When I began writing 'Electricity' in 1999, one of the influencing factors was an article I'd read on scientists wanting to recreate the big bang in 'safe' conditions. Ideal fodder, I thought, for a sci-fi flavoured tale.

Perhaps surprisingly, I don't really read any science fiction. I find science quite exciting and inspiring though, in an ill-informed sort of way. Certainly a "big bang" machine is the sort of big idea that demands a story written.



This week, scientists are finally preparing to throw the switch. Will the reaction flare out of control and destroy the planet, if not the cosmos itself? It remains to be seen. The likely (and hopefully accurate) answer is no, of course not. Either way, we should find out this Wednesday, September 10 2008.

From a fictional point of view, I quite like the idea of a circular history. The Big Bang creates the universe. Man evolves and tries to work out why. Man recreates the conditions for the Big Bang to find out. The resulting Big Bang (re)creates the universe. Man evolves and tries to work out why. Man recreates... etc ad nauseum.

If all goes wrong, we can but hope that Aston and company will be there to do something about it. Failing that, apparently the often dangerously inept Torchwood apparently will be.

For the nightmare scenario, courtesy of the Daily Mail:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1052309/MICHAEL-HANLON-Are-going-die-Wednesday.html?printingPage=true (image taken from this article)

For a more scientific approach:
http://www.reuters.com/article/wtMostRead/idUSL846768920080908

Well, it looks like I might be lying low for a little while. Possibly the next few months, while I bang together a completely rebuilt version of HtDC. It'll still essentially be the same book but (hopefully) much better. There may be reasons for this, but I'm keeping shtum. The important thing is I'm really excited about what the second draft will look like.

This does mean however, that further adventures of Salmon and Dusk are unlikely for a while. Time is, as I may have mentioned below, a little short in supply at the moment. Also, I'm determined to get the first book 'right' before moving on to the second novel proper.

Other podcast novels aren't an impossibility though. I love the format of podcasting and the relationship it allows me to develop with listeners/readers while the creative process is still underway.

I've really been wanting to attempt a follow-up to Electricity, mainly as I enjoyed recording it and feel it's my most successful use of the 'podcast novel' format. Something with a similar focus on music, told by a central character in a similar, stripped back voice. What was holding me back, of course, was an idea. Until yesterday, when I had one of those fantastic moments (sparked by a fusion of cold weather, exhaustion and pop music) that had me scribbling in my moleskine. At least one of the characters from Electricity would slot very well into that tale, so we'll see. I do like returning characters.

There's another idea that's been kicking around for years and that I finally had time to elaborate into a workable plot (during an incredibly boring conference I was recently sentenced to.) It's probably more of a screenplay idea, but I'm quite excited about that too.

Ideas aren't in short supply at the moment, which is reassuring. As much as I love them, I wouldn't want to be stuck with Salmon & Dusk forever. Of course, finding the time to do anything with these ideas remains an issue.

Hopefully there'll still be some interest left by the time they emerge...

Aside from the odd-spot of freelance journalism, I have three projects on the go at the moment which are more or less equally exciting. I'll talk about the second two over the next week or so.

The first is a short-story for a forthcoming anthology, which should be troubling me more than it is. It should be troubling me for two reasons.

One reason is that it's been years since I wrote a short story and they've always caused me immense pain. I had planned to write several short stories (such as My Chalk Outline) under the banner of The Terrible Business of Salmon & Dusk. Writing a shorter tale, I discovered was no less effort than a novel as the storytelling has to be so concise and focussed. I like to ramble a bit. There's charm in a bit of ramble (I tell myself.) MCO was almost as exhausting as the year I spent on HtDC.

The main reason I should worry is that I haven't written it yet and I seem to recall a June deadline being bandied about. No problem really, as I write best under pressure. Well, I write most under pressure. Without any deadlines, my portfolio would consist of three hundred first chapters of several different novels. When it comes to freelancing, I rarely miss a deadline but I do need to feel it pressing at my eyes with the balls of its thumbs.

I only finished Electricity as I'd started it as part of NaNoBlogMo - a competition run in November of every year, in which aspiring writers are encouraged to write a novel inside a month. I had a particularly untaxing job at the time, so I thought I'd give it a go. At the time it had been six years since I had written the first chapter and I felt a lack of time to prevaricate might encourage me to finally write the second. As it was, I think it took me about six months to finish. But I finished! I'm sure my 10 loyal readers were rather glad. Well, one or two of them, at least.

