Looking back over my emails, I am reminded that it was this week in the Ancient Year 2011, when my super-agent Stacia Decker sold my first original novel, Blackbirds, to Angry Robot Books. That book, about a young woman with a very foul mouth and a terrible attitude who can also see how you’re going to die when she touches you, took five years to write and two years to publish (a year to sell, a year to build up to its release). I wrote the sequel to it, Mockingbird, in thirty days. From there, I’ve had a fairly successful — and, to be sure, privileged-as-fuck — career. In that time, I’ve published 23 novels, plus two books of writing advice, a book of magic skeletons lovingly drawn by Natalie Metzger, not to mention a few novellas, a handful of comics, and some other miscellaneous debris. I’ve two more books coming out this year, and another three novels contracted after that, and another book of writing advice. I’ve met wonderful people, readers and authors and idols, not to mention amazing booksellers, librarians, and publishing humans. I got to work in (and then mayyyyybe get blacklisted from?) Star Wars. I get to do this as my full-time job from inside the weird wonderful box that is my murder shed writer shed. It’s been a lot more good than it has bad.

And, and, and and and, yesterday I just completed the first draft of a new book — Wayward, the sequel to Wanderers, which currently is clocking in at almost exactly the same word count: ~280,000 words. I started writing it in September, a book about the after-effects of an apocalyptic global pandemic, written during a *checks notes* global pandemic. It’s a weird book. I don’t know if it’s a good book. I enjoyed it. It’s epic. My glorious editor, Tricia Narwani, will know how to reduce it to its constituent atoms in order to rebuild it into something better.

So, here we are.

I am a lucky boy.

Initially, my plan was, let’s revisit the career and figure out what the hell I’ve learned. Did I learn anything? Can I tell people what that thing was? After all, I’m a writer, and this is a blog. Listicles are a thing, even if they sound a little like testicles? I could do a classic return to the 25 Things series which populated this space for many, many years. But —

Ennh.

Ennh?

Ennh.

I’ve said so much about writing. Do I have twenty-five new things to tell you? Probably not. I know less about writing now than I did ten years ago. Some of that is born off of the hollow, callow confidence of youth — some of that comes from the rigors of a hopscotching career bouncing from this genre to that format to this style and back again. I have learned that I don’t know how to write a book, and that’s a very good thing. I learned that when I finish writing a book, I’m a different writer from when I began. And when I start the next book, I’m a different writer again. Every book demands you be the writer to write that book and that book alone. Your process can change book to book, chapter to chapter, day to day. You learn a lesson with one book that doesn’t apply to the next. As I am wont to say, this shit ain’t math. You can’t plug your collected reagents into the crafting table and get a diamond pick-axe. It’s a different adventure every time, because that is the nature of adventure. If it was the same every time? Well, it wouldn’t be a fucking adventure, would it?

So, instead of twenty-five things I learned, I instead thought–

Is there one thing?

Is there one lesson I would attempt to impart to others, even knowing full well that writing advice is bullshit, that it is a product of survivorship bias and would end up a piece of advice guaranteed to be useful only to the writer who gives it?

It took me a little while to realize what I would impart.

And what I would impart is this:

You need to know thyself as a writer.

You need to know who you are.

That’s easily said, but heroically done.

Before I get too into the weeds, though, let’s talk about what that even means.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of, well, okay, you need confidence to be a writer. Or you need, what, skill? Talent? Is talent even a thing? (Probably not.) Ah! A process, that’s it, you need a single-bullet one-size-fits-all process. We accept this, and so we begin to mythologize our processes, our standards, our ways and means of doing this thing we do. (It’s often in this place, at this time, that we start to offer advice to others. As we internalize our process, we tell others how to do the same with theirs.) This feels like Knowing Thyself. “This is what I do,” you say. “This is how I accomplish it.” It becomes codified. It becomes folklore. It’s the legend we tell of ourselves.

And it’s… maybe mostly bullshit.

It is not, in fact, Knowing Thyself.

What I mean is this: knowing your process is not the same thing as knowing yourself. Process is just recipe. It’s an Ikea instruction manual. But what you’re doing is telling stories, making art. Yes, there is procedure and process, but at the end of the day, your process will inevitably fail you. The recipe will stop working. You have the instruction manual to build a Billy Bookcase but now you’re making a Fjärngblorg Swedish Fornication Chair, and lemme tell ya, that is a whole different animal.

When your process fails you, it can destroy you. Short term, long term, it can cut your throat. It’ll make you feel like an impostor. It’ll make you feel like you’re lost in the woods. Except —

If you know yourself as a writer, that failure becomes understood. It’s expected.

