Chapter Two:  The Midnight Spark

Most revolutions do not. Most begin with a need for bread, injustice or a man in a hat declaring that everyone else’s hat is illegal. But Localad’s began with a fantasy paperback called The Obsidian Crown of Eternity, which was a title containing three leading words and no detectable restraint. It was a terribly bad book.

Localad had recently ordered three paperback copies of this fantasy novel that the distributor's catalogue had promised would be "the next great epic," the kind of blurb that appeared on the back of every third book that crossed his counter and meant, in practice, absolutely nothing. Distributor catalogues described everything these days as the next great epic, including a recent celebrity cookbook in which the celebrity appeared surprised by potatoes.

He'd read it in two nights. Not because it was page-turningly good, more so because he made it a rule to read what he sold. This was partly professional responsibility and partly because he could not honestly bear the idea of recommending a book that he had not personally inspected for structural weakness. It was a kind of professional diligence, or a mild form of self-harm depending on the day of the week.

By page fifty, The Obsidian Crown had introduced a farm boy with a secret destiny, a princess who was “not like other princesses,” and an ancient prophecy helpfully written in rhyming couplets. By page one hundred, the farm boy had acquired a tractor, the princess had acquired leather trousers, and Localad had acquired a headache behind his left eye. By the second night, he was sitting up in bed with the paperback held at arm's length like something that had gone off in the fridge.

It wasn't that the book was badly written, that was the insult of it. The sentences obviously worked and the plot moved with the brisk, empty confidence of a man striding purposefully into the wrong building. But it felt, to Localad, like it had been built out of other books rather than out of anything the author actually believed. Every character spoke in the same monotonous voice, the way photocopies all have the same handwriting. It was competent the way a tribute band is competent, all the notes present, and correct, but thoroughly drained of the reason anyone wrote the song in the first place. Or, accomplished in the manner of hotel art. It occupied the required space, matched the furniture and had no intention of upsetting anyone with an original thought. Every twist was a twist he felt he had read somewhere else before.

“No,” he said.

The apartment did not answer. It had learned not to encourage him.

He put the book down at eleven-forty and did not go to sleep. Instead, he got up, made himself a coffee at an hour when coffee was a serious mistake and a signed declaration of hostilities against the morning. He sat at the small kitchen table and thought, with the specific fury of a man who has just been personally insulted by a stranger's prose style:

I could do better than this crap. Not because I'm more talented. Because when I write, I actually mean it.

It was not; he would tell people much later, though at the time there was no one telling anyone anything, a moment of grand ambition. It didn't feel like the beginning of something that would end in Los Angeles, in contracts, in his own name on a marquee spelt wrongly. It felt like frustration, plain and specific, the kind that makes a person pick up a pen instead of putting one down. It was inspirational dissatisfaction at its finest.

But that bad novel on his nightstand had made him angry in a useful way. Somewhere out there, someone had written something completely hollow and gotten it published, gotten it onto his shelves, and gotten it into the hands of readers who deserved a hell of a lot better. And somewhere in his apartment above a failing bookstore, he had a story that mattered to him more than almost anything in his life, and he was letting it rot in a drawer because he was too scared to publish.

That was the night he stopped being scared, or at least started being less scared than he was stubborn. He pulled his manuscript from the drawer. Two hundred and eleven handwritten pages emerged, coffee-ringed, held together by a rubber band that had long since abandoned any pretence of elasticity with the exhausted expression of an overworked civil servant nearing retirement, and he read it straight through for the first time in eight months, while his coffee went cold and reproachful beside him.

The first chapters were better than he remembered, which pleased him somewhat. The middle chapters were worse than he’d remembered, which felt more familiar. Jasmine was vivid, difficult and sad in all the right ways. The fallen knights were individually magnificent and collectively impossible to tell apart. The villain delivered several speeches that seemed to have been written by statues.

