About last year, I decided I could write Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld in a year, but life, it has demands, and I like to do things like start working for myself and writing comics. Five months after that deadline, I'm looking at six months, but not too much longer, I don't think, for I've gotten it all down in my head.

I am at the stage now that I'm writing and cleaning up and rewriting as I go. It's not that surprising, since I rewrite a lot. I don't know what other writers are like when it comes to this, but I vomit words and ideas down, and then begin to shape it through a first draft, then a second, third, and so on until I'm happy with it. At times it strikes me as odd that I should spend so much time creating something that most people will spend a couple of days with at the most, but what can you do. Other times I wonder why my spelling doesn't improve, but I've grown immune to this, I think, to the point now that I can even ignore spelling in email. Still, an example of the changes I make is that, for the past hundred thousand words, I have been dutifully blacking out parts of a diary that forms the second narrative of the book. A fantastic idea, I thought: I'll black out all the parts that point to the villains, and have this be something that the main protagonist discovers on his path of killing people. I congratulated myself when I thought up this. Clearly, I was a genius. And what a self sacrificing genius I was, too, for I would be blacking out my own precious, precious words. Yes. Truly, an artist.

Yeah.

Well, it's helpful no one gives out artist licences, since I'd like have mine taken away from me now. The final quarter of the book, where the protagonist's brother dies--his is the diary in the novel, so it's not a spoiler, or any shit like that; the whole novel is about killing the men who killed your brother, after all--anyhow, at this stage, where all the plot strands are being tied together doesn't work at all if all the valuable plot points in the book are fucking blacked out, does it now? Heh. Bloody genius I am. "Yes, hi, I'd like to visibly hide all the plot strands from the reader, and let them figure it out for themselves. Could I include a map written in invisible ink?" Still, it's on par with the stuff I've written before, where I've gotten to the last quarter and I'm tying up everything and I realise that my moment of brilliance needs to be scrapped out. Oddly, I've done the blacked out text bit a couple of times now, and I guess I've got an urge to do the whole thing where you hide important information from the reader, but imply it through another means.

At any rate, I decided this morning that for a blog post I'd drop a section of the book in to give people a look. I've shown bits from the start of the book before, but I figured this time I'd pull something from the middle, just for kicks:

It was with no surprise, then, when the blurred, orange lights of a gazebo appeared in the dark and it became clear that Sara Mae was leading them towards it.

Closer, and Brady could see that the large gazebo sat on the edge of a ravine, but also that, on second glance, that it, in fact, went into the large divide of the land, the copper and brass and wooden walls attached to the rocky wall. He suspect that it went all the way to the bottom of the ravine, but he could not make it out properly due to the darkness; the light from his bike was no help at his distance, either. The lights from the house, tiny burning eyes, likewise, did not reach the bottom of the ravine, but rather stopped, half way down, as if the rest of the structure went to a place that light could exist in. Of the gazebo itself that clung, much like a hunched figure, to the ledge, it was as if it were light like the remains of a destroyed building, so did the lights within it seem to smolder. Yet, there was nothing to hint at a damaged frame, or to say that it had suffered from any kind of destruction, self inflicted or otherwise, and it to gave the impression of being nothing short of occupied.

Closer still, and Brady was able to make out the silhouette of a man, emerging from the door.

His presence did not surprise Sara Mae, who continued without pause; but for Brady, and for Cowan, who was ahead of him, it did, and both their bikes dropped a gear as they came upon the path leading up to the gazebo. Indeed, they paused, Cowan first, then Brady, and watched on idling bikes as Sara Mae stepped off her bike, and walked up to the man and hugged him. In response, Brady heard Cowan grunt, the sound a mirror for the one he did not voice, the sense of unknown he did not like about what was before him, but then he rode up the path, the shrinking distance stripping away the shadows of the man, to reveal him to be ten to fifteen years older than Brady. He was of about medium height, average in build but for a slight layer of fat to his entire body; upon that fat, however, and of most interest to Brady as he killed the engine, and kicked out his stand, was the neat and very traditional marks across his skin: the marks, in short, of a mortician. He even wore, the other man noted still, the traditional mortician's black pants, and with a dirty, grease stained white shirt wrinkled and untucked around him. Yet, there was something about him, and perhaps it was in the unshaven, messy haired face that he had, or in the way his faded blue eyes flicked from him to Cowan, casually, and without first glancing at their own marks, that spoke not of the latter mess, but of a calm, controlled quality that Brady first associated with morticians.

“Matt,” Sara Mae said, as he drew closer. “Robert. This is Jonathan Daniels.”

The man held out his unmarked hand, which Cowan took first, then Brady. “Bit of a surprise,” he said, his voice easy, casual, a hint of a smile on his lips. “I wasn't expecting visitors.”

“I came to see my brother.”

Daniels—the name so close, Brady noted, to Daniel—nodded.

Sara Mae pushed through the door first, the others following behind. Inside, the smoldering light of the gazebo continued, casting the room in a soft, coppery light. Brady had been expecting to find a morticians chair, a tattoo gun, and rows of ink, but instead, he found a large, long work bench, in which mechanical devices lay across in neat, organised lines, their wiring and wires and sprockets laid out next to each other, the internal laid naked. On the bench was a clock, a fan, the engine of a bike—or a generator—and, lastly, a brass boned, very still body of a cat. Behind the bench was a long library of books, the titles of which, Brady noted in his glances, related to anatomy, to diseases, to mechanics, to philosophy, and to botany. A glance to the ceiling told him that even the space up there was used, with large baskets hanging from hooks—and containing what, he wondered—interspaced by copper bladed fans that, even now, spun slowly. It was there, while staring at them, that he realised that the gazebo, unlike so many others in Ailartsua, had electricity in it, and that the smoldering effect of the light was caused by this, and that, yes, on second glance, the object that he took to be an engine or a generator, was in fact the latter, but the putrid odour he associated with them was not there, just a faint chemical smell.

“You're not a mortician, are you?”

