Today is filled with all the usual excitement, expectation, and nail-biting dread of every milestone I’ve faced thus far in this weird business of being a published author. However, today also marks a bittersweet end of the road in my publishing journey. Unless I pull a Pachinko within the next year or two, this will be the last UK pub day Lightborne ever gets.
I loved this book. I worked on it through my 20s and 30s, and into my 40s. It was a way of life for so long that tearing myself away from it took nearly as much discipline as writing the damn thing. Now I’ve moved on, and it already feels distant at times, but the lessons I learned in writing it will hopefully stick with me forever.
I’ve been living a weird double-life over the past two years, embarking on my next book while my first was making its international debut by slow stages. In the beginning, transitioning away from a book I knew so well I could set the characters free in the maze of my head and simply sit back and “observe” them was painful at times. After two years, I still don’t know my new cast of characters that well, although I am getting closer. It’s a strange feeling to be back in a part of the writing process which I last experienced so long ago it’s only a distant memory for me, leading me to second-guess myself – to think I’m doing it wrong. Connecting with other writers is keeping me grounded, but I already can’t wait to be in the 15th or 20th revision again, at the point where “mess becomes book.”
Those are some of my most treasured memories of Lightborne, even now. While publication is exciting and vindicating, it’s also a lengthy process of letting go. And while I still love “my boys” – even the wicked ones (looking at you, Poley) – I will never again experience that sense of mutual habitation that came with writing their story. This is what people mean, I suppose, when they talk about being visited by the Muse: a collaboration between me and the imaginary beings I’ve created, acting not independently of me (obviously) but in ways I can’t entirely explain. People also call writing a lonely profession, but when the writing is going well, it’s anything but.
So I’m a bit sad, but very excited to keep working, keep writing, and celebrate not the last, but the first of many last, glorious voyages of my debut into the world, with hope that it will find readers who will love it and need it as much as I did.
I must admit I love a good paperback. Smaller, lighter, easy to carry, a paperback book feels like a close friend. I love the subtly textured surface and faint newsprint smell of the paper, and the way the spine of a truly beloved paperback becomes grooved and whitened with age. Hardbacks are great and all, don’t get me wrong – but a paperback is a living thing.
So naturally I was giddy with excitement when my complimentary author’s copies of the forthcoming Lightborne paperback edition showed up at my door the other day. I’ve seen PDFs of the new cover and therefore thought I knew what I was getting into when I opened the box, but no PDF could possibly do it justice.
I think someone in the design department at Atlantic Books must have heard me going on and on about how much I loved the gold on the “deluxe” edition cover from last year, because they went all-out with it. Believe me when I tell you, this baby glows.
And it looks pretty great from the back too.
With the official paperback launch date set for 6 March, preorders are of course available (and encouraged!) But for those who prefer ebooks, the ‘Zon is also running a Kindle Deal on Lightborne for the month of February, where you can score a copy for just £2.19.
It should probably go without saying that all of this is coming at an exceedingly weird time, particularly yet not exclusively if you’re American like myself, and particularly yet not exclusively if you happen to also be queer, and writing queer books, and plan to continue being and doing all of those things for as long as you have breath in your body. I am glad, at the very least, that I made some difficult but necessary decisions to start out the year, and intend to carry that energy with me into whatever comes next.
The intersection of my self and my obsession with history means I cannot avoid writing about queer survival under truly intolerable conditions – history is sadly saturated with them. It also means, of course, that not everybody makes it out alive, and those that do emerge scarred, battered, and at least a little bit broken. But we will always have a future, even in the bleakest of times. History may often show us in our darkest hour, but it also offers hope: we’ve always been here, and will always be here.
For me, the most important words I wrote in Lightborne were these:
You must live because I love you – because you must be avenged – because to live is a form of vengeance, when so many have sought to destroy you.
Sometimes it comes down to that: staying alive. Because us staying alive really pisses off the ‘phobes.
And if I’ve learned anything about myself this year, it’s that I get a kick out of pissing off ‘phobes.
I can’t help but want to talk about perhaps too many things in this post, as I know many of us are still reeling after last week. Perhaps shocked and blindsided, perhaps proven right in the worst way possible, perhaps teetering just above despair. Anyone celebrating is invited to leave at this point. Anyone lashing out, lighting fires, throwing blame at those more vulnerable than themselves, screeching “I told you so” as they rub salt into others’ open wounds, is invited to seek therapy.
It feels very strange and not a little delusional to be talking about my book at a time like this. Not that it doesn’t feel strange to talk about the future at all, given how little we can say for certain about it, other than that things look bleak. They certainly look bleak if, like me, you are a queer author who writes queer books. As I discussed at length in my previous blog post, we could easily be entering a dark age in terms of art and literature, an age in which books like mine will become hotly contested objects. But it’s one thing to worry about whether or not your book might still be legal in your home country a year from now, quite another to worry whether you, as a human being, will also be legal: your marriage, your passport, your family, your friends, your livelihood, your joy, your resistance, your thoughts, your dreams.
However, as a number of other queer authors have also pointed out, there’s no sense whatsoever in backing down before the fight has even truly begun. We are already tired, especially those of us who have been targeted before, but I hope we are far from giving up. Now is a time for those of us who can afford to be loud to scream with all our might.
Knowing my history as a queer person is a double-edged sword, because I’ve seen my community in its darkest hour, but I’ve also seen us emerge from that darkness, again and again. Whatever is coming, we have every right to feel dread in the pits of our stomachs, but also every reason to believe we will find ways to survive it. As Marlowe says in Lightborne, “to live is a form of vengeance, when so many have sought to destroy you.”
As long as humanity lives, we live. I’m sure it drives those who hate us crazy.
All that said, I’m extremely lucky to have exciting things to look forward to in 2025, among them the paperback launch of Lightborne in the UK. Come what may, in March there will be a whole new edition of the book out in the world, with a stunning new cover to rival the old one.
And now, without further ado:
Courtesy of Atlantic Books
We still have the beautiful gold accents that gave the original cover such a bold presence on the shelf, but now with a much darker, moodier atmosphere, and even a subtle appearance from Kit Marlowe himself. I chose this design among several options – it wasn’t easy, as they were all impressive – but I loved this one for that rich blue tapestry background, and the vintage feel of the design.
The back cover, I should add, is equally gorgeous:
Courtesy of Atlantic Books.
Those who have read the book already will surely recognize Frizer’s knife peeking out! I fought for that knife, I will say, and I’m so glad I did. Authors – this is me advising you to fight for things you want on the cover. You might not get them, but you’ll have no regrets.
I’m beyond excited to see the paperback in its full glory, as I hope readers will be as well. Whatever dangers are barreling down at us from the future, I hope we’re able to find reasons to stay excited and engaged. After all, the world desperately needs that from us. Our anger and outrage is necessary, but so is our hope, our creativity, our joy.
It might mean the difference between simply getting through whatever comes next, and doing the work that desperately needs to be done: of building a better world than the one we started with.
On the eve of the US presidential election, this historical fiction writer has some thoughts.
CW: Racism, medical abuse, SA
I keep thinking about the several weeks this past summer, just before Joe Biden announced his intention to drop out of the US presidential race, when social media became absolutely flooded with appeals for a return to “precedented” times. Even now, type the word “precedented” into any search bar, and you’ll get thousands of hits, all expressing the same mixture of exhaustion and dread: Free us from nonstop whiplash. Give us boring and predictable.
I understand the sentiment. Our particular historical moment feels uniquely dire. But every time one of these posts pops up in my feed, I can’t help but think that all times have been both precedented and unprecedented, that we exist just as our ancestors did and our descendants will, putting one foot in front of the other as we trudge the treadmill of history. The shape of our times, and of our little lives within them, will inevitably be decided by those who outlive us – a hazard of being situated on the inside rather than the outside of a story.
Were we capable of peeking into future history books, what we’d read about the early 21st century would likely surprise and bewilder us. Possibly, we’d barely recognize ourselves – as would our ancestors, were they privy to our contemporary take(s) on them. Just as myths and folklore evolve over eons – as old tales are rewritten, lost, and rediscovered – history changes wildly based on who is telling the story, and when, and for what purpose. Whether times are precedented or unprecedented is not a matter of fact, but point-of-view.