It becomes a natural part of this journey: the failure and transformation of process.

Death and rebirth. Haughty, weighty shit, I know, and I’m sorry it sounds so fucking airy, but that’s what it feels like — every story, you’re reborn, and somewhere writing that story, you die again.

Forgive the following ambles into Metaphor Town, but it’s how I think, how I convey wriggly ideas, and it’s how I (attempt to, probably poorly) instruct.

Think of it this way: when you move into a new domicile (house, apartment, bear cave, elf tree, whatever), it is new to you. You might wake up in the middle of the night early on and forget how to find the bathroom. You might not even remember where you are. You will have light switches that are a literal mystery to you. They don’t seem to turn anything on. You will smell smells and hear sounds that are odd, maybe even off-putting. But as the weeks and months progress, you begin to know your house, don’t you? You know its creaks and groans, and can differentiate the normal “house settling sound” from “that is a hoofed demon sneaking into my kitchen to steal my lemon cookies, that motherfucker.” You know when a smell is just the heater kicking on and when the cookie demon is smoking a cigar. You can make your way through the house in the dark.

Or, think of it another way: when you learn how to cook, it’s all about the recipe and the ingredients. You arrange the items, you put them into the pot in the order that is described, and you eat the thing you made. Maybe it’s bad, good, great, whatever. But after years of cooking, you change that a little — or, at least, I did. You start to learn how to rescue a dish that’s going south. You start to learn what will kick up a dish, and not simply in a way that is simplistically designed as “better,” but that is instead “more keyed to your preferences.” You learn that you prefer this chili powder to that chili powder. You also go beyond just ingredients, right? “This needs acid,” you think, and you think about what acids are available to you (citrus, vinegar, fermentation, Xenomorph innards) and what they bring to the dish and why that taste is essential to you.

Or, let me try this metaphor, see how it lands: I experience the joy (/sarcasm) of generalized anxiety. Panic disorder, all that happy shit. It’s not severe, but it’s ever-present. The trick is, I know it. I view it like heartburn: I know there are triggers, I know what many of them are (and a few I don’t), I know usually how to avoid it, I know how to medicate against it, and I know that when those first two things fail (avoidance, medication), I know how to deal with the actual attack if it happens. (Ironically, anxiety can cause heartburn, and heartburn can trigger anxiety, in a delightfully fun feedback loop that is, I suppose, neither here nor there.) There are strategies to deal with it that range from meditation to logical thinking to simply letting it run its course with the recognition that this thing will not last forever and I’ve been here before, it was fine every time, and sometimes you have to let the river take you where the river takes you. It’s not a perfect system, but it provides comfort.

In the above examples, there are three pieces I want to grab hold of with my crab pincers, pluck them out, and plop them onto the sand in front of you, my sweet sweet crabby prizes.

a) You can make your way through it in the dark.

b) Why that taste is essential to you.

c) It provides comfort.

These are the three reasons to Know Thyself as a writer.

You will encounter a great many difficulties as a writer. As noted, your process will fail. You will be challenged by critics, reviewers, editors, agents, some of whom are very good, some of whom are not good, some of whom who have the story’s best interests at heart, and some who have only their own interests at the fore. You will sometimes get lost in a story. You will sometimes lose confidence in it, or yourself. You will at times feel like an impostor. You will compare yourselves to others. You’ll have a book nobody wants to publish. You’ll publish a book nobody reads. And so on, and so forth.

But in all things, you can go to ground and make it through —

You can find your way through in the dark.

You can know what you like and what you don’t like.

You can find comfort in who you are and what you’ve done —

And, you also gain comfort in the chaos.

When your process fails, when a book isn’t working, when you’re stuck, you need a rope to hold onto through the dark to make your way through the forest. When an editor or critic tells you this thing doesn’t work, you come to know what darlings you can kill and what hills you need to die on, because you know what pieces of that story are yours, or moreover, are You. And when the shit hits the fan, you know the river will take you where the river will take you, and you find comfort in the uncertainty — because this whole thing we do is wildly uncertain.

You start to understand the weird noises, the base components, the triggers.

You can predict the hills and valleys. Both creatively and in the business.

And you can know how those things are temporary. How failure is a step forward that feels like a step backward. How you will lose confidence in the work at certain milestones and how the self-doubt is normal, not exceptional. You’ll know when you can weather through and when you can’t, or shouldn’t. You’ll know what the first and last days of writing a book feels like, and how much time you need to take off between trying to edit it. You’ll figure it out.

And for me, it’s what allows me to keep going. It’s what lets me hold onto the ladder and not fall into the fucking abyss. Now, the big question is —

How?

