Video Interview 1

My friend Evelyn came round on Saturday and we recorded four short interview segments about City of Masks - this is the first, and I'll be releasing the others over the next few weeks. Evelyn was one of my original pre-publication critique group, so she knows the story well. We tried to stay clear of outright spoilers, but some of our references won't make complete sense until you've read the novel.

I have to apologize for the sound. My best microphone, which I've been using for the podcast, is a clip-on and only works for one person at a time. It was a rainy day, and we had two laptops running, so lots of fan noise. I filtered out the noise from a second copy that Evelyn recorded on her Mac, but inevitably some of the signal went as well, so in the end I've combined that with the original track recorded by my camera's mic - reinforcing the signal but leaving the noise on one of the two versions.

Here's a transcript to partially make up for the sound quality:

Q: Is this your first novel, or have you been published before?
A: Yes and no. It is my first published novel. It's not the first novel I've written, and it's not the first book that I've had published, although I've never had my name on the cover before. It was always projects – work for hire, basically.
Q: You've obviously read a lot of books and maybe even books about how to write. Would that be the case?
A: Yes, yes, pretty much. I've read some writing advice books, which all seem to boil down to one major piece of advice, which is "keep writing". Read a lot, write a lot, toss out what doesn't work, and eventually you'll have written something that does work if you have any ability at all, just through sheer perseverance. And that seems to be the major piece of writing advice that there is. But what perhaps City of Masks arose from is a lot of reading of mostly fantasy and science fiction, even though it's not fantasy or science fiction by strict definitions.
Q: What is its strict definition?
A: You could call it "slipstream" – that's a fiction designation that's around, that most people haven't heard of, which makes it a bit less useful. But it's somewhere in between mainstream fiction and the fantasy-science fiction sort of thing, in that it has elements of the fantastic or the counterfactual – as City of Masks does, it's a city where everyone is required by law to wear masks – it's a what-if, and yet there's no magic, there's no advanced technology, it's not an alternate history in any strict sense. It's not an alternate Venice, for example – no canals in the City of Masks.
Q: That's true. Just highways.
A: Just highways, highways and low ways.
Q: That's right. That's intriguing. It creates a nice picture, as well, it creates a picture of there being lots of levels to the whole city.
A: And the city is very class-stratified, as well. The lowest people are on the lowest roads, and the highest people are on the highest roads, and they only mix in the middle. It's the same thing with the houses. The poor live in the bottom of the houses and the rich live in the top of the houses.
Q: Unless they fall from the top to the bottom. How long did it take you to write the novel?
A: Well, from start to finish, ten years. But the last part was done very quickly. I sat down over a period of about a week and wrote – I'm not sure how much – the last 10 or 15 thousand words, anyway, and the problem was that I got stuck after I'd got the main character to the location. It was, "And now what happens?" I didn't know. I didn't know what was going to happen. I knew that there was going to be a chase across the rooftops, probably with the shooting of arrows, and a sword fight. I didn't know who was chasing whom or why, but I knew that that was in there. And what I ended up doing was I charted out all the characters and their relationship to each other and what they wanted on a big piece of paper like a mind map, and the plot really fell out of that. Once I had it down in that format I could see, this person wants this thing, that's going to lead to certain events, this other person wants this other thing, there's conflict there… it just seemed to develop out of that. But unfortunately I didn't have that idea for quite a while.
Q: The idea of joining everything together?
A: The idea of mapping it all out like that.
Q: So you didn't start with a grand map and then join it all up in words?
A: No. No, I started with an idea about "what would it be like if everybody had to wear masks that told people who they were?" That was my base idea. And from that, which is kind of a metaphor or satire on our society, where we do go around wearing masks that tell other people who we are, and pretending to be people that we aren't, or pretending to be people that we are, sometimes. And I just wanted to explore that. But it ended up as an adventure story and a mystery.
Q: You did intend to write a novel, though, didn't you?
A: I did intend to write a novel, not an essay.
Q: And you just said, we go round wearing masks pretending to be who we are. Is that possible, to pretend to be who you are?
A: Yes. There's actually a book which I came across after I'd finished – or as I was finishing writing City of Masks, called The Woman who Pretended to Be Who She Was. It's a non-fiction book. And I quite like that idea, that if you're true to yourself, if you're authentic and genuine in expressing yourself, that you end up with a mask of your own face, and there is no difference between what you're presenting and what's actually inside.