Still, we, the players on that stage, are not helpless. Our work is in the making of those future historians – in the shaping of that point-of-view. Here and now, we decide what truths will be self-evident in the decades and (hopefully) centuries to come.
Take J. Marion Sims, for example: medical doctor, known as “the Father of Gynecology,” immortalized in statues, medical schools, and public buildings all over the United States. For most of the 130+ years since his death, Sims was lauded as a champion of women, having revolutionized a profoundly neglected field and led the vanguard in techniques ranging from fistula repair to anesthesia. It’s only within the last few decades that Sims’ use of enslaved Black women and girls as test subjects for his agonizing experimental procedures – performed without anesthesia, due to his belief (which many in the medical field still absurdly hold today) that Black people cannot feel pain – began to overshadow his previously spotless legacy.
J. Marion Sims statue located in Columbia, South Carolina. Wikimedia Commons.
The reason why it took so long is that prior to the 1990s, Sims was mainly written about by white men, occasionally white women, for whom Sims’ well documented anti-abolitionist stance, Confederate sympathies, and medical (and possibly sexual) abuse of enslaved women and girls simply made him “a man of his times.”
It took Black women scholars like Durrenda Ojanuga and Harriet Washington to shine a light on the harrowing stories of girls like Anarcha, a thirteen-year-old fistula patient on whom Sims operated without sedation more than thirty times, often before an audience comprised of both medical students and morbidly curious looky-loos. But even prior to these scholars’ work, Anarcha was not some deeply buried secret in Sim’s story. In his memoirs and diaries, Sims himself had painstakingly – and proudly – documented his own mistreatment of Anarcha and other young Black women.
A self-evident truth in the worldview of Sims, and many – too many – who came after him, was that Black lives mattered less. All Black researchers did was simply ask that Anarcha be given full consideration in the story – that she be treated as a human being, not merely a tool for the “hero” to make use of on his journey to immortality. Nowadays, the women and girls who suffered under Sims’ knife are more frequently depicted as the main characters of their own story, appearing in documentaries, plays, paintings, and even, at last, a monument installed in Montgomery, Alabama in 2021, dedicated to “The Mothers of Gynecology.”
Here’s the point: the history we learn about Sims now, in 2024, is immensely different from what was taught just 30 years ago. The past, obviously, did not change. The way we see and understand the past changed, in large part thanks to a wider diversity of voices involved in the researching and shaping of history, and culture in general. Such has led to a slow shift in the way humanity views itself: a long overdue upheaval of who fully “counts” as human in the Western world.
The infuriating truth of the matter is, we are still only at the very beginning of that revolution in thought. The powerful and privileged still look much the same as they did 30 years ago, 130 years ago, 230 years ago, only a tiny minority of whom have plucked up the raw ore of the idea that humanity is a trait equally and innately shared by all human beings, none more or less deserving than any other, and are puzzling over what to do with it. How does this idea fit into their worldview? What’s in it for them?
[Historical fiction] brings you up against events and mentalities that, should you choose to describe them, would bring you to the borders of what your readers could bear. The danger you have to negotiate is not the dimpled coyness of the past – it is its obscenity.
Hilary Mantel, The Guardian, 2009
I can’t be the only historical fiction writer who is also a disillusioned former academic. In a sense, all history is historical fiction, in that all historians make decisions about what to highlight and what to suppress. But there’s a spectrum between “truth” and “straight-up bullshit.” Whether you’re writing literature or academic history depends on where in the spectrum you land, or at least aim to land, which itself depends (rather a lot more than some would like to think) on who you are and what you believe.
Even the most impartial and considerate historian can rarely ever hope to get much further than halfway from bullshit. Read too deeply into almost any subject and you’ll soon discover that “experts” are frustratingly fallible people, prone to contradicting themselves, repeating falsehoods, confusing conjecture for empirical fact, encoding bias into praxis, cherry-picking their sources, etc., etc. It certainly doesn’t help that the field of History has been so long dominated by men first, white men second, and wealthy white men third – demographics generally adverse to challenging one another in any way likely to disturb the overall homogeneity of their precious worldview.
Title page of Thomas Bowdler’s infamous The Family Shakespeare (1818), a heavily expurgated version of Shakespeare’s plays which omitted “words and expressions… which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” Wikimedia Commons.
The Victorians did immeasurable damage in their time, committing just about every academic fallacy under the sun, shoehorning all the terrible and beautiful chaos of human history into prissy parables about the virtues of piety and obedience. It’s frankly criminal that much of the Elizabethan history I studied in school came secondhand from those Bowdlerizing little creeps, forcing me to waste many hours in simply peeling back layer after layer of bias and bullshit in order to reach a kernel of truth, if any had managed to survive. And yet, the Victorians were only “men of their times,” working in the grand tradition of a field developed in service to the moral and martial instruction of aristocratic young boys. “Close your book, Master Algernon, and tell me: what was Xerxes greatest mistake at Salamis?”
Don’t get me wrong – I loved studying history (theatre history, specifically), but decided to write historical fiction instead because I saw a potential in literature to do what scholarship could not: to somehow transcend the narrative imposed by generations of Ivory Tower greybeards and recover the fugitive now-ness of the past, at the point when it was still present. The raw, churning, messy humanity of it all.
Maybe the potential is there, but achieving it is a pipe-dream. Firstly, because books are meant to be enjoyed. For the sake of the modern reader’s comfort (and sanity), the only way to bridge the gap between, say, 1593, when my novel Lightborneis set, and 2024 is to bring 2024 to 1593, and not the other way around. Characters might speak in an approximation of period dialect; certain events might have to be simplified or ignored; the broad concerns of a person alive in that specific time and place will have to be selected based on their relevance to the story and their relatability to the modern reader. In historical fiction, the “now-ness” of the past is an illusion, refracted through the now-ness of, well, now.
Secondly, as I tried to illustrate above with the case of Sims and Anarcha, historical truth is political. Unfortunately, we novelists are as human as anyone else, each of us with our own little agenda, which is often secret even from ourselves. Nowadays we say that “the personal is political,” meaning we are obliged to examine our biases, and correct them to the best of our ability; meaning also that, for some of us, our personhood, our mere existence, is politicized whether we like it or not. Quite naturally, this effects how we write, and what we write about.
Some writers might aim for a neutral view of humanity – a so-called “universality” – but I’m afraid there’s no such thing. Just as true political centrism is a myth, a “neutral” view of humanity presupposes that there is a single, standard, immutable shape, size, color, and kind of human being. Nearly always, this true “neutral” human is presented to us as white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male, Christian, and “middle-class” (another myth).1 When authors and literary critics employ terms like “universal” to describe stories or characters, they are often (perhaps unknowingly) doing the work of white supremacy.
Those awful Victorians owe much of their awfulness to the fact that they lived in a time and place where the definition of humanity was about as narrow as it gets. Worse, as historians, their profession obliged them to be ruthless guardians of those borders. Prior to the egregious intellectual and cultural wrongs inflicted by early anthropology and psychology – not to mention eugenics, whose poisonous influence on the western world cannot be understated – history was the scholarly field most responsible for shaping the way humans viewed themselves. Therefore, it bears enormous responsibility for our still-blinkered view of the past as a string of white men’s accomplishments, in a world utterly devoid of queer, Black, non-European, non-Christian, disabled, and/or women’s ingenuity, innovation, or simple relevance.
Essentially, every human story is political – because politics determine, firstly, who gets to be human.
So much of human history is selecting what to remember, deifying or reifying some aspects and forgetting others. I’m not suggesting the past haunts us, but until one comes to terms with it, the past will be a haunting – something you can’t shake.
Two months ago, many of us were shocked and horrified by images of hundreds of books piled high in dumpsters at the New College of Florida, the former contents of its recently dissolved Gender and Diversity Center. But few of us who had been following the US book bans closely, or who know our history, were surprised to see the inevitable fruits of the right-wing war on free speech and free thought. As Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry point out in their excellent article, incidents of mass book removal, disposal, and/or destruction go back far enough to demonstrate a chilling pattern:
Would-be tyrants have been destroying books for centuries, and once you start destroying books, it’s usually not long until you treat groups of people the same way.
