I tell stories

Kilbrack. So, from the cover I’m guessing it’s some kind of ‘romance in a sleepy seaside town’ kind of book. The town being Kilbrack?

You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But no. I’ve yet to work out what relevance the cover has to the story, since it involves neither leap-frogging nor beaches. There is a village called Kilbrack, though.

Oh. So what is it about?

The premise is pretty fun. Our MC is O’Leary Montagu, who woke up in a hospital 11 years ago with amnesia. For 6 of those years he’s been obsessed with a book called Ill Fares The Land, a biography of Nancy Valentine, who grew up in Kilbrack, was mysteriously expelled and returned years later to find the village a ruin. O’Leary is now travelling to the village himself.
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I’ve been tagged on this blog hop by the wonderful Priya Sharma, and meant to do this a week and a half ago. I did, at least, manage to get to the story she asked for a bit faster.

I’m capable of going on for about three solid weeks on how Priya’s stories of beautiful horror, broken romance and twisted myth are amazing, but if you’ve read this blog for any length of time you’ll have heard me say all that before. So for now, I’ll just point out that you can read some of her stuff on her website, and it’s a far better use of your time than any wittering from me.

Though there was a reason beyond my being rubbish why this post took a bit longer than planned.

I’ve had a really hard time trying to think of things I don’t write about. One of the side effects of committing to do stories pretty frequently, even little flash ones, is that you cover a ton of ground. I thought: poetry. I don’t write poetry much. Then I sat down for that day’s story and came out with John Frum ‘Merica.

But there are some things that even over the course of 240-ish stories, I haven’t touched.

1. Melodrama

My natural place on the story-writer’s spectrum is between speculative and magic-realist. When I’m writing fiction, I don’t like to keep to the confines of reality. It feels like that’s not what fiction’s for.

So things like melodrama are basically beyond me.

I tried, once. I set out to write a story of a doomed relationship in the similarly decaying streets of Venice. By the end, the city was sinking, there was a procession of dancing ghosts in St. Mark’s Square and one of the characters might have been around in the 1700s.

I decided after that it probably wasn’t my thing.

2. Mystery

Any piece of longer writing, for me, comes with two caveats. Firstly, when I start writing I need to have a plan about where the story is going, from beginning to end; and secondly, there is no chance said plan will survive until the middle of the first draft. Mysteries, with their need for some fairly intricate plotting, don’t play well with that process. I remember hearing an interview with a crime writer – I forget her name, unfortunately – who said she often didn’t work out who the criminal was until she was 80% of the way through the book, and SERIOUSLY HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE? My brain just rebels at the thought.

3. Magic-medievalism

I don’t have anything against high fantasy. I’ve read quite a few sword-and-sorcery books, and told well these stories can be quite a lot of fun. But even in the well-told ones, I read about the war between the elves and the humans that’s raged for 2000 years and think seriously, in all that time, no-one’s come up with the cannon? Or slightly more inventive siege tactics?

The whole genre seems to rely on societies that have an absolute refusal to progress. And I don’t mind reading about it for some cheerful Orc-decapitating escapism. But writing it I find kinda dull.

And yes, some of the delay with this blog post was due to coming up with a term for sword and sorcery that began with an M.

So what do I write about? As you can imagine, I had rather more to choose from here, but I’ve tried to nail down some of the broader tendencies.

1. Fairytales and mythology

If you’ve read my stories for any length of time, you’ve probably grasped that I love this stuff. I’ve got something of a fascination with the past, and these stories feel like the closest link we’ve got to the people who told them.

The flash, in particular, has them crop up over and over: Snow White, Cinderella, Cassandra (twice), and of course the Magpie stories, which started as a conscious attempt to write myths of my own.

2. Tiny bits of weird

So very many of my stories, both the flash and the longer stuff, come from taking the world as it is now, changing a couple of little things and then carrying events to their logical conclusion. It’s often in the implications that you can find ways to put a new twist on an old idea, and where a lot of the human drama can fall.

This one’s a bit of a cop out, since you can say that about entire genres, but since it’s where so many of my ideas begin, it should be in this list.

