Sometimes, stuff won’t leave you alone. Concepts and images and characters and interactions bubble away in the back of your head, like a cauldron gently steaming with ideas.
You keep notebooks, or file cards, or Pinterest pages, or a fuckton of snippets on your phone, weaving them together in odd moments to see where they go, what they make when they join at their edges. And, sooner or later, you may even end up with a thing that you never actually intended to write.
With that in mind, let me take you back in time.
In 2016, I finished Children of Artifice, a queer science fantasy that remains one of the best (so I reckon, anyway) and most deeply personal things I’ve ever written. A year later, after going all round the big/traditional UK publishing houses*, it didn’t manage to land itself a deal (the irony being that, these days, it would fit the market perfectly), and I just crashed and burned.
This stuff happens, of course it does, and you have to learn to cope with it, but I’d spent the intervening year struggling to write the sequel and not getting it right, and when the first one wound up back on my desk, I just gave up. I had no clue what to do with myself.
So, that summer, I started something new.
I took that bubbling cauldron and began a passion project, something that had no expectations, no deadlines and no intended market. Something for myself, to get my confidence back. I wrote the first four chapters in a straight-through blaze of glory, and then there was Mercy, and Sister Augusta, and lo, I was back in the deadline zone.
But, the passion project kept going. It wouldn’t leave me be. Odd moments of time between contracts, or when I was away from work (a lot of it was written over lockdown), or when Isaac was out on manoeuvres with family. And slowly, slowly, its story took shape. As the narrative wound onwards, the world grew and its characters came to life. For a long time, I never really expected to finish it, and sometimes it became almost hypnotic in cadence, because I would pick it up after four or five or six months, and have to go right back to the beginning, yet again, to remember what was going on.
But (and slightly to my own surprise), it’s done. Seven years, and it’s done.
All of those early snippets and images (some of them incredibly powerful) are now a book. It’s just undergoing the final rounds of edits (which have been shelved again, because deadlines) and it still remains just a passion project, not something I can try and sell.
It’s called Lugan Vision Quest, and it takes us back to the world of the ECKO books, a thousand years (returns) after the close of Endgame. Seen through Lugan’s eyes, old and wise and wily (though he still says ‘fuck’ a lot), it’s a different take on the same Ikegai concept, on the portal fantasy that I’ve loved my whole life.
Titan Books have given it their blessing (no copyright or licensing issues), its cover art is complete (and beautiful, and I’ll share it very soon) and I’ll talk more about exploring self-publishing in the coming updates.
For now, though, it’s enough to be able to sit back and know that I’ve done it.
And hey, who doesn’t want to read about an ageing, one-time-hard-case biker, dropping a fuckload of psychotropics and going on a guided trip?
Reading: second book of the Blackwater series, The Levee. Really enjoying these, slow and gentle, evocative and downright bloody creepy, and can’t wait to see where the story ends up.
Watching: Jeff Goldblum in Kaos, which is a fabulous take on several Greek myths, most centrally the Orpheus/Eurydice story. Featuring a brutally elegant Hera, a suitably wild Dionysus, who’s really just trying to do the right thing, and Goldblum himself, hamming it to absolute nines, and it’s savage, bloody, sexual, and exquisitely put together. If you haven’t watched it, then please give a go.
Playing: our D&D has taken us back to Arabel and to the Forgotten Realms, where we’re still trying to solve the mystery of the missing Gods. Our Ninja has acquired a mooing pigeon (as well as his pet chair, which follows him everywhere and really fucks up his sneak rolls), our Satyr mage is now part-lobster, and my half-drow fighter is apparently developing a thing for ladies’ underwear (though only of the highest quality, you understand).
Go on, Hasbro. AI that, you fuckers.
*Children of Artifice is published by Fox Spirit Books, where it found its spiritual home. Support your small presses, people, and give them all the love they deserve!