Interview with Hal Duncan

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Q: I've read somewhere that what ultimately became the story behind VELLUM and INK started out as a single short story. Can you tell us a little more of the road that led you from that short piece to what became The Book of All Hours?

There was a story -- actually "plotless adolescent tosh" is more fitting than "story" -- which featured an early version of Jack Carter (as a werewolf) and in which I came up with the idea for the Book. Then there was a long period of writing a pile of stories and novellas before I finally wrote this other story, "The Road of All Dust" which featured a version of Reynard Carter and in which I actually nailed the idea of the Book. I realised I had the prologue of a novel when I looked at it, and when I looked at the pile of stories and novellas stretching back to the Book's first appearance, I realised that in the ten years in between, without knowing it, I'd actually been writing The Book of All Hours.

Thing is, that early story was torched as part of a boxful of puerile crap, but I'd seen the novel potential in the Book of All Hours, and tried to write it. I had this Grand Plan of a four-volume epic, with each volume based on a season and a time of day: Fall/Dusk; Winter/Night; Spring/Dawn; Summer/Day. There were ideas like the Cant (the magical language of the unkin) and the bitmites (the nanotech ink which comes to embody it) which would end up in Vellum and Ink, but my first bash at it as one big novel failed utterly. I was being way too ambitious, partly from having just read Finnegans Wake and being enraptured by Joyce's use of wordplay to show reality in complete flux, partly from not having a clear enough idea of the story I wanted to tell and why. Either way, I didn't have the skills to write the book I wanted to.

So I shelved that and moved on to another Grand Plan. The idea of the unkin had come together as a way of syncretising world mythologies, emerging in my first published story, what would later become the Slab City scene in Vellum, where Metatron meets Phreedom and Finnan. I wanted to do a whole series of interconnected stories in this mythos, stories about all the draft-dodgers and deserters trying to get through the War in Heaven kicked off by the Covenant, humans dragged into the apocalypse. But that also failed; I had too many other ideas I wanted to write, set in worlds that were too wild and pulpy to fit into that mythos.

The Book of All Hours kept re-emerging though, along with other tropes and themes, like the unkin or the Cant, popping up in a Lovecraftian story of an expedition to Kur, or Indiana Jones style adventures in Tell-el Kharnain. Phreedom and Finnan sat gathering dust, but Jack and Puck, Reynard and Joey were constant characters, their relationships played out time after time, linking across stories. Puck's death in one story made sense of Jack's madness in others. Then, as I say, I wrote "The Road of All Dust" which brought it all together. I finally realised that what I'd been writing for the last ten years was all one big mosaic. I didn't realise how deep the links went until I started binding it into a book, right enough; I was sort of laying out the pieces in place, trying to figure out what fitted into the gaps, what had to go, what had to be completely rewritten (which was pretty much all of it), and Phreedom came roaring back into the picture, with her lost brother Thomas as the link between the mythos of the unkin and the stories of Jack and his cohorts.

Q: Have the plotlines diverged much since you began writing the series, or did you have the entire plot more or less figured out from the very beginning? Were any characters added or further fleshed out beyond your original intention? Have you made any changes to your initial plans during the course of the writing of the series?

Because the majority of the narrative threads were written separately, as soon as I started to weave them together into the big thematic structure it was fairly obvious they had to be worked over big time. But it wasn't so much changing plotlines as drawing existing ones out in the links between them, bringing this part of the story into clearer focus here, switching a character in a sequence there. You know how fragments of a hologram contain the whole image but with only their own little area in focus? All of these stories and novellas I had were like hologram fragments I was trying to put back together, so the Big Picture would be whole again and clear. Only these stories were themselves made up of fragments; they were failed experiments which had been glued together wrong, screwing up their version of the Big Picture. So there was a lot -- and I mean a lot -- of radical revisions, smashing these up and recombining them.

When I started seriously on Vellum, for example, the original intent was to have the second volume focus on Jack, but Finnan's story emerged so strongly from the Somme sequences in Volume One, the whole Prometheus Bound storyline of Volume Two just demanded to be written from scratch. Where Volume Three was going to focus on Joey, writing the harlequin play thread as the backbone changed that a lot.

And yet I had beginnings like "The Road of All Dust" or endings like pretty much the whole of the Tell-el Kharnain narrative, plot-points and interactions in which the whole thing was mapped out. There are benchmark scenes in there, like the final meeting between Finnan and Phreedom, where I wrote the resolution of a story I hadn't even written ten years ago. It's weird. I think my subconscious knew exactly what the story was; it just made me figure it out the hard way over a very long time.