Babel Clash

So I guess we’re at the packing your suitcase and waiting for a cab to the airport stage of our visit here at Babel Clash, and I’d like to echo what Graham said last night: we’ve had a splendid time, it’s been great meeting you all and chatting to you and, hey! We broke a record too!

I was just checking over the comments from the last post to see if there were any questions left unanswered. I was drawn to Paul’s comment -the point he made was a good one, but I especially enjoyed his admission that “this is by a long way the nerdiest thing I’ve ever posted so forgive me”. I could almost hear the resigned sigh that accompanied it, and I so recognised the feeling: the moment you know you’ve been drawn into, and committed to, the internal logic of a conversation that you know has long since crossed the Nerd Event Horizon. My empathy for Paul’s remark aside, it’s actually a significant characteristic of my work and the over all subject of this fortnight’s digressive discussion. It’s the level of willing immersion you have to embrace if you want to play in someone else’s universe. It’s taking the sort of questions typified by that old cliche, “Who’s stronger? The Thing or the Hulk?” and considering them soberly and thoughtfully, despite all the eye-rolling and the mocking and the digs like, “Why are you taking this so seriously? It’s not real, you freak! It’s only a comic/game/movie/bunch of toy soldiers!” (delete where applicable). Digs like, “It’s not even a proper book.” And “You are so sad, dude.”

And I guess we all know why, don’t we? We’ve all got at least one thing that we take that little bit too seriously. The thing that can actually draw us across the Nerd Event Horizon to engage in serious debates about non-existent things… like hit points or gene seeds or power rings or flux capacitors or jelly babies.

You can make a good case for it being much easier to work in someone else’s universe because a) someone else has already set the rules for you and b) there are lots of other people to ask, but both of those points are based on the false assumption that the rules work and all of those other people agree with one another. You can make a similarly good case for the idea that your own universe is the easiest playground, but it can be lonely there, and cold, and you can get cabin fever, and there’s no one around to stand with you when the wolves start growling outside the door.

I suppose what I want to leave you with more than anything is the idea that tie-in work, when it’s taken seriously, is not a soft option, a quick hack job to earn money. I wouldn’t want to draw a line between my original universes and the ones I’ve been allowed to play in: I have found both rewarding, and if it sounds like I’m bigging-up the latter here on Babel Clash, it’s probably over-compensation. People say some crappy things about tie-in work. It’s only just getting a scrap of the respect it deserves for the industry and craft it involves, and… well, to be honest, if us tie-in writers don’t stand up and explain what goes into it and why it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand as a great big pile, then who the hell else is going to?

That final stray question from Marine, seconded by Elizabeth - yes, I menaced poor Ben with an axe and told him to keep Loken’s ‘death’ vague. And if I told you guys how he was going to make it off Istvaan, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?

On behalf of me and Graham, thanks again everyone, and thanks to Morgan and Babel Clash for having us. We’ll both be checking in over the rest of today to catch any final comments. But this doesn’t have to be the end, oh no! If you look to the right or below, you’ll see links to our home pages, where you’ll find our blogs. You can come and have chats like this with us there, where we will be prepared to speak about all aspects of anything. I kid you not. My particular area of expertise is digression. So, party at our place! Let’s go!

One last thing. I was struck by how many of you have said that the enthusiasm of our posts over the last fortnight have inspired you to write your own stories or even novels. That’s pretty amazing. Off you go, find some universes… your own or otherwise.

So, Saturday morning here in the UK, really early, still dark, crisp and cold. Don’t know what woke me. Maybe it was the giant-size Hollywood-style full moon lighting the edges of the cloud banks as it sets; more likely the telepathic tremors letting me know how popular our stint here at Babel Clash has been. Well, how gratifying is that?

It’s the last few days of our stay here, and I thought we’d be pretty relaxed about it and use the time to answer any (within reason!) questions you might have left, however idle they may be.

Let me start today by picking up on a few comments that appeared in the last couple of days alongside Graham’s fantastic posts (I agree with you, Philip!) about working on the Heresy.

Cor - you mention Loken. As far as I’m concerned, Loken’s not dead.

Richard - in 30K, there’s a sense of possibility, about an aspirational future for Mankind, however directed and controlled. In 40K, it’s everything Mankind can do just to hold on to what he’s got.

Cees - I think one of the things that all the Heresy authors have tried to look at is not WHAT happens but HOW and WHY. As you say, we know Caesar’s fate - the interest lies in finding out the surprises and secret twists that led to it. I was going to mention the movie Titanic then, as an example of something being remarkably successful even though we know what’s going to happen in the end, but if I do, the next thing you know it’ll be all Irish Jigs and life drawings, and I’ll be forced to send for the cheese police.

Jay - your idea actually made me stop and think for a moment. There is something very interesting about instruments ultimately resenting the inferior things that created them. However, Graham’s rebuttal was spot on - as was Big’s, in a completely different spirit. “Yeah, I know we said we were okay with the no-kids thing, but we’re really not…” made me laugh: it’s a mainstream, prime-time drama subplot meets shooty-death-kill in space. It’s Calista Flockhart in carapace armor. It’s Kristin Davis on a Golden Throne (with scatter cushions).

Frank - you know, of course, once you’ve fallen to Chaos, there’s nothing to say that Slaanesh can’t adjust your desires, tastes and… well, anatomy.

Graham’s blog yesterday talked specifically about the “Prospero Books” and how they came to be written (in the case of mine, STILL being written). Joking aside, the picture is surprisingly accurate. We’d enjoyed writing the first two books in the HH series so much, passing notions and characters back and forth, that we approached these with a more deliberate intent. Both of us assumed I’d be Magnus and he’d be Russ. I’ve never liked the Space Wolves much. Don’t get me wrong - they’re great in the game, just brilliant, but in terms of crafting fiction around them, they always seem to be too… well, vikings in space, really. Too on the nose. Too much what they appear to be in an SF context where that shouldn’t be realistic.

