Collaborators wanted

I'm looking for one or more artist collaborators for a couple of graphic novel projects. I see them as following the free webcomic/POD print version model.

Project 1: Guardian of the Gates. A young thief-girl is sent to steal an elaborate watch from a mysterious man, and discovers that he is the guardian of gates to other dimensions. The wizard who commissioned her wants to take over his power, but as she grows to know the Guardian, and accompanies him on his rounds, she realizes where her destiny lies.

I see this one as being illustrated in a very beautiful painterly style.

Project 2: Four orphan teenagers come together and discover that they have some unusual abilities, and that a mysterious man in a brown coat is after them. They try to piece together the story of their past and defend themselves, while confronting the personal issues which their powers reflect and intensify.

This one would suit a more manga style.

So, tell your artist friends! Send them here, or send me to their portfolios via the comments.

And artists, take a look at the links in the sidebar to check out what my fiction is like.

Video interview 4 - innocence, themes, language, voices and the Countess

The last of the four interview videos. I've uploaded this one at higher resolution ("broadband" instead of "ISDN"). I may go back and do the same for the second and third (the first is at about the same resolution as this one).

Transcript:

Q: You dedicated your book to your late father, who taught you to be an honest man, you say. Are you the Innocent Man?

A: I wish I was, in a way. I'm not. My blog - or one of my blogs - is called the Innocent Man, but it's an aspiration rather than an attainment. And I think that you can become, if not innocent, at least simple-hearted, and that in a way that's the goal of a lot of spiritual practice, a lot of spiritual teaching, that you once again gain the straightforwardness that Bass is displaying. So I would like to be.

Q: Going on to what is happening outside of your story - like the Narnia series and Tolkien's trilogy, is this story a spiritual metaphor wrapped in Renaissance narrative?

A: It's... like Narnia and like Tolkien, it's not intended as an allegory. It has aspects of metaphor, as I've already talked about with the masks being a metaphor for the way that we portray ourselves as people that we're not, or as people that we are. I think it's kind of its own thing, it is what it is, but inevitably that reflects on questions like identity and intent and how we present ourselves to other people.

Q: So if, boiling it down further, if your book were to be studied by 7th-form English classes in the future, what would students study as themes?

A: Definitely identity, the masks are all about identity. And roles, roles that people play.

Q: And when it came to answering in their school exams "What was the author trying to say in writing this novel", what would a good answer be?

A: Ooh. They say if you want to send a message, call Western Union, but I suppose what I was saying is... a lot of it's encapsulated in Tamas's sermon, actually, that very hypocritical sermon which he preaches about being who you appear to be while he's being somebody else. Yes, it's saying we all have the ability to be authentic and we should strive towards that. And that when you're at your most authentic that is when you're at your best, in a way.

Q: Linguistically, you do some language tricks in there. Where would you say you learned to work with language like that?

A: Well, my degree is in English. I studied a lot of 16th and 17th-century literature, also Middle English and Old English, but most of what I studied was language. So that kind of gave me a feel for language and a feel for manipulating it. And the language of City of Masks isn't actually late-medieval or early-Renaissance English, though it gives the flavour of being. It's closer to 18th-century really, for more accessibility as much as any other reason, and because it's easier to write. But I was setting out for a tone of antiquity and formality - there's a lot of formality in the City of Masks.

Q: There are no contractions, are there?

A: No. Actually, I did find one when I was podcasting it, when I was reading it aloud. I found one "don't", I think.

Q: Who says it?

A: Bass. But that was a mistake on my part.

Q: It was a slip.

A: It was a slip, yes. And I tried also to give each of the characters a distinctive voice. That came out much more when I was doing the podcast, obviously, when I could speak in a different voice. But Corius is the only one who says "yea" and "nay", for example. Everyone else says "yes" and "no". And that sets Corius off as being, despite his education, a member of a different social class, with perhaps a little bit of a dialect.

Q: And what of Corius? Is he the only male self-possessed enough in the story to deny the Countess's advances, and does this explain his mysterious disappearance?

A: Well, sometimes you just have to not explain things, and I deliberately didn't explain why Corius got into the trouble that he got into, because the story stands without knowing that. It tells us about the Countess, is its function, rather than necessarily needing to be a mystery that we have the answer to.

