Why do I set a lot of my stories in a paranormal universe, you ask? It’s a question I often grumble about to myself.
I am slightly resentful of my writing-subconscious, because it doesn’t want to make things easy for me. I love writing historical stories, the research, the social history, getting into how people thought at the time. I suppose I could be writing these stories without the paranormal element…and indeed, I have! But quite often I start off thinking that’s what I’m going to do and then boink, there we are with mysterious howling and people dissolving and what-not.
Obviously, I had to have some sort of ooops, we’ve slipped through time element at the very beginning of the Border Magic series to get Lew back to 1919 in Lost in Time. But initially that wasn’t really the focus of the book. I wanted to contrast the experiences and expectations of a man born in the 1880s with one born in the 1980s, and time-travel just seemed a really cool way to do that.
And the whole Border Magic Universe has snowballed a bit from there.
I am aiming less for Narnia—a world you can easily pop through a wardrobe door to get to that is magical of itself—and more for Lovecraft, where the magic is dangerous and inexplicable and has consequences for the humans who’s lives it touches. Each of the people in my books discovers and reacts to the magic in different ways and readers aren’t meant to have a whole picture of how it works, because the characters don’t. Sometimes they’ll know a bit more about what’s going on than the characters if they’ve read other books; but it shouldn’t make any difference to their enjoyment of the story if they haven’t.
Readers seem to either like the drip-drip of more information about the magical world or loathe it. As a writer it’s a bit of a cop-out because I don’t have a series-bible with all the rules and regulations of the magic written down in advance. This means I can whip a thing out of the hat to make the story more gruesome or coherent if I want to. My rule to myself is that I can’t change things I’ve already written about—so the magic is internally consistent from book to book and the magic system grows all the time. I know what the rules are, pretty much, but I don’t’ have them written down anywhere in a very formal sense. I should also admit I do subcontract out some of my gothic horror…Talking Child came up with the idea of the hollows in The Flowers of Time and is still smug about it however many years later.
Will I write a story set in the Outlands, so people can find out more about what’s going on behind the scenes? Honestly, I don’t know. At the moment I’d say no, I wouldn’t. But three years ago I’d have told you I’d never write contemporary stories or short stories; and I’m quite happily writing my Reworked Celtic Myths in just that format!
Here’s a deleted scene I posted earlier, Fenn in the Outlands with a bit more about the world.