Anyway, that’s eventually why I thought I ought to write their side: it would be too easy to take the sorcerer-astartes and write inside my comfort zone. I realised I needed to face my demons and tackle the challenge. And I wanted to give Graham a proper creative choice, monkey knife fight in the car park or no monkey knife fight in the car park.

It was the right choice to make. I am a brother of wolves now, and I own an axe.

And I’m not kidding.

Philip mentioned yesterday the fact that it’s a shame my half of the pairing won’t be seen until next year. Graham’s half, A Thousand Sons, is indeed already out. My half, Prospero Burns, will be available for pre-order in the latter part of this year. It‘s had to be postponed in the schedule, and I can’t say how sorry I am about that. No matter how well you plan things, you can’t predict everything. Last autumn, while I was working on the book, I started to suffer seizures. Several months of CAT scans and MRIs finally revealed that I had developed epilepsy. Now I’m learning to live with the condition, which has involved making all sorts of changes in my lifestyle, not all of them unwelcome. Right now, I’m really getting back into the swing of things and building momentum in my work again. I’m not making light of epilepsy, but that eventual diagnosis came as a huge relief: the seizures could have been evidence of something a great deal more… how can I put it? A great deal more drastic. But, as you can imagine, Prospero Burns did get a little disrupted at the end of last year.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I’m really sorry that Prospero Burns is late, and I’m also sorry about anything else that’s run over a little, and the convention appearances I’ve had to cancel, and I’m sorry to Graham that our working relationship on the Prospero books, though great fun and very productive, wasn’t QUITE what we were imagining.

I’ll try to make it worth waiting for.

Oh, and fyi - in terms of writing tips: monkey knife fights in car parks can be a very useful creative tool if used correctly.

I think Angry Robot’s statement is pretty accurate in terms of intent, Morgan: they are ambitiously and enthusiastically pursuing some great material that would be hard to pigeon-hole in traditional ways. I think a cocky mission statement like AR’s simply serves to remind everyone how excitingly broad the possibilities contained within the category “SF and F” really are. And I think that genre writers have always been prepared to take those giant risks, but it’s a lonely life at the keyboard, and sometimes you want your ground to be safe rather than new. It’s energising to find an imprint like Angry Robot that happily wears its awareness of those risks on its sleeve, and is eager to see them being taken. It’s about attitude.

Big’s comments yesterday about Triumff were very nice to hear. Tsar Boris asked about ongoing series versus finite stories: some things (like Gaunt) have always been open-ended, in that I’ve always felt that I’d recognise when it was time to stop when I got there. Others (like Eisenhorn) were going to be finite trilogies from the get go. I think I try to govern how these things grow using a mix of flexibility and quality control. I don’t, for example, know how many Triumff books I’d like to write, but the number is not set. Right now, I’ve written one and I have a great idea for the sequel. Maybe there’ll be a billionty-one. Maybe there’ll be two. There certainly isn’t a neon rule in my head flashing “Triumff = a maximum of four books.”

The Gaunt’s Ghosts series is planned out in three or four book arcs (each arc has a sub-title). All the while I’ve got fresh and exciting ways of continuing the series, I’ll keep going. The moment, and I mean the very moment, I feel I’m just churning out Gaunt stories for the sake of having a new Gaunt book, I’ll stop. It occurs to me that it may be surprising for some people to hear that tie-in series, which are supposed to be driven more by consciously commercial concerns, have creative discernment involved in their production.

Embedded, my next book for Angry Robot, is a return to the hard combat SF that I’m best known for. Freed from the constraints of someone else’s universe, the combat is going to be harder than usual, and I’ve been having wild fun creating a setting that will be unpredictable yet credible. The premise is this: on the frontline of a future war, a journalist is covering the action ‘chipped’ into the head of a serving trooper. When the soldier is killed, the journo - unable to eject his consciousness - has to take control of the body and get home again, reporting live feed all the way.

See? You want to read it already, don’t you?

The universe of my novel Triumff existed in my head for about two decades before I got it into a printed form. It didn’t take that much longer to reach publication than my 40K books because the universe took so much more time to design, but the contrast is useful from the perspective of the jobbing writer. A key advantage of working in someone else’s universe is that it already exists. You climb aboard, you make a creative space for yourself, you benefit from (and, if you’re doing your job right, contribute to) the ongoing momentum. Coming out of nowhere twenty years ago, I’d probably have had great difficulty selling Triumff to anyone, and if I’d managed it, it would have probably have gone out so low key it would have vanished again. Twenty years later, with a track record and past credits, I was a better prospect. Triumff isn’t being sent out over the top on its own.

Oh, and this is a crucial thing: twenty years later, Triumff is a much better book.

Triumff has benefited from the time I’ve spent in other people’s universes, both in the evolution of my actual writing chops and the development of my ‘brand’ as an author writing different things with cross-appeal to overlapping audiences.

And that’s the last time I intend to talk like a marketing manager in this blog. These are the sort of things you probably want to consider less publicly, or maybe chat about with an agent (if you have one).

Let’s talk about Triumff some more, and make sausages again. I’d always loved Elizabethan England as a setting, and I wanted to work out a way to set a (light-hearted? maybe?) novel there. But I also wanted to find a way to be a little, how can I put it, post-modern with it. I wanted to be able to make arch comments. I wanted to be a little knowing. This also might be explained by the simple fact that I was too lazy to do such thorough research there wouldn’t be any anachronisms, but I don’t like to admit that.

