My writing is flawed, but it's beautiful.

The saying quoted everywhere has something to do with veins and blood and paper, and even though I like the imagery, writing isn't like that for me.

It's like...it's like every wrinkle in my brain is trying hard enough to give me a migraine. It's like building a five-dimensional sculpture out of glass. At its best it feels like I can reach the inner workings of the universe because writing success hits my endorphins, not because I can actually reach anything.

I think the meaning of life is subjective: we make our own. My meaning in life is to write fiction. If you'd like to support me, please consider becoming my patron.

I mean, you actually get stuff in return...I'm not about the "give me money because I say so".

All of my patrons will get:

• Content exclusive to Patreon: I will not publish anything I make for you by any other means unless every patron agrees that I should.
• Editions exclusive to Patreon: I will make exclusive Patreon editions of content that I publish by other means.
• Presents! I am particularly fond of gifting goofy flotsam/jetsam, e.g.: erasers that look like food, rubber goldfish, unicorn themed stationery, sample-sized packages of tea, curly straws, NSFW books from the 25p bin.
• Scheduled patron-only chats.

What are you supporting? I write:

• Speculative fiction (that is to say, fiction with an element of the unreal)
• Literary fiction
• Experimental fiction
• Any combination of the above

Will you enjoy it? I hope so. The chapters below are from a novel in progress, "Moonlit", that I intend to sell through my agent. I've pasted them here so you know the kind of writing to expect from me. This particular work has no experimental elements: the concept is film noir starring a femme fatale, set in a clockwork city that I based on Fritz Lang's Metropolis.



I—Tully Hotel 

Hush. Listen to the water. Under the dock, where it slips past rocks and sleeping, clinging creatures, is there a difference in the sound? No?

The water sucks on his fingernails, licks the corners of his eyes with sweet tongues. His throat is open; in his gullet a minnow dreams of flickering sunlight. His right hand is tangled in rope, its fingers pulled back against their sockets; his left plays with wavelets on the surface. His neck is broken.

At the edge of the dock is a pair of red satin shoes; the left carries a flower, appliquéd at the toe in rhinestones the colour of old blood. Water splashes them through the gaps in the wood, leaving kisses on them, marking the fabric and diluting the dye. Where did their owner go? Ah, there she is: hands thrown up above her head, her fingers knotted together, her hair woven with bubbles. Her dress will be ruined.

The minnow darts from between his teeth into the black rocks at the shoreline. She pulls herself forward, arm hooked around a wooden piling—her fingers brush his cheek. He stares at her with fish-bitten eyes.

She has a difficult time getting out: the dock is slippery, and her fingers are cold. She rocks from side to side to get a purchase on the wood with her hips—despite her efforts, her dress tears up the seam. She gets up onto her knees and scrapes her hair away from her forehead with both palms; water runs down her back. She sniffs, wipes her nose with the back of her left hand, then props her knuckles on her hip.

She picks up her shoes, one finger in each, and walks in stockinged feet across a manicured lawn. When she gets to the gravel paths of the back garden she tiptoes over the grassy margins to avoid braving hard stones. A man in tails and a top hat watches her pass, but doesn’t turn his head, as it would be uncouth to stare. She waves at him.

She leaves wet footmarks on the golden parquet floor of the ballroom, where she startles the jazz band into a missed offbeat; the saxophonist smoothes it right over, and the singer doesn’t even notice. Everybody is far too well-mannered to ask her what the hell she’s doing, but she does get a soft snort when she waits in line at the buffet table for a plate of sandwiches.

The phone booths in the hallway have brown, sticky shadows and stink of old cigarettes. There’s just about enough room for her sandwiches if she puts them on top of the phonebook. She eats a triangle of curried chicken salad with the hand she used to touch the corpse—picks up the handset with the other.

“City 0001. Tully 5530 calling,” she says. She ruffles her drying hair whilst she waits for the connection; droplets of lake water and brown dye scatter over the frosted glass panel in the door.

“You have reached the telephone number for reporting to emergency services. This is a recorded message,” says the receiver.

