While I’ve not felt well enough to write, here at Arvo H.Q we’ve been watching ‘Dark’. No, I didn’t get a surprise TV deal. [sad face] No, it’s nothing to do with me. It’s a German Sci-Fi timey-wimey thing on Netflix. Extremely, clever, thoughtful, beautiful, sexy, violent and exciting. We’ve been binging it back to back. I’d highly recommend it, bring your thinking brain! The whole thing of reading or following someone else’s story that’s been extremely well done, I find extremely therapeutic. I never get that ‘ooh this person’s so brilliant, I shall never write again’ thing. Well perhaps a little, with Neil Gaiman. But that’s another blog post entirely.
And yes, I thought of the name first. I first started writing ‘Dark’ in 2008, between the birth of the two kids. It’s experimental first shapes and chapters slowly took form on WeBook* when that was still a thing. I’m sure some of that stuff is still up there on a dusty server somewhere, but if you follow my SFF stuff, you’ve read what it became. The title for me was a bit more of a shout out about the idea that it’s easy to claim whatever you’ve written is metaphysically dark. Everyone claims that. Especially in modern SFF. I was interested in what any idea would look like *entirely* in the dark. No light at all. People had skated round the idea: Nightfall by Asimov, sections of stuff in Heliconia by Aldiss, Pitch Black, but mostly it was used as an ‘ooh, scary, dark, wooh’ kind of a way, and that didn’t interest me at all. I wondered if heroes and societies could exist in a lightless world and what they might get up to. How reframing that reliance on sight, might allow a different set of heroes with different ways of experiencing the world. I didn’t know if the whole thing would even work. Would there be enough science to support it? Can eco-systems sustain themselves with no photosynthesis?** And if the science did work, would the stories, characters and adventures be readable enough? That, of course is up to you. Dark links to buy are here if you fancy and you’ve not, but this isn’t a sales pitch.
In the end, once I’d finished writing Dark, I realised that it was a lot more about the inside of my own head (having retired from a career as a Lighting Designer, to become a stay at home carer). That all felt pretty dark at the time, though I honestly didn’t realise that until after I’d finished writing it and it took someone else to point it out to me then! And in the same way that the characters in my book explore their world that’s often scary and always unfamiliar to save their loved ones from the brink, that’s what I slowly did in real life too. My daughters odyssey with being a SWAN***, then finding out she has a one in a billion genetic condition, learning to cope with the good bits as well as the bad as we nosed out as a family to explore? That’s another story.
*Pre-cursor to Wattpad. Collective one at a time chapter writing, reading and critiquing. It was very cool and introduced me to some cool people and the idea that I might be able to write stories that other people might like.
**Turns out yes they can, the midnight zone of the ocean and other extremophiles are a fascinating time-sink for the interested! Fab National Geographic article here.
***SWAN stands for Syndromes Without A Name, or one of the thousands of kids born every year in this country alone, with a serious health affecting condition and no diagnosis. Find out more about that here if you’re interested in finding more about Nenna and kids like her SWAN_UK is the group where families like ours hang out .
