So, I’m not averse to a little retail therapy, as the saying goes, and given the week that just transpired, I decided to do exactly that. And it’s pretty standard that my kind of retail therapy is, well, books. Books comfort me. I like to be surrounded by them. Obviously, I also like to read them because, that’s the point. (Except when they’re just there in a tower, an obesisk of unread books, serving as a totem to whatever STORY GOD you worship.)
And I thought, hey, maybe you want some books, too. It won’t fix anything, not out there, not in the world. But maybe books fix a little something inside ourselves. One brick returned to a crumbling wall.
As such, hey, I’mma give some books away.
See, I have an ARC (advanced reader’s copy) of The Staircase in the Woods and I’d sure like to send it to one of you.
And I’ll send some other books, too. Whatever I have lying around. Might be some random stuff — I’ll definitely throw in a copy of Gentle Writing Advice and You Can Do Anything, Magic Skeleton, but also some other fictiony bits too. Not sure what I’ve got on the shelves but expect a box of books to come your way if you win.
I’ll sign ’em! Personalize ’em too if you want.
The way to enter is easy: just go into the comments below, and leave a comment with a book recommendation. You must leave the title and author name, at least. You’re free, but not required, to also leave more of a comment as to why you liked it or whatever. It’ll be nice to share the book love.
Share some book love, maybe get some books.
I pay shipping, you pay nothing.
Caveat here is, it’s open to US folks only. I know, I want to do international, but the shipping is high, and the chance to lose a package is also higher than domestic, and that would be sad for everyone. So, US only, I’m afraid.
I’ll run this till Friday, November 15th, 9AM EST. I’ll pick a winner randomly, and will send the books out in the following week.
Sound fair?
COOL.
All right. You know the drill. Get to the comments. Leave a book recommendation (title, author), you might get some cool books (including Staircase!) from yours truly.
I don’t know that I’m ready to write much else since the thing I posted other day, but maybe I’m never really ready to write anything at all. And writing is what I do, for better or for worse; it’s how I engage with and interact with and challenge the world. My writing is a toddler’s hands: they reach out clumsily, grabbing stuff and shoving it in my drooling mouth.
So, here I am, and here I write.
Sensibly, or not. Cohesively, or not.
I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what to tell you to do. I’m only guessing at it. It’s purely me fumbling in the fog, through the dark. As always this place is for me more than it is for you. I can only tell you what I would tell myself in this moment.
I think first and foremost, you have to be okay with not knowing what to do. This cannot last, of course. Eventually we have to do something, we have to move forward, we have to take steps somewhere, in some direction. But it’s okay to just be all up in your what-the-fucks right now. We’re just days past the revelation of a huge reversion of our expectations and understandings of the world and people around us and it hasn’t even really happened yet. So it’s fine if you’re flailing. Or just staring into the void. The void welcomes your gaze, and the void understands.
I think it’s okay to not be okay. That’s true every day, for any reason, but doubly triply multiplicatively true now. You can just be Not Okay. Sure, sure, hashtag resist and all that, but also resist anyone telling you how you have to feel or cope or what you must do or how there are all these easy angry answers if you just look for them. I think it’s okay to sit quietly in the darkness and regard the darkness for what it is without someone telling you to turn on the light already. I used the metaphor a long time ago that there is a toilet on fire in the middle of the room, and sometimes it feels like no one else sees it. I think it’s okay right now to look away from it, to not want to sit and look at the fucking thing. And it’s also okay to see it directly, to stare right at it. It’s fine to point at it and say, “Hey, there’s a toilet on fire in the middle of the room.” And maybe we need to find others who see it, who say:
“Yeah, I see it too.”
Which means it’s important to reach out. Don’t be alone if you don’t want to be alone. (Alternatively: be alone if it’s what helps you and how you process. It’s not healthy for everyone all the time but sometimes, like I said, you just wanna sit quietly in the dark.) Community doesn’t always mean some big, broad-reaching coalition. Family doesn’t have to mean the people with whom you share blood. It’s good to extend a hand out of the darkness and see who else is there. And accept a searching hand in return. We’re going to need one another and that doesn’t mean needing everyone or being there for everyone, either. It just means reaching out to someone.