The voices that read out service announcements and other public messages are all very similar: soft-spoken, placid young women. They’re extensively coached and given a shot of opiates before being recorded. Olwen finds them soothing.

“Your location has been taken by the switchboard operator. If you wish to state the nature of your emergency, please hang up and telephone City 0010, where you will be able to leave your message with an emergency services operator. Thank you.”

Olwen waits until she hears the tape ending, then thumbs the switch hook. She jiggles it in a rhythm of dits and dahs; they look random, but aren’t.

“Emergency services operator, one moment please.” There is a light click and a heavy pause. Olwen winds the telephone cable around her fingers.

“How may I help you?”

“I’d like to make an anonymous tip. I’m calling from Tully 5530.” Olwen’s voice is faint, distracted. She’s thinking of something else.

“Yes, ma’am,” says the operator. She’s heard it all before. Her job is to take notes, not make commentary. She receives hundreds of calls every day, and her responses are so meaningless to her they’ve developed into something with their own melody. She’s a songbird: her sentences are sung by rote, and they mean something as a whole—but her personality asserts itself in the trills.

“I found a body under the dock at the hotel,” says Olwen. “I slipped into the water by accident and saw it as I was trying to get out again.”

“Thank you. The appropriate authorities are on their way.”

“Thank you,” says Olwen, then replaces the receiver.

For a moment she sits in the phone booth blinking at the wall, like a revelation will appear there in brilliant letters, out of the wood. In the toe of her shoe is a metal-mesh change purse. She pulls a thin white booklet from it, titled “Blasphemy”; she writes lightly in blue architect’s pencil: “My breasts get bigger every year, which worries me. It seems like they’re going to fall off once they fill up. Like some slow-growing drops of water on a cave wall.” She dates the entry.

She wipes down the phone booth and sandwich plate with a linen kerchief from her change purse. She checks that the hallway is empty before she opens the door. She brings the plate with her.

Olwen takes the stairs because all the guests are wearing evening clothes, and will want to use the lift. She loves the carpet runner; it’s medium pile, but soft enough that she can wiggle her toes and it will tickle her, even through stockings. They seem to replace it often: the wooden surface of the stairs is old and has been varnished countless times, but the carpet looks like a blanket of freshly laid snow. Olwen’s feet have dried; she makes no prints.

She leaves the sandwich plate on a maid’s cart that stands in the third floor hallway. It has a stack of dirty dishes on it already and she thinks it’s unlikely that anyone will notice an extra plate.

Boots stamp the corridor somewhere downstairs. The Que are nice but they tend to panic when there’s a corpse involved. Olwen doesn’t know apart from what she’s been told. She’s never met a Que because if her makeup failed they’d kill her—so she walks a bit faster.

Olwen opens the door to her room and doesn’t turn on the lights. She floats in a cold solvent bath in the dark for one perfect minute—dyes pour off her back and sink to the bottom. When the Que knock on the door, they find room 205 unlocked and musty. It’s listed as unoccupied. They do a cursory walk, and don’t notice the liquid around the rim of the bathtub drain.


II—New Royal

There’s a storm that blows in from the east, sweeps up trash—leaf litter—and piles it under train tracks. It only comes late at night. From the express Olwen sees scattered wet leaves like broken pottery shards riding on curtains of rain before they duck under the wheels and disappear through the gaps in the rails. She draws the dead man’s face chiaroscuro in her blasphemous notebook and labels it Courtney Tully.

The lens in her left eye is hurting her, so she starts to fish it out, but the obnoxious yellow strip under her berth door flickers and she stops. The conductor is standing in front of the door—he’s probably dreaming of breasts or food, hands in pockets—and she can see him shift his weight. Hints of burnt plywood and hickory—he’s smoking a quick cigarette in the hall.

The storm racks her train with sobs; little gusting fingers reach for the snifter of sweet brandy that sits so comfortably on her windowsill, and tears streak her windowpane. On the wireless, some John Q. mafioso strokes a double bass so it murmurs in her ear.

