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<\/a>When the city is sick, everyone suffers.<\/em><\/p>\nSteven Hines listened to the city and the city spoke. Cleveport told him she was sick. With his unnatural connection to her, that meant Hines was sick too. But when his friend, Detective Abby Jones, comes to him for help investigating a series of deaths with no discernible cause, Hines can\u2019t say no. Then strange fungal growths begin to appear in the streets, affecting anyone who gets too close, turning them into violent lunatics. As the mayhem escalates and officials start to seal Cleveport off from the rest of the world, Hines knows the trouble has only just begun.<\/em><\/p>\n Some of the things I\u2019m going to relate here I seem to learn anew with every book. For example, for me a book comes together not from a single idea, but when two or more ideas clash in a kind of mental pile-up. I\u2019ll have all these things swimming around my brain all the time, making me stare at walls and not hear my wife calling me. That\u2019s just being a writer. But then something will happen. One idea about a character will stroll through my thinkmeat just as another idea about a cool scene is trying to make out with a third idea about \u201cwhat if this was that\u201d, then something greater than all those parts happens and boom! There\u2019s a book. My brain is a strange place. HIDDEN CITY grew from just such a collision of cool ideas: parasitic fungus, magic out of control, a harmless drug turned deadly, a broken-down, grief-stricken citymage\u2026 But even then, once the idea collision had occurred and I saw a bigger picture in the shape of a novel, I still needed the story<\/em>. This is the thing I learned again. The ideas were cool, but they\u2019re not the story. As people wiser than me have said, plot is what happens, but story is why we care.<\/p>\n And this leads to another thing that I seem to re-learn with every book. You\u2019d think I\u2019d know by now and start here, but my story-brain just doesn\u2019t fire like that. It needs strange fuel at strange hours, often assisted by whisky. While plot is happening, you care because of the story, and the story is the characters. In the case of HIDDEN CITY, two primary characters drove the story together for me. One is the (fictional) city of Cleveport. In the noir style, place is always a character. In HIDDEN CITY, I take that to the max because Cleveport is a sentient city. Cities are all sentient, of course. You knew that, right? And most of them are assholes, but some are cool. Except Cleveport is more<\/em> aware than most, which makes her dangerous. The other character to put this book into shape for me was Steven Hines, the aforementioned citymage. He has a kind of more-than-psychic connection to Cleveport. I\u2019ll be honest, their relationship is fucking unhealthy, and Hines knows that, but it\u2019s what he is, you know? What\u2019s he gonna do? Then we throw in Hines\u2019s best friend, Cleveport PD Detective Sergeant Abby Jones, and a spate of mysterious deaths, and now we have a story to care about because we care about these people. I hope.<\/p>\n I got a bit hung up at the start of HIDDEN CITY trying to figure out what it was. I felt like I should get a grip on the genre before I began. But I should have known better, from previous experience. Genre is what bookstores insist on, so they know where to shelve something. Readers tend to just want a good story. And you know what? I never met a genre I didn\u2019t like, so I cram \u2019em all in to my books if I can. HIDDEN CITY is supernatural noir, it\u2019s urban horror, it\u2019s dark fantasy, it\u2019s a crime thriller, it\u2019s cosmic horror. Hell, you tell me what it is so I can let people know if they insist on shelving it.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve got this notebook\u2026 well, I have dozens, it\u2019s a common writer affliction, but I have this one in particular where I was working out how things happen in HIDDEN CITY. One of the primary drivers of events in the novel is the sudden appearance of a deadly fungal outburst throughout Cleveport. If people get too close they\u2019re turned into violent psychopaths. They\u2019re actually turned into something far worse, but I won\u2019t spoil the story here. But to make this work, I needed to have a plausible lifecycle of this horrendous and virulent thing. So I started sketching in that notebook. I have these little drawings of fungal growths, then arrows and stick figures and notes. And it had to make sense. I mean, it\u2019s horror and fantasy fiction, not real life, so it\u2019s gotta make sense, you know? Turns out that\u2019s a lot harder than I thought it would be, but I\u2019m pleased with how it came together in the end.<\/p>\n Okay, so my son has recently discovered Frozen<\/em> and that\u2019s a special torture, but pity me and let\u2019s move along. The point here is that I have amazing first readers (we read for each other so our agents and publishers don\u2019t have to suffer our early drafts). There was one thread through HIDDEN CITY that I loved, I thought it was clever as fuck. One reader was all Meh<\/em> about it, but another had a real problem with it. She used words like \u201cshoehorned\u201d and \u201cdistracting\u201d. But I loved it! It was amazing, you know? Reader, it was not amazing. Sure it was a cool idea on its own, but not for this<\/em> book. I finally accepted her words as Damned Good Advice, and I killed that darling, and HIDDEN CITY came together so much more tight and punchy. I would have been an idiot to ignore her. If you trust people to be first readers for you, learn to trust what they tell you too. It made HIDDEN CITY a much better book, and that\u2019s all I ever want to do \u2013 put out the best book I can.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n ALAN BAXTER is a multi-award-winning author of supernatural thrillers, dark fantasy, and horror. He lives on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, with his wife, son, two dogs, and a cranky old cat.<\/p>\n Alan Baxter: Website<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n HIDDEN CITY: Excerpt<\/a> | Amazon<\/a> | B&N<\/a> | Kobo<\/a> | iBooks<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the city is sick, everyone suffers. Steven Hines listened to the city and the city spoke. Cleveport told him she was sick. With his unnatural connection to her, that meant Hines was sick too. But when his friend, Detective Abby Jones, comes to him for help investigating a series of deaths with no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-31926","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-8iW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31926"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31929,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31926\/revisions\/31929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The idea is not the story<\/h2>\n
Story is characters<\/h2>\n
Don\u2019t worry what it is, just write the damn thing<\/h2>\n
The lifecycle of an invented parasitic fungus is tricky to get right.<\/h2>\n
Let it go, let it go, my darlings never bothered me anyway<\/h2>\n