Alan Baxter Trilogy

To celebrate the release of Alan Baxter’s Alex Caine Series in print edition, I resurrected my Sparks  series and asked Alan to tell me about where the idea for the books came from. Alan brings all the knowledge and experience of his two careers together in the books, creating something quite unique.

 

Alan: Kaaron asked me to write about the spark that led to the sprawling bushfire that is The Alex Caine Series. It’s actually a very simple thing but it took a long time to come around. My first novel was RealmShift, originally self-published in 2006, then acquired by Gryphonwood Press in 2010. The main character in that book and its sequel, MageSign, is a guy called Isiah. He’s a powerful immortal with an unenviable burden, and he’s also an accomplished martial artist. After all, you can get pretty good at something when you’re immortal.

Because of those books, among other things, I got a reputation for writing good fight scenes. Given that I’ve been a martial artist for over 35 years now, and my day job is as a martial arts instructor, it’s no real surprise that I was writing what I knew there, and apparently doing an okay job of it. For a long while I’ve been running workshops on the subject, helping other writers to put together more realistic and compelling fight scenes.

And then I got to thinking. I’ve written lots of characters who happen to be capable martial artists. But I’ve never written a character who was a career martial artist. A practitioner and competitor, happily living his martial arts life, who then becomes embroiled in a story. And that was the spark for the character of Alex Caine. Caine starts the story as a successful underground cage fighter, making good money in illegal MMA matches, until he runs afoul of mobsters and magic. I’d also been noodling around with this evil book idea, a subverted fantasy quest idea (set in our time, our world, with dark and horrible occurrences involved) and it all slammed together and Bound, the first book in the Alex Caine trilogy, was born.

Books 2 and 3, Obsidian and Abduction, were quick to follow. And Alex Caine’s life as a fighter at the top of his game must seem like such a distant memory to the poor bugger by now. But he’s certainly had  the opportunity to put an awful lot of his martial arts training to the test.

The Alex Caine Series – Bound, Obsidian and Abduction – is available in paperback and ebook now.

 

Here’s Alan’s bio: Alan Baxter is a British-Australian author who writes dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. He lives among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of NSW, Australia, with his wife, son, dog and cat. He’s the award-winning author of several novels and over sixty short stories and novellas. So far. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website – www.warriorscribe.com – or find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter and Facebook, and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.

 

 

Here’s Alan getting excited about his books. I love that such a well-published, award-winning writer still gets excited by it all!

For those of you in Sydney or nearby, you should definitely got to the launch of these books. Alan in conversation with the amazing Garth Nix, who is both wise and funny and knows how to pour a glass of wine.

 

 

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Sparks: Deborah Kalin

I haven’t done a Sparks post for a while, but with Deborah Kalin’s collection “Cherry Crow Children” coming out soon from Twelfth Planet Press, the time seemed right. I’ve loved Deb’s writing since we did a workshop together years ago. She has a magically original voice and she creates worlds with such depth you can smell them.

Here’s what she had to say about the spark for “The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood”.

“There’s a distinction for me between ideas and Ideas.

The former are odd little beasts, which come at me all the time. A chance overheard phrase will strike my ear; an image will catch my eye; a news story will sail straight on by an intriguing mention or even the whole point. Everywhere I look, listen, or turn, I pick up fragments of stories, and I squirrel them away, along with the thoughts to which my mind immediately run, in an online notebook.

Mostly, they sit there, mouldering in secret. Every now and then, usually when I have a new Idea, or when something I’m working on is stuck and I can’t quite fathom what’s missing, I trawl through that notebook, looking for inspiration – something that, on the surface, doesn’t fit at all but, when juxtaposed with the story I’m telling, helps jolt things forward. Because that’s what ideas, lower-case, are for me: facets, a corner of buried treasure peeping through the soil. They’re never the story itself, they’re just glimpses of something deeper, or a lens through which I can bring something distant or obscure into focus.

Ideas, capital-I, are different. They have heft to them, enough to withstand the scrutiny of a drafting process. Whereas ideas are shiny and make me stop a moment in admiration, Ideas unpack when examined, always yielding up more and more story, often sending out feelers in multiple directions, like a plant taking root. Ideas grab hold of me and won’t let go.