Lightning webs the firmament—electric grey—and the Ria-Metro Building is cast in relief: abandoned, dark, waves thrashing beneath its squat legs. Olwen imagines its missing bronze letters embedded in the ocean floor: a “t” that houses coral reefs, a dash that impales a rotten wooden galleon, an “o” leaking coppery green into a bed of kelp while porpoises use it to teach their pups precision swimming. She sees herself standing in the lip of the precariously swinging “e”, wild hair, skin lashed with rain—staring past the swooping ghost that bridges the river in white marble, blurring black iron wheels and violet trim, back through the train window at herself.

She opens her lips and brandy slips down her throat like burning oil. Her sinuses fill with the memory of spring honey. Courtney Tully is dead, which means someone’s out to break her heart.

Olwen throws the brandy snifter across the room. It scatters across her walnut double-breasted closet. The glass is so fine that when it breaks it sounds like paper crackling in a fire—but the conductor, still outside the door, doesn’t move.

She stalks to the water-closet—a miffed cat, or a strutting cockerel, perhaps—and flushes her flawless hazel eyes down the open toilet, through the tracks, and into the sea. Now she’s entirely bare, stripped of acquired attributes: her head is shrouded in pallid cobwebs and the flesh of her cheeks is held in place by jellyfish skin. She has a whiplike white scar that bisects her left cornea.

Next to the sink is a red silk bag embroidered with tiger lilies. Olwen plucks out a cut-crystal perfume bottle, cap ringed by a strip of brass Chinese flowers and topped with a faceted garnet—inside, a glass dauber descends into liquid the colour of rotting chestnuts. When she unscrews the cap and holds the dauber over her eye, a single green leaf swings over her index finger by a delicate chain.

She must look up to place drops directly over her pupil. Her eyes are diseased—lilac irises, glassy muscle overlaying capillaries—and unmedicated they tremble, as though she has blancmanges embedded in her skull. When she looks back at the mirror, her stare is steady and peridot green.

She dusts urine-yellow powder into her hair from an origami box and distributes it with a silver-backed brush, then adds touches of coloured paste to create depth. She sweeps her hair away from her forehead and behind her ears with pomade into a smooth crop that ends at the nape of her neck.

The comb that puts tint on Olwen’s snowflake eyelashes is ivory, decorated with apples in miniature. It comes from her childhood dollhouse. She dabs fawn pastel on her eyebrows with a paintbrush.

It’s useless to cover bread dough with tan slop and expect it to look normal; Olwen only adds deeper shadows where they’re expected: the crook of her elbow, her knuckles, the folds of her ear. She covers the smooth rubbery patch on her left cheek with matte makeup, then rubs glow into her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose: dust, from pink clay, that will cling to her skin’s oil—scented with attar of roses.

A final touch—one that is sadly necessary—she takes out something that could be a tiny instrument of torture: a wooden handle attached to a metal disc, thin steel wires in a circular pattern that stick straight out. She dips it into a bottle of pale sticky stuff and lets it dry for a second, then touches the wires gently to her cheek scar and pulls away quickly, which she repeats, over and over, until the entire scar has fine, blonde fuzz. Before she added this to her routine, people would stop her on the street and ask her if she was seeing a burn surgeon—now they don’t.

Olwen packs her things in a tan leather travel bag, which she leaves by the door, and pours herself a cup of cold coffee from the tray on her dressing table. Outside the city is beginning to thicken: warehouses and wharves are hunched over the water, causeways chaining them to shore. The storm has cried itself hoarse; the rain has been reduced to a miserable drizzle too light to fall in straight lines.

New Royal, thinks Olwen, makes the only kind of water that can fall up.

She dresses in a grey suit, a black cloche hat, and shoes the colour of bruises.

Olwen’s name is Reuebeck; New Royal, the city—the only city worth anything at all—is therefore hers. Her name is on murky brass plaques and manhole covers. Shadows of dead advertising spell it on the walls of trainyards-turned-apartments, underneath slick murals about tooth powder. The New Royal museum of nautical technology occupies The Reuebeck Apartments on the fifteenth floor of the Ossman Building, and there are three Reuebeck Diners within walking distance of city hall.