The easiest way to do ‘post-modern Elizabethan’ was to create an Elizabethan Age in modern times. Once I was on the path of alternate history, I needed a trigger event: the Thing That Happened that changed history from the one we’re familiar with having lived through it. The trigger turned out to be magic. In the universe of Sir Rupert Triumff, the Renaissance rediscovered magic, not art. The great empire of Elizabeth the First capitalised on this ‘technology’, became the pre-eminent world power (Liz One married Phil of Spain for new World consolidation purposes) and the rest was (alternate) history.

I could, I know, talk about humour in Triumff, because that’s a key theme, but while I’m prepared to make figurative sausages and refer to myself as a ‘brand’ without irony, I cannot bring myself to do so. There really is nothing more painful than someone explaining the mechanism of his jokes. For a start, it involves him selecting the things he believes to be examples of genuine funny. Oh god, it makes me clench just thinking about it.

I will say this: I was chuckling when I wrote Triumff, in the same way that I chuckle when I write my long running Euro hitmen comic strip Sinister Dexter in 2000AD, and people have been kind enough to tell me both have made them laugh a great deal. If the humour (that I’m not talking about) in either one works, I believe it’s because it operates in relation to its world setting, and the world setting works. Twenty-First Century Elizabethan London (in Triumff) and the massive European supercity of Downlode (in Sinister Dexter) are both very real places, in my head, that I work hard to realise for the reader.

Triumff’s success (and it’s yet to go on sale in the US, so American readers have all that excitement to come) has meant that my third book for Angry Robot will be a sequel, named The Double Falsehood. In the meantime, my second book for Angry Robot will be called Embedded, and will play to my strengths as a writer of Combat SF or, to give it its technical literary term, ‘Shooty-death-kill In Space. More on that next post.

Today, I was going to talk a little bit about the other side of the equation: working in your own universe instead of someone else’s. In the spirit of Graham’s excellent advice yesterday, I’m doing that whilst listening to someone singing in French.

I’ve really enjoyed reading what Graham has been writing about this weekend, and I can tell you have too. I agree with everything he said, including the notion that ten different authors will tell you ten different ways. Actually, especially including the notion that ten different authors will tell you ten different ways.

My novel writing process is much more ramshackle: Graham’s work sounds like an organized operation of military precision compared to mine. Blitzspear’s comment about it being a mistake to write notes on the bag of shopping receipts and cigarette papers is news to me. My only professional sophistication of that method is to make sure I collect and sticky-tape (not necessarily in any chronological order) those scraps and notes into the pages of a note book so they’re all in one place.

I’m not suggesting that I’m deliberately lazy or scrappy. Each novel for me is a kind of organic whole that I have to work until it’s the right shape. Like potter’s clay. What concerns me is not so much where it’s going to end, but the over all mass and feel of it.

So each novel has its own notebook or legal pad into which, like a crazed beachcomber, I gather all the ideas, names, words and stuff that feel like they belong to the novel, then I shape the book out of it, constantly dipping back into the notebook for inspiration or atmosphere. Q: Dan, are you, in fact, creating a ‘mood board’ for each novel? A: Get the words ‘mood board’ the hell out of my blog.

Once things feel right, then I shape them into the skeleton I need (the ACTUAL, you know, PLOT that will have been agreed in advance with Black Library etc). My desk is covered with vast, over-stuffed idea scrapbooks, each one a work in progress. I don’t use receipts and cigarette papers so much, but I will admit that I use a lot of American envelopes. I get a lot of mail from the States - from Marvel and DC - and US stationary is just not like UK stuff. I’m always making notes on some because I’ve left some on my desk, unable to throw it away. They get stuck in my notebook.

There are two things they say you should never let people see you make: one is sausages. The other is supposed to be laws, but I think it should be novels. I’m pretty sure I must sound like a Collyer Brothers style compulsive hoarder after the sidebar about envelopes above. This is just the way it works for me. Graham’s shown you the neat and structured plans and diagrams he makes; I’m showing you the mess I make down my apron. Don’t judge me. Once I was a human being, just like you.

Actually, in thinking about the process, I turned up a notion that applies directly to The Thing We Were Supposed To Be Talking About. Remember that? Whether I’m writing in someone else’s universe or one of my own creation, I still gather ideas together and bundle them up in a notebook. Sometimes ideas harvested for one go into the other. The point is, if I’m writing, say, a Black Library book… well, let’s take as an example Titanicus, the novel I published about the huge walking war engines in the 40K universe. I like Titanicus a lot, because it’s a novel about giant war engines (what’s not to like?), but also because it’s about an hive city, about the layers of life in a hive city. I found myself looking for and collecting stuff that I knew would fit that setting: walking down the ideas beach, I’d know pretty quickly what was worth picking up for Titanicus and what wouldn’t fit. In other words, when it’s somebody else’s universe, you look for stuff that will match, that will compliment. You look for the stuff that will decorate it in the places where, perhaps, it needs a little perking up, or in the places where no one’s done more than give it an undercoat of primer.

Last year, I published a novel called Triumff. It’s out from Angry Robot, an imprint of HarperCollins (go check them out at angryrobotbooks.com). It was a big deal for me, because Triumff was my first ‘original‘ novel. I invented it all, universe and all. It was a very satisfying thing to do after thirty six other novels set in other peoples’ back yards. More satisfying? No, differently satisfying.

