Thoughts on fanfiction

There’s been a featured post on the Livejournal homepage recently talking about the opinions of various well-known authors on fan fiction. It prompts me to consider more deeply what I think about it, now that I’m trying to start a Proper Author Blog  and considering the world of professional ficiton writing seriously.

There are various quotes in the post from everyone from George R R Martin (who objects to other people muscling in on his sadistic fun) to Charlie Stross (do what you like as long as I still get paid). It calls in at various barmy stops along the way – including Anne Rice’s hilarious comment “It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.”

The reason I find Anne Rice’s attitude funny is that fanfic is out there. It exists. It is part of Internet culture. Sticking your fingers in your ears and telling the horrible nasty fangirls to go away is just daft. Genies don’t go back into bottles. So if you’re a writer in a world where fanfic exists, how do you cope with it?

Now I’ll admit, in the interests of full disclosure, that I’ve written fanfic myself. No, I’m not telling you what fandoms or where you can read it, because I was having a crap time in my life back then and it’s all a little too obviously written as part of me processing my Issues. All of my writing is fundamentally about me reflecting on my inner life, but some parts of it are a little less embarrassingly transparent than others!

I came to fan fiction in my mid-to-late twenties, long after I started writing original fiction, and I’d call myself a dabbler – I never really became embedded in online fandom, just had fun for a while and then moved on when my inner conflicts were a little more settled and my neophilic fascination waned. But one thing I do know is that I wrote fanfic exactly the same way I write original fiction – as an exploration of myself, my life and my attitudes and ideas. I write to process the cultural world around me, and I do that whether the characters I’m using are mine or not.

And in fact, I think that’s what a lot of the best fan fiction is. During my time in fandom I saw, broadly speaking, two schools of fannish creativity. One was fanfic as a social hobby; these are authors who write mainly for their circle of friends. They may write scorching erotica, lingering romances or gloriously insane crackfic (and there are some exceptionally talented writers out there doing all of these), but they do it purely as something they can share and enjoy with the people they care about. I’ve always been very refreshed by the average fangirl’s acceptance of her own sexuality, too – there’s plenty of smut in fan fiction and most of it is created by women for women, but the nice thing is that as a rule the women doing the creating accept that their sexuality is a valid part of them. Even if, like most men, they still feel a little dirty for enjoying it at times. Equality can be a fascinating thing.

The second school of writers are very bright and deep-thinking people who write to examine, whether consciously or unconsciously, big personal and social issues. They’re just doing it through someone else’s characters. In some cases I think it’s because they’re either not people with a gift for original world creation, or they simply haven’t had enough practise to be good at it yet. Being a good writer is not easy and takes both ability and work. In others, however, I think it’s because that particular fandom, that particular world, speaks to that person about a given set of issues and makes them think. One such writer I knew in fandom was an academic who used fan fiction as a way of getting a different angle on questions she also considered in her professional work. Immoral? Invalid? Socially retrogressive? You decide. It’s this second school of fandom that’s closest to my own heart, but it’s clear as day to me that even for those in the first school, the practise of writing fan fiction is just another way in which to put in some of those legendary ten thousand hours.

Now, on the subject of plagiarism I’m firmly with Charlie Stross: you leave my (putative) money alone. If you’re writing in fandom I think it’s vital to have a clear sense of boundaries: to understand that your fannish adoration doesn’t confer any kind of ownership of the original work, or any right to expect rewards other than the social reward that comes from participating in fandom. Some people are self-centred and venal and are never going to accept that, so in a world where copyright means profit, creators are always  going to have to keep their own sense of boundaries tight and hold the big stick in reserve for those who don’t play by the rules. Passionate fans who know how to do fanfic right can be a huge help in policing that kind of miscreant. A lot of fan writers are young teens who simply haven’t developed a full sense of boundaries and personal responsibility yet, which is a different issue and best addressed by promoting a culture of responsibility within fandom. But – the reason I can’t quite agree with the “I do not permit fan fiction” attitude is that fan community makes such a huge difference to the profile and indeed profitability of a work that I would be mad to tell my future fans not to interact in the way fans like to do. Hell – if my work engages people enough that they want to write fanfic about it, then it has reached them. It has touched them. It’s become part of their inner life – part of culture. And isn’t that what we all, as writers, ultimately try to do?

