Commentary - Her Hands Were Ablaze

(Please note – contains SPOILERS for the story).

‘Her Hands Were Ablaze’ was originally written in 2018 for publication in a short story anthology of Manchester-based writers of speculative fiction that a writer friend of mine suggested I should pitch to, but the deadline was pretty close. I’d had an idea for a magical realist story set in Manchester about a woman trying to save her brother who had become addicted to practicing magic (which was killing him) in the company of the warlock who had trained him in the art. I had made one attempt at writing it, but hadn’t gotten very far before realising that I was taking the wrong approach. But when I needed an idea quickly, it was the one I turned to.

I had been thinking for some time about magical realism, and what it might be like if someone like Gabriel Garcia Marquez had come from a north of England, working class background. Magic is currently all over fiction of all kinds – the obvious franchises do not need mentioning. But the presentation of magic never satisfied me – magic is the ability to change the universe, so it should take more to achieve it than just to wave a wand and say a few magic words. It is dramatically unsatisfying that the ability to shift the universe should come without an appropriate price to pay or a sacrifice to make. There also seems to be an annoying theme that working class characters can only learn magic by being ‘improved’ by their social betters – by attending a posh boarding school out of the 1950s where everyone is white, and straight, and you have to fit into the ridiculous rituals of the upper classes. Quite why magic should be the preserve of the upper classes has never made sense to me – as Eddie puts it in the story, if anyone needed magic throughout history, it was the peasants, not the lords. So these were the two ideas I had in mind that I particularly wanted to explore, and will no doubt continue to explore in the future.

I had previously worked in the West Gorton area of Manchester during the period in which the old-fashioned terraced housing (made famous on Coronation Street) was being knocked down and replaced by brand new, modern-design housing. For quite some time after the majority of the houses had been demolished, there was a single row of about five houses still standing, four of which were boarded up but one of which appeared to still be occupied. So it seemed a good place for a down-at-heel warlock to live, protected from demolition by low-level magic. Once I had the setting, the opening of the story (as Anna explores the house) came pretty easily.

The biggest change to the original idea was the decision I made that Anna’s brother had died before the beginning of the story, so she was searching for answers rather than attempting to mount an intervention to save his life. This meant the story became much more internal, and the conflict between Anna and Eddie became a game they played against each other as she manipulated him into guiding her down the same path her brother took. This was much more interesting than a story in which Anna has to convince Eddie to help, and then the two of them have to convince Gavin to stop practicing magic in a no-doubt melodramatic and over-the-top scene.

I finished the story and submitted it for the anthology. I didn’t hear anything for six months, then out of the blue I received an e-mail from the editor, asking me to check the final proof to confirm I was happy with it. When I opened the document, my story had been integrated into the final proof without any indications of where any changes had been made, meaning that I had to go through it line-by-line comparing it with my original manuscript in order to find the edits. It became obvious very quickly that a large number of changes had been made to the story without any consultation with me, many of which were to the detriment of the piece. As such I felt I had no choice but to withdraw the story from the book, and this is its first publication.