They’re much, much rarer, and usually I have to work harder to unearth them in their entirety.

Sometimes, they arrive as a dream. My first published novel did, as did “The Wages of Honey”, the first story in my upcoming Twelfth Planet collection. For that, I dreamt of a foreigner and a local, standing atop a precarious mountain path while he stared down at terraced fields, and something was coming for them. I woke with their twinned emotional states clouding my mind: the happy awe of the oblivious tourist, and the worried local’s sour, helpless dread.

More often, even if my dreaming subconscious provides me some starting material, I still have to chip away, questioning everything about my starting elements, questioning why my brain insists they fit together.

“The Cherry Crow Children of Haverny Wood” arrived coyly like that. For that one, I had three elements: the title, which brought with it images of birds flitting through forest byways, their swift black shadows a thing to be feared; a dream of a hotel where the admin staff, all women, shared the same doctor, who had stitched up their stomachs with red thread, sewing signs and symbols into their skin to keep them calm; and a memory of a Paul Klee painting I saw while I was in Lucerne, Switzerland. I’ve no idea of the painting’s name, so I’ve never been able to find an image of it, but it featured some stick figures (among trees, I think?), one of which was twice as tall as the others and bore a bright red heart. When I went to scribble that description down, I found a one-line character précis I’d written down four and a half years earlier which meshed in my head with the painting: a boy with a small, round, open wickerwork basket instead of a heart.

Putting all those in the one place together gave me everything I needed: I knew the setting was the hamlet of Haverny Wood, with its huddled inhabitants and its many predators, and I knew two characters: the village girl, and the wild boy of the woods, with his wickerwork heart. And I knew someone in the village was stitching up spleens (I picked spleens because I was in Switzerland when I was brainstorming, and there was a local legend about creatures who stole the spleens of children to make them light enough to climb mountains), which gave me the idea that there was something about dreams the villagers feared, which in turn gave me the idea for the crop by which the village made its living and, of course, the conflict that would surround my village girl.

It still took me nigh on 100,000 words and at least seven false starts to write the story, though. And to figure out who, precisely, were the children of the cherry crows.”

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Sparks: Dan Abnett

Dan Abnett is an amazing writer. He writes action scenes that play out before your eyes like a movie. He’s funny, clever and he’s my son’s favourite author. Here, he discusses where his sparks come from. I’m exactly the same; so many of my ideas come when I’m sitting in that stasis of public transport.

“My ideas come by train. And bus. Mostly train. Public mass transport, basically. I presume they buy their own tickets.

When I first started writing, even in a vaguely professional capacity, I was commuting in and out of London for work. Daily journeys on trains, on the Tube. It was the only time I got to think, the only enforced free time between a full day at work and a full night of writing. This was, of course, during the Punic Wars, before the advent of laptops or smartphones. Yes, we had pencils. Yes, we did. But there wasn’t much opportunity to sit and write on a crowded South Eastern commuter train. So I’d sit and think instead.

Ideas do come from other places. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find them on the pillow, and sometimes, sometimes, I actually deliberately think them up. With my brain.  After twenty-five years, I have honed the requisite professional skills to actually be able to sit down and, at will, during regular business hours, come up with fit-for-purpose ideas ready to be used in commissions. It’s a learned skill. Like riding a bike. Or cutting keys. Or cobbling.

But some of the best ideas are the ones that come out of nowhere and mug you. Or the ones you find at the back of the drawer (before you look, it’s a metaphorical drawer). Or the ones that apport into the middle of your kitchen floor during an otherwise ordinary afternoon.

Or the ones that arrive by train.

What do I do with them? I seize them! I seize them, I say, and I clap them in chains! …Well, I write them down for later use. I think you know when a spontaneous, unbidden ideas is a corkingly good one, just as you know that if you don’t record its finer points fast, before it fades like a waking dream,  it will just be a memory shaped like a good idea, the moulded space in which a good idea once fitted, rather than a working good idea that you can use because all the plugs and adaptors, and the instructions, are still in the box.  Before I learned to write things down, to recover them and prepare them for a later use, I lost many because of the foolish notion that I would remember them when I got home or needed to use them. Sometimes I remembered the idea, but not the point, the one tiny detail that made the idea usable and good. Sometimes, all I remembered was that I’d had an idea. I am still haunted by the memory of forgotten ideas from years ago, by the empty shaped spaces. And I have a good memory.

