Love is kind of crazy with spooky little girl...

Of course, as much as I love the cowboys, the tough guys, the brutes and fallen nobles, the stink of horse and the suck of mud, lighting matches on your jaw and all the rest, I also love the spooky, black cat hair and the mojo bone, the conjure and the fetch stick and strange sigils and the Latin imprecation.

We've met before, you and I.

I was the kid in the library, his head down in a book when he should have been playing in the sun. The one who read all the books on UFOs and Loch Ness Monsters and weird Aztec crystal skulls and the Egyptians with their brain surgery, lightbulbs and beer. The one who could tell you exactly which episode of 'In Search Of...' was about to play based entirely on the size and shape of Leonard Nimoy's moustache. (I have a dream, that one day I will, Marenghi-like, get to host my own weird happenings and history show... dreams and dreams) The one who poured over encyclopedias like 'Man, Myth and Magic'. Who knew all the ways to kill a werewolf and vampire, who scared himself stupid with every ghost and alien movie he could blag his way into seeing. Under the blankets with a torch, reading fascinatedly about Don Calmet, the Bimini Wall, Ponape and Sean Manchester and all the rest.

You know the kid. Hell, if you're reading this, the chances are good that you probably were that kid at least once.

But what really got me, what kept me fascinated, from the day I could read until the second I write this, was magic.

Pretty much every interest I have ever had in my entire life has spun off from this central preoccupation. This endless fascination. Nagual and Palo Monte, those blood and bone shamanisms. The austerity and complexity of the Western tradition, the elaborate practicality of Bon and Buddhism, the sexy punk occultism of Chaos magic and its attendant ideologies and more. The idea that ritual and rite, the will and desire can somehow access the hidden rules of the world, that those who choose to hitch wagons to strange passions and intelligences to look behind the curtain fills me to this very day with a killing-jar intensity.

Like I said before, fun at parties, hey...?

It is not exactly surprising that I have written about magicians a fair amount in my career. The arrogant physicist Nathaniel from Dunwich, who saw magic as another way to perfect his knowledge of cosmology. Rose from the same work who saw emotion as magic and magic as permission. Gavriel from Witch King was a magician who saw magic as the key to fulfill any curiosity and pay back and slight.

All different characters, I feel. All sharing obsessions with myself. Possibly because I'm too lazy to think up characters who haven't read the same books as me. You be the judge.

I knew the Western story I was going to write wasn't going to be set in the real world. Not in the really real world, anyway. Too messy, too much baggage, not enough strangeness. So it was I turned my attention to melding these two genres; westerns and dark fantasy.

And all I knew was that I was going to have a cowboy magician. A savage savant. Man sworn to his own code and, in this case, sworn to other powers than those that walk the fields we know.

Writing itself is not fun. Well, it's OK and it beats heavy lifting and taking public transport for a living. I've been doing it professionally for a few years now and despite the fact you can go to work with no pants on and smoke at your cubicle, it must be undertaken with the discipline of a job. Sometimes, that's no so fun when the editors and Dark Masters are sending increasingly dire emails and throwing rocks as deadlines creep in. Or your mates are all going to the pub and you have wordcount to make.

But the real fun, the really real fun, the bit that is more addictive than needle or love, is the making up. Throwing nets into strange unconscious seas, looking for characters who are interesting enough to walk in their skin awhile. Plots that surprise and edify. Letting the themes whittle themselves out of thought. When you're a writer of fantasy, there's also cosmologies and cosmogonies and pantheons and histories and geographies to induce from the febrile inner world.
For me, Eldritch Kid really came to life with three things.

A friend's dream.
My dream.
And the thought that if I had one magician cowboy, what if I had a magician Indian? What if they were all magicians? What if magic was always real forever and everyone always knew it.

So I had another genre to play with - alternate history and a world filled with magic and monsters and a fevered hallucination of the West to play with.

Right, that's enough from me for now. Next time, I'll talk about those dreams and why I fucked off most of the alternate history stuff. I'll also try and convince CB Burns to make with the purty art.