You gotta take care of yourself. Drink water, eat real food, try to exercise if you can. Brush your teeth. Floss. Shower. Seek nature. Seek people you trust and love. Be near art, make art, consider art.
It’s also fine to like, eat some fuckin’ ice cream, I dunno. There was an injury, a grievous one, and it’s okay to take a moment to not be perfect, as long as it doesn’t knock you off of a better, more essential path. I’m not saying like, “Hey, maybe cocaine?” — but I think you’re allowed a “sit on the couch and watch movies and eat a whole goddamn brick of Halloween candy” period, yeah? Day or two after a funeral no one’s like, “Hey maybe cool it on the lasagna.” Just eat the fucking lasagna. You’re in mourning. It’s mourning lasagna. You can be better next week. It’s fine. It has to be fine.
You can stay away from the news, if you want. The world will happen without your eyes on it. If your tooth is broken, no need to stick a screwdriver in it right now just to jiggle it around.
You can scream if you want to. I mean it. Yell. Howl. Primal shit.
Get an MMA dummy. Punch the fuck out of it.
Write a whole page of ALL CAPS ANGER. Or small caps love and hope.
Play Dragon Age: Dawnguard. It’s good.
Go learn a thing. A weird fact. Strange history. Learn about what lies at the bottom of the ocean. Learn how to make a better Molotov cocktail.
Find birds, listen to birds, do whatever they tell you to do.
This can be a period of radical, intense self-care. That can mean whatever it can mean. It can mean administrative shit like getting your vaccines up to date, renewing your passports, getting any healthcare done that needs imminent doing. A small act, “Oh, I need to renew my car’s registration,” can feel fulfilling. No, this does not change the world, but it feels good, it gives you motivation to do more, to steady and strengthen yourself for whatever is to come next — little bricks making up the house that is you.
(And hey, nobody hates a dopamine hit.)
Plan a trip. Take a drive. Pet a dog. I dunno.
Be angry or be numb or be sad. Be horrified, be optimistic, be pessimistic, be the light, be the void. As long as you’re still here, being.
Get off social media if it makes sense to do so. It’ll be here later.
If you’re still on it, maybe block wantonly. Don’t wade into it with silly, shitty people. They’re vampires looking to drain away your life, leaving you enervated and raw, doing little for you but wasting your time.
I also think this is a good time to resist easy answers about *gesticulates broadly.* We will be looking in the coming days for simple correctives, as if the bullet that killed our hope came from one gun instead of from a firing squad holding AK-47s. As if all we have to do is find the one magic thing to fix. But nothing works like that. Especially something this big, this deranged. The fallacy of the single cause is real, and for things like this, there’s never one reason, one answer. It’s ten things. It’s a hundred. I have long been fascinated with the discord and complexity found in cascading failures, and there’s no reason to believe that the sheer intricacy of human society is not subject to the will of such unpredictable waves of chaos and failure.
(That said, were I pressed to point out some of the big issues, I’d say it sure doesn’t help having a profit-poisoned media environment, a propaganda-poisoned social media environment, and billionaires running rampant without any checks on what they can say or do or buy. That’s a good place to start, and even there, perhaps you’ll find a few hesitant steps forward: you can remove from your life those mainstream media outlets who sanewashed Trump but who will now be championing the resistance against him. Give money to Propublica. Subscribe to the Philadelphia Inquirer or Rolling Stone or Teen Vogue. I do not endorse it yet because I’m only just poking around it, but Adam Conover seems to recommend Ground News, which would appear to provide glimpses of news narratives from varying partisan angles. Though it may also be a sponsor of his show, Factually, and in that sense may be a biased recommendation on his part. I don’t know!)
(Also, I can assure you the reason for the loss was not trans people or “the woke mind virus” or “women aren’t nice enough to men.” Do not throw vulnerable people under the tires of democracy just because you think they’re in your way. That’s how the other side talks and thinks, okay?)
I don’t really know. And it’s important to recognize, you don’t know either. We don’t know what’s to come or how bad it’ll get it. It may be worse than we expect or a little better, and it’ll almost certainly be stupider than we think, because fascism is surprisingly oafish, which makes it feel all the worse that it succeeds when it does, because of how fucking ridiculous it is. We don’t know why this all happened or what. We can only know that we are here in this moment and we are together in some capacity, and we will have to form or reinforce coalitions and communities with as much grace as we can muster, but right now, it’s okay to just sit in the darkness and regard the void and think about trees and Thanksgiving and somewhere you’d like to visit and an errand you need to run and a video game you’d like to replay. Just be good to yourself and then, by proxy, to those around you. The work will come. The work will get done. For now, breathe and think of birds.
