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[This article was originally published on my blog in May 2020. In it, I talk about how I came to write my strange fantasy story The Greenery Has Come Again. I am republishing it here in the hope that people will become interested in the indie adventure magazine Cirsova, which is packed full of weird and thrilling adventures.
This is my small attempt to spread the word about alternatives to mainstream culture. There isn't just Cirsova, there are many other indie magazines, books and comics out there. Maybe someday I'll write something about the broader scene.]
Link to Cirsova Magazine Summer Special 2020 on Amazon.com
My story The Greenery Has Come Again has just been published in Cirsova magazine, Summer Special 2020, and Iām very proud of it. Itās one of the most ambitious stories Iāve written, and it received a very positive review in Tangent Online, whose reviewer picked up on the most important themes in the story.
In this blog entry Iāve decided to put down my thoughts on how I came to write Greenery and how it was influenced by a range of classic writers, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to E. F. Benson, and on to the weird fictioneers Clark Ashton Smith and C. L. Moore. Yes, strange bedfellows, indeed.
Although The Greenery Has Come Again is published in Cirsova magazine, it has its origins with another publisher altogether.
Flame Tree Press is a small-to-medium publishing house, based in the UK, that publishes a lot of fantasy, horror, and gothic fiction anthologies. These are a mix of public domain classics and new fiction. Iād seen a lot of their calls for submission, and been impressed with their books in one of my local bookshops; they truly are beautiful.
A couple of years ago, I saw one of Flame Treeās calls for stories, and decided to write something for it. I forget which anthology it was for, but they were due to publish it quite soon and it had a limited word count, maybe 5,000 words, and I thought Iād have a go at writing something quickly.
At first, I decided to free associate at the keyboard, to warm up my writing muscles, and not to actually write anything focussed. I just wanted to get ready before getting to work on a real story. I disengaged my conscious brain and let my fingers type what they wanted. In the back of my head I thought I wanted to go for a mock Edwardian style, as Iād been reading a lot of stories by E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson ā more on Benson in a moment.
Normally, I start my stories in the middle of the action, with the main character doing something crazy or exciting, preferably both, and in a very direct style. My previous story in Cirsova, All That Glitters, starts with the main character, a thief, talking to his sentient knives, which had once been milk teeth in the jaws of a demon. You donāt get much wackier than that.
However, this experiment in free association brought up the opposite ā an old man reflecting on the disturbing and spectral events of his youth, written in an old-fashioned style. I was surprised by this content, but I could at least see that in style, at least, it was influenced by the short ghost stories of E. F. Benson, which is what I was aiming at.
Benson was active in the early years of the twentieth century and wrote strange stories of the supernatural, shading into what we might now call weird fiction. You can find most of these stories in the collection Night Terrors from
Wordsworth Editions. He was one of four talented siblings. There was a sister called Margaret, an Egyptologist and author, and two brothers who were also noted writers: Arthur Christopher and Robert Hugh. The Slype House by A. C. and The Watcher by R. H. are both excellent, both with a strong weird theological slant. A. C. is probably most famous for writing the words that were put to Elgarās Land of Hope and Glory.
But back to my story. Another interesting thing about this whole first paragraph of free association is that I kept it all intact. It has made it into the final story with only a couple of minor changes. I canāt be bothered to go back and check exactly what, but I canāt see any substantial differences between that draft and what was published in Cirsova, except that the setting of Wessex (clearly a Thomas Hardy influence) has become Yorkshire. When I look back at it, this paragraph set up the final story very well.
Most amazingly, at the end of the first paragraph I knew what the story was about! I even wrote a very quick summary into the file at that point.
Having free associated this first paragraph, I know what the story is. The narrator is haunted by a dryad on the estate, living in a tree which is being chopped down. He can't save her but perhaps is visited by her at the end of his life.
So that was that. This wasnāt a writing exercise anymore, but the germ of a full story, a real story. I set to work to write it, and continued free associating some more paragraphs. An old family estate sold after the mysterious deaths of the narrator's parents, a benefactor from abroad with a beautiful daughter, a dark mysterious forest, and a tree harvesting machine brooding over it all...the introductory paragraphs came very quickly. Very gothic. Of course, things slowed down after a while; there is only so much writing by the seat of your pants you can do, and there comes a time to let the contents mulch a bit, before working on them some more.
The rest of the story eventually followed in a strange unfathomable way. It was almost a case of art working through me, definitely in the epilogue, and quite a lot in the rest of the story. The āplotā came over the next few weeks, mostly non linearly, often in images that I knew had to be in there without knowing why or where the images came from. Itās the strangest writing experience Iāve ever had. I canāt recall another story that grew like it before, though Iām now working on a couple of other stories that are coming along in the same way.
As Greenery developed, I could see that it was moving more from the E. F. Benson haunted house territory and veering into the fervent religious territory of Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne, with a side trip through C. L. Mooreās world of psychological archetypes.
Smithās Averoigne stories were published in Weird Tales in the 30s and 40s. These deal with witches, love potions, giant golems, gargoyles, and more, all set in the densely forested and haunted region of Averoigne, France, in various periods of the Middle Ages. There's one story called The Mother of Toads, named for a ghastly sex witch, and another called The Disinterment of Venus about a voluptuous statue, mysteriously discovered under the ground, which sends a load of monks crazy. I think you can guess what these stories are like. That milieu had obviously got under my skin. I also live near a thickly forested and historically dense area, so Iām sure my own environment was affecting me too. The woods in the story started brooding more and more as the story progressed, and stranger creatures crept out of the undergrowth.
