It's a first for Tad — he's been writing two novels at once. They are Shadowmarch, of course, and a new novel which he is now finishing (this is March 2002): the working title is War Of The Flowers.

Unsurprisingly, since we began the creation of the Shadowmarch web site in the fall of 2000, things have been pretty intense for Tad. The juggling act of moving between concurrent projects is one challenge. Another is that someone who is skilled at working with the epic, is now required by his own ambition to write the material for two of 'em. Actually the most visible toll has been to his wrists and shoulders — Tad really suffers with tendonitis and bursitis. On Shadowmarch days — the 13th, 14th, 28th, and 29th of most months, or maybe if things are really nuts, just the 14th and 29th — Tad's pretty sore.

War Of The Flowers (I should point out that the title will almost certainly change) is a stand-alone novel, not a series, although it will unsurprisingly be a big book with a quest format. It's the story of a cataclysmic war in a fantasy world that is an urbanized, modern fairyland, a world where there are cities and technology. The technology is pretty alien, deriving as it does from magic.

It's a world that is as beautiful as a summer garden, and as psychotically strange as Victorian faerie paintings, or the work of Hieronymus Bosch. Tad is exploring the darker reaches of fairy lore. There is a huge cast of arcane and exotic fairy creatures. And of course, the events of the novel take place in a city backdrop. One of the things that really hooks you in as a reader of Tad's, is the insanely high level of invention. Flowers has that a-plenty.

And in the larger picture, there is something else happening, related to Tad's on-going evolution as a writer. There's a two-fold path developing. One path is Tad's fantasy writing, of which Shadowmarch is a sturdy example. The second is Tad's experimentation with all forms of fantasy and science fiction — mixing 'em up, turning 'em inside out, and battening 'em all tight to a driving story. Maybe it will turn out to be innovation.

When we talked about the new novel for this article, Tad was wrestling its ending into submission. It's always an interesting time in our house, when a novel is being finished. With Otherland, for several weeks Tad wandered around repeating variations on, IF EVER I ATTEMPT SOMETHING AS COMPLEX AS THIS AGAIN YOU MUST STOP ME BY ALL MEANS POSSIBLE, I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I WAS THINKING, I AM SO TIRED OF THIS WRETCHED STORY. Things have been a bit smoother, a bit quieter, with Flowers, although the finishing of the book has gone on for longer than Tad anticipated.

It's interesting, actually, just how draining the last weeks can be. It isn't the pain of, say, writing awful fates for people and worlds you care about, although Tad like all writers experiences that to a degree. It's just that Tad drives himself so very hard to keep his fiction authentic. And by that I mean, affecting, and moving, and always exciting. Tad absolutely refuses to write anything which could be thought of as, bang-it-out, just-meet-the-deadlines, fiction. I don't note this because it's virtuous, or even with unstinting admiration, because it can create its own problems. I just note it because it's there.

Tell me what you're thinking about, now, with the creation of the ending.

Just, all the things the story needs. At various points I have to pause and let them develop in my head. There are times when I know I am not ready to write something.

After developing the initial story, you plot in leaps and bounds, it seems to me. You figure out what's next for whatever plot strands you're working on. Basically you sit in odd corners with a notebook, or you lie on the bed in the afternoons staring at the ceiling, or you run errands and things get sorted in your mind whilst you’re driving.

Right. And that's what I’ve been doing the past few days, coming to a point where I was trying to think about the end-game of the book, how it was going to be resolved and how it would all fit together. But the thing that particularly interested me this time, was I realized there were certain tropes of mine that I felt compelled to use. A certain assault on the tower kind of thing which I'd used in both Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and Otherland. And I said to myself — But this book does not have to be like those books ...

You can see why people can sometimes be accused of writing the same book over and over again. We all of us have things that catch our interest, that work for us. But you shouldn't necessarily trust them as a writer. You can become over-reliant or they can get repetitive.

What I came up with is, I realized that I could have an appropriately cathartic ending without recapitulating the major thematic elements in the other two stories. But exactly what that is, I can't say without giving away elements of the plot.

What surprised you in how the book evolved?

One of the most interesting things has been the challenge in constructing the fairyland that is the book's setting. I needed it to operate on three different levels at least. I needed the world to be a comprehensible setting for the story — that's the most basic level. The rules that govern this world have to be either self-evident, or they have to function so that they don't interfere with the comprehension of the story, leaving the reader puzzled. If you write a thriller based in the Latvian postal system, you have to let people know right away about anything that is crucially different from the postal systems they already know, so they can absorb that difference and move on.

The second level is that I wanted this fairyland to work on the satirical level, because when you're writing about a parallel society, part of what is effective and enjoyable is the fact that it satirizes our present circumstances. So even though it's an imaginary society I wanted it to feel funny and truthful about our society.

Which brings me to the third and in some ways most important aspect which is that it's fairyland and it has to feel magical. If it were purely a satire, just a funny version of our world, then you would lose one of the reasons people want to read fantasy and SF novels. It's to wallow in a believable otherness, and particularly in the case of fantasy, to sniff a little bit of what real magic would be like. Therefore for every kind of fun amusing thing that happens in the satirical part of my construction of fairyland, I have to remember to keep things also distant and mysterious as well in something like a Yeatsian sense — Yeats' poetry about the fairyworld and the supernatural world is both very present and very oblique. You get glimpses of other-worldliness that suddenly open a crack in the narrative and you see through into incredibly exotic and frightening and beautiful depths — and that's all you need — you just need to feel it and believe it. No amount of real-world mimicry, however entertaining, can give you that feeling. So this was something I really had to work on in the book, to keep saying, but this is fairyland, it has to feel like the place people disappear into in old stories, and they don't come back for 100 years and to them it feels like just one night.