Why trains? I’d say because the world goes by. It’s not a specific and focused inspiration, like a good book or a newspaper feature, it’s just a series of views, a moving panorama of nonspecific life, none of it intended for, or prepared for, observation. It just goes by. There are either subliminal hooks buried in it, or it’s simply enough to have a moving, non-static visual feed to get my brain firing. Like ambient visuals.

I must learn to get on trains more often, to deliberately seek out the resource rather than accidentally use it because I happen to be going somewhere. The endorsements speak for themselves. This summer, I had, at one point, three big jobs that needed to have ideas developed for them so I could submit and pitch. I wasn’t exactly struggling, but the ideas were not coming out cleanly. I had to go up to London for a signing, and on the train ride home – a journey of just fifty-five minutes – I ‘received’, without trying, without effort, all three, one after another.

I wasn’t even thinking about the pending jobs.

From my house, if the wind’s in the right direction, I can sometimes hear trains passing through the local station. Buses grumble by the retaining wall at the end of my quiet street.

I think they’re trying to tell me something.”

Dan Abnett is a New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written over forty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies,  The Silent Stars Go By (the 2011 Christmas Doctor Who novel), Triumff: Her Majesty’s Hero, and Embedded. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent. Dan’s blog and website can be found at www.danabnett.com

and you can follow him on Twitter @VincentAbnett

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Sparks: Kirstyn McDermott

I chose Kirstyn McDermott’s “She Said”, from Scenes From the Second Storey, as the best horror fiction published in Australia last year and gave it an Australian Shadows Award. She has an incredibly liquid way of writing about nightmarish things. She’s one of the best writers of tactile fiction I know. Here, she talks about another brilliant story, “Frostbitten”.

“It’s hard for me to pinpoint the first sparks from which any particular story took light. I tend to view the conception part of my creative process as something akin to walking through a junkyard. I pick up odd and interesting bits and pieces along the way and shove them into my pockets for later use. Sometimes I lose them. Sometimes I never do figure out what to do with a particular piece. But sometimes I’ll reach into my pocket and realise that two or three bits of junk that I’ve been carrying around for ages actually fit together. And then I still have to sit down and try to figure out the rest of their story as I write it.

Occasionally, though, there is a distinct spark to which I can point and say, “Look. That thing, there. That’s where this came from.”

“Frostbitten” (published by Ticonderoga Publications in More Scary Kisses) was one such story. The central image came from the tail end of a dream, what little I could snatch into consciousness when I awoke one morning. Two naked women, stuck together and pulling slowly away from each other, their skin tearing red and raw as they did so. It was such a striking image, but not one that came bundled with any particular feelings of horror or revulsion. The women, I knew, loved each other and were in that situation because they loved each other. The rest of the dream was lost but the image, and the sense of love and sacrifice that accompanied it, remained with me for the rest of the day. By late afternoon, I knew who the women were and had their story almost entire in my head. Two days later, it was finished – the fastest I have ever written a story from conception to completion.

If only they all came that easily . . .”

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Sparks: Allyson Bird

Allyson Bird is one of those writers who see things in many layers. She has a sharp vision and a dark, dark turn of words.  She has an almost filmic way of writing, I think, so that a story plays itself out very visually.

“Three sparks that started some of my stories off…

The idea for In a Pig’s Ear from Bull running for Girls came from a real project where scientists were able to grow pig’s wings. In the story Stella Kiefer explains what she is doing.

‘I was now working on three projects. My main line of research was concerned with residual DNA. I experimented with pig DNA and there was also my little fertility programme. It was old hat to grow a pig’s ear. I was a little more adventurous and wanted to see if I could grow a wing from bone marrow stem cells on to bioabsorbable polymers. I never got tired of trying to grow them into different shapes and coming up with ever more complex designs. Last time they came out like bat’s wings and this time I was aiming for a structure of wing like the extinct gliding reptile, the pterosaur. That would take more time. Some experts said that birds evolved from little feathered dinosaurs but I had always quite liked the hypothesis that birds diverged from reptiles before dinosaurs, and that mammals had evolved from reptiles with the propensity for genetic change that could lead to flight. A whole new take on pigs can fly—perhaps they could, given the right wings, hollow bones and a more developed muscle structure.’

