Hello and welcome to Track of Words, where today I’m handing things over to the wonderful Nate Crowley for a fascinating guest post discussing disaster-driven winemaking, Black Library novels about (among other things) “gigantic, roaring green killing machines”, and the difficulties of writing during 2020 and 2021! If that sounds like an unusual combination, well…it is, but it really works – I think this is a fantastic article with a compelling mixture of dark humour and brutal honesty, touching upon themes that a lot of us can relate to. Author of my favourite Black Library novel of 2021 – Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! – and some of the best, most entertaining books I’ve read over the last couple of years, if you haven’t yet checked out any of Nate’s work then I strongly recommend you remedy that very soon.
First, however, here’s Nate with his brilliant guest post…
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One of the best drinks I’ve had was a glass of port, on a hillside at the edge of the rainforest in Queensland, Australia. It had quite a dramatic story to it, too. You see, the winemaker had lost a third of his vineyards to a huge fire a couple of years previously, and then another third to the thick, scorching smoke the wind dragged across them for weeks. Pretty bad situation for a winemaker.
But, ever the pragmatist, this guy saw an opportunity in the devastation. The grapes on the vines in the smoke’s path had been shrivelled up, concentrating their sugars, and simultaneously smoked. They were perfect, in fact, for making a dessert wine – and what a drink it turned out to be. It was a pretty brutal glug by anyone’s measure, and not what you’d call easy sipping, but the sweetness, the complexity, and – for lack of a better word – the character of the stuff was unforgettable.
Which is all to say, in a very roundabout way, that I think we’re due a lot of great science fiction next year. Let me explain a bit more.
Speaking not just for myself, but for a lot of friends in the same line of work, the last two years have been a really tough time for writing. Producing prose for a living is a time-consuming, lonely, and introspective business at the best of times. And at the worst of times, when even the bits of your life around the edges of the writing become time-consuming, lonely and introspective, it can be really rough on your brain.
I went really hard on work, as 2020 slalomed into bleak absurdity. We moved house on the eve of the first lockdown, and due to the way circumstances shook out, I ended up living at the new place on my own for a few days, with literally nothing except an air mattress, my laptop, and a couple of changes of clothes. In that time, I finished The Twice-Dead King: Ruin, my most recently published novel for Black Library, and there was a sort of feverish thrill to the single-mindedness of it all.
It had been a great distraction from everything else, basically. And so I looked to carry on in the same vein. As the year went on, I spent longer and longer each day working at my PC, and I thought I’d found a superb coping strategy. Alas, I had not.
And now, I’d like to tie this whole thing back to winemaking, in a ham-fisted metaphor worthy of a third-rate school assembly. You need a heck of a lot of grapes to make even a little bit of wine, you see. Throwing out the crap ones, pulping the good ones, sieving it all and fermenting the result leaves you with a tiny residue of what you began with.
It’s the same for thoughts, perhaps. You talk to people, experience things, read books, watch movies – you live your life, in other words – and then all that input gets pulped by your brain as it transcribes things to memory. What’s left is a sort of formless, semiotic soup; conceptual grape juice, if you like, which I suppose you can drink neat in the form of dreams. Ideally, though, you let this mashed and sieved reality ferment in the imagination. And eventually, once your unconscious mind has really been to work on it, you can decant it from your brain into the metaphorical green glass bottles of the things you write.
That’s where the problem came in, last year. All the experiential vineyards of an ordinary life had either been burned to char, or blighted by the smoke. I didn’t see friends any more. I stopped reading books. I stopped watching films and TV. I set up twenty fish tanks, which in hindsight was a fairly persuasive indicator that I was losing my mind. There was nothing new going into my head, and yet I was determined that the way through the whole situation was to keep trying to squeeze more out of it.
It became a vicious cycle. The harder it became to write, the more time I would have to spend trying to write in order to achieve the same results. And at some point, I lost the plot. Now, admittedly, I’ve always worked best in the mornings, tending to get up at 4 or 5AM to work. But as 2020’s bullshit ran on, this inclination slid from the sphere of eccentricity into something pathological. I pushed my alarm back to 3AM, 2AM, 1AM. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all.