3. Boundaries

There’s something about the edges of things. It seems to be where stories are found. This could be the line between a good place and a bad one, one year and the next, different seasons, or life and death. Boundaries mean something is changing, and when something is changing, there’s something worth writing about.

So who’s next?

I have been extremely lazy about my tagging, but one person has graciously agreed to pick up the baton:

Dave Higgins – Dave has been featured in the Fauxpocalypse anthology (which I reviewed here a while ago), and his short story collection An Unquiet Calm is next on my reading list.

If you want to have a go yourself, consider this an open invitation. Let me know when you’ve posted, and I’ll add you to the list of bloggers here.

Twenty years ago, the scientists set the earth on fire.

They said it was an accident. Just temporary. But still, the ground our goats once grazed on bubbles and melts, and our house smells of sulphur.

Everyone else left, but not Father. “Hell or not,” he said, “it’s our home.”

He died soon after, choked by fumes. Enesh and I stayed. We had nowhere to go.

Now we’re getting visitors. Men in suits and large black cars. They say they’re going to do something about the burning.

We’re a developing economy. It’s very important, they said, to safeguard the gas.

I was human once, he said, licking sharpened teeth and eyeing hungrily my open flesh. But my depravity turned me into this. An abomination unto God, drinking the blood of men. Do you fear me, boy?

No, I said, returning to my painting.

You should.

Is that so? My brush flowed, catching muscle and madness.

You’d taste good, I’d wager.

And he bared his fangs and lunged at my throat.

I plucked the creature away, cast it back behind my canvas.

Sit, I said. Being evil doesn’t make you strong. You call yourself a vampire. I call you a flea.

It was seventy years past that I met a man named John Frum
That’s John Frum ‘Merica.
He said I’ll bring you cargo and riches where now you have none
‘Cause I’m John Frum ‘Merica.

So now my door stays wide open and I watch the skies for
Old John Frum ‘Merica
But when he turned his back, that was the last I ever saw
Of John Frum ‘Merica.

The priest told me I was being foolish, I’d wait seventy years more
For John Frum ‘Merica
I said you’ve waited two thousand, but who’s keeping score?
Not John Frum ‘Merica.

The Emperor Of The Universe spends most of his days sweeping streets in Cheltenham.

Most people think it’s a punishment, after the New Dawn swept him from power, tearing down his palace, burning his throne.

They let him keep the crown, though.

In fact, they insist he wears it. They call him the Sweeper-King.

It’s meant to be equal parts reminder and torture. What he was. What he now is.

But the Emperor knows better. He still rules an empire: of dust, alleys, and empty morning roadways.

Being a sweeper is a job. Being Emperor is a state of mind.

The headline said: One Little Girl Got Up On Stage In Front Of Hundreds Of People… And You’ll Never Forget What She Does At 0:54.

It was right.

The way she started to levitate, her eyes glowing with otherworldly light, and the look of twisted glee as she began to incinerate audience members… that’ll stay with me forever.

By 2:36 she was constructing an altar from bone fragments, and intoning what sounded like a summoning ritual for Nyarlathotep.

I had to close the tab at 4:22. Insectoid feelers were trying to come out of my monitor.

I liked and shared.

The photographer said later he’d never seen anyone look so calm as this poor girl, in the hole that seemed to be made for her.

She could be sleeping, he said. Are you sure she’s not just sleeping?

The crowds had gathered, hushed and quiet, as if they too were afraid to wake her.

He looked up the 86 stories she’d fallen, and down to the limousine, its roof compressed, cradling her like a duvet.

And he walked on, because she wasn’t asleep.

And he walked home, and he put the camera down, and didn’t pick it up again for years.

It was 3 o’clock, and we had to hide from the bats.

They come in their hundreds, great leathery wings blotting out the sun.

They took Annie last week. Plucked her right off the street.

I always knew you couldn’t trust genetic modification. I said sure, now it’s just being used to improve crops, but what if some madman created something dangerous?

Like, say, homicidal bat-people.

The scientists didn’t understand why anyone would do that, but I showed them. I made my point.

Maybe a little too well, because now the monster that was Annie is scratching at my door.