(Actually, I'd tried a similar experiment a couple of years earlier, in which I published a novel Burnt Toast & Unrequited Love on a website as I wrote it. I think I only had about 3 readers, but the attention - or their expectation - was encouragement enough to finish it. Which is almost a shame as I now think it was a bit rubbish. I might redraft it one day.)

When it came to write to How to Disappear Completely, I'd written about five chapters before I began podcasting it. Insane. Quite, quite insane. For a while I was attempting to write AND record AND edit AND post a chapter EVERY WEEK. This was the same year I began a career as a full-time teacher, a move widely known to bring about nervous breakdowns in most who attempt it. Now I think about it, I did possibly go a bit strange.

Ultimately I settled down into a pattern by which I wrote a chapter one week (generally on my iBook during an hour-long commute) and recorded and edited it the following week. A fortnightly pattern was more sustainable but still rather hectic. Chapter 25 was written during a month in New York, most of it over Green Tea Lattes in a Midtown Starbucks.

Time is my enemy then, when it comes to writing. I need to feel time-starved before I get anything done. Some sort of balance is ideal, I suspect, as currently I've been too time-starved to get much done at all. I used to write from midnight to three a.m. but having a partner and a full-time job has tended to preclude this. I still creep from the covers in the early hours some mornings but I generally end up just making a few bleary-eyed notes before returning. (And then lying awake in plotting-induced insomnia.)

The demands of a listening public provided the push necessary to finish How to Disappear Completely, written in snatched moments across a year or so. Obviously, there's a lot I'd now change and have changed for the second draft. Act II, for example, is completely upside down and overlong in the podcasted version. But the important thing was getting it written, getting it right comes later. In fact, the whole Act structure works against the book. If there's a print version, we'll see a far more streamlined, plot driven version. The current structure owes more to television than commercial fiction. I'm looking forward to rebuilding it into something tighter over the next few months.

(That said, I still think it's rather marvellous. I read it again recently and surprised myself - Did I write that? I think that's my favourite part of the writing process.)

Would I write more given more time? Well, yes. Obviously. I have far more discipline than pre-Electricity and have learned a hell of a lot about plotting from mistakes I made on HtDC. The next book is going to be much better structured, even if written at the same breakneck speed.

Electricity, as part-memoir, bears the imprint of many experiences and influences, but there are two clear sparks that started that fire. One was a dream I had, just before I left Perth for London, about intelligent electricity; physical, tangible electricity being crafted for entertainment. The second was the film clip for Suede's single 'Electricity', which I first glimpsed after returning from a drunken night out. (Spending a few drunken hours watching weekend all-nighter music programme RAGE was de rigeur after a night on the town.)

When starting writing something, I like to have the "vibe" worked out - the aesthetic. Usually this amounts to a vague sense of visuals but also a quality of the world the characters will inhabit, be it joyful, murky, autumnal, rainy, clean, gritty, magical etc. For my Electricity, I wanted something hard-edged and ordinary, laced with bigger possibilities. This was crystalised in the film clip - a cool as fuck band shimmering in and out of existence in a rainy London alley, like manufactured ghosts.

It barely mattered that the song in question was more or less a retread of 'Trash' from Suede's previous album or that Anderson's lyrical lexicon was already caricaturing itself - the refrain 'bigger than the universe' worked as that mysterious trigger to start writing. Within months I'd written the opening chapter to Electricity, more or less as it stands. At the time, and for some time after, I thought it was the best thing I'd ever written. It was so good, in fact, that it took me five years to write the second chapter.

From the archives:

I have rediscovered the joy of Suede, having recently picked up a copy of their biog, Love and Poison via ebay.

Some years ago I tortured many a hairdresser insisting they bend my unbendable hair into the Anderson fringe, used to take in the NME to some poor Italian in the local mall. It was all black hair and skinniness then, sweltering in the Perth summer beneath black shirts and hairspray. They weren’t a band for an outdoor city, for the determinedly masculine and casually dressed. They were style and pallour, urban despair and decay.