As the infamous Nazi burning of the library at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology made terrifyingly clear, it is a remarkably short step between burning books and burning people.2 And yet, for all that the extreme right’s rhetoric has grown increasingly violent and dehumanizing over the past few weeks, major media outlets such as The New York Timesare seemingly twisting themselves into ever more Gordian linguistic knots in effort to normalize the, excuse the phrase, utter batshittery of what is being said and done. Meanwhile, even historically “apolitical” types are looking over their shoulders, wondering, Are we at the point of no return yet? Has it gone that far?
Reader, I guarantee you: in 1933, people were asking themselves the same question.
The presumptive architects of an American autocracy have made their plans freely available to read online. Those of us who like to know what our enemies are plotting can now recite highlights from the Project 2025 playbook point-by-point. The apparent goal is to “take back” the United States to some illusory, simpler time, when humanity was uncomplicated and unalloyed, when white was white and black was black and never the twain should meet – a vision not far from that of those accursed Victorian moralists. But the “perfect,” homogenous nation of obedient, pious and patriotic white, Christian, patriarchal households for which the right desperately longs can only be imposed through violence. Humanity was never thus, and never will be. America was never thus, and never will be.3
By banning LGBTQ+ books and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (which is simply uncensored US History), the right is testing our endurance for violence. For the destruction of books, and the denial of the right to an education, are indeed acts of violence. In the right’s perfect world, we will be told what to accept as “truth,” and forbidden to question it. There will be no historical fiction, only fictional history.
… he who has been treated as the devil, recognizes the devil when they meet.
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
It’s no accident that history and literature are often among the first targets of tyrants. Throughout the tumultuous Tudor era, in which my novel Lightborne is set, theatres, schools and universities became political and sometimes literal battlegrounds as each new religious binge or purge rocked England’s foundations. With the country swinging from Protestant to Catholic to Protestant again, artists and educators frequently found themselves caught in the crosshairs for failing to obey the current dogma, whatever it happened to be. Some conformed, but others suffered horrendous fates. Lightborne is, of course, about one of the most famous dissenters of that age: queer poet, possible spy, and accused heretic, Christopher Marlowe.
Marlowe is now often known for the goriness of his plays, but what truly defines him as a writer was his obsession with power: how it was obtained, defended, employed as a hammer against ordinary people; how power, in its fierce need for ceaseless expansion, could crush whole civilizations in its path. Contrary to the ruling doctrine of his day that power was a gift endowed by God upon those most deserving, Marlowe’s plays suggested, rather, that power was a deadly weapon, won not through one’s innate virtue but through greed, megalomania, venality, and bloodshed.
Under the rule of Elizabeth I, who, as both Head of State and Head of the Church, demanded cultish devotion from her subjects, this was an extremely dangerous position to take, and one that may very well have cost Marlowe his life. Perhaps it was his experiences in espionage that “radicalized” him, as we might put it today; or perhaps it was simply his life as a queer man working in the rough-and-tumble world of the Elizabethan theatre – not the glamorous lifestyle we might think of now, but a precarious, marginal existence, likened in its day to sex work. Either way, Marlowe, like so many who came both before and after him, would have often found himself forced to choose between living freely, or simply living another day.
I dearly hope that one day, we’ll no longer have to concern ourselves with the same fears our ancestors faced 400 years ago. I hope for a future with fewer impossible choices in the name of basic survival.
But that hope feels more tenuous by the day. The Tudor monarchs and Donald Trump may bear little resemblance to one another at the surface, but both arise out of the same vicious impulses: to crush dissent without mercy, to villainize the vulnerable, to pander to grotesque wealth, to self-style as demigods, to reward violence and cruelty, to criminalize critical thought, to censor art and education, to undermine fact, to enforce religious conformity, and to make brutal examples of any who oppose them. Different yet equally terrifying tyrants, with different yet equally ridiculous hair.
Now, in our minute and perishing present, we risk becoming the intellectual property of bigots and autocrats, who will ensure the future remembers us as best suits their narrative. For many, this means losing access to our own humanity, a distinction which far too many human beings are still denied. To be Black or brown, queer or trans, an immigrant, non-Christian, disabled, working-class, unhoused, or certainly, Palestinian – to be in any way distant from historical power and privilege – is to be rendered into historical fiction while you are still alive, written out of your own story and into the shadows of some grand, artificial narrative, at best as villains and bogeymen, at worst as silence, as the blank spaces between words.
What greater threat is there to humanity than the desire to erase our history, our curiosity, our creativity, our defiance, our resilience, our joy? What greater evil is there than dehumanization?
And what are we going to do about it, while we still can?
If you’ll forgive me nerding-out here for a sec, the notion of class universality in literature goes way back as well. Take Everyman, a play printed in 1530 but possibly much older. As the title suggests, audiences are meant to interpret the main character as a universal representation of “man,” although in the play he is clearly depicted as a person of wealth and resources – much unlike the vast majority of people alive in in the 16th century, who existed in a state of indentured servitude. ↩︎
I’m echoing Heinrich Heine here, whose book Almansor was among those burned, and contained the words, “Where they burn books, they’ll burn people too.” ↩︎
“No,” you’ll say, “‘America’ is in fact a nation built upon the blood and bones of colonized and enslaved peoples” – but of course, those people were here, and still are, and are more than their suffering. We can care about justice for the dead without being apathetic to the living. ↩︎
It’s summer, 1997. My sixteen-year-old self is in their room, on the phone with their best friend, who says she isn’t interested in being friends anymore.
(This is a conversation I’ve been dreading, having sensed it coming for months – the gradual tapering off of phone calls, the resignation in her voice when I cancel plans, again. My best friend won’t fight for me. Truth is, I don’t even want her to.)
She says, “It seems like writing a book is more important to you than having friends.”
At sixteen, I didn’t have a lot of friends to spare. For starters, though I attended high school in downtown Pittsburgh I lived way out in what everyone referred to as “farm country,” a two hour bus ride away. And then there was the truly unconventional way I spent my free time. Every afternoon, as soon as I got home from school, I’d rush upstairs to my desk and barely move for the rest of the night. I was the only person I knew who wrote books – for fun.
It certainly couldn’t have looked like fun, from the outside. Most nights I ate dinner at my desk like some sad corporate drudge, squeezing in every last minute I could. Some time after midnight I’d crash into bed, get maybe four hours of sleep in before my mother woke me by shouting my name downstairs. Then another two hours to school, in the dark, during which I might write six pages in my head, tucking them into a mental folder to be opened again at the end of the day.
God how I miss that superpower now: the ability to hold whole texts in my memory, to summon them up hours or even days later with all the revisions and additions intact. It would really come in handy.
It came at a cost, of course. I expended so much mental energy keeping stories on ice that I had little left over for “normal” sixteen-year-old concerns. I was emphatically not a “normal girl,” and proud of it. But everything I knew about girlhood came from stories I absorbed through books and media, which were nothing at all like my reality. Girl stories, I thought, were about going to the mall, vying for the attention of boys and counting calories, despite the heroine always being thin, blonde, popular; or maybe unpopular but thin anyway, pretty if she takes her glasses off. Before the story ended, she would learn lessons about the importance of loyalty, forgiveness, sacrifice; the transformative power of a new dress, the transformative power of dropping five pounds.
Above all, in every story, the girls were always surrounded by friends, typically three or four, each with her own small, inoffensive quirks, who were there when the heroine’s story began and would be there till the end, standing by her side with blank smiles, their own stories (if they had them) tidily and expediently resolved.
In hindsight, I think girl stories made me uncomfortable because they were all about being visible, about being consumed. The heroine survives or triumphs because she steps out into the world with arms wide open, having done the hard work of changing herself to please others, or (more rarely) the even harder work of accepting herself.
You could say that girl stories are often “coming out” stories.
Girls almost never figured into the stories I wrote at sixteen. The book I’d spent my whole summer working on, instead of hanging out with my best friend, was a sprawling bildungsroman, loosely based on a true story, about an autistic painter who escapes a Soviet mental institution and defects to the United States. The next summer it would be a historical thriller set in 1899 about a traumatized gay man who builds a vast city underneath Manhattan as a respite from the surface world. After that, there would be a fantasy trilogy in which Lucifer and Jesus Christ are the same entity, and in order to save humanity, they must rally angels and demons alike to kill a smite-happy God.
All my stories were about escaping, defecting, retreating, un-making, un-doing. They were the opposite of “coming out.”
On a class trip in 1997, looking like a roly-poly Robert Smith.
