I have been asked to make a showing at Nerd East, the Larp fair at Durham on 9th June 2012. There may be some manner of speechifying. The speech may include recycled elements from my Picocon speech. See how green I am? I'm constantly trying to reduce my inspiration footprint. Anyway, I shall be there, and I shall be happy to sign stuff, answer questions, receive drinks and the like.

After that I am one of a host of names at Edge Lit on 14th July 2012 at Derby Quad. No idea what I'm doing there but ditto the signing and the questioning and also probably the drinking.

I have another short story on the way into print, too. I'm not a prolific ghost story writer, but I'm very proud of my creepy little piece, Not a Cat Person, which will be coming out soonish in Newcon Press's Hauntings anthology. I'm also working my way through their back catalogue at the moment. I can strongly recommend Ian Watson's new collection, Saving for a Sunny Day.

Finally, there's this: Waterstones and Amazon are exploring a new Book Coprosperity Sphere . I will freely say that I honestly don't know enough of the ins and outs of the business to make any comment as to whether this will work for Waterstones (or Amazon, but one kind of feels that Amazon will be selling books to the cockroaches long after we're gone (1)), or what other considerations are going to rear their heads, but as I am very much in favour of high street bookshops, I do hope this means that we might have the last chain left for a little longer. It's also potentially a step towards the strategy that was being talked about at last year's Fantasycon, the idea that you could buy the physical book at a store and get the ebook in the same purchase (meaning you could have your library and home, in pleasing paper, and also cart it around conveniently, without having to buy everything twice). Now this current deal is a long way from that, but what it is, is infrastructure that might conceivably lead to it. Anyway, we'll see.

(1) And you know me well enough by now to know that I genuinely mean it in a good way.

In around 2004, and having amassed enough rejection slips to auto da fe a dozen heretics, I decided to start work on a Grand Project. I was feeling strongly as though I was running out of chances with this writing lark, and very much as though, if the next manuscript bit the dust like the last few (1) then I should probably give the business up as a bad job. In order to make that Grand Project a good one, therefore, I ransacked my past for an idea that had been with me a while, and grown and developed, and still held its appeal. There were actually a few other contenders, but what got resurrected was the insect-kinden and their world. I set to writing Empire in Black and Gold and, rather than submit that as soon as it was done, I didn't stop until I'd got Salute the Dark down because I knew that I'd not finish it otherwise, if Empire got knocked back.

It was my extreme good fortune that, amongst my submissions I sent the first few chapters of Empire to Mic Cheetham & Co, and a certain Simon Kavanagh who, thereafter, mercilessly badgered the publishing industry on my behalf until he convinced the then-editor of Tor, Peter Lavery, to take me on. The selling point that swung things was that four books were already in the bag and so Tor could turn them out at whatever rate of knots they liked. As they did. Empire hit the shelves in 2008.

I have, this evening, put down the last words of the first draft of Seal of the Worm, the tenth and final volume of Shadows of the Apt.

It has been a long and joyous run. There's still work to do — I need to go read the damn thing now and see whether or not it's turned into unreadable tosh since I wrote it, and it won't see the light of day until around 2014, but even so. Standing at the end of that road, looking back over all of those words, all of those battles and betrayals, twists of fate, all the many characters of the insect-kinden (2), it's a strange feeling.

And yes, I will go back to them. The plan's already there. But for now, who knows? Fresh fields and pastures new.

And yes, this does mean that if I suddenly drop dead now, you still get to finish the series.

(1) /several/all

(2) albeit that, owing to my particular machine-gun approach there are now not nearly so many of them.

So, aside from finishing one chapter and starting another (just past the 2/3 mark on the first draft now), and also writing about 1,000 words on Super Secret Unpublishable Project Force (2) I went to see Cabin in the Woods, a film that has been Wowed beyond Wow by reviews that are maddeningly unable to talk about the Wow without spoiling the film for you. So, yes, Wow. And I myself am now not going to spoil the Wow, save to say that, as I am not a habitual horror moviegoer, the stuff that scared the bejeezled crap out of me probably wasn't actually all that, on a scale of one to Cannibal Holocaust. The ideas and the thought behind the film, as well as the crazygonuts fantastic third act, make it a definite must see if you've got the nerve though.