There was little decay in Perth, which was probably why I was so keen to leave it. Songs like ‘The Asphalt World’ seemed ill at home among the open green and blue of the quiet town of Cottesloe. But these were songs that felt like home anyway. There were three Suede fans in Perth and I was dating one of them - I think the glamorous decay of their music glamourised the decay of that relationship far longer than could be healthy - so it was a small but determined clique. It was music determined to be unpopular, music for the misfits and outsiders. (Actually, I’ve been asked to point out that there were probably more than three Suede fans in Perth, which is very true. We were just too busy being glamorously miserable in our bedrooms to ever congregate anywhere.)

Of course, in London they were topping charts and covering papers but that was, quite literally, a world away. In Perth we were ‘alone, but not lonely’, skinny and gloriously miserable.

By the turn on the century I had become embarrassed, as one always becomes embarrassed of an ideology left behind. The band had stagnated and caricatured themselves. From ‘Coming Up’ on, each album seemed to in some way imitate the last, albeit less successfully. ‘Trash’ became ‘Electricity’ which became ‘Positivity’ in a sliding scale of quality. ‘Head Music’ seemed promising at the time but, once that time had passed, it was empty with filler. 2002’s ‘A New Morning’ was unexcusably dire, with lyrics that once verged on urban poetry suffering from a vastly reduced and self-conscious lexicon. The less said about the two singles fronting 2003’s retrospective the better, which was just as well as there were too few people still listening to say much.

So Suede and I parted ways, shortly before they parted ways with each other. In 1996 I would have been appalled, 7 years later I was almost relieved. I still thought about them, still cared in the distant fashion reserved for ex-lovers. I picked up the biog dead cheap on ebay gripped by a fleeting nostalgia, with some vague thoughts of research for a music piece I was thinking of writing. It’s a good story - theirs, not mine - and has returned me (older and wiser) to the flock. Given the tempest of addictions, illnesses and tantrums that surrounded the band, it’s remarkable they ever released a record. It’s an incredibly readable nightmare romp which I devoured within a week’s worth of train journeys.

Shock! as first guitarist (Bernard Butler for the uninitiated) begins leaving shortly after the release of their first single. Marvel! as he rarely speaks to his bandmates throughout the recording of their masterpiece, ‘Dog Man Star’. Be Amazed! as his replacement, 17 year old wunderkind Richard Oakes perfectly replaces him before descending into alcoholism. Despair! as Brett Anderson swaps addictions between smack and crack and seems to rarely leave his flat. Despair again! as keyboardist Codling develops ME and has to regularly crawl offstage to collapse in a dark corner. Detest! Blur frontman Damon Albarn as he steals Brett’s girlfriend and generally acts like a wanker.

So. Suede. Love and Poison. Makes old obsessions new again. Although it really is only their first two records that still stand up timelessly and astonishingly… And some b-sides. And ‘Beautiful Ones’. And I have a soft spot for ‘Lost in TV’… And ‘Everything Will Flow’…

It’s strange really. I was feeling utterly miserable going home from work on Tuesday. Graffitied train through North Melbourne urban wasteland, grey clouds. And the Suede comp in my Discman (ipod? pah!) fitted perfectly. Yesterday I went home feeling enthused and optimistic. Blue skies, clean train, open spaces. Ducks on the river. And the Suede comp in my Discman (if I could listen to my old 12"s walking around town I would)* fitted perfectly. Suede. Dead but eternal.

* I think my anti-iPod stance lasted another three months. What was I thinking?

Since I began this somewhat irregular series, my list of stolen inspirations has expanded somewhat. More than anything else I've written, How to Disappear Completely had an impressive gestation period. I used to marvel that it took Joseph Heller seven years to write Catch 22 (that's on my list, by the way) but from the first time I typed Kilbey's name to the last, most of a decade had passed and the next was nearly over.

In that period, you'd imagine that my interests would have altered fairly dramatically. I was 17 when I wrote the beginning of Kilbey's story - at that stage he was a middle-aged detective investigating the death of a blue-eyed duck (I'd just finished reading Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently books, which are also on the list) called Kilbey Salmon De La Hunty - and I'm 30 now. So many bands and fads and movements arose and dispersed in those thirteen years, their influence waxing and waning. Grunge, Britpop, Generation X-fiction, Post-Rock, Harry Potter. Ultimately the final draft that I embarked on in 2005 was - barring a few sections written in 2000 - fresh, as they should be. The last thing I wanted to produce was something mired in the mid-1990s.

