FAERIE APOCALYPSE
I'm still a bit gunshy about talking about my bigger projects on this blog, but I'm also determined to keep talking about my writing processes on this blog. I wrote about my recently completed novel, BLOODY WATERS here a couple of months back and now I'm going to do the same for my other almost-complete novel, FAERIE APOCALYPSE. (The BLOODY WATERS posts are now locked away from the public while I play the agents-and-publishers waiting game. Sorry, folks.)
I started FAERIE APOCALYPSE at roughly the same time as BLOODY WATERS, and I wrote both books more-or-less simultaneously. But they're very different works, and the problems I experienced in developing FA were almost entirely different. This week I will begin final proofing for the manuscript before I start seeking representation for it. Unlike BLOODY WATERS, I have not submitted earlier versions of the manuscript around, so I expect that that process will be quite different as well.
Raw Material
I'll come right out and say it: FAERIE APOCALYPSE began as a reaction to Neil Gaiman's STARDUST.
No aspersion on Neil's work; he's a wonderful writer and he's been a huge influence on me, but STARDUST was more or less exactly the opposite of what I wanted it to be. I read an interviews in which Neil explains thathe wanted to write a fairy tale for adults that deliberately avoided metaphor. What I wanted was deconstruction of the genre. So I went and wrote my own.
There is a line in STARDUST that says that only lovers, minstrels and the mad come venturing into the Faerie Realms. I took that as my starting point: the first chapter of the book is called "Lovers, Poets and Madmen" and treats with exactly that premise: those are the only categories of people who are permitted to enter the Realms. So, at least initially, FAERIE APOCALYPSE takes a similar form to STARDUST: it's about a lost soul wandering in Faerie Land, looking for something impossible.
Okay, I know you're giving me funny looks right about now. This doesn't sound really sound like the sort of thing you expect from me, does it? Well, it's not--that's why it was interesting to write about for me. I think it becomes exactly the kind of work you expect from me in fairly short order.
STARDUST was my starting point, but I pillaged a lot of other fiction. Enid Blyton's children's fantasy novels were, literally, the first real books I ever read, and I read them voraciously. Part of it was in wonder at Blyton's magical worlds, part of it was amazement that I could finally read--my parents are both readers and I was desperate to learn the skill. And, lo and behold, being able to read was even better than I had imagined.
It's hard to understate the influence that Enid Blyton's stories had on me: particularly the MAGIC FARAWAY TREE series, about a tree that is inhabited by fairy folk and the magical lands accessible from its boughs; and the MR PINKWHISTLE adventures, which are about a fairy and his magical friends who help out the neighbourhood children in various ways.
Ursula LeGuin's Taoist fantasy series EARTHSEA is also graven large on my writing, and on FAERIE APOCALYPSE in particular. I read Le Guin's work a couple of years after I had plowed through Blyton's catalog--I must have been 8 or 9--and it really did blow my mind. In the first novel, the protagonist completes his hero's quest almost immediately upon gaining maturity... but it's meaningless. In fact, his victory is a tragedy, if it's anything at all. Ged flees, pursued by his own shadow into a final confrontation that can only be described as existential. Like I said, it blew my mind.
Of course, if you combine Enid Blyton's schoolyard detective stories with Ursula Le Guin and you look sidelong at Neil Gaiman's BOOKS OF MAGIC you get HARRY POTTER. If nothing else, I can promise you that FAERIE APOCALYPSE is nothing like that.
I'd be remiss not to mention ALICE IN WONDERLAND here. ALICE transports you to a terrifying and surreal landscape, inhabited entirely by mad and psychopathic characters--not the least of which is Alice herself. There's a degree of malice in Lewis Carrol's whimsy that was I certainly tried to capture in this book.
The last major piece of the puzzle if Roger Zelazny's AMBER series. I love the Zelazny's anti-hero protagonists and their enemies wreak havoc across a canvas of infinite worlds while pursuing the grandest of ambitions, the pettiest of desires. You don't have to look hard to see echoes of that in FAERIE APOCALYPSE. In fact, one of the most important devices in the book comes more or less directly out of one of THE GUNS OF AVALON; one of the early novels in the Amber cycle.
I use rock'n'roll to glue some of the stories together. Jimi Hendrix links the first two chapters of the book, Black Sabbath features in the second chapter, and the fourth is full of references to To, Waits' BONE MACHINE album. And other bands are mentioned in various places. One of my early readers didn't like it, but I think it's essential to the project at hand. Rock'n'roll is about sex, death, and revolution--what better harbinger of the Faerie Apocalypse?
Method
I'm not one for worldbuilding. I like to write my way into a scenario and build it up as I go (although I generally know how everythign ends and some major waypoints on the road). It's common for me to discover connections I hadn't noticed at the time of writing when I start rereading, and that was most definitely the case this time out.