How the hell do you Know Thyself as a writer?

It’s reductive to say, you just do, but that’s at the core, the answer. You just do. And that word, “do,” is key — do, being an active word, not a passive one. You write. You write and you rewrite and you fail and you give up and then you try again and you buy the house and you start cooking and you get heartburn and, and, and. You do it even though it’s silly and feels weird like it’s somebody else’s underpants and you put the bucket on your head and try to headbutt the wall until it falls down or you do. You write. You fail. You write again. And you do so with a special eye toward that ultimate goal: Knowing Thyself. Not just process. Not just recipe and equation, but really figuring out who you are, what you like to read, what you like to write, what experiences you bring to the page and what experiences you want to have in the future so you can bring them to the page. You try to be present within yourself. You try to be mindful of the whole journey, not just its parts.

It sounds hard. And it’s the hardest thing. But also the easiest thing. Because you are who you are. Your voice isn’t a thing you hunt down, it’s the thing you have had all along. It’s like how you don’t always know you’re home until you leave it for a while. It’s hard, and it’s easy, and above all else, it’s really, really weird. But that’s it. That’s my lesson. To me, and maybe to you, if it’s useful.

Know Thyself.

Hopefully I’ll see you in another ten years, where my one lesson will be, just exist, or something equally bizarre and reductive! Also if you’re so inclined to pre-order The Book of Accidents or Dust & Grim, they’re coming out soon, and I need to feed myself and my family, and if I can’t feed them with words, I will have to begin to hunt humans for their meat, and nobody wants that. Bye!

So, The Book of Accidents is out on July 20th — holy crap, one month away?! — and I will be appearing at various bookstores in support of it! The trick is, like most authors during the Quarantimes, I’ll be appearing at these bookstores from the comfort of my own li’l writing shed, rising as a virtual ghost, a veritable digital specter, crawling into your internet to talk about books and horror and birds and apples. It’ll be great! And you don’t even have to leave your house. And why would you want to leave your house? THE WORLD IS A HUNGRY MOUTH. Safer instead to come meet me on the plains of 1s and 0s, yes? Yes.

The especially cool news is, I’ll be appearing at these bookstores with a handful of very wonderful authors, truly some of my favorite writers and people, so I expect that the ensuing conversations will be a gosh-dang monkey-fridgin’ delight.

Here is that schedule (also viewable in the above graphic) —

July 20th, 7pm EST, in conversation with Aaron Mahnke, as part of a joint bookstore event between three PA bookstores: The Doylestown Bookshop, Let’s Play Books, and the Midtown Scholar. (If you want signed, personalized books, then buy from one of these stores, if you please.) Register for that event here.

July 21st, 7pm EST, chatting with Paul Tremblay for The Strand / Metaverse NYCC, NYC. Register for that event here.

July 22nd, 6pm EST, conversing with Stephen Graham Jones for The Fountain Bookstore, in Richmond, VA. Register for that event here.

July 23rd, 7:30pm EST, hanging out with Delilah S. Dawson for the University Bookstore, in Seattle, WA. Details here.

July 28th, 8PM EST, visiting with Kiersten White for Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, WI. Register for the event here.

And finally, July 29th, it’s me and Cassandra Khaw, chatting at Powell’s Books in Portland, OR. Register here.

Obviously, I ask that if you partake in an event, you try to buy a book from the hosting bookstore! (They should all have signed copies available, with a number of signed bookplates at each.) They are kind enough to run these and provide the infrastructure and the support, and of course bookstores are a mighty wonderful part of the BOOK ECOSYSTEM. If you like books and authors and stories, then supporting an independent bookstore is an essential component. I also hope you’ll consider buying the books of the conversing authors, all of whom are amazing goddamn authors and whose books demand your eyeballs. You will be rewarded with excellence.

And most of them will ship books right to you.

As to whether or not I’ll be doing any in-person events, it’s not likely for this specific release window, given that things are still up in the air — lots of airline cancellations, plus the rise of the delta variant, plus the differences in COVID numbers and protocol state to state, makes that tricky. But, I’m not averse to doing an in-person event at some point soon, either, because I am a vaccinated human* who is happy to meet other vaccinated humans! If I have such an event where we may orbit one another’s flesh sacks in three-dimensional space, I will surely put it here on this blog. So I remind folks that subscribing is always a good idea, if you’ve not done that.

I’m also doing a virtual chat at the Jacksonville Public Library this week — 6/23. You can find details for that event here.

Hope you’ll check out the book! If you don’t, I die!

MORE AS I KNOW IT.

