Richard Wright

Some things that have happened.

Elvis Presley has applied for a job as our driver.  I am not kidding.  Unfortunately, he is unlikely to get the position.  Having googled for character references, he is apparently nothing but a hound dog.

The weather here in Delhi has made another sharp change, and is closing fast on a British summertime.  It’s gorgeous today, clear skies and temperatures in the mid-twenties.  By next weekend it should be hovering near thirty, and it’s not yet March.

Next weekend, however, is a holiday weekend, with Monday being Holi.  People throw paint over each other enthusiastically, so I believe.  We will be spending a couple of nights in the city of Jaipur, poking around and generally exploring.  It’s known as the pink city, which I suspect refers to the stonework more than a subculture, and we’re taking a slow train there and back.  Looking forward to seeing some of the India between the cities, even if it’s only in passing.

Various bits of television are being watched at the moment, on iTunes or DVD.  Season one of Babylon 5 is for the most part comically bad, but extremely watchable.  The last season of Lost is so far daring and baffling, with concurrently running parallel universes in which the characters are living different versions of their own lives being one of the most daring ways to run a narrative I’ve seen (yet to confirm whether it’s going to actually work in drawing the series to a close).  24 is as brilliant and unlikely as ever.  The second series of Being Human is lovely, compelling, and beautifully written.  The first season and a bit of The Wire have convinced me that all of the ‘greatest television series ever made’ reviews may not actually be hyperbole.  There’s more, but I shan’t bore you with it just now.

I now have a lovely Rorschach print above my desk in my study.  I see a praying child, Kirsty sees Kenny from South Park lying on his back, Eva sees a monster.  Your mileage may vary.

Hiram Grange continues to pick up excellent reviews.  The third book should be along shortly, and I’m just about to start work with the editor on my own tome.  Exciting times.  Final edits have also been received and returned for the Apex Books anthology Dark Faith, which is going to be quite a book.

And now it is the weekend, and slumping can happen, with some slouching thrown in for good measure.

Finally, after four months of taxis and tuk-tuks around Delhi, we’ve order a new car.  It looks very much like the above, except it doesn’t have fancy script over the licence plate.  We’ve a short period of waiting to undertake, as various forms get filed at various departments, us being furriners and all, and then we can take to the road proper.

Well our driver will, anyway.  We’ll be in the back, taking in the sights.

It’s a big motor, at least bigger than anything we would have considered buying in the UK, but height is a definite bonus on Indian roads, as is power.  Eight seats, 2.5 litre engine, and in ours anyway, tuk-tuk-intimidating front bull bars.  After that, the traffic can come and have a go, if it thinks its hard enough.

Valentine’s Day has largely involved varying degrees of suffering in this house, but only because we went out yesterday instead (no school run to get up for this morning).  There was beer.  There was bollinger.  There was wine.

There was, today, a great deal of lying still and groaning.

The meal was good though, partaken of at a nearby Lebanese place called Mashrabiya.  We were seated in a tent, with various cushions to become recumbent on, and had a comedy waiter who threw beer around, fell over himself while trying to light our cigarettes, and attempted to set fire to our tent with a brazier of hot coals.

Most entertaining, though unfortunately not the sort of regularly scheduled performance you can call up and book.

So, I was in the study, headphones in, enjoying an atmospheric audio play involving Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and friends.  It was a dark and stormy night.  There was thunder crashing and lightning flashing.  I thought the audio mixing was a little off, because I couldn’t really make out what the actors were saying beneath the storm effects.

Except, of course, the audio was enhanced by the actual storm that had sprung up outside.  Crashing, bashing thunder, a brutal downpour, lightning, flooding – even hail, and not measly flecks of it either, but big, bouncing chunks of ice.

As is our way, we stood in it for a bit, and breathed it all in.  We like storms, and we really like being surprised by them.

Here’s the second in a brief series of articles about the creation of the Hiram Grange novellas, currently being released by Shroud Publishing, and due to conclude in April with my own ‘Hiram Grange and the Nymphs of Krakow’.  You can find part one here, in which Tim from Shroud Publishing makes mysterious utterings, and lures five writers to him.

Having summoned us to the online equivalent of a darkened room, quietly locking the door when the last of us was in, Tim unveiled his notion.  Five novellas, each twenty-thousand words long, about Hiram Grange.  A man who fights monsters, but who is also a monster.  A scarred, sneering relic, brutally efficient, more than a little misogynistic.  The stories were to be classic pulp fiction, brought bang up to date.

We stared at him for a little bit, in an online, metaphorical sort of a way.

And then we all started to talk at once.  Loudly, and with some waving of arms.  Ideas flew around, steaming hot.  A lot was nailed down, very quickly.  One of the first contributions I made was that the series be properly serial, with each standalone story containing hints of a bigger picture that would play across the five books, and conclude in the last.  As a reader, I love that sort of double engagement with a story – it rewards investment, and has you drumming your fingers waiting for the next part to arrive – and was delighted when the idea was embraced.

We spent a few days emailing constantly – questions and questions and questions.  Who does Hiram work for?  Who are his friends?  Where does he live?  Is he really a borderline alcoholic and habitual drug user?  Were we telling a story that was essentially static, so that the status quo was retained at the end of book five, or were we prepared to set up Hiram’s world, and then explode it around him, ready for something new if the books did well enough for us to take things further forward?  How heroic a hero is he?  What does he wear?  How did his parents die?  Why is one chamber of his Webley filled with a spent shell?  How do confluences actually work?  Who is his real nemesis, and how much do we unveil about him/her in the series?  We agreed, we argued, we nicked each others ideas, changing them and throwing them back into the pot so that somebody else could do the same thing again.

We slaughtered each others babies mercilessly, leaving room for better ones to be born.  Not the most humane metaphor for the writing process, but better than the usual triteness about nurturing a story like a child and watching it grow, etc.  I always find it more like a cull, followed by the brutal conditioning of and enforced surgery on any survivors, until you’ve one left that you think you can live with.  That’s how it works for me, and definitely how I viewed the creation of Mr Grange.

It was bloody exhausting, but extremely exciting.  By the end, we had something to take forward, a world and a man we thought we could tell thrilling stories about.  That’s when we went away into our own little worlds, to make his stories our own.  In a month or so, I’ll tell you about Poland, and the Beast of the Air, and the horrors of continuity, and how we infected each others stories so that each book has a little bit of all of us in it.

In the meantime, for more Hiram you can check out an interview with him, currently running at Choate Road.  You don’t often see your characters interviewed, so this was interesting.

You can also check out this review of Hiram Grange and the Twelve Little Hitlers, Scott Christian Carr’s brutal and twisted second entry in the series (how can you not love the title?).

And of course, you can go to Amazon and buy the first two books.  Just tap “Hiram Grange” into the search box, and get ready for a ride.