Chronology of Major Events 

2020: the birth of Dr. A.E. Anderson during a bio-contagion

2030-2050: a series of five eco-catastrophes leading to a world controlled by Consortium.

2050: The Battle of Kingsway

2057: the worsening of planetary conditions which impact the lives of Abigail, adopted daughter of Dr. A.E. Anderson and the Women of the Wishing Well. 

2072: The Resisters continue to battle Consortium.

2087: The New Dark Ages 

the far future: where we first meet Bramah and the Beggar Boy.

Behind the Scenes with the Author: 
The Timeline in Book One, Bramah and The Beggar Boy

In fragments that grew as the characters developed over time.

The first thing that arrived, were sets of images, snippets of conversation, and rhythmic patterns.

All of these somehow telegraphed to me that they came from the far future.

An eerie experience for sure.

Certainly, and unexpectedly, as I worked on individual poems, sometimes over a period of months, the characters of this epic started to claim me. That’s the only way I can describe what happened. 

The Timeline Creation Process

So two threads (at least!) started coalescing: 

• the words and sounds and images that drove the creation of the poem.
• then the lives, loves, heartaches, tragedies and triumphs, usually short lived, of the characters.  

The characters started to act like magnets for the poems.

The more I tapped into the motives of the characters, the more they pulled me into the language of their lives, and the poems just sort of spilled out onto the page.

In the revision process, which is still ongoing as this is a series, I started mapping out the characters’ lives. That really drove the timeline creation. The other startling “unprecedented” factor was writing this saga into and during our pandemic. 

Suddenly, the year 2020 contained great psychic force and the character of Dr. Anderson claimed me. 

I see her character’s life and what she does and what happens to her as a kind of message from the future and also from our past, should I be lucky enough to have readers of this epic in the far future.

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Influences (mundane and specific)

I’ve always loved high fantasy novels, epic sagas, and cycles of songs, things in series.  

Epic poems such as Homer’s Odyssey or Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost create such intricate textures of time and place, through poetic form. 

What I find fascinating is the timeless-ness of these epics, they deal with the distant past in a generic way and funnily enough, I interpret them as simultaneously ancient and futuristic!

And a guilty reading pleasure confession: 

on summer evenings you can find me burrowed into old unfashionable historical romances like Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave and Hugh Walpole’s The Herries Chronicles or Winston Graham’s the Poldark series.

The worldbuilding in these novels uses time to create patterns in narrative and space. They gave me the idea that dates can contain whole worlds. For instance, in our history: 1848, 1945, 1776.

I wanted to imbue THOT J BAP with that kind of worldbuilding feel. In Bramah and The Beggar Boy, these three dates really resonate: 2020, 2050, 2057.

After you’ve spent some time with the book, let me know if you feel the same way! Leave a reply below or email me at portals@thotjbap.com.

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