I have included both finished and unfinished fictions. Typically an unfinished fiction became the foundation for something else or transformed. It all forms a kind of network of complex system of the writing self.
Where I have earlier drafts of the writing I have included them. I can quite imagine the shock horror some writers might feel at the idea of their immature work being brazenly naked before the world. I see this much the same as I might showing something a photography or movie of myself at an earlier age, should I disown who I was when I was younger because I was less capable in some way?
As I draft and rework this history for the website I start to see patterns in the development of the work I haven't fully considered previously. I can see a kind of story of myself as a writer emerging. It starts with imitations of the fantasy fiction I enjoyed as a child such as Narnia and Lord of the Rings, then a as I became more intellectual and better educated man I started to push those templates in various ways. Relationship with literature - in the past decade I tried to break out of the fantasy mould and write general fiction such as the romantic comedy Lord Hayward's rose and the literary of The Colour of Chocolate. Finally I rebelled against my own rebellion and accepted that I am fascinated with the fantasy template but I wanted to reinvent it.
I lost a lot of my early work in one of my moves between the United Kingdom and Australia (something I have done three times so far) and so in many cases cannot post any of the original samples or the illustrations I produced for them. As a rough and ready stopgap I have produced some images in PowerPoint that hopefully will capture a little bit of the flavour of some of them.
2000-2009
This was the first decade of my life in writing that saw no completed works of fiction (other than a major rewrite of Fighter Freeman an earlier finished fantasy novel). But it is also the most fertile and varied part of my writing life. I tried many different fictions, a lot of them more general or literary than the epics I had been doing and finally return to fantasy with The Devil's P.A..
The Devil's P.A. (Development and writing 2005-present)
See Fictions: The Devil’s P.A. page for more on this novel, my primary current work in progress.
A first person female perspective novel in which a young female Antichrist relates the events that led her to instigating Armageddon.
In many respects this novel is a distillation of all the previous fictions. I am playing once again with the dark lord from my earlier fantasy in The Devil. My attempts to write a story with its foundations in the fall of Atlantis which started abortively with Living on the Edge are woven into the back story. I often wrote fictions about characters developing powers such as Fighter Freeman, Frederick, the Power and The Land and here is a godlike young woman who can manipulate reality in almost unlimitless ways. I had been trying to write and experiment with a literary from and style but become frustrated with it, and here I am writing in a non literary style, the chatty confession of a young women more akin to a chicklit novel but the literary fascination with weaving themes and symbols and images into a fictional fabric is there.
The Devil's P.A.: Chapter One December 2010 draft.
A series of drafts showing the development of this chapter is on The Writing Process section of this website.
Woman on the Beach (development 2004-2005)
At some point in this online discussion, which was more of a childish rant in some ways, I proposed an example of a fantasy story about a woman who lives alone in a cottage by the sea and collects found objects washed up on the beach. With these she constructs a story of her life. I was using this image to suggest that such a story could take place on a fantastic world or 100km from where I am writing this now. It was the essence of the story that mattered not the genre or the reality of the setting, yet I insisted you do not tend to come across many fantasy stories like this and my question was - why not?
One day in April 2004, I came home from work and started to write a series of fragments and ideas centred around the above concept. Interesitingly given my gripes, I didn't write them as being in a fantastic world, but very much in this one.
What emerged in a sudden fevered writing session was a middle aged woman who has been a successful artist, secluding herself in a cottage on a remote Scottish island. I wrote about the boat coming to the island; her feelings and fears and doubts about the wisdom of her self exile as a massive storm howling and lashes her small stone cottage at night; walking along the sand of the beach and finding flotsam on the shore and starting to form relationships with the found objects; her introspections about self and herself as an artist as she watches the sea and the sand and the creatures that scurry upon it each day.
These vignettes were written in a literary sort of style I had never experimented with before. While my most recent fiction at the time Lord Hayward's Rose, had been general fiction with just a hint of the supernatural in the background, the style had been genial and fairly simple. This I was perhaps looking for a kind of rthym bewteen language and image.
Crucially however these vignettes were fictions without context or story; they described her visceral and emotional reactions to her self imposed exile and the patterns of her thought as she relates to the isolated landscape of the island, but said nothing about who she was, where she had come from and why she had come to that lonely refuge from her fame as an artist.
I sent them to a writing friend I had met online in an email entitled ironically enough "Goldman Sachs and Woman on the Beach", the first half of the mail complaining about life working in an Investment bank, the second half was the several pages of this stuff I had bashed out that evening.
What to me had been really an exercise in playing with image and language my writing partner felt a strong emotional resonance with particularly in its potential to explore the pysche of an artist. She wanted to try and develop beyond vignettes and wanted to try and develop them further to which I replied - go ahead think of the piece as a gift to make what you will from. After a period of processing back came a reworking in which she had provided a history for the character - a past as a child in the second world war, parents with backgrounds and a name.