“Once,” Daniels replied. “Before I was transported.”

“You were transported?” There was disbelief in Cowan's voice when he spoke. “I never heard of a mortician being transported.”

In response, the older man merely smiled, and shrugged.

Ahead of him, Sara Mae had reached the end of the room, where, behind a set of copper gates, sat an elevator. However, while she pushed the gates back, Daniels turned, faced the two ex-convicts, and directed them down a short hallway, where, in the faint light, a pair of couches could be made out, a glass table between them. As he made his way to it, Brady glanced back, once, to see the girl step into the elevator: as she did, she offered him a tiny smile, a hesitant thing that, he thought, was the kind you gave before you did something you knew would be emotionally difficult.

“I doubt she'll be long,” Daniels said.

As the elevator began to descend in a rattle, Brady said, “She can be as long as she wants.”

In the room, the older man offered them drink, which they took, and he passed Brady an ashtray as he pulled out a cigarette. In response, Brady offered him a stick, which the man took, the ritual of ex-convicts.

“You been here a while, yeah?” Cowan's voice had a touch of jealousy in it which, Brady thought, he tried to mask by pulling out his own, cheap grey cigarettes. “Place like this just doesn't appear.”

“Takes some time,” the older man agreed, “and some money. I was transported ten years ago.”

“How long you get?”

He offered that easy, casual smile of his. “I was told not to come back.”

“You get a sentence?”

“Two years—I served about six months, before I was employed on the settlements around here.”

Brady blew out smoke. “You're a surgeon, aren't you?”

“I know the trade, yes.” Daniels saluted with his own cigarette. “But I'm trained as a mortician—the marks probably tell you that. The Morticians Council doesn't approve, however, when you start trying to combine the two. You record a life, they say, you don't make one.”

Back down the hallway, he heard the elevator shudder to a stop, returning. Quick. Much quicker than he thought it would be. The footsteps that he heard were not just a single pair, but two and, he realised, he wasn't surprised by that. Cowan, Brady could see, was; but for himself, he had begun to piece it together quickly, to realise that as he saw and heard more from Daniels, that Sara Mae had not traveled to a grave. She was not going to sit and talk to a little marker. There was no emotional bond to be had with a site. No. She had come to find her brother, her actual brother, who had died, who had killed himself, if her story was to be believed, and who this man had Returned. Had made a Return. Out here, in the heat, in the red dirt, beneath the red sky, and with the electricity he had made himself... and as the sound of gears, the growl of mechanics came close, as it drew behind him, then in front of him, Brady felt a faint smile cross his face. But. But as the smile began, as the thought of what this meant to him crossed his mind with it, it stopped, halted by the sight of the two figures before him, and off the tattered, exposed nature of the second, the Returned.

He was not much taller than Sara Mae, but after that, there was no similarity between the two, for in Daniel Oktober, there was a body clothed in tatters: in ripped pants and shirt, and in ripped, decaying skin, so far gone that it revealed the copper and bronze bones of his arms and chest, the silver veins that crossed dirtily from each to each, the pumps and the gears that lurked in his chest in a massive display of complexity, a jigsaw he would never be able to decipher. And of his face—his face, with the original skin that he had once had—was a ruin, with decay having set in there to such an extent that it was all but an old child's tattered mask, with bright, artificial eyes staring out of his face.

“Though as you can see,” Daniels said, still casual though his voice was diminished beneath the machine growl of the boy, “I've never been interested in that rule.”

Of course, I hate everything about it, but that's part of the course at this stage of writing, too. 'cause hate means you're almost done.

After all, you never leave a thing while you're in love.

Somewhere along the line, I started using a narrative device where I switched between two characters, one in the present (the now) of the story, and another in the past, or future. Since I was too lazy to actually track down the technical term for doing this, I ended up referring to it as the braiding technique.

The most extreme version of this was in 26lies, where I took one main narrative, and then began braiding all the content from twenty six different chapters so it would intersect in X, in chapter twenty four. But, outside that book, most of the braids have been fairly simple in that they've been one main narrative, one second narrative. Stories like 'The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys,' 'The Dreaming City', 'The Funeral, Ruined,' and 'theleeharveyoswaldband' have all featured it. In fact, to illustrate it a little better, here's a quote from the last story there:

From behind rain slicked glass, the streets of Detroit were a dark pattern highlighted by smeared yellow light. To Zarina, it felt as if hundreds of eyes were weeping brightly as she passed. She watched them from the passenger seat of a tiny blue hatchback that was driven by the plump, middle aged Emily Brown, who, as her name suggested, wore a baggy brown suit to match her cheaply cut brown hair and name.

“You’re being quiet,” Emily said.

“Yeah.” They were at a red light. Emily only talked at red lights. “Just thinking.”

“Try not to over think. Nothing good comes from that.”

Zarina made a noncommittal sound, then said, “I think I’m making a mistake.”

“Nonsense.”

But she was. Zarina hunched down into her patched army jacket and stretched her black docs out so that they were under the little car’s heater. She didn’t know why she had done that: she wasn’t cold—in a minute, the heat would seep through her boots and turn uncomfortable—and hunching made her jacket bunch at her neck unpleasantly. But she couldn’t keep still; she fidgeted while trying to reason out why she was there. She should be back in her apartment uploading new recordings and making sure that someone was covering shows for the Pixel Babies and Eddie Isn’t Dead Yet next Saturday. She should be cooking for Sara. She shouldn’t be taking two unpaid days (Friday and Monday) from her call centre job to make this trip to Detroit to meet the sole member of theleeharveyoswaldband. She should have said no and junked the email. But when she had read Emily’s words telling her that Lee wanted to meet her—

“You’re fretting,” Emily interrupted as the hatchback stopped at another light. “I can see it on your face.”

“I don’t—I don’t usually meet artists I like.”

She laughed. “My. I’ve never heard Lee called that before.”