Although… and this is a weirdness… I wrote part of that film in a weird and totally non-litigious way. Not actually the part that is the point of why the film is so very interesting, but there is a point where Cabin runs on parallel tracks for just a tiny bit with my own story The Dissipation Club, which I had out in Miskatonic River's Dead But Dreaming 2. So, great minds, y'know (4).

(1) Tad Williams and GRRM have both produced (very good) volumes long enough that they had to be split up for the paperback release. I am waiting for some wit to write something so long that the ppb is in itself a trilogy. That will mark some sort of Mayan Apocalypse of fantasy novel memes, I think.

(2) It's like Mighty Morphing Power Rangers except nobody cares (3)

(3) Sorry, it's like Mighty Morphing Power Rangers except even fewer people care.

(4) Please don't sue, Joss.

Did a couple of decent panels — the first was "not another f*cking elf" where the four of us had no moderator whatsoever, and ran everything quite satisfactorily as a socialist commune. This explored a lot of good ground on fantasy tropes, and especially the different way that elves and other races are used — we got onto orcs, too. I contended that there was little ground between Tolkien's "orcs" and the lower class "oiks" but Paul Cornell stuck up for Professor T on that one. There was also a suggestion that orcs have now migrated to the noble savage archetype and everyone wants to show how lovely and misunderstood they are, which does seem to be a think with orcs.

Sunday's panel was diversity in fantasy — we managed to cover gender, sexuality and race under the able helming of Mark Charan Newton. As someone pointed out after, we didn't look at disability, which was true and a shame. Still, much was said, and the general conclusion is that the genre is at least having a go at broadening its demographic — both in terms of characters, authors and hopefully readership.

Also got to see some other fun stuff — nice SF panel — "is SF dead", which as was pointed out contrasted nicely with last year's "has SF taken over the world". Next year: "SF has risen from the grave."

On the subject of SF, I would like to think that I have in some small way diversified myself into that sister-genre by getting a (very) short story accepted for the Nature magazine Futures section — this prints brief stories dealing with a speculative treatment of real science, and I'm very chuffed to have something accepted (hint — it wasn't the first time I tried it). No idea what issue it'll be in, but the story is called "21st Century Girl" and more details as and when. I've submitted a few other stories to various anthologies that have been on the hunt, and so crossed fingers for some more shorts news in upcoming months.

Last up: I have now registered formally as an author on Goodreads. This appears to have a kind of forum-like thing in its Q&A sessions, and so I will probably set something like that up. For now I'm busy giving good ratings to all my books. Yes, even that one.

You should expressly not read this if you haven't actually read Heirs as that would be both a serious spoiler and very confusing.

As pointed out by Mark Guest in a comment to the last post, the 8th book of Shadows of the Apt will be out 2nd August, meaning I should start thinking about signings for around that date (and Fantasycon 2012's just a month later, for that matter).

This is of course the beginning of the end, in that it's the first volume of the final plot arc. We've had the first Wasp war, ending with the treaty signed at the end of Salute the Dark. We've had all the fallout, the stories of Che, Stenwold, Seda and Tynisa that have occupied the attention of Scarab, Sea Watch and Heirs. Now the Empire has got its act together. Compare and contrast with Mr Brooks' cover to Empire (out now, I believe).

As chance would have it, I'm on the final proofs for Air War right at this moment. It's pleasant to be able to get to this stage, which is often when the book is starting to seem like a house guest that just won't get the hint and leave, and still find the story zipping along quite nicely. Things explode. What's not to like?

