Intelligent Designing

 

Many writers are drawn to the romance of historical settings. Not me. I’m drawn to the bloody stupid. I’m enchanted by the crazy things that struck our ancestors as being a good idea. Not the events of history that contributed to the great ‘march of progress’, but all the wrong turns, and all the things that never were. The Victorian era was awash with insanity. The mad inventors, the youthful sciences, the quack medicine, the showmen and charlatans, the mermaids, the flying machines… I love them all.

So while other people have beautiful heroines and splendid science and great moments of history… I have Druids on a traction engine, socialite archaeologists, devices that don’t work, random explosions, and Penance Biscuits.

The Penance Biscuits owe more to time spent as a pauper living on a narrowboat than to anything specifically Victorian. We bought an edible, food-like substance, that was very, very cheap. It was also very dry, and very sad, and seemed to be made out of desiccated hopelessness, and tasted like wood shavings and futility. I started wondering in what circumstances anyone would consider these things to be a good idea, and so they were re-named the Penance Biscuits, and from there gained a life of their own and a significant place in the plot I was working on.

Fiction, for me, is a bit of a cobbling together process. Like a mad inventor of old, I sit at my table, hammering together things that have no place being attached to one another. Things I read, and things I observe. Bits of my own life, twisted out of all recognition. Daydreams and ideas, wondering ‘what if?’ and trying to cheer up the kind of day when you’ve accidently bought something truly miserable but are going to have to eat it anyway. Sometimes there are explosions. Sometimes the strange creation hobbles out into the world and runs over a puppy.

Without further ado then, the beginnings of the fictional Penance Biscuits, and an ornate bucket that turns out to be quite important…

Intelligent Designing book excerpt, read by the author.