The one constant influence throughout this period was, unquestionably, Doctor Who. The fact that is was missing from the airwaves throughout that entire period is, in some ways, crucial to the novel's gestation. When Who went off the air in 1989, it was the first time in 26 years it hadn't been around. Sad as it is, part of the process that led me to write HtDC was a desire for something to take its place. In other words, the absence of a regular Who fix led me to attempt to replicate something that matched its genius, without ripping it off wholesale.

I think there was also always a nagging sensation that Doctor Who was rarely quite as good as you wanted it to be. There was something magical and addictive about it, nonetheless, but it didn't touch genius as often as the concept deserved. Writing my own stories allowed me to fill that gap between concept and execution in a way that felt more satisfying.


Doctor Who was with me when I was born and, at this rate, is likely to be part of me until the (hopefully distant) end. I have no idea why this should be, but there it is. Blame my father and his father before him. My grandfather bears a passing resemblance to Jon Pertwee and my father to Tom Baker, so perhaps Who is hardwired into my genes. (Although that would make me Peter Davison which, while being preferable to Colin Baker, lacks any great appeal.)

The premise of the show is undeniably attractive. A slightly eccentric, anarchic, moral figure able to traverse the entirety of the space and time in a telephone box. In the process, the program was able to slide across an incredible range of genres, styles, contexts and subtexts. I never really read much science fiction and it's not a genre that excites me greatly, but this was something else. It was unconstrained, capable of telling any kind of story in any kind of place. That freedom to blend and shift genres still appeals and is at the heart of How to Disappear Completely.

Tom Baker - still thought by most to be the definitive - was the Doctor when I was born and one of my earliest memories is watching him fall to his death and transform into Peter Davison. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, I was convinced at the time that he had actually transformed into Griff Rhys-Jones. Strange.

More than any other actor, Tom was the Doctor. In his later years, he admitted that he thought the best way to play an alien was to, more or less, play Tom Baker. Fiercely intellectual and frequently silly, righteous and irreverent, the man probably had more influence on my childhood morality than God.

With an actor so inventive and unpredictable, the series infused me with a sense of the possibilities of imagination. Rather than being a handicap, the ropable special effects encouraged leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief that made it possible to then invent new stories and scenarios in the backyard. An alien need appear no more fearsome than a few tin cans and a rubbish bin to pose a serious and terrifying threat. I suspect my interest in creating narratives and scenarios - that obsessive impulse to create and write new and exciting worlds - stemmed from this. The first stories I wrote were, in all likelihood, Doctor Who stories.

Obviously, the real world became increasingly compelling over the next decade and I stopped inventing my own in the backyard. The stories I wrote reflected my own experience, as you might expect, and I was more interested in exploring that world than far distant ones.

As for Doctor Who, it all became a little white and sterile throughout the 1980s, more scientific than magical. In doing so, it lost most of its appeal to me, which was the possibilities in opened up in the real world. A telephone box could be spaceship, seaweed the hideous insides of a metallic robot, shop window dummies were waiting to spring into life and wreak slaughter upon suburban streets. Once Who moved off into far distant corners of the cosmos in ever-more-ridiculous outfits, I tuned out. Space never interested me as much at the world outside my front door.

It's this dual interest in the fantastic and the mundane that created How to Disappear Completely, a world where a London cab could take you anywhere and your own shadow might eat you while you're not looking. I think Who instilled an interest in what might be just around the corner, just out of sight, laying in wait in the most ordinary of places. The book very deliberately starts in the real world, as a story of a young woman feeling lost in a big city. Act III is set on a London housing estate as a reminder that, no matter how far we go into Kilbey's world, the real world is still here and just as important. I feel the reality of that setting and the ordinariness of that character is essential, given what follows. I wouldn't want to read a book that started on another planet or with a dragon swooping over vast green plains etc etc. Such things say nothing to me about my life, to misquote Morrissey.

I wanted How to Disappear to say something about life as I saw it, before it departed for somewhere else entirely.

SOON(ISH): Kilbey's character and Doctor Who

I spent so long working on what ultimately became How to Disappear Completely (probably around 12 years from the first moment I wrote the name Kilbey Salmon to the launch of the podcast) that there are far too many influences for me to remember, let alone document, half of them. I feel incredibly sponge-like and a little vulnerable when mid-project, finding my writing easily stained or led off course. For quite a while the book was very much 'magic realism', focussed far more on the magical and its effect on the characters than concerned with a driving plot. It took me some years to decide it wasn't a genre or direction that excited me terribly. Instead I became increasingly excited by genre-fusion, becoming something of a bricoleur, stealing elements from texts that had very little in common with the hope of creating something different and yet strangely familiar.