Just getting on Graham’s theme of ‘how one writes a novel‘ today has made me realise the process for Triumff was virtually identical to the process for any of the others, except for one simple contextual detail: I went idea beachcombing, I hunted and I gathered (note to self: I really should have started out with the image of the ‘idea hunter-gatherer’ instead of the ‘idea beachcomber’… it’s so much more cool writer dude), and I collected everything into a bizarre, ever-growing, disorganized grimoire. The difference is that with 40k projects, I go foraging for ideas fit for purpose. With Triumff, and other universes of my own, I hunt for anything bright and shiny I like the look of, and THEN figure out how they fit together. Not all of them will, but the way that the most promising and interesting do will help determine the shape of the universe they get used it.

Triumff is a fantasy adventure of derring-do and buckled swashes. It’s set in an Elizabethan England. You’ll note the ‘an’ there. This is alternate history. England has ruled the world since Elizabeth Glorianna’s time thanks to the rediscovery of magic. An unbroken line of Elizabeth’s (in the book, we’re on Elizabeth XXX) has dominated the globe as the absolute monarch of a magically-armed super power. Our hero, Rupert Triumff, is a rather wayward, dissolute seafarer, once favorite of old Triple-Ex , who stumbles into the middle of a horrible conspiracy that threatens the security of the realm. There are some rather good sword fights and, though essentially a serious adventure, the book does wander past some jokes here and there. Puns, particularly. I love a good pun. Especially when they’re fresh and fizzling. Current puns (ba-dum! I thank you!).

The universe of Triumff had been in my head for almost twenty years before I got to write it. That’s time for a lot of hunter-gathering. The danger is, you could get too vague and everything-including-the-kitchen-sink. In somebody else’s universe, somebody else has set the rules, and you’ve got to play by them.

In your own universe, the rules are all down to you. And if, like me, you decide those universal rules have to include a magic system, then you’d better make sure they bloody well work.

Next post, I‘ll take a look at Triumff’s universe a little more, and try and figure out if the greater creative liberty of working in your own universe is a bonus or a hindrance. I’ll also be answering questions such as, “Dan, what are you going to write for Angry Robot after Triumff? and “Is it an SF Combat novel called Embedded?” and “Isn’t it handy that you can use a discussion of the contrasting differences between your own and other peoples‘ universes to promote books like Triumff and Embedded?” and “Ow! Dan what’d you just kick me for?”

I just wanted to pop back tonight and get you all fired up for Graham McNeill, who’ll be manning the main blog here for the next couple of days. Expect Ultramarines, the origin of Graham’s Ultramarine fiction, writing nuts and bolts (should that be ‘bolters’?), and plenty of other cool stuff. I’ll be chipping in too, in the comment department, and then next week we’ll be onto all sorts of cool stuff.

Have a good weekend, Babel Clashers. With Graham in the Big Blog Chair, how could you not?

Graham and I have been gossiping away like a couple of fishwives over the last couple of days about the general subject of whether it’s more difficult to write in your own world as opposed to a shared one or not. Digressions, well there have been many, but we thought we’d share the conversation with you today.

Dan: So, easier or more difficult?

Graham: That’s an oldie but goldie. I’ve written stories that are part of shared worlds and stories set in worlds of my own creation. Both are hard work and both give me the chance to stretch muscles in different areas of my brain. In one I can be as inventive as I like, with the walls of the sandbox as wide as I decide to make them. In the other I can be as inventive as I like, with the walls of the sandbox as wide as I decide to make them…
 
Writing in my own invented world allows me to do what I like with such trivial matters as the laws of magic, geography and other such mundane realities. After all, who’s going to contradict me? It’s my world, the laws of nature bend to my every whim, allowing me to play out my crazed fantasies with the lives of mortals as my playthings. Ahem. But what I like best about invented worlds is that there’s no limit to the levels of invention. I can build incredible vistas unfettered by anyone else’s vision of how things ought to be, and that’s a very seductive promise. But then, that world has to work and have depth enough to be believable and consistent or else I’m going to fall flat in a pile of soggy logic. And you can bet that anyone who decides to follow me into that world will spot any cracks in the logic.
 
So does writing in someone else’s invented world remove that problem? Nope, because when you get right down to it, the world background is only the beginning; it’s the characters that populate it and their stories that are important. Whether a world is invented by the writer or someone else, its compelling characters and interesting stories that pull the reader along, and that’s where the invention comes in. I mean, who wouldn’t want the chance to invent and create defining elements of an established universe? That’s what I love about writing in the Horus Heresy project; we get to fill in the blanks between the lore, creating new stories and characters from the raw stuff of unwritten history. Yeah, I could play within what’s there without deciding to fill it full of my own creations, but that would be a chore. I mean, how counter-intuitive is to be shown a great big magical kingdom beyond the front door only to decide to play inside for the day?

Dan: That’s the really appealing thing about the Horus books, I agree. With 40k, there’s a basic level of stability to be maintained, because it’s got an ongoing life: people are playing (literally or metaphorically) in the sandbox every day, and you have to be mindful of that. But with the Horus books we’ve been able to open things up, and pass ideas between ourselves, and the other writers on ‘Team Horus’. I find it very satisfying to navigate the gulfs between existing islands of fluff in the Horus material, to find out what invisible real estate lurks, waiting to be discovered, where you can build something amazing, and also to work out what sort of amenities actually need to be constructed. Wow, I went off on a whole little town planning analogy of my very own there.

As someone once said, and I think it was Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility”. It’s worth us pointing out that we’re very careful with this work: it’s not stretching things to suggest that 40K fans are counting on us not to screw this up. If we blithely suggest that, I dunno, Rogal Dorn has a real thing for showtunes, or the God-Emperor is, in reality, a six year old girl from Tower Hamlets called Stacey, or that the whole Heresy was an entirely avoidable falling out triggered by low blood sugar late one afternoon, then I fear we would be told to leave the magical kingdom and never return.

