As I intimated in my last blog, Lights in the sky is not over, as I’ve now started the seventh novel, with the title I trailed last time, …when you wish upon a star, which was just too good to pass up really!
The downside being I’m again putting off trying to market my growing ouvre to agents and publishers, in favour of doing what I really want to do, which is to write more fiction and spend more time in the comforting fictional world I’ve created, as opposed to an increasingly scary real world. There’s also an element of selfishness in this. While I remain obscure and largely unread, the world of Lights in the sky remains mine, and mine alone. I have no agent to make suggestions, no commissioning editor to suggest revisions, no readership to make demands. It gratified me, when reading the obituary of the great Toni Morrison, to learn that she’d kept the manuscript of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, for years before eventually submitting it, even though she worked in publishing. She subsequently explained that she’d wanted to keep the novel private, recognising that once it went out into the world it would no longer be entirely hers. And I can understand that; a fictional world is a precious and intensely personal thing, and being published (and acquiring a readership) entails letting go of part of yourself.
Anyway, back to the work in hand…
As usual, writing a new installment in the series entails a lot of research in order to develop new characters with convincing backstories, and develop tangible locations where the action of the novel can take place, what in cinema is referred to as mise en scene. Some of this research is via my usual sources (step forward and take a bow, Wikipedia, and Google Maps), but a lot of it consists of rereading and research within the existing books of the series. I find that although Marta da Guia is an established character who appears (at various points in her life) in at least three of the novels, there’s an awful lot that we don’t know about her. This is of course the reason for the book, she’s pivotal to Lights in the sky, without her neither of the other two Martas (the main characters in our series) would exist at all. But she has hitherto remained on the periphery, a supporting character, never the main event, bar the twelfth chapter of the first novel.
All this will now change…
I have also decided to incorporate the stories of the other two characters I referenced last month into this novel, rather than condemning them to short story purdah. It makes sense really: Ester Almeida will become a pivotal figure within the Camposetta movement that will eventually destroy the Alpha Mission and Miss da Guia’s world. She will do this via her position as the leader of the Camposetta’s political wing, Partido dos trabalhadores do campo. Clara will not be centre stage, in fact she will eventually go into hiding, but her purpose will be to dramatise how the developing crisis destabilises the lives of ordinary people, as the certainties that have underpinned their existence are steadily eroded.
Finally, I have decided to make Miss da Guia’s biological parents (who never actually meet their child, or each other) significant characters in their own right, more so than Marta’s Alpha Mission-appointed foster parents, and the various educationalists and functionaries that will surround her. By remaining detached, I hope they will be able to take on the role of a Greek chorus, commenting on the action as it proceeds with the grinding inevitability of all history.
So that’s the plan, but there’s so much more to be done, and so much more to come…
As a sidebar to the above, I’ve found a number of really good YouTube channels in the last couple of days, writing specifically about SF movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar, and my personal favourite, the peerless Arrival.
Their various analyses (especially those on the nature of language, presented in two programmes on Arrival) got me thinking, and I came up with the following notions, which may not be original, but aren’t based on anything I’ve ever read.
Around five and a half thousand years ago we went through a pivotal moment in the development of human society, specifically the jump from a purely oral culture to a written one. This gradually percolated downwards from a learned elite to eventually encompass the bulk of humanity, and in the process profoundly altered the way people think, effectively rewiring our brains.
And now I think this is happening again, with a jump from a written culture to one mediated by Artificial Intelligence. This has already significantly altered the way many of us behave, and the process of rewiring human consciousness appears to be happening all over again. But this time with frightening speed, and with profound and unknowable consequences for us all.
’til next time
The Author September 2019