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.
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.