When it comes to building your own worlds, do you have any guidelines you’d be prepared to share with me and six billion readers? I mean, you mentioned soggy logic: do you sort out your world rules before you start writing and scrupulously reject anything that contradicts them, or do you start out from a vague place, fine tune and tweak as you go, and then revise afterwards?
Or do you just go hell-for-leather for whatever feels like it’s going to be the most fun, and hang any contradictory consequences (which is, I believe, isome people refer to as the Russell T Davies method)?

Graham: I had serious thoughts to share, but the idea of Rogal Dorn belting out, ‘Happy Talk’ from South Pacific with a chorus line of dancing Imperial Fists behind him has pretty much derailed me. Sorry, Dan, I know you like the Imperial Fists and all, but that image is here to stay.

What I love about Heresy era writing is that there’s so much that isn’t known, and what is known is sketched out in such broad strokes that when you look closely you can see the bits the painters missed. And therein lies the fun, scratching your own doodles into the empty spaces and thus changing the pattern completely. Hmmm, you go for town planning analogies and I do home decorating, must be the frustrated artist in me coming out.

When it comes to building my own worlds, I start up high in the clouds with concept. What if all the cellphones and iPods became self aware and started controlling people through their playlists? (For a start, I’d be in a mad place, given I only have three playlists; Metal, Cthulhu and Stand-Up Comedy. “Aaargh! The Old Ones Return as Eddie Izzard talks about cross-dressing!”). Or a world where everything we knew was maintained by a bureau of Normalcy, who papered over the cracks in reality with aberration-resistant wallpaper. Each concept then begs a dozen different questions. Who are these people? Do we know about them, and where to they live and work? What happens if they don’t do what they do? What’s the daily life of one of the operatives like? Does he go home and have tea with his wife and talk about the mind-melting collapse of the laws of physics he saw through the ruptured fabric of reality or does he simply say, “pass the salt, dear.”? Each answer spawns more questions, and before you know it, you’ve got a (sort of) working frame to hang your other ideas on. It’s a bit of a ramshackle way of doing it, but it seems to work for me, so I’m not going to tinker too much with it. Sometimes it’s good just to write a sample of the world and its characters to see what comes out of it, as most of the best ideas come out of the writing. Though I can, and do, get lots of good ideas planning out the background to a world, you just can’t beat tossing aside the inflatable armbands and jumping in to see what the water’s like.

Dan: yeah, I do so regularly. There’s that old saw that says you have to know the rules before you can break them, though I tend to favor a ‘mischievous schoolboy‘ version of that: I know what the rules are so I don’t break them and get into trouble. However, I also work out what aspects of school life are not covered by rules, and flout them outrageously.

All in the best possible taste, obviously.

With the Horus series, it seemed to be there were a couple of things happening. We’d all planned and brainstormed together, and got detailed approval and briefings from the High Lord of Terra ( or ‘Alan’ as we call him). When I started writing the first one, I’d sent dismembered bits of it to you to look at so you could get your teeth into the second volume. You described it as me “lobbing tennis balls into the air for you to smash”. I’d knock up a plot point or concept, you’d deliver the kill-shot. And that was mostly very deliberate.

But I was also noodling away in between times, developing local colour and fluff, and it was interesting how those things carried over as well. There was a sort of ‘contamination’ of actual universe fabric. You and I were busy saying “remember to show X killing Y” and “make sure you set up A betraying B”, and in the back ground, invisible idea spores were drifting about, spreading the-

Great, now I’ve worked myself into a mold analogy.

It worked so well, we deliberately chose to do it with the most recent Horus books: A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns (the battle of Prospero told from two different sides, the former yours, the latter mine). Now, this was all derailed by the fact that I spent the last quarter of 2009 inside MRI machines while they worked out I had epilepsy (whole other story), so A Thousand Sons is out now, and is particularly splendid, but it will be a while before we see Prospero Burns (I’m working hard to catch up). The best laid plans, and all that. Despite the cock-up on the timing front, this creative combo has once again paid dividends, I feel. Organically, and certainly not the way we expected it to, but again I’m feeling that kind of osmotic drift …

I suppose what I’m saying (dragging this back to the original topic… “there was an original topic?” I hear you all cry) is that working in somebody else’s universe can have downsides: you don’t set the key rules, you’re working for The Man, The Man gets the final say, there is a stigma attached to tie-in work. BUT… when it works, you know its working, and there’s this really exciting creative chemistry that wouldn’t happen if an author was working alone on his own ‘universe’, and only really cooks off when you’ve got like-minded writers teaching each other tricks in the same Big Top (oh my god. He’s off again. Send for the Analogy Police).

Graham: Ha, I remember well the first meeting we had for the Horus Heresy project, a grand mash up of ideas and plots and characters that literally had me drooling at the prospect of getting started. And you know, I think these books perfectly represent the best aspects of working in someone else’s universe. See, I too can stick to the point! We get to collaborate with some exceptional people and throw our ideas around while bouncing them off multiple sounding boards. It’s a real buzz watching such a talented bunch of creative types bat ideas around like a pack of wolves with a wounded lamb. It was such an inspiring experience, because I remember everyone’s take on the Heresy and the background was ever so slightly different, and that allowed a real froth of excitement and flow of creative juices to bubble up. Okay, I’m getting slightly overblown with my metaphors, so I’ll rein that in for now.

The point being that having so many of us putting our thoughts into the mix allowed us to come up with story arcs and themes we might not otherwise have invented. Getting people like that together, it generates material that, more often than not, is greater than the sum of its parts. Everyone comes up with ideas in a different way, and everyone wants to inspire, and be inspired by, the others. I’ve yet to come away from one of these meetings without a dozen ideas jostling for pole position in my head, a slew of notes and the urge to get them all down on paper before they evaporate.