At sixteen, I didn’t yet know I was queer. Correction: I’d known I was queer even before I’d ever heard the word, but over time I’d managed to wipe that knowledge from my mind. It was a matter of survival. I lived in a town with more churches than supermarkets. Not long before that fateful phone call with my best friend, I’d had to switch schools for the second time in four years because I was acting out, destroying school property, self-harming. The first time, I had been bullied so badly the teachers themselves had suggested my parents find another school for me – I had been essentially run out of my home town, or at least my public school district.
At sixteen, I didn’t yet know I was queer, because even though I compulsively wrote characters who loved or existed unconventionally, changed genders or were genderless, I didn’t live in a world where queer was something I could be. Queer was for other people. (It was the 1990s, so, tragic, doomed people.) But writing was a place where I could safely try on different versions of myself. Some of my characters were parts I stepped into as if for the stage. Others stepped into me. Gradually, I came to recognize which ones brought me strength, or confidence. I started to crave their visitations, to grieve them when they were gone.
My senior year of college, one character would set up shop in my head, and not leave until I’d done him justice. An Elizabethan playwright whose name I’d heard in my early teens, and whose story I’d never been able to forget – Christopher Marlowe – came storming out of one of my mental folders, dragging four-hundred years’ worth of queer rage at having to escape, to hide, to un-make ourselves along with him.
Ultimately, it would take me twenty years of multiple false-starts, failed attempts and “life stuff” delays, but when the dust finally settled, I would be holding Lightborne, my first published book. And I would not be alone: standing to either side of me would be the friends who had never stopped cheering me on, the fellow writers who gave me their time, the partner who gave me all the love and patience I could possibly ask for. I would not be alone in the dark any longer.
Up in my bedroom on the old cordless phone, my sixteen-year-old self has no idea how long it will take, or how much will be lost and gained along the way. They can’t imagine going more than a day without writing, but being published isn’t necessarily part of the plan. They write to live.
When their best friend says, “writing a book is more important to you than having friends,” she sounds as if she pities them. Maybe it is sad. A sixteen-year-old kid who spends all their free time locked away in a room, and who, to be honest, has only one friend in the world. Reality is, it’s 1997 and this kid should be begging their parents for a pager or Alanis Morissette tickets; reality is, this kid survives one day at a time, by pretending they are a stateless refugee, or the queer king of an underground realm, or some half-divine, half-demonic creature, at war with an unjust God. Reality is, this kid survives by being anything but what the world sees when it looks at them.
So, sixteen-year-old me tells their friend, yes – writing a book is more important to them.
And their heart sinks as they say this, realizing they can never take it back. But after sitting with the dread for a few minutes, in the silence after they hang up the phone, it dissipates. They’re at their desk, in their room. Their book is on the screen in front of them, flickering white, like a hearth that burns cold.
I want to tell them: twenty-seven years from now, I promise you, it will have been worth it.
Not because you’ll publish a book.
Because you’ll find out who your real friends are.
Sometimes, book promo can actually be fun! Case in point: during my recent trip to London, I spent two days visiting some of the sites featured in Lightborne, from St. Helen’s Bishopsgate to Seething Lane, location of the Privy Court (Elizabethan MI5); from the Rose Playhouse to Deptford Strand, and Kit Marlowe’s final resting place.
I put it all together into two short videos which I’m posting below for the non-Instagrammers and -TikTokkers among us (seriously, all my respect).
There’s a slight misconception that all of medieval and early modern London has been lost, what with the fire of 1666, the Blitz, etc. In fact, a number of buildings survive, along with traces of the old neighbourhoods preserved in names, the layout of streets, even sometimes quite literally in basements. Please join me as I take you on a tour of some of these places, and offer a few brief insights into their connection to Christopher Marlowe’s story…
People who follow me on social media are sure to have noticed my daily Lightborne Chronology posts over the past few weeks, where I’ve been sharing historical tidbits alongside excerpts from the novel. We started on the 12th of May 2024, when, 431 years ago in 1593, Christopher Marlowe’s roommate and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested on suspicion of heresy, jump-starting the events of the book. We end, naturally, on the anniversary of Marlowe’s untimely death in Deptford, on 30th May – with a number of questions left unanswered.
For anyone cool enough to stay off social media (I tip my hat to you), or those who want to revisit the whole series in one convenient place, scroll down and click the arrows on the sides of each image to flip between the slides. Enjoy learning a little bit about Ingram Frizer, Robin Poley, Thomas Walsingham, early modern London, and of course, our protagonist Kit Marlowe, and the enduring mysteries surrounding his life and death that inspired Lightborne.
I have only a few words, and most of them are gibberish. Lightborne has been given this brief but amazing review from Nick Rennison, author of 1922: Scenes From A Turbulent Year and Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography.
Obtaining reviews in mainstream papers requires a monumental effort mixed with pure dumb luck, and is a resource many authors are shut out from, whether for lack of connections or industry bias against indie published writers. I feel incredibly fortunate to have managed to worm my way in, thanks entirely to the hard work of my publicist at Atlantic Books.
Good press can certainly help sell books, but this is a fickle business, so we’re still in “wait and see” mode. Reviews from readers are naturally one of the best, if not the best determinant of a book’s success, so to anyone out there who has bought and read the book, please do leave your review on sites like Goodreads, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. (Even if it wasn’t for you – reviews are to help other readers decide whether the book is right for them. So help your fellow readers out!)
As for me, I’m going to take a short break from biting my nails, and throw myself into the best cure for debut author anxiety – working on the Next Book….!
Last week, I traveled to London to see my book off into the world and to revisit a few of the locations from the novel, some of which I hadn’t managed to see in person since the early days of research. Call it a pilgrimage. While there was no particular requirement for me to visit London last week, it felt wrong not to be there when Lightborne finally hit the shelves in the city that had inspired me for the past 20 years.
Luckily for me, I have a wonderful publishing team at Atlantic Books, who seemed to know exactly how to celebrate the Big Day. After giving me the full star treatment at their offices in Bloomsbury, they swept me off to the legendary and venerable Gay’s the Word, the UK’s oldest queer bookshop, for a signing and some photos.
Me with Jim MacSweeney, Manager of Gay’s the Word since 1989, looking as if he’s about to ask me what I’m doing standing in front of his shop. You can just see Lightborne by my right elbow! Photo by Laura O’Donnell.
I can’t begin to express how exciting it was to step behind the desk at Gay’s the Word, a staple in London’s queer community for 40 years – nor, for that matter, can I tell you what went through my head when I first saw Jim and Uli putting Lightborne on the shelves. There was such a whirlwind of emotions that the only moment I remember with true clarity is when I sat down to do my signing and noticed a picture of queer artist, author, AIDS activist and personal hero David Wojnarowicz looking down on me from the wall above. There came a singularly strange, out-of-body sensation, as if I were watching myself from across the room.
Photo by Laura O’Donnell.
It’s one thing to write about history, quite another to touch it. To enter it, even, for the briefest of moments. Gay’s the Word is one of those places made all the more sacred by having survived so many attempts to destroy it, much like the queer community it serves. Opened on the brink of the AIDS crisis, raided under “obscenity” laws, threatened with closure, its tenacity in the face of hardship and ignorance is every bit as inspirational as the lives of people like Wojnarowicz and his contemporaries Keith Haring, Candy Darling, Angie Xtravaganza, Peter Hujar, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera – every bit as inspirational as a life like Kit Marlowe’s, queer before “queer” was even a thing. I don’t know whether it’s possible to top the feeling of knowing that I have my own little corner in such a space, for however long it lasts.
They took RuPaul’s House of Hidden Meanings off the shelves for this photo-op, but I’m not bragging. Photo by Laura O’Donnell.
As part of promotional efforts, while in London I also had to take myself and my very patient wife on a tour of locations from the novel in order to record some short videos, which I will hopefully post in the future. Despite the destruction wreaked on London by the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz, you can still visit numerous places that existed during Marlowe’s lifetime, from the Church of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate to Southwark Cathedral, not to mention Marlowe’s final resting place in the yard of St. Nicholas’s Church, Deptford – a living archive to mine for gold.