A biting, post-modern horror about day jobs and monsters – one of which will devour you whole, but perhaps not the one that you think. What will you put up with to not have to go back to the day job you hated? A lot apparently, a whole HELL of a lot.
Noah desperately needs a new job that involves less blood and piss than his current one. So, when he spots an ad for a newspaper with ‘No experience preferred’, he puts on his good shirt and marches down to their average-looking office to unknowingly sign his life away.
Malachia is the only human left in the City of Silence and she spends her time wandering its empty, bone-filled streets. Until one day she finds a lone figure hunched over a typewriter, his fingers enmeshed with the keys. Could he be the answer to finding her missing girlfriend?
Propelled by their pursuits for rent money and truth, Noah and Malachia are pushed to their limits by a sinister media powerhouse. Will either of them survive the darkness that ensues?
Writing dialogue is fun and that’s how books get huge
Before this novel, I had, obviously, never written something this long before. I had always marveled at the PHYSICAL MASS of words that some writers could commit to the page. I had also sort of rolled my eyes when a writer would talk about being SURPRISED by what the characters had to say or where conversations went. (I mean you’re writing them how the fuck is it a surprise) And then I started writing character dialogue regularly and I had that AHA moment. They were right and I was wrong, these characters who I thought I had known were some CHATTY MOTHERFUCKERS and were just going on for thousands of words when my mental outline had been much, MUCH shorter. In fact, I had to reign them in often to keep from just bloating the book with constant banter. That’s how books get big, uncontrollable literary ghosts that just whisper nonstop in your ear and demand that you transpose all their inane conversations.
The whispering shadow behind my fridge has some very good ideas and is not just always a judgy jerk
This writing experience also taught me that you need to let go and rely on others in the writing and editing process at times. Other writer friends, editors, the WHISPERING SHADOW THAT LURKS HUNGRILY BEHIND YOUR FRIDGE. That last one was a true treasure of a discovery. I mean I had always known it was there right? But normally it just would comment on the ripeness of my teeth, the ripeness of my friends’ teeth, the ripeness of…well you get the picture. But while I was working on this book it really had some insightful things to say about the pacing and overall structure of the novel. We would stay up late many nights workshopping particularly tricky sections of the book . . . and commenting on the ripeness of the character’s teeth.
Characters and books really do have a voice that surprises you
I did not set out to write a funny book. I have been informed that I have written a funny book. Just like being surprised by character dialogue spooling out of control prior to writing this I had been skeptical of statements like “I had no idea the plot was going there” or “I am as surprised as you are that X character did X action” Like how is that possible when you are the brain it is coming from? Whelp. It is possible. In my little secret writerly heart I had hoped to write something in the tone of someone like Brian Evenson and instead the novel has been described as “Douglas Adams lit on fire and with row after row of glistening teeth” which I am totally okay with, but it was quite the experience to be writing and just watch it run away into this entirely different tonal direction that what you had first set out to write.
There are many variations of ripeness for human teeth.
I heard something once call the human mouth an orchard planted in secret and waiting for the harvest. That kinda sticks with you and in fact there are like whole charts for judging the ripeness of human teeth and when they are best plucked. Who knew? Now you do.
Sometimes done is good and you can always write a sequel
This book took far too long to write and if my editors had let me continue pecking away it would have been twice as long. It is good, I think, to allow wiser heads to guide you towards the exits when you’ve started building hallways over where the doorways used to be and adding new wings and subterranean annexes on what was meant to be a summer cottage. That is not to say you can’t immediately start working on that cabin in the woods for the upcoming winter. I’ve already started outlining the sequel to HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA and am champing at the bit to really dig into the writing of it. But I would still be probably adding new parapets and linen rooms to this house if left to my devices. I am happy to be instead poring over the blueprints of what is to come.
