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...

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.

The dullest of questions (feared by anyone who's ever written the shortest of stories) is, supposedly, 'Where do you get your ideas from?' In the course of writing How to Disappear Completely I think I had about five emails featuring a variant of the question and I'm not sure I answered any of them particularly helpfully or honestly. Really, the answers should be interesting as it can be the most exciting part of the writing process - the spark and burst of enthusiasm before the more workmanlike process of plotting and typing and drafting begins. I think writers tend to fear the question for two reasons, which I'll quickly elaborate on before confessing the root of my own inspirations.

Firstly, they worry about stripping their work of its mystery. Brian Eno once said that, when listening to a record, the last thing you should be thinking about is a band recording in a studio. Similarly, when reading a book (or listening to a podcast), the author doesn't want you to be paying any attention to him (or her). You shouldn't keep falling out of the fictional world to wonder how long the author spent finding names for the characters. (Kilbey Salmon came from a band poster, by the way, his name existing long before he did.)

Secondly, I think writers worry about being caught out. Every author steals, whether from life or art. It's the nature of the thing. Obviously, it's more comfortable to forget about these light-fingered moments and claim divine inspiration. Where caught out, a writer can plead homage. All the same, I thought it might be fun to trace the roots of How to Disappear Completely - in the vein of locating the origin of a train of thought that has jumped several tracks.

To that end, here are a few influences on How to Disappear Completely (still available at Podiobooks.com). In other words, here are some works I burglarised:


Neverwhere.
I only mention this one first as it tends to get mentioned in most reviews and people are always asking me if I've read it. The answer to which is Yes, I have, but it wasn't really on my mind when I was writing HtDC. I started work on what would become How to Disappear Completely way back in 1995. At the time it was set in Australia and The Eternal Footmen were more or less a secret masonic-type order preventing unseemly development. There was a bit of time-travel but without much purpose.

In 1999, I moved to London and began work on what would eventually become (more or less) the finished product. At the time, the Harry Potter books were starting to go critical and, living in London, I loved the idea that there could be secret parts of the city ("forgotten parts") like Diagon Alley tucked away down alleys in Soho or Camden. That rubbed off on HtDC and I started constructing ideas for 'Albion', this forgotten England hidden from view and populated with people history didn't have any room for.

It was only once I started writing that it occurred to me that Neil Gaiman had already done something similar in Neverwhere, which I'd read four or five years earlier and rather liked. (I actually much prefer American Gods, which I recommend to anyone who might have enjoyed HtDC.) As a result, I cut out large parts of the narrative that were set in this alternate London and shifted the focus very much back to the 'real world.' All we're left with from Albion is a few bars and shops, places that are still very familiar but have festered peculiarly from neglect.

The influence of Neverwhere is, I'm sure, quite strongly felt throughout parts of HtDC, but it affected the novel as much in terms of what it couldn't be as what it could. By this I mean, I was very aware of trying to avoid dwelling on concepts Gaiman used in that novel. Ultimately, I feel the stories are quite different, but I understand - and am quite flattered by - the comparison.



Withnail & I.
I love this film. I'm not sure I could ever explain why adequately, so I won't say too much about it. Whereas I worked quite hard to distance HtDC from Neverwhere, I worked just as hard to drag it toward Bruce Robinson's cult 1987 film - possibly the film most quoted by students, worldwide, ever. (With the obvious exception of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Its drunken quotability aside, there is a wonky majesty and literate, bitter humour to Robinson's script that remains irresistable. His use of dialogue is something most scriptwriters can only aspire toward. More than this, there is such clear, loving characterisation of the sometimes-fraught friendship between the eponymous two and an obvious joy in the use of language (both romantic and vulgar).

Robinson's ability to create poetry from the crudest parts of our existence is something he carried through to his novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, a book I bought and devoured shortly before commencing the first draft of HtDC. More than anything else, it's a book I credit with helping me discover my 'authorial voice', such as it is.

I was determined, when writing HtDC, that it wouldn't read as 'genre fiction'. I wanted to write something that was about language as much as it was plot. Something that had its own voice, even if it borrowed its stresses from elsewhere. I'm very aware of the influence of other writers when I'm working on something, so I'm quite careful about what I read mid-project. Working on HtDC, I carefully avoided reading anything remotely genre-ish. There were three texts I returned to - Great Expectations, Raymond Chandler's Marlowe tales and Thomas Penman. All three are very much in love with the language they're using, albeit in different ways. Chandler's work, for example, reads almost as a form of urban poetry, using words in ways that hadn't been written down before. All three novels have, I hope, left wonderful bruises on my prose.



Minder.
Along with Butch Cassidy and Withnail & I (and before either of them), Minder instilled in me a love of the odd-but-complementary couple. While Kilbey shares a silhouette and several bad habits with Withnail, he has more than a little in common with Arthur Daley. Arthur had a similar love of the dodgy business deal and a knack for getting himself into trouble. Nero was conceived originally as the muscle who would - a la Arthur's Minder, Terry McCann - come to the rescue when things went pear-shaped.

More than this, I think Minder greatly influenced the landscape HtDC inhabits. There are shades of beige to The Albion that belong to Arthur's drinking spot, The Winchester Club, while the circles Kilbey moves in are not a million miles away from the Cockney villains Terry would invariably thump at the end of an episode.

Additionally, I think there's a slight anachronistic quality to Kilbey's world that I suspect owes a little to the DVD release of the early 80s episodes. A slightly faded quality, perhaps. No-one ever believes me, but the first two or three series stand up remarkably well. Each episode is more or less a mini-film, many of them more memorable than the British gangster films of the time.

The final thing I want to say about Minder in terms of HtDC, is its influence on the plot. The structure of the novel, I feel, owes more to television than a traditional novel. I very much wanted to create a series of 'mini-adventures' for Kilbey and co., which would ultimately tie in to an overarching narrative. I love the start of a new adventure with familiar characters and wanted to work a couple of these in to the book. Now I think about it, I was probably thinking more of Between The Lines, an excellent police drama from the 1990s, which was one of the first British series to work in long-running plot threads to an episodic series. (I could write several paragraphs about Between The Lines here, but I'll save that for another time.)


In my next post, I'll look at a few more influences, including music, Cowboy Bebop and Doctor Who.

The links below will allow you to subscribe to the both podcasted novels: