders?

The City approaches.

The hill and its temple soon fell behind them, though for the rest of the first day whenever they might choose to rest in the lee of a blue shadow, they could see it shimmering in the far distance, until finally replaced by its mirage.  They passed over the dunes and followed the broken line of columns, worn capitals and fluted lengths blasted into smooth, truncated teeth.  They saw many sights, none of them worth noting.

Only the violent sunsets, aswirl with particulate-fed glass visions like windows cut in a cathedral of air, gave their days any hope or measure.  Little was said amongst them, even at night; their voices falling silent as they stared at the flames of the fire, faces set and blank of meaning as the stones whose path they traced.  Each lost, in a wilderness of their own.

They traveled for three days without anything much happening.  Then the sun rose one morning, white and hot, and there before them as if sprung overnight from the lifeless soil, loomed the wasteland gates leading into the City.

News arrives from distant places:  I'm now editing chapters to send off to agents.  I've still some remaining work to do on the final sections of the book, but after six months of hard graft - the Invisible City has appeared in its preliminary shape.  Work on the first draft nears completion.

How long it will take to edit and how many submissions sent in my quest to find the right agent, is anyone's guess.  In the meantime, I've got plenty to work on as the last of the book comes together.

Keep your eye on this space for future announcements.

Until then, enjoy,

E.

Superstructures in the Night

"A post! A post!" squealed the nearest of the cubs, nestling into the soft folds of Barnabaris' vast chest.  The old muta smiled slyly and shifted his pale bulk upon the warmth of the trash heap.  The wound in his hind limb pained him yet.  His tail twitched, coiled around another club's kicking foot, and was still.

"A post?" asked the ex-pathfinder, his yellow eyes dampered to dim sparks in the darkness.  Let them ask again.  The tunnel walls on either side sweated great pearlescent drops of moisture, though they lay above the flood.  He groaned in mock distress and closed his eyes further.  More squeals of excitement arose at this well understood ritual; the conurbation of tightly packed bodies squirmed and quivered all around the greater island-like bulk of the story teller like the movement of the waves.

"I might have a tale, yet to tell, I reckon," said Barnabaris.  His eyes slowly opened, swelling like pools of reflected light; forming bright caves above the long greying muzzle of his face.  "If you'll have another..."

***

The cubs clamour and their excitement echoes down the branching passages; some of the dark furred children are unable to contain their anxiety and blindly nipp at their mates, their patron, and even their own twining tails.  The lame once-pathfinder ignores their sharp teeth and waits for the seething mass to slowly quiet once again.  Their barks diminish.  His eyes swim open to their fullest aperture and he begins.

"Come closer my lovelies, and cuddle near, for up above your dreaming empty heads, the City is a shifting shoal, awash with new events and strange affairs borne on tides and turns of the current which never sleeps, no more than do the stones on which the City stands.  And down it seeps to refresh us all - oh, but my throat, my dearies, if only the mould and nitre did not dry it so -"

And thus the cycle gets underway and small thimble sized libations are brought tumbling forth from paw to paw from what secret hoards and purloined skins, none likely even themselves the bearers later can recall.  But the medicine does its customary work and the tale, the most important tale of all, their tale and that of the wonderous and frightening metropolis in whose lower lime scaled and sloshing chambers they make their home, grinds on.

***

And so does mine.

The Invisible City and its ensemble cast grow ever less occluded as the days go on.

I've now hammered down the final structure of the novel and its plot - and I'm about two thirds of the way through filling each of its seven parts with the stuffing that changes it from mere dramatic framework into a book.  Many cracks remain - but my trowel is a silver blur.

As I've noted, less and less updates will now appear until the final chapters are written, dusted, and sent off to the lucky agent.  But the beginning of the bit that comes just before the start of the end, and definitely isn't just the start of the middle, and is a long way from the mere beginning itself or even the middle of the first and second parts, is now in sight.

With luck and a lot of damn writing, this will mark the end of the summer and then September shall bring a change in direction, as well as in the weather.  A book, perhaps not in its final form, but a book no less for it, will have been born.

Best wishes and enjoy,

E.

Ten Weeks & the Best of Intentions

Confessions of a Writer:

It's been a fine (mostly) ten weeks of speculative sailing since I began this blind voyage into my first concerted effort at fiction writing. Having set out on a day dedicated to fools, have I completed my efforts any the wiser? I suppose I have. Certainly I have learned a great deal and my confidence in my writing has grown, though completion of the task at hand is another matter.

Ten weeks ago I set myself the challenge of conceptualizing, plotting, and writing an entire full length fantasy novel in a fit of madness rarely seen in our modern age - or at least the first draft thereof, in said period of time.  Afterwards, it was to be given a final week's polish - cue laughter, and tied up with virtual string. I had other works I'd been tinkering with for longer, but I needed something that would represent a fresh start, I felt. Did I do it? Do I have an entire, ground-breaking work of speculative fiction in my pocket to present to you? Were my mad plans brought to fruition?