“It’s just—just meeting them, y’know?” Zarina continued, trying to push out her words, her fears. “Meeting them can just—can just fuck it all up. That’s what I tell Sara. That’s always what I tell her. Just the thought of meeting him has woken us up at night.”

“Is Sara your daughter?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

The light turned green.

The other thing, Zarina knew, was her life. She wasn’t ashamed of who she was, knew she didn’t have to justify anything—and wouldn’t, fuck the world if they thought she should—but after that one word, Emily shrank behind the smooth mat black steering wheel and chewed on her bottom lip, allowing the silence grow heavy as she drove slowly through the wet streets. It reminded Zarina of the very real possibility that Lee Brown could say something that would ruin his music for her. All he would have to say was some small-minded thing, some red state thing, and that would be it. Her fingers pressed into the palms of her hands, bones cracked, and she thought about that night, after the Annandale, when she had returned to her apartment. Without flipping the lights on, she had crossed the cold wooden floors, flipped on the stereo, dropped her ipod into it’s cradle, and with Sara’s cool white fingers sliding across her stomach, played theleeharveyoswaldband set. The set meant more to her than Brown ever could.

“Well,” Emily said, then paused. She cleared her throat like a careful teacher. “Well, it doesn’t matter. There’s no need to fret, anyway.”

“I shouldn’t have come.”

“Nonsense. You changed his life.”

“That didn’t have anything to do with me.”

***

The Annandale Bootleg changed everything, didn’t it?

It made Lee Brown a cult icon. I mean, seriously, I saw him on a fucking t-shirt the other day. Couldn’t believe my eyes.

It is ironic that a man who couldn’t read would be so embraced by net culture.

You got to thank Zarina Salim Malik for that.

You don’t think it would have happened without her?

No.

Some people, y’know, some people—that fame will happen anyway, and it doesn’t matter who is around. I’ve heard people say that if it wasn’t for Sin-e that Jeff Buckley wouldn’t have been found—but Sine-e was just a café that he played in it, y’know? Could’ve been any place, it wouldn’t have mattered cause Buckley was just genius waiting to be found. Buckley was going be Buckley and didn’t matter how it would happen.

But theleeharveyoswaldband wouldn’t have been anything without Malik. The music was shit, Brown couldn’t keep a band, he could never get regular gigs—and then she showed and bootlegged him in a pub and put it on the net and suddenly it’s everywhere and people can’t get enough of him.

Thanks, in part, to Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing who pushed the link through the site to the thousands of bloggers who reproduced it.

Exactly. Blog culture, the net—it just gave theleeharveyoswaldband an audience, and that allowed Malik, who eventually became Brown’s manager and record label, to exploit it.

I remember reading this article that said that the success of the band rested in the fact that it never released a studio album, and that new recordings—new unique records—were put out at every live show and loaded up by dedicated bootleggers, making them part of the process. Part of the music—the sharing, the distribution. It was basically saying that because it embraced everything established music didn’t want too, that’s why it worked. Which is some weird logic, you ask me, and ignores the fact that Brown was just messed up, and that the brains behind it all was Malik, a blogger with an already existing bootleg audience. But, apparently, the more messed up he became—

Well, the more of a cult figure she could make him.

I picked the story, incidentally, because you can read the whole thing here, if you're curious.

Anyhow: as you can see, the aim of the quote is to take the arrival of Zarina at the house of Lee Brown and add an extra layer to it through the conversation with 'Jack Ruby', a former band mate of Brown. There's a whole tragic, post Cobain feel to Brown who, illiterate, unable to organise a set list, and just generally fucked up, is made famous through one meeting with Zarina, for who, in my mind, is the centre of the story. The trick, therefor, is to braid the two lines, that of Brown's fame, and Zarina's meeting with him, so that you can see the resolution from it at the same time as seeing the cause--rather than extend the story out in a linear fashion for twice it's length, where you get the same resolution buzz, the braiding, in my mind, anyway, allows for you to create a tighter, and shorter, piece.

I must admit, I grew fairly found of this technique very quickly, to the point where I had to actively stop myself using it, afraid that I'd just be writing dozens and dozens of stories that worked in the same way. It's a quick way to become bored as an author, and boring to an audience, I think.

Still, I found it a lot easier to write like this than using a straight, linear narrative. Whatever the reason, I find writing like that quite difficult. It's either the sustained distance of having one long scene, and putting in the pauses and breaks and build up, or it's just that the fragmented, pull together at the end thing is much more representative of my mind. When I give it thought (it isn't much), I come down on either side--but I am a fairly fragmented kind of guy, and I lose track of conversation threads, get distracted very easily, and tend to jump round. Whatever it is, I'm always impressed when someone can pull of a linear narrative without scene breaks or line breaks for any length beyond two or three thousand words and still make it an interesting story.

At any rate, my love of this technique got the better of me last year, and I decided that I would use it in the novel I'm writing, Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld. The heart of the book is the story of Matt Brady who, having been released from prison on the penal colony Ailartsua after thirteen years of chain gangs and prisons, discovers that his only family member, his brother Alex, has been murdered (with, in fact, his wife and two children). What follows then, is a narrative in which Brady hunts down the five men who have, in recent years, moved to the new colony to set up their business. It's a very simple heart of a story: kill the men who killed your brother. I'm a simple kind of guy, really, though while I was forming the book, I decided I would also weave in information about European settlement of Australia, specifically referring to the generational genocide against Aboriginal people. I've become interested in the idea of marrying reality and fiction together, in part by an interview I read with Lydia Millet who, and I'm paraphrasing here, said in relation to Oh Pure and Radiant Heart that there was no good reason why you couldn't mix non-fiction and fiction together. So I'm giving it a quiet push and shove in this book, because in the next one I have planned, I actually want to use the braiding system not with a second narrative, but with actual non-fiction content, such as she did in that book.

With Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld, however, the braiding technique is split between Matt and Alex, a past tense third person narrative for the former, and a past tense first person narrative in the form of a diary for the latter.

Example?

Well, okay:

I am sitting in a coach as I write this, Matt. It is warm, stuffy, and even though the children have wound down the windows to let what is passing for a breeze in, I find myself drifting off. The four of us (the driver sits at the front, outside, just as they did over ten years ago) take up too much space in this box and, with the motor beneath the floor burning hot with coal, and that heat rising through the bronze floor, there is nothing to do but feel your blood turn sluggish and your limbs heavy. We all have another six hours remaining to us in this little moving sauna.

We have left Issuer for Ledornn, finally. Seven years working in that town was more than enough for me. It was enough for Lauren as well. The streets are so weighed down with damaged people that it begins to effect the way you see the world. Eventually, you begin to see only the grief in everyones eyes, that powerful emotion that has ground their life to a halt, and which causes you to wonder if they will ever recover from it. I suppose this state of mind is the natural result of living in the shadows of the Ovens—how could they not? When I stepped outside and looked up at the cracking brown-red sky in the morning, the first thing I saw was the huge, hulking, soot stained monoliths that dominated the skyline. The Ovens. They never fade into the background, either, not with the constant influx of men and women from all over the Shibtri Isles arriving each week. Each one of them bringing their dead. Bringing their grief. There is so much work to be had in Issuer now that the Ovens burn once a week, and every Friday, a tart sweetness drifts through the streets. It arrives with fresh, fatty black ash. It takes a rare kind of person to live in such a town for the entirety of their life, and when I say rare, I mean in a damaged way. Damaged both physically and emotionally. Damaged to such a point that the environment around them is in such compatibility to their own self that they see nothing wrong with living in air stained with the bodies of men and women and children.

Yet, for all that I think this, and as the hundreds of windmills that spin over the houses of Issuer became thinner and thinner until they faded away against the red horizon, I do feel a tiny sense of loss. Lauren and I had just married when we arrived. It was our first home. Both Angela and Iain were born beneath the Ovens. I was paid well, too, for the work, and we never went without want. Yet, I remind myself—I must remind myself—that the work I did was never my own, the house never ours. I was always living in Mrs. Fraé's house. I was always writing in her script. I was always working on her skin.

In returning to Ledornn, this will change. I will be taking over Adina Benjamin's skin, and making it my own. I will use my own script to write, and have my own skin to write it on. After all this time the name Adina is probably one you have forgotten, Matt, but she was the mortician that I served my apprenticeship under. She is close to eighty now and her script, or so she wrote to me in a letter, is suffering—I suppose it could be true, as the lines that she wrote in pen were not as strong or as bold as they had once been, but I think it more likely that she is leaving before her work suffers. The idea of skin being read before God in an unsure hand is not one that any mortician likes to think of.

In her letter to me, Adina said that she had a hundred and twelve skins, which I recall is about half of the number from when I was there. I'm curious as to what has happened to the number, but Mrs. Fraé, when I discussed it with her, said that such a decline at the end of a mortician's working life was not uncommon. They stop taking on new skin. Old skin dies. They are preparing to leave. This means that the business is not as strong as I first thought it to be, but, also, it means that I will only have to write in Adina's script on a hundred and twelve skins, and not the two hundred plus that I had thought. I will be able to begin using my own script as soon as new skin is brought to me.

Lauren has just asked me what I have written to you. She has Iain lying next to her. He has fallen asleep on her long, brown panted legs, and there is ash in his blond-brown hair. When I told her, she told me that I was boring you dreadfully and that you must now be hunting for something to burn this diary with, or at the very least thinking it is a prison trick. She said I should describe the empty, ash coloured world around us, and the unpaved road we're traveling on. That, she said, would be more interesting that anything I had written.

Matt, I think she hates you.

***

The street leading to the hotel Five Down, Five Across was made from hard red dirt. Brady had left the paved road two blocks back, where large, multi-storied gazebos cast frail shadows. In a way, he was glad, because the shade did nothing to stop the stones from catching and holding the midday heat, and it was actually more comfortable to walk on the dirt and the sun faded wooden steps that lead to the hotel's door. Inside, he found a round, spacious room, elevated from the dirt by a rough wooden floor, and with a three tables, a dozen chairs, and a long counter down the right side on top of it. The furniture was made from a sun bleached white wood, though a quarter of them had been painted red and brown, and the appearance of the room was motley and rundown. There was only one person in the room and she, a heavy set woman in a loose green dress with dark blue tattoos up and down her thick arms, had her equally thick feet propped up on a chair in front of her while she waved an orange paper fan at her face. When Brady entered, she paused in her waving for a moment, then said, “It's three pounds a night for a room, and there are no floors. It's just dirt. The register is over there.” She nodded with her greying, uneven hair cut towards the counter.

“There a bed?” he asked, still standing in the doorway.

“Single. You want a double, that's five pounds.”

“Single will do.”

At the counter, he found the ledger open. There were two pens sitting next to it: the first black, the second red. The former was more popular to write in, it seemed, as only one man had signed his name in red on the nearly full page.

“Black,” the woman said, fanning her face. “You want to use the black pen.”

“Why is that?” Brady asked, holding the red.

“The red is for the blacks,” she replied, completely without recognising the ridiculousness of her words. “Every one of the natives that stays anywhere in Ailartsua has to sign their name in red.”

Blacks? Brady hadn't seen one since he had stepped out of prison, and said so.

The woman chuckled in response, and said, in a lazy, faux innocent tone, “I hear they're a dying kind of tourist.”

Brady had heard similar—had heard it often, after the fiasco of sweeping the land for renegade blacks—but he didn't much care if it was true or not, and would care less once he was gone. Wordlessly, he swapped pens, signed his name, and walked over to where the woman sat. There, he counted out three pounds from the bag of coins that the Warden had given him. For her part, the large woman paused in fanning herself, and pulled a bronze key from a larger ring of bronze keys and gave it to him. She pulled the keys off the chair next to her, where she also kept a short, ugly looking shotgun. On the back of the key the number '1' had been scratched. With a nod in thanks, Brady walked to the back of the hotel and stepped out into the hot, midday sun again. Ahead of him were five small gazebos, each made from unpainted, sun bleached wood and copper corners. They each had lattice patterns over the windows and doors to provide a sense of security, and behind that pattern were thin white curtains. Brady found his gazebo room quick enough: inside it had a narrow bed made from wood and with a thin mattress. There was a small table in the corner and that was it. Regardless of the meanness of the room, Brady fell gratefully onto the bed.

There, he pulled out a long bottle of beer from his duffle bag and, having pushed himself up against the wall, cracked open the lid and took his first drink in eight years. The last drink Brady could remember had been in stolen: he had taken to robbing coaches on the roads through Cirotciv and Tuos Weh Senlaw after his last escape. It had not been his plan, of course: every escape he made in the early years was meant to result in his return to the Shibtri Isles, but he always required money to pay for silence on the ship, or he needed to lay low for a while so that he didn't get caught on the docks. It was difficult, also, to find work, since the only things that Brady had been trained to perform were acts of violence and he found himself naturally gravitating to it—and thus it was not surprising, even to himself, that he fell quickly into robbery when pressed to survive. Of course, this had resulted in a larger than usual bounty being put on his head, which meant that it was only a matter of time before he was captured. Brady's last drink had been taken, in fact, as he stared at a rough drawing of himself, with the word REWARD written beneath, and the offer of a hundred and fifty pounds. He had been tempted to turn himself in for the money.

The next morning, however, he had been awoken to the sight of two lean soldiers in maroon and black, and with ugly, tarnished rifles pointed at him. Behind them, a tall, thin black man was resting in a crouch, and it was clear, before even a word was said, that he had tracked him from the town to his camp.

It was the knock that brought Brady out of his thoughts and back to the warm darkness that he sat in.

It was not a hard knock, when it sounded again: it was soft, polite, almost, but Brady had—quite reasonably—not been expecting anyone to come to his door and so he found a suspicious frame of mind quickly. It was made even worse by the fact that he had not been in his room for more than an hour. The knock sounded again, and Brady pushed himself up off the narrow bed. Still holding the brown bottle in his hand, he opened the door, and felt the midday heat push itself uncomfortably against him. His attention focused, however, immediately on the slim, elderly man in front of him. The man had a grey band of hair around the side and back of his head, and a neatly kept grey and white beard, and was wearing a light, black suit, with a white, long sleeved shirt, the cuffs of which poked out around his wrists from beneath his jacket. Over the back of his hands, and around the open collar of the elderly man's shirt, Brady could make out the black tattoos of words.

“Mister Brady,” the elderly man said, “my name is—”

“You're a mortician.” Brady lifted his bottle in mock salute. “I don't need no new marks. I been judged enough.”

A tiny smile creased the mortician's equally small mouth. “I'm afraid you misunderstand.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. May I come in—the sun is quite taxing on me, I must admit.”

“You should have come at a different time in the day.” Brady had not yet moved out of the mortician's way, partly because of the black leather bag he held in his hands. It was there that morticians kept their tattoo needles and their ink. “What is it that you want, anyway? If you're just hear to—”

“I'm hear to talk about your brother, Mister Brady. About Alex.” The elderly man ran a hand over the skin on his head. “Please, may I come in?”

Brady did, at that, step back. He did not want too, however. No mortician—no man or woman—would come out in this heat to talk to a man about his brother for a good reason, he knew. Good news could always wait. He knew that he was not going to turn around, sit on the sun faded bed and have a discussion about how Alex was looking forward to seeing him. They were not going to discuss work in Ledornn. The fact that Brady had not received a letter from Alex in six months, and that the last one he had received was dated the year before, took on a new meaning. Before, he had been able to pass it off as nothing, as a just the way the system worked—every convict had the same problems, and they were worse if you were being punished—and this allowed him not to worry about it, to believe that his brother wanted him home, to believe that he had a home to return too... but now, with the old man standing on the edge of his bed, he had a sudden clarity, a realisation that of course Alex would not want him with his family, and thoughts of self loathing began to burst in his head.

“The news is not very good, Mister Brady.”

He knew that.

“Would you—could you please face me?”

“Just say what you have to say,” Brady muttered, “then get out.”

Silence.

“Say it.”

“I'm afraid...” The old man cleared his throat. “Your brother is dead.”

Again, silence.

The mortician began, “Did you—”

“I heard you.” Brady straightened, turned. “Get out.”

“Alex was murdered,” he said, instead. Brady heard the black bag click open and a rustle of paper emerged. “We have come to you as part—”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Brady found himself growing angry, while at the same time he was blinking rapidly to keep tears back. “I know what you and your kind want. Leave.”
The mortician was silent, but then, slowly, nodded. “Of course.”

Brady thrust the door open with his hand and the hot, red sky waited.

“My name,” the elderly man said as he paused at the door, his gaze trained on the world outside and not Brady's slowly, crumbling face, “is Dekal Ballantine. I am at The White Horse Hotel, and will be there until the end of the week. Please, see me before I leave. I have left a diary for you. It was your brother's. We found it in his house—it was addressed to you. This is how we found you, I am afraid.”

“Just get out,” he whispered harshly. “Now.”

The door clicked shut and Matthew Brady was left alone.

***

Ledornn. Eight hours in this coach. Everyone is asleep around me and so it is I alone who sees our approach to the city. From a distance, it looks like a body lying broken on the ground. In its arms and legs and chest and skull are lights from the apartment blocks and houses and streets and those lights are in bloom. They are like flames breaking through the skin.

Fun, innit?

Half the trick to making braiding work (at least, in my mind), is being able to bounce the narratives off each other. It's not enough to leave them distinct from the other, and in fact, if you did that, I tend to think it would fail something awful.

In my head, when I think of having the narratives touch each other, I use the word 'bounce', rather like you're in an old game of video game ping pong, where you move your flat disk round to bounce the square ball back and forth. It is because I have a doctorate in literature that I can use these terms, like bounce, and like braid, and make comparisons to old video games, and know that they make perfect sense. Honestly, you could just about call them anything: touch, slap, tickle. But I use the word bounce, because I just like to hit the second narrative, then jump back into the first (or hit the first and jump back into the second). You don't do it all the time, of course--just the same way that the pinging sound in ping pong speeds up and becomes irritating when compared to that slow, steady ping, you can overdo the bouncing by repetitively hitting each narrative. The best way round this, I find, is to seed in a thematic concern so you can go long periods without having the two interact and then, when you do so finally, you create a nice dramatic effect.

But still, I began writing this book last year, the start of last year, and I have only just begun to see daylight at the end of it. There's still about forty thousand words to go--I'm at about eighty thousand, I think--but I know where everything goes, where everything bounces, and how it ends, which is of course in blood and violence and history, which is a nice and obscure line to add here. But yet, yet, what I didn't realise when I set out to write this book, was just how fucking time consuming doing this braiding would be--sure, it always took me a while to write the short stories, but the truth of it is that short stories have always taken a while to write--I hate feeling that I'm repeating myself, I like to try new styles, new narrative techniques, and I rewrite a lot. But this is the case regardless of if the short story is braided, linear, or experimental. The shit takes me some time.

With the novel, I didn't realise just how time consuming that would be. There are weeks, maybe even whole months, were I've felt that I haven't made any progress on the book, because I've had to go back, seed earlier scenes, fix up the bounces, rearrange the braid, mostly because I cannot switch voices as I go along. I don't write Brady, Alex, Brady, Alex--instead, I write a section of Brady, usually about ten, fifteen thousand words, and then a section of Alex, to fit around that, and at about the same length. With the braid, you're forever going backwards, forever reworking, and as a result, the first seventy thousand words of the book are fairly polished, which is some joy, I must admit, since once I'm done, will mean I won't have to spend a lot of time reworking.

Anyhow this is just me, thinking aloud, dropping notes in, and giving you all a monster long post to read. Say hi when you read the bottom.

Fuck.

I've reached the point where I'm talking about my book as I write it and there's no-one round to email insanely, so it'll have to go here.

When I was writing 26lies, I had these huge conversations with Deb Layne (wheatland_press) going, which must have driven her up the wall, but like the fine publisher she is, she kept talking to me, letting me talk the book out and out. There's a line, in fact, in a Raymond Carver story, called 'Why Don't You Dance', in which the young woman in the story is telling her friends what she's seen, and Carver says that she's trying to talk it out, or something similar (I don't have the book with my at the moment, so if I'm wrong, there you go). That line always struck me as one of those personal little epiphanies, because I'm a lot like that: I like to talk things out until they make sense. All kinds of things, really. Books, short stories, girls, food, whatever, y'know? Some times I think that the things I write are nothing more than an expression of that, an extended, composed version of my talking something out, and shaped into a narrative so I can work resolutions and answers in, if I come up with any.

Of course, a lot of authors I know, they don't talk things out. They keep them pinned up inside, waiting until they're formed to show the world, or afraid that someone else might take their idea, and use it.

It's a fair enough in both cases. In the former case, I can understand not wanting to talk the half formed idea out, and later, when it is fully there, there comes a time when you need to be quiet, because if you're busy talking a story out, why write it? You've told it then, go off and write something new. As for being protective of your ideas, that's all well and good, though for me, I just figure ideas are, as the Americans say, a dime a dozen. Plus, every idea I have has been used by someone somewhere, so I don't see the point. Personal choice, that, for, to me what makes a piece of fiction work is the author, the way he or she spins the idea, the voice he or she uses, the verve that he or she has. Originality comes from the pattern of thought within the author, not the one high concept idea. Or, at least, that's what I figured a while back, and I've never much seen any idea to go back and change it.

Anyhow: this is long winded.

What I'm thinking about today is violence. It's an important conversation in Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the introduction that I posted a few days back, but what I'm thinking, lately, what I'm thinking, is how I can make every moment of violence carry a weight to it, and yet not be caught up in that emo argument you have about how wrong it is. Don't get me wrong--I'm not a fan of violence, and I don't want to have a narrative that is supportive of the casual, effortless deaths that are the background noise of so many books and films. I've never had a huge problem with works that do that. In fact, I've enjoyed more than a few. But I don't find it very interesting to casually kill seven people and not have it so much as appear as a blip on the inside of a person's mind. To do that, somehow, and at the very least in this piece of work, feels as if I'm short changing one of the thematic elements of the book, and further, it creates a tonal inconsistency. The downside, however, is it makes things a lot more difficult: how do you justify the deaths of guards, then, when you know, through endless amounts of narratives, that guards are an anonymous point of violence, a nothing but sharp crack, burst of a bullet, slice with a knife, the representation in the book of the author making a the short, sharp cut to remove the plot obstacle for his or her character?

This is what I'm thinking about right now. It's a thought in my cluttered head. A problem to be solved. Maybe it doesn't make any sense to you. Maybe it's not even interesting. That's how it is sometimes, I guess.

On the weekdays, I used to write in the afternoon, and into the evening. It was good. It suited me. Then, three out of five weekdays, I started working in the evenings and afternoons. After school hours, basically, and my writing pattern got shot to shit.

A lot of people will tell you a lot of things about the practice of writing and they're mostly a yawn. I figure you find your way and do it, and whatever that is, you do it. Write drunk, write sober, write high, write straight, write naked, write clothed, write whenever, write however. It's the end product that matters. For myself, when I'm writing a piece, I find that having a pattern is what's important. All I need to do is sit down every day and write a bit of it and when I'm done, I'm done. Of course, when I haven't got anything to write, I don't much worry about this. I go and watch a film, read a book, pretend that I'm going to learn how to play my harmonica (every now and then I learn a tune that I promptly forget, but it's not important, and I think I just like making noise). Some new idea will come to me soon enough, and the downtime is nice, since it allows my mind to turn over stories I've had lurking in the back of my head.

But that said, recently it's been a bit difficult.

