Nine years after the horrific and violent events in Grendel, Babe Walker reunites with April Speed. Why has he returned? Who has he come to kill? And after all this time, what is it that still binds them so closely together? Stateless is a meditation on violence, loss and redemption.
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Almost due for a final edit.
Wahey!
We have souls. This little fellow, Angus, enlightened me on that topic, because he so obviously has a soul.
Therefore we do too.
I think maybe all living creatures do. That doesn’t mean that Angus wouldn’t tear apart a fox or badger or rat, he would if he could, he’s a slave to his instincts, and only the fact our local garden-meandering hedgehog has spines has saved him from a savage death on numerous occasions, but Angus has a soul. We all do. I think the hedgehog has one too.
It’s a welcoming thought.
Today’s visitor map. Doesn’t say how many pages each visitor looked at or how many stories they read, and I guess with an online population of four or five billion it’s hardly more than random chance anyhow, but I like the spread.
No New Zealand or Australia or Kazakhstan, I notice.
My favourite novel by Ernest Hemingway is The Garden of Eden, unfinished, unpublished in his lifetime, but a truly lovely book – a meditation on the nature of love and its
boundaries, and on writing too.
Hemingway killed himself before he finished it, and perhaps he would never have finished it, he’d worked on it on and off for years and years, but I don’t understand how he could voluntarily leave the world with a book that needed completing.
Maybe he was tired of the struggle.
“Is that XX?’ Jackson asked as he got out of the car. It was. Loud Places by Jamie XX (ft Romy). Must be three years old now, maybe more. I play it before I begin work on Jago.
Dakota.
Jester.
Where are they?
I’m working on it, I’m looking for them, every morning by half six I’m in deep. They’re looking for each other too, converging.
I began working on a project called the gods some time ago but it split into two different things, one a collection of micro stories and the other a longer contemplation on the idea of immortality.
the collection of stories is still called the gods and is on kindle but the longer piece, the long light, was lost in translation. I went back to it a couple of weeks ago to look at the structure, and a thought struck me so I decided to follow that and it looks like it might be working out. The title came to me while I was musing as I stood in the queue in MaccyDs, waiting for my second coffee of the morning.
Lucas is going to create a cover for me for a different project, so I might ask her to do one for this too.
Photograph by Laura:
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I enjoy mythology, especially Greek and Norse, and the character of Grendel has always intrigued me. I’ve always thought him not as a troll, but as a man. If Beowulf is the good king then Grendel is the tyrant, and he does the evil that men can do.
I have a novel called Grendel which is based on the premise of a woman falling in love with a man who is quite normal apart from his tendency toward multiple murders, a man who lives with the ghosts of his crimes and who, in his own way, is quite vulnerable.
And now I’m redrafting a story in which a character called Wyatt literally is Grendel. Or he was, a long time ago, and now he’s just an ordinary man. It’s part of my series of stories that go under the umbrella title of the gods which is a contemplation of the lives of the immortals.