Jordan Shiveley is a writer and designer who lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their work has appeared in venues such as Nightmare Magazine, Baffling Magazine, The Best Horror of the Year Volume 15 and various anthologies from Neon Hemlock among others as well as roleplaying games. Their Debut novel HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA is now available from Unbound. (Also, editor’s note: Jordan is the one responsible for Voidmerch, of which there is WENDIG MERCH if you are so inclined to seek it.)
There are bluebirds in our apple tree this morning and I am sad for them. Sad for the tree, too. The tree is a crabapple tree, technically. It’s an old tree, bursting with fruit. The tree doesn’t know who won or lost an election or what an election is. The birds don’t know, either, and I’m happy they get to have that. We also haven’t had meaningful, measurable rain in five, six weeks now. We’ve wildfires popping up just a few miles away. It’s November 6th and will be 80 degrees today. The tree and the birds must know they’re thirsty. They will know if fire comes for them.
I’m sure the rain will come, and I’m hopeful we will be untouched by fire, but I also know the lack of rain will dry us out more often, just as I know it’ll flood more often, and I know the fires will come more often, and the tornadoes, too. And you like to hope that someone in charge has a plan, that they believe in this reality going on around us, that they share in the same reality we do. But we’re not there anymore. We lost that yesterday. We lost a lot yesterday. (Perhaps chief among them the illusion that we shared one country, or even one collective reality.) I don’t know why or how we lost it, precisely. We can unpack it however we want to — the mainstream media sanewashed the man; the woman was a woman and men would rather choose to control women than vote for them; don’t forget the racism, can’t forget the racism; the woman ran the wrong campaign and cozied up to the GOP and didn’t say enough about Gaza and global warming; it was the economy, stupid; it’s Russia; it’s disinformation and misinformation and Musk and RFK and the price of milk and the cost of rent and something about the border and something about COVID and —
What I know is that I don’t know. What I know is the things I thought I knew, or that I believed were true, really aren’t, and that once more I exist in need of a word, perhaps a German one, that expresses both the act of being shocked and a total lack of shock at the exact same time.
I knew he could win. I half-expected it. And yet all parts of me strained against the illogic of it, the sheer incredulity of the possibility of his win. People looked at his first four years, at COVID, at January 6th, at all his promises, his crimes, at all his people, at all the ones who told us he was a fascist, a dictator, an anti-democratic nightmare, and they said, “Yeah, him again, let’s fucking go.” And they pressed the self-destruct button, using the system of democracy to attempt to undo the system of democracy.
People chose this. In considerable number. This, grotesquely, is democracy in action. Though a democracy mauled into a cruder shape by disinformation.
This is a doom post. I don’t want it to be (and I’m sorry for it) but I also don’t want to be flippant or twee. I don’t want to hashtag-resist you into trying to have hope on a dark day. Perhaps some dark days must simply be dark and we must be in that darkness. Maybe we need to let people have their hopelessness today. Let them have their doom. Do not scold. Give them no stirring platitudes nor poetry of resistance. Just let people sit and ruminate however they must on the hard mad road ahead.
Because that road ahead is hard, and it will be maddening. We’re in some very serious trouble. The climate, the environment, those bluebirds and that tree, are at stake here. Our friends — especially transgender folks, cisgender women, really anybody who isn’t a straight white Christian dude with money — is going to be worse for wear at some point soon, even if they voted for him. It’ll be up to us to help them, to protect our friends, even when we don’t know how, even when we may need that protection ourselves.
Our democracy is in danger — all the lights on the console are blinking red, and the klaxons are deafening. Is there a deportation force coming? Are we really going to ban vaccines? Are we going to put Musk and RFK Jr. in charge of important levers and buttons? How deeply will we cement a corroded, cruel SCOTUS majority and for how long, and will we even be able to turn the tables on that again? I don’t know. It really isn’t good. A lot was on the line yesterday and while I like to think we, as the at-this-point-cringey-cliche goes, left it all on the field. The stakes were high and we lost. And there may be a lot of suffering in the wake of that.
