Cwej: Springs Eternal - Riley G. Boyd Interview

We had the pleasure of speaking to Cwej: Springs Eternal writer Riley G. Boyd about her story, influences, and what's next for them!

art by Jonne Bartelds

Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m 21 but I’ve been doing paid creative work since about, I wanna say 17, but could’ve been later. I was doing minutes and writing the finalised script outlines for a yet to be released audio drama series, (also in the Who EU, and a franchise some readers here might be veryyyy interested in), that evolved into doing episodes and then the bug bit like no other and I’ve been doing odd jobs here ever since. I’ve written a lot of short films and I’ve helped a lot of other people with their scripts, but I shouldn’t kiss and tell. I’m currently a student at one of the UK’s leading industry educators. Outside of shoptalk (why wouldn’t you wanna talk shop?), I’m big into gaming, music, urban exploring, and I love a pub crawl. Nuff said?

What was your introduction to the Doctor Who universe?
Lots of near chance encounters, but I couldn’t for one tell you which is first. The memories all sit haphazardly beside each other. I remember doing a DVD swap with a primary school friend, I gave them that animated Buzz Lightyear film, the original one, and they gave me a double feature of End of Time and Eleventh Hour. Another moment when I caught the end of Death in Heaven on broadcast, I asked my mum for a screwdriver, like an actual one, so that I could play along. But it started being Doctor Who when I was able to actually watch the classic show all together on streaming. It was a show about literacy first and foremost, about creativity and opening your mind, looking outside, so it spoke to the curious burgeoning writer in me. Then came online communities, fandom, and the centre of all my Who related compulsions, the EDAs.

What's your take on the character of Chris Cwej?
He’s a really well centred character given that you can put him into basically any situation and it’d make for an interesting scene. As a companion, he was McCoy’s son slowly drifting away from him. Their awkward and understated finishing trip approach to Tardis travel, with so many things left unsaid, when they were on their own at the end of those books really hooked me. But I’ve gotta admit he didn’t really click for me until Dead Romance in the Benny books and you could see him under the hood a bit more. He’s quite classically pulpy in that sense, that naive well to do action-man boyishness as a front for a really avoidant, often directionless guy who’s bent on escaping himself through whatever mission he’s gotten wrapped up in this time. That cognitive dissonance with him fascinates me and I tried to emphasise it in my story by having him get hounded with genuine consequences and paired with a mirror with the same deep rooted issues but who expresses it in the opposite way and the clashes of that.

What makes your Cwej story unique?
I tried to go for this feverish stream of consciousness where the details and setting comes alive and bleeds together, there’s a lot of anthropomorphism in the prose and the tone shifts a lot  with perspective as you peel back the layers wading through someone’s head. I really wanted to hit that offbeat and often sinister creeping dream logic you get in works like Phantasm. And there’s a lot of pulp allusions, using that to inspect on the nature of Chris as this unchanging face of his genre and story engine who’s not really allowed to grow as a person and stop doing what he does, because then the story would be over. And what does he get out of that? The little things, it seems. At its heart it’s a story about angry clever boys who are scared of growing up and scared of staying where they are, and that applies for every main character.

Would you like to mention any influences or inspirations?
Moore’s Night Raven was how I pitched it, Chris faces his juvenile leaning tendencies in the power fantasy world of classic comic booky noire, but it drifted away from that into something a bit broader and less connected, more about using the stories that helped you to help yourself and tell your own to get by one day after another, best foot forward because sometimes that’s all you can do. The whole thing is very tongue in cheek British Invasion, a scummy rotten Ken Loach British realist world getting infected with this almost fiction virus, and becoming this Sapphire and Steel styled liminal space filled with larger than life titans of their respective genres (crime, western, warmags, and fantasy) and it becoming, rightly, a nightmare.

Did you face any interesting challenges in the course of writing?
Lots of them. Like I say, I’m a student with a two hour commute for three days a week, so a lot of writing had to be done on the train in a rush, and my fiancé’s family home got raided (nothing to do with me, though) and I spent the better part of a week helping fix the door and locks, which to someone with no handyman experience, was a lot harder than it looked. Yes, very surprising, I know. Generally life just kept getting into the way of me with this and I had to really bargain for my time alongside a lot of my other deadlines like videography for club work or course stuff. This was only helped by Gerard being the most gracious and patient editor on the crucking planet.

What's your next creative project, and is there anywhere readers can follow you?
Follow me on Twitter on @RG_Boyd. My next project is Simon Says, a web comic. Basically, girl vanishes from social. Dead beat and beaten down cop Imogen Hayes is the only person in the world who cares, she’s drawn into the middle of an ideological battleground for supremacy amongst Britain’s secret occult conspirators, and she’s forced to trust the deadpan possibly fictional occultist Simon Iff, who seems to only exist inside her head. It’s a horror noir for the internet age. We live in a world where people believe Etsy witches can create kill curses and the elite literally eat babies and our governments do untold acts of memetic warfare. Baudrillard hyperreality with demons, through the lens of an X Files meets Edge of Darkness paranoia thriller, and the aesthetic trappings of every conspiracy forum board you could think of. The scripts for issues 1-4 and central character designs complete and so pencilling will be beginning shortly and we’re aiming for an end of summer digital release. If you want a comic with body stealing war criminals, girl gangs using Francis Bacon’s flying witch elixir to astral project and beat up boys, teatime with LAM, and neonazis getting their comeuppance through self created memetic entities named (((them))), you’ve found the right place.

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Cwej Springs Eternal is Available Now!