But I’ll tell you one thing, future fans of my as yet unwritten work. Write, draw or edit up your fic; absolutely. Share it with your friends, go ahead. Love my work and enjoy your fan time; I made it for you to enjoy. I don’t need to know what you get up to in your private moments, so I don’t really need you to show it to me… but don’t imagine for a second that I don’t know the game. I’ll be watching, waiting, googling your fics once in a while – and meditating on whether to Joss the whole lot of you within an inch of your lives

Of elephants, writing and mice

There’s an apocryphal quote that floats round the Internet about a sculptor who, when asked how to carve a statue of an elephant, replied “It’s easy. You just chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.”

I love to think about the writing process as a learning experience every time, and I’ve just finished the first draft of a short-deadline story (using Scrivener) which was written very much by this kind of process. I am happy to report that writing using the carve-an-elephant model is an excellent way to produce, as you might expect, an elephant. The problem is that when it’s a short story you’re writing, an elephant is not as useful as you thought.

At 10k words the story’s definitely failing on the “short” criterion. To be fair that’s a first draft and it’s now in the capable hands of my flatmate and co-conspirator John, who is gifted at wielding the Big Hatchet and will likely tear both the loose flesh and the sci-fi background to shreds for me. It started out as a longish, exploratory set of rambling paragraphs that established a world and a mystery but had no real plot; on being asked by an anthology editor whether I could come up with a different piece which was a better fit for the antho I submitted to, I’ve now spent a manic week (in between work and an assortment of irritating medical appointments) (a) outlining a proper plot, (b) producing enormous quantities of further verbiage which developed the irritating habit of redefining the plot plan without asking, then (c) throwing chunks of prose around like a mole in a temper and rewriting the linking material according to the brave new plot’s demands. In short, I’ve been lost in the attempt to chip away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.

Well, now I’ve got an elephant. And the next task is to seek its inner mouse…

Writing software: Scrivener vs LSB

I’m currently having a gigantic fit of “WHY did I not know about Scrivener before?”.

OK, so the obvious answer to that is “because it’s only recently become available for Windows and you hate Macs, Felix” – but even so, I’m amazed I managed to overlook a writing tool this useful. I had been attempting to teach myself to use Liquid Story Binder, which is free, but unfortunately it’s also complicated, very poorly documented and isn’t always powerful enough to do the job well.  The only thing it really has over Scrivener, in my personal judgement, is “vibe” (which anyone who’s read the Mixerman Diaries will understand). LSB is set up on the workspace model; it takes over your desktop with a dark-coloured, plain background and allows you to scatter inspirational pictures and media across your screen while you write in another window. If you don’t like too much pre-defined structure and love to immerse yourself in atmosphere to get your creative juices flowing, LSB is grand – unfortunately, it’s not really useful if what you’re looking for is a strongly structured and user-friendly organisational tool, and it seems that’s something I need.

Scrivener is much more focused and organiser-like, although it also has a full-screen mode which fades out the clutter and leaves you alone with your text. The organisational tools it provides are intelligently designed and really, really powerful – there’s almost nothing you can’t do to understand and rearrange your own text with Scrivener. Its features just work, where LSB’s sometimes fail (for example its connect-the-boxes diagram tool has some frustrating limitations on the types and numbers of connection it can make). Scrivener really was the thing I’d been missing in helping me think and plan my writing through – I’m currently using the trial version to finish a short story to a tight deadline, and Scrivener’s corkboard mode has made planning that would ordinarily take me a week whistle past in about two days. It essentially takes over the organisational thinking for me, and gives me the freedom to be a feckless artiste.

Furthermore, it does something I first encountered in my career as a technical author, which is custom compiling – it will create a manuscript from your selection of sources and format the whole document uniformly. I’ve wasted so much time over the years fiddling with OpenOffice and re-saving Word documents three times because I cocked it up somehow – with Scrivener, I can leave in or leave out scenes with the click of a checkbox. It lets me dump that so-so flashback from the final draft without fussing around selecting for cut’n'paste. It’s fantastic enough for dealing with a complicated short story whose plot is evolving at breakneck pace, but I can’t imagine how much more use it’s going to be dealing with something as massive as a novel. My Great Languishing Unfinished NaNo Novel ended up as a collection of per-chapter OpenOffice files, and the mere thought of having to go back through all those monoliths of turgid prose fills me with fear. Scrivener (which can also import files and split them at the cursor) might just make that a surmountable problem. So I’m sold; it’s a great match to the way I write and well worth forking out for.