This isn’t a post with a plan, this isn’t a pep talk, this isn’t about hope. I’m wallowing in the doom for a moment. Maybe it’s foolish. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing that, or telling you about it. But I wanted to say it, to be true to where my head and my heart are at. I want it to be okay to feel shitty. To not force joy. I don’t want some artifice of hope. To be a lantern in this tunnel right now feels false. I feel like I need to be in the darkness here, to be one with it, to become part of this new, lightless reality. I’ll get there. I’ll get back to a better place. But right now I want to realize how much trouble we’re in before I tell you how we deal with it. Maybe the worry and the fear will motivate me. I don’t know. I’m sitting with it. I’m considering the trouble, the doom, the darkness. I’m thinking about the bluebirds and the crabapple tree. And I’m hoping somewhere in the darkness I find a way forward.
If you need it, there’s 988 Lifeline — call or chat.
It’s difficult to see how he wins, if we’re being honest. That is to say, if we’re also being logical. But we do not live in an honest age. Or a logical one.
Still — reality has stacked itself against him. The pattern isn’t good, though patterns do not always hold true, and few of them are forever. Just the same, increased voter turnout has yet so far not rewarded Republicans very much, and this cycle we are definitely seeing increased turnout. Polling, which already slightly seems to favor her, also has been wonkier and wonkier with each cycle, largely undercounting Democratic momentum. And each cycle since 2016 has more or less been a repudiation of the man, a turn away from him and many of his chosen acolytes. His own staff of the past doesn’t support him. He’s a felon. He’s suffering some manner of cognitive decline, where a brain that was once made of pudding is now made of old pudding, pudding that gets that gross chitinous skin on top of it, pudding that starts to leak its own brown deliquescence out onto the countertop. He’s old. He’s hateful. He brings little joy and mostly — well, it’s not even anger, it’s not even wrath, not precisely. It’s grievances. A thousand petty grievances, leaking from his pores, from his pale lips, from his puckered butthole eyes. Denethor with the tomato. As for her — a campaign that was relegated to feeling like two old sacks of white guy slugging it out turned into a thing of hope and delight and potential, even if that potential is complicated by the crass realities of politics. She’s got energy. She’s got momentum. She’s got bigger fucking rallies, and if the size matters, then she’s got size on lock.
Were you to dangle me over a pit of crocodiles and demand I pick who I thought would win this horrible contest on Tuesday, a contest between a savvy, capable woman and a bigoted inside-out Halloween mask, I’d say I think she’s going to win. Not just because I want her to. But because that’s just how it looks from here.
But looks can be deceiving.
And he can very much win.
He can win because we may not clearly see the deeply sunken groundswell of hate that refuses to report on itself, that will soon burst forth like an infection. He can win if there are enough aggrieved young men, mostly white, but not all, each taught that things aren’t working out for them because They, with the conspiratorial capital T, are viciously working against them from the shadows, from the borders, from the gender-neutral bathrooms. He can win because, simply put, there are horrible people who like him, who like that he’s horrible. He can win because some of them have been hiding in plain sight. Look no further than that neighbor who you liked very much, who you thought was normal, who one morning went out and stuck one of his fucking signs on their lawn. He can win because logic and honesty do not always win the day. He can win with racism and sexism. He can win because we live in the upside-down and chaos definitely reigns.
And I think it’s important to realize that if he wins, which he can —
We are pretty fucked.
I do not want to be a huge bummer — after all, it’s Wednesday, it’s Hump Day, we’re over the hump, we do some humping, whatever, I dunno what it even means — but we are very seriously in super-fucked territory if he wins.
Which he can.
I am tired, of course, of existential elections — and sure, all elections, big and small, are important in ways that are obvious and in ways that are not, but very few of them feel quite like an apocalyptic hinge. Where if the door swings one way, we all get to leave and go out and play in the sun — but if it swings the other way, the lock clicks and we’re trapped in a house on fire.
If he wins, climate change — already at a tipping point — falls off the agenda, and shit definitely tips in the other direction, probably for good.
If he wins, bigotry wins, too — our trans friends are in trouble, our migrant friends are in trouble, women are in trouble. They’re already targets in this life, but now the bullseyes get a whole lot bigger. They’ll suffer.
If he wins, abortion rights are gone, gone, gone. Women will die in numbers far greater than they do now. IVF, also gone. Birth control, gone. Not right away. But the front sights are set. They’re targets. We’re targets.
If he wins, Elon Musk will be in charge of the economy, which is like — well, how do you quantify that with a metaphor? He’s already the best worst example. He bought Twitter, fucked its rock-solid branding, then drove it off a cliff into a swamp. The Cybertruck is easily the most embarrassing American product released, and that’s in a country where we have Shake Weights and hats that say FBI FEDERAL BOOB INSPECTOR. Musk wants to cut all “non-essential” spending, which is to say, he wants to set fire to the American economy, either because he’s a skipping dipshit or because he knows if he crashes the car they can sell the scrap metal to Russia.
If he wins, RFK Jr. will be in charge of health policy, which is like — well, it’s like if you let Elon Musk run the economy. They want vaccine mandates in schools gone. Vaccines. Vaccines. Easily one of the most crucial victories for civilization, they want to kick to the curb. We’ll all be licking roadkill and sharing brainworms. Elon Musk’s mind-chips will have a little glass terrarium for RFK Jr.’s brainworms. A match made in hell.
If he wins, democracy is skewered. That’s not my promise. It’s his. And he has a Supreme Court who has confirmed that he has a truly alarming freedom from consequences. Worse, he’ll get to pick more justices, potentially.
If he wins, it’ll be another four years — and maybe more — where we wake up every day, every fucking day, and the moment we glance at the news we know we’re going to be inundated with some new stupid shitty thing he said or did or both, some racist shit, some sexist shit, some ignorant shit, one more thing broken and left on the floor in shards. Guardrails kicked over, systems dismantled, safety nets sliced into ribbons. Every day, every goddamn day we’ll have to joylessly wake up and bear witness to the great dismantling.
If he wins, Russia wins. Ukraine is in deep. And Netanyahu wins, too, and Palestine ends up as beachfront property, with blood soaking the sand.
If he wins, billionaires and corporations get more rights than we do, and our already-termite-chewed regulatory state will collapse into sawdust. Lead in our toys, listeria in our food, planes breaking in half, every car an 8-bit dumpster. What brittle trust we have now, stepped on like a cookie, turned into a scattering of crumbs.
If he wins, the next pandemic — bird flu, if I had to put money on it, though in this hell-age it’ll probably be aerosolized gonorrhea or a zombie plague– is gonna get us real good. It’ll be worse, somehow, than the last one. What, you think RFK, Jr. is going to fix it? We’ll all have to line up at our chiropractor to get our daily ivermectin shots as we cough and puke and boil.
If he wins, information will mean nothing. Misinformation and disinformation will be the best we get. A hurricane of bullshit.
If he wins, AI will be absolutely everywhere.
If he wins, truth will be absolutely nowhere.
If he wins, the rich get richer, and the rest get fucked.
If he wins…
It’ll all come crashing down.
All of it.
Everything. And though some may romanticize this as some essential breaking of a corrupt and corroded cycle, the romantasy of it dies under the pile of wreckage and the heaps of actual dead people.
And the thing is, what I’ve mentioned here, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Haven’t talked about education, or surveillance, or book bans, or holy fuck, how he has threatened to use the military on the “enemies from within,” enemies he has identified as being his political opponents.
It’ll be a nightmare, unfolding slow, then fast, where we get front row seats watching a dystopia form to carry us through an apocalypse.
But we have another way.
You gotta vote, and you gotta vote Harris / Walz. You gotta help others do the same. And I know, there are certainly policies you don’t agree with of hers, and here I encourage you to watch Bernie Sanders on that point. It’s good to have principles, but not when the execution of those principles serves only your moral comfort and not, say, the greater good. The perfect cannot be the enemy of that good. We choose the path that gets us collectively closer to a better place — not the path that will take us into only darkness.
If you’re like me, you’re currently gnawing yourself down to the nerve bundles. You know how when you have an appointment at 3PM, you have a hard time accomplishing anyfuckingthing until 3PM? The election is like that 3PM appointment for me. Mostly I’m just sitting here, staring forward, trying to accomplish something but mostly only rawdogging reality like it’s a bumpy overseas flight. But there are things you can do.
EVEN GREATER LONDON, 1887: a vast, uninterrupted urban plane encompassing the entire lower half of England and, for complex reasons, only the upper third of the Isle of Wight… The immense Tower casts electricity across the sky itself, powering the mind-boggling mechanisms of the city below; the notorious engineer-army swarms through its very veins, building, demolishing, and rebuilding whatever they see fit; and – at the heart of it all – sits the country’s first ever private detective agency.