No. Of course not. Not entirely, that is. Even the best built plans and ships often go astray, only needing some fool to open a faulty bag of wind and blow you off course, grounding your efforts on some alien shore where the ill-tempered monocular locals eat your crew for breakfast. We're not home yet, but what a trip it's been!

I had hoped to produce forty-nine chapters plus a prologue - having arrived at that figure no more scientifically than an answer received from an oracle or one of these. I have written the fifty odd chapters undertaken, and more, so in that sense the experiment has been a success.  I have also come up with a really good story.

If that was the end of our tale, then the chapters would be on their way right now to your nearest literary agent - but somewhere along the ten weeks something happened: the book got longer, stranger, and I'd like to think, considerably better for it.

New and supporting characters crawled in from the margins, demanding more time on the center stage and their share of the text - and then some, be added to the already complex plot. The districts of the Invisible City grew wider and wilder, no mean feat in a place that defies maps and puts the blade in the concept of traditional boundaries. The dangers and difficulties which the protagonists need face, rose up like a wall of water, towering above them and in whose currents deadly indistinct shapes circled.

In short, the book isn't done. I haven't arrived yet at the fabled shore, but I can see it now and am closing in, passing through the shallows. Another month, perhaps two, and all should be well and the first draft lie sparkling in the sun, rich and strange, just beneath the receding waters. It's hard work steering a course between Scylla and Charybdis, and no doubt some of the book will be duly sacrificed to lighten the load.

Nothing for the agent though, not today. Not tomorrow, but soon. The Clos des Goisses '96 will go back under the bed and I'll be continuing to turn all my efforts to this increasingly epic work in progress. Between now and then, when that glad day should fall in the waning weeks of summer, I doubt very much that I'll be posting anything noteworthy in the way of updates to this page. I need all my concentration and both eyes, firmly fixed on that ghost-haunted horizon.

Enjoy,

E.

Bad Things to Worse

I have been busy working on chapters 16 and 17.  There has been discussion on a few sites about what happens unseen to the text of a book as it goes through the many re-writes and necessary edits that publishing generally demands.

Enjoy,

E.

Lucky Number Thirteen

Despite the lure of the sun and the airplane-free, ash flecked skies, work on Invisible City continues at a furious pace. Thirteen chapters now have passed under the many bridges and life is getting interesting both for the finder Sevius and his adopted sister, Alyia.

The metropolis is transfixed by the nightly spectacle of the festival of Veostalia/Uropolis while the days have been plagued with odd outbreaks of violence and simmering unrest across the great ruined quarters of the Invisible City.

As our intrepid finder emerges from the belly of the earth mother and three dark figures appear unbidden at the feast in the hall of the caravaners, the next chapters await.

I'm having a grand time as well living in interesting times, watching the story change and shift from its abstract conception into something that at times possess all but a will of its own.

Now, back to the chapters.

E.

There Is A City

There exists, or so it is whispered in hushed voices by the wise in those places of the world were great secrets are known, an Invisible City.  It is the centre and the beating heart of a vast unknowable empire.  Four diverse quarters span this uncertain terrain; alien zones pushing outwards in each cardinal direction.  Together they form a shifting endless sphere of city, each with their own ruling species, and not all of them human.  On the land, under the earth, beneath the waves, and high above the broken spires, each zone a part of this most secret of metropolises.  The great quarters of the city sprawl further fragmented into a mosaic pieced together from a thousand strange districts and unnumbered lesser wards.  Communes which like their denizens, can not all be sure of lying beneath the same sun and moon as their brethren.  Amid the ruins of long forgotten shrines and ancient boulevards, its citizen walk in circles, hands set perpetually upon each other’s shoulders, blindly seeking the way; each one following the next but none knowing where they go.  It is a city whose greatest walls are built not out of stones but of secrets.  Nameless and overlooked, it hides itself from the finding.  It is a city which has had so many names over the long march of eons that now in the present thin age of our day it has none.  There are of course those who argue that such a city belongs to no more than the annals of myth; a story told by passing fire-licked travelers to hold back the darkness and bifurcate the night.  To those who think such a capital a physical impossibility, these tales are not worth the re-telling save to be presented as evidence of the easy credulity and simplistic superstitions of those whose current state has not moved far apace from the primitive.  They are, of course, wrong and on all counts.  For the city exists, sat behind its occluded walls like a transparent spider hidden in the silken funnel of its web; a principality not of the lands on which it touches, but a wedge, an opening, a void of an un-place which hangs cradled like a crack in the walls of the world.

Welcome then traveler, welcome to the Invisible City.

E.

Separate And Unequal

So I've taken the (bold, the foolish, the unadvisable) the maddening step of introducing multiple points of view to the novel. Let me rephrase that. I have taken the step of introducing a few chapters which follow more closely the actions of a handful of other characters important to the story.

Now in and of itself, this is old rope in my chosen trade. Large multi-book epics like those which are to comprise the Secret Quarto series are full of digressive bolt holes, swarms of characters, and the frequent switching between the main (or even minor) protagonists, sometimes chapter by chapter.

However, the book Invisible City follows a central path which revolves around a single character. He is not alone, but he is the flame to which most of the others are drawn.

For a while I wondered if I should simply keep the narrative anchored to his solitary viewpoint, as after all, the story unfolds mostly (or entirely) in traditional third person narrative. There are ample opportunities to give a bit of the light over to those others who crowd the scenery without bestowing on them more.

But I'm finding that it's not enough. Other voices and other stories are demanding to be heard. Reports from places just a little to the left or right of the centre, seem to clamour for their fair share of my words. Of course, to a degree I must deny them this or risk plunging into a morass of stories and characters from which the central tale might never emerge (George R. R. Martin might be able to pull it off, but for my first book I'd like to stay paddling in a smaller pond).

If they are to have a separate voice in the narrative, it will be one that is unequal. I simply have too much to do and say with the main character of the tale to leave him absent from the stage for long. Whether he shall turn out to be the hero of his own story, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, my pages must show.

I am left feeling a bit like a ship's captain on the night of a planned mutiny. I can see it coming. I'm uncertain if I'll survive it intact or even be able to influence the course it takes; but it is too late to stop it entirely with liberal rations of rum and the lash.

Perhaps I'll just tie myself to the wheel and see where the current takes us.

E.

Prologues & Preludes

Work on Invisible City is progressing nicely at a glacial pace. I feel as if I'm getting a real sense of the place. Something so important to me, as otherwise, it's hard to feel the imaginary spaces my characters need navigate, and not just the physical ones but the hum and vibe and smells of a living place that only exists in my feverish imagination. Alongside them, the characters are drawing into clear focus as well.

One thing I'm struggling with, or perhaps a better description would be "considering," is whether or not I want a prelude or prologue in the work. I chose both. The nice thing with this, is that for now I can leave it hanging and always come back to one if I desire, further down the line.

Why bother? Many writers and critics are dismissive of prologues, but personally I enjoy them. And like maps (this is going to be another interesting knot to work out -how to map an invisible city whose very streets, houses, and districts frequently go wandering) they seem an important nod to the holy conventions of my chosen genre.  The solution, no maps.

Anyway, I like them because you can throw in something light and interesting, like a starter or even an amuse-bouche, with characters and outcomes only distantly related to the main thrust of the story, before moving on to the weightier courses.

We'll see. For now, I'm moving on, full steam into the next chapters.

E.

Welcome to Hidden Things

Welcome to The Invisible City, citizen.

It's official: Book One of the four books I have planned to form the core of the Hidden Universe series, is in production. The project started on 1 April, a fools journey I know, but who but fools dare to try in the face of today's publishing industry.

As if that was not enough, I've decided to make thing more interesting: I'm outlining the entire book, from start to finish, in just 10 weeks. My goal is to produce around 5 chapters a week with a final count of about 50, resulting in a book of 480-600 untold pages, give or take a bit more or a bit less.

After that, I'll package it up with my already written cover letter and off it will go to the list of agents that I'm trying to seduce with the smell of its freshly inked pages. I'll spend more time editing and rewriting than all the time spent writing it to begin with.  And that's just a start, it seems.

I think it can be done, and more importantly, be done well. If nothing else, it will be exciting to see how things develop working to such a tight schedule.

I am now part way through chapter 5, with 97 pages under my belt. I've spent some time as well choosing my epigraph, plotting out the major events of book one, creating most of my major (and a few minor) characters, locations, world building, races, magic, technology and figuring out the various threads from other existing works that I want very much to weave into my own special creation.

The book holds quite a very few classic fantasy tropes, but I'd like to think it is a recipe leavened by liberal amounts of the weird, wonderful, strange, and down-right noir-ish, and that I've done them better than most.

Well, that's it for now. Keep your eye on this space for regular updates, though most of my limited time as a full time carer for two under fives has got to go into stealing those scant few hours each day to actually do the writing bit which I'll admit, is hard graff if you can get it.

I'm now on Twitter as well all the time, so some of my updates will likely find their way there as well.

I hope you enjoy the ride odyssey, and as they say, buy the book.

Best wishes,

E.

The Shape of Things to Come

The Invisible City has shimmered into view. Enjoy it traveler. I've put up this blog to keep a watch on my newest creation, and what will be hopefully, my debut novel in the realm of fantasy fiction.

I hope you'll enjoy watching it go from a misty conception to a full-fledged creation. There are bound to be bumps and various cliffhangers along the way.

Watch this space for regular (but not too frequent, seeing as most of my time right now is to be tied up in my tight writing schedule of 10-12 weeks to kick things into motion) updates on how the project is progressing.

Thank you for stopping by,

E.