I had Air War and War Master's Gate pretty well plotted beforehand — the process was quite tight, quite blow by blow. I tend to not set pen to paper (1) until I've got a good idea of the story's shape and structure, otherwise the pacing goes to crap and I end up going down dead ends or over-weighting parts of the book that aren't worth it. I think I'm basically an undisciplined writer at heart, and to cope with that I have to stand behind my own chair with a whip sometimes.

Book 10 is a little different. I think it's a symptom of the long series (and as I'm talking about the long series in a few weeks at Eastercon I should probably spin out a few thoughts on it). Book 10 has a certain set of key scenes, the climax moments of the plot, that I've had in mind for years now, but the territory between them has been evolving in a fairly murky fashion as I've filled in the blanks of the earlier books. Even now, at past 1/3 of the way through the first draft, there are serious gaps in my knowledge about how major events will unfold — it's all cross-country stuff without map or compass. The little notes I have for the plot are much more general that usual. (Not that I always stick to my original plans — in fact I don't think I ever have, all the way. There's always a better idea waiting in the wings.)

I'd thought this would seriously slow me, but the other thing I've found, joyfully, is that the plot is rushing me along — it feels like the same burst I tend to get right at the start of a project, when I can't get the ideas down fast enough. In this case I think it's that the whole 9 previous books are providing the impetus, the motive force to make things happen. The logic of the world and the plotline, that I've sweated and strained over, now has an answer to my questions. All the pieces are falling into place, but literally just as I need them, each grey area of plot coming to me as reach its page. Hopefully this will keep up throughout the rest of the book, or you may see a rather more despondent post here in a few weeks.

Writing a long series has had a lot of unexpected problems. Certainly, at around the time of Heirs of the Blade I hit a plotting crisis point where all the stuff that I was bringing with me from previous books hit the foreshadowing of all the stuff I knew I was going to bring in later, and started a three-way fight for space with the actual story I was trying to tell — meaning that I have never had to rewrite so much of a book as I did with that one, and not just once, either. There were some really nice bits that ended up on the cutting room floor, including a whole sequence where the lake-kinden from Blood of the Mantis came to reclaim Sef from Gaved, but you have to murder your darlings, and in the end it had to go (2).

But anyway, the long series thing is currently working for me. Book 10 is on track. Horrors await.

(1) or equivalent keyboard image

(2) There was less of this in book 6, but an entire scene in which Stenwold learns how the habitually solitary Medusoi reproduce, which was utterly crazy, did get cut.

But I get ahead of myself. There was another panel that I want to have a look at. This was "It's not a story, it's a map!" and was about world-building, ish. Tagline was "does fantasy place world-building over character", but it did get hung up on maps as my earlier one did on elves. Although chair Juliet McKenna did try and put a pro-map case, with some support from David Tallerman and Ian Whates, there was a lot of anti-map sentiment from Gaie Sebold, Sam Sykes and especially China Mieville. I do a lot of maps, as you know, and I'd have had some pro– stuff to put in. To be honest, maps are a bit of a side-argument, but I would propose:

- on the "show don't tell"(1) basis, maps are a useful tool for the reader, in any story that travels around or involves multiple states/nation/etc. However:

- Maps that don't have anything off the edge of them so that the whole world is contained therein are bad maps, and will work against the imagination of the reader (and the writer)

- Maps that could serve as the contents page because every conveniently distinct little country is going to get a visit are also bad maps, and indeed such a howling cliché of epic fantasy that they get a derogatory mention in Diane Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Basically, maps are a tool subordinate to story etc (and indeed subordinate to world-building, see below) but a useful tool nonetheless, a reference and resource for the reader and (when you get long enough through a series and need to check your own consistency) the writer as well.

And that's most of what I wanted to say about maps. You don't have to have them. A stand-alone book doesn't need them as much as a series might because a series likely has much more legging it about the place. A book with a stationary setting such as a city doesn't need a map in the same way that one with multiple locations and/or hoofing it around might. I stand by my maps. I also confess to using an entire map in The Sea Watch as a mean-spirited piece of plot misdirection. Very meta of me.