That was the plan, anyway. Who knows how successful I was. In this second of three posts in which I cough up to a bit of thievery, I going to ramble on a bit in the direction of some other, largely unrelated influences.


Music.
I've always used music when writing. Not necessarily during the eye-gouging work of sentence construction but very much in the plotting and planning stage - the generation of ideas and tone. Songs have long provided me with something of a shorthand for the feel of a piece, both in terms of an overall work and the vibe or emotion of a particular scene.

I'm probably less of a music obsessive now than I've ever been, but I still spend at least an hour most days tracking down new artists and releases. In my time I've (in variously limited senses) worked as a music journalist, hosted a new music programme for a Perth radio station and spent the best part of ten years behind the counter of record stores. Most of How to Disappear Completely was planned on one such counter, while listening to a carefully chosen soundtrack.

When first developing a piece, I tend to list albums or artists who wouldn't be out of place on the soundtrack. Sometimes I put together a CD (or, more recently, a playlist). This sonicscape more or less provides the shades in which I try to cast the story, lending emotional colour to the characters and the world and around them. I suppose what this is really telling me is that I've spent most of my life using music to colour my own world and lend a vicarious glamour. Which might be a little sad, I don't know.

I particularly enjoyed working on the podcast of Electricity as the music that was so crucial to its formation was finally able to be part of the finished product. The soundtrack to the podcast is very similar to the one occupying my head when I began work in 1999 and then resumed work in 2004. For the podcast of How to Disappear Completely, I confined myself to royalty-free music, but the influence of the albums that spawned much of it can be felt in various, non-too-subtle references.

The list, which is long since lost, was very much focussed on British bands - and a particular type of Britishness, one which (like the country itself, perhaps) had one foot in the past and one in the present. A very urban sound, but not without romance. Other bands would have included the likes of Doves, Elbow, Suede. For a long time I think I was visualising Kilbey as played by Jarvis Cocker. Which would be a bit strange, really.

(Ultimately, Kilbey became a Tom Waits fan. This was partly as a contrast to the Britishness but mainly because his early records have a late night feel that I very much wanted to borrow for HtDC. Like Kilbey, I adore his album 'Nighthawks at the Diner', not least as it borrows its title from one of my favourite paintings - which I also used as a tone reference. I may borrow that title myself one day. Music is clearly important to both Kilbey and Nero, the latter obsessed, of course, with his rockabilly.)

Radiohead are an obvious influence, although I can't say I've genuinely loved much of their recent output. Their track 'How to Disappear Completely' certainly shaped the feel of the book - I listened to Kid A a lot while planning one version of the storyline - but the book's title had actually been kicking around since the end of 1998. No, really. I think I dreamt it in a particularly fertile couple of weeks in which I also dreamt the idea for Electricity. If only I could remember what I'd been drinking...


Cowboy Bebop.
This was a late addition to the influence pool. I'm not particularly into anime, but this early 2000s series was something quite different. For the uninitiated, it concerns the misadventures of a group of space-age bounty hunters in a world that is strongly influenced by film noir, westerns and a particularly smoky variety of jazz. The lead character, Spike, gave me the idea of allowing Kilbey to keep his Footmen's suit, mainly as I thought it looked very cool. Up to that point he'd been kicking around in a three-quarter length leather coat.

The main influence on HtDC, aside from reminding me to be inventive and dangerous with regards to the 'cases' Salmon and Dusk would be sent on, was Cowboy Bebop's attempt - as it states in the opening titles - to create a new genre, stylishly fusing elements of the past with those of the far future. In doing so, Cowboy Bebop was able to be both very familiar and very strange. Halfway between the past and the future, Cowboy Bebop's world feels quite like our own, but is able to regularly surprise us.


Alcohol.
Much of HtDC was conceived under the influence of booze. Both literally and thematically. In some ways, I used drunkenness (the character's, not mine) to gloss over the necessary bewilderment involved in discovering the world has deeper depths than could be imagined. Booze allows one to slide down the surface of things a little. It's certainly always been my drug of choice, although I rarely write anything worthwhile after a few. Nonetheless, it's good for the gestation, if not the concentration.

Next: Doctor Who.