Then I thought of H.G. Wells Dr Moreau and realised that what would happen next would end in a similar location….

‘The Amazon canopy was heaven with these tiny winged angels that looked like Sistine Chapel cherubs with their ruddy complexions and winning ways. I adored them all. They were perfect. Each generation grew their wings earlier and earlier, and the wing structure became stronger as they glided from branch to branch. It was not me that gave them the name Homo angelus—but it stuck.’

Vulkodlak in Wine and Rank Poison was my response to internet trolls, sock puppets and to malicious people who use anonymous, pseudonymous reviews or even their real names to achieve their goal.

‘Vesna wrote. “I’m here to talk about werewolves.”

I’ll show her what I know, thought Stefan. And if she couldn’t play the game he’d sort her. For a few minutes they chatted amiably and then he decided to bait her a little to see if she was good enough to even think of putting pen to paper on his favourite subject. He could see Susiewolf skulking in the background coming forward with the occasional contribution then backing off quickly when he turned on her and gave her a warning snap. Alpha male. He thought of himself as alpha male. He would come back later after he had finished with Vesna to see if he could get a rise out of her. She was always fair game. This new one, Vesna, he’d get her…bring her down, make her look small. He might keep to being anonymous. He liked to hide behind a different name now and again, too.

From a new story The Beat Hotel. This one is hopefully going to be in the Joe Pulver R. W. Chambers homage anthology A Season in Carcosa. Spent a few weeks engrossing myself in The King in Yellow and other stories. Thought about decadence and looked at the lives of the beat generation. The King in Yellow and the latter seemed a perfect combination. A man from a strange relationship I was in once makes an appearance, too…inevitably.

‎’What happened to Kaja and her book of Human Songs? Had there been anything sweet in them? Human. Returned to dust. Or be black and white. So white. Thousands of doves flying together against the snow and one black rock in the way. Obsidian. Pearl. Sand…and finally glass. Dozens of thick, dark green glass panes in a window with the reflection of one gone now within each.’

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Sparks: Aliette de Bodard

Aliette de Bodard, another Angry Robot author, has an almost magical ability to bring history alive on the page and make the unreal real. Here, she talks about her series Obsidian and Blood, and the process she went through to develop the storyline.

“One of the advantages of having a series with a historical backdrop is that this provides ready-made inspiration in the form of various events: my Obsidian and Blood trilogy is set in the Aztec Empire in 1480, a fraught time when the Empire was nearing its maximum extension, but already showing the political weaknesses that would eventually doom it at the conquistadores’ hands. 1480 happens to be the date when the long-lived Emperor Axayacatl died–and the inevitable tussle for power that follows a monarch’s death formed much of the background for book 2 in the series, Harbinger of the Storm.

When I tackled the sequel, Master of the House of Darts–which would also be the last book in the trilogy–I naturally hunted for what had happened after the designation of a new Aztec Emperor. It turns out that the new ruler was meant to go on a coronation war, the success of which would prove his fitness to rule. It also turns out that the 1481 coronation war was a major disaster, quite possibly the only coronation war in Aztec history to have finished into an ignominious retreat. The Aztecs, a warrior culture, naturally interpreted this as the displeasure of the gods; and the new Emperor was made much weaker by this initial setback.

“This was perfect for Master of the House of Darts: its predecessor had ended with the selection of the new ruler; this book would open with the ruler’s utter failure to manage the Aztec Empire–a neat way to keep the stakes high, and to tie in with the previous book in the series.

“Unfortunately, I had few details of  that time period: I completed this inciting event by as much as I could, by researching the personalities of the various people in presence. For instance, the young commander of the army, Teomitl (a major player in my series), was known for his hot temper, and his preference for war over political intrigues (he is recorded as marching with his soldiers and sharing their life on the rough). Many of those traits ended in the plot: Teomitl is beloved by his soldiers, but impatient, and utterly inept at peace-time court life. Having all this information helped me narrow down my plot options, by having the fictional characters compose with the reactions of the historical ones.

