If you’ve spent much time on BlueSky (or wherever else people talk about science fiction and fantasy on the internet these days) lately, you might have noticed a small kerfuffle around the recent release of Project Hail Mary, based on the novel of same name by Andy Weir.
Neither the kerfuffle nor this newsletter are about the book or the film, which I quite enjoyed. The ongoing discussion surrounds Weir’s assertion that his books are not only free from politics, but from any message or meaning at all: "I never put any politics or messaging in any of my stories at all. There's no deeper meaning; there isn't even any symbolism, even non-political. There's just no symbolism at all. My books are just purely to entertain."
Other people have already talked quite eloquently about how it’s impossible to imagine a future that’s not shaped by politics, and how artists that say they don’t do politics usually just mean that they don’t think about their politics. There’s an excellent review here from Nerd of a Feather looking at the choices PHM makes about where to put its focus, what it considers worthy of attention, and how all of that serves its nonexistent message. I recommend giving it a read if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
But I’m not here to hold forth on what Andy Weir should or shouldn’t say (that would be absurd – he’s clearly much better at reaching readers than I am!). I’m just sharing some characteristically scattered thoughts about process, because his comments struck me as so antithetical to my experience of how writing works. If that's not something that interests you, here's your cue to scroll on down to the News section.
Thing is, I never know what I’m writing about.
Well, okay, I could tell you the plot of one of my stories, who the main character is, what kind of a weird situation they find themselves in, and so on. I could tell you the political thrust of the piece, because you don’t write a dystopian novel without thinking about that quite a bit. But meaning beyond the level of the obvious? Symbolism? Why I actually wrote the thing and what it meant to me? Those are things that I always realise months or years later.
From the iddiest fanfic to award-winning published works, it’s always that moment of clarity. Oh. Of course that’s what it was about. The that might be something personal I was going through at the time, or it might be a current event or another piece of art that informed the work, but I never know it while I’m writing.Sometimes it's a pattern that becomes clear later on. (Huh, maybe I keep writing stories about mothers and daughters because my own mum's getting older and having some health issues.) Or it might be more obvious to another reader than to me. (The reviewer who said of "The Last Good Day" that "[one] gets the feeling that the author exorcised a lot of Covid-pandemic demons in the writing" might've been onto something.) And it means that my own understanding of what my work means isn’t static – and maybe it shouldn’t be trusted as the sole authority.
That sounds sort of whingey, but it’s not a complaint. For me, it’s a necessary part of the process.
I feel as though I’ve been banging on about the Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country anthology forever at this point, so apologies to those of you who follow me on BlueSky and might have heard this bit before.
My story from the anthology, “The Last Days of Don Juan Jenkins”, is something that spent around a decade percolating in the back of my mind. Our narrator is a librarian in a small town somewhere on the East Coast of the US. His boyfriend has dumped him and he’s generally feeling a bit stuck in a rut when the library where he works gets an unexpected visitor. Cai Jenkins, a Welsh scholar, is looking for the diaries of his ancestor, who in turn came to America in the eighteenth century. He was searching for evidence of the descendants of Madog, a medieval Welsh prince who was said to have sailed west to escape his feuding brothers and reached America.
In Jenkins’ day, the Madog legend was taken up as a cause celebre by Welsh separatists like Iolo Morgannwg, who thought it would provide a great excuse to establish a Welsh colony in the New World and escape the dastardly Saes. Of course, they never found any evidence it was true, and Jenkins disappeared, having apparently gone mad from syphilis. Nonetheless, our narrator finds himself caught up in Cai’s storytelling and joins him on a roadtrip following in Jenkins’s footsteps. But along the way, they encounter bizarre legends about fishmen and start to suspect Jenkins met a much stranger fate than the one recorded in history. And Cai begins to undergo a transformation of his own…
If the Jenkins story sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve listened to Gruff Rhys’s album American Interior, or read the accompanying book. The book focuses on Rhys’s own ancestor John Evans, who really did undertake the fictional journey in the story (though, as far as I know, he had nothing fishy in his family tree). The story idea came from my reading American Interior in 2015 or so and thinking that the Madog legend of an escape across the Atlantic would make an interesting mash-up with the Lovecraftian notion of a hidden undersea civilisation.
I wrote a version of the story back then and it got accepted for an anthology that was subsequently cancelled when the publisher went under. Looking back, it came as a bit of a relief. I think part of me knew, really, that it wasn’t very good.
Why? I think because I had too clear an idea of what I wanted (and didn’t want) it to mean. At that point, it was just over a year since I’d completed my PhD, which focused on Machen and Lovecraft. I’d written extensively on “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – the most obvious influence on “Don Juan Jenkins” – in my thesis and knew its themes, historical context, and more, uh, problematic implications inside out. This was great for a scholar, but for fiction, not so much. It meant that I ended up treating the story more as a statement of my Thoughts On Lovecraft than a piece of art, writing as though I needed to demonstrate everything I knew. The end product was plodding and uninspired.
By the time Mark asked me to contribute to Cthulhu Cymraeg: The Night Country, I’d been out of academia for several years. I hadn’t particularly kept up with the field in the meantime, having spent some time fed up to the back teeth of all things Lovecraftian. But this meant I was now able to approach the story through atmosphere and character, as a tale about two people experiencing some weird shit, and not as an essay. That’s not to say that my own politics and thematic obsessions aren’t present in the text, but hopefully they’re subtler this time around, leaving more room for the imagination to play and for readers to bring their own interpretations.
I think it’s a better story for that, and readers seem to agree. At least, the couple of (very nice) reviews of the anthology that have come out so far have had kind things to say about it. And I think it would be daft of me to claim it definitively means one thing or another – I’d rather see different readers emerging from it with meanings I didn’t know I’d put there.For me, it's a necessary trade-off. If I try too hard to write something that has a definitive message, it's going to end up clunky. I don't set out to write polemics in my fiction. But that means accepting that my own biases and assumptions will make their way into my stories, including ones I don't even know that I have. Readers bring their own experiences and assumptions to what they read, and they might interact with my own in unexpected ways. That's fine. I'm not going to tell someone they're reading it wrong. The acts of reading and writing are a conversation, not me handing down something written in stone from on high.
So, next time someone asks me what the piece I’m working on is about, maybe I’ll answer honestly – your guess is as good as mine. That's just how it works. We’ll both figure it out later.
Writing news
has been out for six weeks or so, and there have been some excellent reviews from
and
. And I'm also in this month's
Buzz
magazine, holding a copy and looking slightly startled.
Otherwise, I've kept up my resolution to write more short stories this year -- finished another one this month and wrote a good chunk of another. I'm working slowly on putting together a collection, and I'll keep you posted on how that goes.
Revisions on
Salt Angels
, my Victorian weird novella, are going well, and I'm getting that ready to send out to some publishers. Keep your fingers/tentacles crossed for me.
What I've been reading
The only non-book club novel I finished this month was
Death of the Author
by Nnedi Okorafor. I had mixed feelings about this. The SF and metafiction elements were what got me to pick it up, but for me those ended up being the weakest parts of the book, and I found the family drama far more compelling.
What I've been watching
Last week I saw
They Will Kill You
, which I really enjoyed -- not for the weak of stomach, but great, trashy, unhinged fun.
What I've been listening to
Last week I went to see TTSSFU play in Clwb Ifor Bach. Messy, fuzzy, wickedly funny and occasionally dreamy. I had a great time. Support band Wyatt were pretty decent, too.
That's all from me this month. 'Til next time.
JL