As I mentioned, this project started after I finished reading STARDUST (I have the original Vertigo serialization, replete with Charles Vess' beautiful artwork). I felt unsatisfied, and I spent a while trying to figure out why. Eventually, I sat down to write my version. I knew I wanted something darker, wilder, and more disturbing. Instead of a naive hero, I wanted one who was older and more damaged.
I hammered out a few pages, in which a nameless protagonist makes a journey into Faerie Land by climbing an enormous tree and then riding a spiraling slide situated inside its trunk--a very direct reference to the Magic Faraway Tree. I'd been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy; I tried to bring some of that apolcalyptic feel to the prose--an overwritten style that was a lot denser and more lyrical than my usual writing style (for example, BLOODY WATERS.)
It was just a sketch;a study. I wrote a few pages and forgot about it. More than a year later, while casting about for something to take to a writing workshop, I rediscovered it. Reaction at the workshop was so good that I went home and wrote a bit more, and eventually I produced a novella called LOVERS, POETS AND MADMEN. This novella is the first quarter of the book.
After a while, I decided that I wanted to tell the story of one of the antagonists from novella, so I sat down to write that. This character can in no way be mistaken for an antihero--he's not just a villain, he's genuinely evil.The second novella, THE MAGUS, gets a whole lot darker than the first, and the first is pretty black. This novella is structured differently to the first one--it begins in the middle and intercuts flashbacks (in seuqence) right the way through until we reach the end (which precedes the first novella). It works as a stand-alone story--it's actually set prior to the first novella--but it pays off some question raised in LOVERS, POETS AND MADMEN if you've read it. That worked out pretty neatly, given that I hadn't planned any of it.
I wasn't going to write anymore, but after a while I got to thinking about what happens next, and it occurred to me where I was headed: apocalypse. I mulled it over and decided that I need two more novellas to get there. The first, which is called THE SCIONS, concerns a new generation of travelers (kin to characters in the first two sections) making their own journeys into the Realms of the Land. There are three narrative streams in this chapter, one for each protagonist, and they do not all start in the same place, either chronologically or geographically: one starts in the LAnd immediately after LOVERS, POETS AND MADMEN; one starts in London, 20 years later; and the third starts in Salvador during early events in THE MAGUS. When all three story threads meet, they resolve and set up the final novella.
The fourth novella, BLACK WINGS, has the original protagonist return to the Realms of the Land one more time, retracing his footsteps as he sets about finishing what he started. He didn't really know what he was doing in his first trip, but his second trip is a wholly different matter altogether.
That's it for now, folks. Next up, I'll discuss the characters and the setting.
-- JF
I started FAERIE APOCALYPSE at roughly the same time as BLOODY WATERS, and I wrote both books more-or-less simultaneously. But they're very different works, and the problems I experienced in developing FA were almost entirely different. This week I will begin final proofing for the manuscript before I start seeking representation for it. Unlike BLOODY WATERS, I have not submitted earlier versions of the manuscript around, so I expect that that process will be quite different as well.
Raw Material
I'll come right out and say it: FAERIE APOCALYPSE began as a reaction to Neil Gaiman's STARDUST.
No aspersion on Neil's work; he's a wonderful writer and he's been a huge influence on me, but STARDUST was more or less exactly the opposite of what I wanted it to be. I read an interviews in which Neil explains thathe wanted to write a fairy tale for adults that deliberately avoided metaphor. What I wanted was deconstruction of the genre. So I went and wrote my own.
There is a line in STARDUST that says that only lovers, minstrels and the mad come venturing into the Faerie Realms. I took that as my starting point: the first chapter of the book is called "Lovers, Poets and Madmen" and treats with exactly that premise: those are the only categories of people who are permitted to enter the Realms. So, at least initially, FAERIE APOCALYPSE takes a similar form to STARDUST: it's about a lost soul wandering in Faerie Land, looking for something impossible.
Okay, I know you're giving me funny looks right about now. This doesn't sound really sound like the sort of thing you expect from me, does it? Well, it's not--that's why it was interesting to write about for me. I think it becomes exactly the kind of work you expect from me in fairly short order.
STARDUST was my starting point, but I pillaged a lot of other fiction. Enid Blyton's children's fantasy novels were, literally, the first real books I ever read, and I read them voraciously. Part of it was in wonder at Blyton's magical worlds, part of it was amazement that I could finally read--my parents are both readers and I was desperate to learn the skill. And, lo and behold, being able to read was even better than I had imagined.
It's hard to understate the influence that Enid Blyton's stories had on me: particularly the MAGIC FARAWAY TREE series, about a tree that is inhabited by fairy folk and the magical lands accessible from its boughs; and the MR PINKWHISTLE adventures, which are about a fairy and his magical friends who help out the neighbourhood children in various ways.
