Novic Blog Tour: How I Write by Eugen Bacon

How I Write

Novic Blog Tour

by Eugen Bacon

I am neither a pantser nor a plotter. I’m a gardener. I take a seed and understand it. I find the soil to put it, test the soil, then I plant it. I water and irrigate it, weed and clean to thrive it.

As the buds begin to sprout, I trim and shape them, trim and shape them so that, by the time the harvest is ready, nothing is a surprise. The fruits and vegetables are exactly as I anticipated them. Because I put in the work.

The heck am I talking about?

I am talking about ideas. Ideas are everywhere. As I wrote in Writing Speculative Fiction, ideas:

‘cartwheel in little word associations in your vocabulary. Unfound plots flirt all around you: in the rubicund bell innocently dangling on the Christmas tree in your unswept lounge; in the bald young man with honey-brown eyes who beamed at you in the lift on your way to work; in the ash-eyed tramp by the wayside who held your gaze a particular way and asked for nothing, but something drew your hand to your pocket and you pulled out a note; in the tarmac-black pebble that a little girl with braids throws onto a chalked out square on the gravel, and you see nothing but the blackness of the stone as the child hops on one foot, square after square, humming a nursery rhyme…’

I listen to them and understand them. Some speak to me more strongly than others. It is those that I heed, and find a canvas for them. Short stories surprise me—I begin with a skeleton, and the characters astonish me. A novel or a novella demands a semblance of discipline—a synopsis and a part-by-part outline.

The story begins with a question, or a curiosity. I am seeking to find something, and sometimes I don’t know what it is. It may be a longing or a memory, a dirge or a possibility. The quest is fluid, and I am open to where it might take me—sometimes to a different question, or curiosity.

When writing a novel, a novella or a novelette, I approach it, first, as a writer of short stories. I apply a model of stories-within-a-story, one that allows a short story writer to layer the novel, novella or novelette story by story, creating a longer piece of work using a discipline of short story writing already familiar.

They are embedded stories that can continue. Character or event scenes in poems or vignettes invisible to the reader, but they carry mutability and intensity while layering the longer fiction with characters, timelines, motifs and interplay—a sum of the parts.

Read more about how I write on my SFWA blog article, ‘Sudden: Writing on the go’.

NOVIC by Eugen Bacon

RELEASE DATE: September 16, 2025

GENRE: Sci Fi | Dark Fantasy

BOOK PAGE: https://meerkatpress.com/books/novic/

SUMMARY:

Discover the haunting origins of an immortal soul in Novic, a mesmerizing novelette by Eugen Bacon that serves as the “story-before-the-story” of the enigmatic Sayneth priest introduced in her acclaimed debut novel, Claiming T-Mo.

In Claiming T-Mo, Novic emerges as a figure of profound mystery—an immortal with eyes as ancient as Jacob and a visage that whispers of death itself. Novic’s defiance of a matriarchal society’s conventions sets in motion a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation of his son T-Mo that shapes his destiny along with the three women who love him.

But who is Novic? Where did he come from, and what forces forged his immortal path? This prequel novelette delves into Novic’s past—his trials, his transgressions, and the timeless burden of his existence.

As lyrical as it is dark. Novic is a must-read for fans of Claiming T-Mo and newcomers alike.

BUY LINKS: Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a Solstice, British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick Award, Ignyte and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was also announced in the honor list for “doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction.” Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a “sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work.” Visit her at eugenbacon.com.

GIVEAWAY: $25 Meerkat Press Giftcard

https://meerkatpress.com/?rafflepress_page=rafflepress_render&rafflepress_id=4

EXCERPT from NOVIC by EUGEN BACON

The slow trek of a snow camel took him there. He never looked where he was going. He just went. The course through the mountains was a brace—all tangled. Everything was savage about it: humping ground personified to viciousness, roaring wind unwilling to give any answers. Things crawled at him from the edge of his eye, dissolved when he looked closer. He was a wreck. He felt a wreck. Further still, the horizon ran out of time. The beast he rode on let out a gushy fart as Novic slid off the saddleback. He slapped its rump as the handler said he should, and the camel chewed cud and batted long lashes at him before it turned.

He trusted it would make its own way back down to the cameleer farm he loaned it from. He’d bobbed in weirdness, gently moving his body back, forth, lumbering side to side between its two humps, and the only bother he felt was not from the stiffness of its woolly fur beneath the skinny saddle but rather from the musky odor of it. There was also the sour pungency of the camel’s breath, emphasized at intervals with rancid burps. In essence, it was darn good riddance to let the beast go—he was done holding his breath.

