December 18
T. L. Huchu
About T. L. Huchu
T. L. Huchu (he/him) has been published previously (as Tendai Huchu) in the adult market, but The Library of the Dead is his genre fiction debut. His previous books (The Hairdresser of Harare and The Maestro, The Magistrate and the Mathematician) have been translated into multiple languages and his short fiction has won awards. Tendai grew in up Zimbabwe but has lived in Edinburgh for most of his adult life.
Award-winning author T. L. Huchu reflects on his inspiration ahead of the release of The Library of the Dead, Book 1 in the new Edinburgh nights series.
On Inspiration
I lost my religion a long time ago and I’ve come to believe the muses are a young person’s game. I wish I had a romantic story to tell you about how I wrote “The Library of the Dead”, something mystical sounding involving dreams, glimpses of shadows in Edinburgh’s closes, weird rituals and maybe even late night visits to the various cemeteries dotted around the city. But this is the grown up world, magic doesn’t just happen, you create it yourself. By this I mean you are no longer the kid that wakes up to find the two quid the tooth fairy shoved under the pillow, the fantastic presents Santa left in your stockings on Christmas day. No, you’re the poor bugger that makes this shit happen and then pretends otherwise. At least that’s what I think. . . then again, what the fuck do I know? I’d been working in genre for a good few years, mainly doing short fiction, gradually building up the muscles necessary for a novel. Circa 2015 I published the short story Ghostalker in the ezine ‘Electric Spec’. The nameless narrator of this tale stayed with me; she had a strong voice and spunk in abundance, and I knew she could carry a novel, but I didn’t yet have a world big enough for her. Edinburgh is a small city, hell you can walk across it in a couple of hours if you fancy, but what it lacks in breadth, it more than makes up for in the depth of its history. And so the fourth dimension, the temporal aspect of the city stretches out to make up for its diminutive spatial element. History playing out in the present would become the driving force behind my narrative and so I named my character Ropa Moyo and said go forth and do your worst. I also cannibalised another short story, aptly titled The Library of the Dead which I had published in an anthology in 2017 and used the eponymous setting, plus the main character of that story Jomo Maige would become Ropa’s bestie. Come on mash-ups are so hip-hop. But, does it count as inspiration if you are plagiarizing your own work? Isn’t this what all writer’s do eventually? Perhaps not in the exact same fashion, but I believe after you’ve done this crap for a while, you begin to circle back on yourself, revisiting old haunts, picking up unfinished fragments, ripping apart and reworking what you once thought were finished tales, trying to best your younger self because you have something they did not — a little more experience. Maybe down the line people will say you have a certain style, a polite way of reminding you that you keep doing the same shit over and over. But if you can disguise it well enough then it may just work. I’ve been writing for a while now, working on my craft, I still am, the only difference between now and when I started is I don’t wait for inspiration, I create it for myself. In any case, I know now that ideas are two a penny in this town, the real grind comes in doing the work, the gruelling sentence by sentence slog of turning out a cohesive narrative — paradoxically this is also the fun bit, or it can be if you allow it to be. Now that for me is the real magic of writing.
Find out more about T. L. Huchu:
When ghosts talk, she will listen…
Pre-order T. L. Huchu’s The Library of the Dead - out on 4 February 2021 - from Pan Macmillan or support our local bookshop Transreal Fiction - Scotland’s leading SciFi and Fantasy bookstore - in Edinburgh.