I then took this new reality for the character and wrote futher vignettes about her earlier life before World War II, her impressions of her parents - her father walking down the streets of an Eastern European city, her younger years post war, her relationship with her children later in life and her developing life as an artist. I didn't question the contextual framework my writing partner had created, I just accepted it in its entirity and let myself react to this new reality through spontaneous use of language and image.
We did some further work on some aspects of the piece across a year or so, but in the final analysis I wasn't engaging with it fully on an emotional level. For me it had been an experiment, a play with language and form like a kind of literary dooble and I had not become engaged with the character in a meaningful way. My writing partner however, had become enthralled by the character and she was now living in her not in me. Consequently I gifted the entire thing to her to develop as she saw fit. Possbily it might seem strange gifting a novel to someone like this; but it seems perfectly natural to me - ownership of the character is not important to me, but the need for the character to gestate and be born and fully realised, is.
I have included a few extracts from the original rough draft "Woman on the Beach" below. It is raw writing and in some cases the logic of a passage is a bit wonky, but I will leave it uneditted as it transmits something of the spontaniety of the act of writing it.
Exile
She did not come to the shore to paint, or sculpt, though she brought some of the objects to do those things. Rather like packing the right number of pairs of underwear, she could not avoid it. She gets them out in the first few days and finds only intent. She suddenly feels alienated from objects she has handled with confidence and joy for so long. She came here to be, she suspects. She will have to be patient. Though she knows nothing in this place, in this penance she is performing like a puppet, she is enough wise to know when to wait. She suspects that more will come, even if doubts will plague her.Sand as canvas
She is restless at first. Images and tugs of home and family and the familiar torment her. She cannot sleep, she doubts herself and one day packs to leave, but then walks out into the morning and is astounded by the immediacy, timelessness and shock of the dawn. Stricken and dazzled for a moment she returns inside, she remembers, in her knowledge of history, countless men and women who have braved the unknown and yet found and celebrated the familiar of the sea and its moods alone in themselves. She feel a sudden confidence, as though those once dead - milling, crying, smiling, knowing - have spoken to her and told her that where they once trod you dare not follow. You do not know us, and our infinite unsung moments, unrecorded, we struggled against things that you have never known, and we triumphed and yet were never asked anything of it.
She thinks about how the world might see her. She realises that she cannot separate herself from the long familiar experience of being written about and studied and imagined, by others. She feels suddenly ashamed, she is struck by a need to persist out of respect for the dead, out of curiosity for knowing what they knew. It burns in her and calls to her. They never wrote of it, they were never known in their solitude, yet they lived it. It was the smallest thing, yet even one of them in forgotten history was braver than she. She feels a sudden humility and slowly unpacks her bags and feeling like a child again, shakes with apprehension at the road ahead.
She see patterns in the sand each day, ridges, contours, warm and grainy, like the skin of a restless creature, revealing something more of itself each day, constant yet never the same. Never telling what it is. She images there is a being, or awareness there, trying to say something in the restless sand. Has anyone watched it, loved it for long enough to hear what it is saying? Is it trapped, or is it she who is trapped in the world above the sand. If she could be truly be one with the sand, she would be an artist forever, or until the end of the Earth.
The sand like a palimpsest, her footprints washed away, yet leaving tracks in memory. She can recall herself, imposed over herself again and again like a double, triple or multiple exposure photograph of the same scene, foot print upon footprint. She can leave no trace here, only in herself. The sand challenges the artist, it takes the impression and then takes it away, like a cheeky acceptance of an offering. The sand and its power is a god that frightens her until time and reflection brings her acceptance and stillness. She has to have detachment; here is a work that can never last, that can never be witnessed and celebrated. She never knew before how much the witness of her work by others meant to her. She feels childish, she feels obstinate, she hates the sand for a time, and then she sees herself one day and smiles: The sand is her teacher; it is its own artist, it creates constantly, yet has no ego, it cannot be anything else. Could she ever have such dedication without reward?
Flotsam and Jetsom 1
When the first object is washed up, it surprises her. She realises she had an idealistic view of herself in this place at this time; the world will not let her remain pure to her own intents, nothing is pure. Her ego wanted a blank canvas, but the idealistic are always tripped up by the elusive lesson of chance.2
She finds herself unable not to take this thing, and the memories and sensations it might invoke and place them in her new home. It sits on a shelf, a single, sudden seed of something. She watches it each day like a suspicious, skittish creature, fascinated yet wary.
She cleans it, and then regrets that. She realises that her habits and instincts borne out of a lifetime of arranging and cleaning in her own life, have suddenly robbed it of its being, its moment, its surprise. Then it surprises her again; it is forgiving. She picks it up one morning and then sets it down somewhere and feels a resonance with its prescene. She feels grateful then, it is only a small thing, but suddenly she is filled with optimism and excitement. She searches the beach that day for another object but finds only pebbles and fragments and sense that she is trying to create. She cannot do this now. She has made a sacrifice, she has done something sacred, she has to wait to see what will come.