So much for maps, and it's unfortunate that "maps" turned up in the title because much of what followed kind of got tangled up in the idea of a map as the symbol of all that is unholy. However what I really noted was something China raised about halfway through: His stance was that the "reality" of a fantasy world stops at the page — that asking "what happened next?" or "was there really a ghost?" or whatnot is a meaningless question, because what the author wrote is all that s/he wrote. His position was that it's a pointless exercise to look for the "reality" of the fantasy world beyond the author's intentions.

So, here we go. Disagreeing with Mr M is sort of entering an ass-kicking contest with a centipede (2) — and I wasn't on the panel so who knows what I might have said at the time? — but if I understood his point correctly, I disagree with it.

I think that readers are absolutely entitled to ask, "What happens next?" or "who lives over the hill." I think that putting this question in the map debate is problematic, because it leads on to "setting too much in stone" arguments. I myself, speaking solely for my personal preference, like worlds that extend beyond the story, and maps that extend beyond those locations the story visits. As China noted, M.John Harrison  - a writer that he and I both greatly respect — has kicked very hard against the mere idea of world-building. I'm not sure if he uses the phrase in the same way I do. In his succinct and elegant essay (quoted here and elsewhere) he feels the practice is an offence to writers and readers. For me, story and world have unfolded in complementary tandem, and the world beyond the boundaries of the story — as shown in chance mentions, nods, remarks or the rumoured origin of a stranger passing through — has been instrumental in inspiring the story's further development. Does that mean that I let plot and character suffer as I fetishise over the world?  I would say no. I would say that they are the richer and the more interesting for having a rounded world to be set in. Those fantasy series that I truly do not respect are generally those that don't take the time to build the world, but simply cobble it together from stock concepts and then just drive a similarly ill-shod plot through them. It's like the elves — too many writers use fantasy standards like elves and the like as a crutch that means they don't have to think about the world: Who lives in this nicely square country? It's elves. That's fine then. Everyone knows what elves are like. Nature, bows, interminable poetry.

Isaac dan der Grimnebulin in (of course) Perdido Street Station, trying to solve the problem of flight for his client Yag: "Well, first of all there's the problem of getting hold of insect wings big enough. The only insects big enough already aren't going to just hand'em over. And I don't know about you but I don't fancy fucking off into the mountains or wherever to ambush an assassin beetle. Get our arses kicked." To me, that is world-building. That is the essence of world-building, and those books (and all of China's books) are full of that kind of intricate, immersive detail. I'm not expecting there to be a painstakingly detailed place on the map that says "here be assassin beetles". There should always be something off the map, because that's how a world works (see how the map debate colours the wider argument?). I'm similarly not expecting whatever author to have a 4,000 word essay on the life cycle of the assassin beetle or to be able to give any more details than are on the page if they don't want to, but it is the mention of those far places, those rumoured things, that pushes back the boundaries of the world, that gives the story itself a reality that it would otherwise lack. And yes, I know I've lost the reality argument barring serious psychotic imbalance, because of course these places are not objectively real. But they have a reality beyond the page: they have a reality in the writer's mind, and the readers'. The writer must not (as Harrison says) restrict the reader by making too much concrete, but the writer also has a duty to draw the reader, to tantalise, to hint, to feed the imagination. That, as I'm sure the counterargument would run, is what character and story are there for. But world-building, as I think of the phrase, is a part of that. In providing a world that has the blush of life to it you show the reader that this is a vehicle worth exercising the imagination on. You encourage it. It is the world that the writer has not given that kind of thought to that cripples the imagination, because it has no depth.