Mothers, don't let your sons...

I love cowboys.

No, no, no.

I love cowboys.

That's clearly not surprising from a chap who is writing Western comics but hang with me a moment.

Violent, sexy, morally dicey, there's something about them that colonized my imagination. Tough guys, standing up to bullies, not interested in the Good thing, willing to do the Right thing, which is way more interesting to me. Men who achieve fine things through methods murderous. Oh yes. These men were not afraid, not intimidated, ready to carve out justice with iron and fist.

It meant something to young Christian and no mistake.

When I was a little kid, I lived in Canberra, Australia, on the outskirts. Back then, that city just ended like a curtain came down. Suburb, suburb, bush. If you've never been to Australia, one of the things you'll never realise is how prevalent the bush is. Leave a city and there it is. It goes on forever, scrubs and thick black trees. Dryness clings to everything. Long low mountains that arch out of the earth slow and strong. The colours change by the hour, going blacker and redder and stranger.

Cowboy movies reminded me of where I lived. Frontiers. Look one way, schools and shops. Turn the other, scoria and heat as far as I could ever see. Its funny, so much early Australian art, done by pale Victorian Englishmen involves pallid, overdressed figures staring into illimitable horizons, overwhelmed by scale. John Ford and Sam Fuller movies have that same feeling of overwhelming scope of land. Cowboys were there from the start for me and living big inside of my brain.

Lets move forward a few years and I started digging history. All sorts. Didn't matter what or where. WWII, Ancient Rome, the waves of invaders poor old England endured, a bad day at the post office in Dublin and all of it. Seriously, I'm super fun at parties... Then I sort of rediscovered cowboys. See, when you read history you have to balance out the stories of great men and women with understanding social orders, historical contexts, all that stuff. Very interesting of course but sometimes you just want to read a story about a badass just putting the beat down on a scumbag.

My friends, Western history is full of it. My spiritual hero Doc Holliday and his nemesis, Johnny Ringo, his romance with Big Nose Kate... my god. Fascinating man. The violent, smart, haunted John Wesley Hardin, Bass Reeves, the first black Marshall and genuine tough guy. Black Jack Ketchum, the little man with the soul of steel, Elfego Baca and all the rest. Love 'em. Read about them. Violent, brave men stamping their mark on history.

Yet, a look under the surface strips these guys of their myth. Big Nose Kate never knocked out a sheriff and saved her man from a burning building. The Irish gentleman Bat Masterson killed one guy in a gunfight. Wyatt Earp was as much a criminal as he was a lawman. Then there's the destruction of the Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, the scum Van Buren, the Mexican-American war and more and more. Don't look at cowboys in the light of truth if you want grand stories. It ain't there.

Sooner or later, I wanted to write about cowboys. About a frontier land, about a tough man dealing justice, about finding his way between Right and Good.

From the seventies onwards, movies and books became what they called 'revisionist'. The idea was that cowboys became bad guys and the Indians became the noble and put upon victims of white Imperialism. There's two problems with that. Firstly, it is swapping one didacticism for another. Secondly, academia comes along and says that finally the genre is finally growing up. As is usual, literature majors jump up and down, desperate to become taste-makers, never realising they are plain fucking wrong. Westerns have a long history of moral ambiguity and interest in opposing viewpoints. But revisionism muddies the waters. Things swung so firmly towards the revisionist point of view that I can't imagine writing a genuinely newly rebellious cowboy book without handsome white guys getting saved by the fucking cavalry.

No one wants to be a propagandist, writing about the West as a cheerleader for industry and cleruchy and ignoring all the ground that was legitimately made up by the revisionist movement. Then again, writing something boring and depressing strikes me as outside my interests as a fiction writer.

Wanting to write something about cowboys, wanting to write about grand figures of violence and justice, feeling weirdly hobbled by prevailing literary opinions, there I was, sort of trapped.

Then I remembered something. I love cowboys, I love history but... oh yeah, I'm a geek!

Which means I also love monsters. And magic.