Q: We can only imagine what it was like. Well, any final comments?

A: Well, I have to say it's been tremendous fun writing the book and also semi-dramatizing it, reading it aloud, doing the various voices. I really regretted when I was doing it that I hadn't given the Countess more lines, because her voice is wonderful to do.

Q: Can you give us a demo?

A: "I am hinting to you, Bass." She has that rich, honeyed voice that is full of threat and possibilities.

Q: Which he instantly picks up on when she comes by his ear at the beginning. There's definitely - that scene has weight, that she's someone to look out for.

A: Yes, the Countess stands out in any company. She's always at the centre. She's the spider at the centre of the web. And one of the people who read it said, "I wanted to hear more about the Countess, I wanted to see more of her."

Q: You have to get out the psychology books, don't you, to understand her, given her family happenings.

A: Yes, she's definitely a bit of a mess.

Q: A psychotherapist's dream. Especially with the havoc she wreaked.

A: Yes. But Bass was tremendously fun as well to do, the ponderousness and the... I'm sure a lot of my listeners think I'm much larger than I am, and will be surprised if they watch these videos to see that I'm actually quite slightly built.

Q: And very tall.

A: Yes.

Video interview 3 - Juliana, postmodernism and transmodernism

Here's video interview 3 of 4. Evelyn and I discuss: Is Juliana really virtuous? And what might the Characterists and Personalists represent in our real world?

Here's the transcript (the video also has subtitles, but I've just played it and realized that the compression makes them unreadable anyway):

Q: Juliana does an excellent job delivering deadpan innuendo. Is she really so virtuous?

A: Well, she says herself she's not necessarily virtuous entirely by her own choice. She considers herself unattractive, and so her lack of involvement, as it were, is not necessarily her own idea. But she appreciate's Bass's... attention, and his low-pressure approach, his own sense of what's right and proper.

Q: But her comments do suggest that she's certainly not naive.

A: No, no. She's definitely not naive, she's probably the smartest character in the book, in fact.

Q: And there's her having a title at the end, gaining a title at the end. Which she does, I imagine, gain?

A: Yes.

Q: Beyond the last page.

A: Yes. Yes, she kind of makes up for Bass's innocence. She's the counterbalance.

Q: Would you say that there are non-fictional equivalents to the Personalists and the Characterists in your story?

A: I've been thinking about that. They were - in terms of the politics, they were based on the factions which were at war in Renaissance Italy, the Guelphs and the Ghibbelines, I'm not sure if that's the correct pronunciation, who had... the supposed reason was different views on how bishops should be appointed and the power of the Holy See, but in practice they were political. Or on Catholics versus Protestants through most of the Reformation. But the more I think about it the more I think it's my metaphor for modernists and postmodernists on the one hand and whatever it is that I am on the other hand. Which... I've been using the term "transmodern" for lack of a better one.

Basically I see modernism and postmodernism as emptying, deliberately emptying out a lot of meaning out of life, out of things in general, and particularly modernism is saying, if you can't measure it, if it's not scientific, it has no meaning, out with it! And then postmodernism comes along and says, "Look! Everything's empty!" Whereas transmodernism says, "Well, actually, it's empty because it's been emptied. And you should maybe examine your assumption that there is nothing but the mask, that there is nothing but the superficial, that there is nothing but what you can see and touch, and that there might actually be something behind that that's real."

Q: It sounds a lot like the shadows on the wall of the cave.

A: Yes, yes, I suppose. And one of the reasons I think that I chose a late-Medieval/early-Renaissance setting is that I quite like the thinking of that time in terms of the reality that they saw underlying the external and the superficial, and that was lost in the subsequent "enlightenment", so called.

But obviously we've been through the Enlightenment, we've been through the 19th century, we've been through the 20th century, we can't go back. We can't suddenly become medievals again. And nor would we necessarily want to. So I suppose I'm saying, "Let's look at some of the things that were emptied out about culture and see if we can put some of them back again." In a transformed form, because you can't just go backwards.

Q: No. And can you think of an example of one of those things that you'd like to see put back in?

