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Riley G. Boyd asks Aristide Twain a few questions following the release of Volume 1: The Final Word, the first official installment of Arcbeatle Press’s new Auteur series. Aistide Twain conceived and edited the project, as well as authoring the novella-length short stories Marginalia and House of Auteur which open and close the anthology — plus a very special foreword… 
 Extra character illustration for ‘Marginalia’ by Dante Vernor Katz. Tell us a bit about yourself, your creative background? Well, I’m a French-born editor, writer, cartoonist, and voice actor, as ranked in descending order of competence. I’m quite private when it comes to my personal life, but in the interest of not coming across as some sort of obsessive art-demon — a niche which is, I find, best left to fictional skeletons — I’ll also mention my abiding interests in nature photography and gardening, which often go hand in hand. And, of course, I read an awful lot of things. My first serious project (if serious is the right word) was the webfiction series The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, which I created in 2018 with my dear friend, L. Alves; whimsical science-fiction in the Adamsian mould, with an ever-expanding cast of characters. A surprisingly short time after that, I was welcomed into Arcbeatle Press by James Wylder and James Hornby, with contributions to 10,000 Dawns and other flagship series of the time. Those experiences, in turn, led to me branching out and getting involved with other small publishers, from the Cheshire House to Obverse Books — but Arcbeatle remains my primary creative home to this day, and in recent years, I’ve been entrusted with editing a number of holiday crossover anthologies, from the meta madness of the short-and-sweet Noodle Incident one memorable April Fools’ Day to the frankly unreasonably-huge treasure-trove of Arcbeatle goodness that was The Book of the Snowstorm, our all-purpose winter anthology for 2023. All of which just about gets us up to speed to the point when this anthology seriously began to be written, because this thing has beenn a long time in the making. How did the Auteur project come about? Well, I’ve always been fond of skeletons and metafiction. [Laughs] It’s true! But that aside… as Fate would have it, Jayce Black, the original creator of Auteur in the Faction Paradox series was one of the first people I befriended when I got into the series around 2018, together with Nate Bumber. Not only that, but I believe that James Wylder’s White Canvas, a 10,000 Dawns novella which guest-starred a younger incarnation of Auteur, was itself the first Arcbeatle book I actually got my hands on. That, in turn, spurred me to go back and dive into his origins in Obverse’s Book of the Enemy and Book of the Peace. I’m telling you, I never stood a chance. Prone as I am to weave whatever interests me into my writing, it was only a matter of time before I asked Jay to let me play with the character — which eventually, of course, they did. At first it was only an unofficial short story put out during Lockdown, but by the end of 2020, I’d well and truly caught the bone-bug. Auteur turned up in the Copper-Colored Cupids series, first once, then twice, and slowly it became clear that we’d opened up a whole new era for the character. It really — that is the word, it dawned on me, like a vocation, this awareness that now I’d have to go and brainstorm an Auteur series, because…Jayce Black and James Wylder, these huge, towering talents, had told a self-contained arc, beginning a long, long time ago with a lonely, vindictive little child on the Planet of the Gods; an arc which ended at the First Auction in Heaven, at the climax of one of the best Faction Paradox stories of the 2010s, when a mad skeleton with delusions of godhood was devoured by a giant snake out of Egyptian mythology. All this, they’d achieved in a span of exactly eleven months, between January 25th and December 25th of 2018. It was perfect. …And now I’d gone and brought him back again! I had to create a story worthy of that sacrilege, something more than a handful of online larks. Besides, he called to me. Gods do that, even when they’re not real. Something about him felt right, like there were stories to tell, untapped potential I’d brushed up against and fallen short of. So, in the last weeks of 2020, I did what anyone would do: I announced an Auteur spin-off series for 2021. Interesting. I notice that it’s now 2026, and Volume 1 has just come out. Is it? Oh blast, my watch is slow. [Sigh] Thing is, I didn’t actually have a plan yet; heaven help us, for a while I toyed with doing it as a comic, until the continuing stringencies of the COVID era proved that to be financially impossible. And for some inscrutable reason, I wasted considerable time brainstorming a version of the series that was actually one big flashback, an interquel between the original Book of the Enemy and Book of the Peace stories — which would have been absolutely wrong, though ideas from it found their way back into House of Auteur. In the end, I came to my senses — I realised I couldn’t do this by myself. And thus, the idea of Auteur as a group project, a short story anthology, took shape, one friend and one message at a time. The indispensable L. Alves was, of course, among the first to answer the call, alongside Plum Pudding, who was not, then, the brains behind Disparate Minds at the Cheshire House yet, but instantly impressed me with her grasp of tone, her keen understand of the character and of the nascent series. As for me, I didn’t set pen to paper right away, perhaps out of cautious editorial instinct, but more likely because of how incredibly busy I was with other projects. Instead, as far as