Cover Story

My cover for Spatiality began as a line of light.

I wanted a symbol or icon that would carry through all the books. I imagined a vivid slash slicing through the page like a blade. I imagined this as folded line, a line of light—an architectural gesture, enigmatic and ephemeral. It could be the edge of a structure or an aperture.

It also represents the fabric of space, the folding between space—the way that the Heliod manipulate space, make use of it, control it—exist within it.

The line is also a portal, a threshold or a rift.

The rift is the element that looms heavily over all the books; the rift the antagonist seeks to tear into space, to breach into another space, to free his brethren, to avenge their imprisonment.

It is also a line that both divides the characters from one another and at the same time binds them to each other, a demarcation of their fates.

Following the line of light, I imagined silhouettes etched into the stars.

I wanted to avoid direct representation. I wanted a shadow, an impression of the main characters without conveying exactly what they looked like. I deliberately eschewed that direct representation as I felt it would prevent the reader from imagining them themselves. Again, I wanted a symbolic iconography, something not unlike like an 18^th or 19^th century portraiture of silhouettes.

I knew she should be sad, not unlike the character of Hannah as you meet her initially. I knew he should be proud in a way, looking out into the distance, meeting his fate directly as Ethien perhaps wants to, but may not actually be capable of.

And then more pragmatically I knew I wanted there to be space between the letters as the letters in the title fill the negative space of the slash, the line of light bisecting the main characters. My hope was the symbol, the silhouettes, the very placement of the title and the nature of the font and text would convey the key concepts of the books in an indirect way, and convey some aspect of the characters’ personalities.

Spatiality Book 2

I'm pleased to announce I just published Book 2 of my sci-fi/fantasy series Spatiality on Amazon Kindle

Here's the synopsis:

Hannah Allende, alone and stranded on a distant world, begins a desperate search to save Ethien who has been mortally wounded after a savage attack by the allies of the Gol-Het. He lies shrouded by a mysterious nimbus, an apparent effect of his newly bourgeoning powers. Hannah’s search will lead her to the Bhel-Kailist, a powerful race of healers, led by Mircea, Ethien’s childhood love. Mircea, who once healed Ethien when they were young, must now risk her life to save him, the aftermath of which will force Hannah to confront her own feelings for Ethien once and for all.

           

The second book of the Spatiality saga finds Hannah and Ethien torn apart by tragedy, conflict and jealousy. But despite the hardships and turmoil they must somehow find a way to heal their wavering bond and resume their perilous road to a place whose existence is veiled in mystery. There they hope to uncover Ethien’s true purpose as he grapples with powers he doesn’t understand or can control. With every step he becomes more uncertain of his future and overcome with fear of losing the woman he loves forever.

So, Love

Aside from the somewhat esoteric architectural and philosophical ideas, the other genesis for Spatiality was the desire to write a love story, one that felt genuine and true. I found myself frustrated by the lack of a representation of love that I felt any kinship with, that resonated with me in any meaningful way.  I wanted to represent love between two people who were careful and guarded with their emotions, not likely to express their feelings openly. Not necessary damaged in any way, but unwilling to risk anything for fear of undoing their relationship. If I had any inspiration for this, it was the X-Files. I can think of no more compelling love story between two people who genuinely respected and loved one another. But because of their close friendship, their professional relationship, they could never cross the line beyond friendship in any direct way, really until they were parted from one another. Some of that was likely the desire on part of the show’s creators to tease it out as long as possible, to come close but never quite giving the audience what they wanted, because once they did what was left to tell?

           

I found myself faced with a similar dilemma. My two heroes meet under similar inauspicious beginnings as Mulder and Scully. Scully was essentially placed to spy on Mulder, in Spatiality Hannah encounters Ethien while tasked with completing a mission that ultimately involves capturing him, taking him prisoner until a terrible moment of tragedy compels her to give up this mission and he, moved by her sorrow chooses to comfort her instead of fleeing or even killing her.

I found almost at once I didn’t want their relationship to devolve into the usual conflict, of hating one another and slowly softening to friendship to love. I found I wanted both to be motivated by their terrible fear of being alone, both lost in their own way, asked to do something neither is particularly capable of or prepared to do. That motivation is so powerful they quickly abandon any antipathy one might expect them to have towards one another as they are forced to flee an enemy bent on their destruction. And like Mulder and Scully they begin to form a bond based on mutual respect and admiration for one another.