Picspam: congrats to Anne Lyle!

Just a drive-by picture post to say many congratulations to Anne Lyle on the publication and launch of her first novel, The Alchemist of Souls.  I was lucky enough to critique a very early draft of the book – indeed, part of the printout I wrote all over is still here beside me on the sofa, covered in scribbled notes from my latest foray back into Uru Live – so seeing it in the flesh was fantastic to say the least. Well done Anne!

L-R: Rob Pearce (now available in Web 1.0), Valerie Vancollie and John Ayliff at the book launch. All my pics of Anne herself came out blurred!

Lies of Locke Lamora: the final post!

This whole readalong experience has been awesome Thanks to everyone who’s followed and commented, and I hope I get the time to keep up with all the interesting new blogs I’ve found!

 

1. The Thorn of Camorr is renowned – he can beat anyone in a fight and he steals from the rich to give to the poor. Except of course that clearly most of the myths surrounding him are based on fantasy and not fact. Now that the book is finished how do you feel the man himself compares to his legend? Did you feel that he changed as the story progressed and, if so, how did this make you feel about him by the time the conclusion was reached?

How does any human being compare to their reputation? Usually, they have rather more in the way of flaws, quirks, irritating personal qualities and general ungainliness. Locke is a fictional character and therefore is rather more likeable than most average people – it’d be hard to capture readers if he was a git – but over the course of the story there’s been a clear development in him. He’s lost a lot of the support he took for granted and has had to think on his feet and make the most of the friends and the talents he does have; he’s also achieved his goal of revenge on the Grey King, which leaves him a saturnine confidence trickster without a city to scam. I felt we were seeing the earlier part of the classic hero’s journey in this book – from a big fish in a small pond, a complacent talent content to live for the present, to a man with some dangerous enemies (in the shape of the bondsmagi) and an uncertain future, but nevertheless a tight-knit circle of friends and consummate skill.

 

2. Scott Lynch certainly likes to give his leading ladies some entertaining and strong roles to play. We have the Berangia sisters – and I definitely wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of them or their blades plus Dona Vorchenza who is the Spider and played a very cool character – even play acting to catch the Thorn. How did you feel about the treatment the sisters and Dona received at the hands of Jean and Locke – were you surprised, did it seem out of character at all or justified?

Gender in fantasy is something I’m very interested in, and I liked the way Lynch did women. I thought that Lynch was very even-handed in his handling of the Berangias sisters and the Spider – they’re women playing a serious game, and he doesn’t let them get away without the same consequences his male characters would face. Maybe it’s just my age and the old-fashioned microculture in which I grew up, but I find that a hell of a lot of fantasy characterisations of women are informed by a very princess-culture unwillingness to be too nasty to them – which makes for some supremely annoying Mary Sue heroines who get away with murder in every chapter and somehow never really get kicked in the teeth by their own mistakes. In Lynch’s writing, if you play a dangerous game you face dangerous situations, whoever you are. Locke and Jean don’t underestimate their adversaries because of their gender, and consequently they don’t cut them any slack that could be used to gain an advantage. Good stuff.

 

3. Towards the end we saw a little more of the magic and the history of the Bondsmagi. The magic, particularly with the use of true names, reminds me a little of old fashioned witchcraft or even voodoo. But, more than that I was fascinated after reading the interlude headed ‘The Throne in Ashes’ about the Elderglass and the Elders and why their structures were able to survive even against the full might of the Bondsmagi – do you have any theories about this do you think it’s based on one of our ancient civilisations or maybe similar to a myth?

I think it’s “sufficiently advanced technology”, to be honest. There doesn’t need to be a reason; it’s an eternal mystery which lends contrast to the impermanence of the cities built by men. I see a lot of contemplation of questions about power in this book, especially as it relates to information and how evanescent power can be when it turns upon a secret; the Elderglass structures are both secrets impenetrable to the mind of man, and forces of nature in the same sense as a mountain – immovable, inscrutable and unmved by human affairs. Which is entirely fitting with the theme of power relating to the fragility of your secret.