Archibald Fleet and Clara Entwhistle hoped things would pick up quickly for their new enterprise. No one is taking them seriously, but their break will come soon. Definitely… Probably.
Meanwhile, police are baffled by a series of impossible bank robberies, their resources wholly absorbed by the case. Which means that when a woman witnesses a kidnapping, Fleet-Entwhistle Private Investigations is the only place she can turn for help. Luckily they’re more than happy to oblige.
But what’s the motive behind the kidnap? As Clara and Fleet investigate, they find more than they could ever have imagined…
1. Don’t wait for permission
My debut novel (co-written with my husband Chris) wouldn’t exist if we had gone about things in the traditional way, that is to say, if we had waited for someone to give us permission to write the thing we wanted to write.
Chris and I have spent a long time writing comedy together, and spent many years performing with our comedy troupe at fringe festivals around the UK in the hope that we would be “discovered” by one of the gatekeepers who could give us permission to write something for a wider audience. This didn’t happen, and eventually we got fed up with waiting and decided we’d find a way to reach that wider audience ourselves. This led to us creating the audio-drama podcast Victoriocity: a neo-Victorian detective comedy. This decision was one of the best we ever made, because after the show’s second season we were contacted by our publisher (Gollancz) who encouraged us to write a novel set in the same world. That novel is High Vaultage,but it’s a standalone story that doesn’t rely on prior knowledge of the series.
What we learned was this: don’t wait for permission from the gatekeepers. We spent so many years waiting for someone to invite us to write for radio or TV, following the usual advice of touring live shows and submitting (unsuccessfully) to the very limited and hugely competitive open-door initiatives run by traditional broadcasters. Victoriocity was a way to showcase our writing and build an audience without having to wait for a commission, and it led to opportunities including the book contract and – funnily enough – writing for a traditional broadcaster (in our case the BBC). That’s not to say writing an audio drama is the right route for everyone, more that it is worth considering alternative routes to achieve your writing goals.
2. A good editor is worth their weight in gold
Chris and I were extremely lucky to be paired with the supremely talented editor Claire Ormsby-Potter at Gollancz. One of the biggest challenges of writing is not always being able to see where the cracks are. You can have such a clear idea of what your story is and where it is going, that you can miss different – often better – opportunities for story direction and development. This is where a good editor can help transform your book into something much stronger than your initial draft, something we definitely learned whilst editing High Vaultage with Claire (who would never let us get away with using clichés like ‘worth their weight in gold’).
Our novel is essentially a cozy crime mystery set in an alternate Victorian London. In one chapter, Chris decided that a fun location to visit would be one of the many building sites run by the in-world engineer-army of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In the first draft this was simply a colorful backdrop against which one of our detective protagonists could learn some information that would propel the plot forward. This led to our favorite editorial note to date: ‘you’ve accidentally invented a doomsday weapon as a casual aside, perhaps we should… do something about that?’
3. We remain as preoccupied as the Victorians with trying to make sense out of chaos
Floating over London in a hot air balloon in 1862, Henry Mayhew reflected on the ‘special delight’ the mind experiences when it is able to ‘comprehend all the minute particulars of a subject under one associate whole’ (‘A Balloon View of London’). Invoking the metaphor of London as a ‘monster’, Mayhew casts the city as a frightening, unfamiliar thing of chaos. Yet the piece as a whole works to subdue this threat, to tame this monster by demystifying it through the demonstration that, given the right vantage point, it is capable of being viewed and understood as ‘one associate whole’. As Mayhew observes the vast cityscape from the air, he renders the ‘Great Metropolis’ comprehensible ‘at one single glance’, creating from the ‘previous confusion of the diverse details’ a ‘form and order of a perspicuous unity.’ Mayhew achieves this feat through the clever use of metaphors that describe the ‘strange conglomeration’ of the London landscape in terms both familiar and domestic: meadows become ‘table covers’ and steam trains ‘ordinary tea-kettles.’
