By Eugen Bacon
Collaboration is trust and respect. Trust that, together, you make a perfect author.
I’d finished reading Andrew Hook’s short stories in Frequencies of Existence, Human Maps, The Forest of Dead Children and The Alsiso Project, and was hooked.
I didn’t know at the time that he’s a three-time British Fantasy Society award-winner, and he’s since mesmerised me with Candescent Blooms—I can’t stop talking about it.
I was also fresh off collaborating on a short story, ‘The Failing Name’ with Seb Doubinsky—that ultimately became a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, and had previously written with E. Don Harpe (various short stories) and Dominique Hecq (Speculate), so writing with others was not a novel thing for me to do.
And I was already nuts about Hook’s way of saying, how and where his mind takes him. In a nutshell, I was Hooked.
Would you… might you… I broached nervously.
‘A collaboration sounds like fun and something I’d definitely be interested in,’ he surprised me with his response. ‘Do you have any specific ideas?’
I didn’t.
‘When I’ve done it before,’ he said, ‘it was a case of taking turns with the other writer, adding 500-750 words or so and then sending it back and forth until the story was finished.’
Yes! I loved it.
‘Looking forward to seeing the start of the collaboration,’ he said, leaving me in a mixture of trepidation and ecstasy. What the hell were we going to write?
I opened a folder named ‘working with Andrew Hook’.
And started typing:
An Unnamed Story
By Andrew Hook and Eugen Bacon
I was passing through an altered line-up of suspects removed from linear time, but none revealed their wind or percussion, not even a state of mind. What I needed was a shift that happened inside out, outside in, something fixated on call and response. What I needed was a zoom, possibly in never out…
I wrote 908 words, to be exact, including a header that stated:
Eugen Bacon & Andrew Hook about xyz words
The excerpt finished with:
I caught a whiff of cinnamon, muffins freshly baked. Something burnt and nutty: coffee perhaps.
“Will that be all?” piped a voice.
I sank on the bed, too miserable to tip the child—the child!—perhaps a teenager, wearing curls on his head, a tux and a bowtie and the big eyes of an adorable puppy. I put my head in my hands, stared at my feet as the door softly closed.
The blood on the door and the carpet was gone.
Hook took a few days, perhaps a week, came back with a response—433 words. I loved how he’d picked up the story and connected with where he was going:
Dr X was an intriguing nom de plume, an inescapable lie. Regardless of a shifting perspective which nagged at my psyche, I had recollections – memories, education – which scrolled through my mind like a zealot through microfiche. Data, sensations, visions, dislocations formed information I knew and moments I had lived. In addition, those strong breakfast smells suggested baseline reality. Whilst forcing a construct upon my malleable environment, I found I could operate within different parameters. I watched my fingers mutate in the process of extending, reaching for a muffin which changed shape before my eyes. My conclusion defaulted to virtual reality, yet when the muffin reached my mouth there was no sensation of falsehood. The texture was as authentic as the taste. Perhaps it was more likely any hallucinations were narcotic in nature, as opposed to an exterior simulation.
My keenness soared. Especially when I read this part where Hook wrote:
I was reminded of a galaxy, Messier 94, itself an anomaly within others of its kind. Unlike regular spiral galaxies which were a disk of gas and young stars, intersecting a large sphere of older stars, Messier 94 did not contain such older stars. Instead a bright central structure held intense star formations which resembled a bulge forming a ring around the central oval region.
So I renamed the next draft from ‘An Unamed Story’ to ‘Messier 94’, and sent Hook the next iteration. He replied with more words. And thus it was, back and forth, back, forth.
What struck me about Hook was how he sent back polished drafts. His email would be something like: ‘…been busy… found a minute… hope you like it…’ And it would be a perfect write. Where I fiddled and fuddled, edited, edited… Hook took a minute on his computer, quickly read through the story so far, and then punched something polished straight from his head.
Sometimes the story appeared to spiral, and I worried we might be unable to contain it. But it always aligned itself. Finally, I sent Hook what I thought might lead to a neat closing.
He replied in a few days. ‘Here’s our collaboration. Added 774 words,’ he said. ‘Worked it back around (I hope). Feel free to conclude.’
The conclusion became a few iterations of tweak and refine, v0.4ah, v0.4 ah eb, v0.5, v0.5ah…
Finally, we had a story, 5,300 words of slipstream fiction that made perfect sense, and didn’t. It was awesome.
‘Messier 94’ is the eighth story in Danged Black Thing, published in November 2021 by Transit Lounge Publishing.
This collaboration appeared to whet our appetite to work together on something else, which is what led to our newest novel Secondhand Daylight. And that co-writing is a story in itself!
Secondhand Daylight (Cosmic Egg Books), a novel by Eugen Bacon & Andrew Hook.
About the authors of Secondhand Daylight:
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author of several novels and fiction collections. She’s a 2022 World Fantasy Award finalist, and was announced in the honor list of the 2022 Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Recent books: Mage of Fools (novel), Chasing Whispers (collection) and An Earnest Blackness (essay collection). Eugen has two novels, a novella and three anthologies (ed) out in 2023, together with the US release of Danged Black Thing. Visit her website at eugenbacon.com and Twitter feed at @EugenBacon
Andrew Hook is a European writer with over 160 short stories in print, including notable appearances in Interzone, Black Static, and several anthologies from PS Publishing and NewCon Press. His fiction has been reprinted in anthologies including Best British Horror 2015 and Best British Short Stories 2020, has been shortlisted for British Fantasy Society awards, and he was longlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize in 2020. As editor/publisher, he has won three British Fantasy Society awards and he also has been a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. Most recent publications include Candescent Blooms (Salt Publishing)—5-star reviewed in the Telegraph. Find him at www.andrew-hook.com or @AndrewHookUK
