I’m completely bewildered and thrilled to say that Dark River has been nominated for best fantasy novel and best newcomer at the British Fantasy awards.
I often think about the way that the acts of writing and reading have a strange relationship to time. It takes days or months or years to write something in whichever culturally mandated way a writer is steeped in, and then it can reach a reader the very next instant when the tweet loads, a week hence when the letter arrives in the post, or two years hence when the novel is edited and published and sitting prettily on a shelf, waiting to be picked up and thumbed through. Or a hundred years later when a curious scholar digs deep into a dusty archive. Or a thousand years later when a part of a city is dug up to build a skyscraper and an archaeologist finds your silly message to your sister and extrapolates an entire civilisation from it.
And as you scratch little marks on a piece of paper or press keys that translate into phonetic symbols on a computer screen or inscribe lines and curves into a block of stone, you’re not entirely sure which of those it’ll be. Perhaps you’re not entirely sure which of those you want it to be.
It feels like I wrote Dark River a long time ago, partly because I’ve been scribbling away at other things since- but in book years Dark River is a tiny baby! When I heard about the shortlistings, I experienced that odd slippage of time. I was reminded that although I spent a year (a few years ago) writing about the distant past and the near future, readers who pick it up experience it in a few hours of their current lives, with all their current experiences and distractions and feelings. It’s a wonderful kind of paradox, and a huge responsibility. No one’s getting back that time they spend with your words.
So to hear that a few people did not regret their hours with Dark River in Shaye and Shante’s company, was a deep blessing and honour and honestly something I can hardly believe.
Now, to while away some hours buried in the pages of the other stories on the shortlist!