With the first two Horus Heresy Books, your Horus Rising and my False Gods, we talked on the phone and e-mailed each other throughout the process of their creation, and let me tell you the books are the better for it. I remember one person saying on a forum that they had suspicions that I’d not actually written False Gods, as the writing flowed so seamlessly from one book to the next. For the briefest moment, this mortally offended me, before I understood it for the compliment it was. Clearly working together and keeping the lines of communication open throughout the writing of the books had paid off. It’s something I think we enjoyed so much that we did it again for The Dark King and The Lightning Tower. Inadvertently, we also did it for Mechanicum and Titanicus, one a Horus book, the other a Sabbat Worlds novel. I’d sent you the synopsis for Mechanicum, and within a day or so you’d phoned to say that some of the themes in my book were similar to ones in yours, and that it might be a good idea to compare notes… Once again, this led to a great conversation where ideas were traded back and forth and connections forged between the stories, leading to a pair of books that I think are better for the creative collaboration. And just to make sure it was working, we did the same with your Prospero Burns and my A Thousand Sons (out in March, people!), albeit in a slightly different way, but I think it’s generating positive vibes on both fronts.

Now, dragging my wandering narrative back to the point once again, what I like about this is that it’s a creative process I simply wouldn’t get if I were working in my own little bubble of a world. Sure, I can share thoughts with test readers or fans, but no matter how much they might like it, they wouldn’t have the same connection to the world. When we get together at the Dark Tower of Black Library, it’s with an equal understanding, love and respect for the world we’re working within, and that kind of collaborative gold is beyond price. I’m sure the Warhammer worlds aren’t unique for this, but I bet there’s pretty few shared universes where all the writers get together for jam sessions like this.

Even when I wrote I, Mengsk for Blizzard, I wrote it more or less in a vacuum – though I could always e-mail the head bods in California for fact checking and to throw ideas out for consideration, but it’s not the same. And I’m a social person, I love talking books and writing with people. When you feel the concept flowing, the stories coming together and the idea that just rocks, it’s one of the best feelings. I mean, do you think it’s a way we should write more of our fiction, as part of a creative team or duo, or is there a virtue to working alone, without the help/interference of another ego, errr, I mean, creative person…?

It was recently announced that the luminous Michael Moorcock would be writing a Doctor Who novel. In the press release, he said that this book was “not a tie-in”. Later, presumably after people had coughed quietly and politely behind him, he issued another statement correcting the (I’m sure quite genuine) error. He said that when he’d called his book ‘not a tie-in’, he’d meant that it wasn’t going to be a novelisation of a TV episode.
The stigma of the tie-in rises again. I mention this after Adam’s comment yesterday. And blow me down, if that doesn’t reveal another ghetto of fiction. There are the high-end ‘real‘ books, the stigmatized tie-in stuff, and then there are novelizations. I’ve got my hands full fighting the good fight for the original tie-in, but while I’m on the subject… (*deep breath*) there is ALSO a real craft to taking a movie or TV script and turning it into a slice of fiction. It is an old and honorable trade. People have devoted their lives to this particular job, and they are unfairly dismissed. Of course, BY ITS VERY NATURE, a novelisation is going to look more like a flimsy cash-in than another tie-in product. And some are bad. You know what, some ‘real‘ books are bad too.
What I’m really saying is, there are two types of tie-in and I write the good kind… oh, people, I’m kidding! Okay? Kidding! The previous paragraph was intended to show full solidarity with the writers who make the unsung art of the novelisation their stock in trade. It’s a real skill to do it well. Actually, now’s a good time to mention that tie-in writers of all stripes have a recognised international association, the IAMTW. Go google it. It’s long past time I became a fully paid-up member. If they’ll have someone like me after this.
40K tie-in is a funny beast, unlike any other brand I’ve encountered. In the first place, the universe is the best part of three decades old, and it’s matured (yes, that’s the word. Not ‘fermented’). In the early days, the masters of that universe had huge difficulty generating fiction or comics precisely because they were so worried about strangers coming in with muddy shoes, scaring the cat, and breaking the fine china.
I was approached to write for the 40K Universe (and its fantasy counterpart, Warhammer) in the late nineties. As a recovering role-playing gamer (I still attend meetings: “my name’s Dan, and I’m a third level magic user”), I got it pretty quickly. I enjoyed writing ‘straight‘ (or ‘adjective-less’) Warhammer (still do), but the rules were very tight because it’s only one world. 40k is a galaxy, a multi-dimensional universe, in fact. It’s huge. There were a handful of very simple, unbreakable rules: certain things you simply Could Not Do and certain things you always needed to, but they were really easy to remember. What impressed me from day one was the scope and scale. This universe was massive, and so exotic and unexplored, you could find plenty of space to develop all sorts of ideas that in other pre-fab universes would have been continuity no-no’s.
What impressed me even more was the emphasis on flavour. Yes, of course you had to get the rules and technical details right, but the most important thing to capture was the very particular taste of 40k. It’s exotic, cruel and dark, an Imperial glory that is part Ancient Rome and part high Victorian; it’s grotesque and heroic, savage and ornate. You want the movie pitch? It’s Mervyn Peake’s Dune. It’s Charles Dickens’s Gormenghast. It’s Frank Herbert’s Brave New World. It’s Terry Gilliam’s Gladiator. It’s H.P. Lovecraft’s Full Metal Jacket.
I started on a small scale, creating the character of Gaunt, an officer put in charge of a recon regiment called the Ghosts. Combat SF, infantry war. Wilfred Owen’s Heart of Darkness. Clark Ashton Smith’s All Quiet On The Western Front. I chose human characters (Imperial Guard) rather than Space Marines (the post-human 40k poster boys) because I was on a learning curve and I needed that human connection. I’ve since written space marines, successfully, but the books about Gaunt and the boys and girls are my main series, because, when all’s said and done, they’re about people. It doesn’t matter what universe they’re in (or who invented it), it’s a character-driven thing.
Ghosts die in the books. It’s war, and I am not a benevolent creator. Boy, do readers get upset. I have been physically menaced on occasions because people have become so engaged with a character or characters. I can think of no finer compliment. I can think of a few pleasanter ones, but…
Once I’d developed a little confidence in the 40k universe, I started to play around. 40k is essentially a table-top science fiction combat game. That’s precisely what the Gaunt books depict: they don’t wander too far from the game experience. Then I started writing the Eisenhorn books alongside them. This trilogy (and its sequel trilogy, Ravenor) covers the life and adventures of inquisitors, the ‘occult police enforcers‘ of the 40k Imperium. These aren’t battlefield stories, they’re supernatural detective thrillers set in the hives and cities and slums and ruins of the 40k universe, on alien worlds, in industrial structures, in daily life. It was one of the first times anyone had taken a shot at portraying the 40k universe away from the frontline. The editors and I gave it the underwhelming name ’domestic 40k’. It proved to be very popular (readers often tell me that the Eisenhorn books, now collected as one gorgeous omnibus, are their favourite things, and I love the Eisenhorn and Ravenor sequences so much, I’ll be writing a third, final trilogy - the Bequin books - as soon as I can).
The same goes for the Horus Heresy. Since 40k was first invented, part of the background fluff has been that there was a great civil war, the Heresy, ten thousand years before the game setting. The Heresy made 40k the universe it is. A hand-picked elite team of writers, including me and Graham, were recruited to write books recounting this story. A bit like the Dirty Dozen with laptops. Rather than ‘domestic 40k’, we were developing ‘historical 40k‘ (aka‘ 30k’). Graham and I will be chatting about this a little tomorrow.
My point (and I do have one) is that the 40k universe, despite being somebody else’s, and full of somebody else’s rules, has revealed great creative freedoms to me. You don’t have to break the toys and then invisibly mend them, nor do you have to be so careful with them you leave narry a mark upon them. You’ve got to know where to look, and you’ve got to know how to exploit what you find. You’ve got to be sensitive to the rules of the common reality, yet bold enough to test them. At no point has that process seemed less satisfying than being creative in a universe of my own, because I’ve immersed myself so deeply in it, that distinction has blurred somewhat.
Yesterday, Derrick very kindly commented that he never thought of 40k as NOT being my universe. Then again, gainsayers may argue that all I’ve done is create a ‘Dan-i-verse‘ inside 40k, just as Graham has created a ‘Graham-i-verse’, and the real rulebook sticklers often rebuke me for making mistakes. Well, it’s a big universe and there’s room for everyone.
Then again, as e.e. cummings wrote, “Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go. “
Nice one, e.e. In the spirit of that quote, I will, in a day or two, talk about working in my ‘own‘ universes, with Triumff and Sinister Dexter. Tomorrow, you lucky people, we’ll post up a chat Graham and I have been having about 40k, the Heresy, making things up, universes (our own and others), and so on. Be warned: put the analogy police on speed dial.

