Well here we are.
Here we are indeed.
A lot’s changed since 1862, the last Project Tempest release.
A global pandemic. A decade’s worth of change compressed into one year. Cyberpunk 2077. Oh, and John le Carré died.
Did it make it harder to write Her Mad Song?
New Zealand, so far, has done exceptionally well managing the pandemic. We had a relatively short national lockdown and then some regional restrictions, but life here is about as normal as it can be. Shops and restaurants are open. People went on holidays over Christmas.
Having said that, honestly, for actually shipping creative work, this past year’s been like broken glass. I hit multiple walls trying to get Her Mad Song out. I’ve always prided myself on the ability to finish things but this was absolutely brutal. I think the release date shifted 6 times, the title’s not the same, and there are abandoned promises all over the podcast and the newsletter about when it was actually going to emerge. Usually I find setting a public deadline a really good motivator to get shit done. Not this time.
But, again, we are here. Done.
And Project Tempest itself has shifted scope, somewhat.
It has. The world’s changed so fast that certain themes and ideas have had to evolve at speed to keep up. The form, too, as our audience has grown. My original plan was five novellas over an eighteen month span. But the first two releases, Hearts & Minds and The Island, are out of step now. So they’re going into the archives, or the closet, or the crypt, whichever you like to call it. They were excellent learning experiences. But the reborn Project Tempest starts with 1862 and now Her Mad Song. And we’re looking towards more interactivity. Tempest Bay as a place for people to shape story experiences themselves, over time.
A metaverse?
That seems to be the lingo, at the moment. Hopefully more about that soon.
We’ve also gotten the Project Tempest podcast off the ground.
I’m really proud of it, and it’s shaping up to be a damn good set of ongoing conversations about making things. Ed McRae, a brilliant Kiwi narrative designer, kicked us off beautifully. Just the chance to sit back and share perspectives on what it’s like in the midst of the creative tangle. Big ideas. Human details. Bad jokes. All of it.
Without having to write anything down.
Without having to write!!!!
So what’s the big idea, at this point? It feels like emotional climate change keeps coming up.
Yes, made more explicit by Hedy’s quasi-meteorology in the story. I need to start off by being clear that this is a metaphor. Physical, real climate change is a well-measured increase in volatility with atmospheric carbon as one of its key factors. And it’s increasingly clear that all the world’s physical systems are deeply interconnected. Amazonian trees, South China sea currents, African water supplies, everything affects everything else.
But we don’t always think of emotions that way. They’re real, we feel them, they strongly influence our behaviour, but where do they go? Is there an external imaginative environment that connects us all together, somehow?
And the leap in the background of Project Tempest is to say, yes, they do. That there’s an environment we’re all part of where emotions, especially strong ones, build up like carbon. And that over time this leads to increasingly volatile behaviour. Which for Tempest Bay manifests as these storms that roll in every few decades and drive the whole town into orgiastic, creative, violent frenzy.
Social media feels like the perfect real-world example of this. I mean, clearly, over the last 10 years or so something is building. Spilling out everywhere.
What if we’re causing permanent lasting change in the imaginative environment? Beyond just chemical pulses traveling through our body on a temporary basis.
Of course, as a hypothesis there’s currently no useful way to test it. No direct method of measuring emotion or imagination worldwide. You can measure a bunch of secondary results, most of which are behavioral. Though I’d suggest that certain large data platforms have as good a shot as anyone at really starting to see what’s happening. And that if you were sitting on top of one of those, you might know something that the rest of us just feel.
It could be one of the largest, most dangerous secrets one someone could discover. Something that might you flee to a place like New Zealand, and adopt a very different perspective on the future than the usual upward-curve optimism of the tech sector.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
I wake up every morning and there is a resilience in there. A bounciness. It was a long time developing. But it is there, and it’s part of what I think is reflected in Tempest Bay. This mad, rocky, sea-tossed town where people cling to the shore like limpets and are often extraordinarily horrible to one another… but they persist. They keep waking up and living life and creating things.
Philip Glass once said music is a place. I think he’s right, and I’d extend that to all of imagination, this territory we need to find ways to navigate better. I like putting a lot of pressure on that idea. Taking it where it goes.
How can people be part of Project Tempest?
Tell someone about these mad little stories. Subscribe to the newsletter at project-tempest.net. Have a listen to the podcast at project-tempest.net/podcast. And write in with any comments or questions to hello@manonfire.org. The very best part about all this malarkey is connecting with people and building our strange little community around Tempest Bay.