Each object might release a memory or a sensation, but sometimes they give her nothing. Once two objects mean nothing until she brings them near to one another. Then she feels gravity, like the love of every particle in the cosmos for every other particle. She stares at them for hours, she moves them a little closer, a little further, she holds them both at once and is stricken by their disparity. Then she realises that it is not the objects , or even their relationship, but her own presence with them that makes them something more.The old man and his boat
Sometimes it is obvious, it is an easy image, a reminder of the past. But sometimes it is just the feel of her fingers upon its texture, that, like Proust's coffee, releases something. How can the object, arranged in her home or in her growing art form, show this to her? She cannot know it and she cannot know its story in herself, without touch? Perhaps she tries to touch all the things she has collected one day, and is hurt by the sudden way she cannot find anything in them. She realises she must be patient, she must be a student, she is not creating this work, the fickle, loving and ancient sea gives her a thing, a moment?
An older man brings her supplies periodically. She can hear the chug of his outboard motor approaching. He is a simple man, he loves his habits, he loves the sea, he loves her courage to defy the sea's worst tantrums on this lonely island. He always takes his hat off and sighs when he comes to her. But he also challenges her. He makes her aware that she has often surrounded herself with people who talk in theory, who see themselves as having a vision. This man has no visions, he knows the joy of being and yet he is sad too. He intrigues her, a little, he is proud in some ways, and though she can see something in him, some unresolved question, he can never reveal it to her. She doesn't want to discover this, though she aches to, because she knows that frame in the clumsy guesses of language it will be a dead and slight thing. She prefers to see him from a distance, she enjoys most the moment when she hears him approaching, yet she wants to touch him with her heart, not sexually, not intellectually, she wants to intercept this secret thing without knowing it, she wants to just feel, for the slightest moment the fullness of what he cannot speak of. When he approaches she feels excited, like in her youth, but only then, not when he arrives.The naturalist
A young scientist is working, studying wildlife on the other side of the island. She sees her optimism to discover and study. She reminds her of her son; have the principals and have the light and yee shall discover the truth. She talks a lot. This young woman does not comprehend what the woman herself is doing here.
They share soup or tea together sometimes. She does not mind spending time this woman, at least once in a while, like a sudden and unexpected snap of life’s whip, but more than that these brief interludes disrupts her discourse with herself and the landscape, and the gifts of the sea. The scientist visits her one day and asks silly, nervous questions about the objects she has gathered in the cottage. She wants to know why she is here, what her history is. She sees the woman in her youth and undiscovered frontiers, and she feels like a ancient being, like a god looking down on a world, yet she does not judge, she loves her for her simple, unobserved and unquestioned habits.
To see another person is to speak a different language, if she does it for to long she forgets how to speak her own language as she needs to. She is hostile to the scientist once; she regrets it, but she is beyond the tug of conscience now. She does not apologise. She knows the woman will find an explanation.
Lord Hayward's Rose (Development and writing 2003-2004)
Aristocratic scientist who hates new age and a former Engineer who makes money from writing books about the engineering of anceint buildings. They meet on a road to the festival when a Fake UFO model almost crashes on her car. and then meet a diffrent way when new age lunatic dig up her rose looking for a treasure he describes in one of his books. Then follows antics of their developing romance as the three day festival and the all the weird and wonderful goings on play out.
The novel itself is a text book case of an image sparking an entire story. When visiting Avebury in August 2003 with my then wife I witnessed a middle aged American lady, standing with her head bowed against the great Swindon stone at the northern end of the village, on a stinking hot day. I have no idea who she is, but the image of her standing there in the heat - searching for something unseen in the massive monolith - wouldn’t leave me alone in the weeks that followed: What was she looking for? What do the locals residents think of people doing this sort of thing on their doorstep? What would happen if these two very different sorts of people met and shared something in their hearts while their attitudes to such mysteries remained quite unalike? Of simple snapshots or impressions such as these, are far larger things born and writing is as much about the unpredictable nature of the people you meet and the random things you experience as anything your might pretend to control in your imagination.
I have always had a soft spot for romantic comedies and was a bit fed up of writing fantasy and science fiction at the time so it seemed a good project to work on. I read somewhere between 40 and 50 chicklet books to get an idea of what that market was interested in.
Completed 35,000 words of a projected 90,000 words and stopped writing it primarily because my marriage was disintegrating and simply couldn't at the time keep hold of an imaginative space that was steeped in romance and love.
Another aspect I think that drew me away was the the character was too old.
It is something I would like to return to, though not necessarily as a novel. I recently wrote an outline for this as a feature film, changing the setting to rural Australia. Possibly a film script will come out of this if I get the time and inspiration to develop it further.
