Evolution
(or: Where Shadowmarch Came From, Sort Of)
by Deborah Beale
Mr Williams is my best friend. I am his. We have what we call our Grand Enterprise. It's comprised of work, children, as many creative bits and we can fit in – taking care of the important stuff. We're ambitious in a quieter way than when we were younger, not so much out in the world, shouting. We're still ambitious, of course. But now we nurture our life and our business from home.
Tad and I had a business relationship long before there was a personal relationship. And now it's all mixed up: all business is part of our life process. So if I am going to write about the evolution of the Shadowmarch project, the first thing to say is that it has come out of the good working of our life.
Originally, however, Shadowmarch had little input from me, other than, perhaps, some critical feedback. It was Tad's proposal for a TV series. (Maybe we'll post that proposal one day, but not until we're sure it doesn't give any of the story away.)
First it was optioned by a production company called Tiger Aspect. This was in London, when we were living there, and before we had children. Tad liked the people at Tiger Aspect, but after they optioned Shadowmarch there was a round of musical chairs in British TV — by which I mean all sorts of key players swapped jobs — and various changes inside Tiger Aspect too, and what with one thing and another, Shadowmarch the TV series did not happen.
(Somewhere in this time frame, Tad was also briefly under consideration to write the BBC's production of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. Businesswoman-me was glad he did not get the job. You don't earn much money for something like that, and we would have wound up staying in London and so missed out on some key opportunities in California. But Tad sighed when it went elsewhere. The idea of scripting Gormenghast was very appealing and exciting for someone who first read the great fantasy classic at fourteen, and dreamed of what might be, one day.)
In the summer of 2000, Shadowmarch began getting attention in the U.S. Jeffrey Willerth, a producer and actor from Babylon 5, had a number of phone conferences with Tad about putting the project together. At the same time, things began moving quickly with the Sci-Fi Channel.
Which then just as quickly stopped.
The Sci-Fi Channel gave a reason for their ultimate turn-down that amused us: Shadowmarch was "like Xena". Which, sorry, I have to say is just silly. Perhaps they weren't able to say the real reasons. Rejections often don't give you anything real. They're mostly just a person's opinion. Learning this is key to developing the tenacity that any creator needs to survive. Really, there are only two real reasons for rejecting a project of any kind: I can't see it making money, or I don't like it, sorry, it's not something I want to do.
It's also quite possible that Sci-Fi Channel's reasoning was just a demonstration that nobody working in television knows (or cares) much about the fantasy genre.
Anyway — August of 2000, I was standing in the garden when Tad burst out of the house. The door slammed behind him. This is unusual for Tad. He is mostly a sanguine person. It's me who has the temper. I stood in the shade of one of our huge redwood trees and watched with interest.
Tad has just heard about the turndown from the Sci-Fi Channel. He had a lot to say about it. He flung his arms around. He lit a cigarette (he has since given up the habit.) He walked up and down and swore.
Then he said, "Let's do Shadowmarch on the web."
I said, "You sure about all that extra work?"
He said, "I'm tired of trying to explain it to people who don't get it. I just want to do it myself, Deb. Put it out there myself."
I smiled. I said, "Okay. When?"
"Let's launch next spring."
"Mm," I said. "Do we have enough time?"
* * *
At this point in our lives, the female half of the Williams-Beale enterprise began flexing her strategy muscles. Business is what I know.
However —
"I don't know bugger all about the web," I said.
(Brits reading this will immediately recognise good ole Brit vernacular. For puzzled Americans or any other nationality, "bugger all" means "sweet F.A." — oops, that's another British-ism. It means "diddly squat", I guess.) I was using the web, of course, but creating a site? Way beyond me.
Tad said, "Ah, but Josh and Matt and Aaron do."
Josh and Matt and Aaron — Los Boys, as I call them. Every six months or so, these three guys would come to our house for dinner, bearing books and comics and toys and whatnot, and they were always huge fun and they just wore out my sorry ole ass. Their knowledge of popular culture, of all things sci-fi and fantasy video-gameish and filmish and anything you could think of that could be described as popular culture, was awesome (a word Josh likes to use — a lot.)
Tad's known them for a while, but I met Los Boys for the first time when Tad and I (plus other friends) were filming the reunion of Idiot, which was Tad's once-upon-a-time rock 'n' roll band. We were making a documentary about growing up in California in the seventies. Ultimately the documentary did not get finished, but at least it was a great party. And Los Boys came along. Matt was shy and seemed a bit nervous. Josh and Aaron were a breezy one-two act, and they did a wonderful turn as two protective heavies (they're both big guys) when somebody's drunken kid brother turned, well, a little ungracious on me, for a while.
Another thing about Los Boys is, they all know a lot about Tad's books. Josh had even written his graduate thesis on Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, then posted it on the web.