Not all have survived exactly as Marlowe might have remembered them, but sometimes the traces left behind feel still realer than brick and mortar, straddling the line between story and substance. Just down the street from Shakespeare’s Globe on Bankside lies an ordinary looking office block with an extraordinary secret in the cellar – the ruins of the Rose Playhouse, the setting of Lightborne’s opening scene:
The curtains part, cutting a gash of daylight through the backstage gloom. Beyond, the Rose Playhouse appears, a vortex of timber and plaster and densely packed humanity that reels upwards, three stories, to a dilated eye of cloud-streaked sky.
The Rose, brainchild of entrepreneurs Philip Henslowe and John Chomeley, was the earliest of London’s theatres to take on the now iconic, polygonal form later echoed by the Swan and the Globe. It opened in 1587 and existed just into the 17th century, hosting the first performances of most of Marlowe’s plays and many of Shakespeare’s. Its performance and financial records, scrupulously recorded in a small leatherbound book by manager Henslowe, comprise some of the most important documentary evidence of theatrical activity during the Elizabethan period. Perhaps most famously, the Rose was recreated for the Oscar winning film Shakespeare In Love.
An artist’s reconstruction of the Rose with a cross-section exposed. By William Dudley.
After lying buried in the Bankside mud for four centuries, the Rose came to light again in 1988 when building works exposed its remarkably well-preserved foundations. But although the playhouse’s discovery was initially met with a flurry of excitement from theatre makers and devotees, writers, archeologists and historians, the Rose has long lain in hibernation while funds are raised to resume the excavations cut short in 1989. In the meantime, the remains of Shakespeare and Marlowe’s first theatre remain mostly dormant, lovingly cared for by a team of volunteers and archeologists, subsisting on charitable donations and high-profile benefactors such as Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. Last Saturday, for the first time in ten years, I was able to see it again.
The Rose as it appears today. Photographer unknown.
It may not look like much. Due to their centuries spent buried in the Thames’ anerobic mud, the Rose’s foundations must now be kept underwater to forestall decay. Thus, what you see when you enter the former dig site is a pit of raw earth enclosing a dark, shallow pool. Beneath the water’s unnervingly still surface, strings of red light outline the footings of the stage and the yard, throwing an eerie glow onto the steel beams that crush down from overhead. It is cold inside, damp-smelling and dim, lending the space a grave-like atmosphere.
But far from diminishing the Rose’s power, the sepulchral surroundings have a strange way of imbuing it with all the hushed, unearthly hauntedness of an ancient site of pilgrimage. Contrast the chilly silence with the roar of the crowds that came centuries ago, and you can’t help but imagine yourself in the company of many thousands of restive ghosts – maybe Kit Marlowe’s among them.
My hope, of course, is for the Rose to come alive again, however affecting it may be in its current state. Previous excavations carried out on the site were performed hastily and under constant threat of foreclosure by developers, meaning that there’s still much left to uncover. In addition, plans are underway on The Rose Revealed Project, a proposed visitor’s centre, performance space and museum which will preserve the Rose for generations to come. Though there’s an enormous, money-shaped hurdle still to climb, I’m hopeful that those plans will come to fruition – and I sincerely hope all this might inspire someone out there to support the project.
Today, the Rose Playhouse sleeps again, awaiting its next day in the spotlight. A signed copy of Lightborne sits in the front window of Gay’s the Word, gleaming spectacularly gold in the afternoon sun. (May it find a loving home!) And all I can do is wait and see.
Last Friday I received the most exciting bookmail any author could ask for: a box full of shiny (very shiny) new copies of my debut novel, hot off the press! They even have that “new book smell,” which, IYKYK.
Look at that GOLD!
With my planned trip to London for pub-day fast approaching, just about every friend I talk to asks me whether things are starting to feel “real” yet. What I’ve discovered throughout this whole publishing process is that the goalposts for “real” keep moving the closer you come to the big day. Seeing the manuscript become a digital ARC felt “real,” then holding the physical ARC in my hands felt even “realer”; after that came the final cover design, then the corrected digital proof, and now I sit here with a copy of Lightborne next to me – the same as will soon appear on bookshelves across the UK, Ireland, even as far away as Australia.
It can’t possibly get any “realer” than that, can it? Have we not, at last, reached “maximum realness,” as a drag queen somewhere is probably also wondering right now?
I count on nothing, as far as that is concerned. A year ago, in my naivete, I might have believed that walking into my book launch would be the peak of this whole experience, but now I’m no longer certain there will be such a thing as a peak. (Or a launch, for that matter!) We writers like to impose the rules by which our little worlds are governed onto the “real” world, in the hope that we might feel just a little more in control of our lives, but the shape of a publishing journey is not a single curve building towards climax, probably more like a series of waves of varying lengths. There’s an addictive element to it – the highs are very high, the lows abysmally low. And you never really know when one is going to hit.
For now, amidst so much uncertainty, I’m doing my best to focus on the milestones I can count on happening: the next time I hand a friend or a family member their very own copy of the book and blushingly insist, “You don’t have to read it”; the first time I get to listen to the entire audiobook, and hear award-winning narrator Will M Watt bring Kit Marlowe, Ingram Frizer and Robin Poley to life. The first time I walk into a bookshop and see Lightborne for sale – an experience I’ll be lucky enough to share with my wife, and my parents, who are traveling all the way from Pittsburgh.
For now, please enjoy this extremely amateur unboxing video, in which I finally get to hold Lightborne for the first time – another beginning in a long series of beginnings.
It’s finally happening: after many months of tireless work from my agent and rights manager, Lightborne has officially found a home in my home country with Pegasus Books! While it’s available to pre-order in the US now, you can look for it in bookstores from October 22, 2024.
As soon as my agent gave me the good news, I realized there was something very familiar about the name Pegasus. Like many of my anecdotes, it all starts with my dad and his ever-expanding collection of books.
Cast your eyes across the innumerable spines packed higgledy-piggledy into Dad’s groaning, sagging bookcases, and two things will surely stand out to you: one, that nearly every book has something to do with history, and two, that the Pegasus logo appears over and over again. Turns out, my dad is one of their most dedicated customers. He likes to describe himself as a history buff – though “fanatic” might be a more accurate word – and for just about every notable person, important event, place or people you can think of, there’s a book or two in Pegasus’ catalogue. On any given weekend morning, you may find old Dad planted in the history section of one of his local bookstores, flipping through some massive tome about a medieval Venetian cartographer or the life of Hannibal or the beef between Andrew Mellon and Winston Churchill. Only rarely does he walk out with his wallet unscathed. I’m fairly sure that some of the booksellers in southwestern Pennsylvania are only keeping the lights on thanks to his patronage.
It’s humbling and exciting to see my own name listed alongside luminaries like these. But naturally, nothing brings me more pleasure than to imagine Dad walking into one of his favorite bookstores on a Saturday morning and seeing a copy of Lightborne there on the shelf, in its gorgeous new American jacket.
A stunner, isn’t she? I’ve really lucked out with my cover designs!
(Dad, if you’re reading this, when the time comes: DON’T BUY IT. You’ll be getting a free copy!)
And now – for now – it’s back to gearing up for the UK launch on 2nd May. There will be an event scheduled in London to celebrate Lightborne’s birthday. More details to come!
It’s LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which means I’m thinking about Christopher Marlowe – again – even after spending half my earthly existence writing a novel about him. Despite having been a major influence on Shakespeare, an innovator of English poetic form, a writer of numerous homoerotic verses, and the author of the 1st English play to feature an explicitly homosexual relationship between men, Marlowe is often left off the Queer Historical Figures roundups that come out around this time of year. Which, y’know, really bugs me.
So what happened? Who was “Kit” Marlowe, and why is he still important?
Marlowe’s story is often likened to that of a tragic rockstar: the flame that burned bright, and much too fast. After sailing to the highest tier of English poets at just 24 years old, Marlowe’s life came to a violent end before he turned 30, in 1593. His murder continues to baffle historians, and is a huge topic all its own. But right now, I’d rather talk about the circumstances that led up to it, and what they mean for his legacy.
Scholars disagree as to exactly how much trouble Marlowe was in at the time of his death, or what exactly put him on the wrong side of the law. Nevertheless, 10 days prior to his murder, Marlowe was placed under arrest and ordered to make daily reports to the Privy Court in London. Just 6 days after that, Richard Baines, a spy with whom Marlowe had once spent an ill-fated winter abroad, handed in a document to the English authorities accusing Marlowe of sedition, heresy, and sodomy, and suggesting he might have been guilty of far worse.
But it wasn’t Marlowe’s actions that were of concern to the powers-that-be. It was his words.