I became monstrously fatigued, and had to stay rooted in my chair for hours upon hours just to get a few decent paragraphs onto the page. I was also working a full time job writing about PC games for Rock Paper Shotgun: it was work I enjoyed immensely, but even that became an absolute monstering of the grey matter, when attempting it after spending half the night trying to 127 Hours myself out from under a boulder of creative block.
These were, somehow, the working conditions under which I wrote Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet Of The Waaagh!. By the time I handed it in (and I really cannot stress how much I owe to the support of my wonderful editor, Kate Hamer, that it made it over the line at all) I was barely functioning as a human being. When people sent messages asking how I was, I would feel so blank at the prospect of trying to answer truthfully that I would simply never reply. I literally didn’t leave the house for weeks at a time. There’s a couple of months back there I don’t really remember at all. If I’m being honest, I think it’s taken me all of this year to get back to being myself.
It’s not just me who had a time like this. I was hugely relieved, recently, to find myself in a conversation with a few of the other Black Library writers, in which they revealed they each had their “lockdown novel”: a book written very much… uphill, against a gale-strength wind of mental deterioration. Most of these books are coming out in the next few months – and you know what? I think we’re in for some belters.
I’m really, really happy with Ghazghkull, as it happens. I’m dead set against praising my own work, but I will say it’s possibly the thing I’ve written that I’m most proud of. And from reader reactions to the limited edition which was published in June, it seems I’m not being completely delusional. It’s pretty good! [It’s more than ‘pretty good’, it’s utterly fantastic! – ToW]
But having totally run out of figurative juice to ferment, my brain had to work with what was available when it came to the writing. And as it happens, “what was available” turned out to be “considerable psychic distress”. So that’s what went in.
I hate the cliche that suffering is necessary for creation, because it’s a load of bollocks. But especially in a setting like Warhammer 40,000, I’ll admit that pain’s not a bad fuel, in a pinch. It certainly made for a much more melancholy, thoughtful story than one might expect from the tale of a gigantic, roaring green killing machine.
A much more personal story, too, once you know the context above. When my wife Ashleigh finished it, she said it was the most unorthodox therapy session she’d ever encountered. When my three-year-old daughter saw the frontispiece illustration of Big G himself, she announced the story was about “a big green man who’s crying ‘cos he’s hurt his knee”. Which is fair enough, too.
I hope I never have a year as rough as the one this book came out of. But I don’t regret it for a moment. Because sometimes, when life gives you bushfires, you just end up with a really interesting glass of port.
Small plug: if you want a taste of Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet Of The Waaagh! prior to its release, I’d recommend you read my short story Mad Dok, out on Christmas Day as part of Black Library’s advent e-short series. Focusing on celebrated ork medical professional Dok Grotsnik, it’s tied in directly with the novel, and also features massive ork submarines.
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Nate Crowley is an author, interactive fiction consultant, videogames journalist and public speaker. He lives in Walsall, but will sometimes show up in London if you shout his name into a bag full of bones.
Nate has worked as a journalist, a publisher, a teacher and an aquarium guy. He has a degree which involved all sorts of stuff but basically ended up being about the history of natural history. In addition to writing, he is an enthusiastically crap illustrator, a decent voice artist and a recovering comedian.
He enjoys a good trip to the zoo, creating feasts, and staring into the wasteland behind his house. He loves to talk about beasts and SF and the sea, plus history and films and all kinds of nerd stuff. If you want to talk to him about any of that, he is @frogcroakley on Twitter.
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I’d like to say a massive, massive thank you to Nate for contributing this brilliant post to the site. It can’t have been an easy article to write, but I’m very grateful for it and I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did. Here’s to a great 2022, and lots of fantastic novels coming our way!
Check out my review of Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!
See also: all of the Nate Crowley-related interviews and reviews on Track of Words.
Check out the links below to pre-order* Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh! and make up your own mind about it! I don’t think there’s a 100% confirmed release date, but it seems to be currently listed for March 2022.
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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