inner workings
my next conversation on Substack Live and goodbye to the LHC
Dear word explorer,
Thanks to everyone who tuned into my live chat with artist Lisa Laughy on Saturday, or watched the video at a later time. It was a new endeavour for both of us, and we had an enjoyable conversation about our creative careers and Lisa’s process for creating the cover for my novella, House of Wyrd. Cheers to Lisa for agreeing to participate!
You can watch it below if you are interested in finding out more about creative collaborations.
This is part of a mini-series of conversations I’m having with the team who are publishing House of Wyrd. Writing the book is just one step in the process. It’s a group effort if you’re lucky enough to work with a traditional publisher.
Next up is a conversation with writer and editor Marie O’Regan this Friday, the 3rd of July at 3 pm (Irish Time or 10 am EDT). If you can’t watch it at that time you’ll be able to catch up when I post the replay video.
Marie is a writer and editor with an incredible track record for her horror/crime fiction, and for the anthologies and novellas she has edited and co-edited over the past few decades.
She’s the Managing Editor of Absinthe Books, the novella imprint for PS Publishing in England, whose titles have been critically acclaimed and have been nominated (and won) some of the major awards in the field.
Here’s a quick synopsis from Marie’s profile on Reedsy:
… in 2022, The Bone Lantern by Angela Slatter won a Shirley Jackson Award, and Pomegranates by Priya Sharma received nominations for the British Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and won the World Fantasy Award for best novella. This year, Absinthe Books titles have received nominations for Bram Stoker Awards®, British Fantasy Awards, Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. In my roles as managing editor for Absinthe Books and an anthology editor, most recently for Titan Books and Flame Tree Press, I routinely commission authors, work with authors on developing and editing their stories, and put anthologies together. Our anthologies have been very well received critically, and several have garnered their own award nominations. I've also written four short story collections and my first novel, Celeste, came out in 2022.
She has several new anthologies coming soon from Titan Books and Flame Tree Press (co-edited with her husband, Paul Kane), and she also offers a range of professional editorial services.
From 2004 -2008 Marie was Chair of the British Fantasy Society, and was co-Chair of the UK chapter of the Horror Writers Association for seven years. She even co-Chaired the genre conference, ChillerCon UK, which took place in May 2022. It should not be a surprise that she was awarded the 'Legends of FantasyCon' by the British Fantasy Convention in 2022.
I worked with Marie and Paul on my story ‘Faith & Fred’ (which was based on the folk stories around ‘screaming skulls’ in England) in the Cursed (2020) anthology, and most recently Marie edited House of Wyrd for Absinthe Books.
I love working with an editor who is willing to offer perceptive feedback on my writing. Marie is an experienced and thoughtful editor who offers excellent critiques.
There will be so much to discuss with Marie! I hope to touch upon the evolution of her career, the art of crafting a good anthology, and how to curate a memorable list of novellas for a publisher. No doubt we’ll touch upon the vagaries of life as a jobbing editor with the advent of new technologies.
Yes, I know this newsletter has been focused on my book lately. Honestly, it takes a supreme effort not to mutter about it once under my breath, and hurry on to other subjects. Yet, I am indebted to those who have demonstrated faith in my writing by dedicating significant resources to produce House of Wyrd. It’s so telling that once I re-frame promotion as honouring the PS Publishing creative team then it is easier to push past my concern about becoming a Book Bore!
And yes, I am proud of the work too.
We are only a month away from Lughnasadh — the Cross Quarter Holiday celebrated on the 1st of August. Last year I wrote about its origins and how it marked the start of the massive summer Tailteann Games. If you fancy reading up on how the Irish invented the summer festival then you can read it here:
Okay, maybe the Irish didn’t invent the summer festival and promote feasting, dancing, literary events, and competitions of fitness, but even the tiniest townland in Ireland has some kind of hoolie going on in the coming months. My nearby city of Galway will be heaving with tourists in July as we celebrate the Galway Film Fleadh, followed by two weeks of the cultural smorgasbord known as the Galway International Arts Festival, and galloping at the rear is the Galway Races Summer Festival. Most the county is convulsed by the impact of these events, and yet a local village has the temerity to organise the South Galway Bay Music Festival during this period.