“However, something still wasn’t quite clicking. Though I could work forward from my inciting event and open up the plot, it all felt too mechanical, and I had the feeling that I was painting Aztec murder by the dots–something I absolutely wanted to avoid, as writing the same book over and over would have been a disaster for the series.

“It took me a while to realise that I had fallen into another series pitfall: because the cast and universe were already well in place, I had locked myself into a mindset where I wanted to keep the status quo rather than move the story forward. I didn’t want my characters to fall out, to attack each other, or even to have competing agendas–and this just wouldn’t work as a book: people getting on well together is marvellous, but as a source of plot it is a rather dry business.

In the end, I gave myself permission to work out the consequences with no holds barred. That was I realised that my characters would have fundamentally different responses to the opening events of the novel, and that the logical conclusion was the opening of rifts between them–not small quarrels, but deeper animosities that wouldn’t be solved so easily.

“Those rifts that open, not only within the Empire, but also within allies, ended up driving most of the plot: Master of the House of Darts is, first and foremost, a book about consequences spiralling out of control, and I borrowed many of its arcs from tragedy: it’s obvious that disaster looms, but many of the characters cling to their convictions, until everything hangs in the balance.

“The only thing I did not borrow from tragedy was the ending, because I had no intention of killing off my entire cast just for the sake of narrative fittingness (and I have always found the Greek tragedy endings a tad unrealistic, the other side of the coin compared to the “happy endings for everyone”, and equally unbalanced)

“But the ending is nevertheless harrowing, and painful; and it is clear when the last page turns that things have altered fundamentally, and that there will be no coming back to more carefree times.

“Quite possibly, this is why I hated the book while I was writing it, because I put myself as much through the wringer as my characters. But, in the end, I think it’s definitely a stronger book because I burrowed deeper; and it’s most definitely a lesson I’ll remember for future books.”

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Sparks: Jason Nahrung

I loved Jason Nahrung’s story in ‘Dreaming Again’, and to me this spark explains why it has such heart.

‘Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn’ (Dreaming Again) is set in an askew Wyandra, an outback town reduced now to little more than a pub, a post office/store/cafe and a few houses. The idea for the story arose out of a road trip that I took with my father, who spent his formative years in the region. He was hoping to catch up with old mates from that time, but as we asked around, a couple had moved on, but most had died. It was a sad return and a very emotional sign that an era had passed. I added roo shooters, now government contractors hunting undead, because vampires can be wonderfully melancholic symbols of the past still haunting the present.

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Sparks: Chesya Burke

Chesya Burke is a deceptively kindly writer. She draws you gently into the personal world of her stories, then hits you with harsh realities, vicious imagery and heart-breaking endings.

I met Chesya Burke this year at Readercon, having heard of her through Laird Barron’s rave review of her short story collection “Let’s Play White“.  You can read an excerpt of the story she discusses by clicking on the link.

“The story idea for The Teaching and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason has dual meaning for me.  I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, called Hopkinsville. Doubtless, just as many of the classic stereotypes of typical small towns are true about Hopkinsville, as are wrong.

But it does have a rich history of ghost and supernatural happens. The well-known Edgar Cayce was from Hopkinsville and I grew up with my family telling stories about experiences with other worldly things, both dead and mystical.

I’ve always been intrigued by Edgar Cayce’s supposed ability.  I’m also fascinated by the idea of twins.  Binary beings, whose every thought and action are understood wholly by another person. But I thought: what if that very connection made it possible for them to reach out to others in the same way?

Although I don’t talk about it much, a few years ago, my 16 year old sister died from congestive heart failure while running track at her high school. (LINK: http://www.horsegroomingsupplies.com/horse-forums/r-i-p-shadvina-iona-leavell-loved-105312.html)  Of course it was devastating and we started a campaign to put respirators in all schools in the state.  She was a twin. She shared a connection with her twin (my sister) that is difficult for me to explain, even as a writer.

I decided instead to explore the idea in fiction.  The Teaching and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason was the result.