She buttons her coat and avoids the conductor, who stinks of smoke. It’s almost sunrise so even though her sunglasses touch both brow and cheekbones Olwen opens a funereal umbrella before stepping onto the platform. Despite the luxury of the train line and the porters’ anxious looks, she carries her own bag.

Her brother-in-law waits for her by the engine, legs crossed at the ankle, smoking a pipe. He’s facing away from the platform to avoid being seen.

“Hey, kid,” he says.

“Good morning, Ashley,” says Olwen.

“Enjoy your trip?”

“Got some kinks out of my spine.” They walk toward the concourse. The steam that slinks up from the tracks plucks at their ankles.

“Must be jolly cold in the lake this season.”

“Not awful, if you wear a good bathing costume,” says Olwen, thinking of her late red chiffon dress.

“Well, look, are you retiring straight away? If no, Ed wants us to go for breakfast.”

“I have an appointment at eleven.”

“You’ll be awake anyway, then.”

“Mmm,” says Olwen, who can sleep standing with her eyes open. “Be lovely to see Ed.”

“He works like a devil,” says Ashley, fondly.

He rests his hand on a panel of the bronze and glass ticket gate; in front of him brass-jointed marble teeth click open and peel back and now there’s a door, where before there was only wall. He steps through into the dark morning.

Olwen pulls her ticket from its vellum envelope—royal purple blotting paper that’s thick and plump like skin, pigeon-wing grey lettering, a pattern of bauhaus shapes on the end in pure gold leaf that encodes her ticket number—and feeds it to the gate. She holds her right glove by its fingertips and pushes her right hand into the surface of the panel. A legion of blunt-tipped pins describe the contours of her skin; air blows up between them to measure the ridges of her fingertips.

If the unique number that her hand produces matches the number of the hand that entered on this ticket, she can leave. If not, glass doors will close behind her and she’ll be trapped until the Ques arrive. Little cogs and wheels turn in the ticket gate—they sound like seawater washing over a pebble beach—and Olwen succumbs to terror that spikes her lungs. Tickets are rarely printed with errors, and her pedigree seems to give everybody in authority a sudden case of cataracts, so she shouldn’t be afraid. Her hand trembles; the wall opens.

She slides her glove over her fingers to smooth away their tremors, and joins Ashley at the bottom of malachite steps. She leans on the copper rail and her coat drinks up raindrops that dot the metal. A haze of freezing water blows at her cheeks.

A pink neon sign buzzes faintly across Third Avenue, still just visible through a hundred feet of thick cloud—Steinway’s Fine Tobaccos, it says, though the apostrophe is struggling—but the ground is too far away, and when she looks down, Olwen can only see roiling black. Far right, beyond the train station, is more neon: a haze of blue and green—unreadable. A martini glass, eternally filling, tips booze onto the floors below in discrete segments; the pimiento’d olive comes and goes as it pleases. The taxi road appears on Olwen’s left, levels out at the lower balcony, and then slopes gently down for another fifty feet before being submerged in darkness.

“I’ll go see if there’s a car,” says Ashley.

Olwen is in the middle of applying lip colour when he calls for her, his head poking out from the balcony below and squinting up into the rain. “One’s just come!” he says, and she hurries past the attendants’ booths to the stairs, doubling back and down to where Ashley is holding open the door of a cab.

She scoots to the far seat and opens the vent next to the window.

“Garden Club, Ninetieth and Steinbaum,” says Ashley, and shuts the door.

Olwen extends her telescoping cigarette holder and locks it in place by twisting the ebony mouthpiece. She slots a bead into it and breathes: espresso’d smoke fills her palate and extends curling threads from her nostrils.

Ashley waves his cigarette case at her. “Sure you won’t have a real one?”

“No need for any more cancer, Ashley,” she says, then, “Don’t look so awful,” when he grimaces.

She leans back into her seat. Behind a complex silhouette of the Third Avenue skyline, the clouds glow violet for a breath, then spit lightning.

