The sun is raised to its lofty zenith, more or less now. Dazzling, when we do sometimes see it here in Scotland. The nights up at this latitude are brief and twilit. Almost white, in fact.

It’s just the time of year when Alexander meets Katerina.

Among my many favourite songs is one with a wealth of sterling versions. Malagueña is a Cuban song, from what I gather. No doubt it has its Latin fire. I’ve always had this, of all music, in mind, for when Katerina pulls her eager eyed fool away from his nightmare and into a montage of whirlwind romance. They deserve it, given what’s to come. As its end is our own beginning.

Today I happened to be in the mood to hear the song again, as the daytime’s gloomy stranglehold of clouds melted away, come the evening’s afternoon. I put on two of them, back to back. Two of the very best of all.

The first was Julio Gutierrez in fine form on Progressive Latin. You can tell it’s good with a cover like that. (I always had my doubts in 1980s childhood about the intent of those retro Modern chairs. But they were perfection in 1960.) He leads a great Afro-Cuban ensemble into the charge with dizzying verve and pinpoint precision on piano. A great, great listen. I highly recommend it. He put me into the ideal mood for the next one.

But it was Klaus Doldinger who got to me. His Malagueña from Doldinger in Süd Amerika, just five years after Gutierrez, is so painfully perfect I can scarcely contain my praise. He slides around on tenor sax in a style as distinct from the first as is his instrument from the piano. But, again, it’s the way the whole group plays the composition that you hear, fronted by his plaintive, earnest, haunting horn. I can barely describe how it rolled over me like a tempest and a truckload of bittersweet bricks. I should have known to expect this by now. His is one of my precious few reliably teary songs.

Doldinger’s Malagueña evokes for me that excessive, desperate kind of love that we living mortals only tend to see so long. Like Daedalus and his fondness for the height that would kill him, the closer you get in that kind of relationship, the more burned you will be. It’s the hedgehog’s dilemma. (And one of my favourite episodes of Evangelion.) The way we deal with it is to leave. You have to when your mutual destructiveness is as strong. But as the writer of this story, I have a power that I don’t in my own reality. I can balance the pair’s desperate needs and crushing faults just perfectly. I can design the perfect wrong. I can make theirs the ideal, sick love.

One track is dazzling rhythm, one is painful delicacy, yet both are the same song. That’s music writ large right there. How I love it. And I’m forever in debt of its gifts to me. There is no better narrative inspiration.

I heard the Gutierrez version a few years before I found Doldinger’s. For a while, it was the one I pictured using, in my imaginary soundtrack. You may well imagine what happened when the score was evened. Not only is Doldinger’s a more compelling song, it even fits the troubled destiny my characters were born to see. There was no Alexander or Katerina without Malagueña. And there’s nothing to the story without the two of them at its maddened heart.

No doubt there are many ways to write. Mine relies on memory. I create as I live: in that little inner world of mine, a part of which you see here. I gather that everyone is different; not all of us remember the same kind of things, or as much. Besides, memory is the most partial and selective of human powers. But let’s just say that I can access quite a bit.

I was listening to my favourite podcast when this came up. John Roderick seems similarly disposed to ancient recollection, and described a wonderful one from his Alaskan childhood, starting just before 1:03. Give it a listen and you’ll know why it caught me.

He tells the story of one walk home, decades ago, alone in the harshest cold that an afternoon in Anchorage can muster. He walked in that transcendent landscape that you and everyone who’s ever been a child surrounded in snow will recall. The heavy air, the crystal quiet, the immense other worldliness.

But young Roderick brought something of his own to it. He was walking, slowly, unfussed by the chilling landscape all around him, focused purely on the world within. He concentrated his mind as hard as he was able, and tried him damnedest to access his magic. He tried, without a sliver of doubt or incredulity, to conjure a glowing orb!

Adolescence, isolation, misunderstanding, forlorn hopes, and magick! Truly the perfect story to my ears.

He and Merlin do a great little interpretation of its significance, too, in the context of a forgotten age when Dungeons & Dragons was feared by adults just as harshly as if magic was indeed real. You could do worse than explore the possibility for yourself. Power is the one thing above all, in that moment of our lives, that we all most dearly need.