City of Masks: Episode 18

Episode 18.




Offers are made and, for the most part, accepted. Rivers and Sallia reflect on recent events from their own unique and surprising perspectives.

Bass's theme: "What if I never speed?" by John Dowland.
Rivers' theme: "Can she excuse my wrongs" by John Dowland.
Sallia's theme: "Saltarello" by an anonymous Italian composer.
Outro bracketed by: "The Witches' Dance" by an anonymous English composer.

All music performed by Jon Sayles and used by his kind permission.

Well, that's the final episode. Please stick around; there will be video interviews soon (technology permitting), and don't forget to take a look at the new project, Gu.

New novel has begun

I've started my new novel, Gu, over on http://gu-novel.blogspot.com. Make sure you put in the "-novel" bit if you're typing it in, or you'll get someone else's blog in what looks to my inexpert eye like Tagalog, or possibly Malay.

I'm using the comments to do a kind of director's commentary track as I write. You can use them too, to ask me questions, point things out or whatever. I'd like to hear from you.

City of Masks: Episode 17

Episode 17.




An unexpected summons from the King.

Bardo's theme: "Browning" by Elway Bevin.
Outro bracketed by: "The Witches' Dance" by an anonymous English composer.

All music performed by Jon Sayles and used by his kind permission.

Coming soon: New novel, and interviews

I thought I'd just give you a heads-up on what to expect over the next few weeks, since we're nearly at the end of the podcast with just two episodes to go.

First, I'll be starting my new novel project, Gu. Here's the current blurb:

Gu - the Protean substance, the last industrial product, the stuff that can be anything, can morph into any shape.

Susan Halwaz, the famous maker of digital-experience documentaries, is tracing the human story of the development of Gu. You experience this story through her eyes and the eyes of the people she interviews.

Differences from City of Masks:

It's science fiction in a more traditional sense - fiction in which the key difference from our world is not simply sociological, as in City of Masks, but technological. The focus, though, is on how this technological difference becomes a sociological difference (because in a technological society, technology ultimately is sociology). It's about the human experience of a disruptive technology.

It's not an adventure story in quite the same sense, either. There's not a mystery to be solved or a single, external threat to be overcome; there's no villain, as such. Rather, the struggle and the conflict is between people with differing ideas of how life should be lived and how, or whether, technology should be used. Everyone is a hero to themselves and a villain to someone else.

And rather than being told as a series of journal entries, it's told as a description of what you would see, hear and feel if you were experiencing Susan Halwaz's documentary. It's a kind of extended blow-by-blow review which conveys the content of the multisensory documentary as well as text can manage.

I'm going to need to be reasonably clever to get some of the setting across, because there isn't a convenient idiot to explain things to in infodumps. I'll be doing it as a series of blog entries, and one of the reasons is that it gives you a chance to comment as I go and say, "Huh? What? I don't understand what he meant when he said..." In other words, it's a check on whether I'm babbling incomprehensibly.

(City of Masks would have been great to do as a blog, with the journal format, but when I started it blogs didn't exist yet.)

Similarities to City of Masks:

I can't be certain exactly how Gu will turn out yet, of course, because I discover what shape something is by making it. But it will have flawed characters with an element of genuine idealism. It will explore identity and how we express it. It will use the literary techniques of modernism and postmodernism while ultimately rejecting the modernist/postmodernist view of humanity and existence as artificially empty.

More on what I mean by that last sentence will probably come up in the interviews. I've arranged for my friend Evelyn, who was one of the test readers of the first complete draft of City of Masks and is an excellent interviewer, to interview me about CoM at the end of June. We'll be recording the interview with a webcam and, all going well, posting the videos on YouTube and linking to them from here.

So that's a little preview of what's to come. I hope you'll come along for the ride.

City of Masks podcast: Episode 16

Episode 16.




Juliana's secret is revealed. We learn further details of the adventures of Corius and the scholars, and how things now stand in the City.

Juliana's theme: "Sweet was the song the virgin sang" by John Wilbye.
Outro bracketed by: "The Witches' Dance" by an anonymous English composer.

All music performed by Jon Sayles and used by his kind permission.