He had been circling the fourth draft of Purradise for two years, writing scenes out of order, losing his nerve every time he got close to an ending, telling himself the book wasn't ready when the truth, which he was only now willing to look at directly, was that he was actually afraid of finishing it. Because a book that isn't finished can still be perfect. While a book that is finished, can only be judged.

Localad had spent nearly twenty years protecting his Purradise from any judgement, which was another way of saying he had spent twenty years protecting himself from any confronting evidence.

Yes, it was better than he had remembered. It was also; he could see now with a clarity that felt almost cruel, severely unfinished in ways that really mattered. Jasmine's arc had stalled two-thirds through, the way a good sentence sometimes simply gives up. The knights of the fallen order needed one more scene to earn their final vindication. And the ending, the ending he had spent two years successfully avoiding, did not exist at all, beyond a scrawled marginal note that read:

SHE HAS TO CHOOSE THE SWORD OR THE SISTER, NOT BOTH. FIGURE OUT HOW!!

He looked at the note for a long time.

At twelve-twenty, someone knocked on the floor.

Marjory lived across the square, not beneath him, so this was probably the shop itself lodging a complaint over him being up so late.

Then he uncapped his pen and started to write.

“I could do better than that rubbish,” he whispered. This was not arrogance. Arrogance stands on balconies. This was indignation in slippers.

He began with Jasmine at the foot of the Wound.

In the old draft she stood nobly beneath the torn sky, which was the sort of thing characters did when authors had not yet fully decided what else they should be doing. Localad crossed it out.

Jasmine arrived late, wet, furious and missing one boot.

Better.

The Wound spoke to her in the voices of people she had disappointed.

Better still.

Her sister’s sword began complaining about the weather, not aloud exactly, but in the old metallic language that weapons use when they believe their owners have become sentimental.

Localad wrote until the windows paled. He wrote through what remained of that night and, when the shop's bell made its cutlery-clatter the next morning for the first customer, he was still at the kitchen table upstairs, unaware that an hour had passed since he'd meant to open up, mildly astonished to discover the morning had already happened without his permission.

At eight-ten that morning, Mr. Okafor stood outside Harbour Page waiting for his newspaper. He was a tall, deliberate man whose silences had more furniture in them than most people’s conversations.

Localad ran downstairs with one sock on, unlocked the door and apologised.

Mr. Okafor regarded him, the unopened shop and the sock.

“Writing?” he asked.

Localad blinked. “How did you guess?”

“You look happy and at the same time, a bit unwell.”

This was accurate.

Mr. Okafor entered, collected his paper and placed the exact change on the counter.

“Finish it,” he said.

Then he left.

Mr. Okafor rarely said anything about anything, which the town had long ago learned to interpret as a form of extremely dignified patience.

Localad stood beneath the cracked bell.

It was not advice delivered dramatically. Mr. Okafor did not point toward destiny. There was no thunder. The bell gave a small metallic cough.

Localad spent the whole day distracted, itching to get back to the page, feeling for the first time in years that the story in his head was moving faster than his hand could follow it. But something in him had settled.

That night he wrote again.

And the night after that.

That was how it went for the next three weeks. The shop by day, Purradise by night, the ledger's bad news and the story's good news taking turns in keeping him awake. Localad slept badly, ate standing up and developed the shining, hunted expression of a man pursued by his own imagination.

Marjory noticed the circles under his eyes first and assumed, reasonably, that it was the bank. When he told her it wasn't — or wasn't only — she studied him for a long moment with the particular squint she reserved for diagnosing people more accurately than they'd diagnosed themselves.

"You're writing again," she said. Not a question.

"I never stopped."

“You’re writing properly,” she said.

“I always write properly.”

“No. Usually you arrange words defensively. This is different.”

He wanted to deny it. Instead, he looked down at the ink on his fingers.

The story was moving faster than fear.

For the first time in years, fear was having to run.

"You know exactly what I mean, and I refuse to let you pretend otherwise."

He did know what she meant. He was writing like it counted this time. Like the story might actually, God help him, end.