Publishers, books and sorcery
About ten years ago, I took some of Tom Brown’s ideas for a comic that never happened, and turned them into a novel called Fast Food at the Centre of the World – which you can find on bandcamp and can listen to for free if you don’t download it.
I’m delighted to announce that there’s going to be a print version, with Tenebrous Texts. This was the fastest and most entertaining experience I’ve ever had around pitching a book to someone. One of the upshots is that the publisher suggested I should consider writing a sequel, which I’m now exploring.
The core idea of Fast Food at the Centre of the World is that a sorcerer who has identified the magical centre of the world opens a cafe there. The fast food in question is about good quality, quickly available food, which is more feasible when you live where food is grown.
I think the sequel is going to be Fast Fashion at the Centre of the World. I’m also thinking about corruption and overly complex systems that dehumanise workers. My aim is to end up with something funny, because it’s often easier to think about difficult topics while also having a laugh.
Since the first novel, I’ve had considerable experience of the Transition Towns movement. While the first novel clearly aligns with that movement, this was largely just a happy accident. I will be taking more knowledge and insight into this second novel. I also think I’m going to repurpose ideas I’d been collecting for a different project, that I now think won’t be happening. I’d been world building for a novel that was intended to be a joint project, but I don’t think I’ll be working with that collaborator now, and I’m not inclined to waste what I’ve already done. I think I can use ideas I’d been exploring to flesh out the curious city at the centre of the world.
One of the more pernicious writing myths is that a person has an idea for a book. I often hear from people at events who tell me they had an idea for a book. If you’re lucky, an idea will give you a short story. It takes a lot of ideas to tell a story that lasts for sixty thousand words or more. Those ideas need to connect with each other so that themes, setting and character combine into something that makes some kind of sense. Even when books are set in the real world, there’s a lot to know and understand before that can be possible.
A significant chunk of the time it takes to write a novel goes on figuring out how everything works. For me, that involves time spent learning, reading and ideally, experiencing things first hand. The more I know, the more raw material I have to work with. I also reject the image of the author alone and separate from the world, dreaming their book into existence. I do a great deal of imagining, but I also try to root that in things that are substantial.
My main aim with this project is to write something that will make people think about how preposterous modern life is and how much better our lives could be. There will be silliness, because I’ve found that I often do my best and deepest thinking when I’m trying to be funny, and because there’s comfort and relief in laughter and I think we could all do with more of that at the moment.
