The first time I arrived in Vienna, as a jet-lagged 20-year-old on a 6-month college exchange program, I thought…
Well, okay. My real first thought, when I emerged from the underground subway station into the glorious central square of Vienna’s first district, just in front of the stunning Stefansdom cathedral (with its double-headed Habsburg eagle glowering imperiously down at all the tourists, was: Oooooohhhhhh.
And it didn’t get much more coherent as I turned in place, taking in the gorgeous tall buildings all around me, the cobblestones, the delectable-looking slices of cake set temptingly in Konditorei windows nearby, the men and women dressed in 18th-century clothing as they hawked tickets for musical performances…
It overwhelmed me. I wanted to absorb it all.
But at some point over those next six months, the thought became very clear in my head: I want to write a book set here.
I didn’t manage it at twenty, though. I went home at the end of those six months without any concrete ideas except: I have to get back there.
I made it back to Vienna at 22 on a Fulbright scholarship, studying historical musicology at the University of Vienna and teaching English at a local secondary school. Over the course of that year, I came up with more and more ideas for different kinds of novels, all of them set in Vienna and all of them with an f/sf slant. I even finished drafting one of those ideas two year later, my first complete novel…but it was a total mess. Following one family across a century of Viennese history, it was packed full of my love for the city and my fascination with its history…but it just didn’t work as a book. Oh well.
Its first chapter was at least good enough to win me a place at the Clarion West f/sf writing workshop in 2001…which actually brought me back to Vienna yet again, because less than a year later, I moved back to Vienna to live there with my new partner, fellow writer Patrick Samphire, who’d come to Clarion West from his home in the UK. Together, we lived in-between our two countries in Vienna for six months before moving together to the UK…where I started a PhD program studying opera and politics in Vienna in the late eighteenth century. The obsession continued.
And I finally, finally found the right frame for my Viennese novel a few years later. Aged 28, I started the first draft of my novel Congress of Secrets, set at the 1814 Congress of Vienna. It was a historical moment bursting with intrigue and possibility. Aristocrats and royals gathered from all over Europe to celebrate Napoleon’s downfall with glittering ceremonies, balls, and soirees. Diplomats fought their own battles behind the scenes as they negotiated a new re-division of the continent, re-drawing ancient national lines in a war of influences, bribery and broken promises. Actors and entertainers and conmen flooded into the city to make their own marks…and the emperor’s notorious secret police observed it all, picking out bits of burnt letters from important visitors’ fireplaces and reporting their findings to the intensely paranoid Austrian emperor.
It was the perfect crucible for a story of intrigue, deception, and dark alchemy. It was exactly the Viennese novel I’d always yearned to write…but the truth was, I wasn’t ready yet, as a writer, to make it work.
My first draft of that book was a mess. So were my second and third drafts, over the next year and a half. My fourth draft wasn’t a mess anymore…but at that point, when I was 30, I looked at it and despaired. It looked polished on the outside, but I knew it wasn’t right. Worse yet, actually making it right would force me to dive deep into the darkest parts of my characters’ psyches…and at that point in my own life, when I’d just been diagnosed with a lifelong chronic illness that had forced me to give up my dayjob and my plans for the future, I simply couldn’t bear any more darkness in my life.
So I put aside that book, un-fixed. I thought I was giving up on it—and on a Viennese novel of my own—forever. As a writer, I moved on to write a series of light, frothy, MG Regency fantasy novels full of laughter and fun and sisterhood and magic. They were exactly what I needed to get me through my own dark moment. They saved me in more than one way.
But I never forgot Congress of Secrets. It kept on tugging at me over the years. And in 2015 – having written and sold five other novels in-between, and having won myself a life I loved despite the ongoing chronic illness that had taken away my earlier plans – I was finally ready to look back at it again.
I took a deep breath. I opened up the document for the first time in years. I read it again. And I thought: Ohhhh. Yes. I can see it!
I was 38 by then, not 28. Not only was I a better, more experienced and mature writer, but I’d been through my own personal battles with darkness and despair in a way that my younger self could only have imagined. So had my characters…and I was finally ready to tell their story in a way I couldn’t until then.
The version of the story that I’d written at 28 was glittery and shiny on the surface. It was painstaking historically researched, and it looked good. But it didn’t have any real depth…because when it came down to it, when I was younger I didn’t completely understand either of my two central characters. They were both older than I had been when I’d first imagined them, and they were both reacting (in different ways) to real darkness.
I couldn’t delve into that darkness when I was most enmeshed in it. But I was finally ready to do it in 2015 and 2016, as I dived back into that world…and I was ready to give them hope as well, the kind I’d found for myself.
Congress of Secrets comes out on November 1st, 2016. It’s full of dark alchemy, political intrigue…and unexpected romance. It’s about survival and redemption. And it’s set in my favorite city in the world.
It took me nearly 20 years to bring that Viennese novel into the world. But I really hope you guys will enjoy it.
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Stephanie Burgis is the author of Masks and Shadows. She has published over thirty short stories for adults. Kat, Incorrigible (US)/A Most Improper Magick (UK) won the Waverton Good Read Children’s Award in 2011 for Best Début Children’s Novel by a British writer. It was followed by Renegade Magic/A Tangle of Magicks and Stolen Magic/A Reckless Magick. Born in Michigan, she now lives in Wales with her husband, writer Patrick Samphire, and their children. Before becoming a fulltime writer, she studied music history as a Fulbright Scholar in Vienna, Austria, and worked as a website editor for a British opera company.