*sack of wizard-cursed apples

A family of luck poachers receives a phone call that sets them off in the hopes of reversing their bad fortune. At a singles mixer for chemical elements, a luminous-yet-jaded Neon looks for love, or at least a one-night exothermic reaction. When blue skies turn gray and the daikaiju siren blares, the ten-year-old daughter of the local weatherman discovers her destiny. And washed-up evildoers live out their meaningless lives at a retirement home for villains—you never know when someone might turn the swimming pool into a shark pit, or bring a death ray to Taco Tuesday.

From the imagination of S.G. Browne comes a collection of fourteen short stories of downtrodden luck poachers, lovelorn chemical elements, obsolete villains, disillusioned children, trademarked teenagers, outcast reindeer, victimized zombies, and time-traveling alcoholics—many of them lost and searching for answers. Some of them find what they’re looking for, while one or two discover that childhood dreams can come true.

***

There’s A Leprechaun Sanctuary In Carlingford, Ireland

Carlingford is a small coastal village in northeast Ireland, about an hour south of Belfast. Among other things, Carlingford is known for its oyster farms, medieval buildings, and leprechaun sanctuary. That’s right. A leprechaun sanctuary.

You can learn all sorts of interesting (and often useless) information when you write a short story about the pandemic, incorporate the internet meme “The earth is healing, nature is returning” into your story, and end up reading a bunch of articles about mythological creatures and going down the proverbial research rabbit hole.

The genesis for the leprechaun sanctuary started back in 1989 when P.J. O’Hare, a local pub owner, claimed he found evidence of a leprechaun after hearing a scream near the wishing well on Slieve Foye, the mountain that overlooks Carlingford. When the pub owner investigated, he found small bones, a tiny green jacket and pants, and a handful of gold coins surrounded by what appeared to be scorched earth. I have no idea if there were any other witnesses. But the clothes are apparently on display at PJs Pub in Carlingford.

The discovery sparked The Carlingford National Leprechaun Hunt on Slieve Foye, with thousands descending on the mountain to search for leprechauns. While many of the locals embraced the surge in visitors and the increased revenue it brought to Carlingford, they wanted to make sure to protect the little people and their habitat, as it was believed that 236 leprechauns lived in the caverns of the mountain. I have no idea why or how they arrived at 236 rather than a nice round estimate like 250. I’m just the messenger.

Finally, in 2009, twenty years after the discovery of the leprechaun’s remains, the European Union granted official heritage status to the leprechauns who lived in the caverns of Slieve Foye, declaring the mountain and all of its inhabitants, animals, and flora a designated area of protection under the EU’s Habitats Directive.

So who wants to go to Carlingford?

Chlorine & Fluorine Are Promiscuous Elements

I received a C in my freshman college chemistry class. I aced high school chemistry and was a straight-A student going all the way back to 1^st grade. So getting a C during my first semester at college came as somewhat of a shock. It probably had something to do with the fact that in high school, I wasn’t staying up late three nights a week playing drinking games in my dorm room. It didn’t help that my chemistry class was at eight in the morning on Friday and Thursday night was a big party night.

I didn’t retain a lot of information from my college chemistry class. Go figure. But even had I not been hungover in class on a regular basis, I’m pretty sure my college chemistry professor never mentioned how chlorine and fluorine are two of the more promiscuous elements of the periodic table.

Fluorine has formed compound bonds with nearly all of the other elements. Like all halogens, Fluorine only has nine electrons. In periodic table parlance, she’s one electron shy of a full shell. Not to mention she’s highly toxic. So caveat emptor. Chlorine, meanwhile, has, at one time or another, hooked up with nearly all of the other elements, which is surprising considering he’s toxic, gassy, and irritating. But who am I to judge?

When it comes to chemical promiscuity, Hydrogen isn’t much better. It doesn’t matter if you’re noble or poor, stable or monoatomic. If you’re ionizing, Hydrogen is synthesizing. So if you’re looking for a serious relationship, he’s not exactly husband material. Carbon, meanwhile, has two stable naturally occurring isotopes and is capable of forming multiple stable covalent bonds, which makes him more of an ideal candidate for a long-term relationship. Although when it comes to monogamy, he’s not exactly a paragon of virtue, having formed more compounds than any other element.

If you’re not interested in making a commitment or forming any kind of lasting bond, there are plenty of chemical elements who are just looking for a one-night exothermic reaction. But it’s probably best to avoid Technetium and Promethium, since neither one of them has any stable isotopes. The last thing you want is a stalker.

I think it’s safe to say that most of the elements on the periodic table tend to be polyamorous or at least prefer to be in open relationships. I also think it’s safe to say that when it came to writing a short story about a weekly singles mixer for chemical elements, I learned a lot more about chemistry than I did in high school or college.