And the interaction between world and story is complex. And over-planning is going to be restrictive — the world is likely to evolve like that "fog of war" you get in strategy games, so that the map (sigh) is revealed as your characters move around the world (which is why my later books have new maps).Yes, the story should not be to showcase the world. That is exactly cart-before-the-horse — or authorial masterbating, as Sam Sykes put it. However, a well-considered and consistent world showcases the story. And if you have that world, which grants your characters breadth and history and surrogate reality, then your readers will ask "what happened next?" I'm not going to go into detail about long serii like Shadows of the Apt needing more of that kind of stuff, but I think it's true just because writer and reader inhabit the same world for so much longer. Consistency and the suspension of disbelief require you to ensure that it all fits together.

And as far as suspension of disbelief goes, I feel that a fundamental part of reading a story — and most especially a fantasy story — is entering into a world that is presented as having a reality that stretches beyond what is written (3). On a literalistic interpretation, of course it need not have. The author can create that story and have no thought to anything beyond those words, or even be vehemently denying any "extended universe" — to use such a horrible phrase — with every word that gets typed. To expect the reader to somehow have that in mind as they read, though? It would be like interrupting a play half way through to show the audience backstage and see the actors smoking and going to the loo. To expect the reader to stop when you stop, at that final dot of punctuation, and never ask "what happens next" is to expect too much — and to expect something that would be actively damaging to the reader's appreciation of the story. Both China and Mr Harrison prompt that "What happens next?" question from me in all sorts of different ways. Harrison's Viriconium, in its own shifting and degrading detail, is fascinating. And yes, it changes story to story — it cannot possibly be mapped — but that change is in itself part of the fluid setting (perhaps I will be shot if I say 'world') that Harrison is presenting (see my references to it in my recent post here). That very uncertainty in the characteristics of Viriconium is an integral part and point of the story sequence (4). It is a valid reading. What do I say if Mr H tells me it is not a valid reading? I don't know, but the debate on author and authority (5) is one that all literature has fought over for a long time.

(1) Do not start twitting me with the anti-"show don't tell" thing. I know, it's not a universal rule, but similarly, sometimes it's better to show. The geographical relationship between places can be one of those times. If that makes any sense whatsoever.

(2) a buff, good-looking and incredibly erudite centipede.

(3) Yes, I'm sure there are works out there that very explicitly don't do this. My gut feeling, no doubt born of my ignorance, is that they will be reaching for a part of literature where art elbows out readability.

(4) So a follow-on point is that you can't expect every book to be a Viriconium. The fluid reality of the stories was, often explicitly, what the stories were about. If you start from a standpoint of "no reality to any story" then they actually lose much of their impact.

(5) Not one of Austen's better works. Too self-referential.

And, yes, they say make your blog entries short and pithy, but when I get my rant on it's hard to stop, Explains why the books tend to break the 200,000 word barrier, certainly.

And before I start, the Shadows of the Apt Wiki has just had a superb facelift, so go check it out!.

OK, apropos of nothing save my recent Christopher Priest binge, secondary worlds for real, or for make believe:

Getting past any initial objections about considering the reality of fictional worlds, when sundry children found their way into Narnia this was presented as a real place. You’d have to stretch the text past breaking point to find an interpretation where it was all, as Edmund originally claims, just a game, imagination by consensus. Narnia exists, insofar as the books are concerned. It’s a real place, as real as the “real world”, and indeed set within a wider multiverse of linked worlds (and aren’t those parts of The Magician’s Nephew actually more intriguing than actual Narnia itself?).

There are similar stories where the balance of probabilities tilts strongly the other way, though: that the fantastic world is the product of imagination, or even mental disorder. This can also be found in work intended for a younger audience. The film Bridge to Terebithia, for example, is pretty much impossible to interpret as a genuine fantastical encounter. Although we see the world the children “visit” it’s  explicitly all in their heads.

Or the reality of the secondary world is up for grabs. Of the “big three,” for example, Wonderland could go either way, although as it is essentially a satire (indeed a mirror, in the 2^nd) of the real, a “realist” argument possibly carries more weight. On the contrary, Neverland and Oz are both presented as very real (save perhaps in the best-known filming of Oz, where they chicken out) and both Barry and Baum go as far as to present their fantastic worlds as superior and preferable to the actual one. It’s a bold move that I think would cause difficulties today – the idea of children retreating into a fantasy world being a good thing would catch a lot of flak from conservative critics (1).