A section of the “Baines Note,” showing the most infamous of Marlowe’s alleged quotes: “all they that love not Tobacco & Boies are fooles.” Image by The British Library Board.
The “Baines Note,” as it is now known, allegedly records things that Marlowe said, albeit abstracted from any context. Did Marlowe ever say, as Baines claimed, that John the Baptist and Christ were lovers, or that “all they that love not tobacco & boys are fools,” or – very dangerously for the time – that the world was far older than Adam & Eve? We don’t really know, and some scholars dismiss the Baines Note as mere slander. But Marlowe had stoked controversy before. One year prior to Marlowe’s death, his fellow playwright Robert Greene had even made veiled references to Marlowe’s “atheism,” saying, “he hath said… ‘There is no God.'”
Was Marlowe, as accused by Baines and Greene, an “atheist?” Maybe not, at least in the modern sense. He was, however, prompting people to ask questions about the religious doctrine by which the laws of the land forced them to abide. He was poking fun at dogma, and by extension, mocking the queen.
We tend to think of pre-20th century history as dominated by rampant queerphobia, and therefore might expect Marlowe to have been persecuted mainly for his sexuality. But in fact, it was his heresy that made him more dangerous to public order. Marlowe’s England was ruled, above all, by religion. Even now, the myth of the peaceful, progressive Elizabethan Golden Age persists – a myth that was formulated while Elizabeth I still ruled. But in fact, the reign of Elizabeth was marked by war, rebellion, and religious strife, leading her government to impose still harsher strictures than her predecessors on anyone caught deviating from the Protestant Church of England, of which Elizabeth herself was the head.
To so much as voice doubts about “her Majesty’s church” in any form was not merely heretical, but potentially treasonous. Do it loudly enough, and the punishment was death.
Although heresy was the deadliest of the accusations levied against Marlowe, the crime of sodomy also technically carried a death sentence, and had since the time of Henry VIII, with the passing of the “Buggery Act” in 1533. But it would not be until later, with the rise of Puritanism, that this law would be enforced in the extreme against gay men and gender nonconforming people.
During Marlowe’s lifetime, certain forms of homosexual behavior were tacitly condoned, so long as they fell within strict parameters determined largely by class, race, and age. The sexual use (and abuse) of servants by masters, or underage prostitutes by wealthy men, went broadly unprosecuted. Loving, committed same-sex relationships, on the other hand, brought certain dangers, which Marlowe explored thoroughly in his play Edward II.
There’s a group of academics out there who argue quite adamantly against including Marlowe in the queer canon, despite the queer themes found throughout his body of work. Largely, these scholars’ reluctance is based in the fear that Marlowe’s queerness somehow feeds into the feverish speculation that surrounds his life, and to a greater extent, his death. To claim Marlowe as queer, in short, would be unseemly. Hysterical. Melodramatic. Playing into conspiracy.
Whether or not Marlowe was queer is not really the point. Marlowe never married, maintained long-term, intimate relationships with other men for the entirety of his adult life, and was surrounded by rumors of homosexuality both during his lifetime and afterwards. But what really matters is that Marlowe wrote queer stories – was, in fact, among the first English writers to do so, and do so consistently. Marlowe gave queer stories, queer love, queer desire a seat at the table, to an extent that no one would dare do again till centuries later.
So why, in queer history, is Marlowe so often left out of the conversation?
Well, Elizabethan propagandists were extremely successful in destroying Marlowe’s reputation, aided later on by good ol’ Victorian Comstockery. Mere months after Marlowe’s death, moralists and mouthpieces of the state mounted a smear campaign against him, maligning him first of all for his heretical beliefs and, in time, for his rumored sexual “deviance.” The archival discovery of the “Baines Note” in the 1780s led to a firestorm of disapproval in the decades that followed. By the 19th century, performances of Marlowe’s plays were often heavily censored, and accompanied by withering caveats about the author’s “degenerate character.”
To put it in modern terms, Marlowe was “cancelled.”
By the 20th century, Marlowe, once known as “the Muses’ darling,” had become a dark, controversial figure, dogged by a “bad boy” image, overshadowed by his longer-lived and less incendiary contemporary Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: Marlowe’s life was short and violent, but in fact not unusually violent for his time (see: Ben Jonson, actually killed a guy!) Some deride Marlowe’s plays as loud, garish gorefests, but Shakespeare frequently outpaces him in blood n’ guts, and frankly, the perception that Marlowe’s language was overblown or bombastic probably says more about our mania for comparing everything written in this time period to Shakespeare than it actually does about Marlowe as a writer.
Drawing comparisons between Marlowe and Shakespeare does both authors a disservice. Shakespeare built an incredibly successful career on not ruffling feathers (for the most part, see: Essex Rebellion), nostalgia, populism, and sentimentality. Marlowe was a very different writer, drawing on a proto-camp sensibility to tell stories that subverted the jingoistic myths of Elizabethan England. His theatre was political, jarring, irreverent. It was Charles Ludlam, not Andrew Lloyd Webber; John Waters, not James Cameron.
This is why I spent so… damn… long writing a novel about Marlowe, and why I feel like it’s high time he took his rightful place in queer history, as one of our ancestors. I hate all this self-promo stuff as much as any writer on the Internet, but if I look upon the task ahead as promoting Marlowe, and his story, it gets a little easier to show up and do my little dance.
Marlowe lived in a time of moral panics, global strife, and cultural upheaval, not so alien to our own. His story has a lot to reveal about our world today.
Don’t take my word for it: read Marlowe’s Edward II – a devastating play about a king who loves his male lover much more than his kingdom, and pays the ultimate price for his devotion. Read Hero & Leander, an erotic, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking pansexual romp about sexual awakenings and love – or lust – at first sight. Read about his riotous, glorious, tragic life.
Or if you wanna make this humble scribbler’s day a little brighter, preorder my book LIGHTBORNE, coming Oct 22nd 2024 to the USA – or if you’re in the UK, head to your local booksellers or buy online.
(This post is modified from a thread originally posted on Threads, 5 Feb 2024. It was last updated on 14 Oct 2024.)
Before we get into the thing you’re actually here for, let me start this one off by saying, if you’re not listening to the 7AM Novelist Podcast with Michelle Hoover, then start now – not just because yours truly makes the occasional appearance on the show, but because I do so in excellent company. This latest season features an all-star cast, including Anjali Duva, Ron Maclean, Nancy Crochiere, Sara Johnson Allen, Marjan Kamali, Joanna Rakoff, Emily Ross, Andrea Meyer, Virginia Pye, Henriette Lazaridis, Colwill Brown, Crystal King, Chris Boucher, Dawn Tripp, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Mark Cecil, Jenna Blum, Jane Roper, Ethan Gilsdorf, Whitney Scharer, Shalene Gupta, Louise Miller, and many more, all ready to help struggling writers work through whatever’s holding them back from getting words on the page.
Recently there were two back-to-back episodes dealing with the stressful process of publishing your first book, as Aube Rey Lescure hopped on to discuss the launch of her debut River East River West, and Kasey LeBlanc, Christine Murphy, and Aaron Hamburger came on to talk about the travails of starting book 2. Listening as someone who can relate all too well to the topics at hand, I found my mental state veering wildly between excited and despairing, inspired and terrified.
Let’s be real: publishing a book is the thing we writers tell ourselves will finally make our lives fall into place, fix our self-esteem issues, vindicate our hard work, even solve lifelong crises of identity. For over a decade, it was the thing I felt I had to do, if only to justify the time and money I’d sunk into writing my soon-to-debut novel, Lightborne. And of course, I am thrilled beyond belief that it is finally happening. But I’m also learning that publication will fix absolutely none of the above problems. It will, in fact, create a few new ones.
Now that debut authors are speaking more openly about the mental health struggles they face in the lead-up to pub day, what emerges is the clear need for us to support one another. The tawdry, soul-crushing business of self-promotion can feel desperately lonely; the burgeoning public exposure can make you paranoid and crash whatever modicum of self-esteem you’d built-up since surviving high school. The dark, primal urge to dig yourself a burrow and hide in it starts to take over.
