Little Boat

Back when Arthur was published, Gareth Jelley - editor of Interzone - didn’t explicitly say that he wanted another story featuring Joy and Arthur. But between the acceptance and the actual publication, I was determined that I would get another one ready in any case. Having found an editor who liked something I had written, I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to give them more of it: as long as Gareth is happy to read them, I’m happy to keep giving Joy and Arthur new things to do.

It may not sound as sexy as claiming the muse handed me a story that I just HAD to write, but that’s the life of a jobbing writer.

The first thing I needed though was a story to write. This is a situation you can find yourself in a lot more often than not as a writer: a lot of writing is just getting words down on a page, and waiting for inspiration is a luxury you can’t afford. Fortunately, with Joy and Arthur a lot of the work is already done: I know both of these characters pretty well by now, and having brought them together and resolved any lingering tensions between them in the last two stories, there was really only one thing left to do. If they wanted to head toward the fjords of Norway, it was time to start them on their journey.

It might be hard to pick up in Joy and Arthur, but I had an idea of the geography of both stories: Joy starts in Blackpool (North West England) and makes her way over towards Newcastle (North East England) in Arthur because that is pretty much a straight line for her to get to Norway. What I hadn’t considered, though, was that this would be a very big sea journey, particularly as she would be leaving from a country that had been left to die so didn’t have commercial crossings running. What she should have done is headed South to Dover, where the distance between England and Europe is small enough that it is possible - if exceptionally dangerous - to make the crossing in a small boat. Joy is an intelligent woman who grew up in Britain before it fell, so why would she make the mistake of heading in the wrong direction? The answer to that question gave me pretty much the whole story: she’d headed that way because she wasn’t ready to leave, and was trying to delay fulfilling her promise.

On top of that, there were plenty of stories in the UK press about the refugees attempting to come into the country via the same route Joy would need to take: having recently had my own experience of crossing even a small bit of sea in a small boat, I really wanted to write the story of an English refugee trying to escape the country via a small boat.

With those two things settled, all I had to do was write it.

The pitch this time was a little more nerve-wracking: Gareth hadn’t asked for this story, and he had recently turned down some non-Joy and Arthur stories I’d sent him. But as I sent back the final amends for Arthur, I also sent Little Boat and asked if he was interested in having it. At the time, Gareth already had stories commissioned for quite a way into the future - in fact shortly after I sent it in, Interzone closed submissions for a few months - and so he warned me it might be a little while before he could give a yes or no. But he was still supportive of Towards the Fjords - a name he asked me to come up with to give the two stories a sense of being part of a series - and there wouldn’t be any series without him, so it was an easy decision. It was October 2023 when I sent it in, and by September 2024 I still hadn’t heard anything back.

But what I had heard was that Escape Pod wanted to feature Joy as a reprint story on their podcast. Knowing that this would provide an opportunity for IZ Digital to promote the whole Towards the Fjords series to anyone who liked Joy and wanted to know what happened next, I got in touch with Gareth as soon as the contract was signed. There was a delay - Gareth still had to read and, more importantly, like Little Boat - but he soon got in touch and said that he would love to feature it, again in IZ Digital. I suggested the idea of publishing it at the same time as my Escape Pod episode, which Gareth liked and Escape Pod agreed to when I put it to them. This meant in practice that while the story was effectively sold, there was still six months for any editorial to happen.

What is it they say about the best laid plans?

There wasn’t a great deal of editing required for Little Boat, just a few typos and as is obligatory with my writing a sentence that didn’t parse the same way in the reader’s head as it did mine. But other factors meant that we didn’t quite make publication coincide with Joy coming out on Escape Pod. This was good for me, however, as it meant my work was spread out a bit more across the year: 2025 is looking to be my busiest year of writing for a while, and the more I can spread that out, the more time I can devote to each individual story. The story was published and now you can see whether Joy and Arthur make it out of the United Kingdom.

So what happens next? Once we’d sorted out when Little Boat was going to be published, Gareth asked the same question. Joy and Arthur haven’t quite made it to the Fjords yet, but they have had a very good run for two characters created for a short story that was rejected by its intended home. Where Little Boat leaves them could be an ending: I told Gareth that three was a good number to end on, if we wanted to. But do we want to? Well, we’ll have to wait and see what happens …