Fiction aimed at adult/older audiences also shows this uncertainty. Leaving aside Walter Mitty(2), whilst the phenomenal film Pan’s Labyrinth looks on first viewing to be about a child escaping a traumatic home environment by taking refuge in her fantasies, it’s quite possible to watch through on the basis that it’s all real, and arguably that brings a more satisfying (certainly less depressing) closure to the film.

For me, I’m an unregenerate fantasist. A secondary world presented as a therapeutic tool or delusion to be escaped from in order to find wholeness is always a bit of a let down for me – “it was all a dream” sort of thing. Terebithia was a well-made film, and heavy with meaning and poignancy and all that, but at the same time the Scooby Doo of it left me feeling empty. Just my personal take, but I’ll go some distance to find a reading that will give that world reality.

Iain Banks pulls some interesting sleight of hand with some of his early “mainstream” books. On the face of it, The Bridge is a look into the damaged mind of an accident victim trying to find his way out of his own injury, and that’s the standard reading I think. The world of the Bridge that we’re presented with, however, is fascinating and bizarre, a kind of mix of Kafka and Gormenghast stretched over the unending structure of the title – it seems almost too much to be just a fleeting construct. The world is a satisfying one in its own right (lord knows there have been straight out secondary worlds with less depth (length, breadth?) than that of the bridge.)

What precisely is going on in Banks’ Walking on Glass is even more uncertain. It’s like Lao Tzu and the butterfly – anyone’s guess as to who is dreaming who. Banks, of course, has something of a unique relationship with the bookshelf, having his two personas, ostensibly genre and non-. Whilst a number of his “non-M” books are solidly rooted in the real world, one wonders how much of a sly game he’s playing with the critics. Transitions, the latest “non-M”, has a great deal of topical relevance, but although it sits there on the general fiction shelves it’s surely a stretch to read it as anything other than flat out world-switching science fiction. With that in mind, it’s worth a re-reading of The Bridge and Walking on Glass with an eye to the reality of the fantasies presented.

The secondary world can also decline in reality as a series goes on. M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence, for example (3), kicks off with some epic far-future dying earth fantasy that could link arms with Jack Vance or Michael Moorcock, but each iteration of the setting brings more uncertainty and a greater distance. The very reality of the world is explicitly malleable, the issues at stake become more nebulous and less epic, the heroes less classically heroic, until we are left with “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium”, locked out of the world that we have known, left with nothing but the real, and maddening, unfulfilling whispers. At the end of our journey, we are forced to ask if any of it was actually real, or just our own delusion (4).

But it can go the other way. I give you Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, where the main character is a Londoner who has a breakdown and ends up torn between the demands of the real, and the fantastic “Dream Archipelago” as he tries to address his own past and identity. Simple. Except it’s Priest, so it’s not at all. The protagonist has written an ‘autobiography’ that is not only inaccurate but takes place in the Archipelago, another world. The “him” in the Archipelago has memory issues and has to rely on an account he wrote that is set in our world. Although I suspect the mainstream reading of the book is “real world man with mental health issues suffers from delusions” it can be read the other way, it really can.

And then Mr P brings out The Dream Archipelago, and, very recently, The Islanders, the first a collection of stories set in the Archipelago’s fully detailed world (with no concessions at all to the real one) and the second a purported travel guide interspersed with short fiction, much of which relates to the stories and characters of the original, making the whole enterprise something remarkable and possibly unprecedented as a literary endeavour. But the Archipelago has its own reality, however much it cannot be mapped or quantified.  It is that rare thing, a modern secondary world – not an alternate history, not a possible future, but a world that (post-Affirmation) has no concrete link to ours, and yet is recognisably on a par with our 20^th/21^st century existence (5). Indeed — and with the caveat that, like Gene Wolfe, you can’t take anything Priest writes at face value — arguably Islanders is more fantastic than Archipelago – there’s one story pair, mentioning no names, where the Archipelago original seemed to be strongly indicative of repressed traumatic memories in the narrator, but where it’s Islander “counterpart” pretty much says, “No, that horrifying crap was real.” Priest has therefore given us a world that has gone from a dream of mental imbalance to a self-contained reality over three volumes. Of course, his next one, should he revisit the islands, might turn it all on its head again.