The cab takes the exit for the Upper East Skyway, and Ashley packs his pipe.

“Courtney Tully died,” says Olwen.

“How? He was only a little older than Ed.”

“There was a huge fuss on my last night. Apparently he didn’t show up for a ball at his hotel.”

“What, whilst you were there?”

“Yeah,” says Olwen. “It will be in the papers this afternoon, I expect.”

“How he died?”

“Oh, no. Nothing about that.”

“Did you see him around?”

“No—I wasn’t invited to that ball, anyway, Ashley.”

He looks a little indignant. “Strange of them not to.”

“They didn’t know I’d come. More relaxing incognito.”

Ashley lights his pipe. “Spooky stuff, kid.”

“I expected it eventually,” says Olwen. They approach the corner of Mossman and Eightieth and she fixes her eyes on a bank that winds up to the sky. The gargoyles at its equator vomit dusty rainwater into an ornamental moat at street level, and Olwen nearly laughs when the cab gets near enough to see one closely: its eyes are rolled up into its head in agony. No wonder he’s upset, she thinks, when his guts are so unreliable.

She starts when Ashley speaks again. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ”

“Sorry, drifted off into a daydream. Getting late for me,” says Olwen. “The man was a recluse. Something dark in his life. I’m not surprised.”

“Why on earth are you annoyed, though?”

Ashley is too perceptive at times. “Just grumpy. Tired.”

The cab stops. Ashley goes out first—and doesn’t look down. In the second before Olwen gets out of the cab she sees: a stone structure, cut in half, its penthouse and spire floating nearly ten metres above the rest of the building—but then pillars form, like they’re made of rain.

She steps onto the air. On a clear night the street traffic would glitter under her feet, but in this murky pre-dawn the only thing beneath her is mist and cloud. Ashley is scared stiff of heights so he marches directly through the glass balcony to the maître-d’, where there are visible floors underneath. Olwen strolls and it feels like a luxury.

In the lift to the dining room she breathes to fill herself—the walls around her peel away and she rises above the city like a mechanical bird. She thinks about the miles of spindly metal and stone that keep her so far in the sky. Through the glass ceiling of the lift blue fades into a deep pool of nothing, dusted with stars, as though the lift were about to pass through the pupil of the world’s glorious eye.

Somewhere in the dark spins a clacking, grinding thing, photographing the movement of the heavenly spheres—when it lands technology will have moved on and everyone in the world will be dead. Her brother Ed invested in the satellite project; perhaps he subconsciously believes he’ll live forever.

The dining room of The Sunrise Grill occupies the circular penthouse of a department store, and is attached to the lower levels by glass columns—from below it looks like the restaurant is a visiting spacecraft, hovering over a convenient landing spot, wanting to get a good look at the city. Olwen prefers to eat on the terrace, next to the panoramic windowpanes, but Ed has of course requested a table near the centre, where palm fronds cast geometry on his face and keep people from gawking at Ashley. And he’s partly done it for Olwen’s sake—even here, behind ivory leather booths and under her hat and glasses, she’ll be paying out her health in nickels and dimes.

She wants a bloody mary but she can’t have any alcohol because of her procedure, so she orders seltzer water with her buttered eggs. Ashley gets a diet meal: broiled grapefruit half, cottage cheese on a circlet of pineapple, black coffee. Ed orders food—just that, ‘food’—meaning the kitchen will probably grill him a steak.

When it arrives, it’s topped with mushrooms, which Ed scoots to the side.

“Good of you to come,” he says.

“Glad to. What’s it like in the strata?”

“The same.” He never tells her anything. He saves her from the messy business of earning money—as he thinks a big brother ought. Olwen is nevertheless fully versed in his business affairs. He’s currently engaged in a hostile takeover of a conglomerate that made its name supplying pig iron to the parts industry—nuts and sprockets and fan blades—and now is responsible for international shipping companies that carry manufacturing materials.