Auteur was concerned, I went back to the conversations I'd had with Jayce, and to the story directions suggested by the slapdash Lockdown-era trilogy of shorts; together, they provided a backbone for a narrative arc that would run through the new crop of stories, giving structure to what was suddenly becoming a thrilling but chaotic convergence of disparate visions. Before I knew it — this was in 2023 or so — I was elbows-deep in manuscripts, and it became necessary to split what had originally been a single standalone book into two volumes. In time, each of these volumes would undergo its own mitosis, bringing us to the current tally of four anthologies and upwards that have drafts already in the can — not to mention the out-of-order ‘preview’ Auteur stories I started stuffing into the holiday anthologies as teases for the future, like The Two Auteurs in The Book of the Snowstorm, which were invaluable in helping me to get the feel of the character in time for his grand debut. That first impression was something I was very keen to get right : by 2024, when I really started working on Marginalia, it was clear that not only would the series run indefinitely, but it would be marketed as the truly original work it was becoming, aimed primarily at new readers, rather than Faction Paradox diehards — though those are still very welcome too! What makes Auteur such an interesting character for creatives to work with? …I did mention the words ‘metafiction skeleton god’, yes? You’d be surprised how well that works as an elevator pitch. There’s something iconic about it, something fundamental; you can condense him into very few words, and they’re not words that had ever been put together in this particular order. He’s incredibly specific, and incredibly self-explanatory. He’s a ranting, cackling villain with the manner of a snob, and he thinks the world is a story that exists for his entertainment only. It’s genius. I’m glad I didn’t invent him, that way I get to state that as plainly as it deserves to be stated. Genius. Throw him at any situation, any genre, sparks will fly. In a way, he’s almost too convenient: other characters might want to do good in the world, or indeed, to do evil, and if you let them get their way, they collapse your narrative down upon you. Because, well, who wouldn’t? Actually imagine yourself trapped in a story — you’d rebel, of course you would. You don’t want the tribulations, the twists and turns; you want to get to the good bits at the end. No one likes to live in Interesting Times™. But Auteur? Auteur wants to spin a good yarn. He’s a writer’s best friend, a fitting patron deity for the storyteller’s craft. Except, of course, he isn’t. That’s the other clever bit. When Writers — it’s always Writers with a Capital W, or worse yet, Storytellers with a Capital S — when Writers tell grand epics about the Prince of Fiction or somesuch, there’s a terrible danger of everything collapsing down into a singularity of self-congratulation about the sodding Power of sodding Stories. Aye, but… Auteur is a bad god, a mad god, a neurotic personality wound tight as a fist and let loose upon an unsuspecting cosmos. He’s gaudy and he’s petulant; he’s childish and easily bored; selfish and self-satisfied. He’s everything you don’t want to see in the mirror when you’re in this business. There’s something incredibly cathartic about letting a terrible little imp run around doing all the impulsive things to your characters that you’re too reasonable to do, and then watching it all fall apart, and seeing what you can rebuild from the rubble. …And somewhere under there, somewhere deep and dark and hidden, there’s an actual soul, a complex, aching personality. I like to keep that in mind, and prod at the edges of the character when a story allows it. I think a lot of people will come away from The Final Word with a newfound appreciation for the guy; perhaps even something like sympathy. But I don’t want to overegg that aspect. Sometimes you just want an awful little man to boo and hiss at, and many of the greatest Auteur stories, both published and unpublished, play that tune to perfection. For such a flamboyantly unique creation, he’s really very multi-purpose — devil and clown, man and monster. Have I mentioned that I love this goofball?  Above: extra character ilustration for ‘Marginalia’ by Dante Vernor Katz. What can you tell readers about your stories in Volume 1: The Final Word and how they were developed? What were your biggest inspirations for them, and for the project as a whole? Well, let's see… I have, by any sane analysis, two stories in this book. There’s also the foreword, or Avant-Propos, which Auteur hijacks to have a conversation with me, the editor; but it really doesn’t count — how else would you write a foreword to a book like this? In any case, it isn’t fiction, because it really happened. Read it, and you’ll understand. No, my first real story in The Final Word is Marginalia, a novella-length affair whose bones went through many configurations before the draft became remotely functional — I threw away more Chapter 1s than I can count, merged and unmerged characters, but I think it was all worth it, and the core elements remained the same throughout, including the pivotal role played by Epsilon, a long-gestating character whom I am eternally grateful to my long-time friend Lowri Llewellyn for allowing me to borrow and give a proper debut to. In its final form, Marginalia starts with a girl with wounds that won’t stop bleeding, and an abiding love of an obscure fantasy book series about Archons from beyond Space and Time. It’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius as rewritten by Clive Barker; I’ve bombastically described it as a Borgesian spin on gothic fantasy — two great