What I'm All About
Since I was very young - at least as far back as I can remember - I have spent my time occupying a zone of thoughts, wonderings, and what-ifs. In the beginning these were your typical, childish musings: "What if my toys really are alive?" "What if a creature that nobody has ever seen lives in those woods and watches us all, day in, day out?" "What if my Uncle is actually a vampire?" Okay, so perhaps the last one is more atypical, but you get the idea.
For a while, teenhood and adulthood threatened to wipe these imaginings out. Fantasy became replaced with the dull, dreariness of real life. Horror took on the form of a dwindling bank account, an idiot President, and the terrifying prospect that while cancer affected one in four while I was younger, that number is now one in two. Adventure was simply playing a new videogame that was far enough removed from real life to aid in ignoring it.
In late 2012, following a disastrous year in my life, I moved to Scotland.
It was a temporary move at first, but it was a welcome escape from the life I had been leading further south. The move was for work, and the work was long. But I had a car, and I had no ties. On those rare occasions that I found myself with some free time, it was no longer destined to end in the chime of a PS3 being switched on. I began to take drives north. The flat, fieldscapes that had bored me since 1991 were now replaced with hills and mountains, dense forests, and crashing waterfalls. Small, winding roads took me on adventures I hadn't realised were possible, the calls of animals not found around my old home echoed around me as I traipsed through lush woodland. Ancient ruins and standing stones erected by the humans of long ago revealed themselves as I left the beaten paths on my rambles.
For a man that overthinks about everything far too much, finding all of this threatened to make my mind explode. I would lie in bed each night, mulling over what I had seen, the folklore that surrounded the lands I adventured in, or what on earth could lie beyond the crests of the mountains I scanned from the top of Cairn Gorm. I couldn't just let this swill around inside my head; it was becoming hugely distracting. I began to write.
Of course, I became a fantasy writer.
But fantasy...? That's sort of pigeonholed me to you, the reader. Fantasy is swords, sorcery, and men in loin cloths fighting dragons. I won't lie, there is some of that in my work, but fantasy also allowed me to paint backdrops with which to try out so many other genres. Drama, horror, romance, mystery, diaries, travel, history, poetry. Fantasy is an exciting realm to occupy, and one that affords a lot of leeway when it comes to trying out different things. Fantasy is a great mindset to dwell in while you're trying to figure out what you write best. Perhaps its mish-mash nature puts some off. It isn't focused enough. It allows the writer to create absolutely anything.
For me, fantasy is hugely inspirational. Free of barriers that limit real-life. Fantasy allows you to fully explore the ideas that might not (yet) fit other genres.
I chose to write fantasy for many reasons. I love the untouched, open wilderness of the outdoors. My favourite fictions are Gormenghast, Conan the Barbarian, and The Lord of the Rings. I listen to music that focuses on ambient, takes me on journeys without lyrics to worlds that really do exist outside our own if you let your mind wander.
Let's ignore that I had written several, accomplished (my 100% biased opinion) stories back in primary school. Instead, we'll fast forward to 2013 when I first began "proper" writing, and started with what I hoped would become a big novel. I had spent many a night thinking about how far the universe went, and what might be on the other side of the edge. The kind of thoughts that stop you sleeping, and even make your brain hurt a little. Space is terrifyingly vast. What could be beyond it? What could be bigger than it? I began making notes on a tale that attempted to explore that. Surely our universe can't be the only one? Surely the expansion of our place in existence isn't limited to one instance? I began to imagine a space beyond space. A dimension filled with other universes, all expanding. All growing like ours. That brought me to the conclusion that some would be bigger, or smaller, older or younger. What if the plane of existence that this group of universes occupied began to run out of space? What if our own universe became crushed and pushed back inwards by the force of something bigger on the other side? The apocalypse to end all apocalypses.
It was an interesting idea, but ultimately it failed after around 10,000 words. The story taught me that some things were too big for me at this point in my writing career. Not enough planning and world (universe) building meant that I had a fairly decent opening that quickly died a death when I realised I had no idea where it could go after that. That was probably a fairly obvious outcome. I started with the biggest thing of all. The universe.