A: Well, one thing that the 20th century notoriously emptied out was the value of the human person. And you only have to look at 50 million people killed in World War II, at the atrocities in places like Cambodia, Uganda, to see that. And Bass is speaking for me when he says, it doesn't matter if the High Priest is a good man or a bad man, if you like him or don't like him, he's a human being. You need to protect his life because he's a human being. It's wrong to kill him.

Q: So in that way does Bardo represent what is to come in your hopes, in your wishes after postmodernism? Is Bardo taking us into the next movement, so to speak?

A: Ooh. Ah. Bardo's rather ruthless, and as Corius says I don't think he necessarily considers the value of a human life to be inherent. No, I don't think Bardo's taking us forward.

Q: No? Even though he presents a whole lot of hope for the City of Masks?

A: He does, he does, but the hope that he presents is a hope that goes backwards. He's a hard-line, old-style monarch turning back the clock, and I don't think that's the way forward for us.

Video Interview 2 - influences, ideas and names

Here's the second of my four video interviews with Evelyn. In this one, we talk about influences, ideas and the characters' names. This time I've put subtitles on the video as well as making the transcript below.

(I haven't transcribed or subtitled one embarrassing mistake in which, despite the fact that the character Bardolph is in three Shakespeare plays so I had three chances to get it right, I assign him to a fourth one.)

Q: Mike, can you tell us about the literary influences both for you personally, and that have bearing on City of Masks?

A: I realized actually after I'd finished it that my main influence was probably G.K. Chesterton, who, when you think about it, looked remarkably like I imagine Gregorius Bass - perhaps a little heavier. But his The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his novel, which is set 80 years in the then future, but he explicitly says at the beginning, "And nothing has changed technologically." The only change is social and political. And he goes from there. And the whole thing is an exploration of: if our society was just like it is now, except with this one difference, what would that look like? And also explores a very eccentric character, the Napoleon of Notting Hill, and explores some ideas through that.

But Shakespeare, obviously, is an influence...

Q: And you say "obviously" because of the language?

A: Not so much the language, it's more the setting, is kind of... I was picturing Shakespeare's Italy. And it has twins, it has swordfights, it has... I mean, even the name Bardo is partly based on Bardolph.

He's an influence, and Alexandre Dumas, with particularly the wicked noblewoman and the swordfight, they're coming pretty much straight out of the Three Musketeers. So a few different and disparate influences, but the strongest one I think is from G.K. Chesterton.

Q: And what about for you personally, who would you say your greatest influences are?

A: Well, the books that I enjoy most, which are probably the same thing, are Terry Pratchett, with his humour that also manages to explore questions of morality, I suppose, and ethics. Neil Gaiman, who's just a crazy man with a wild imagination. Those are two of my main favourites. Jim Butcher, I've been reading lately, who's kind of urban fantasy, and again his main character is someone with a very strong moral centre, although he sometimes has difficulty sticking with that because of the things that he ends up having to do. But he's definitely - he's not an innocent man, but he is an honest man, and he won't compromise his own moral code. It bends sometimes but he never breaks it.

Q: Can you tell us how you received the idea of the masks? Where did that come from? A city full of masks?

A: I'm not sure, actually. I remember early on coming across a Byron quotation, I think it was after I'd had the idea, though, talking about how the mask reveals rather than conceals, that the mask shows who a person is, and thinking yes, that's where I'm going with it. But what actually led to the idea of the city of masks I don't know. It was one of those ideas that just turn up in your head.

Q: In the middle of the night?

A: Possibly. Possibly in the middle of the night.

Q: Did it come in one hit? Or it gradually...

A: It gradually came clear. It's kind of like the mist gradually clearing. You've probably heard the story of how C.S. Lewis for years had these images in his head of the great lion and a faun walking through the snow with an umbrella, and he didn't know how it connected up. And it was a little bit like that. I had the idea of the sword fight high above the rooftops and just odd scenes here and there, and eventually I found out what lay under the mist, as it were. It was kind of like the tops of the houses seen through the mist and gradually the mist sank down and I could see the ground that connected them.

Q: Can you tell us about the characters' names? Do they have meanings in other languages?