But this is why community is so essential to the debuting author. It may come via social media, or through writing groups and classes, or – just maybe – through fellow listeners of a writing podcast. I’m very fortunate to know many of the panelists on the 7AM Novelist through the legendary Boston writing center, Grub Street, where I participated in the Novel Incubator Program some [cough cough] years ago. But one of the great things about the 7AM Novelist is how it allows writers from all around the world to make connections. Seeing ideas exchanged and friendships forming in the chat box during every live episode recording truly warms this withered old heart.
So I very much hope anyone reading this will be sure to check out the show and support the author panelists: google them, subscribe to their newsletters, buy their books! This season is particularly exciting because every episode deals with questions submitted by listeners – even though I’m on again tomorrow, Jan 11th, I still don’t know what topic we’re going to get. So if you have a sticky issue to work out with your WIP, your writing practice, or career, please do go to the podcast page and submit your answer to the question, “What’s holding you back?” Maybe I’ll even get a chance to help you through it.
And now that you’ve scrolled all the way down here, you may collect your reward: a first look at Lightborne’s lush, evocative final cover!
Via Atlantic Books
As you can see, the cover will build on the proof design, using the same black and gold damask pattern and a simply gorgeous font based on 16th century typography. I’ve been informed that the pattern will, in fact, be stamped in gold foil – so in person, it’s going to be stunning!
Preorders are rolling out, so please check with your local booksellers. For those who use NetGalley, ARCs will be available soon.
I may be technically “done” with LIGHTBORNE, my first novel, but it seems like the research just isn’t done with me. After years – too many years – spent scanning documents for familiar names, I am primed to pick them out from just about anywhere. Every now and then, an old ghost steps out of the shadows, and the hair stands up on the back of my neck.
Today, the old ghost’s name was Nicholas Skeres – one of the three men who were present when my protagonist, Christopher Marlowe, was murdered in 1593. Just as the motives behind Marlowe’s death carry an air of mystery, all three of the chief witnesses/accomplices/perpetrators are enigmas in one way or another, which naturally I have exploited the hell out of for narrative purposes. Robert “Robin” Poley was a spy with a frighteningly dark history; Ingram Frizer, who wielded the fatal weapon, was a servant who worked for, of all people, Marlowe’s friend and patron.
Within that shady crew, Nick Skeres was always the one I felt I didn’t need to worry about. His youth as a con-artist, cutpurse and thief is well documented, and his later work as a lackey for important people, like the Earl of Essex, seems clear enough. In all likelihood, he was probably a pretty nasty character. Look him up in Charles Nicholl’s THE RECKONING, an admittedly more than slightly problematic investigation into Marlowe’s death, and you get the confident assertion that he was “Walsingham’s man” – in other words, a government spy. Look him up in other biographies by David Riggs, Park Honan, Constance Brown Kuriyama, F.S. Boas, all the way back to Ethel Seaton, who first identified Skeres’ name in connection with espionage way back in 1929, and you find the same conclusion.
So, why is Nick Skeres suddenly weighing on my mind?
Well, while doing some research for book #2, I happened to run across a reference to “Skyrres” in a letter connected to the Babington Plot. The Plot features heavily in LIGHTBORNE – a convoluted conspiracy which drew in Catholic priests and sympathizers from all across England and beyond, ostensibly spearheaded by the young, impressionable, and loaded Anthony Babington (although it is far more likely that Babington was merely a patsy). The goal was, in a nutshell [*inhales*], to jailbreak Mary, Queen of Scots, transport her to the Continent, hook up with the French Catholic and Spanish armies and lead an attack against England, eventually overthrowing Elizabeth I, installing Mary in her place and restoring the official state religion to Catholicism.
The scheme felt harebrained from the start, and Elizabeth’s spies, under the aegis of Sir Francis Walsingham, her “Spymaster,” were all too happy to let the would-be plotters walk themselves straight into their clutches… which, spoiler alert, they totally did.
In the weeks that led up to the Plot’s final, tragic unravelling, Babington and his friends were frequently on the move between bases in or around London. In August of 1586, right before Walsingham finally sprang his trap, his secretary, Francis Milles, wrote to him about people whom he’d seen hanging around the Catholic safehouse where Babington was believed to be hiding out:
Alt Text: Screenshot from The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers as Told by Themselves, 1872. A highlighted section reads, “Bab., Donne, Skyrres [?], and some others both men and women of this crew I have discovered this day with my own eyes, and therefore seeing Bab. is not departed, I hope for the better success of this service.”
Until a few weeks ago, I’d never read Milles’ letter myself, but I’d read about it. If “Skyrres” was our Skeres, then he wouldn’t have been the only one present at Marlowe’s death to have also been embroiled in the Babington Plot. Robin Poley was, in fact, Walsingham’s chief instrument in taking Babington down. What I find interesting here is the way that Milles talks about Skeres: as one of Babington’s “crew,” seen with his “own eyes,” and taken as proof that Babington is “not departed” – in other words, also present at the house, though unseen.
Milles’ letter in no way treats Skeres as separate from the other conspirators, like “Donne,” i.e. John Dunne, who was soon after convicted of treason and hanged along with Babington. If Skeres is mentioned “without further comment,” as Nicholl says, then so are they. If anything, Milles’ letter suggests that, whatever our Nick’s reasons for being amongst Babington’s “crew,” they might not have been so cut-and-dry as previously assumed.
Was Skeres a double-agent, not entirely trusted by either side? Or was he, perhaps, an apostate – a Catholic sympathizer who would soon betray his own cause?
Whatever the case, if Nicholas Skeres was in the employ of Sir Francis Walsingham in 1586, then Francis Milles, as Walsingham’s personal secretary, should damn well have known about it. The letter, to my eyes at least, suggests that Milles had another understanding about him entirely.
Skeres virtually disappears from the record for three whole years following this sighting by Milles. That might not be a red flag in itself, as paper-trails frequently go astray in this period, and the aftermath of the Babington Plot was every bit as chaotic as its advent. When our Nick resurfaces, he is working as a messenger for both Walsingham and the Earl of Essex, meaning that he is firmly entrenched in government employment. Did he serve faithfully? Who can say. As it happens, Skeres would eventually be arrested in connection with the Essex Rebellion – another attempt to overthrow Queen Elizabeth – and probably ended his life in prison.
How is any of this relevant to the murder of Christopher Marlowe – the one we actually care about?
Well, the uncertainty surrounding Marlowe’s death has really been something of a plague on Marlowe studies. It’s the mystery everyone wants to talk about but no one really wants to solve – because if we solve it, then we won’t get to speculate anymore. After so many hundreds of years, answering the problem would hardly feel like justice, but rather more like killing poor Kit Marlowe all over again.
Most of the biographers I mentioned above ascribe to some version of the theory that Marlowe’s murder was a grand conspiracy, orchestrated by the government or some other powers-that-be.1 The thing is, though the circumstances of Marlowe’s death are in fact pretty suspicious, there’s no “smoking gun” that proves it was a hit-job. There are, I think, reasons to believe his murder was swept under the rug, but that does not necessarily mean it was planned from on-high. All it means is that someone was protecting the people likely to suffer consequences from it: Poley, Frizer, and Skeres. The people who were actually there, the room where it happened.
A notorious spy. A servant of Marlowe’s friend. And a man long presumed to be a government spy, whose motives, loyalties, and ambitions may be far murkier than previously assumed.
If that’s who Nick Skeres really was – and Milles’ letter certainly makes a case for it – then our picture of the scene of the crime shifts towards something potentially more personal, and far messier, than a state-ordered assassination. Why were these particular people there? What was Marlowe’s connection to them? What did they want with him?
This is all perhaps just a very (very) long way of saying that the work goes on. I’ve already written my version of Nick Skeres, who is every bit as shady as you’d expect. But the novel I’ve written is not about proselytizing my version of “what really happened.” I’m not so interested in that. Fiction is about asking questions for which there are, ideally, no clear answers. Even historical fiction, despite having one foot in fact, takes events or lives that were momentous and singular to those who lived them, and – rather heartlessly – scavenges them for parts. The dead, long gone, exist only in fragments from which we storytellers glean what we may, and (like conspiracy-theorists) straight-up bullshit the rest.
Photo by Hesse Phillips. Yes, it was fun.
Oh yes – in case you missed it, LIGHTBORNE is an ARC now, and looks very fetching in gold, if I do say so. I’m told that copies will be available on NetGalley soon!