tastes that taste great together. And what is it that links them? It’s a preponderance of labyrinths; of hidden passages beneath the ordinary world, shifting mazes packed with obtuse geometries, otherworldly wonders, and secret doorways in every corner. Such constructs demand narrative structures to match — mysteries within mysteries, hidden connections, and a fourth wall that is not so much broken as fitted with a revolving glass doorway. But through all those clockwork mysteries, it’s also a very human story — one about living in the margins, about disability and disempowerment, broken dreams and lost futures. And yes, about the way we relate to stories and to language, but people, in all their strangeness and complexity, remain a senior partner in that delicate equation, and I hope to have avoided egregious platitude. I’ve mentioned Borges, the master of us all, but as metafictional fantasy goes, I'm also hugely indebted to Steven Hall, whose novels The Raw Shark Texts and Maxwell’s Demon are absolute must-gets for anyone who enjoys what we’re doing with Auteur, as are his Big Finish audio plays The Word Lord and A Death in the Family. All these are very much in the same world as Marginalia — aesthetically at least, and perhaps diegetically, too. There are a few hints to that effect throughout the book, one of which I got to make quite explicit, as Steven was kind enough to authorise a nifty little name-drop. (A lot of people have authorised nifty little name-drops; it would take too long to thank them all again here, and in any case, it'd spoil the surprise of spotting them as you go along.) Then, of course, there’s Lance Parkin’s 2005 novel The Gallifrey Chronicles which provided a crucial ingredient for the plot, though I’ll hasten to add that prior knowledge of the novel is not required. Indeed, I like to think you can read Marginalia and The Gallifrey Chronicles in either order and get an interesting experience. And I mustn’t forget The Book of the War, the original Faction Paradox lore-codex spearheaded by Lawrence Miles at Mad Norwegian Press, whose grandiose bird’s-eye-view of an intertemporal war Auteur spends the entire story trying to outdo (can relate). I don’t want to say too much about House of Auteur, which rounds out the book. I’m not one to fret unduly about spoilers, but trust me, that story’s one where the blind approach has much to recommend it. I will say this, though: if you read it and put the pieces together, you’ll never see Auteur the same way again. I’m hugely proud of it as a culmination of Volume 1, especially considering that it was only after the second round of splits that I realised this collection of stories needed a proper finale, a real climax that builds on all that came before. In hindsight, I really can’t imagine the overall arc of the series working half as well without it, even if most of the plot beats that found fertile spoil in the last-minute slot would have probably emerged some other way. Another unexpected delight in the making of House was the degree to which Louis Peacock and Newton Locheye’s The Collector, another late addition to the line-up, could serve as a perfect thematic lead-in to that grand finale. Louis, of course, additionally contributed to the flashback ‘fragments’ that are embedded within the main narrative of House, as did Auteur’s own creator Jayce Black (returning to the character for the first time in half a decade) and even Auteur's unofficial godparent Wylder; crafting a worthy story to cohesively incorporate such precious raw materials was both a daunting responsibility, and a joyful honour to achieve. What’s next for you and for Auteur? What else are you working on, and where can our readers find you next? Well, first of all, I solemnly pledge not to take six years to complete Volume Two! It’s called A Better World, and I don’t want to say too much about it either, if only because by the time it hits the printers, I’ll likely have taken all my drafts apart and sewn them back together in unrecognisable Frankenstein patterns. Best not to spoil the magic. But I can tell you that several Volume One writers will be returning, together with some very exciting names making their Arcbeatle Press debuts. Actually, one of those new writers illustrated a story in Volume One, and he and I very nearly share a first name… Ho, hum… In the meantime, I’ll spend some time recovering from this intense creative experience by throwing myself headfirst into a bunch of others, as usual. For one thing, I might have run away with one of their characters, but I’m not done with Faction Paradox proper by a longshot… and I’ve got something else cooking at Obverse Books, but hush! I'm still helping out at the Cheshire House, where the long-delayed Part Two of my Castaways of Ishiok story Coalfire will very soon see the light of day. Back in Arcbeatland, I’ve also been developing stories for the SIGNET, Cwej, and WARSONG ranges, among others, and I’ll continue popping up in the holiday anthologies as usual. And then, there’s The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, which is still ongoing, not to mention my work as event organiser for Jenny Everywhere Day, an annual call for stories and artworks featuring the world’s premier open-source character herself — slowly but surely, this year’s J.E.D. is coming up! August 13th! Don’t miss it! Tell your friends! And if you want to chat with me for any reason, I’m always happy to meet new people. You can find me through the social media listed at my website, or contact me on Discord as @aristidetwain — so don’t be shy! And if you’ve got the bone-bug too, well, Auteur is always glad to get new pitches, mes amis… Auteur: The Final Word is available now: EBOOK
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