Mayhew’s desire to make the world around us familiar and unimposing, to make it comprehensible and communicable in everyday terms, has always reminded me of the Victorian novelist’s desire to create the sense that human mastery over the world is possible (see further: Peter Brooks’ The Realist Vision, Lyn Pykett’s The Sensation Novel, Raymond Williams’ The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence). I think a large part of what lay behind that impulse to render the world knowable and communicable in meaningful ways was the sense, or fear, that the world might just be chaotic and meaningless. There are a multitude of reasons why people felt this way, not least the huge technological and scientific advancements that completely transformed the way people thought about, for example, time and space (the coming of train travel, the invention of the telegraph) or even their own existence (Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theories of evolution).
High Vaultage is set in Victorian London, albeit a reimagined one, and during the writing process I think we learned that part of the appeal of writing about Victorian England is that we are still troubled by the same worry that everything, in the end, might just meaningless chaos, especially as we are ourselves experiencing our own age of techno-bafflement. In many ways I think High Vaultage and the chaos of its world is a working out of our own feelings and fears about the tumult of our own lives. But we hope – like any good mystery story or Victorian novel – the resolution of High Vaultage brings the comfort that there is meaning behind everything after all, even if that meaning is to be found in the relationships, and in particular friendship, with those around us.
4. Out-imagining the Victorians is really hard
The setting of our novel is Even Greater London: a nineteenth-century megalopolis which covers the entire lower half of England. The idea for a London that never stopped expanding came from Chris, and was inspired by Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower. Tesla’s tower – a project that began on the eastern seaboard of the US and was eventually abandoned – was a very early experiment with wireless power transmission. The tower was intended for communications, but Tesla’s experiments also reveal that he believed it was possible to beam electrical power wirelessly through the atmosphere. In Even Greater London, this wireless transmission of energy has been achieved, resulting in a supercharged industrial (and electrical) revolution. This setup was intended as a way for us to pose the questions: what if the Victorians, but uninhibited by the limits of their technological progress of the time? What if the Victorians, but more bonkers? What if the Victorians, but more bizarre? What we learned was that this imaginative exercise is reallyhard because not only are you contending with the gigantic minds of geniuses like Nikola Tesla, you’re also competing with people who already dreamed up some pretty bonkers inventions.
A perusal of various Victorian periodicals reveal countless advertisements and designs for electric corsets, oscillating bathtubs, tent-coats, drawbridge pavements to deter burglars, a transparent spherical velocipede (which looked like some sort of early zorb ball prototype), and street lighting suspended from hot air balloons which doubled as viewing platforms with telegraphs in order to create a panoptic network across the city in a sort of terrifying early imagining of CCTV. I even once read about a piano oven that was designed to bake the perfect meringues while you delighted guests with, presumably, whatever musical piece paired best with a pavlova.
5. Always say what happened to the dog
When we had what we felt was a good draft of High Vaultage, we sent it out to a few beta readers to get some much-needed feedback. When that feedback came in, there were a number of things that a few of the readers had picked up on or agreed about – aspects of the novel that needed to be improved or better drawn, for example. But there was no one thing that everyone unanimously agreed on. With one exception: the dog. At the start of the novel our detective protagonists have just set up Even Greater London’s first detective agency, and it’s not going well. To indicate this we introduced the idea that the only active case they had was a lost dog, a case which they had taken to appease their landlady and owner of the downstairs coffee shop and to whom they owed rent. In the draft sent to beta readers, the mention of the poor lost beagle was merely meant as chapter one scene and scenario setting, as a way to indicate to the reader that business wasn’t exactly booming for our detective duo. But it turns out there is no such thing as an incidental dog: the readers demanded to know what became of the missing hound. And who are we to argue?
Jen Sugden is one of the co-creators of the audio drama podcast Victoriocity, a comic sci-fi detective thriller set in a reimagined Victorian past. She holds a PhD in Victorian Literature from Royal Holloway, University of London where her research focussed on nineteenth-century sensation and detective fiction. Alongside her studies, Jen began writing and performing comedy with her now husband and co-writer Chris Sugden, who she met whilst an undergraduate at Oxford University. After a number of years performing live improvised and scripted comedy together, the pair moved into writing audio drama and were part of the writing team behind the BBC Sounds weird fiction anthology series Murmurs.
Originally from Doncaster, Jen now lives in Oxford with Chris, their son, and two intermittently obedient cairn terriers.
