The Notice Board: Week 7

This week the page passed a thousand subscribers, sitting at 1,016 as I write this, and crossed ten thousand views in the last thirty days. Saturday marks six months since I started. I want to say what those numbers are, and then I want to talk about something else.

I did not come here to build anything. I started writing again because it came up in a therapy session, unprompted, the way things do when you are talking about something else entirely, and the therapist suggested I go back to it. So I did. For myself, first, and with no plan beyond that.

Fifty-eight posts later, this is what happened instead. I have started building a fantasy world and I have gone a long way down into pre-Christian belief to do it, further than I expected to and with no bottom yet in sight. I have written a lot of short fiction, more than I would have believed possible in half a year. I tried science fiction for the first time in my life on what was essentially a dare to myself, and it turned out to be the most successful thing on this page. And I met people. That last one is not a line I would have written six months ago.

The subject matter is not an accident either. I write about people whose worlds were taken apart, about belief that thins when the community holding it stops, about what a family remembers and what it loses, about the difference between leaving and being made to leave. Displacement is not a theme I chose for its literary possibilities. It is the water I am in, and it shapes the questions I find interesting whether or not I set out to write about it.

Two things people said this year did more for the work than any amount of praise.

The first was at Write Club, where three separate readers, independently and within the same forty minutes, told me the same story was thin on sensory detail. When three people find the same gap without conferring, that stops being an opinion and becomes a fact about the draft.

The second came from a reader who took issue with a story of mine set in the medieval world. Her point was not theological. It was that if you write from inside a medieval consciousness, you must be careful not to hand a medieval man a modern reading of his own experience. I have been turning that over for a week and I expect to be turning it over for a year. It is the single most useful sentence anyone has given me here.

And one more, which I am going to quote because it is the thing I would keep if I could keep only one. Stephen Thomas wrote that I claim not to believe, and yet I empathise with Christian faith like the best. I am not a believer. But belief is the one thing I take entirely seriously in everything I write, because you cannot build a world where belief has consequences and then treat the people who hold it as fools. To be told that it reaches someone who does believe is the only review I actually wanted.

Here is the part I did not see coming at all.

I started this writing for myself. Six months on, two of the things I care most about on this page exist to get other people’s stories written down before they vanish. Forgotten Tales has now published from Nigeria, Vietnam and India. Forgotten Kin has published its first family history, from a manuscript a grandmother could not finish in her lifetime. Neither of those was in any plan. They came out of the fact that when I put something up here, people told me theirs back. Grandmothers, lost recipes, languages nobody writes down, rules a family still keeps with the reason worn off.

I thought I was publishing. It turns out I was setting a table. Thank you for sitting at it.

The Marionette is finished. Written, edited, and ready to go to the anthology it was commissioned for. This will be my first publication anywhere, in any language, in print or otherwise, and I have been sitting with that quietly for a couple of days now. It is a detective story, and it answers a piece I wrote when I was seventeen without my having planned for it to.

Three things went up recently. The Chalice Bearer, a short story about a leper carrying something holy through a market town, which has become the most talked-about thing I have published. Essay III on Panteleimon Kulish and The Black Council, the first novel written in modern Ukrainian, which two readers then went looking for and found priced at three hundred and forty-nine dollars, so I have since dug out a free translation. And a new Forgotten Tale, Nirbhag, from Dear Manisha, told in a courtyard in Haryana to a younger sister who could not sleep.

Twenty-seven writers signed up. Two illustrators. That ratio does not work yet, so rather than stall, there is a poll open:

1. One, start with the illustrators we have, one visual prompt for three writers.

2. Two, one visual prompt shared by nine writers working in different genres against the same image.

3. Three, mix in text prompts, photographs and sketches from other people to reach nine writers, which several of you suggested in the replies.

Go and vote. And if you make anything visual, the offer stands and has not changed: I am not asking for commissions, I want to point at something you have already made and would like more eyes on, with full credit and links back to you.

Best post is Vampire Daddy chapter 22, You Could Be A Villain, by LC Douglass. A vampire who has spent centuries being memory-wiped finally finds the archive kept on him, and discovers his own identity was assembled by someone else before he ever met her, down to the name he thinks he chose. It is science fiction, it is Mars, it is a serial and this is chapter 22, so if you want the whole thing start at the beginning. Fair warning that it is properly dark and does not look away. What got me is the structure of it: the horror is not the vampires, it is the paperwork.

Best comment goes to Meg, on The Chalice Bearer. She wrote that what struck her was how the story changes as it is passed down, the chalice becoming the Grail, the leper becoming a knight, the disease becoming a curse or a test depending on what the teller needs it to mean, and that the original witness preserving the ambiguity instead is the powerful thing. That is the layer I hoped somebody would find, and she found it first.

And thank you to the people who actually turned up this week.

Hai Dang, Caryn Cordova, LC Douglass, Seth R. Mitchell☕️Fantasy Auth, Kris Buckel - Library of Kris (also special thanks for editting The Marionette if you look for editor, message her), Litharis Archives, C. Xelfaa, Quinlin Hewitt, J. Mira | Nothing Has Changed, Leslie Paul Oosten, The Toolroom Archive , Jacob Seinemeier carried the work further than I could have.

Jay Allen Ford, Bella Simonetta, The Unread Shelf, Nate Wilson, Miles Hack, 🌺🐝 Buzzy Johnson, Pauline Berkes, JAE Cole, Edvane , Marija and Stephen Thomas all argued with The Chalice Bearer in one way or another, and the story is better understood for it.

I'm Still Writing handed me a question good enough to become a note of its own, and Tales of Whoa, Kim Williams, M.Div., Carrie Scott and hill hj answered it with characters they worry about. Brandon Bedard told me about half a spoonful of canned corn saved until it spoils, a WWII rationing habit still running in a house where nobody remembers the war. Dave Boyko explained the particular pleasure of hearing a new IT tech say he will just push one small update at two on a Friday afternoon. Written by Sofie found the same technique I had been pleased with myself over sitting in chapter 26 of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Lisa E walked into a small church in Maaloula an atheist and out of it an agnostic. Liminal Space Creative described a hiking trail in British Columbia that passes through the debris of a plane nobody could recover, which became a monument because nothing was cleared away. Christopher Phelps expected Santa Fe to be Adobe Disney and found mountains with moss and running water and no mosquitoes. Antila H. Belist passed on that one does not pray for rain, one becomes the rain and prays for more of oneself.

Doug Hauger, Evelyn Bruyere, The Restless Mind, Charles Moritz, Lynsey Gedye, Anat Dagan, Just Judy, Amanda Talavera, Quest4Novility, Jocelyn Dovey, Marcello Iori and Matthew E Meurer kept the threads going all week. Colin Parfitt, Gabrielle Marie Kozak, Yumirin/Illustrator and Doyle Buehler tried to solve the illustrator problem with me.

I do not think anybody owes a writer their attention. It is the most valuable thing a person has and the least obligated. So when you spend some of it here, I notice.

Saturday, more old writing. This one is from when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it was meant to be a journey through four seasons. Only the winter survives on my drive. A man crossing a high pass before the light goes, with the wind at his back like a pack of wolves, who makes camp under two leaning stones and watches the stars come out as though the sky were a ballroom.

Tuesday, Architecture of Belief VI: The Return to the Beginning. On what happens when authority fails and reaches backwards for the sacred to hold itself up. Robespierre came into it, in a sky-blue coat, on a papier-mâché mountain.

I am away for a few days from the weekend, so I will be slower than usual to answer. Notes carry on as normal. The board will be back next week.

About Me & Index with links to my other work can be found here.