CREATING THE WORLD OF OWL (PART TWO)

Probably the best collection of Kafka’s writings…

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound us… If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?” Franz Kafka

A BLOW TO THE HEAD

This quote from Franz Kafka really got in to my head, I think because it spoke to me about why we writers write. It comes back to that thing of writing as a matter of raising consciousness, or as Kafka put it, ‘with a blow to the head’; to wake us up from our false realities.

If we read Kafka to try and decipher some kind of code or allegory, we will probably miss the ‘meaning’. What is the meaning of Kafka’s stories like ‘The Trial’ or ‘The Castle’? I think the meaning is in reading (Kafka), that we willingly suspend disbelief and enter these strange worlds of impregnable realties and the intractable bureaucrats who maintain their status quo (sound familiar). Reading is a journey and that should suffice for us. Anything else that we find there is just the intimate details only shared between lovers.

Back to the quote…

So, reading in Kafka’s mind is there because we are willing to be woken up. It says something too about our awareness that not all is right with our world and that we need to do something about it. We may not know what, or how that world can change, but we have this niggling sense of powerlessness, impotence to do anything about it and like Kafka’s worlds, ours seems impregnable and those bureaucrats of the status quo are obstinate, for their interest is in maintaining their grip on power. We end up feeling alienated and disenfranchised, either by the political or religious powers of our day.

A WORLD OF LIMITED POSSIBILITIES

The World of 0w1 offers us this same world of limited possibilities, that our lives have already been written by those who do not know us. We are trapped and if we resist, we are then the targets of the Authorities.

This is what happened to Strix’s parents, Jack Stanza, an underground poet and Shula, a revered Model with the Floran Fashion House.

As much as Shula’s presence in the first book of the 0w1 series is limited, to start going into this past life of a very young Strix and his parents, would have meant that the book would probably double in length. It was then that I decided that if their stories were worth telling, and they were, then I would create a series of backstories.

The trick in doing this is to have a firm understanding of what has happened, which has been referenced in the main novel. This was trickier than I thought it would be and it meant also re-reading “0w1:believe” a number of times, to collect ‘the facts’ of this retrospective exercise.

0W1:BEGINNINGS

It was with these backstories in mind, that I decided to create “0w1:beginnings”. These were to be graphic novels of a hundred pages or so, which I wrote on Final Draft with their Graphic Novel template. This was quite a different challenge from writing screenplays, but once I got used to the software it became a matter of instinct for which keystrokes were needed next.

In this series we explore Strix’s time at the Orphanage and also the world of Shula and Jack, with their friends, who form a dissident group of artists. We see a well-connected national network laid out, which will inform us of characters in the 0w1 series of novels.

Story...is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it. —Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

I had decided very early on that Strix wasn’t going to have those embarrassing, no-hopers called parents; with a bland concept of death after life, but still walking around and annoying their kids with their parental advice and diktats. Jack and Shula were going to be different. But this difference was to have a cost for Strix; indeed, a very grave consequence.

The first image we see of Strix is after his arrival at the Saint George’s Project. He is with his best mate, Calvin who is having a rant about ‘the cost of being different’ and how this can make you a target for those who do not want to be disturbed. Gradually Strix will lift the veil covering his past and his best mate becomes his soul dude.

Jack and Shula became targets of the Paparazzi in Chelsea, London; Jack was dubbed as the ‘toxic poet’ and Shula as “Shula, Princess Predator” or a lesbian sexual predator of young models.

In the end, the were ‘exiled’ to Bristol, where Jack was eventually arrested (again) and taken to a Political Correction Camp, in Lincoln Gaol. Shula ended her days on a council estate, in a high-rise flat, murdered by the State Security Services.

SAMIZDAT

This is far from having bland, benign parents and we see in the first novel how this has affected Strix; the rest is revealed in other publications by Jack’s publisher, Paul O. Hasard. These were underground publications to a secure mailing list. This was something they had learnt from the Russian dissident underground publications, known as Samizdats, which were typed on the cheapest of papers and circulated to their known connection in the Resistance. But that’s a revelation for another day.

It is this influence which finds its way into the design of our front cover.

DESIGN IMAGE HERE

THE GROUP

Strix was born into a family and their dissident friends, who believed in change through non-violence; their son then takes this to heart and is determined that this is the path he will follow, with his own band of dissenting friends. The Group is made up of artists and coders, who find ways of subverting the power of the State and its Church.

You can see that this is an extensive character web, but the trick for me was in not flooding the story with too many characters, but to introduce a world in which Strix and his friend were small cogs in a State Machine, enough to show that this is not a small town, boy meets girl story of love found and then lost.

This reveals the benefits of working with a series of stories, in which the anonymous State will become a very up close and personal threat. Also it’s not just the characters that will be shifting, but also there’ll be a couple of perspective shifts for the vision space from each of the stories . However, I’ll not give anything more away, but hope that we will travel together on this journey in the ‘World of 0w1’.

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Geoff Hall