I’m firmly of the belief that everyone is magic at age twelve. It’s the crux of the greatest turning point in life. Puberty is upon you, transforming your friends, while society is still far from accepting any of you as adults. In a way, you’re smarter then than you may be for the next ten to twenty years! Or it surely feels like it. As, with Roderick, I remember.

The adult height of a child’s desire, all while being neither one. What a mess! No wonder we all wanted out of it. The experience, and its hardened metaphors, are more vital than much of childhood proper. So says my part time inner Freud! That time above all truly shapes us. It’s “character building” as they say, in neither a good nor inherently bad way; but surely heightened. I’ve never seen anyone come out of it quite the same.

Perhaps it was just the ubiquity of the young protagonist’s trope that made me cast a twelve year old at the heart of my creation. Although, if it was, I chose a young one. Christopher is neither an empty vessel for the legend’s instruction, nor is he a full formed adult within or beyond his mind. But there’s no hiding that he’s crucial. I never intended it at first, but this is his tale. Just ask Carl.

So, I’m channeling the adolescent mystery which joins the lot of us, as it’s the story I need to see in Christopher. The better he is realised, the better Andala is entire. The atmosphere of life’s most awkward phase; the depth of our questions, most never to be resolved; the baggage he’s forever carrying, in himself: it’s not easy. And nor is he.

To get Christopher wrong is to misremember. As, for all this fiction, I can only say we’ve already met.

As it is the season for digging into the parts of this project where I find the most resistance, I thought I’d cover flight.

It’s always been there. Right from the very beginning. I never so much as chose that the people of Andala could up and fly as easily as we can walk. They just arrived that way.

Flight is an age old dream. An archetype all of its own. Everyone’s heard of Icarus and his many imitators, the men who made themselves wings; before we figured out how to build our own machines instead of mimicking the birds. Flight has transformed since then, until, for most of us, it is something quite mundane. An unpleasant confinement with our fellow passengers, from one port to another. Though if you ever do get the chance to take the controls for yourself, the magic is most surely there intact. Not least in a glider.

But there’s just something about the way the birds do it. Unhindered. Unaided. Innate.

I was watching one of Edinburgh’s birds of prey circling in the wind this morning. I was only waking up when I looked into the brisk stirred blue and saw its telltale silhouette, climbing thermals high above. Buzzards are fairly big, and yet it looked so small up there. Its movement told me what it was, as its wings held solid on the glide, then flowed like cloth when it turned. Then I saw something I haven’t before. This one climbed through a cloud, vanishing completely, until it appeared again on the other side. It wasn’t up that high to get a better look down on its prey, so far below, it was just enjoying the climb.

The way I see Andalans flying is both like and unlike birds. They don’t rely on air, so they don’t rely on wings, and needn’t have the specialised bodies of all the flying creatures our world has seen. The force that keeps them up there is, of course, aner. Their experience moving in the third dimension is much like ours when we lose ourselves in the action, like, say, when dancing or playing sport. They’re practised in flitting around in quite the same way as we are at using our legs to move without over-thinking the details. In that sense, they are very much as I imagine birds must be. The more you watch them, the more you see that everything is instinct to them. They inhabit the air in the fullest sense. They see where they want to be, and the next thing, they are there; at the speed of their choosing. This is also precisely the case for people on Andala.

The irony being that there are no birds to fly with them, there.

Something I have in mind for Beta, the second book if you can believe in such a feat, is a ground-up experience of learning how to be Andalan. Christopher, the crucial link between our worlds in Ana form, has his work cut out for him. He must learn his aner. His only glimpse so far of the power he was born with was inside-out, so to speak. Jocaster was the one calling shots, while Christopher supplied his unconsciousness. Yes, I’ve still Alpha’s writing all ahead of me yet! But I think the fleeting experience of the first book’s introduction to all of this would be well balanced by a truly first person perspective in the second. Flight being at once the simplest and the damnedest skill for Christopher to achieve.

I’ll tell you what: talking about flying folk doesn’t sound like “science fiction” to me. Quite whenever I decided that was what I’m doing, I don’t know. Despite myself, I still feel an awkwardness at what my story actually involves. I hope this doesn’t get in the way of doing it justice. Perhaps, or surely, it has in my getting on with it in all this time. But this is how I am. A touch shy of the glowering light of my ideas, even when, all along, I know I can only choose to make them.