The story is about twin girls in the early 20^th century who share the dual roles of supporting their community; just as Cayce did those many years ago.  For me, whether Edgar Cayce could predict the future was irrelevant once I understood that he gave an entire community (and in many ways, the country) hope.

The same is true, I think, for my twins in the story.  Sure, their community is in jeopardy, but in the end, they offered hope and release to a broken town and people.

I’d like to think the same can one day be said for my sisters, the twins.”

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Sparks: Nicola Abnett

I first came across Nicola Abnett when I read the first chapters of her novel ‘Naming Names’. I was struck by the intensity of her words, and by how far she was willing to go to tell the story. She doesn’t hold back; there’s no letting go for the reader. She wants you to know exactly what horrors occur, and she describes them from a point of view of acceptance, which makes the horror all the more extreme. She’s very, very good.

“Myra Hindley made me a cup of tea today.”

I was a teenager when my father told me that the most notorious female sex offender and child killer in British history had made him a cup of tea. He worked for the Home Office in the penal system, and this sort of thing happened to him, from time to time. He didn’t talk about it much, or often.

I wonder if my interest in gross criminal psychology came from the very fact that the Official Secrets Act, which he took very seriously, meant that my father didn’t talk about his work. I had to get my information from other sources: magazine articles, books, television documentaries, but the research was always based in fact. This was not the stuff of novels.

When I decided to write fiction for real, this was what I wanted to write about. In the end, I wrote something else first, and this was my second novel; I call it “Naming Names”. It is about a young woman who suffers maternal sexual abuse, abuse that has been institutionalised in a family over generations. When she eventually ends up in the system, it is up to her and Trevor to work out who she is, her name and her age. She records events from her life in long monologues, and Trevor recounts the classical tales, myths and historical events informed by the various names given to her during her childhood.

For most of my almost-thirty-year relationship with novelist and comic-book writer Dan Abnett I have been Nik Vincent: occasional co-writer, editor, first-reader, sometime muse. Now that I am a respectable married woman, it only remains for me to wonder who will publish the other Abnett.

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Sparks: Anne Ostby

I’m thrilled to present a Spark from my dear friend, Norwegian writer Anne Ostby. Anne is an award-winning, best selling author and I’m hoping before very long her work will be translated into English and available.

I heard Anne read part of ‘Town of Love’ when we presented a literary evening together in Suva, Fiji. Here’s a pic of us afterwards; you can tell what fun we had. The reading was wonderful; so beautifully written, such a deeply upsetting subject presented with such respect and passion.

“The idea for Town of Love was sparked in a garden in Tehran in 2007. I was talking with my friend Ruchira Gupta, the anti-trafficking activist, Emmy-award winner, recipient of the Clinton Global Citizen Award, and so much more, about her NGO in India when she suddenly suggested: ”Why don’t you come visit me and see what we do? Then you can write a book about it!” I thought ”Why not?”, and the seed for the opening chapter had been planted.

That conversation became the start of a long journey for me. Not just a geographical one, to a small town in northern India on the Nepali border, but also one of understanding and acknowledging responsibility. Understanding what the buying and selling of human beings really entails, and recognizing that I couldn’t simply turn my back on that knowledge. That is why I had to write the book. That is why I had to go back to Bihar again and again, get to know these women, hear their stories, and carry them forward in the shape of a novel.

The story of the Nat women in Town of Love begins and ends under a mango tree in Bihar. It is told through many voices in many places – some real, some fictional. But everything that is important in the book is true. That young girls are kidnapped and hidden away; that children are assaulted, abused, and raped. That those who reap the benefits of the human flesh trade, with all its violence and brutality, mostly walk free.

But the story also finds a glimmer of hope for the women who walk the streets of the Town of Love, the girls on display in door openings and on balconies. A hope brought by those who care. Those who enter the tiny rooms, push back the curtains, share in Rupa and Salma’s pain. Like Tamanna and Fawzia, there are those who reclaim the governance of their own lives and their own bodies. The hope of Town of Love is that there will be more of them. So that the spark ignited in a garden in Tehran will become the roaring fire I dreamed of.

Anne Ch. Ostby”

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