So: "Los Boys," said Tad as we discussed Shadowmarch. "Call 'em up."
I was in the stage of things where everything to do with the Internet and the new economy was fascinating, but pretty hazy. I said, "Okay, they know all about the web. But what exactly is it they do?"
"Um," said Tad, and waved his hands and said hazy things.
I called up Josh first. I said, "We've got a web project and we'd like to talk to you —"
Josh said, "Wow. Cool. Shall we come over tonight?"
* * *
The history of any one project is a mosaic, made up thousands of decisions big and small. A project is filled with happy coincidences, blows of fate, very, very hard work and the occasional wonderfully smart idea.
(Employing Los Boys was certainly one of the first smart ideas. For the record, Josh Milligan is a design manager with a video-game company, producing sites for that company. Matt Dusek is an independent programmer. Aaron Castro is a freelance web designer.)
 |
| Either the site of an early Shadowmarch planning meeting or a tintype of Lewis and Clark first viewing the Pacific Ocean. |
I crunched figures and sweated over budgets. I persuaded people and created deadlines. And I tried to make a little space and the quiet for Tad to write. The business of our lives is complex but I find most things just plain interesting by their very nature. (Except doing the taxes, of course.)
But there was a new challenge for both of us with Shadowmarch. And that was, how to fit it in. At first we thought the site would not pay us to create it unless Tad produced as much as for his normal print fiction.
Now, anyone who knows Tad's work knows that he writes really long books. That's his natural form. (And yes, he can talk about anything and everything, at length, brilliantly, and he's a total SOB to get in an argument with, too.) Writing long means after a while you become prolific. You become fast.
But it began to dawn on us that with everything else in our lives, this really could be overreaching ourselves. There's no guarantee Shadowmarch will ever make money, so Tad has to write his regular books at the same time — food, shelter, reasons like that.
And there was something still more important than mere exhaustion. We have two small children. Did we really want to work so hard that we would miss large pieces of their earliest years?
No. We did not. That, truly, was the line we would not cross.
We paused. We took stock. Tad told me he could comfortably write the equivalent of half a novel more a year (which is still material long enough to be perhaps two novels for many other writers.) So we reshaped the model for the site based on that.
The end of 2000 into the spring of 2001, we pushed on. There was a lot happening all around. Tad finished the very long last Otherland book, Sea Of Silver Light, then toured the U.K. and U.S. back to back to promote it. (During the first days of creating Shadowmarch he toured Germany too.) We invented but didn't manage to sell a toy (we're still working on that one). We wrote a children's book called Lexie Grows Big And Her Parents Grow Small (still working on selling that one, too). Our daughter turned one and our son, four. We had one domestic drama after another — our old house deep in the redwoods needed rather more work than we anticipated when we bought it. Landslide management, roofing, skylights, heating systems — ask me about 'em, watch my muscles flex. We did get at least one really nice piece of news: a German radio drama to be made of Otherland, the biggest ever in the history of German radio, we are told.
But somewhere in the thick of all this, and despite the hard work, it began to feel like Shadowmarch was slipping away from us. Because originally we were launching in April. Then May. Then that went, too — all these deadlines being beaten out by Tad finishing the last Otherland and knowing he would have to tour.
"June," said Tad, "and I'll write it in stone."
"What?" said I.
"We'll anounce it for June in the new book, in Sea Of Silver Light. Then we have to launch on time. Look." And he wrote the announcement into his proofs. It was pretty much the last amendment to them he made.
"June," I said. I told Los Boys.
"Oh, God," said Josh the producer.
And Matt the site architect said: "We don't have time."
* * *
We did have time, sort of. Well, you never put out there exactly what you want to put out there, or what you quite thought of when it all began. But that's the nature of life. (I blame Plato. Something to do with his theory of ideal forms.)
As for these last scrambling weeks, you'll be able to read about them soon on this space. In the meantime, I have a couple more things to say.
For anyone out there who is young and dreaming — a time Tad and I remember acutely from our own lives — of what they might be able to make of themselves in the world, writer, web artist, publisher, producer — them I'm going to try to show with this project how something works (and perhaps how bits of it don't, quite) and how it comes out of the life process of a writer like Tad.
Of course, the ultimate matter of Shadowmarch is in Tad's head — in his imagination, in that marvelous idea-creation machine of his. You don't see much of this from outside. The most in fact that you can see is something like this:
Tad lying on our bed, in the cool of the afternoon.
I go in there and he's staring at the ceiling. Tad imagines most of what he is creating before he commits it to paper. Writing and living in your head is something meditative, and like meditation it comes more with practice, it is a process of going deep, very deep.
I say, "Hey, Buddha. I know you're working." And we both smile.
Really, the only enemy is time.