Lord Hayward's Rose: Chapter 1 Draft
Living on the Edge (In development 1997-2004)
If you read Plato's description of the Atlantis myth, he very definately states that they were a glorious civlisation that became corrupt and brought desstruction down upon themselves. I wanted to write a story that delved into what destroyed Atlantis, a dark tale.
In 1998 I spent over a year researching to try refine and develop my basic concept. It got through a great variety of books, probably close to 150 in an 18 month period. I read quite a few in the new age archaeology field and paranormal phenomena and UFOs, both classics of the fields but also more recent such as though penned by Graham Hancock. At the same time I also read into science, mythology, history and other fields. I was looking to absorb a huge network of ideas and distill them down into an epic that took a little bit of everything.
By 2000 I was pretty much ready to start turning all this into an actual novel.
The story as I had envisaged it was set slightly into the future (although by now actually almost the present). It wasn't exactly a Disney outing. The villains were genetically engineered super intelligent children who were highly telepathic and had taken over the government project and were infiltrating and manipulating human society for their own amusement. They could use adult like puppets and were obcessed with experiencing sex vicariously and using human civlisation as a kind of life sized toy. This is fairly heavy concept of course, but I was looking for something outlandish and corrupt in a modern sense that might reflect the corruption in the Atleantean sense.
After spending more than a few years playing with the idea and knitting in many aspects ofth e fields I had researched I made several attempts to get the writing going but always ran up against a wall. The whole story had so many threads and plots lines and characters that I could never get a hold of it and find a focus. I needed to tame it somehow but just was never able to find a way to do it. Eventually I did, but by transforming it into The Devil's PA and using the first person female perspective as a focus to.
I wrote a test chapter involving a terrorist attack, the main characters are held hostage in Aya Sofia in Istanbul by advanced soldiers and research scientists using a drug in a vain hope of someone who can activate the Atlantean consciousness network. I wrote bits and pieces of action and description and worked on some of the characters. The overall problem with the book was that there was so much going on and so many threads and plot lines I was having trouble finding any focus in it, let alone a prospective reader. I also got married around this time and a lot of my attention was absorbed into dealing with the joy and hells of that experience and so the whole thing got let on the back burner for a while.
By the time I had developed to form the basis of The Sins of Atlantis Trilogy, of which The Devil's P.A. is the first novel.
Living on the Edge: Chapter 1 Rough Draft:
1990-1999
Fighter Freeman and the Sword of the Thrice Born (1997)
Melbourne Comics artist Greg Gates read the original version of the Fighter Freeman novel in 1997. He was looking to put together a submission for a new fantasy comic and thought the novel might work well as a comic.
I felt the novel should stand by itself rather than be both comic and novel, but I offered to write an earlier version of the adventures of the two main characters Fighter Freeman and Ronii Raygun, whose contract treasure hunting business was described in the novel.
We worked on concept art across a period of few weeks and I wrote an outline for a five issue mini series, scripting the first three issues.
Greg needed the blocking done. I had no idea what this actually was but my friend Charles Spiteri did. Charles Spirteri did blocking for the comic.
Fighter Freeman (First draft finished in 1996, extensive revisions during 2003)
See the Novel's Section, this has been developed into a series is still live and work pending on the next novel. I am doing period work on the first book, a prequel to the novel already written.
Fighter Freeman: Chapters 1-3
This World We Live In (1989-1996)
This was my first serious novel in the sense of a
A character from a fantasy world fails to fulfil his destiny and defeat his adversary and is tossed into a dimension rift to find himself in our own world.
Discovered traumatised and confused on a lonely country orad in the United Kingdom he who finds his away into ours, traumatised an old art teacher uses art a therapy.
Years later he has a place in society, hides his past. But when the victorious dark lord come looking for him.
At first he cannot find him until he discovers stream of consciousness that flow through a fractured London. And when he encountered a warrior part of, he journies down through many versions of London cooloured by different conciousness searching for his adversery and to defeat him.
This was a major work and I spent much of my twenties working on this project and wrote the first of what could have been a series of four books. It was the first piece written entirely on a word processor, Word Perfect 5.1.
It started out fairly routinely but develope into a what was essentially a postmodern literary novel and while my writing style was stil fairly juvenile the metaphysics and weaving of concepts was developing very rapidly.
was still not quite settled down here, it was my first serious attempt to play with the tropes that had influenced. The female lead was the grand daughter of Susan of Narnia.
Over ten years ago I embarked on a post graduate thesis about the illegitimacy of fantasy fiction in western literature. Basically I wanted to examine why fantasy is seen as a poor man’s literature or not taken seriously, which despite many interesting books that have hit the shelves, is still the case today in many minds.
I didn’t finish the thesis, I actually stopped quite early on in the research phase, because I found that I wanted to explore this question through fiction rather than an academic work. To be honest, academic texts, footnotes and references drove me bonkers. I needed a canvas to work with using my imagination and my own rules, rather than those of the faculty. Call me stubborn if you like.