She watches him dispense with his meal. The Reuebeck children have a gauge, ticking down, counting the energy they consume—when they refuel, they eat exactly as much as they need and no more, just like their mother. For Olwen, this is advantageous when planning. It lends Ed an air of efficiency during business lunches that has served him well. Poor Ashley, a sibling by marriage, must scrimp and scheme to remain dapper.

“And you?” Ed says. “How are you?”

“I have a doctor’s appointment at eleven. Nothing tomorrow.”

“What for?” says Ashley. “You didn’t mention in the taxi.”

“I need another shoulder graft. Not too large—a postage stamp.”

“Hmm,” says Ashley. Ed asks, “From where?”

“They’re using a mesh. The doctor hopes there’ll be no more of this carving-out-bits-of-skin-to-replace-other-bits business.”

“Tough luck,” says Ashley sweetly, and lights a cigarette, leaning back in his chair. “And you’ll have to take care of it?”

“Not at all. They wrap it up lovely and tight. As long as I don’t peel off the waterproof bandage or soak my shoulder in oil I should be all right.”

“Got a spot there?” says Ed, ever simplifying.

“A satellite,” says Olwen. “Left over.”

“They didn’t catch it, hmm?”

“It happens. A few cells come adrift, attach themselves in the surgical scar.” And if it happens again, she’ll have to be flayed over a larger area, and then larger, until they’re wrapping her entire shoulder in cheesecloth like a ham hock.

It’s only a few minutes before Ed leans back, steak divided neatly, the smaller part consumed. “Would you like a lift to the surgery? Which one is it, the one downtown?”

“No, I’ll take a cab—thank you, Ed.”

“I’ll go with you,” says Ashley. He worries.

“No, I’ll really be all right.” She prefers going alone: she shares her cab ride with the city—watches it talk to her through the window. “You probably have something to do in the public eye.”

Ashley laughs. “Probably.”

“Ash,” says Ed, “are you going home? Give the rest of my steak to Roxie, will you?” And just like that, the subject is forgotten.

When they leave, Ed grabs her gently across the shoulders with his arm and squeezes. Their father used to give these same two-dimensional hugs. “Be all right, kiddo.” He pecks Ashley on the cheek and checks his watch as he goes.

Ashley waits with her at the taxi rank. He even holds the doggie bag with panache. Olwen delights in watching his movements: he exists in a series of poses, as though someone designed him specifically for the purpose of catching the eye. People hum softly to each other as they walk past him—Olwen can’t break down celebrity, philosophically speaking, but it’s inevitable that when she’s with Ashley she tries. She knows it’s easier to be anonymous in the lee of him.

He sees her off; perhaps he feels it’s the least he can do. She waves to him from the cab.

She reapplies sun cream and pins her hat. Through her sunglasses, the city is eternally midnight. She spent a great deal of money on them: the front is a camera, the back a screen. They encase her eye sockets; they delete an entire section of her face. She doesn’t like it, but it’s necessary.

She tells the driver to take the expressway. She loves its brass and marble barriers, the clockwork tollbooths, the feeling she’ll die at any second when the cab takes a turn and her window fills with the ground—so far below it’s tinted blue.

Olwen buys a penny-glass of soda from the jukebox in the lift from the local highways. She doesn’t spill a single drop on her gloves. At the tollbooth, she leans toward the window to smell the thin, raw, upper atmosphere air before it’s sealed away by the toll counter. She takes her punchcard out of her pocketbook and plucks her right glove away one finger at a time, so she can authorise the purchase with the pinbox; the pins feel icy cold, like needles, but warm air fills the spaces between them. She looks up while the pinbox is digesting the information in her palm: behind her glasses the field of clouds below look feverish, grey—they writhe.

The tollbooth clicks and murmurs—chimes—her window rolls up, the seal is broken, and the toll counter retracts. Plates lock on the inner side of the cab’s wheels, holding it by the chassis, to stop it hurtling thousands of feet to the earth at the turns. When the brakes release, Olwen’s stomach flies into her throat and she presses her knuckles into her lips to seal in a squeal of delight.

It’s worth the expense; it mitigates the thing that waits for her.