During July in Galway it’s mandatory to be merry!
Finally, farewell to the current iteration of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator housed 175 metres below the France–Switzerland border near Geneva. It’s suspiciously like the lair of a Bond villain, and of course its experiments have spawned many a convoluted theory about its impacts upon the world.
As a mythophile, I know that those who delve deeply into the Earth in pursuit of secrets usually uncover something more mysterious than they were expecting, so it doesn’t surprise me that this endeavour has attracted a lot of suspicion. Thus far flaming Balrogs have not heaved out of the tunnels, and pipers have not danced the innocent into labyrinthine caves, so that’s promising! This narrative nicely interweaves with our long history of ‘mad alchemist’ tales, featuring awkward investigators with crazy hair waking up cosmic forces using transgressive arcane rituals badly translated from a half-charred tome.
I’m being light-hearted, but I only possess a basic grasp of what’s going on in CERN’s circular tunnel. Subatomic particles are spun up close to light speed and smashed together to simulate the conditions of what is theorised about the beginning of the universe. Do the scientists understand what they’re doing? I hope so!
The accelerator was switched off yesterday, staring CERN’s Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), a major upgrade.
LS3 marks the most extensive intervention on CERN’s accelerator complex since the construction of the LHC itself. Between now and 2030, the shutdown will involve thousands of specialists from CERN and partner institutes worldwide, who will transform the LHC, the injectors and their experiments into their HiLumi versions, and carry out essential renovation projects across the entire accelerator complex and experimental facilities…
If you want a quick synopsis of the LHC then watch this overview produced by CERN to explain its development (a loooong journey).
Its most significant discovery was the confirmation of the Higgs Boson in 2012. Here’s the CERN description:
In our current description of Nature, every particle is a wave in a field. The most familiar example of this is light: light is simultaneously a wave in the electromagnetic field and a stream of particles called photons.
In the Higgs Boson’s case, the field came first. The Higgs field was proposed in 1964 as a new kind of field that fills the entire Universe and gives mass to all elementary particles. The Higgs boson is a wave in that field. Its discovery confirms the existence of the Higgs field.
This stuff feels arcane and ineffable, and lots of people bounce off this level of inquiry into the fundamentals of the universe.
If you can spare an hour, here’s an interesting video about the Higgs Field:
Let’s hope when the upgraded High-Luminosity LHC is switched on in 2030 we’ll improve our understanding of how things work, but maybe by then our knowledge will already have accelerated into new arenas and the HiLumi LHC will be less impressive...
This is the territory of forces beyond the ken of most of us. Notice the uneasy current in many of our TV shows, video games, and movies, especially the incredible quality of current horror cinema, which is decidedly more surreal and eerie. In these stories our bodies and homes are unfamiliar and permeable. Boundaries are illusionary.
We exist in a field where known and unknown swap fluidly. While pondering this topic this evening, I fell down a rabbit hole that led to ‘Les Sept vieillards’ (‘Seven Old Men’) by Charles Baudelaire from Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). The poet wanders a city and is alarmed by its unreal quality and preponderance of scary characters.
His senses and imagination are alienated by the people and the landscape. He returns home and bars his door. In the last stanza Baudelaire says:
Vainly my reason tried to take the helm;
The frolicsome tempest baffled all its efforts,
And my soul, old sailing barge without masts,
Kept dancing, dancing, on a monstrous, shoreless sea!1
Perhaps in this era we must become better acquainted with uncertainty.
In those wobbly moments, the wisest avenue is to resist isolation, and connect with a kind-hearted friend for conversation and laughs. Best of all is to meet in person, and walk to your destination, observe the elements, hear the birds sing.
It’s a sure way to align the drifting soul.
I’m strangely moved by the LHC’s pause. The dragon sleeps and gathers wisdom.