The challenge of writing a piece of historical fiction is the tendency (or perhaps fear) to get the history wrong. The journey barely begins and already you are stuck. Choices become petrified, ossified. To speak in the language of science, you have no vector. Which way did this go? Can it go? I can’t explain.

The first instinct is for research. But a tool can quickly become a crutch, a way of thinking without imagining.  Historical thinking. Recreating the space of history, edification without the need for a story to emerge. Your story.

Is it from a fear of getting things wrong? Or a desire to speak in another voice, to become the muse and let the oracle of history speak through you?

The challenge is made harder when you are forced to think and breathe in a completely unfamiliar landscape, a different language, a different organizing principle. And I don’t mean because Chou is set in the Middle Kingdom. Because that’s not actually true. My challenge is writing a story that exists between the gaps of history because this is really where Chou exists.

When asked to explain what the book is about, I say it is a story about a Chinese philosopher set in Ancient Times. All of the problems alluded to are contained in that misleading description. Ancient Times is such an expansive terms covering 3000 years of history up to the present which continues to be haunted by this ancient metaphysics.

I offer no solutions because the problem is history. The most radical stance, the most revolutionary and therefore fully conscience act of defiance is to will into existence the counter-narratives upon which history is built and also excludes. To reintroduce the contingent, the accidental, the nonlinear, the daring, discrete, unstable broken up ground of history not the smooth, continuous arc of deterministic history. History not as a cure but as a disease, and writing as the virus.

This arc is almost here. This is our time. We are entering it whether we want to or not. Very soon this Chou virus will be unleashed upon the world. The arc is almost here. But I fall back doubting unclear. History – cure, crutch, cancer.