I Enjoyed Exploring My Feminine Side

Prior to writing the majority of the fourteen stories that comprise LOST CREATURES, I wrote nine novels, one novella, and four-dozen or so short stories. I don’t mention this to boast or humble brag, because there are countless writers who have written and published far more stories and novels than I’ve ever imagined. I mention my writing history to emphasize that although my novels and many of my short stories have featured prominent female characters, none of those characters played the role of the main protagonist. So the majority of my writing was male-centered and told from the male POV, which, over the past two decades, has been almost exclusively in the 1^st person.

Then I was introduced to the short story collections of Karen Russell and Kelly Link.

Not that I hadn’t read books or stories written by female authors before, but none of them had inspired or compelled me to shift my perspective when it came to my characters and how I wanted to tell my stories or who I wanted to tell them. Not to mention the type of stories I wanted to tell. It brought more balance to my writing and I found myself exploring ideas and stories and characters that I never would have considered writing about before because they wouldn’t have worked as well, or at all, when told from a male POV.

So while half of the stories in LOST CREATURES have a male protagonist, the other half are told from the POV of a female—including a ten-year old Japanese girl concerned about daikaiju ruining her weekend plans, a college-aged zombie taking remedial English classes, and a mother reminiscing about the pet centaurs she raised as a child. Most of the stories are told in the 1^st person POV, which allowed me to spend a lot of time in the female perspective, seeing the story and the world through a different set of eyes than I had so often told most of my stories. And these stories turned out to be some of my favorite stories I’ve ever written.

By the way, if you’ve never read anything by Karen Russell or Kelly Link, I highly recommend it.

Writing Short Stories Helps Me To Find My Happy Place

The thing they don’t tell you about being a writer is that there are times when it can become a grind, sucking all of the joy out of the creative process. Not that writing is always fun. The business side can be a time suck when all you want to do is sit down and write. But sometimes it’s a challenge to be creative, to write words that you’re happy with, to craft sentences and paragraphs and scenes that make you think, “This is what I was meant to do. This is my jam.”

That’s the sweet spot that writers look to hit. And when we’re lucky, we hit it. But other times it can be tedious, like when you can’t figure out how to fill a plot hole in your novel or when one of your characters starts doing things that don’t make any sense and you shout at your computer, “What the fuck, Timmy?”

When the story isn’t working no matter how hard you try to make it work, especially when you’re on a deadline and you have to find a way to make it work, that’s when the joy of writing becomes a panic-filled grind. Because if the story isn’t working for you, chances are it’s not going to work for anyone who reads it. And that’s worse than anything Timmy was doing to piss you off.

And then there are the times when you’re not writing to fulfill yourself but in order to fulfill a contractual obligation. It happens more often than you’d think. Sometimes the business of writing becomes more about the business than it does about the writing. And that sucks.

When writing becomes a grind for me, when my novel isn’t working or I find myself writing something for the wrong reasons, I write short stories. They’re my way of exploring ideas that matter to me without having to worry about a deadline or a contract or if my agent or editor will like them. I write them for me. I write them for fun. And I write them without the constraints of expectations about whether or not I can sell them. It would be nice if I could. But that’s not why I’m writing them. I’m writing them for the pure joy of writing. To remind myself that writing can be fun. To remind myself why I started down this path in the first place.

To write stories.

Compiling A Short Story Collection Is Like Being A Literary DJ

Over the years, I’ve made my fair share of mixtapes and am old enough to have made some on actual cassette tapes. I still occasionally make mixtapes on CDs (although you could argue that it’s technically a mix-CD). But I’ve always enjoyed the process of compiling songs and putting them together to create a specific experience for the listener. I even had a brief side gig as a substitute DJ in 1990 while living in Los Angeles, spinning records Friday nights at Alzado’s Restaurant & Bar in West Hollywood. Alzado’s liked their rock and roll on the classic side, which was right up my musical alley. But you still wanted to spin a good mix of tunes that would keep the energy going and the customers happy.

To me, short story collections are like literary playlists and the writer is the DJ, spinning tales to create a rhythm and flow to keep the energy going and the reader engaged. I can’t speak for other writers, but when I compiled LOST CREATURES, I put the stories down in a specific order, moving them around until I found the right flow, with the idea that reading the collection from start to finish would give the reader an experience they wouldn’t get by jumping around from one story to another. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just not the experience I intended for the reader to have.

So LOST CREATURES is my literary mixtape. My Friday night DJ gig. But instead of spinning songs, I’m spinning stories, trying to create the right mood and rhythm in the hopes that the reader sticks around until last call.