I had already been writing a novel about an adolescent hero from a fantasy world who ends up in modern day Britain after failing to defeat the scheming baddy in his own world, and falling through a dimensional rift. He is adopted by a retired art teacher who finds him wandering on a country road. We meet him again in his late twenties, He has become socialised in modern life, has trained as an artist, works as a designer in a computer graphic studio and has all but suppressed his memories of the world he came from.
Some way through the novel, there is a crucial scene which is sort of a key part of the original thesis projected into the fictional setting of the narrative.
He hides the paintings he has created of his experiences in what was to him, the very real fantasy world of his youth, fearing that it will reveal his true nature. He wants to fit in and be normal because in his past is only terror and failure. However he shows some of these paintings of the other world to the main female character as an act of confession when they grow close.
She finds it difficult not to see silly paintings of fantastic landscapes, battles and horrors. Have I become intimate with a man who just is escaping from the world, a fantasy nut, she wonders? She certainly does not realise they are the real experiences of a man rather than hopeful aspirations and egoistic delusions.
This for me, is an important point. People tend to react to fantasy as a legitimate form of expression because it is identified with a departure from the world of our experience, rather than an expression or reflection of our experience of that world.
Part of the question a writer faces is what conceptual language do you, and can you, use to explore what you feel and what you have to say. It is more or less legitimate to tell a realistic story and try to accurately capture a ‘real’ person’s ‘real’ life, and by doing that, say something about the sort of life the character leads and the sort of world they lead it in. Or is it more or less legitimate to dramatise what you feel in an impossible, imaginary setting with characters who could not exist in our world, but a world and people who reflect your internal processes as they seem to you, or as they are best understood and realised in a narrative, rather than dictated by common sense.
A writer of literary realism would probably lean to the former, and a fantasy writer to the latter. Both are just ways of telling a story inspired by your own experiences and perceptions. Both are fiction.
One of the things that has become very apparent to me about fantasy, is that it is very much about things we feel, or hope for, or fear, or a map of experiences, projected into a landscape with a fairly coherent logic. Landscape seems to me a crucial concept when it comes to fantasy writing.
In fantasy, the themes and emotions within the writer are crystallised into an environment, a culture, a mythos, a legend, and a narrative, or journey, in particular a guest for resolution of tensions and discovery of insight. The trouble with fantasy is that quite often the landscape is just a reflection of other fantastic landscapes, ones that have been visit many many times before.
Something that would certainly help strengthen fantasy as a form, to my mind, is the possibility that metaphysics is to fantasy, as science is to science fiction, a form far more legitimised in the general literary imagination, probably because it seems to deal with plausible possibilities.
Little in fantasy, to my mind, seems to deal with how the reality of a fantastic world works, what it means, and how it relates to human experience. I don't mean endless details about magic systems here, or creating encyclopaedic fauna and local colour to make the world seem completely believable. No, I mean thinking about the logic of an unreality in such a way that it can be grasped by a reader and related to questions of who they are.
A good example of this carried out successfully, I think, is the work of the fantasy writer Robin Hobbs, who in her Assassin books, has two magics. The Wit and the Skill. The Wit being a commoner’s magic, to do with bonding with animals, and thus very much about empathising with others and forming relationships, and the Skill, an exclusive regal magic to do with telepathic manipulation and knowing things about distant locations that can be used for strategic advantage, by an large, a magic of ego and power.
This is nothing desperately complex,, but it is done well and resonates with the reader’s own experiences. The writer manages to create a metaphysical coherence in the unreality that is rooted in our everyday experience and in the extremes of our character, understanding and support someone else, or trying to use them for our own gain.
Actually, in many respects, I think fantasy is a form of writing that increasing looks very well suited for the world many of us actually experience.
We do not mediate our selves and our experiences with a simple set of accepted ideas and experience, like church and field and village. We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by multiple visions of ourselves, or hoped for selves, or feared for selves within advertising, popular culture and the media in general.
In a sense, we are all trying to make a journey in a world of unreality, trying to make sense of that landscape of experience and perception so different from the mundane things we see around us. The world of modern consciousness is a fantastic world and finding meaning within it and surviving it psychologically rather than physically, is a modern preoccupation. We need to discover patterns, logic, themes and quests and destinations that give us meaning and a coherent sense of it being a landscape we can see, understand and successfully past through, be it day to day, or through a life time.
Fantasy has some growing up to do as a literature in my mind, too much of it has been inspired not by genuine curiosity about the world and ways of exploring it, and projecting our experience of it, but by lazy and often quite unimaginative derivative homage to familiar forms. Not to say there is not some great stuff out there. But like any cultural form of expression, it needs to become an accepted part of the language of who we are before some of the best practioners will fight to speak with it using vision, gravity and conviction.
I didn’t finish the thesis, I actually stopped quite early on in the research phase, because I found that I wanted to explore this question through fiction rather than an academic work. To be honest, academic texts, footnotes and references drove me bonkers. I needed a canvas to work with using my imagination and my own rules, rather than those of the faculty. Call me stubborn if you like.