I am in the middle of writing Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld, my-red-sun-bushranger-inspired-revenge-narrative novel, and which I said to people at the start of the year that I would have done by the end. It's a deadline I don't plan to fall down on and the book unfolds nicely, though it's a little larger than I first conceptualised it, on account of my insertion of a second narrative to run parallel to the main, after I thought the main didn't have enough emotional kick for what I wanted to do. Also, I've been doing the two narrative trick a lot with the short fiction I've been writing of recent, and I get a real pleasure out of weaving the two narratives against each other, and playing the second off the first, and so doing a larger piece like that seemed only natural. The letters in 'The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, Not Little Boys' is an example of it; so is the interview in 'theleeharveyoswaldband'; and I use letters again in 'The Funeral, Ruined', as well as a few others, I believe. I'm careful not to let myself get too caught up in it as a style, but for some reason, I've become quite attracted to the particular form, since it allows me to bounce two narratives directly off each other, and use juxtaposition for dramatics and a touch of irony. A little bit of irony goes a long way, I find.

Here, to show you what I mean, is the opening of the book:

Matthew Brady was transported at the age of twenty-two for murder.

He considered it a black piece of humour that he had been convicted for the death of one man since, at the age of sixteen, he had been part of the Shibtri Isles Army. For nearly six years, he had fought in campaigns across dry, burnt soil that lay beneath empty red skies. When not fighting on the land he had been born, he traveled, and fought on soggy, sodden, yellowed half grown fields beneath the same sun; or in the long tunnels of the Queen's Empire, where the only light was provided by phosphorescent stones and moss. In these campaigns, the dark, maroon uniform of Brady's native country remained the same no matter his antagonistic of defensive roll, though he questioned neither. The military was the only employment that he had ever known. He had joined, not through of a sense of patriotism or duty, but rather because the dangerous and violent nature of the work offered was attractive. He wasn't like his brother, Alex—Alexander—who had the natural gift of intelligence and interest in study and who was offered a morticians apprenticeship at the age of thirteen—the offering of which had allowed him to leave the orphanage and underfunded public school system that they were both stuck in. No, for Brady, life existed in the physical, the tangible, and the pleasures that were offered through these experiences, and so when the recruiters stood in their maroon uniforms in the middle of the broken cement quadrangle of the school he attended and told him that he could have a life with money, food, and travel in addition, he did not hesitate to sign up. That he was to be part of campaigns that resulted in the deaths of men and women with whom he had no personal connection with did not bother him. Likewise, he was similarly unconcerned by the destruction that was caused to towns and cities and countries that he visited. Why should he have been? The question of why he was there had been made before the army was sent into battle, and he never saw a reason to question them—until, that is, the day he killed William Morris.

Killing Morris was different to any death that Brady had been responsible for. When his knife slipped out of the other man's stomach, when the blood flowed over Brady's hand, when the strength seeped out of Morris' body with it, when his breath against Brady's neck stuttered and stopped...

When he was dead.

When he was dead, in short, Brady felt a pleasure that he had never felt before.

Which, of course, was the problem. When his lawyer arrived, the neat, non-tattooed (clean skinned was the slang) young man took it upon himself to explain to Brady that he could not kill the people he wanted to kill. He did not use those words, of course: the lawyer had the sentiments couched in long, twisting sentences, relating to morals, social standards, and other curiously frail arguments that, in the end, argued that it was fine—indeed, encouraged—for Brady to want to kill the men and women who were the enemies of the Shibtri Isles. That those enemies changed as the political climates did was not up for debate. They were the enemy. They were a danger to the prosperity and freedom of the country. You could not argue that their deaths did not serve a purpose. William Morris, on the other hand, was a citizen of the Shibtri Isles, and in additional, a valued member of the military. He had a wife and daughter, both of who were innocent, and both of who had to live with the tragic results of Brady's actions.

William Morris, it was explained to him carefully, slowly, as if he were a child, did not deserve to die.

At that moment, Matthew Brady had what he would later tell his brother was an epiphany. With a startling clarity, he felt as if the artificiality of the world that he lived in had been stripped away, and that he was left holding a plain and simple truth that related to the lies that were accepted in daily life. It should, Brady realised in this moment, have been more understandable for him to have killed Morris: he had hated the man and loathed his presence. Morris, for his part, had returned it. The hate between the two of them was born out of divides created through birth and education. Even if they had not had these divides, it was arguable that they simply would have clashed, for Morris had been the kind of man who enjoyed the benefits of his birth above others, and Brady was the kind of man who resented anyone who thought that they were born better than him. At any rate, the personal animosity between the two meant that killing Morris was something to Brady. Oh, he wasn't naïve enough to believe that anyone would celebrate the fact, but he had at least done it for a reason, and to have a man stand before him and tell him that that reason was not acceptable, that it was in fact wrong, when he had been given orders to kill men and women whose greatest fault was that they had been born in another country, was simply ridiculous. Before the lawyer had finished his speech, Brady had begun to laugh, and the mocking sound filled the warm, brass barred cell that he was in so loudly that the other man was forced out of the door and into the hallway. It was a week before he would return.

From that point onwards, Brady could not take what happened to him seriously. It was a farce, a punishment over a ludicrous distinction of choice that he could not, and did not, respect. The only part of the trial that he did take seriously was when he was told that transportation was being sought by the prosecuting lawyer as his punishment. After he heard that, he warned his brother of the outcome, and Alex told him that, if possible, he would be there for the trial itself. However, when Brady's trial finally took place, it was behind closed doors, and no family or friends were allowed into admittance; not that he had much of the latter. Instead, he sat alone in the middle of the room with brass shackles around his wrists and legs, and the dull, brown prison uniform turning the colour of old blood as the flat red, midday sun fell over him. There were seven other men where in the room with him: two lawyers and five judges, the latter of which sat behind an expensive, black wooden table and gazed down upon him for the entire three hours of his trial without emotion.

Then.