Ripples and shimmers, in the mind sea.

— October 2004

There’s much to be said for big dreams. The ones from the deep. The ones that change you.

It was literally a century ago when I started dreaming of “the mind sea”. Awake as much as sleeping. I was having a rough old time as the millennium loomed ahead, and never did get around to finishing my studies. A theme developed, as I tried to figure out what was going on, an ancient one as clear as can be; not that I even realised it at first. I kept seeing the sea, from below. I was submerged.

Water is our symbol for the other part of us. It’s the unconscious image of unconsciousness itself. When the ocean comes to inundate your dreams, you can be sure the sleeping counterpart of yours, with which you share your mind, has a point to make about where you’re headed. I didn’t like such airy fairy sounding nonsense the least small bit myself, when it met me head to head. But the experience was deep and inescapable. I learned something. Big dreams do indeed change you.

There are a few of them lined up, of course, in my book. The original one of which, for Alpha’s leading boy, Christopher, I described in my notes like this:

Water, the stars and the energy, swirling, submerged. He lights it, and sets it backward, as it dances around him as though with an intelligence. He tries to use his power, even though he knows asleep that he can’t, and it crackles and distorts in this strange surrounding prescient horizon. Then, flying, he emerges from it, the world draining as the drops of water fall from him onto its endless night’s surface. He looks up, hearing them, and sees a space, infinite and with nothing. The most terrifying sight of all, as below the light of creation ripples and shimmers in the mind sea.

— October 2002

Yes, ten years and counting. Well, this project’s been going on for quite a while.

Christopher is the story’s closest approximation to a hero. He’s just a boy, aged twelve or thereabouts, thrown into his momentous fate without the least bit of preparation. He doesn’t even know what and who he is. Christopher’s introduction to his powers takes place while he is unconscious. Jocaster is the one in control, as he takes Christopher’s body out into the fight without the boy’s presence or permission. While Jocaster fends off his foes using his stolen arms, Christopher is trapped in his own unconsciousness. What better place to dream of the deep?

The next step was the song.

A few years ago, I got into Xploding Plastix. A Norwegian duo whose music defies sensible description, I’ve lined up one of their songs for my writing soundtrack to Ambassador Walken; an oddball fully qualified for the fact. But the deeper into their catalogue I went, the less I could get a grasp of them. This is usually a bad thing, but in their case it was quite different. They surprise me good and bad at every turn. And the one that really caught me was Cashmere Tarmac.

Simply put, this song is absolutely mind boggling. The first time I played it was immediately followed by the next dozen, as I tried to work it out. This old pattern of mine of trying to boil things down into the knowable, digested truth. Cashmere Tarmac defies my attempts, even now a good few years later. Instead, I find it as alive as the first moment I heard it. And where there’s life, there’s invention.

Christopher’s big dream is set to Cashmere Tarmac. The part of it he experiences in Alpha takes place during the first two minutes of the song. The rest is reserved for reprise and sequence later.

It goes like this. He semi-consciously awakens in a vast, undefined space; much like you may have done too in many a dream. Awareness only develops slowly over time when you’re under. Several seconds in, at the music’s cue, he breaths out a cloud of bubbles. That’s the jolt right there. He’s underwater, even though it doesn’t feel like it. He doesn’t feel submerged. His weightlessness isn’t immediately obvious. And yet, the air flows out of him in bubbles and he knows he’s in real trouble.

Next, Christopher does the only thing you could in that predicament: he tries to find the surface. In his hurry, he doesn’t even notice the means of his movement. He doesn’t thrash about, as you or I would in deep water. He flies. Instinct is all he’s got in such a panic, and instinct teaches him his first lesson in how to use his power. Not that Christopher is one to learn quite as easily. His struggle to come to terms with his Ana nature is a story for another day.

Lastly, Christopher finds he is not alone in there. He sees another child, the same size and age as him, but a girl. She’s as calm as he is panicked, and deigns not to speak but just to look at him with a slight and yet impenetrable grin. The two are perfectly opposed when he meets her eye to eye. If only it weren’t for the gulps of air he exhales every few seconds. When he tries to touch the ornate Ana jewellery she is wearing, again on a cue in the music, the dream ends instantaneously.