The use of true names in magic is very ancient if I remember rightly (which I likely don’t) – I wasn’t surprised to see that turn up, but I did like the use of cat’s-cradle threads in a binding and control spell. It reminded me of a piece of  Tibetan folk magic I once saw in a documentary, where the priest-practitioner bound a slip of paper containing some form of powerful words with many turns of a coloured thread to seal in and concentrate its perceived magic.

 

4. We have previously discussed Scott Lynch’s use of description and whether it’s too much or just spot on. Having got into the last quarter of the book where the level of tension was seriously cranked up – did you still find, the breaks for interludes and the descriptions useful or, under the circumstances did it feel more like a distraction?

I found it very well balanced, personally. The interludes were always relevant to the culture and background of the world, but there was a clear conceptual distinction between the lessons in Camorri history and the main plot. That created enough of a distance between the two that I never felt the main action was being held up by unwieldy exposition.

5. Now that the book has finished how did you feel about the conclusion and the eventual reveal about the Grey King and more to the point the motivations he declared for such revenge – does it seem credible, were you expecting much worse or something completely different altogether?

It’s… very fantasy. It was nothing I didn’t expect for the genre, but that’s not to say I found it hackneyed; it gave me a wonderful sense of neatness, of the tidying up of all the existing loose ends. I really found the plotting in this book to be good, solid, user-friendly workmanship; it wasn’t that I couldn’t see what was coming, it was that I liked the story so much I didn’t mind. Lynch may not be China Mieville (as I’ve said before about other writers, who is) but he takes the tools of his genre and uses them to give his readers a damn good time. And I’ve always got a soft spot for being treated well

As for the world-specific stuff – the conceit that all Camorri are vengeful, grudge-holding schemers is not one I find instinctively engaging but it’s clearly enough signposted in the book that the eventual resolution made concrete sense to me. And by that point, we’d also seen Locke lose enough and take enough punishment at the Grey King’s hands that I at least genuinely cared about getting to see him strike a blow for Bug, the Galo brothers and himself. It worked because it was thoughtfully, precisely and solidly constructed.

6. Were you surprised that Locke, being given two possible choices (one of which could possibly mean he would miss his chance for revenge on the Grey King) chose to go back to the Tower – especially given that (1) he would have difficulty in getting into the building (2) he would have difficulty in convincing them about the situation and (3) he would have difficulty in remaining free afterwards? Did anyone else nearly pee their pants when Locke and the rest were carrying the sculptures up to the roof garden?

No, I wasn’t surprised by that choice. As I said in one of my earlier posts, writing rogue characters is plagued by the problem of making them sympathetic, and I’ve thought throughout that in terms of his basic morality, Locke is actually a nice guy. He’s on the side of light. He’s a priest, and we’ve seen him pause for reflection about the spiritual consequences of his life several times; he still isn’t a cold-blooded murderer; he still uses trickery instead of violence even though he now has the means (in Jean) to use force first if he likes. Of course, he’s also a twisted and manipulative bastard, and he doesn’t just go into the Tower cold and end up in chains – he goes in there and scams the very people he’s helping, in the name of making the grandest gesture possible for his fallen comrades. He’s still playing the system for everything he’s worth – but by this point, you’re so delighted by his cheek and so invested in the story of those comrades and the love Locke has for them that you’re already cheering him on.

I didn’t think the sculptures were going to blow up that close to the end of the book, but I will say that I didn’t see the ship trick coming – this being exactly what I mean about Lynch’s watertight plotting. Nothing is a loose end, even when there’s a hell of a lot going on. It’s incredibly satisfying to see all those questions resolve – and he always manages to find a way to link it all back to Locke as well. Glorious.

7. Finally, the other question I would chuck in here is that, following the end of the book I was intrigued to check out some of the reviews of LOLL and noticed that the negative reviews mentioned the use of profanity. How did you feel about this – was it excessive? Just enough? Not enough?

Pfft. I think people who complain about swearing in fantasy novels are uptight. The genre has moved on and expanded a lot since Tolkein, and people who still expect the entire field of fantasy writing to be squeaky-clean sword’n'sorcery are a bit like the guy who complained on Bioware’s forum about Dragon Age Origins offering gay romance options, based on the fact that he (as a straight male) was their “main demographic”. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy; I’m sure there are people out there who like their clean, ethical escapism, but there are also plenty of us who like it a bit grubby and real. Out of the ungainly monsters of cross-fertilisation comes hybrid vigour and future growth, and to be honest I think I must have missed the ugly-mutant phase of the realist era of fantasy literature, because this book sure as hell is not awkward in any sense of the word.

