The Recent Past - a nostalgic journey

Hengist Journey #10

While writing the Hengist and Colour of Light stories, I met a number of characters who I thought were merely there as a foil for the principals, be it comic relief, a worthy adversary or a shadow-hugging bit-player who had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the spotlight.
Several of them lit up the stage, demanding attention; some had such engaging/poignant stories. I felt they needed a chance to grab the mic and show us what they were made of. And I was rewarded with some rich background detail, some of which helped shape the following three stories as I got to understand more about the complexities of the links between the characters inhabiting the two worlds. Hence the first Colour of Light book “Context” – strictly speaking a bridge between the Hengist series and the other three Colour of light stories.

Floppy Disks, look!

A bit of a change for me, focussing on the nasty aspects – every one of these stories features characters who are the absolute antithesis of the “Mary Sue” characters critics have accused me of writing. Can I help it if I like to see the good in everyone?
Be warned – some of the scenes are not ones you’d want your maiden aunt reading.
I’ve given the book blurb a bit of a Fairy-tale-retelling spin, but it’s kinda tenuous – it certainly wasn’t a conscious effort on my part to do this. But, as people are fond of saying, there are only so many basic story types!

The aspect requiring most research was the timing. In order for the final books to be set in this century, it meant mothers like Lynette and Maura had to have their tales set in the last millennium. It was a challenge to get accuracy with the level of technology available in the eighties and nineties – particularly anything to do with phones, computer games and the internet.

I had to get proper tricksy with some of the scenes – like in the first one where Maura/Fiona researched her escape route in an internet café – these did not exist back in the mid 80s. Hence the short spiel at the start of each story letting you know which decade (or world) it was set in.
I have a complete file devoted to this so I could figure whether Archer could actually use a sat-nav in Catalyst to track Rory. In the original (written back in 2002) no such thing existed. And the entire thing ends before smart-phones came on board – so I had to re-write all the scenes where people consulted their phones in the middle of the pub. So it won’t feel completely modern-day, but it’s a great reminder of how we used to cope back in the day.
It was a proper nostalgic journey for me, remembering all the stuff which seemed cutting edge – Polaroid Instant cameras, hand-held computer games and my very first mobile phone – a hand-me-down from my daughter. And how reductionist of us - all the functions of the equipment on this page are now performed by a single device! Proper Star Trek, that is.