Through all of this, Christopher has not been simply lying down in bed. He’s been fighting, under Jocaster’s power, in an immense battle with no room for the slightest mistake. And yet he does awaken, beyond the master’s control, when his father, Alexander, revives the old prince with a start. Christopher’s dream is about the great ocean of our unseen minds within. Christopher’s awakening occurs right outside in space.

For all this avoidance I’m still up to when it comes to Alpha, I am still truly beguiled by that book of mine as yet all but started. I’ve a good few tricks to play in there, and they feel so right to me. If anything, I know it too well. So it takes a song I cannot understand to inspire me.

We are nothing if not the change we bring to the world; our memory, our legacy, our dent upon the universe. So it goes. Our greatest dreams demand the greatest upheaval. As to forge the future, we must break the past.

All in pursuit of perfection.

Every once in a while, an entire generation is thrown into the fire to grasp it. Some of our dreams, the worst ones and the most powerful, demand a new beginning. We hurl our ever greater resources at the hideous task: be it scorched earth or the final solution. (Aren’t they always meant to be so?) The previous century will be remembered, as long as there are people to know, for its decades long adventure into hell on earth. It was the worst of us. What different worlds could we have seen if the fire was not lit, ninety-nine summers ago. If indeed you or I would have ever been born at all.

History is written by the winner. But push it hard enough, and you’ll leave your mark in either case. Just don’t count on liking it.

Fortunately for the lot of us, beyond two cities in Japan, everything changed in 1945. Our newfound nuclear prowess put the kibosh on the once very appealing notion of a winnable war between great powers. As unfashionable as it is to say, I really do think that our remaining ability to demolish one another in a furtive hour or so is what remains our principal peacemaker to this day. The nations of the world are led by no brighter minds or more enlightened souls than before. As if. And our interconnectedness, though ever stronger, is not the sort of thing the past could never know. Rather, we went our way safe in the knowledge that future tyrants had better think small. So far, they have.

But what about when we must no longer share the same lonely little world?

In my story, Aria is the first to stir this fate. A confrontation between our first and second Earth results in something so atrocious that it is still, in Alpha’s time centuries later, known as just the “Aria incident.” It is the nightmare of shining apocalypse that I imagined everyone must have had during the Cold War; whose end alone I saw. It is an orgy of space borne violence, triggered in confusion but executed meticulously. And I have a song set aside for it, to be explored in time.

This memory of a lost world is the setting for the people of Earth come the story proper. As above them threatens not Aria’s forgotten army, but a single man. The one who could, and would, end it all for us. That we might finally repay our debt, and meet Elysium as one.

A neon genesis, as it were. Many minds think alike for good reason. Before and after discovering the fact.

Ode to Joy is the poem and the song for this set piece. What else could suffice? Schiller’s appeal to our gloried future when put to Beethoven’s most enduring symphony’s very climax is perfection in itself. The ultimate soundtrack to the battle at the end of the world. All quarter of an hour of it!

I have an orchestra in mind, playing a concert while it happens quite beyond them and old Europe’s evening horizon. The Ode is the centrepiece of their performance, played to mark the centennial of the world government whose leaders are attending. It is, of course, still the anthem. Though seldom quite as long as this.

As great an indulgence as this all surely is, I’ll note that I’ve worked out what events come when, in the music. One highpoint is when Yolanda, the president, is finally handed a screen onto the live events above. She went in to the hall knowing that a standoff was now likely, but her underlings acted alone to unleash all this. Echoes of Aria, which foreshadows everything.

But not quite.

So I started this whole thing in 2012. Just three posts are older than that. The first was my mighty blaze of an introduction to the whole lot, which even still represents my best attempt at describing what I’m doing with Andala. The second was my first sojourn to Sumer, the origin of so much of lasting humanity. And the last was on the significance of visionaries like the dying Steve Jobs, then in his final days. But January was when I got the routine. Compare this year’s 188 entries now. Such a simple thing, too, that motion is the very bedrock of progress; as I alone find a surprise.

