Ask the Author: Noel Coughlan
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Noel Coughlan
From my early teens, I wanted to create an original secondary world with a novel mythology. I conceived the Photocosm, as I now call it, as a world where the inhabitants practiced a religion/pseudoscience centring around colour. Mr Blue Sky by ELO may have been an influence. The gods of this world were Lights of different colours, and matter was simply a tangible form of light. Also, darkness was not merely the absence of light but a light in its own right. The universe was a product of the interaction of these divine lights. I wrote a creation myth around this idea, and you get a glimpse of some of the events in that story in the novel.
The initial focus of my writing was the offspring of the Dark Light, the Sables. However, I was eventually drawn to the Ors, the people of Aurelian, the Golden Light. One influence in their creation was an image of a pre-Christian Irish stone head I had seen in some school history book. I suspect that the head actually may have had three faces, but the picture showed only two, in effect making the bust a sort of bald Janus.
I like looking at the world from radically alien perspectives, though they are very challenging to write because the reader needs to understand the mindset of those characters to appreciate the logic of their actions. Sometimes they’re a bit counterintuitive. I created the Stretchers initially as proxy for the reader, but they took on a life of their own. The forked cross is based on a forked stone in Ireland. It is also like a fork in a road. The saints are loosely based the early church in Ireland with a frisson of druidic authority. Irish folklore, particularly the changeling, plays a big part in their relationship with the Ors.
Lastly, the name of the book is an inversion of the normal association of evil with darkness. One of Aurelian’s many titles is Bright Lord, an inversion of Dark Lord. I like twisting and inverting things because well it’s more fun.
The initial focus of my writing was the offspring of the Dark Light, the Sables. However, I was eventually drawn to the Ors, the people of Aurelian, the Golden Light. One influence in their creation was an image of a pre-Christian Irish stone head I had seen in some school history book. I suspect that the head actually may have had three faces, but the picture showed only two, in effect making the bust a sort of bald Janus.
I like looking at the world from radically alien perspectives, though they are very challenging to write because the reader needs to understand the mindset of those characters to appreciate the logic of their actions. Sometimes they’re a bit counterintuitive. I created the Stretchers initially as proxy for the reader, but they took on a life of their own. The forked cross is based on a forked stone in Ireland. It is also like a fork in a road. The saints are loosely based the early church in Ireland with a frisson of druidic authority. Irish folklore, particularly the changeling, plays a big part in their relationship with the Ors.
Lastly, the name of the book is an inversion of the normal association of evil with darkness. One of Aurelian’s many titles is Bright Lord, an inversion of Dark Lord. I like twisting and inverting things because well it’s more fun.
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