Yesterday the fine folks at r/CraftSequence and thehiddenschools.com reached Four Roads Cross in the Craft Countdown AMA sequence. There were great questions this month and I had a lot to say! Here are a few highlights:

From u/BravoLimaPoppa: “So, what inspired the deep sea vampires?”

…. Would you believe, I had a vision?

I guess that’s a bit of a dramatic way to put it. A bit more normal to say, “idea.” While writing Full Fathom Five I was thinking a lot about the ocean and about the midnight zone—the point past which sunlight doesn’t reach. And about faith, and crushing pressures, and the kind of being who could live down there. And it occurred to me that if you were a vampire, and wanted to build a real civilization on Earth, where you didn’t have to worry about villagers with pitchforks and torches, where better to do it than at the bottom of the ocean? There’s a moment when Kai’s swimming underwater in FF5, and almost dies, and she hears choral singing: it’s a bit like that.

And there were already vampires in the Sequence of course; I had a sense that vampirism was less a particular lineage as in the World of Darkness and more of a common bargain or curse or arrangement of potential that might occur in many different places for many different reasons, over and over throughout history, like democracy or cannibalism. (It works a bit like this in the Anne Rice Vampire books iirc.) But vampires tend to steamroll settings: once you have secret immortal bloodsuckers, it’s easy to end up in the World of Darkness, where everyone’s secretly working for the Ventrue (shame I never got to write that V:tM novel, would have been fun to do something with a Ventrue Capital firm (sic)). I liked the Preacher vampires, where (at least in the early part of the series, which I’ve never finished) the few ones we meet are scumbags barely getting by, just like everyone else (even the ancient conspiracies, in early Preacher, are scumbags barely getting by)—and Raz and the other vampires we see in Cat’s orbit had a bit of that kind of workingman’s-undead energy. But surely someone would have started to gather power. So where were they?

I’ve been joking with my dad since eighth grade or so (don’t throw anything out, kids!) that vampires are a sort of local pagan’s terror myth about newly arrived Christians: pale hypercivilized weirdos who talk about immortality a lot, drink blood to live forever, tied to ancient (Roman) power structures and iconography, etc. This was before I’d encountered any of the very good work that’s been done on Dracula and polymorphous Victorian anxieties, or the concept of Dracula-as-technothriller, it was a kid’s shoot from the hip parallel, but it felt like it had juice. But, if we have Christian vampires, and the Roman Empire gradually converts to Christianity, then we have a Roman Vampire Christian Empire. Which! Okay!

The pseudo-Western postindustrial modernity of Craft Sequence North America and Europe did need a Roman Empire back there somewhere—it felt hard to make the math work otherwise—and I’d established a few religions with forms of Catholic (or Episcopal) observance. Those came from somewhere. (I allow myself a bit of fun with Pratchett’s “specialized strings of narrative spacetime” to excuse things like Craft Disneyland, but I try to maintain at least some reasonable genealogy for ideas and cultural forms that aren’t pure jokes. Craft-Wagner implies Craft-Strauss, Craft-Meyerbeer, etc.) But if there was a Roman Vampire Empire, what happened to it? I imagined some combination of overextension and massive resistance. But anyone who stood against such a force wouldn’t stop until it was gone forever (wishful thinking on my part maybe)—but how could they follow their enemies into the ocean?

But the squids can!

So we have a sort of malevolent undersea vampire cult of pseudo-Christians dreaming of the time when they can rise and reclaim dominion over the secular world, waging war against giant squid saints in the deep waters where the sun can’t reach, who see part of their mission as uniting all vampires in their singleminded quest—which partly explains why there aren’t more established vampires on the surface, since they’re targets for both the usual pitchforks-and-torches routine and recruitment by the deep sea contingent.

Logical, really!

From /u/mishiavelli:

“If you had to make a playlist, for either the whole series, or Four Roads Cross, what artists might feature?

Alt Coulumb or Dresidel Lex are both incredibly fleshed out locations, did you draw inspiration for either of them from other cities, either fictional or otherwise?

And, hello I am such a fan, even though your books inevitably make me cry in the last 100 pages, they've been massive highlights in my reading list this year!”

Thank you so much! I’m glad they’ve been here for you. I really care about these people and this world—I’m trying to come through for them.

