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‘Tis I, risen from the Substack grave! Which is fitting, as I’m currently writing my next book, involving the undead. More on that later, or maybe not, depending on where my mind rambles.
As you are well aware by now, old subscribers (SPOILER ALERT, new subscribers): I’m not very regular with my newsletters. I planned to write something about beginnings but mulled it over for about two months and now it’s March, so let’s pretend I was inspired by Spring. The start of Lent or whatever.
In related news, I forgot every single point I’d mulled over because worthwhile thoughts occur to me as I’m in the middle of scanning my Co-Op card at the self-checkout or scooping clumps out of the cat litter tray. Note-making, therefore, usually escapes me.
The actual inspiration for what I’m writing about (finally, we got there) was the response to one of my posts on social media regarding my first book, Disbanded Kingdom. In it, I expressed the vague regret that accompanies any thought of my debut these days. Here’s that thread on Twitter:
A number of kind people slid into my DMs, some to ask for nudes, others to express their sadness at reading what I wrote. For what it’s worth, I didn’t intend to make anyone sad. (This is a common occurrence when I share something about my life. “They’ll titter with pained recognition,” I think, then turn to find my audience sobbing and inconsolable.) I simply wanted to share the fact that, if I’d been in less of a grateful rush to be published and had just given my “journey” a bit more thought, I may have chosen to keep that book to myself.
Of course, this is all said with hindsight. That book meant a great deal to me at the time of writing, and I was both relieved and flattered that others thought highly enough of it to represent it, publish it, long-list it for the Polari Prize, etc. It remains the only one of my books to be repped and sold by an agent, or nominated for an award.
Yet instead of pride, I look on Disbanded Kingdom as if it’s someone else’s work left on my desk. Because even though it’s very me, it’s simultaneously not very me at all. Yet that is the very me who went out, jazz hands, introducing me to the literary world. I just wish he’d pulled me aside to ask if that was OK with us.
Ever since I was a teenager, I had a particular “voice” in my fiction, be it for the page, stage or screen: dark, tense, maybe a bit funny, imbued with death. My biggest successes as a fringe playwright were the Gothic chillers Peaceful and Hyde (an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic). The folktales I love to tell are of ghosts, faeries, demons, goblins, vampires and their ilk. A friend once excitedly linked me to an article on the seven early-twentieth-century sisters with incredibly long hair exploited by their dad because she knew that’s what floats my boat, history-wise. At the Q&A of my book launch, another friend tellingly raised his hand to ask, “When are you writing a horror novel?” Because my friends know that, as someone who hides from sunlight, dark is my vibe.
Having released Disbanded Kingdom, a book which (let’s be real) made no mark on the literary landscape, I felt I had to make my way over to the gremlin side gradually. The Way It Breaks was to be the bridge to the “real” me, and I based that on it being totally Cypriot. In many ways, that book – unagented, released to no fanfare and ignored by almost every blogger/critic/journalist in existence to sink without a trace – is the book that I wish had been my introduction as an author.
The subsequent A Good Year, as a slice of magical realism steeped in the folklore of my people, was the first book I put out that anyone who knew me and all my work prior to Disbanded Kingdom might pinpoint as The Sort of Thing I’d Write.
Now that those three books are out there, a little journey of sorts feels complete. All the remaining ideas bouncing around in my head are those grim little creatures of old, and I am now free to embrace them. "Hello, I’m Polis and these are my children. This one’s my youngest, a thriller about Edwardian Brits on a tour of Italy. Here is my eldest, a wicked misanthrope who will be reworked for a YA readership. When I say “eldest”, I mean she’s practically middle-aged and was produced before all the others. Let’s not even speak of the ones I sent to boarding school in Switzerland and am now estranged from.
At times I find myself adding undue pressure on this book I’m currently writing, which tells of a bi boy in Limassol in 1999, experiencing fear alongside desire and dread. If it gets published, it’s to be my fresh start, my reintroduction to the world as an author, after a prologue of two novels and a novella.
Except it isn’t a new start. At heart, at cold, dead vinegar-soaked vrykolakas heart, I know it’s a culmination of the aspects of me embodied by the previous books, at various stages of my life – including that stranger’s debut.
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Hey welcome back to Substack! I left Twitter at Crimbo, so its good to catch up with you here! Hope all is well. 💕