Featured image: Fede Galizia, Portrait of Paolo Morigia (detail), Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons
Brown Kuriyama is an outlier here for her “no-nonsense” approach, i.e., taking all of the documents and testimony associated with Marlowe’s murder completely at face-value, for better or for worse. ↩︎
Last week I had the immense privilege of visiting my publisher Atlantic Books’ offices in person. Little did I know when I was making aimless circles around Bloomsbury, hopelessly lost, that once I got there I would be greeted by printed, jacketed, ready-to-go ARCs of my debut novel – a whole pile of them awaiting my woefully unpracticed signature.
Photo by Laura O’Donnell
I’d been convinced that the ARCs were still weeks away, if not months. Being able to pick up a copy, flip through the pages, and see what I’d thus far known only as a Word document looking very much like a real book put me into some kind of fugue state. I barely remember signing the copies, only that my signature degenerated steeply from one copy to the next. By the time I got to the last one it looked like a toddler had scribbled all over the page.
Of course I’m still excited and riding high from the experience, although an astonishing amount of terror has since crept in. Things are moving quicker than I’d expected, which means my little window of peace and privacy is closing, and not only must I come to terms with the fact that the need to self-promote is inevitable, but it is also imminent. As in, I clearly should have started doing it weeks ago.
I think many writers break into a cold sweat at the thought of having to put themselves “out there,” whether it stems from a simple dislike of the spotlight or the crippling, unshakable belief that we are not worthy enough or smart enough or good enough, and sooner or later the world will catch on and punish us for daring to take up space. The latter is certainly true for me. The law of impostor syndrome is that the voice of self-doubt will always grow louder and stronger when presented with mounting evidence that it’s really full of shit. (Much like people who are full of shit.) The closer I come to any kind of success, the easier it is for me to convince myself I’m not deserving of it.
The most constructive way I’ve found of dealing with impostor syndrome so far is to think of it as a necessary stage in the process of working towards a goal, and moreover, a sign that things are, in fact, going pretty well. This doesn’t silence the voice of self doubt, but it does put it at a slight remove. Fortunately, I’m riding a train over whose path I have zero control, which means I have no choice but to keep moving forward. It’s surprisingly easy to be braver about taking certain steps once the option of turning back is gone.
Besides, the scenery really is lovely. Look at this, LOOK AT THIS!
We’re just about into that incredibly exciting stage where things start getting printed on paper – meaning that I’ve recently received the most important pdf file of my entire existence so far, and have spent the past week going over it with a fine-toothed comb. It feels weirdly unceremonious to see my proof sitting open in a Chrome tab along with email and about 50 other tabs worth of research for my next book, as if it were just another JSTOR article that I stopped skimming last week and forgot about.
Fortunately, it is gorgeous, as you can see from the image above. I’m thoroughly impressed with my publisher’s choice in fonts, all of which are wonderfully evocative of Elizabethan-era typefaces. And then there’s the uncanny resemblance between the header font and the tattoo on my right forearm:
Yup, that’s me, in my bathroom, because let’s face it, it’s the only room in the house with good lighting. You can probably tell from my face that I’d just spent two hours getting stabbed with tiny needles.
I got myself the tattoo last year to celebrate signing my deal with Atlantic. A more superstitious person than myself might take the resemblance as some kind of omen. Lente currite noctis equi (“run slowly, horses of the night”) is a phrase that originally appeared in Ovid’s Amores, a series of quite randy love poems which my protagonist, Christopher Marlowe, translated into English as a student at Cambridge. It also, and perhaps more famously, appears in Marlowe’s own play Doctor Faustus, used by the titular character as a magical incantation in effort to halt time in its tracks. Notably, the incantation does not work – Faustus can’t escape his deadline with the Devil, who promptly shows up and drags him screaming into hell.
So, uh, not sure whether that’s a good omen or a bad one, but it is at least a lovely coincidence.
From here, the next stage is to print ARCs (advanced reader copies), which will hopefully lead to some nice endorsements from people far more interesting and successful in life than myself. After that, we’ll begin work on the final text for publication in May, at which point my book will truly have grown up and moved out of the house for good. For now, it’s thrilling to see it all dressed up in a spiffy new suit, looking very much like a “real” book, albeit in digital form.
Things are definitely heating up, so hopefully I’ll have more news to share soon!
This post originally appeared on Dead Darlings 28/2/2023.
Let’s start with the good news before we get to the complicated feelings: my debut novel Lightborne is coming out next year. And I am ecstatic!
Lightborne is a historical novel about Christopher Marlowe, an Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare who died violently and young, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Rumored to have been a government spy, famously brash and outspoken, the author of the first play in English to feature an explicitly queer relationship between men – I fell in love with Marlowe the first time I discovered him, at thirteen or fourteen, and from that point on it was only a matter of time before I tried to write a book about him.
I could not possibly have known, when I finally got started in my senior year of college, that I would spend the better part of the next twenty years writing about Marlowe.
The thing is, I misspent my youth writing “novels” – practice novels, I think of them now – one after another, often only to chuck them in a drawer after just three or four drafts. Lightborne, however, was different. Over two decades – half my life, really – I compiled hundreds of hours’ worth of research, wrote and scrapped something like five different novels about Marlowe, made forty-plus revisions to Lightborne, and slogged through rejections in the triple digits. To say Lightborne was “a labor of love,” as I’ve been saying repeatedly ever since the good news became public, feels like understatement.
I had plenty of opportunities, and every reason, to stop. Put it in the drawer. Work on something else. So why didn’t I?
Love did have something to do with it. I loved Lightborne, and I loved writing it. I loved “my boys,” as I often refer to the three main characters, despite having done a great deal to torment them. For years on end, I’ve agonized over these (mostly) made-up people’s lives, at my desk, on the couch, wide awake at 4am, lying on a beach, wandering around the supermarket… They say, “A writer never stops writing,” and that is devastatingly true. All other thoughts become intrusions, as does life. Only love makes you that stupid.
But it was also labor, with all the pain that implies. I’ve lived so long now with the anguish, not of disappointment or failure, but of hope – terrible, all-consuming, sadistic hope – that I don’t quite know what to do without it. A writer never stops writing – and part of that is convincing yourself that it will all be worth it one day: that one day, finally, you will stop.
So this is the end. After two decades, I’ve stopped writing Lightborne. This is a celebration, but it’s also a eulogy: for the work, for the hope, for the task I just had to complete, which began as all eulogies do, with death.
Twenty years ago, this October – a few months before my first attempt to write a novel about Christopher Marlowe – my friend died. At the time, I was already working on an undergraduate thesis about Marlowe’s play Edward II, and the queer canon, and the task of finding ourselves among the dead. Then my friend died. Soon after, my thesis began spilling over into a novel on the side – nothing at all like Lightborne as it stands now, except perhaps in two key ways: that it was about a young, queer man who dies far too soon; who, in life, was widely loved but misunderstood, and sometimes vilified. And, it was about bearing responsibility for his death.
I dedicated even that first messy, embarrassing draft to my dead friend. “In memory of.” Through all those years, for each new draft or entirely new version of the story, the first thing I would do upon opening a blank document was copy/paste that dedication. Looking at it, I could imagine the words printed in a book, with some stranger out there holding it in their hands, reading my dead friend’s name. If nothing else, the dedication page was a way of holding onto the original impulse that brought me to tell this story – to always be writing, but to always be writing towards an end.
The thing about the dead is, they are never satisfied. Never appeased. For us, they exist in a state of arrest, with the last thought, the last gesture, the last sensation frozen in time. I think one of the reasons why we write is to capture every fleeting thought or action as if it were the last, to nail the seconds to the wall so we might pore over them from every angle: catalogue every detail, ask every question, draw a circle around every mystery. Of course, the final stage of writing is to let all of that go and give the story to whomever wants it, for them to envision and interpret as they see fit. Which I suppose is a kind of resurrection, a kind of life.
That’s the joy, amidst all this excitement and terror and uncertainty: the joy of knowing there will be life for this story beyond my little brain, there will be life for my boys. One day – surely sooner than it seems to me now – a stranger will open a book that says Lightborne on the cover, and their eyes will glance briefly over the name on the dedication, “In memory of”: multiple names now.
And then they will turn the page.
Lightborne will be published in the spring of 2024 by Atlantic Books UK.
Image: “St. Jerome Writing” (detail) by Caravaggio, Wikimedia Commons
HESSE PHILLIPS 