I had already been writing a novel about an adolescent hero from a fantasy world who ends up in modern day Britain after failing to defeat the scheming baddy in his own world, and falling through a dimensional rift. He is adopted by a retired art teacher who finds him wandering on a country road. We meet him again in his late twenties, He has become socialised in modern life, has trained as an artist, works as a designer in a computer graphic studio and has all but suppressed his memories of the world he came from.
Some way through the novel, there is a crucial scene which is sort of a key part of the original thesis projected into the fictional setting of the narrative.
He hides the paintings he has created of his experiences in what was to him, the very real fantasy world of his youth, fearing that it will reveal his true nature. He wants to fit in and be normal because in his past is only terror and failure. However he shows some of these paintings of the other world to the main female character as an act of confession when they grow close.
She finds it difficult not to see silly paintings of fantastic landscapes, battles and horrors. Have I become intimate with a man who just is escaping from the world, a fantasy nut, she wonders? She certainly does not realise they are the real experiences of a man rather than hopeful aspirations and egoistic delusions.
This for me, is an important point. People tend to react to fantasy as a legitimate form of expression because it is identified with a departure from the world of our experience, rather than an expression or reflection of our experience of that world.
Part of the question a writer faces is what conceptual language do you, and can you, use to explore what you feel and what you have to say. It is more or less legitimate to tell a realistic story and try to accurately capture a ‘real’ person’s ‘real’ life, and by doing that, say something about the sort of life the character leads and the sort of world they lead it in. Or is it more or less legitimate to dramatise what you feel in an impossible, imaginary setting with characters who could not exist in our world, but a world and people who reflect your internal processes as they seem to you, or as they are best understood and realised in a narrative, rather than dictated by common sense.
A writer of literary realism would probably lean to the former, and a fantasy writer to the latter. Both are just ways of telling a story inspired by your own experiences and perceptions. Both are fiction.
One of the things that has become very apparent to me about fantasy, is that it is very much about things we feel, or hope for, or fear, or a map of experiences, projected into a landscape with a fairly coherent logic. Landscape seems to me a crucial concept when it comes to fantasy writing.
In fantasy, the themes and emotions within the writer are crystallised into an environment, a culture, a mythos, a legend, and a narrative, or journey, in particular a guest for resolution of tensions and discovery of insight. The trouble with fantasy is that quite often the landscape is just a reflection of other fantastic landscapes, ones that have been visit many many times before.
Something that would certainly help strengthen fantasy as a form, to my mind, is the possibility that metaphysics is to fantasy, as science is to science fiction, a form far more legitimised in the general literary imagination, probably because it seems to deal with plausible possibilities.
Little in fantasy, to my mind, seems to deal with how the reality of a fantastic world works, what it means, and how it relates to human experience. I don't mean endless details about magic systems here, or creating encyclopaedic fauna and local colour to make the world seem completely believable. No, I mean thinking about the logic of an unreality in such a way that it can be grasped by a reader and related to questions of who they are.
A good example of this carried out successfully, I think, is the work of the fantasy writer Robin Hobbs, who in her Assassin books, has two magics. The Wit and the Skill. The Wit being a commoner’s magic, to do with bonding with animals, and thus very much about empathising with others and forming relationships, and the Skill, an exclusive regal magic to do with telepathic manipulation and knowing things about distant locations that can be used for strategic advantage, by an large, a magic of ego and power.
This is nothing desperately complex,, but it is done well and resonates with the reader’s own experiences. The writer manages to create a metaphysical coherence in the unreality that is rooted in our everyday experience and in the extremes of our character, understanding and support someone else, or trying to use them for our own gain.
Actually, in many respects, I think fantasy is a form of writing that increasing looks very well suited for the world many of us actually experience.
We do not mediate our selves and our experiences with a simple set of accepted ideas and experience, like church and field and village. We live in a world where we are constantly surrounded by multiple visions of ourselves, or hoped for selves, or feared for selves within advertising, popular culture and the media in general.
In a sense, we are all trying to make a journey in a world of unreality, trying to make sense of that landscape of experience and perception so different from the mundane things we see around us. The world of modern consciousness is a fantastic world and finding meaning within it and surviving it psychologically rather than physically, is a modern preoccupation. We need to discover patterns, logic, themes and quests and destinations that give us meaning and a coherent sense of it being a landscape we can see, understand and successfully past through, be it day to day, or through a life time.
Fantasy has some growing up to do as a literature in my mind, too much of it has been inspired not by genuine curiosity about the world and ways of exploring it, and projecting our experience of it, but by lazy and often quite unimaginative derivative homage to familiar forms. Not to say there is not some great stuff out there. But like any cultural form of expression, it needs to become an accepted part of the language of who we are before some of the best practioners will fight to speak with it using vision, gravity and conviction.
