The Map Story
If you’ve been following the scattering of interviews I’ve been doing, you’ve probably already heard this story – but if you haven’t, then here, once again, is the story of how I came up with the original idea for The Blackbird and the Ghost, and the Boiling Seas in general.
Long ago in 2016, I was part of a production of The Comedy of Errors. As tends to be the case with university drama, it was a bit weird in terms of setting and presentation. For one thing, it was set in a market town in 1950s Yorkshire – and in order to bring that town to life, there was a permanent chorus of townsfolk onstage at all times. Publicans, housewives, market stallholders… we had at least four or five people in every scene wandering the background, doing normal human things to keep the stage alive.
One of them was me. I played the illustrious role of a greengrocer, and though I had a few lines at the beginning for most of the play I was sat idle at my stall until the plot called for one or more of us to react. We of the chorus played cards, read, chatted silently… and I brought along a sketchbook. Now I’m no artist, but I like to scrawl occasionally – and one day (I forget whether it was in rehearsal or actually at some point during Act 2), during a particularly long monologue, I started drawing a map of some islands. And when I was finished, I thought it looked pretty good – and a few ideas started bouncing around my head…
[image error]Redrawn in ink, but otherwise exactly as the original.
From the map itself you wouldn’t know there was anything special about the world, but I was already thinking away. Maybe it was the play that did it – The Comedy of Errors opens with a shipwreck, it’s filled with inversions and subversions of expectations – I think that bled over into my thoughts while I was drawing this map, and so I ended up with not just a map but a couple of pages of notes on this inverted ocean and all its myriad perils. The coldharbours, the scholars at the Lantern, the terrifying sealife and the deadly ruins – and a few plot points that I haven’t actually delved into just yet – all of it came from this map, and those few days in February sat eating fruit while Shakespeare happened ten feet to my right.
Bonus Question: If you can tell me where I got the idea for the name ‘Port Malice’… I don’t know, you can have the book for free or something!
