Nearing the end

The places I went, the people I knew

I started publishing Tales from the Triverse in September 2021. The weekly serial will likely wrap up in January 2026, or February at the latest. As I wrote last week’s instalment, I had a palpable sensation of coming to the end, of nearing the point at which I say goodbye to the characters and the world in which I’ve been playing these four and a bit years.

Unknown territory approaches: this newsletter has never existed without Tales from the Triverse. It’s the biggest, most ambitious project I’ve ever worked on, and I can’t really remember a time now when I wasn’t thinking about it.

Spending significant time in fictional spaces does odd things to my brain, as I imagine it does for most writers. I’d love to know if any research has been done into how fiction writers create and store memories. I find myself jumbling reality and fantasy together, with my made-up worlds seeming to occupy the same areas of my brain as places I’ve visited in real life. There is a thin, almost non-existent line between my memories of a holiday in Porto, Portugal (a real place) and of visiting the city of Bruglia (a not real place).

The views, the smells, the sounds, the people. It all mushes together. Often, places I’ve been to for a week on holiday take up a residence in my brain in a semi-fictional manner. Climbing La Giralda tower in Seville, with its wide ramps instead of steps, feels like something from a story I might have written. I mean, who builds a 95m tall tower that you can ride a horse up? Clearly fictional.

Then there’s the street markets of Bruglia, or the palace gardens. As far as my brain is concerned, these are also places that I have been.

It doesn’t help that I often rework real places into my fiction. Fountain University in Triverse is modelled on Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. A city in The Mechanical Crown, an earlier serial of mine, was based on Ronda in Spain. Thus my memories of fact and fiction become ever more entwined and confused.

Perhaps memory is all a fiction. Events and places and conversations are real in the moment, but then become coded into memory according to our subjective experience. The way I remember a conversation can differ wildly from the other participant.

Fictional characters shift back and forth between fictional constructs and palpable people. Sometimes they are pawns under my direct control, existing solely to serve the story. Other times, they’re taking up residence in my mind, much like real friends and colleagues. Sometimes I find myself thinking of characters from earlier projects, like I might reminisce about a friend I haven’t seen for decades.

All of this is how I ended up writing a note of thanks to my made-up characters:

I don’t subscribe to the notion that my characters ‘come alive’ and have ‘minds of their own’, but I do have a suspicion that my brain struggles to distinguish between memories of real places, people and events and fictional ones that I’ve made up, increasingly so as time passes and I get further from the work.

It’s not a surprise that many creators go back to their earlier work, to make a sequel or a prequel or some such. As well as any other reasons, it’s like visiting old friends, or going back to somewhere you visited earlier in life.

Back when I used to publish on Wattpad, many, many years ago, there was a cute moment at the end of any project when you could literally toggle a switch in the book’s setting from ‘ongoing’ to ‘completed’. Presumably their obscure algorithm treated projects slightly differently. There’s no such thing on this newsletter, but Tales from the Triverse will become a different object.

The story always had an ending, and was never intended to be an infinite ongoing. I tend to think that stories only really work if they have definitive endings, which is probably why I’ve never enjoyed watching endless soap operas and tend to dip in and out of mainstream comics based on the writers, rather than to follow the characters. The ending is what ultimately defines everything that came before.

I’ll leave it there. I need to go prepare myself to say goodbye to these people I’ve hung out with for the past four years.

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Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

2025 has been a big year for this newsletter. Creatively, I’ve been very satisfied with my writing. I’ve met new writers, recorded podcasts and talked with fascinating people on live streams. Lots more people have shown up and I’m hugely grateful to all of you. Your support has enabled me to dream a little bigger, and once Triverse wraps up I’ll be putting some of those plans into action.

In the meantime, have a wonderful Christmas to all of you who celebrate. Depending on how much I eat, there may or may not be a Triverse chapter this week. That may, of course, simply be me trying to delay the inevitable.