As for C. L. Moore, her work is full of psychedelic imagery, and she invented the original strong warrior woman of fantasy, Jirel of Joiry, from which all others are derived. Her work is full of very strong women - female archetypes, even - and that imagery and those archetypes were coming through in my story, too. The dryad wasnāt just a dryad, but something much, much more.
The influences of Benson, Smith and Moore explain why The Greenery Has Come Again reads a lot like weird fiction, but thereās also a strong element of Edgar Rice Burroughs to it, too, strange as that may sound. You may remember that Burroughs created Tarzan, as well as John Carter of Mars, and settings like Pellucidar, the lost land at the Earthās core.
Burroughsā works were usually romances in the original meaning, tales of chivalrous adventure. These classic tales of knights fighting giants and dragons and winning the favours of beautiful ladies, were called romances because they were popular in the Romance languages in the mediaeval period. Burroughs, though, was also the master of romance in its modern sense. Every story of his that Iāve read is also a love story where the hero has to fight hordes of exotic enemies to win the heart of the most beautiful woman in the world. His first published novel, A Princess of Mars, set the mold, and contains the Platonic line in any Romance story of any type. John Carter is the hero, Dejah Thoris is the princess in danger, and at one point he comes out with this corker:
āWith my back against a golden throne, I fought once again for Dejah Thoris.ā
Image by Frank Schoonover from the firstĀ edition of A Princess of Mars
No one will ever write a better line that summarises just what romance fiction is in both of its senses.
In a Burroughs story, the hero must fight for the love of a beautiful virtuous woman. As Burroughs got older, his heroines became more than just trophies to be won, but partners to be won over ā though usually the woman also did the winning over of the unsuspecting hero. It was rarely all one way. As I wrote my story, this type of relationship came out more and more strongly, and my heroine is as strong from the start, I hope, as Burroughsā heroines.
(If you want more, Iāve already written about the male/female dynamic in adventure fiction and how essential it is. SeeĀ https://paullucaswriter.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/yang-needs-its-yin/Ā )
Burroughs wasnāt just a fantastic writer of adventure stories and romance in both its meanings, his work is far more atmospheric than most people realise. With the exotic landscapes, strange life forms, and constant threat to life and freedom, he was writing his own brand of weird fiction (Strange Romance?), but set on ānaturalā physical worlds rather than inĀ supernatural worlds. He came up with some great images, too. None of us rate him highly enough for his genuine literary talent. One of those images, from his Mars series, has remained with me for decades and crops up from time to time in stories I have written or am developing, and definitely played a part in Greenery. If youāve read Llana of Gathol, the tenth of his Mars series,Ā and remember the end of the section titled The Ancient Dead, youāll know which bit I mean.
This is the Mars of early 20th century science when people thought it was criss-crossed by canals, not the Mars of reality. On this Mars, humans and exotic alien races fight for survival on a dying planet of dwindling resources. John Carter, main hero of the series, after lots of derring-do, has woken up a group of frozen human Martians, survivors from the days when the planet was alive and green, and they walk down to where the docks would have been. On seeing the dried-up seas and the desiccated landscape, these figures from the past, the ancient dead of the story title...well, I wonāt give away what happens to them, but it is one of the most moving scenes I have ever read, in any genre.
Where Burroughs led, I followed, and that scene has worked its way into my story, but in a very different form, of course. [Added: And my story builds to a climactic battle, both physically and over the hearts of a man and woman, just as Burroughs' works often did.]
Itās funny how things influence you in writing a story. Some I can identify, like Burroughs, Moore, Smith and Benson. Others I canāt. They come from nowhere that I can see, or through serendipity.
In one section of The Greenery Has Come Again, there is a partial solar eclipse, and this was pure kismet. I had no idea this was going to be a part of the story until much later in the writing. After an early draft, I could feel that some things were missing from the story, but I couldn't pin down just what they were, so I trusted to my own intuition and luck. One of the things I free associated when writing the early paragraphs was a timeline that put the story at the end of June 1954. I impulsively decided it was June 30th 1954, and when I Googled it, lo and behold, the first thing that popped up was the partial eclipse. That scene then mostly wrote itself.
The ending, though, didnāt come through serendipity, like the partial eclipse, but from somewhere else altogether. Iāve already mentioned how, after writing that first paragraph, I knew that the narrator was going to be visited by the dryad-like figure at the end of the story, but I never knew just why she would visit him or in what form. There was something more in there, well below my conscious mind, forcing its way out. The story kept telling me, āYou must have this utterly bizarre occurrence at the end of his life,ā and there was nothing I could do to change it. I hope you can tell me what that ending is all about, because I can't. That epilogue was very much the result of a conversation between my conscious and unconscious minds. At times it felt like I was just editing the material that my unconscious was providing.
By the time Iād done all this, the deadline had passed for the Flame Tree anthology ā I hope they publish one of my stories eventually ā and The Greenery Has Come Again was much longer than their word limit, anyway. However, the story was also much better than if Iād rushed to finish it. Iām very happy to see it appear in Cirsova instead, as itās the natural home for weird fiction of all sorts of styles and lengths. Long may Alex, the editor-publisher, continue to produce his great magazine.
You can see I know what I'm talking about when it comes to magic and mystery, so now get out there and read my story The Greenery Has Come Again, only available in Cirsova magazine.
James returns to his family's old estate in Yorkshire after years away and faces a conflict between the scientist daughter of a family friend, and a forest goddess driven by the untamed impulses of nature. Magic and machinery collide in a titanic battle for a good man's heart.
Link to Cirsova Magazine Summer Special 2020 on Amazon.com
END OF REPRINTED ARTICLE
PAUL LUCAS, WRITER AND COGITATOR
paul.lucas0001@gmail.com