Book seven of nine.1 It seems miraculous to still be sat on my sofa doing this and, as ever, I wouldn’t be doing it without my agent, Ed Wilson at Johnson and Alcock and my editor, the wonderful Jenni Hill, and the rest of the team at Orbit.
I hope you’ve enjoyed your time with Cahan (though whether you would want to be around Cahan, well, I’m not as sure). I suppose, at its heart, Gods of the Wyrdwood is about running away. We all run away at times, and even if we don’t there are times we definitely want to. From simple running away, sitting at the keyboard and not wanting to start writing to more serious attempts – going abroad, leaving everything you know behind – we tend to find the same thing. Whatever we run away from is still there when we come back. Or, like Cahan, what we are running from is not what we think, it is ourselves, and you can never outrun yourself.
Of course, in a book you get to be a bit more literal about it. Cahan is repeatedly drawn back to where he starts, unable to escape what he is and forced to face up to it. Only with that can he ever find a little peace. Although, clearly peace is not something Cahan is likely to get in the land of Crua, his past is tied up in the future and he can no more run from that than he could escape his farm, the village of Harn, or the strange and unknowable Gods of Wyrdwood.
One of the great things about writing a trilogy of books is you get to take your time and lay the groundwork. The events of Gods of the Wyrdwood seem relatively simple, but just like the seeds below Harn, this is a start, and from it something far stranger and more complex will grow. Very little in Crua is how it seems, or what the people who live there think it is and it’s been huge fun writing this thing while knowing the places it will go to. I can see the shoots; I am afraid you will have to guess what is going to grow.
And grow it will, as both growth and change are the essentials of being alive and the way people can change fascinates me.
RJ Barker. Leeds
November 2022
1 Well, there’s a fortuitous SF reference to start this afterword off with.