           

Putting two people in close proximity to one another, day after day, fighting for their lives, one would expect them to fall in love as so often happens. And at first I resisted this, wondering if it were possible to avoid that course, to find another path. But ultimately this was not the right story for that sort of exploration. I wanted them to fall in love, but it had to be the right way, the right time and it had to sustain itself for several books. And so certainly I needed to place obstacles in their path, the most significant of which is their own timid and wary personalities, their continuous questioning of their own motives and worth, crippled with an uncertainty of not quite knowing what the other feels. They both find themselves questioning their dependency on one another, not willing to believe in their own relationship. And then there are externalities, conflicts, other possible loves, terrible errors in judgment that nearly cost them their lives. These things act to both separate them and bring them together, their bond tested to its limits, neither prepared to recognize their true feelings for one another until it is too late.

Love is a funny subject, as it is the most profound thing in all our lives and yet it can be represented so tritely in a million and one pop songs or romantic comedies. And yet there is a will to love that those things represent, there is a craving for it, no matter the form. And it is hard to capture, hard to put into words, it is elusive and ephemeral, and yet you feel it through every part of you, it is inescapable. I know I’ve never seen, read or heard it represented perfectly, but art forever attempts to capture it, and that striving to encapsulate what love is, makes us yearn for it ever more.

And so I have made my own small contribution to that project and I hope you may feel some kinship with what I have attempted to do in my writings.

The Memory Ruin

Spatiality began its life as a speculative short story I wrote for a class in architecture school called “The Memory Ruin.” It told the story of a man who had abandoned everything he had known and wandered lost in the wilderness until encountering the ruins of an ancient city that had been built over with a grafting of structures of almost an alien nature. There he must confront his past and the memories of what he had left behind. Many of the pieces of that story make it into the beginning of Spatiality Book 3. I was very interested in the tensions that could be elicited between the formalism of an architecture of ancient stone and a nearly chaotic construction of metal inscribed over it and how that could affect one’s perceptions of self, space, time and memory.

Many of my interests while in school that inform my series Spatiality concerned ruins, ancient forgotten places, echoing with lost memories. Additionally I am very interested in how architecture is informed by and informs our memories, much of which I covered in my last post. A ruin is a particular sort of memory space, one that contains the tracings of all that had come before and is now lost.

I lived in Italy as a child for few years and I strongly recall the relationship between the ancient Roman architecture, the medieval world built upon that and the modern that now inhabits it. I always remembered whenever there was construction of any kind, there were ancient Roman ruins being uncovered. Besides the castles, bridges and narrow medieval streets of hill towns, the Roman Forum was the greatest playground a child could ask for. So I was keenly aware that all civilization is built upon the remains of the one that preceded it. This idea runs through both “The Memory Ruin” and Spatiality.

Also at the time when I was writing “The Memory Ruin,” adaptive reuse was a very prevalent subject and although I felt like there was a strong case to be made for the possibilities of adaptive reuse I was less interested in inhabiting an existing structure seamlessly or “politely” as it were, but in a disruptive or expressively contrasting way that could elicited the very strongest aspects of both the new and existing structure. My fifth year thesis project attempted to explore this idea by creating a series of grafted structures within and around an abandoned rural water treatment facility to create a sort of retreat/spa or sanatorium where there was a “taking of the waters” literally within the boundaries of the old holding tanks. 

One of my strongest influences at the time was Lebbeus Woods, who created incredibly evocative drawings and models of constructs in war-torn and otherwise damaged places and introduced the idea of an architecture that was radical, almost anarchical in nature, populated with concepts of parasites, grafting, scars, sutures, scabs and the like. These concepts greatly informed some of “The Memory Ruin,” Spatiality, as well as my own architectural thinking.


About this time I also became very interested in abandoned industrial ruins, factories, steel mills and plants in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Bethlehem, PA, Richmond, VA and mines in West Virginia. I began traveling to some of these places and photographing them. I found them to be very evocative, filled with the melancholy, that sense of loss that inhabited the ancient Roman ruins I encountered as a child.  These structures rusting and decayed, caked with grime and overgrown with moss and plants, are slowly disintegrating back into the past.