***

S.G. Browne is the author of the novels Breathers, Fated, Lucky Bastard, Big Egos, and Less Than Hero, as well as the short story collection Shooting Monkeys in a Barrel and the heartwarming holiday novella I Saw Zombies Eating Santa Claus. He’s also the author of The Maiden Poodle, a self-published fairy tale about anthropomorphic cats and dogs suitable for children and adults of all ages. He’s an ice cream connoisseur, Guinness aficionado, cat shelter volunteer, and a sucker for It’s a Wonderful Life. He lives in San Francisco.

SG Browne: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Lost Creatures: Amazon | Kobo | Apple | B&N

I’m so sorry, that post title is terrible. But I am a monster, and so I persist. ANYWAY this is just a quick drop in to let you know that, should you be so inclined, Wanderers is a Kindle Daily Deal today, which winnows the price down to a cozy $3.99. So you can head over there and check it out. Let’s see, what else is going on?

I’ll have The Book of Accidents-related news soon. Blurbs, signed copies, virtual tour.

I’d still like to do an in-person event somewhere, but there remains hesitation, which is understandable!

Pre-ordering books is good for the bookish soul — it helps the bookstores, and it helps li’l ol’ me. It makes sure to signal demand, to make sure there are books on hand and that bookstores order more if necessary. And it just supports the overall book-based ecosystem. Which is nice! You can pre-order The Book of Accidents (July 20th), as well as Dust & Grim (October 5th). The most wonderful place of all to order those books is your local bookstore — or an independent bookstore elsewhere across the country, many of whom indeed will catapult books right to your door.

OKAY BYE. MORE SOON.

In the year 1960, private eye John Nyquist arrives in Delirium, a city of a million borders, to pursue his strangest case yet: tracking down Oberon, the stolen, sentient image of faded film star Vince Craven.

As Nyquist tracks Oberon through a series of ever-stranger and more surreal borders, he hears tantalizing stories of the Yeald, a First Wall hidden at Delirium’s heart. But to get the help he needs to find it, he’ll have to journey into the fractured minds of the city’s residents, and even into his own…

***

TERMINUS WAS THE ROMAN GOD OF BORDERS

Within Without takes place in Delirium, a city famous for containing more than a million borders. The exact number is disputed. The borders are constructed from many different materials: wood, stone, paper, wire, people, ideas, magical spells. Some of them, a few, are permanent, many others are temporary, perhaps lasting for a day, or even for ten minutes only. Some borders are official, planned and created by the city council, but most are made by the citizens themselves, for their own pleasure and purpose. For the residents of Delirium love to build borders, they love to queue at borders and pass through borders, and then knock them down, and build them again in a different place. The whole city becomes an ever-shifting maze, dissolving and reforming itself anew as each moment passes. Private investigator John Nyquist arrives in this city, a stranger to its values, and its true nature. He hopes to take on a case, and solve it; yet his every movement is held in check, blocked by one border after another. The early part of the novel details his struggle to negotiate this realm, where a suspect can suddenly shift their allegiance as a new wall is erected. His confusion grows. The case leads him towards the city’s oldest and most mysterious border, the one where the story drifts towards the edge of the page. I have learned however that the Roman god Terminus demanded a blood sacrifice, to be placed once a year under the marker stone where one realm edged another. It made me nervous for Nyquist’s outcome: would he pass over this final borderline, or become a victim of it?

WITHIN AND WITHOUT ARE PLACE NAMES

The working title of the novel was Weird Song Of Breaking Through At Last, a song I remembered from my youth, as performed by a rather obscure progressive rock band called Principal Edwards Magic Theatre. With one day to go before sending off the first draft to the publisher, I was researching ideas for another novel, which took me to an old map of London, showing the city’s wall still in place, and the various gates of the city marked. I saw that some of the towns had two versions of their name, designated Within and Without. For instance, Bishopsgate Without, and Bishopsgate Within. Farringdon Within, Farringdon Without. These London wards had been separated into two by the route of the wall. Immediately I knew that some of my fictional city’s regions could use such a nomenclature: the concept fitted well with the novel’s theme. And then, a moment later the true title of the book came to me. Nyquist is never in one fixed location, but either inside, and then outside, or betwixt and between, within and without.