I didn’t think the profanity was excessive at all; again, very well balanced. Lynch has excellent taste, and knowing when to switch the propriety off for the sake of creating the right kind of chiaroscuro (oo, pretentious) is just having a wider sense of what’s appropriate.

8. Okay one further, and probably most important but very quick question – having finished, will you pick up the sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies?

I’m on a pretty tight budget right now and all my book purchases have to be second hand, but if I come across a copy I may very well pick it up

Review: Avilion by Robert Holdstock

Well, part of the reason I got into the Locke Lamora readalong was to get me reading again, and thus far it seems to have worked. I recently finished a copy of Avilion – in actual fact a pre-publication proof copy, which I was lucky enough to win in one of  Anne Lyle‘s regular giveaways. Reading it was something of an experience, but I was surprised how fast I learnt to tune out the obvious typographical errors and unexpected outbursts of Courier New.

Robert Holdstock is an author I consider a major influence on me, in that he’s one of the writers whose style and worldview captures something very fundamental about how I see writing within my personal world. I first discovered his Ryhope Wood series as a teenager, and devoured the first two books (Mythago Wood and Lavondyss) as soon as I could lay hands on them. Lavondyss is the standout, in my mind – it’s visceral and powerful, and the shamanic preoccupation with masks as a magic that changes the wearer’s perception of the world is both fascinating, and a link into a mentality that’s long been lost or marginalised in Western culture. There’s an echo of Alan Garner in Holdstock’s thinking somewhere, the sort of ancient/modern fusion of thought I saw in Strandloper.

Avilion, then, is chronologically the third in the core timeline of the Ryhope Wood books, but in terms of its plot is (according to Wikipedia, at any rate) actually set between Mythago Wood and Lavondyss. It’s the first of the series that I’ve read as an adult, and I’m simultaneously convinced I need ro re-read Lavondyss, and wary of being disappointed if I read it through the mask of age I wear now.

As a reading experience, I found it flowed along with the same half-conscious dream-logic as all the Ryhope books; connections between events within Ryhope Wood are mystical and instinctual, not logical and clear. The wood itself is a character in the series, a vast and alien mind which seems to work on the same inexorable logic as the human subconscious. In Ryhope Wood, that which is most needed finds a way to become real in the form of mythagos, people brought to life by the imaginer’s mind as incarnations of a mythical archetype. But the wood has its own ideas, much like the alien planet in Solaris - and the results are rarely what the imaginer expected. In Avilion, the main character Steven spends most of the book in a slowly crumbling relationship with his mythago wife, who begins to suffer an identity crisis over the fact she may have been (re)created by her husband’s murderous brother, not by the man who gave up his life in the real world to wait for her return. Her daughter sets out to reach Avilion, the heart of the Wood itself, in the hope of changing the fate laid out for her family – but ultimately, the wood has its own agency. One of the aspect I found most endearing was Steven’s very logical and rational mind – his hopes for the future were entirely reasonable throughout, and almost always at odds with what his life inside the wood would eventually provide. I found it an affectionate comment on the typical masculine mind, which by nature or nurture is often divorced from its own more instinctive side.

Most of the book is seen through the eyes of Steven’s half-mythago son Jack, whose perspective goes hand in hand with his own mythago nature or “green” side, Haunter. Haunter’s viewpoint is eerie and complete, more so to my mind than the moments in which we’re in the point of view of Jack’s sister, who is more in touch with her mythago side than Jack. Some of those moments ring almost false in that they render the forest both facile and alien, a little too close to the magic-reason of a child – whereas in Jack and Steven’s mindsets the forest’s ominous power is amplified by its half-understood aura of purpose and will. Ultimately, Jack chooses to give up Haunter to save a life – and in that choice I see a similar theme of the male mind as defined by the conflict between rationality and instinct (“red” versus “green” as Jack’s family term it), and the ultimate inevitability of being subsumed by the rational, distancing mind.