Later that same year, I was sat with my PS3 playing Minecraft around Christmas time. I was doing little more than slapping down walls made up of mossy rock when I began to explore the idea of an ancient and abandoned metropolis. A city so large that it spanned an island the size of Iceland. A city that had entered a deep slumber after a devastating and mysterious event. The tale became that of one young man as he ventures out into the forbidden walls.
This is Havelock's Path.
[Bleakendom, by Nick Dablin]
The story is complete only in note form and is currently sitting at 260,000 words of written chapters. It is a story that I really want to get right. When I finally release Havelock's Path, it has to be great, not just good. I didn't want to make the same mistakes that I had made with my previously failed venture, so I began to explore means of practicing my writing abilities in other ways before finishing Havelock's Path off.
Next came Cold Call, my first publication.
Cold Call is a short horror story of around 30,000 words. Its origins lie in a train journey I took from work one day, where around six phones in my carriage all rang simultaneously. Weird, even unlikely, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Lots of phones might ring when something disastrous occurs. Then I began to wonder of a scenario where not just six, but every phone began to ring at once. What if the phone calls did something to those that answered? Just about everyone has a mobile phone these days. The effects could be disastrous.
Cold Call took place in a fictional setting in Scotland and England, which was heavily based on my own location, situated in Aberdour, Fife, at the time. Characters were based on people from the village, with the first known victim of the tale being a caricature of the fellow that owned the post office beneath my house. The protagonist, Owen, watched in horror as the world around him fell to pieces. The kind of pieces from which there is no reconstruction. Contrary to some opinions, the ending was neither rushed nor just tacked on. It was always intended that this particular story would end the way it did.
The story was fairly well-received and was even the number one free Kindle horror occult story during Halloween 2016. The book divided opinion, which I suppose I should be proud of. It made people love it and hate it. There didn't seem to be any indifference to what I put out (well, save for those that read it and never reviewed it...).
After this, I wanted to return to Havelock's Path. I began to edit chapters and write new ones, but my experience with Cold Call had me itching to provide something else as well. Fortunately for Havelock's Path, I had spent a good six months prior to writing the first chapter world-building and creating lore for the world I had imagined, and that encyclopedia of information contained a number of important characters.
Marigold the barbarian took centre stage in my work.
Here was a character that was both hero and anti-hero. Powerful and weak. Well-travelled, yet at times, very naive. Robert E. Howard played a large part in Marigold's creation thanks to his Conan stories. I wanted to have a character that I could practice with, who would fit a number of unrelated stories, and be pliable enough to fit varied scenarios. Marigold features in a series that allows me practice all of the genres that I wish to try, while held firmly within the clutch of fantasy. Novels, novellas, short stories, flash fiction: Marigold is an outlet to practice all of these things. The plan here is to earn a level of proficiency in my writing that allows me to finish Havelock's Path to the standard I have held within my mind. Let's hope you see an improvement as you read through them!
The first tale I wrote about Marigold was Grim Work, released in September 2017.
Grim Work is one of the "middle" stories within a host of almost twenty tales. Grim Work tells how Marigold loses everything, and how he deals with it. To put it bluntly, it is a much more violent retelling of how I ended up in Scotland in the first place (I never barricaded a door with a severed arm an leg, for instance).
Right now, I am putting the finishing touches to the first draft of The Crystal Keep. This yarn of adventure and disaster is set several years before Grim Work, and features Marigold alongside companions (some may be familiar for readers of Grim Work). The story opens up more of the world the barbarian inhabits, and revolves around the shady Crystal Cult, who have taken up residence in a mountain that sits slap bang in the middle of the lands that Marigold wishes to settle in.
While time seems to flit by without realising it these days, The Crystal Keep is on track to be published this year (Kindle and paperback). I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. It is likely to take me much of the rest of my life, but it is my hope that one day, the full series of my ideas are available on the printed page. Then you can see just how odd I really am.