THE BOWIE SONG IS ACTUALLY CALLED “‘HEROES’”

Not many people notice, or remember, the double quotation marks. There are levels of ambiguity implied. I read it like this: Someone is saying, “Oh, so you think you’re a pair of ‘heroes’, do you?” The first spark of Within Without started at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition celebrating David Bowie’s visual imagination, in 2013. I wandered around the exhibition, gazing at these large glass cases with the singer’s costumes inside, displayed on mannequins. I had a vision of the museum staff coming in early one morning and discovering that one of the costumes has vanished from a mannequin, without any sign of a break-in. A locked room mystery. I then pictured one of Bowie’s images separating from his body, escaping the flesh, to live its own life. Imagine: Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke on the run in Berlin, merging into the remains of the Wall, which was now depicted, in my daydream, as a green hologram, a reconstructed tourist attraction. A few years later, after Bowie had passed away, I returned to this image and merged it with the idea of the city filled with borders. There is a long tradition in folk music of the border ballad, and I like to think of “‘Heroes’” as an up-to-date version of that genre, with its vision of the two lovers kissing by the wall as gunshots ring out overhead. So then: Bowie, borderlines, escaping images. Sentient masks. Masks as alien creatures that bond with humans, magnifying the host’s charismatic value. It all started to come together. Flesh, image: and the no-man’s land where they don’t quite meet. And Nyquist lost among it all.

YOU CAN ALWAYS TRUST ARIADNE

A friend bought me a pack of cards called the Red Thread, perhaps named after Ariadne’s roll of thread or “clew” which she gave to Theseus to help him map his way through the Minotaur’s labyrinth. The pack contains thirty-two cards, each one with its own image and a title: The Spectre, The Gift, The Twins, and so on. The cards have a strand of red thread across each image, which can be joined to the thread on other cards, to make a map through the images. Just before starting the first words of Within Without, I shuffled this deck and turned over the top card. Whatever came up, I would use in some way, as inspiration. I did this for the whole book, using the cards as a regular input, taking the images literally, or metaphorically, as I saw fit. Sometimes the turned-up card made perfect sense in the narrative, and at other times, I had to think at strange angles. But every single card was used. One card led to an automaton making an appearance, others to Adam and Eve, to a Plumed Horse, to Medusa. The red thread itself actually turned up in one chapter, pinned to the wall of a corridor, leading Nyquist on. I write without any planning, without looking ahead, writing to discover the plot and the characters, as they are needed. The cards helped in this, offering their little shocks and nudges. One card in particular had a deep and important effect on the story, something I truly never expected to happen…

THE COLLECTIVE NOUN IS A LOVELINESS OF LADYBIRDS

Yes, the card showed a ladybird. Because of this, many of them turned up in the story, a whole loveliness of them. I had taken Nyquist from the busy city streets, into a smaller encircled town called Escher. Here, something very drastic happens: all the external borderlines are drawn into the human mind. Nyquist, to his surprise (and to mine!) discovers that he has a wall running down the centre of his skull. And behind that wall, whispering, cajoling, is a character. Another man. This character has been there for most of Nyquist’s life, but only now can the two of them converse, through a tiny hole in the wall. The prominence of the ladybirds led to the name I gave to this internal occupant: Gregor Samsa. Samsa is the protagonist of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, a novel detailing the transformation of a man into an insect. And so Nyquist finds himself moving towards a very dangerous borderline, where one species transforms into another, human into beetle. It might be said that science fiction itself, as a genre, operates in such a borderland, exploring those regions where one world crosses over into another world, old concepts into new.

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JEFF NOON is an award-winning British novelist, short story writer and playwright. He won the Arthur C Clarke Award for Vurt, the John W Campbell award for Best New Writer, a Tinniswood Award for innovation in radio drama and the Mobil prize for playwriting. He was trained in the visual arts, and was musically active on the punk scene before starting to write plays for the theatre. His work spans SF and fantasy genres, exploring the ever-changing borderzone between genre fiction and the avant-garde.

Jeff Noon: Website | Twitter

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It is an absolute pleasure to host a guest post by one of my favorite authors — Megan Lindholm (who you may have read as Robin Hobb), who is here to talk about the story of the City Primeval — and the 35th anniversary of her novel, Wizard of the Pigeons.

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Why, yes. Yes, I do know what primeval means. Ancient. Original. Prehistoric.

So how can a city be any of those things? A city is built by humans, many humans, and it takes years of habitation before it can be called a city. Even if it’s abandoned and falls into ruin, even if the jungle or sands overtake it, or later generations rob it of its memorials, and cart away its bricks and stonework to be used elsewhere, it still can’t be primeval, can it?