The other major moment of synergy for me in this read was the point at which Jack meets the Iaelven, stinking and terrifying creatures clearly based on the archetype of the faerie child-stealer; the way the Iaelven are drawn has an alarming amount in common with the “elves” I created in my unfinished NaNo novel, who were called elves by the humans living alongside them because they were terrifying, and lived in the woods. Holdstock’s take on the archetype is more visceral and owes less to Native American shamanism than mine, but it’s always disconcerting to see the process of simultaneous creation in action. It’s never clear in the book whether the Iaelven are real beings  with a separate existence within the wood, or mythagos created by Steven’s family’s minds, which have come to take on a life of their own in the tale, and even in the history of their tale. This strange circularity of purpose, the ritualised acting-out of stories in the dim quest towards some unrecognised goal, is both characteristic of Holdstock and so strongly reminiscent of what I understand about human psychology that I couldn’t help adopting it as part of my own philosophy of story when I first read him –  I prefer my own stories to be driven a little more logically than Holdstock’s tend to be, but I always return to that quality of myth-like universality as a test of whether the story I’ve made will really speak to people who aren’t like me.

Overall, then, I found Avilion another lyrical, illogical, enchanting window into a world and a type of world which I very personally enjoy. I suspect that rereading these novels over time will be a pleasure; they have a plasticity to their stories that allows for a wide range of different conclusions about their real meaning, and I could see myself finding something new in them every time.

Lies of Locke Lamora, week 4

Late as usual… sorry folks, I plead real life interfering on this one, it’s been a rough week, and I apologise if my thoughts are somewhat scattershot. Here goes..!

1. In the chapter “A Curious Tale for Countess Amberglass” we learn of the tradition of the night tea in Camorr. I found that not so much fantastical as realistic – how about you?

The best thing about Scott Lynch’s writing is that the settings may be fantastical, but the people are so real you can practically smell their sweat. I think it’s entirely plausible for ladies to have tea and bitch about their men – in fact I’ve sat through a great deal of exactly that in my life. Indeed, by the age of eight or nine I was deeply familiar with the long-held family tradition of the Bitching of the Sprouts, in which the women of my mother’s clan would sit around the kitchen table on Christmas morning, dissecting an enormous heap of sprouts and their husbands. Each motley collection of unsavoury items was handled with equal dispassion and viciousness, although they usually reseved the knives for use on the sprouts. What exactly this did to a developing male psyche is hard to quantify, but I’ve never been able to cut a cross into the stem of a sprout without feeling a twinge of sympathy.

In fact at the time I read it, this particular scene made me think about the Bechdel Test; personally I think the test itself is an idea which has its limitations, but at the same time I think this book passes because Doña Salvara is there to shop a con man to the chief intelligencer. And that’s so despite the fact the situation she’s in is one in which relationships are normally the topic of the hour; she’s specifically not interested in complaining about her emotional life. She confirms this more than adequately later on, of course, but I was already pretty much settled on the issue after reading this.

The other thing that was fantastic was the cake, another wonderful instance of Lynch’s food obsession – and the painstaking description of the ingredients in its various sections by the attending servant. Although Doña Vorchenza herself is the real highlight of the scene for me; she’s definitely my favourite character in this book, possibly more so than Locke. I always love feisty old ladies, and her line about flicking the miniature alchemical lights from the cake over the balcony like schoolgirls practically had me cheerleading.

2. When Jean meets with what will become the Wicked Sisters for the first time, the meeting is described very much like how people feel when they find their true work or home. Agree? Disagree? Some of both?

Well it was inevitable, wasn’t it – we’ve seen him with them, and given that Lynch specifically mentions that these are weighted and balanced for an adolescent, they’re not “what will become the Wicked Sisters”, they’re just his first set of hatchets.  I got the impression of someone finding his medium, more than anything – finding a tool he’s really comfortable with.

3. Salt devils. Bug. Jean. The description is intense. Do you find that description a help in visualizing the scene? Do you find yourself wishing the description was occasionally – well – a little less descriptive?

No. I love Lynch’s descriptions – not a detail left out, but not a single excessive word left in. I forget which dead Greek beardie it was who said that a work of art is complete not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove – but I think this is a case in point. The fight scenes in this book make my heart race, where usually my writer’s mind is just coasting along at the back making critical observations and spoiling the fun for everyone like it normally does. I love a writer who can smack that hypercritical sensibility out of its tram tracks and really make the scene jump out and enmesh me. Lynch can; every single action scene in this was like one of the characters leaping out of the book, shoving me against the wall and demanding to know what the hell he should do next (not that I think Locke would have been very taken with some of my more instinctive responses to the thought!). One that really stands out is the second time we visit Locke and Jean’s trip to the Salvaras’ mansion and see how they take down Conte; it was picture-perfect in my head. I often have little clear sense of how a fight proceeds other than who hit who, but I could practically feel the gloomy, high-ceilinged space and the sense of vertigo as Locke and Jean look down on him beneath.  That’s another one I’m filing away in the “scenes to analyse in nauseating detail to improve your own writing” bank.