The Temple of Kripps in the Land of Praeyer at a place below zero was off a cut stone path that led up, up to the sky. A sense of doom hovered about it and he didn’t think it was anything to do with the close of daylight. Novic strode on the cobblestones until he reached the imposition of a two-meter door. He hunted for a bell, and nothing remotely resembled one within his spectrum of visibility.

In the non-appearance of a doorbell, he lifted the giant steel knocker that seemed there for a reason, and rapped the tall, thick wood engraved with death masks.

Whose faces? He couldn’t tell.

A woman opened the grand entrance and stood framed under its arc.

“Hi, I’m Brad,” she said.

He presumed she was the priestess the cameleer had talked about. “Brad,” he said. “As in Bradelia? Bradossa?”

“Just Brad, thank you.”

She looked at him long and hard with the deep, searching eyes of a door-to-door salesperson convincing one to trust them, and succeeding. She wore an even, handsome face—he could almost call it a welcoming square.

She moved aside to let him into the temple.

“Don’t get many of you out here banging at these gates,” she said.

He followed her into dim light, and her flat wooden shoes made a god-awful racket on the stone floor. He’d expected a robed sage, but here she was dressed in hot pants and a tank top. He noticed how her body folded into itself, contours and ravines of skin after skin. Her ash-speckled head was braided in two long-tailed cornrows, and a pearl drop dangled down her nostril instead of her earlobe.

She halted, tinkered with a lantern as he waited. She turned, and led him by lamplight along the limestone tiles of a long, thin corridor three people wide. Hand-painted portraits of deities—the halos?—lined the burnt brick walls. Brad halted without warning and he stopped himself falling into her.

She fumbled with keys on a solid door and pushed into a monk’s cell with feeble air.

“I guess this will do,” she said.

She threw open a baby window framed in ebony wood and he welcomed the white moonshine that amplified the lamp’s glow. He cast an eye about the room, swept his glance across the solemn bed and its stingy bedding. He observed the shedding sheets tongued in a headfold inside a course blanket that could well have been camel hair. A sole prayer stool stood, somewhat lost, in the room. More faces of gods or dead people carved out from the unpolished walls, and he was startled to see a long, thin death mask with an uncanny resemblance to his face.

The bathroom at the end of the corridor was a shared one, partitioned into toilet cubicles and an open area that hosted thirteen sinks and seven shower stalls. Brad left him to it, and he stepped off his clothes, set off the hot water tap. He didn’t notice the absence of steam until he stepped under the shower and let out a shriek as icy water lashed at his back.

~~~

He found her in a modest kitchen, again, all stone. There was a hot pan on the stove.

“Why did you come here?” she asked him.

He didn’t stall by pretending she meant “here” as in the kitchen. He wondered how much to tell her. His power over others. The potency of his Sayneth inheritance. His immortality.

Her eyes lit when he told her his truth.

“Tell me more over food,” she said, and whipped out fresh rye bread, warm from the oven. She put him at a granite table with timber legs and six matching chairs that expected company. She sat across and cut him a thick slice of the mouthwatering loaf, lathered it with “forage chutney,” as she called it. “Potluck,” she said. “I never know what I’ll find in it. Once I got silver ants in the jar. They were so delicious.” She glanced at him. “Ever eaten ants raw?”

He smiled a response.

She poured him a drink from a gourd. “Root beer,” she said.

He took the slice and sank his teeth into it. The first chew was nutty and wild, full of the freshest herbs. He sipped the frothless beer and flames reached his throat. His eyes widened. He looked at the plate, then at the stein. His fingers seared, his throat raged. His hands, legs, his whole body felt paralyzed—he couldn’t move.

Something clattered at or bounced off the table and crashed to the floor.

“Why?” he thought or spoke as he fell.

Brad was on top of him very quickly, or in slow motion—he couldn’t tell.

Her touch was intimate, opening the top of his shirt so he could breathe.

“Why?” his eyes said, a lone tear gliding down the side of his face. He felt the froth filling his mouth.

“I never let an opportunity go missing.”

She stroked his hair as the burning, burning, ate away his gut and he coughed out his stomach in meat, blood and bile, heave after heave, gasping for air,

as his innards

curdled and he

collapsed

out of his

mouth.