Well, I don’t usually corrupt a word, but in this case, I’m going to. In fantasy, there are numerous primeval cities, ones built so long ago that everyone has forgotten them. There are cities that predate the younger age of humanity, full of ancient wonder and magic. In Science Fiction, there are even more and stranger primeval cities; ancient ruins, abandoned by the aliens who built them, full of riddles, puzzles and dangers. A rediscovered city is one of the tropes of our genre, the ideal setting for a game of Dungeons and Dragons, or a tale of awakening old magic, or a Leiber or Howard yarn of Swords and Sorcery.

Have you ever been in an unfamiliar forest, with night coming on, uncertain of which direction will lead you back to your camp or a well-marked trail? You might wonder what else is out there with you, and you will listen, and strain your eyes to see through the darkness, fearing that you have blundered into the territory of an unknown predator, something that operates on rules that you cannot comprehend. Something that sees you only as prey.

Oh, wait. That’s not you in the forest. That’s me, in a city. And not an ancient, forgotten city, but a modern one. New York. Seattle. Paris. London. Edinburgh. Cities have always defied me; my sense of direction fails me when I cannot see the sun or moon. The buildings of concrete and steel and glass are faceless. Even in a retail district with lit display windows, in the small hours of the morning, the emptied streets seem threatening to me. Lighting is uneven, alleys gape, passing traffic glares and blares. And a big city, where the foot traffic remains lively all night? My caution remains.

A big city is the place where our most ancient predators are common. We are stalked by the creature that have always represented the greatest danger to any person: our fellow humans. And unlike a cougar or a skunk or a snake, the motive for attack can be completely incomprehensible. In the forest, one does not fear rape or robbery or harassment. But in a city?

Doubt me? Pooh-pooh this idea as that of a scared old woman? There is a natural law that I’ve never seen broken. Predators follow prey. It’s true on the tundra of Alaska, or the plains of Africa. And the more prey that is present, the greater the number of predators. Is that true of humans? Of course it is. Visit a big city bus station, or park outside a homeless warming shelter, or a soup kitchen. Go to a crowded retail mall when the holiday crowds are in full shopping frenzy. Sit down and watch. You won’t need binoculars to see them. The traffickers, the drug pushers, the petty thieves; they move through the crowd, looking for an opportunity. Or they seek a location from which they can watch the passing herd, and single out the one that looks most vulnerable to what they are offering. Or taking.  Beyond those predators are the creatures once human who will prey on the weak of helpless, for reasons that only they can grasp. Or for reasons that, in their damaged minds, they cannot verbalize at all. The vampires. The werewolves.

Is this overly dramatic for you? For me, it’s not. For me, the primeval predators and their ancient threats to humans are what make contemporary urban fantasy so appealing. That slice of the fantasy genre acknowledges what all of us know on a gut level. The magic didn’t go away with the arrival of the Age of Enlightenment. The creatures that preyed on us through medieval times are still with us. And they are still just as dark and dangerous as we can imagine. And probably more than we can imagine.

I wrote Wizard of the Pigeons over 35 years ago. Seattle was the first big city that I visited on a regular basis. To me, it felt far more dangerous than the forests I had known. The ‘Seattle Freeze’, the concept that Seattleites are generally stand offish and chilly toward newcomers was in evidence. The growing homeless population that now shelters in our parks and medians and street corners with their little dome tents and blue tarps was not evident then. But it was beginning. The signs were there: the sleeping bags that were tucked up under the scant concrete shelter of an overpass, the men sleeping on the park benches during the day when it was safer to be unconscious in a public place. I saw a scattering of beggars on street corners with their softening cardboard signs. It was a time when Vietnam veterans were still badly treated, and there were many of them among the street people of that era.

Within my extended family and among my friends were young men who had returned baffled and damaged by a war that made small sense to many of us. The high school boys we had dated and danced with and kissed goodnight had returned, but not as the fellows we had known. Seeing young men in worn fatigue jackets drunk in the park in mid-morning or huddled, back to a dumpster, in an alley as evening came on made me wonder. Whose boyfriend, whose son, whose brother, whose former husband were those men?  What family was missing a piece? But there were also moments of seeing a couple of them sharing a cigarette on a park bench. Or greeting one another with a hoarse laugh and a pound on the back. Moments that showed me that in some ways, they were moving in circles that I would never be able to access, forming alliances and moving forwards in ways I would never see.

There are many reasons for writing a fantasy. With Wizard, I felt there was an unacknowledged reservoir of power and resilience in the veterans I was seeing on the street. Battered and baffled, but somehow moving forward. I wanted to write about that. And, in many ways, my wish fulfillment was to try to write an ending for one of them that acknowledged that core of strength. So I wrote my story of the City Primeval, and those who wielded the power to both protect that city, and to save their own lives.

Wizard of the Pigeons, 35th Anniversary Illustrated Edition: Bookshop