(1)   Unless, possibly, that fantasy world had strong Christian overtones.

(2)   Unrelated, but it is an odious thing when someone is described in the press as “something of a Walter Mitty character,” because this seems to be wheeled out specifically to describe a shyster who has taken advantage of other people and ruined their lives, but whom we are apparently supposed to dismiss as a harmlessly deslusional/loveable rogue. Digression over.

(3)   Firmly on my list of “You Must Read This” books/series.

(4)   The reworking "A Young Man's Journey to London" (in Things that Never Happen) is cited by some reviewers as Harrison 'making peace' with his earlier genre work, and though I can't comment on this, not being up on the history, it's a welcome reading but not what I took away from the story. To me it seemed to be continuing the trajectory of the original story, taking us further out and killing/excising Viriconium altogether. I found it an unsettling read but I'd be happy to find I was reading it wrong.

(5)   There is a whole extra post in this topic.

Janine already has a body of work out there, of a somewhat different sort, but shortly she will be bringing out her first Arabian Nights fantasy, Heart of Flame, which was published as an ebook by Samhain on 20^th December 2011, and will be out in paperback later this year.

JA: Hi Adrian. Thanks for having me here on your blog!

AT: So, honing my interviewing skills: What's the lowdown on Heart of Flame?

JA: Well, it’s a fantasy-romance  – you can probably tell that from the cover style, heh.  My heroine, Taqla, is a sorceress  in 9^th century Damascus. When the Amir’s beautiful daughter is kidnapped by a djinni, she agrees to help merchant-traveller Rafiq ( a Sinbad type) rescue the girl, because she’s fallen in love with him. But she can’t tell him that. She can’t even let on that she’s female – she’s in magical disguise. They set off on this quest which ends up becoming more complex and dangerous and crazy as they go on, dragging them into wilder and weirder places – swamps, ancient temples, desert ruins, cities halfway across the world — and getting them into seriously deep trouble with undead emperors and pagan gods and hungry ghouls. This is all before they even tackle the djinni…

AT: This is a departure from your previous writing?

JA:  Yes; there’s a lot more plot … and a whole lot less sex. My normal genre is erotica. Heart of Flame is a romance, and it’s not even a straight romance because there’s so much of the magic/monsters/adventure element. So, cross-genre. But the romance is still pretty steamy. If you read the uncensored One Thousand and One Nights, there is an unabashed sexual element there.

AT: The mythic Middle-east is an area I've not seen a good take on in a while, in fantasy fiction. Where are you drawing your setting from?

JA: It’s a fantasy version of the real 9^th Century Middle East – and let’s be honest, it’s very much the Thief-of-Baghdad, Golden-Voyage-of-Sinbad Arabian Nights. I’m not an Arabic historian. My starting point was a translation of the traditional 1001 Nights, strongly larded with the Ray Harryhausen-era  Hollywood movies I grew up with.

I also used a lot of 19^th Century Orientalist art, by people like Jean-Léon Gérôme, as inspiration. These are wonderful, photo-realistic-looking paintings of a Middle East that was only just opening up to the Victorian West. But again, even those depict an exoticised, prurient, filtered version of reality, intended as entertainment as much as education.

I did my historical research too, I hasten to add!  Philip Hitti’s History of the Arabs was my bible. It’s just full of the most wonderful incident and detail. I love it. And I’ve been lucky enough to visit Syria and Jordan and Egypt. I did call on those experiences.