Ursula LeGuin's Taoist fantasy series EARTHSEA is also graven large on my writing, and on FAERIE APOCALYPSE in particular. I read Le Guin's work a couple of years after I had plowed through Blyton's catalog--I must have been 8 or 9--and it really did blow my mind. In the first novel, the protagonist completes his hero's quest almost immediately upon gaining maturity... but it's meaningless. In fact, his victory is a tragedy, if it's anything at all. Ged flees, pursued by his own shadow into a final confrontation that can only be described as existential. Like I said, it blew my mind.
Of course, if you combine Enid Blyton's schoolyard detective stories with Ursula Le Guin and you look sidelong at Neil Gaiman's BOOKS OF MAGIC you get HARRY POTTER. If nothing else, I can promise you that FAERIE APOCALYPSE is nothing like that.
I'd be remiss not to mention ALICE IN WONDERLAND here. ALICE transports you to a terrifying and surreal landscape, inhabited entirely by mad and psychopathic characters--not the least of which is Alice herself. There's a degree of malice in Lewis Carrol's whimsy that was I certainly tried to capture in this book.
The last major piece of the puzzle if Roger Zelazny's AMBER series. I love the Zelazny's anti-hero protagonists and their enemies wreak havoc across a canvas of infinite worlds while pursuing the grandest of ambitions, the pettiest of desires. You don't have to look hard to see echoes of that in FAERIE APOCALYPSE. In fact, one of the most important devices in the book comes more or less directly out of one of THE GUNS OF AVALON; one of the early novels in the Amber cycle.
I use rock'n'roll to glue some of the stories together. Jimi Hendrix links the first two chapters of the book, Black Sabbath features in the second chapter, and the fourth is full of references to To, Waits' BONE MACHINE album. And other bands are mentioned in various places. One of my early readers didn't like it, but I think it's essential to the project at hand. Rock'n'roll is about sex, death, and revolution--what better harbinger of the Faerie Apocalypse?
Method
I'm not one for worldbuilding. I like to write my way into a scenario and build it up as I go (although I generally know how everythign ends and some major waypoints on the road). It's common for me to discover connections I hadn't noticed at the time of writing when I start rereading, and that was most definitely the case this time out.
As I mentioned, this project started after I finished reading STARDUST (I have the original Vertigo serialization, replete with Charles Vess' beautiful artwork). I felt unsatisfied, and I spent a while trying to figure out why. Eventually, I sat down to write my version. I knew I wanted something darker, wilder, and more disturbing. Instead of a naive hero, I wanted one who was older and more damaged.
I hammered out a few pages, in which a nameless protagonist makes a journey into Faerie Land by climbing an enormous tree and then riding a spiraling slide situated inside its trunk--a very direct reference to the Magic Faraway Tree. I'd been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy; I tried to bring some of that apolcalyptic feel to the prose--an overwritten style that was a lot denser and more lyrical than my usual writing style (for example, BLOODY WATERS.)
It was just a sketch;a study. I wrote a few pages and forgot about it. More than a year later, while casting about for something to take to a writing workshop, I rediscovered it. Reaction at the workshop was so good that I went home and wrote a bit more, and eventually I produced a novella called LOVERS, POETS AND MADMEN. This novella is the first quarter of the book.
After a while, I decided that I wanted to tell the story of one of the antagonists from novella, so I sat down to write that. This character can in no way be mistaken for an antihero--he's not just a villain, he's genuinely evil.The second novella, THE MAGUS, gets a whole lot darker than the first, and the first is pretty black. This novella is structured differently to the first one--it begins in the middle and intercuts flashbacks (in seuqence) right the way through until we reach the end (which precedes the first novella). It works as a stand-alone story--it's actually set prior to the first novella--but it pays off some question raised in LOVERS, POETS AND MADMEN if you've read it. That worked out pretty neatly, given that I hadn't planned any of it.
I wasn't going to write anymore, but after a while I got to thinking about what happens next, and it occurred to me where I was headed: apocalypse. I mulled it over and decided that I need two more novellas to get there. The first, which is called THE SCIONS, concerns a new generation of travelers (kin to characters in the first two sections) making their own journeys into the Realms of the Land. There are three narrative streams in this chapter, one for each protagonist, and they do not all start in the same place, either chronologically or geographically: one starts in the LAnd immediately after LOVERS, POETS AND MADMEN; one starts in London, 20 years later; and the third starts in Salvador during early events in THE MAGUS. When all three story threads meet, they resolve and set up the final novella.
The fourth novella, BLACK WINGS, has the original protagonist return to the Realms of the Land one more time, retracing his footsteps as he sets about finishing what he started. He didn't really know what he was doing in his first trip, but his second trip is a wholly different matter altogether.
That's it for now, folks. Next up, I'll discuss the characters and the setting.
-- JF