Still playing...

This is a re-post of the inaugural message on the Pure Hokum site, which launches today. I hope you'll take a few moments to check the site out.

Why does this feel scary?

I have written thousands of posts and newsletters, and I already have two active websites that are regularly updated and maintained. This should be a breeze...

What is here on the Pure Hokum site has been in my head for a while now; interconnecting universes that each started as their own thing and slowly grew together. The picture has been clear to me for a while now, but this is the first time I have tried to describe it to anyone else.

I've always loved world-building, more than any other aspect of my job, but it has historically been hard to do outside of novels, because the minute a movie or TV show gets set up, the underlying rights are owned by the studio. You may be lucky and get to make a bunch of seasons of Buffy and Angel, or several Matrix movies. You might even keep hold of your rights for a while, like George Lucas got to do with Star Wars. But sooner or later someone is going to turn the tap off and that is the world you built, preserved in amber, but no longer growing. I'm the kid who always pretended not to hear the calls for dinner, because I wanted to keep playing.

It was on the second Lovecraft Investigations audio series, The Whisperer In Darkness, that I realised I was building a world by accident. The first season (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) had been wildly, and unexpectedly, successful and the BBC had asked us to do another. The second series was going to take the same investigators and give them a completely different mystery, unrelated to the first. But as I was writing, I found the characters in the house of a man who had disappeared and they were looking at photographs on his wall and I realised that what made the most sense was if one of those photographs was of a character we had met in Season One. This stopped me in my tracks because I really didn't want to commit to that. What if I started building this world and the BBC decided they didn't want any more shows? I remember chewing it over with producer Karen Rose and she pointed out that, because of the way BBC deals work, I owned the rights to the underlying material, no matter what. I had accidentally found myself in a medium that was going to let me play...

The Lovecraft Investigations ran for four seasons on the BBC, and the world built out in every direction (see the Pleasant Green site). Sometime within that, I started writing the first Aldrich Kemp audio series, which I already knew was going to be set inside the Kaleidoscope Universe, a spy-fi world that I had created for a TV show which is still yet to see the light of day (but which is in the process of becoming a novel). I had also written a movie, Clandestino, set in the same universe, so I knew exactly how Aldrich Kemp fitted into it all.

During the course of "Who is Aldrich Kemp?", our heroine, Clara Page, finds herself in Amsterdam and runs into Kennedy Fisher, co-host of the Lovecraft Investigations. Worlds collided for a single episode, and it worked so well that, in Seasons Two and Three, I dragged Forsaken McTeague out of the Origin Universe, which had been created to house a TV show called How to Disappear in America, and walked her, guns blazing, through the Kaleidoscope Universe. Later on, developing a TV show called Shadows of New York, I built out a contemporary US version of the Pleasant Green universe (called the Albany Universe) and realised that the US branch of the Tillinghast family, historical antagonists in Pleasant Green, would be the perfect antagonists in that world.

So Pure Hokum is a modular system; five distinct universes that can be arranged to form one big one.

But the real reason Pure Hokum exists, and the reason I am being explicit about what it is now, is you. Through the audio shows and the websites, these worlds have garnered a huge, engaged and enthusiastic following. The first Kickstarter we did, for "The Lovecraft Investigations: Crowley" series, had a big target (these shows are not cheap to make) and it hit that target within an hour and then went on to obliterate the stretch goal. That was without a single penny being spent on marketing; it was the existing fan base alone that did that. That suggests to me that these universes have legs.

And so I have created Pure Hokum, the company, to curate these universes, and the Pure Hokum site to provide an overview and a guide to what they are and where they go from here.

We're not confined to audio (although we will never stop making it), I have plans for novels, TV shows, movies, games etc. And the real engine of the whole thing will be the Pure Hokum community - the growing fan base; people who fund the shows, who talk about the shows, make wiki, create fan art and so on. You are what keeps this thing going and you are also the source of inspiration for everything that happens here.

Over the next few months, as we put our crowdfund campaign for another Lovecraft Investigations series in place, and as we start to find homes for some of the movies and TV shows, and as I get to work with Pelgrane Press on the Pleasant Green supplement for Trail of Cthulhu, I'm going to start opening the doors to new collaborators across all media, so that we can start to build these worlds out even more and go deeper into some of the characters and situations that we have only touched on so far.

A community-led, community-funded creation machine that works across all media is a pretty ambitious project. And so that is probably why it's scary. But I think it's good to be a little out of your depth. And I don't feel like I'm out here alone.

Welcome to Pure Hokum.