Your protagonist, Theo, doesn't know anything about the world when he's dropped into it — really, it just comes to him with shocking force, I think.

One of the main reasons for having a protagonist who doesn't know the rules is so the reader also experiences the feeling that there probably is an order to things, and everyone else knows that order, but to the main character things seem frighteningly arbitrary. The reader and the main character are then working together to learn the rules, to try to make sense out of what's happening.

What have been the difficulties, this time around?

The biggest has been a plot element that echoes the 9.11 terrorist attacks, and it's been in the story since at least a year to two years before that happened, and it feels like a very important part of the book to me. So it's there. But using it, you worry about gratuitously playing off of people's emotions, which is like using a cliché, and inciting an emotion that you didn't earn as a creator, an artist. Exploiting that emotion. And of course there is the concern of poking at something that is very sore and hurtful.

I didn't want to run away from it: I didn't want to exploit it or over-emphasize it. All in all this made for a very difficult part of the book to write. I expended more energy on about two chapters worth of material than I did on any other half-dozen chapters anywhere else in the story. And I still don't know what people will think.

There's an analogy you use about finishing a story which has always amused me. You say it's like being a shepherd who has let the entire flock out of its pen, free to roam the hills. There comes a point where you realize you have to get every single one back in the pen again.

A lot of the work is — well, I don't want to say instinct because it's more developed and practiced than that — but it's not necessarily something with explicable rules. It has to do with leaving certain things in my narrative designated but unsolved as I'm going forward. It's a bit like when they restore a dinosaur and they do the real bones one color and the fake bones another color. I have to leave lots of fake bones (the place holders for bones that haven't been found yet) in the narrative as I'm working. The difference is, for most of the process I have no idea what the real dinosaur is supposed to look like.

Some crucial elements of what the dinosaur will look like, come in a sort of, Oh, that's how that will work ... But most of the realizations are much smaller than that and oftentimes are completely out of sequence too. I'll be working along on chapter fourteen and suddenly realize, Oh, I know what should have happened back there in chapter six with so and so ... So I'll just go back and make a note instead of going back and trying to rewrite it at the time.

One of the nice things about working, this time, on a single-volume book, is that I can do all of this fiddling without having to commit anything to publication before I'm done with the whole story. I haven't been in this situation for a while! It would feel great if I wasn't so pressed for time, it would be a great luxury if I wasn't doing Shadowmarch and everything else I have on my plate —

We've been making jokes about ambition.

Yeah.

When things ease up, we forget to take a break, and instead evolve something new in another area of our lives. We imagine something, and then undertake it, and it always turns out that what we've imagined is bigger and far more demanding than we expected. And it always surprises us. We always have more going on than meets the eye, and there's a thin boundary between life and work.

That's very much a Deb point of view.

I want to ask you about the characters in War of the Flowers. I mean, Theo is quite intriguing to me. We see him really screw up his life, and yet you pull off a great trick, I think, which is that even as Theo is doing these things, he's so bewildered and confused that as a character he develops a heart-felt universality. Who hasn't felt in the grip of something greater than themselves even as they're making big mistakes? I found him massively sympathetic. By the time the really big surprise comes, you're with him all the way.

You know, I just try to write about different people. I'm honestly just interested in lots of different kinds of people. I just received a mildly negative email, which is a rarity and therefore kind of interesting in itself, that someone should have bothered to write this. Anyway, they accused me of having politically correct characters in Otherland. And I'm assuming that the letter writer meant that my characters are widely varied, in an artificial sort of way, as to race, class, gender, sexual orientation etc. And of course PC also has the negative connotation of something done to avoid censure. I mean, I just don't work like that, period.

With big stories in particular I like to see things from many different viewpoints. Now, War of the Flowers, because it's a shorter book, is more focused on the protagonist's viewpoint, so this time I don't have quite as much opportunity to explore the inner workings of the secondary characters. Therefore I have to make most of them vivid and interesting just in their interactions with the main character.

The fairy-folk are amazingly diverse. I didn't know that many magical creatures existed in mythologies. Some are very strange, very alien. In places it's like being in, say, London or New York, and watching the crowds go by, with their endlessly changing faces and characters. Except of course that these crowds are really weird.

You aren't always that complimentary about my characters.

No. I complained about Renie in the first draft of Otherland IV: Sea of Silver Light. She won big by the end of the novel, but she was so miserable. I mean, I really loved and admired Renie, but that was too much.

I lightened her up — not much — it's remarkable how small the changes are, actually, that are engendered by feedback from my trusted readers and editors. You just need a light touch — you add a sentence, subtract a sentence, and it seems to do all that's needed to be done.

Last question. Where did the original idea for War of the Flowers come from?

Just an image, really, a single image. I was thinking about how most of our mythological conceptions sprang up at a time when humans lived in rural societies, and pre-tech societies. So, what if you were to take that and create something more in line with current human experience. And the image was, fairyland as a modern city, vast and complex and full of dangers. I thought an urban, corporatized fairyland on a big scale could be really interesting. I thought, yes, I'd like to see that.