The mainstay of what I’ve been up to is, naturally, all Proteus. That tale within the tale I only meant as a sequence of expository flashbacks, and a spot of practice. Well, I got that all right. Quite against my plan, I’m still right in the middle of Marie Chen’s account of first contact. But then it’s not without a fair old pile of words. Proteus, in 55 parts so far, is more or less the same length as I intend Alpha to be when it’s done. Andala’s first proper book is a fleeting epic, so I like to imagine. As in truth, I’m no closer to its beginning now than when January last came around.

And yet I have explored, contrived and conjured quite a great deal of this decade old world of mine in just the last year. Not too shabby really. I expect there is a method to this mad old fugue, even if it’s one I don’t get to know at the time.

What I cherrypick to take from this year into the next is simply the persistent belief in what I’m making and how I go about it. Sure, I’d like to see Alpha completed as I’ve imagined it since the beginning of this century. But I’ve patience, all right. And if you can suffer it, you’re welcome to see what I get up to the very moment that I too realise I’ve done it at long last.

This one’s been cooking for a month or so. And I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. But let’s just think out loud here.

Way, way back when the thought of this whole thing first came to me, there was another member of the central household. His name was Karl, with a K. The idea for Alpha, the first story of Andala, arose more or less intact. Which is my way of saying I don’t know what I was thinking when I devised him. He was the one openly acknowledged Andalan aboard Akidu. And yet either didn’t know Katerina’s true identity, or didn’t show it. I had some notion that he could be our introduction to these people. But it soon enough turned out I didn’t need him, and he faded to oblivion, as just a forgotten bullet in my notes.

Or a foreshadow. As I’m in the habit.

I was thinking of Christopher, Alexander and Katerina’s young son, whose path is nearest to the heroic monomyth as you’ll find anywhere in my story. He’s a vital character to get right, and yet perhaps a little difficult. His parents are easily explored by their conversation, as each is quite the other’s codependent, among other things. But Christopher is short of that line of access. Unless he has a friend and confidant to hand.

Somewhere in the meantime, I must have thought about this and come up with a pair of fraternal twins for the purpose. They were Lise and Carl. I had Christopher playing games with them as Alpha started, but it never really worked. The trouble is the very journey Christopher sets out on. You can’t just abduct your friends, and even worse without a purpose. Christopher is absolutely in the dark as Alpha begins; about what’s happening and what, exactly, he is himself. There’s just not the narrative space for friends to visit.

But then I remembered who Karl was at the outset.

You see, I’m a real sucker for characters who are out of place, and know it. The hangers on, the lingerers, the ill-excused who somehow still are in any case. I also much prefer to write about a family full of oddballs. Stay with what you know, and all. And so became my idea for who Christopher might have along with him. Not just a friend, but an adopted brother in all but name. A kid called Carl.

I haven’t worked out the particulars. One thought is that Carl is a relative, by one of Alexander’s own less than diligent sibs. Though I’m not sure if a cousin works as well as an honest stranger, and, besides, I had Alexander slated to be an eldest brother of three as I am myself. Carl is more canny of the world than Christopher, and the best means for that is a boisterous home life among his own, elder, siblings; from which the orbiting quiet of the Dragonfly is a compelling relief. But I seem to know what I want, plain enough. There will be a way.

So, Carl is a close friend and guide for Christopher. A character to write him alongside and against, a means to capture what it is that’s individual to him, and why we should care in turn. In fact, Carl might well be a strongly sympathetic figure in his own right. I like that he’s a human, before and after Christopher’s transformation. For all that his friend may become, Carl cannot. That’s worth its own inquiry.

The awkwardness of a second son, in all but name, aboard their home and ship. The earnestness of his and Christopher’s close friendship. The new angle on the events themselves that he can give me. Sounds like I’m well convinced. So Carl is in, then. And, out in Beta perhaps, his shadow Lise may still come to be as well. In the same book as Artenzu, no less? Oh but more on him another day.

One last thing about Carl, and just as much why I imagined him again when I did. He has a secret. It’s in the way he looks at Katerina. I’ll let you imagine what it is. Nothing’s easy when you’re his age, don’t you recall?

Little Antonaster deserves a wary eye. So far, he’s been an incidental character in Proteus; the instigator of a single dialogue with his father on the threat the humans pose. But the boy is, if anything, the most significant of the lot of them by the time the main tale comes. Oh yes, Alpha. I do remember that I’m writing it from time to time.