4. This section has so much action in it, it’s hard to find a place to pause. But…but.. oh, Locke. Oh, Jean. On their return to the House of Perelandro, their world is turned upside down. Did you see it coming?

In specific? No. In general? Absolutely. I remember feeling a sort of horrible satisfaction when I turned the page; I’d been realising more and more clearly that the world at the start of the book is the bubble of perfection that has to burst, and here was the fragile film exploding; that moment when something beautiful reduces to a fleck of liquid spinning towards the ground. Bug’s resistance, and his youthful foolishness, were heart-aching – it was such a clockwork of inevitability, in the way well-drawn tragedies are. All of the events in it are avoidable, and yet so inescapably natural a consequence of the characters’ natures and flaws. It left me with a strange sense of satisfaction – not at Locke and Jean’s predicament, but at the sheer power of the story turning underneath their world.  Resolution is something modern media (I’m looking at you, Hollywood) too often deprives us of in the name of sequelisation – but it’s here in no uncertain terms.

5. Tavrin Callas’s service to the House of Aza Guilla is recalled at an opportune moment, and may have something to do with saving a life or three. Do you believe Chains knew what he set in motion? Why or why not?

No, I think Chains was a competent and cautious man who prepared his Gentleman Bastards for every eventuality, including the case in which the excrement should make resounding contact with the ventilation apparatus. An eventuality they themselves failed to foresee, being as they are twenty-something and pretty much convinced of their own invulnerability. I don’t see anything mystical here, just a smart, long-sighted, thoroughly corrupt old man. We already know that at least two of the Gentleman Bastards have been sent to more than one temple; clearly, Chains planned to maximise their chances of  success if they needed to bluff.

6. As Locke and Jean prepare for Capa Raza, Dona Vorchenza’s remark that the Thorn of Camorr has never been violent – only greedy and resorting to trickery – comes to mind again. Will this pattern continue?

Insofar as it can in the context, I think. Locke’s going to have to step up to the demands of the situation at some point, and the way the situation is headed, that’s likely to be messy…

7. Does Locke Lamora or the Thorn of Camorr enter Meraggio’s Countinghouse that day? Is there a difference?

No, I think it’s Locke. There is simultaneously a huge difference and no difference between Locke and the Thorn; in one sense, the Thorn of Camorr is a folk hero with mythical powers whose reputation is not really of his own creation and Locke is merely an unusually audacious crook – but in the other, they are one and the same since it’s Locke’s extraordinary talent and chutzpah which created such exploits for the people of Camorr to embroider over their ale.

I will say that I absolutely loved the Meraggio’s scene from start to finish; for me it was one of the key moments in the book. This was Locke stripped bare, deprived of all his mechanisms and supporters, relying on what it is that makes him Locke. And that, I think, is the first time in the book that we really see his true nature in the flesh. We’ve been told about it all along, told what an astonishing crook both the young and adult Lockes are, but we’ve never yet seen him operate without a vast array of props and supporting cast. The moment that really made me produce unmanly shrieks and torture the springs of my malodorous leather sofa was when the first thing we see him try is the cautious, conservative, minimal approach – exactly what Chains would have taught him to trust – and it doesn’t work out. It’s uninspired – the stakes at Meraggio’s are huge and the people are watchful. Caution is no competition, here. The game has changed. But Locke is stubborn – a true Camorri, perhaps; he persists, tries again, and stumbles on the one vital connection that makes his true gift fire. The con he constructs is so spectacular as to be unthinkable – and that is precisely what makes it credible to the victims. Insight, colossal chutzpah, and intimate knowledge of the people and the situation; Meraggio is clever and cautious, but the chaos in Camorr’s underworld is the unknown factor Locke puts to the perfect use. I really can’t describe how utterly satisfying I found that whole scene – take the rules away, shake Locke’s whole golden world to its foundations, and watch him bootstrap his criminal career from nothing, using only what he carries in his mind. Fantastic.