As for Alt Coulumb and Dresediel Lex: that’s exactly what I’m going for, a sense that these are places where all sorts of people live, places as complex as any real city. Though of course I can only show a fragment of that complexity: the art, as I see it, is to give the reader brushstrokes that cohere into an urban space they recognize.

Alt Coulumb started as more of a dream city, sort of the first thing I thought of when I think “city”, like Metropolis in Superman. Which means, as US-American, that it has a lot of New York—the Sacred Precinct I think takes a lot from the unimaginable wonder of Central Park—a wonder of the world, a place that would be impossible to imagine creating if it didn’t already exist. But I’ve never lived in NYC (though I have visited regularly); I’ve lived in the Boston area for well over a decade now, and that sense of urban geography slips into Alt Coulumb and through it. Much of the street life in these books, though, in Alt Coulumb and elsewhere, is inspired by my time in Beijing, by memories of backpacking in Europe when I was 11 or so, by my folks’ stories about the street music scene in Harvard Square in the early eighties…

Dresediel Lex I feel a bit weird about, since it draws so heavily from a kind of funhouse mirror sense of Los Angeles geography and history. I know L.A. through my partner mostly, who grew up there, and through repeated extend visits over almost 20 years now. But D.L. is also a way for me to work through feelings about Beijing, its broad alleys and its troubled history, its mixture of cyberpunk modernity-with-no-brakes and premodern architecture, modern totalitarianism and ancient Imperial forms side by side. I think it’s Anne Lamott who suggests that rather than trying to base a character on a person you know, which often leads to a flat depiction, base one character on two people—you’re more likely to get something interesting in the interference pattern.

As for artists in the playlist: That’s a cool and tough one, and changes from book to book. When writing, if I’m listening to anything, it’s often to wordless music with a clear beat and a degree of repetition, and a sense of ominous significance is a nice bonus—Clint Mansell and the Cronos Quartet’s soundtrack to The Fountain was the key composition music to Three Parts Dead; there was lots of OC Remix in the early days, and I wrote a lot to Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy sountrack for a while. Recently I got better speakers so I’m blissing out on “real” instruments: I’m listening to a lot of Philip Glass (Akhenaten and the Heroes Symphony).

None of this is going to make me sound at all cool, but there’s a certain downbeat yearning in The Wallflowers’ Burning Down the Horse that I dig and sneaks into the Sequence a lot, and The Killers’ whole “there could be something really wonderful here but why are we all so fucked up that we just keep hurting each other?” thing is everpresent. Suzanne Vega is in almost everything I write, seldom explicitly—particularly 99.9F, “Rock in this Pocket” might be the walkout music for a number of my characters but I think Tara feels it particularly, and I’m not sure I can say why exactly but “In Liverpool” is in there too—a bunch of songs from Solitude Standing also, “Marlena on the Wall”, “the Soldier and the Queen”… Recently I’ve been listening to Noah Kahan’s “Dial Drunk” a lot, and I think the woman it’s sung to is named America, I’m not taking questions at this time. And Jonell Mosser’s Townes Van Zandt covers, and Leonard Cohen, Alexandra Leaving, the late live albums, The Future… Randy Newman… I’m just saying things I like now, and I could go on for a while so I’ll stop.

/u/TheHiddenSchools asks: "I enjoyed Alt Coulumb in the first book, but it feels so much more whole and historied here. The books delve into themes of different cities experienced by different people - was this further exploration of AC deliberate to this end, or a byproduct of the story that had to be told?”

Both? Both is good!

After getting my teeth into Dresediel Lex and Kavekana in the intervening three books, I felt I could dive more deeply into Alt Coulumb and into these characters. Three Parts Dead is a very compressed book: a tight cast of characters, a driving plot, a compressed timeline in which I wonder, in retrospect, how our main characters eat and sleep and take care of other physical necessities. There’s nothing wrong with that! & it’s a very natural storytelling mode for me, building and building to crescendo. But that kind of rapid pace can crowd out characters’ emotional reactions, and it doesn’t give a lot of room for the texture and history of a place. A seamless blend of the two is, for me, the goal: for the texture and character to enforce and heighten the dramatic incident, for dramatic incident to make the texture and character feel all the more vital and desperate and endangered and mighty. So that’s a skill I’ve been trying to develop all along, and was working on through the preceding 3 books.

