heronaut

Whilst on our way home tonight we passed through the small Cambridgeshire village of Orwell, most notable for its association with Eric Blair, and again I thought to myself that I can do this, that there are stories worth telling from here amidst the Home Counties.

Later on this year, I intend to resume work on heronaut.

heronaut is proving surprisingly difficult to write at present.

Part of this is due to the era in which it is set and my feelings that to write something in a setting where the Second World War is still a fresh memory in the minds of the central characters and to not address the travesties perpetuated is utterly immoral.

Despite my current writing agenda, I actually have little time for classical superhero pulp. Part of this comes from the fact that I’ve never been able to reconcile the idea of superheroes existing in the same world as the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and not doing anything. Obviously, an analogy can be drawn between the War Cabinet’s knowledge of the locations of numerous camps and their reluctance, for strategic and practical reasons, to liberate them solely by use of air power but that dynamic changes when, instead of Hawker Hurricanes, you have a man who can move mountains.

Whilst reading the Public Domain Superheroes Wiki, I found myself questioning again and again why none of these characters intervened in the camps or prevented the rape of Nanking or the firebombing of Dresden. In fact, when taken further, why didn’t any of these characters use their powers to just stop the war?

The answer to this is because many, if not all of these comics were works of propaganda.

heronaut is a story set outside the restrictions of the era in which it’s set, thus I feel that there is honestly no way in which I can avoid issues that period comics brushed over.

Because of this, it sometimes feels a little suffocating.

One of the great things for me about writing genre fiction is the supporting characters. In a story where the normality of everyday life is counterbalanced by fantastic events, it’s sometimes hard not to find an archetype that doesn’t fit if you look at the world you’re writing in.

At present, I’m currently involved in a romance with the Silver Age of superhero comics, not so much for the individual stories or characters but more for the contrasting feel of those stories when held up alongside the kind of stories that are popular today. Whilst heronaut is set in 1953 and has become fraught with reflection on the reality of what the world was like for the British Empire following World War II, it’s hard to take advantage of some of the styles and tropes of that past era.

It is without further ado then, that I wish to introduce you to Grim Knight Jones as he appears in heronaut chapter two. Whilst this is not his first appearance in the book and whilst a strong line could be drawn connecting him with the character of Jet-Bastard from Millennium Man, this was the scene for me when the character really became one I wanted to write more about:

The dark green Triumph 6T Thunderbird let out a resonating throb of subsumed power as he brought the bike to a halt, silencing it calmly and gently, like a man wishing to pacify a much-loved pet. He swung his leg around and left the bike standing in the gravel car park as he cast his eyes about the lonely greyness abandoned in the middle of the Hertfordshire wilderness.

Before him, an ill painted building of primrose yellow boards and squandered holiday cheer rose up, a metal sign framed before the door and swaying in the autumn breeze. Behind the central café and its weatherworn loneliness stood several trailer trucks, canvas sides decorated with logos for familiar companies the young motorcycle rider had become too disinterested to even read.

With a customary look of derision, Grim Knight Jones turned his attention back towards the transport café, taking long strides across the car park as he reached into the pockets of his jeans and brought forth a carton of popularly branded cigarettes.

The tiny, dilapidated café, several years overdue for a new coat of paint, was located in a pitiful little village along the A10. Grim Knight Jones had travelled down from Aspenden on his bike, joining the snaking road through the desolate dead end village of Buntingford before breaking free of its atrophying orbit and joining the Old North Road towards Royston and King’s Lynn beyond.

He planned to ride the A10 until he reached Cambridgeshire, skirting along the surface of the A14 until he could turn into the city proper and waste time amongst the old scholarly buildings. Prior to such an excursion however, he felt the pangs of hunger, a dry taste in his mouth and a yearning for sustenance that he assumed was physical but couldn’t quite rule out the psychological implications.

Smoke flitted up from the top of his burning cigarette, a wispy vine leading up into the dull heavens above.

The door to the café opened abruptly, revealing three broad-set men, each one dressed in a uniform of grease stained t-shirts, open denim dungarees and donkey jackets.

“You the kid who came in on the Thunderbird?” sniffed the first of the three men, the leader Grim Knight Jones assumed.

He was a short man, dirty blond hair greased into the kind of quiff popularised by Jesse Garon Presley and his square jaw pocked with flecks of blond and black stubble, like pepper and salt upon his worn complexion.

“What if I am?” the younger man answered with false bravado, relieved to feel the reassuring presence of the flick-knife in his left hand trouser pocket.

The relief was short-lived as it dawned on him that, whoever the three bruisers before him were, they were each bound to be carrying knives themselves.

The man with the Jesse Garon imitation quiff smiled again, offering the darker skinned friend to his right a knowing look.

“Well,” he chuckled, “me and my boys here were just thinking what a nice bike it was you had. We were kind of wondering if you wouldn’t mind us taking it out for a spin, just up to Enfield and back or something, nowhere too far.”

Grim Knight Jones felt his stomach flip, anxiety souring to nausea.

“Sorry boys, that bike’s my pride and joy, I can’t just lend her out to any Tom, Dick or Harry,” Jones said, knowing what was coming next.