This World We Live In: Chapter 18:
By Karl1587 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
It is one of the reasons I now try to avoid outlining too much.
The Eighties
Good Old Fashioned Adventure Boy (1987)
Kaylum’s armour rusts, he it picked up by a giant bird, dumped in the mountains where he finds an ancient weaponry emplacement with a giant crystal. He becomes obsessed with the idea of trying to roll this thing through the mountains, eventually he looses and it begins taking him through a series of comical encounters who joined the chase.
I started this novella, a distillation of the previous project ‘Kaylum’ just when I was finishing high school. I began the work in an A4 notebook as had the previous incarnation of the idea. Which I mislaid while travelling in India at the age of 17. I rewrote it from memory in 1987-8.
This included some fantasy concepts I was to later develop in the Fighter Freeman series, such as sky islands and the mixture of farcical humour with genuine observation.
I was working in a video studio in Brighton, UK during this period. My boss was Paul Wynter who had revolutionised the typesetting industry. He had a desktop publishing and computer graphics facilities. I wrote and typeset the text in Ventura on a PC and produced illustrations on a Pluto 8bit computer graphics system (ie, only 256 colours to work with) - there were about 10 of them including a front cover. The illustrations were transferred to slides and I still have them somewhere back in the UK.
I was interviewed by a Computer Graphic magazine about the project, as it was at the time one of the first completely writer and artist produced book and seemed to offer a glimpse of what technology might transform for authors. They didn't end up publishing the piece, probably because the writing wasn't really up to scratch. I guess it was however an achievement at the time.
Later I discussed the project with Pixel Publishing in Sydney. By that time I had begun to see the weaknesses in the narrative and was already becoming interesting in a new project.
Untitled Teenage Novel (1987-8)
It loosely echoed two main characters from Frederick, The Power and the Land, but was about their teenage experiences and the trials of high school. It included a lot of humourous observations about and high school life, including characterisation of teachers and the antics of pupils. I based these on what was going on in my own high school.
It’s hard to remember it clearly over twenty years later, but although it had the humour and cheekiness that characterised much of my work, it was actually a fairly serious piece, centring around the difficulties of the developing relationship between the two main characters. I had observed how relationships often seem to be haphazard, difficulty, with pauses, uncertainties and tried to capture this in the novel. It was also my first attempts to write from a female point of view trying to come to grips with her sexuality.
This is another of the lost typescripts, though in this case it was my own fault.
Fantasy Parody Serial (1986)
Produced a series of parody in a fantasy land and published it periodically.
One day to promote it stuck multiple Sherbet Fountains to the ceiling of the Sixth Form common room. It was an early experience of having an audience.
Kaylum (1985-6)
This story concerned a would be adventurer, a loner who lived in a tree house near a religious city and was ever at loggerheads with the priests who dominated the city. The priests insisted nothing from the past was relevant, Kaylum thought differently and was determined to discover the ancient secrets and legacy of his world and liberate it from their yoke. He never got to actually do anything of this, as I only ever wrote a few chapters.
I would often write material by hand in an A4 notebook sitting in my high school sixth form common room in free periods, or when I came early to school. I enjoyed the quiet at that time. Looking back on it I was getting used to trying out my own sort of construction and character. It was more of an exercise or experiment than a sustained piece of fiction.
I was playing Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and leant that way. I sketched designs for architecture and creatures and landscapes and drew a map. Had become rather obsessed with creating a complete world and spent hours developing fauna, flora and history for the world.
It later formed the basis for the illustrated novella Good Old Fashioned Adventure Boy (see above).
Frederick, the Power and the Land (1984)
This was my first novel begun at the age of 14 and completed not long after turning 16. The finished novel was about 60,000 words.
It was kind of mash up of C.S. Lewis's Narnia tales and the Lord of the Rings with bits and pieces of various action movies.
Frederick and four three friends are transported to a magical world when he discovers a magic torch left behind by a flying saucer. After the initial wonder of being in a world where animals talk and mystical silver birds fly by moonlight, they are attacked by flying demon creation, the first herald of the return of an anceint dark lord style horror.
Subsequently they set off on a journey through a sinister forest to the nearby castle to tell the local honchos about this troublesome development and along the way spend some time trapped in a ruined Temple full of traps and devious illusions. After the castle is attacked by more of the flying demons, they are seperated into pairs. One pair go on a journey into the hellish underworld realm of the dark lord and are chased about by his minions. The other two go off into fabled and mysterious mountains to awaken some anceint magical beings to help in the coming final conflict. Eventually they are reunited at the site of a big battle where the forces of evil are vanquished when all the good races and and all the various types of demons meet on a plain in the middle of the land.
It had lots of action and humour and banter between the characters and also a talking mouse named Sebastian. The characters developed magical powers as the story progressed, something that crops up again and again in later fictions. I also named the characters after friends and made them somewhat like their namesakes and Frederick was pretty much me.