Then, once the lawyers had finished, once they sat down, once there was a moment of silence, and sheets of paper were shuffled, then:

“Sergeant Matthew Brady.” The speaker was a General Harrow, a man that Brady had known, if not personally, then with faint professionalism, for his entire career. The old man's pale, narrow face was held together by series of faint, webbed lines that stitched mouth, nose, eyes and ears together. Like the other four men—younger, but not by much—around him, he was clean skinned, and wore a dark maroon uniform with the black of his rank across his shoulders. There was not an ounce of kindness in his eyes. “Mister Brady,” the old man repeated, the emphasis on title a prelude to sentencing, “Please stand.”

Slowly, Brady did. The brass chains around his wrists and ankles were heavy and limited his movement, but he could have moved quicker, if he had wanted. Not so long ago, he would have.

“You have served the Shibtri Isles for nearly t—”

“I don't want to hear,” Brady interrupted. “Just get it over with.”

“Transportation.” Anger spotted General Harrow's tone. The old man paused, composed himself, and said in a voice as neutral as he could, “To the penal colony Ailartsua, when you will be imprisoned for a period of ten years.”

He would be thirty-two when he was released. Thirty-two.

Pleasure now spotted the old man's voice when he said, “Do you have anything to say?”

“To you?” Brady looked at the six clean skinned men around him. “No.”

General Harrow lifted the bronze gavel from the black table and struck it three times, as if, somehow, that made the sentencing more official.

Matt—

I have decided, since it is so difficult for us to have consistent correspondence, that I will, instead, compose this long letter to you. I suppose you could call it a diary, since I am writing it in one, and it will continue until the end of the year—wherein it will probably take a year to reach you in Port Tahurr, and likely arrive with the other letters that Lauren and I have sent you in the meantime. Most likely, you will be able to read them on the boat back home, which I am sure will make the journey more interesting for you.

Your latest letters (all six of them) arrived together, as they are wont, and in the four months that they covered, I detected an idleness in them, a boredom of the mind, which is only to be expected, really. At any rate, I hope this will go some way to alleviating that emotion and, though you will surely laugh when you read this, I have even made my own ink for you: a mix of red and black that has the strangest reaction—some letters, as you can see, are red, while others black, but most are a mix—and which I have titled Brady's Time.

The usual words about it being unfinished, a work in process, and all of that apply. But this two narrative trick? I'm doing this throughout the whole novel. The whole novel. I'll probably never have the urge to do this twin narrative shit again at the end.

At any rate, what I was originally talking about is how I lost my schedule. For a month and a half there, when I moved cash situations around, I tried a lot of different writing times. There was the late night writing, but I was mostly tired, and writing shitty words when I did that--and there's nothing worse than opening your document at eleven at night to find your shit needs to be rewritten again and again. I tried rotating hours, but that didn't work, either. Writing some days in the afternoon, some days in the evening, other days whenever... that just didn't work for me. Eventually, I settled into a pattern of writing in the morning, which has worked nicely, since it gives me time to fuck round once I finish the scenes that I want. I know a lot of writers who do the word count thing, and I tend to keep an eye on it, but I move scene by scene, mostly--write up to this pause, or that break, you know? It's roughly between a thousand and two thousand words a day, which, oddly enough, I can get done by midday, which is much quicker than what it would take me in the evening. Maybe the morning is actually good for writing--or maybe I just move quicker with the self imposed deadline looming on me. Possibly it's both. Either way, all I know is that if I do what I want by the middle of the day, then the rest of the day is free for complete and utter fuckery, which pleases me to no end.*

Anyhow, I am, now, back into the easy movement of writing, and it's going nicely, and Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld has all kinds of unpleasant goodness in it, and assuming nothing comes up, my self imposed deadline should hold, even if it flexes a couple of weeks.

---

* Turns out that Sean Williams has a similar system. Perhaps I'm on the road to being prolific.

Yesterday I had a good day working on Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld, with everything slotting into place as I worked. It's a nice feeling when that happens--some days you get it, some days you don't, y'know?

At any rate, I thought I'd put a section up here, for no other reason than I really liked the paragraph describing the mortician Ballantine.

When Brady left Port Tahurr for Airotciv three days later, he did so in narrow, paid cabin aboard The Five Hearts of Betty that Ballantine had organised for him.

From what Brady understood, after the mortician had finished marking his skin, and while the former had returned to his gazebo room to lock himself in the still warmth inside, the elderly man had walked down to the docks. He had dressed himself in his heavy blacks and sweated unnecessarily for the entire walk. That he did not change to the lighter clothing that was common in Ailartsua, Brady believed, revealed a quality about the man: one that spoke of an immovable, undeniable sense of righteousness and surety in himself. There was a part of Ballantine that spoke of stopped growth, of a man who had reached an ideal point of self awareness and then, as if that were the end in the way a painting might end, had stopped allowing any new influence upon himself. No new colours and textures needed to be added. He knew where it was that he stood in the world and, within that knowledge, he knew what took precedence in life. He was a man, Brady believed, who did not view the individual as being important at all, but rather viewed the indescribable, unimaginable celestial individual that gave him purpose as the authority from who all importance flowed. The thought—a rare piece of detailed cynicism, in fact—had occurred to Brady when the old man had walked through the sweltering, red skied afternoon heat to Brady's gazebo where, through the closed door, Ballantine told him that passage across the strait had been booked.

Once he had left, Brady wondered how long Ballantine would have waited outside if he had not pulled back the curtain to reveal the sweat stained figure? An hour? A night? As long as was required, he suspected, and he felt irritated by knowledge, as if he were nothing but a tool for the mortician. He was not wrong in thinking that, he knew, and that increased his dislike for the man, though he had not yet figured out why, exactly.

The usual things apply: early version, book not finished, what's spell check, blah blah blah. Chances are this could get scraped out entirely, and most likely it'll be rewritten, but with all that taken into account, I liked it. It felt good. It was the book's voice, coming effortlessly.

If you're curious, I'm about twenty thousand words into it.