“Well, that’s too bad,” said the Jesse Garon imitator, his smile fading, “guess we’ll just have to convince you to come round to our way thinking, yeah?”

“What kind of music do you boys like?” Grim Knight Jones asked suddenly, aware of the movements of the bruiser’s two friends as they closed in on either side of him.

The older man’s face creased in a frown.

“What do you mean?” he asked slowly.

Grim Knight Jones offered him a smile and a shrug, looking slowly away.

“Well, me,” he said carefully, “me, I like music with a little bit of a kick.”

Before the older man could react, Jones had lashed out with his foot, knocking the legs out from under him and sending him crashing down into the gravel and dirt below.

Like a true Victorian enthusiast, this week I have mostly been dealing with the depiction of death and the rites of passing. Both TetsuMan and heronaut have featured manifest ‘Death’ with her knowing smile and mischievous nature, and its arguable that, what with both stories being worked on in tandem, that she is the same character in both.

It’s hard to write Death, especially as a feminine character, without either going overboard on the Persephone-like tragedy of her nature or reducing her to a carbon copy of the popular representation featured in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Originally I attempted to sidestep this issue by incorporating aspects of La Santa Muerte but, if I’m honest, she simply converged with a certain character from Love Amongst Strangers (Again).

The musical context for the writing I’m doing at the moment has been very freeform, without properly being established again. I’ve been leaning towards pop music, one of my many genuine loves but talk of such things is probably better confined to journals that do not possess aspirations of being a professional record of my writing endeavours.

However, should my plan for a story involving David Bowie investigating the Artifice Comics universe ever manifest itself as a viable option, then I dare say there will be a lot about music being written here.

You should all think yourselves very lucky that, whilst reading aloud the first part of heronaut during editing, I didn’t record and upload it here. The idea crossed my mind but made me so nervous that nothing ever came of it. I’ve never really been very good at public speaking or, indeed, at simply being in public so perhaps this was a case of attempting to run before I can walk.

In any case, I don’t believe the world is quite ready for Jacob Milnestein audiobooks, certainly not ones narrated by myself.

I’ve been listening to a lot Bowie records whilst writing – well, at least whilst writing heronaut. I’ve stuck mostly with the Berlin Trilogy but occasional snatches of his early repertoire from the 70s and, dare I say it, even Young Americans has also snuck onto the play-list.

"Do you remember your President Nixon?"

I must confess that I haven’t touched heronaut this weekend however. With lecteur de tarot being so close to completion, I must admit I’ve been spending as much time with it as I could. Today that involved going back and writing an interlude set between chapters nine and ten. I don’t usually do this kind of thing but I came to the point earlier in the month when, in order to meet the expectations of a separate, related lecteur de tarot story – again, from that mythical 27 + story collection – I had to push things along and focus mainly on the novel specific characters rather than exploring the additional back-story of the world.

I’m not actually sure that paragraph made sense but I don’t know if I can explain it properly without telling you exactly what I’m doing…but basically I’m one paragraph + one chapter + one epilogue away from the end and in order to make sure that the story didn’t skip a beat – like an irksome scratch in a David Bowie LP – I decided to add an interlude.

There are few other projects I’m not ready to talk about that are proceeding with varying degrees of difficulty both on the writing front and the realisation front. Perhaps after lecteur de tarot is complete, I’ll be able to focus on them properly.

Music is an important part of my life, possibly one of the most important aspects of my life. It has been there since I was a child, the familiar crackle and hiss of the family record player and the skip of the occasional line or beat in worn LPs. I wrote my first book almost entirely with headphones on and, ever since then have found music to be as significant part of my writing rituals as it is any of my other daily routines.

As I have grown older, many elements of the regime by which I write have been stripped away, I’d be tempted to say ‘refined‘ if I believed that, but in truth I don’t. Nonetheless, I still find it important to listen to music whilst writing, not all the time and not every time but I often find that the right song can set a scene or inspire an emotion with much better results than diving into something cold.

This type of writing is the second form that I find the creative act dresses in. It’s a little less inspired, a little less eager to confess its words onto paper than the spontaneous grab for pen and paper or the quickfire feed of paper in the typewriter or click on the mouse but it’s no less important.

As the weekend just gone was bank holiday, I took time to begin the first part of heronaut, a project I’ve promised to Adrian Watts for PSP’s Astonishing Adventures. The soundtrack for most of this has been a combination of My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade album and After the Goldrush by Neil Young – a fact that is evidenced in the prologue’s faux!Young lyrics.

The Love Amongst Strangers (Again) project has so far consisted of a variety of Paramore songs from their two studio albums, the Veronicas and a very specific song by American Goth revival band, ThouShaltNot whereas the playlist for the pretentiously titled lecteur de tarot side-story, 『天国のお嬢様』 has acquired two very specific Aly & AJ songs from their Insomniatic album and even a track from the original High School Musical.

These are still early days and, as I’m first admitting my obsessions with music here, I hope to go into detail later about the ’soundtrack’ of heronaut as it evolves, along with a possible breakdown of the library of tokusatsu songs that were used in my stint on Millennium Man.

By way of comparison, lecteur de tarot’s playlist is over 4GB of mostly orchestral music.