With this novel I started a tendency to build big canvas stories around action set pieces with distinctive visual images, in this case many of them were inspired by or copied from blockbuster movies I had seen at the time or not long before. A couple of examples are: a chase on stone boats floating on streams of molten lava in the underworld was directly from the mining car chases in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and a chase on a sledge down a snowy mountain which came from the ski and luge scenes in On Her Majesty' Secret Service.
Unlike Lewis's Narnia tales the violence was moderately graphic and the character could and did get injured. They were also a lot more active and there was no talking lion to tell them what to do; while mysterious beings gave them hints they had to figure it all out for themselves.
The first chapter or so were written in an exercise book and the rest on a typewriter. I wrote a first draft and then retyped it, revising as I went. I also produced a number of pen and coloured pencil illustrations for the novel, though they were not actually intended to be seen with the text - I did this to help envisage what I was writing about. At that stage, without much experience of writing, I found I need to draw something before I could fully imagine and describe it. These days, I have forgotten how to draw but can picture things in some detail without any trouble.
It is one of the few pieces I have ever submitted to a publisher; Penguin and Andrew Deutshe. Andre Deutsche congratulated me for completing an novel at an early age, but felt the characters were not strong enough. Peter Dickinson of Penguin wrote me a two page letter in response in which he called it "very much better than most of the typescripts I have go through, which is pretty good going for a teenage first time novelist". He also made some suggestions for strengthening the story.
I did start to revise the novel but by this time was studying 'A' level literature and started encountering literary realist fiction such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and loosing my spontaniety and confidence in the work, became very bogged down in the idea that it all had to mean something. Consequently I ended ruining much of the story by inserting uncessary talking heads scenes where the characters discussed... what everything that was going on all meant.
The typescript was unfortunately lost but I live in hope of it turning up again, as I made five copies and distributed them to various people and who knows it might be in someone’s attic somewhere and turn up again someday.
The Magic Room (1983)
By Wolfgang Sauber (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
This was an illustrated Children's story about a brother and sister and some friends whose playroom could take them to other worlds. The playroom was accessed by crawling through a hole in the wall under a welsh dresser because the father of the siblings had wall papered over the door for some reason I cannot quite recall.
Their adventures included a visit to ancient Greece where they met a very friendly and helpful local called 'Arisperidousridachariotes' who took them to watch a chariot race and also travel to an alien planet. Nothing bad happened; it was all very friendly and gentle.
I had been reading a lot of greek myth at this time and also had been inspired by Rebecca’s World, a Terry Nation children's book while a little girl is transported to another world (Nation was the creator of the Daleks and Blake's 7 but had his finger in other pies).
I produced several full page illustrations for the piece in pencil. Amusingly I had just moved into a flat with my father and his new wife and there were initially no lamp shades in the rooms - while I drew the home of the children as a rather nice middle class sort of environment I also faithfully drew lampshadeless naked lightbulbs in all the illustrations.
The typescript and illustrations were lost at some point.
Lingor's Task (1980)
This was my first piece of completed fiction written at the ripe old age of 11 going on 12. It was about 12,000 words long, which seemed a lot to me in those days but seems less so in the wake of more recent epics. It was written with half a young eye on a Jackanory Short Fiction competition and produced on my grandmother's typewriter when I was living in Haywards Heath in West Sussex. The finished product found its way to the competition but didn’t find any success there.
I had read Lord of the Rings shortly before starting on the piece, and predictably enough, Lingor’s task was derivative from Tolkien’s tale, but I guess an early double digit writer can be forgiven such things. The three main characters, Lingor, Arrowshaft and Kestrel shared a common dislike of the oppressive Krons, who had invaded and enslaved their magical land. They had the keen blade, arrows and axe to conduct some surgery on the problem.
Rather conveniently the men all eventually turned out to be long lost brothers. There was also a dark, sinister wood that had to be liberated from an ancient horror, so the sleeping elves could pitch into the liberation effort, a daring nightime raid on a Kron held city through secret tunnels and it all culminated with a massive battle during a stellar omen, the net result being the Krons were sucked into a crack in the earth and the land was set free.
The typescript is lost, like a lot of my early stuff as a result of emmigrated back and forth between the United Kingdom and Australia, but I can still remember one paragraph. It went something like this:
The three moons made a triangle in the sky. It was an omen. “Look, an omen,” Arrowshaft cried, as he pointed to the omen in the sky
It’s easy to belittle and self parody yourself at a young age, but perhaps the lesson to be taken from it is that day after day for an extended period I bashed away at the typewriter, each time creating more fiction and drawing a little closer to a coherent completed tale. That young self didn’t worry about anything other than the keys tapping, the story growing and have more pages to fan through and wonder at.
I also composed a theme tune for the story, my only piece of musical composition. I had learnt to play the recorder at school and simply improvised the tune on this instrument, though I recorded it in musical notation afterwards - which I knew then but cannot remember now.
