So, yesterday I was out walking (I say “walking” although “slogging through the driving sleet to buy groceries, my second-born’s pram pushed before me like combination dogsled and windbreaker” is more appropriate), when inspiration[1] struck me.
[1] This seems to be the norm, and really makes me think I should be selling this amazing “go for a walk” concept as some sort of creativity-boosting wonder-treatment.
This time, it was the big one. The last one.
I figured out how the world of Creepy and Hatboy links into all the rest of the stuff I’ve ever written. That’s the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, at least until such time as I write something new.
This basically means that, on some massively broad and impossibly high level, every (reasonably-long and detailed) piece of fiction I’ve ever written is officially connected in some way or other.
Speaking of impossibly high, I found this old illustration during my most recent archaeological folder-dig. University, man.
Sure, there are a few snippets from here on the blog, page-length things and random short stories … but the big stuff, the stuff that needed to interconnect – it all works. And with this breakthrough, there’s even wriggle-room for a lot of those smaller pieces. But let’s take it one step at a time and not force things. This all just fell into place with amazing ease (I feel I’ve started to say “this just happened without me planning it, this doesn’t happen very often” so many times, the phrase is losing its effect … but it’s true!), so I’m not going to go shoehorning every last piece of prose I’ve ever conceived into the framework.
My breakout piece, the scathing, hegemony-upsetting and paradigm-rebranding socio-political commentary known as The Dictionary, The Bible, And Other Works Of Fiction, for example (do I want to use the word “seminal”? I think I do, in every sense of the word), will probably have to remain in literary limbo.
This doesn’t mean that all my works take place within a single extended universe, with unifying rules of any kind. Anyone familiar with the diverse crap I pump into this blog will be well aware that that is never going to happen. But when you have something as big as the urverse, and compound it with unreality and the even larger spheres, and concepts such as slo-time, not to mention Yool, the nerve-rackingly buff Christmas tree who has been here the whole time … yeah, it can be made to work.
I’m quite excited about this and need to get started.
Hatboy's Hatstand 
Interesting. Chucky’s Grand Unified Theory of Everything. So, slo-time is also made of aactur or the Book of Pinian urverse is just one bubble in slo-time, or is slo-time a kind of unreality? Is the Book of Pinian Earth the same as the Creepy and Hatboy Earth? Too soon? (Sorry, could not resist the questions.)
I don’t want to answer that too directly because I want readers to solve it and be creeped out by it, but I admit this will be a long time in coming and may in fact never happen.
So it might help to keep in mind that all the Creepy and Hatboy stuff happens within a sphere of world-and-Wasteland. Outside that “bubble” is the mystery-space known as “slo-time”, which is pretty much beyond their measurable existence and therefore impossible to define, but may in fact be something else.
Or that may not help at all, because “slo-time is also made of aactur or the Book of Pinian urverse is just one bubble in slo-time, or is slo-time a kind of unreality” all tends to hinge on a single extended universe with unifying rules of any kind. Which I just said was not going to be the case. So, looking at it the wrong way but I appreciate the theorising.
Sure, I was just thinking that if there’s a link, then there logically has to be some kind of shared framework. But I can’t imagine what it could possibly be, so it’ll be interesting to find out.
Eee, indeed.