Peter Lancett

WHEN AND WHY
Sometime in June 2012, when I was still living in New Zealand, it occurred to me that I'd been working on film and television projects for several years and in that time hadn't written any prose fiction. I did wonder then whether I was out of practice and ought to write something to keep my hand in so to speak. I happened to be at my desk with the laptop open and Facebook staring at me and without thinking I started typing. In less than two minutes, the first episode of The Story was posted to my Facebook status timeline. I hadn't planned it, I simply let it flow as a stream of consciousness. One or two friends asked what it was all about and I explained that I was just practicing some prose writing for fun and left it at that.
   Next day I wrote the second episode, a direct follow-on from the first, and posted it to Facebook. At this point I realised that I wanted to continue with this exercise because I was already enjoying it and already enjoying the character I'd created, Stevie. The obvious move then was to move The Story to a blog site in order to archive it while still making it available to the few friends who'd expressed an interest in following it. So from then on I'd post an episode a day to the blog site and notify my friends via Facebook to say that the new episode was now available. All in all about thirty people were following Stevie's progress and this following kept me disciplined. An episode a day was expected of me and an episode a day is what I delivered. Every day. Without fail.

 

HOW

To make it a more testing exercise for me, I set myself some ground rules. I had to write at least one episode per day and I couldn't spend more than twenty minutes writing an episode. Some days I might write more than one episode, but on those days, each episode had to be written within the twenty minute limit, and there had to be a gap of at least a thirty minutes between writing those episodes. Sometimes Episodes written on the same day were amalgamated to form a single episode before posting as the narrative structure demanded and this was allowed. As a final kicker, I had to post what I'd written unedited to get me back in the habit, as far as is possible, of getting the good stuff down first time. And mostly this worked out because looking back on the raw blog site posts I'm still rather pleased with what I managed to do.

 

WHAT

From the start this exercise in narrative prose composition was called The Story because honestly I had no idea where I was going with it and wasn't much interested in trying to come up with a catchy title. So I got used to calling it The Story and clearly that has stuck. I can't think of it as anything else now. I chose to call my daily segments episodes rather than chapters because they were necessarily short bites of text and often ended with a cliff-hanger, rather like old fashioned radio serials. I'd never considered that The Story would ever be made available for publication but it did occur to me that short bites like this make for an easy read, which is never a bad thing. Pick it up, read a small chunk or two, put it down. Repeat until finished.

 

SUBJECT

I don't know why I wrote The Story as a first-person narrative, but that's how it came out from the very first words. I enjoyed taking on Stevie's persona as I was writing but it's not true to say - as some people have suggested - that The Story is in any way autobiographical. Yes the occult detail, the ceremonial magic and the detailed knowledge of those things, well I admit it, they are part of my biography - mea culpa. But Stevie's journey isn't a road I've travelled. Of course some of Stevie's occult experiences are my experiences - as you'd expect given that I've made the depiction of them as accurate as possible while keeping the narrative readable. It's fair to say though, particularly with regard to ceremonial magic, that the preparations and the rituals would be far too long-winded to make for interesting reading in a work of this nature. There are plenty of books available describing the ceremonial process if anyone is interested in delving deeper as a quick scour of Amazon with "ceremonial magic" as the search words will show. Thinking about it, Stevie's withering and contemptuous comments and his occasional rants are probably as much me as they are him and I apologise if Stevie is sometimes a little sharp with you, gentle reader. Stevie does sometimes go off on a tangent to explain something he's mentioned too, and that is me to a tee. He does acknowledge that he's done it though and almost apologises for it, something that I probably wouldn't do.

 

FAMILY

Because the nature of the content of The Story was prompting questions from its followers - that I was happy to answer - I created a Facebook group for people who were following and that became the question and answer forum. I also used the group to explain things that had come up in the narrative where a detailed explanation in the narrative would have disrupted the flow. This was also a place to have a bit of fun, so I started to post pictures of places and things and sometimes characters mentioned in The Story so that readers could see what I was seeing. I found pictures corresponding to Toni, Hesther, Helen, Maggie, Ella, along with houses, restaurants, cars, clothes and accessories and so on. Characters in The Story have by and large exquisite taste and the means to indulge it.

 

CONCLUSION

So that's it, the story of The Story, and Stevie has come a long way since that initial episode in June 2012. I completed the fourth novel in 2015 but there were a couple of lengthy and announced breaks due to my moving back from New Zealand to England at the end of 2012. There are four novels in the series because The Story took on a life of its own and developed a momentum that I made no effort to check. If you choose to read it, I do hope you enjoy it. I certainly enjoyed writing it. Thank you.
                                                                                          Peter Lancett, England, December 2015

 

OH, AND ANOTHER THING...

I should perhaps mention that my work with Ceremonial Haute Magie - High Magic - began and concluded many years ago in the time before the internet and its quick and easy promises and its opportunities for fleecing and fooling the unquestioning, the unwary - and those desperate to belong. It's a path I haven't followed for a long long time, but of course you can't unlearn what you've learned, you can't put the Genie back in the bottle. Much of what I learned  and experienced has been of great value to me on my spiritual journey, but I feel no regret at having left behind all forms of hierarchical structure, involving as that does, the surrender of personal power and potential to the will of others. It's no longer a way that suits me, though I understand that structure is exactly what others crave. This first novel in the four-novel series following Stevie's quest does concern itself with Ceremonial Magic in particularly dangerous ways. But I'm giving nothing away by saying that in subsequent novels, Stevie's journey is drawn along other paths. For my own part, in case you're interested, I only concern myself with personal journeying through meditation, drumming, chanting and lonely vigils spent in desolate places. Each to their own.