When I sat down to write Four Roads Cross, initially I thought, oh, I’m going to write a Fun New Adventure in the lives of these characters! Only to realize, when I got my fingers in the clay, that I’d left Alt Coulumb in a complicated and messy and interesting place, and the characters too. I could have hand-waved it all, I suppose—“gee, I’m glad we sorted out all that intergenerational trauma and all those addiction issues and the fact that our head of state was a Really Bad Dude for a long time”—but it felt more interesting and vital to dwell in that unsettled space and ask, okay, what’s next? To do that I needed a more zoomed-in sense of Alt Coulumb’s people, the texture of its streets, its nightlife, its character. I also wanted a bit more of a street-level story to counterbalance all the courtroom and boardroom drama—one of the things that makes people like Ramp so dangerous, is that they care a lot more about their own goals than they do about the lives of anyone they consider unimportant. I wanted a story where that kind of thinking can get you in a lot of trouble… who’s to say who, in the end, really is important?

In the end, the city asserted itself: the book telling me what it needed to be.

“Okay I am trying to step back from the maelstrom of what I just read (how dare you, u/maxgladstone???) and think calmly about FOUR ROADS CROSS.

How do you go about plotting out the different threads (both plots and specific POVs) for more complex stories like 4RC? Did you know in advance who would tell which part of the story, and how and when they overlapped? Did one plot form before another?”

I'm sorry! / Not sorry. I wish I could send you the book I have in my head right now — to compensate. Unfortunately I have to write it all out first.

When it comes to plot- and POV-balancing: the early stages of writing or planning hinge on understanding the characters’ stories—emotional arcs, character development, internal and communal stakes. When I start work on one thread, another presents itself. Maybe I’m just easily distracted! But emotional arcs and perspectives seem to me a bit like flavors in a dish, where “balance” also means reinforcing effects: a sweetness requires some salt or acid to make it seem sweeter. At the outset, when I’m planning or free writing, that contrast can come naturally—but also when it’s time to revise, the big question becomes, what does this story need? What elements are missing, which elements can be adjusted? I spend a lot of time weighing scenes where major plots come together: who haven’t we heard from in a while, who might the reader have forgotten, who do I want the reader to forget about so their emergence can feel like a magic trick, how do these two scenes taking place on two levels of reality (or in two different locations) have causal connection, etc.

One thing that’s fun about series work, of course, is that you have all these tools lying around to address the story need, in the form of characters we haven’t seen in a while, special guest stars, etc. I knew that I wanted Caleb to be in this book, for example, but I didn’t know exactly how he’d feature until I had spent more time exploring the story in the first couple of acts. Early drafts just had him hanging around in Alt Coulumb, and didn’t work nearly so well.

So: a mix of planning and revision, really. Taste as you go to correct seasoning.

“Poor Daphne. I felt for her (and Tara) so much. What made you decide to bring her back? And relatedly, how much control did the real Daphne ever have over her actions and words? Did she truly believe in what she was doing until the thing inside took over at the end, or was she always deep inside screaming?”

Yeah, she has a rough run in this book. The emotional core that interested me between Daphne and Tara was that thing where, you meet someone from your old school again, and they've taken a very different career path from you, and you're each looking at the other, thinking: wait, shit, did I make the wrong choice? The story took over from there, but there's a part of Tara still thinking, man, I could be at a big firm somewhere, getting paid enough to pay off my student loans, not having to sweat it so hard. And Daphne looks at Tara thinking, here she is, actually doing something good in the world. And I've given up--well, she doesn't even really know the full extent of it, yet. And of course there's the shared traumatic history under that as well.

I don't think she truly believed in Ramp's mission... but I think she spent a lot of time convincing herself that the next step was okay (while her reasoning was deeply compromised by the hooks Ramp had in her). This is what the partner wants, and the partner's done so much for me, if I maintain this relationship the sky's the limit for my career and when I succeed I'll be free to make my own choices and do things the right way. I'm not sure about most of this... if you asked me to place bets I'd bet that what I'm doing is at least a little evil, but isn't everything a little evil if you really look at it? There is a part of her that's inside screaming, but a lot of what's trying to hush that screaming part up, is also her.

There are a few more great questions over on the post. Thanks everyone for dropping by!

Oh: and a bit of housekeeping. I’m away from my posting desk for much of next week; I might be able to line something up for next Friday, I might not. Excitement!

Also: I’m in the final stages of getting ready to move off of Substack—for all the reasons, including the recent ones. If you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, paid or free, you should port over to the new newsletter automatically. If you’re a “follower” through Substack you won’t come along. So, sign up for emails below!