The truth about the Ana kings is that they are anything but an orderly, dignified or homogenous bunch. The ideal of monarchs everywhere in history is to be eternal. And I suppose this is true in Ayana’s legend too, like the statues of Akanai’s forerunners in the palace. But I like a messy version of reality wherever I can get it, and this is what we’ll see in Proteus and Alpha. Succession is anything but a smooth and gracious thing.

Antonaster sees the human impact on his world very differently from his father. The inner reason for this being something I’ll explore as Marie gets to know them both. “I don’t do good and evil”, goes a motto of mine, and I’ll have my work cut out not to make the boy an easy archetypal villian. He’s really not. “Every man has his reasons”, so goes another more common creed, and Antonaster sure enough has his. Some of them are perfectly rational, I’ll be sure to let him have his word with those. But the most telling ones, as ever, are not.

There’s an ill wind in Ayana’s house. One that’s still alive and well come the day of two more children of hers, called Madala and Jocaster.

I’d do well to remember that Marie Chen’s report of First Contact With Andala, aka Proteus, is not my actual book. Though right now both you and I would be forgiven for mistaking it. Strange as this may be, I haven’t as much as started the book proper yet; the one I described at the outset. Instead, I continue with this line of backstory which has gotten out of hand in just the way I like.

You see, there’s something missing from Marie’s version. And it’s not her fault. Marie’s is a fair enough yarn, as I’ve given her a grand old view and the chance to write herself into history. But for all that happens, it is still a bit procedural for me. If that’s the right word. She believes in what she’s saying, and was caught up in it all as her mission went on, but, well, there’s a certain magic her perspective cannot muster. So’s my excuse. I like to think I’ll do a better job yet in Alpha.

Proteus reaches a vital point now that they are at the capital. Because none other than the great Akanai awaits within. He’s a bit of a character, shall we say. Or a fruit loop, as Robin might. He’s certainly eccentric, but also immensely powerful and so respected all the same. I know the nutty king trope has been done plenty often before, but I reckon I can bring something new to it, and Akanai is my only shot. His son is a humourless boy, and ultimately his absent father’s merciless successor. The vicious ups and downs of the dynasty continue on to Alpha, and so it’s right to set them up at the outset. Jocaster has all the sharper bite once you know about Antonaster.

Music wrote this story, as much as me. As there are some songs which describe exactly what I’m looking for; or first define it. Among those I know so far, lies one by the name of In the Court of the Crimson King. It’s a difficult one, not expressly suitable for putting on in the background to the film. But the vision it does make me think of comes in Alpha, rooted in the past we’re just to see in Proteus. Remember, the absurdity in Akanai is not as he is on the surface, but in just how much danger one man can possess.

So there she is. Tani, our first Andalan, shows a little peek of her true colours at last. I’d like to explore Marie’s reaction, but I’ve left writing a touch too late this last night of the month. So instead: to the notes.

Aner is the big thing about Andala. Exposing it is no small feat, from my perspective. Early days yet in that story, but the part it plays in actual Alpha is not for the faint of heart. And so that better not still include me.

Language has taken a front seat for the first part of first contact. I’m keen not to over burden the story with it all, however, while still remaining true to my interested ways. The sooner the translator starts to work, the better. And Tani is due to take up English at some point, which needs a ramp. I’d rather there be two bilinguists in the cast, so I can play some squabbles between them when the humans meet Akanai and Antonaster, with accompanying stakes.

Another aspect to bogging down my story with inscrutable lines (or not, I hope), is the matter of Robin the Scots engineer. I’m probably overdoing his accent. Not that he’s being at all unrealistic — I really do know many people who speak that way in these parts, and continue to, no matter their company — but there’s just as much to be said for readability. Count this as a note to second drafting self to reassess him. Escpecially for consistency. And if he really should be quite unintelligible to anyone, either tone him down or ensure that the narrative makes sense even if all his lines are dropped.

I like chaos and fallibility. Like dirty ships and plots involving other characters besides the purely good and perfectly evil, it appeals to me as something of the ring of truth. So it is with Proteus. They aren’t perfect, they aren’t wise and they aren’t even fully competent, not quite all the time. But I’ll tell you what: even in this early state, they are mine.