I’ll start this morning by picking up on Morgan’s admission that one of his all-time favorite comic book characters is Adam Warlock. Me too. Absolutely. This is a fine example of the fun I was talking about yesterday. When I’m working on Guardians of the Galaxy (the Marvel cosmic team book in which Warlock is a key player) it comes dangerously close to ticking the ‘too-much-fun-to-actually-be-work-at-all‘ box.
It would also be remiss of me not to mention at this point that my Guardians of the Galaxy run is being released in easy-to-collect trade paperback editions, so you can share that fun…
The mainstream comics industry is dominated by several ‘universes’, the most obvious of which are the Marvel and DC Universes. Each is a shared world continuity in which all that company’s (superhero) characters co-exist. All Marvel stories, for example, take place on the Marvel version of our Earth, in the Marvel version of our Universe (actually, there are some technical exceptions, but if I start to explain them, I’ll be here for more than two weeks). The Marvel Earth is pretty much identical to ours, except Spiderman is a real person rather than a comic book character, and so on.
Oddly, there is none of the snooty-ness I was talking about yesterday when it comes to working in these shared universes. Creators actively and proudly compete to become ‘the new Spiderman writer’ or the ‘new Superman creative team’ or whatever. There is no stigma attached. They want tenure on an existing, long-running character created by someone else in order to demonstrate what they can do with it. No one ever, I mean EVER, is forced to confess that they’re writing Batman, but they really want to write a ‘proper’ comic.
There are many reasons for this. Foremost, I would suggest, is that in mainstream comics you are encouraged to push the boundaries wildly. The editors (and the readers) want creative teams to come up with the craziest and coolest ideas, and do the most radical and deconstructive things possible with their favorite characters. They want them to break their toys in the most inventive ways to see how interesting the broken toys become.
This is all in a day’s work for a comic book scribe. We break toys because the comic book universes I’m talking about are incredibly resilient. Superheroes are modern folklore; they are myth and magic and fairy dust in spandex wrappers. Anything that gets broken or damaged can be put right at the end of a story in just a panel or two. Continuity can be repaired, normal service can be resumed. The writer takes the readers on a wild ride, and then he puts the toys back in the box. He puts everything back the way he found it.
(Sidebar: this ret-conning should of course be done with a light touch, wit and sensitivity. Sometimes, infamously, reboots have been as boorish and heavy-handed as the Mighty Thor turning up to help with the barn raising in Witness. So I’m talking broadly, okay?)
Beyond the mighty worlds of superheroes, universes are generally much more tightly controlled (‘Yes, you will put everything back the way you found it, and in the meantime, don’t touch it. Don’t even look at it.’). Non-superhero continuities are harder to keep in good nick. They stain more easily. They wrinkle. If you want to work with them, you have to abide by much more rigid rules.
I wrote a Doctor Who book for the BBC called The Story Of Martha. It was, as you may have already guessed, about Martha Jones. Most particularly, the book was commissioned to fit between season three, episode 12 (“The Sound of Drums”) and season three, episode 13 (“Last of the Time Lords”). Even though a year passes between those episodes, even though it was the ‘year that never was‘ and therefore a gigantic hunk of reboot, there were all sorts of things I couldn’t do. I worked very hard to stay inside the very clearly defined limits.
It was a very enjoyable job (apart from anything else, I had to keep re-watching episodes featuring the fragrant Freema Agyeman. Life is tough).
This is a very different kind of ‘put everything back where you found it‘ to the one I am supposed to use in comics. It’s the same ‘put everything back where you found it‘ I’ve been professionally required to employ with every Doctor Who, Torchwood, Terminator, Star Trek, Wallace and Gromit, Ghostbusters, and Bananas in Pyjamas (etc) projects I’ve worked on in the last twenty years. You don’t smash the toys, play with the bits, invisibly mend them and put them back; you take the toys, you find a new way to look at them without leaving any significant fingerprints, and you return them (happy consequence of this: you get invited back to do it again). You add to or enhance continuity without altering or disrupting it. It’s quite a neat trick to pull off.
There is a third way of working in someone else’s universe, and it’s the method I employ with 40K.
I’ll talk about that when I come back. Right now, I’m going to jump up and down on the bed and order room service.

