And what if I gave you the key to the doors of your design?

[Kino-running]

#41. Invincible

Sensing a trend, are we?

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Sitting here now in this bar for hours, trying to write it down

I've been totally brain-wormed by the spy-mages today. (And until recently, I hadn't even noticed my spy-fetish. Oops.) Liesel, the femme fatale, has been leaning over my shoulder ranting about stories in which the boring milksop virgin gets the guy, and the competent women in fabulous hats end badly, or disappear. She won't be happy till I've written a manifesto and nailed it to a few doors.

I even wrote an awful sort of blurb for the silly thing today. It would be more useful if it had more specifics than "The Macguffin", and "The Other Cabal". (I think The Other Cabal is in fact Hungarian blood-mages, and I may be able to work in Anna Darvulia somewhere. And then I'm just a skip and and a jump away from vampires... Oh my.)

So far I know it will need trains, movie theatres, lipstick-stained cigarettes, bars in Hamburg, lighthouses, and tickets to Syria. And of course murder, betrayal, and fabulous hats. I think there's some time travel involved, too, if only on a small scale. If I were really ambitious, I'd try to use the "time-travel romance where the characters never actually meet" idea, but I don't think I am. They will play a lot of cat and mouse, though.

Now I need to figure out what the macguffin is, so the various cabals can start fighting over it.

If this grows a working title, I know I'm in trouble. Besides Floodland, which I'm not using. Really not.

Happy Solstice!

I think I'll spend the day working on a book that is Not The Book I Should Be Writing. Because, as Warren Ellis put it:


"Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you’ve got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you’ve got what’s called “an idea”.

And for that brief moment where it’s all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can’t be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein’s brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation."

And that does feel pretty damn holy, so it seems the thing to do.