When is Hopeless?

If you’ve been paying close attention to the blog, you may have found yourself wondering, when is Hopeless? 

You may have noticed that our guest writers don’t all operate in the same timeframe. Nils Visser brought a story to us that connected with his Wyrd Woods. Martin Pearson’s Squid and Teapot stories relate directly to history as we know it. Keith Errington’s Oddatsea places Hopeless in a steampunk sort of history.

Is it all just chaos? You might reasonably ask.

Well, yes and no.

I have an entire other novel (Spells for the Second Sister) that turned out to hold the key to all of this. I’ll be self pubbing that one in the foreseeable future, for anyone who gets the urge. One of the central concepts in that book is of a tidal reality. Places move in relation to each other, and many places exist that are versions of the same place. When the tide is out, they’re all distinct and separate places, but as the tide comes in they merge, overlap and sometimes crash messily into each other.

Hopeless exists in that tidal reality. People who have read New England Gothic will already know that Hopeless has layers, and that its many different places all in the same place. As a consequence, it’s a relatively stable point in a constantly shifting universe.

This is also part of why it’s so hard to leave. It’s not just a case of getting out, but of getting out to wherever specifically you want to go. The tides of the universe are just as likely to throw you back at the island as the local sea currents are.