Wow, this is a bit like checking into a fancy hotel. Will you look at this blog? It’s got decorative side motifs, for goodness sake! It’s not like being at home in your own blog. Everything’s so clean, and there are mints on the pillow… 

I’m Dan. Hello. Morgan and the Babel Clashers have invited me to sit in for a week or two, to chat about writing and invention and so on. Let me introduce myself up front: I’ve been working for over twenty years, and I’ve written knocking on for forty novels and a considerable number of comics. In the world of American comic books, I often collaborate with Andy Lanning and, as DnA, we have spent the last three years writing Marvel’s cosmic books (that’s things like Nova, the Guardians of the Galaxy, War of Kings and Annihilation). Before that, we worked on Legion of Superheroes and Resurrection Man at DC, the Authority and Majestic for Wildstorm, and a (ginormous) bunch of other stuff. 
In the UK, I write a lot for 2000AD and, amongst other things, I have both created and written the series Sinister Dexter and Kingdom. As a novelist, I’ve written some Torchwood and Doctor Who books (and original audios for the BBC), a Primeval novel, and a LOT of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 books for the Black Library. 
It’s those 40K books, especially the Gaunt’s Ghost series, the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books, and the Horus Heresy, that I’m particularly known for, I suppose. Just like when I write for the Marvel or DC Universes (or Doctor who and Primeval), when I write for 40K, I’m writing in somebody else’s universe. 
This is called licensed or tie-in work (except in comics, perversely, but that’s a distinction we’ll get to later). People can be a bit snooty about tie-in fiction. This snooty-ness is most commonly expressed in the question “Why don’t you write proper books?” (variations on this theme include substituting the word ‘real‘ for ‘proper’). 
Well, mister, the answer is… actually quite complicated. Let’s start with the grease and overalls part. Writing tie-in fiction is often good, steady, reliable work. The flow of work does not depend upon the ups and downs of your own “brand”, it depends on the health of a big franchise like Star Trek or Superman. Big franchises are always looking for talented, professional writers to write their tie-in books, and in these credit crunchy times, no one should be sneering at good, steady work.
Besides that, it’s fun. As your job of work, you get up in the morning and think up ideas for Doctor Who (or whatever). What’s not to like?
There are other real pleasures: the pleasure of engaging with an eager and enthusiastic audience, for starters. And you’d be very wrong to think that just because it’s ‘tie-in’ fiction, it’s easier to write. You create your own world, you set your own limits; you take a job in somebody else’s universe, there’s a ready-made standard. People care. People will KNOW when you get something wrong.
I’ve thought about all of this from time to time, particularly in the last year or so. My most recent releases (not counting the third, gigantic Gaunt’s Ghost Omnibus, The Lost, and a Doctor Who audio read by a certain Mr D. Tennant), were the thirteenth Gaunt’s Ghost book, Blood Pact (a Warhammer 40K book, just so we’re clear), and a novel called Triumff, from the Harper Collins Angry Robot imprint. You’ll have Triumff in the States very soon. It’s a rollicking alternate history fantasy, and I’ll talk about it more later in my stay here. 
The reason I mention it now is, because it’s mine. It’s a ‘real‘ book. A ‘proper‘ book. I invented it all. For the first time in almost forty novels, I wasn’t working in someone else’s Universe.
So I’ve had a real opportunity to compare and contrast. Which is better? Which is harder? Are they just different? Do you use different muscles for writing one than you do for the other? Which is the most rewarding? I’m going to try find some answers, and helping me (and providing many answers of his own, no doubt), will be the mighty Graham McNeill, a fellow 40K veteran. Graham and I have collaborated on the world-shaping front, especially on the Horus Heresy books.
I don’t know if I’m going to successfully answer any of those questions, or any other questions, or any questions that you out there might care to throw at me (go on, you know you want to!). But you know what? Damn it, over the next two weeks, I’m going to give it a shot, and I’m not going to be sidetracked until–
Oooh! A minibar!