A: Some of them do, yes. Gregorius Bass - Gregorius of course means "watchful" or "alert", so that's kind of an ironic name in a way, because he's the opposite of alert, he's the Innocent Man, he doesn't know what's going on. And Bass, Bass seemed like a solid sort of a ponderous name. Corius, I think, probably is based on "heart", he's got a very strong heart, and Mende - Mende is mendacious, meaning she lies, she conceals things, under pressure from the Countess.

Tamas is a doubter - he doubts the teachings of the Temple. The other names, they were just names, just sequences of sounds that I thought of.

Q: Sallia.

A: Sallia. Sally the maid.

More on possible future projects

I'm not seeing a lot of migration yet from here over to my new blog-novel project Gu. Which is fine, not everyone who enjoyed City of Masks is necessarily interested in the far more science-fictional Gu, but I do encourage you, if you are into SF or are interested in technology and its human impact, to go over and take a look.

At the moment I have vague plans for a number of works set in what I'm now calling the "Guniverse". Besides Gu itself, these are:

- Topia, a novel set before the invention of Gu itself, in an unusual faith community. It incorporates lots of jazz and blues, and questions about disability and enhanced human abilities. I started writing it some years ago and stopped because I'm not sure where it's going.

- Up the Line, a series of linked stories about Jill, a chaplain in the White Star Order (an interfaith order with the mission of "teaching, encouraging and resourcing the practice of faith in everyday life"), who works at the bottom of a space elevator among the assorted refugees, remittance persons, adventurers, capitalists and other dubious characters who go up it in search of a better life in orbit.

- Canned Goods Inspector, about a United Regions inspector, the only honest cop etc., who fights corruption and criminality in the space habitats (or "skycans") to which the aforementioned people emigrate. Some potential for a crossover of characters there.

- State of Lunacy, in which the Moon enjoys an "alternative political status" comparable in its impact to the creation of the first republics in the 18th century, and in which various people attempt to exploit, protect or oppose that state of affairs.

I also have a couple more ideas. (Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.)

One is a more City of Masks-style one about the creation of an opera in more-or-less 18th-century Prague (in about the same way as City of Masks was set in Shakespeare's Italy). It's a bit inspired by the Tales of Hoffman. A group of artists - a musician, a poet and a painter - are encouraged by their landlord, a herbalist and mystic, to create an opera. He tells them seven stories to give them inspiration. Each story relates to one of the characters - the three artists, the painter's model and mistress, the financier who funds the production, the diva who takes the lead role, and the old herbalist himself. Mostly without realizing it, each of them lives out one of the stories in the course of the production of the opera, the story which will shape their redemption from their various ills of the soul.

(I know, that sounds wonderful, but I have no idea how I'd actually achieve it. As I said, execution is hard.)

I think the title of that one might be Shadow Play.

There's another setup unfolding in my head - about a group of young people with powers - but I don't yet have a handle on it that would make it anything more than pulp. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.) One is able to remain unnoticed, another can open a door to anywhere she wants to be, a third can enhance any object so that whatever it does, it does to a magical degree, and the fourth always knows the exact whereabouts of anything or anyone he knows well. They've been assembled as a kind of espionage group, or possibly are trying to find out and counter the machinations of a rival magical group which has been destroying theirs.

Oh, and another science-fictional one. It's set on a planet populated entirely by women, who give birth to clones of themselves when they reach maturity at about 30, following which they can exchange genetic material with each other to create new individuals. But it's not about any of that, it's about the fact that they're postliterate (they pass memories on to their offspring that they think they will need), and that they're isolationists (having separated themselves from the rest of humanity by destroying the space gate that brought them to their new home), and about what happens when the gate reopens and wider humanity contacts them again and teaches a young woman to read. It's about tradition and ignorance and older generations controlling their descendants. It was originally called A Memule for Abi-Ada but I retitled it to the much friendlier Restarting the Alphabet. (There have been 26 generations on the new planet, and for reasons they no longer understand each generation is named with a different initial sound, 26 of them in total. The 27th generation is going to start again at "A".)

I'll update this blog whenever I do anything with any of these, so please stay subscribed if you are, or subscribe if you're not, to receive the updates as they occur.