AT: How does your setting contrast to its historical counterpart?

JA: I’ve been historically accurate where I can – I use some historic personages like Caliph Al-Ma’mun, and the scholar Ibn Ishaq of the House of Wisdom, who sets my heroes off to find the answer to a riddle — though I did mess with the dates very slightly. The main thing I bore in mind was that I was writing in a mythological setting, so facts were subservient to the Arabian  Nights ‘look’ of the thing. Rafiq fights with a scimitar (which were really a later introduction: Arabic swords at the time were straight). He drinks cardamom-flavoured coffee with fellow merchants (coffee probably hadn’t reached Baghdad from Yemen at the time).  He plays backgammon and smokes a hubble-bubble pipe (tobacco an obvious anachronism, and the water-pipe was a C16th Indian invention). But honestly, that sort of thing is as integral to the Arabian Nights as genies and magic rings – I couldn’t do without them!

AT: What sort of fantastical elements can we expect  — a lot of fantasy at the moment is relatively low-magic and gritty — where does Heart of Flame fall on that scale?

JA: Hah! Old-fashioned high-magic fantasy, I’m afraid. My heroes travel on a magical silver horse, otherwise they’d never reach the places they have to go to. Taqla uses her sorcery to get them out of all sorts of trouble. They meet various monsters, including one holy one, that come out of Arabic and Persian legend. They parlay with an animated statue and a dead man made of flies. And then there are several djinn … and that scary scary angel …

AT: What would you give as your sources of inspiration?

JA:  My inspiration as a writer has always been Angela Carter. Lyrical but totally unsentimental, she lulls you with her fairy-tale prose and then sticks you with something really cruel. In Heart of Flame you’ll also find some sneaky nods to my other favourite writer, H P Lovecraft: there’s a copy of The Necronomicon in the House of Wisdom (under its Arabic name, of course) and the ghouls are Lovecraftian as well as Arabic. This may be the first time anyone has ever snuck the Cthulhu Mythos into a romance novel.  I would like to think so!

AT: How about film and TV depictions of similar settings. For me, I'd put forward the Hallmark Arabian Nights TV Movie as a surprisingly good shot at the genre.

JA: Yes, I enjoyed that: lush, clever and romantic. The tattooed genie from their Aladdin stayed with me as the mental image of my djinni antagonist. I’ve also watched Pasolini’s artsy 1974 version (lots of boobs), but didn’t much like Prince of Persia despite the pretty CGI scenery. The fact that their entire cast was white struck me as … inexcusably cowardly.

My favourite version is still The Thief of Baghdad: given that it was made in 1940, its cheesiness is completely excusable.  Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have a movie version of Heart of Flame with Ray Harryhausen animated monsters!

AT: A great deal of fantasy settings that include a middle-eastern-ish culture tend towards the "religious fanatic adversary" type, and obvious, in the West, that entire part of the world is a sensitive cultural and political issue. Has that influenced the book, and how did you approach that?

JA: It’s impossible not be aware of current events and political attitudes, even when writing a historical fantasy. I did try to be careful. Well, you know me: I’m not naturally the soul of tact and sensitivity…

I mention mosques but don’t set any scenes in them. I mention the Qu’ran once, but I don’t mention the Prophet.  I use the word “God.” My heroes aren’t pious but they are respectful Muslims. The thing to remember is that the Islam of the 9^th Century Abbasid Empire, the “Golden Age of Islam,” was not the same as modern fundamentalism. It was urbane, scholarly and tolerant. Jews and Christians of various sects were part of society.  People drank wine. And Caliph Al Ma’mun imposed a rationalist, non-literalist theology, heavily influenced by Greek science and philosophy.

So yeah, it’s possible that I might offend someone. But you can’t stop people taking offence if they want to. My intentions are certainly positive, for what it’s worth. Rafiq and Taqla are my heroes, after all.

Okay, I’ve probably burbled on enough. Thanks, Adrian!