ON MORTAL LOVE

MORTAL LOVE started as one book and has gone through four or five metamorphoses over the last four or five years: hundreds of pages tossed, hundreds more revised. Originally it was THE MASTER STROKE, which was to be a (mostly) realistic novel about a clan of Wyeth-like artists on the Maine coast, and their relationship to the woman who was their muse. For many years now my editors have wanted me to write something that did not have supernatural content, and so this was to be that book. But the supernatural crept into it, and it became a much more generic fantasy; enough so that when my then-editor read it, she felt it was too much like my earlier work. She was right, and I ended up scrapping about 200 pages and pretty much starting from scratch. This was when an entire timeline in late-Victorian London appeared, grafted not very successfully onto the existing story in contemporary Maine. At this point the book was called WALKING IN FLAMES, and had a more direct connection to the Tristan and Isolde mythos.

Then 9-11 came down, and I stopped writing for a brief while, like many other people. When I finally took the book back up in earnest, in early Januuary 2002, yet another timeline appeared: contemporary North London, a part of the city I know just enough to be dangerous. New working title: PSYCHOMANCY. I also brought in the Benandanti from my earlier books. Several months into this the title changed, for good, to MORTAL LOVE. I cut nearly all the contemporary Maine material, but used one character, Ivy Tun, as the protagonist of my novella "The Least Trumps," published last fall in Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, a US literary magazine. The final version, which I'm in the last stages of editing, has the Benandanti excised, except for the appearance of Balthazar Warnick in a small but important cameo.

ML isn't so much a decadent novel as a Symbolist novel; not a book about the thing but the thing itself. Algernon Swinburne is a supporting character, and really upstages everyone else when he's around. The central female figure is a sort of avatar of the White Goddess; at least that's how mortals see her: her true nature is something else entirely. All my p.o.v. characters are men, something I've only done in GLIMMERING; and in an odd way this novel may be a kind of anti-Glimmering, a novel of transcendence in which transcendence, of the human sort, erotic and creative, really *is* possible. We'll see.