In Progress - Needing Homes!! Look out for these sometime in the future, hopefully - knowing me, sometime within the next decade! Or, if you are a publisher, look out for them much sooner than that - because i'll be whispering in your ear!

 

The Whispering Girl and Other Tales of Experiment and Descent

A substantial collection of linked tales, all touching on Feather, the main character of What the Giants were Saying. These are varied in both scope and content, ranging from small sketches to large novellas. In some, Feather is a central character, in others she is in the background, but her effect is always there.

Among the central stories is 'To Call the Sea' - a sometimes light-hearted, sometimes very bitter ghost story set in a liberal arts college and dealing with the pain of unrequited love and loneliness in company.

I think 'The Magpies' remains the story with the most interesting ideas behind it and in it you will encounter such things as a Magpie Man who eats carrion, a world-spanning polyhedron, lots of music (and its absence) - and all set in the wonderful lonely hills of Dartmoor.

'The Whispering Girl' itself is very melancholy and hallucinatory - a story of reflections and loneliness and what they can mean. I have been skating around a proper cool look into real misery, loneliness and almost maddening depression for a while, but never dared to plunge in until this story came along.  The most direct portrayal of isolation I have ever done.  A young man called Tallis, alone in Ljubljana in one of two towers of apartments, watching the lighted windows opposite and cycling through a continuous relay of deaths, over and over – hallucinations – surrounded by female phantoms.  His own english phantasm Clair, whom he can see reflected in glass and shop windows – whom he continually talks to and engages in conversation.  And Feather, a dizzy and confused down and out wandering the streets, who talks incoherently of love and death, mostly repeating things that Tallis himself has said at different times as though she has a channel to his brain – as well as things he hasn’t said YET.  And an eerie Slovenian girl with her huge grey cat Mačka – who’s arms are always covered.  This story is constructed full of reflections and mirror images – twin buildings, scenes in glass – reflections in windows.  Scenes repeat.  Tallis dies over and over in cycles – in dream, in imagination, in reality perhaps.  I am working to bring Ljubljana to life in this story as well, which will hopefully make it a portrait of that sometimes wonderful, sometimes very bleak city. 

And 'Yellow Eyes' is the first Feather story of all, with a fragment of her rather strange and troubled formative years: white mushrooms, windmills, Samphire and a nuclear powerstation. I walk the narrow tightrope of a fragile character and surrounding brutality because I am determined to find the cold, quiet and rational place that exists at the centre of even the hardest of atrocities. Only there do they start to become interesting.  When, as Feather would put it, you can get to grips with the ‘why’ rather than merely the ‘what’. Or when you cant . . .

There are more - but i will tell you about those when i have finalized the contents a bit more.

Status: Almost Complete

 

The Windmill Museum

A full-length novel. This is the most substantial and complex Feather story of all, dealing with stolen memories, SM interactions and three of the strangest characters I have ever put into fiction - The White Flower Man, The Magician and The English Gentleman. It's an extreme tale and poor Feather gets absolutely put through the wringer by these three lunatic but rather extraordinary men. I will tell you more when it is more in my own focus. I must get that collection out of the way for now.

Status: Substantially in progress

 

GROM

Novel. A ghost story and travelogue set in the wild mountains of the Slovenian Alps. GROM (the slovene word for Thunder) will be a big horror tale featuring storm chasing and uneasy cross-border romance.

Status: In progress

 

 

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