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Alphane life (detail) , dome in distance
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Category: growing old

Back to the future

Back to the future

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I’m cutting it fine even by my recent standards with this month’s blog, writing it on the very last day of June. Apologies also for using a rather obvious SF film reference for the title, however it is appropriate because I’ve actually started a completely new literary project by reaching back into my past. However this doesn’t mean that Lights in the Sky has been abandoned; I’m roughly halfway through the eighth novel, and I’m enjoying writing my allegory of the Spanish Civil War, but finding the title that fits is still proving tricky.

But back to my new project; a very long time ago I spent two years living in Liverpool, not the smart tourist destination of today, but the crumbling remains of a once great port that featured levels of deprivation not seen elsewhere in the country, whose people had become the butt of national humour. I loved living in the city, even though I knew there was nothing there for me long term, and out of the experience came a song, Saturday night in another Western town, written in 1985, and the first really good song I wrote (for a long time it was the only good song!).

Looking back, the title was far too good to be wasted on a simple song, and after an inordinately long gestation period it’s finally become a story, set in ’pool at the time I was living there and featuring a protagonist who’s an amalgam of me and a friend of mine (now dearly-departed). The story is set in the world of local bands and the longing for fame and occasional brushes with success that characterise this milieu. It features (and will feature) incidents that actually happened, but being fiction, will take a turn into the might-have-beens of life. There will also be a time travel element to the story, as SF always lurks in my fictional universe, sometimes dead centre, but here more on the periphery.

At the moment, I have the basis for a good short story, or the first chapter of another long novel. It will be interesting to see how this one turns out…

The Author  June 2021

A private world

A private world

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I sometimes make the mistake of supposing other people think about and understand the world in the same way as me…
But, of course, most people don’t; most people don’t write novels, they read them, or increasingly these days listen to them as audiobooks. I recently tried to listen to an Arthur C. Clarke audiobook online, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as it happens. I lasted one chapter because the process is so slow! I can read the story so much more quickly than the voice droning on through the speaker is able to tell it, plus you have the freedom and time to insert your own thoughts and mental impressions (i.e. create the world of the novel in your head) rather than having to conform to the narrator’s pace. Needless to say I will not be investing in any audiobooks in the near future.
Another thing most people don’t do is write songs, or play musical instruments with a reasonable degree of proficiency. Since I didn’t learn myself until I was in my early twenties I can still remember (as an adult) being an outsider as far as music is concerned; not understanding how it’s put together, not being able to perform it, or create original music. But that now seems like a far off place…
Of course, most people have other concerns: raising children, placating spouses or partners, working for other people, while I have none of these things. I sometimes feel like a monk in some draughty monastery on the Northumbrian coast, sometime in the Dark Ages, working away at my equivalent of an illuminated manuscript. Except that the world is right outside my front window, not many leagues away, and (hopefully) Viking raiders aren’t making their way stealthily up a nearby river.
Since I succumbed and started writing volume seven of Lights in the sky, I’ve been making good progress and I’m now working on chapter four. I’m in that delicious phase, when the whole thing is in front of you and you can start to grasp the full extent of the territory that the novel will occupy (albeit, dimly at times), but you still have to go out and explore and traverse that territory.
The number of characters appears to be increasingly exponentially; some will be familiar, having featured in other novels in the series (usually at different points in their lives), others are invented specifically for this particular volume. I have a feeling that this book will be the longest yet, and once more I’m wondering how I’m going to be able to keep to my convention of twenty two chapters.
But it feels cosy and safe in my fictional world; whereas the world outside seems to be getting more and more hostile. My little suburban monastery is pleasant place to live at the moment, but the Barbarians are massing in the distance, and may be just over the next hill…
The Author October 2019

Saying goodbye

Saying goodbye

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Saying goodbye

I left the majestic world of Alpha 5 once again, half an hour ago…
Perhaps I should explain; I have just finished the latest edit of the original Lights in the sky trilogy, and this gave me a chance to reassess my magnum opus. Each book has its strong points, its favourite moments, but I was reminded that the last volume, The Lost Colony, is the best of all. The last two chapters in particular are both gut-wrenching and unbelievably sad, as I say goodbye to the characters (both human and non-human) that I’ve lived with and loved. Of course, I will read these books again, but each time I return I will know that the story is complete, the lives of the characters have run their course, their entry on the slate of probability decided.
The reason for doing this edit was threefold: I had reached a natural pause in my writing of the last book in the series, Maya, secondly I knew that I would need to ensure that the ending of the series as a whole was consistent with the conclusion of the original trilogy, and this required me to re-read this (and re-reading naturally leads to re-editing!), and a third reason has emerged, I now realise that I will need to up my game if the series as a whole is to get the finale it deserves.
The appeal of the series is not merely emotional. The final chapters of the original trilogy contain a great of cosmological and philosophical speculation, and the task in finishing Maya is to be true to what has been revealed so far, and (if possible) build on these revelations. Each volume of the original series ends with a paradigm shift, where the nature of the world is shown to be at variance with what the protagonists (and the reader) had previously believed.
My challenge in finishing the series will be to pull off a similar trick at the close of the sextet as a whole. I know this will be difficult and so far the new paradigm has not emerged. But I have faith; in writing the series so far I have often felt the unseen hand on my shoulder guiding me towards the direction I need to go.
This is not intended to be a mystical explanation for the roots of my creativity, merely a restatement of the commonplace that a work of art (and this is especially true of an extended work of fiction) takes on a life of its own, and eventually starts to make its own demands.
I need now to listen and be in a position respond when these manifest themselves…
The Author May 2019