Futures and Freedom Audio Series

Kelly Kanayama:

Hi, and welcome to the Scottish BPOC Writers Network’s Book Week Scotland event. This is the second of our audio recordings, and I’m here with Chris Lau Manson. I’m Kelly Kanayama, the editorial and Events Manager for SBWN, and Chris is a comics creator. Chris is a mixed Scottish Chinese artist and writer based near Glasgow, originally from Hong Kong. Chris draws on his twin heritages to tell speculative fiction stories that explore how tradition can empower us and how traditionalism can hold us back. He mainly works in comics, but also illustrates and writes and performs in comedy theatre. So great to have you with us. So first question, how do you define hope as it relates to your creative practice?

Chris Lau Manson:

So first of all, thank you very much for talking with me. Always happy to discuss everything creative, particularly writing and hope. In kind of my creative practice really comes down to envisioning a better future and understanding the even, even though there are things that may hold us back, either in reality or in the the features that we’re imagining, there’s still ways for us to to have that to make something better, to kind of minimize the setbacks or the suffering that we either experience in reality or that we our characters may experience. It’s allowing space for kindness and a certain amount of subversion as well. 

I like, I like a little bit of subversion, particularly where we see a lot of kind of power structures trying to control people, and that often gets reflected in fiction, particularly speculative fiction, science fiction, in fantasy as well, there’s always well established hierarchies that are trying to make people do what a smaller group of other people want to do. And I think it’s vital that we, we kind of undermine that a little bit by showing that no, we can take control of our own lives and we can show kindness and caring to each other, even when everything is telling us, no, you’ve got to be hardened and you’ve got to be, you know, strict. You’ve got to conform.

Kelly:

Yeah, absolutely, definitely agree. And on the back of that, how do you use speculative fiction and the speculative genre to explore more generative features, and, as you touched on, challenge the existing world that we find ourselves beset by so often?

Chris:

Speculative fiction has a rich history of being used to analyze the current social, political standings and think of how things might be different. The big, kind of obvious one is like Star Trek, Roddenberry was an optimist. He was, I don’t know if he specifically was a socialist, but a lot of socialist themes crop up through the various Star Trek iterations. The works of William Gibson were, when they were originally written, were a kind of glimpse into a future that was controlled by technology. I strongly suspect that every week, he wakes up and goes, Oh, no, what have I done? And there’s a kind of more modern example, Rhianna Pratchett, who does a lot of video game writing. I picked up a copy of her Mirror’s Edge comic book, which was a tie-in to the video game. The comic book does a really good job of analyzing what I think is is quite common, but not It’s not bombastic, it’s not a kind of in your face thing, but a lot of people are willing to compromise quite a lot to have comfort, to have stability, even if that means giving up their kind of individuality.

So you know, there’s a really rich history of analyzing where we are by kind of teasing out the extremes, or taking things to their logical conclusions and picking them up and turning them around and going, Well, how did we get here? And, you know, how, how did we arrive at this point in this fictional world from where we are in the real world, and that’s kind of something that I take in my own work. I’m sort of blending speculative fiction with aspects of magical realism as well, where there are unusual things happening, but for the characters in the stories there, they don’t feel so unusual. And kind of since 2020 that feels more and more on the nose, where, sure, these sweeping changes, these major kind of social upheavals, that we’re still expected to go into work on Monday and just kind of like carry on as if everything’s quite normal when it quite clearly isn’t.

Kelly:

Right. And you see this inside this, because it makes me think, as many things do, of Judge Dredd where, especially in the earlier strips, where kind of something incredibly outlandish was happening every week, and then the, you know, the Judges and most of the citizens were just, their attitude is just another one. You know, it’s another, another guy just basically became catatonic because he couldn’t handle living in the future. We gotta go deal with this. Because it’s Tuesday. 

Chris:

Yeah, and it sounds absurd, because the world that we live in is hurtling towards an absurd singularity quite, quite a rate, and kind of exaggerating the more absurd characteristics, and saying to people, yeah, by the way, this is weird. Do you want to take a look at this? This is odd. You know, doing this in story form. It allows us to do this safely. It’s kind of like I’ve written down very specifically, was the phrase I’ve written down, a philosophical laboratory, which is way too highfalutin for me, but it’s a good concept, and the stories and narrative allow us to examine these things in a couple of the comics that I’ve done, I’ve tried to do this as well. It’s satirical. I will, I will often describe it as satire, but it really is just taking these ideas and going, yeah, look at this. 

There’s a bit where in my comic Bad Gal Bodega, the baddie in that is this blob monster who’s woken up from a million years of slumber, and he wants everything to go back to the way it was. You know, when he remembers it in the good old days, despite the fact that those good old days were full of volcanoes and fire and brimstone, which is no good for anyone.

Kelly:

Right? And it keeps on. They were tough back then, you know. 

Chris:

Yeah, and you can, you’ve obviously latched on to the point that I was making. It can be quite obvious, even though, you know, the premise is ludicrous. He is this green slime monster. But we see the patterns, and we can recognize, no, that is ridiculous. We can’t go back to the time of, you know, volcanoes and sulfur and brimstone, because that doesn’t work for everyone anymore. And when, when you’re able to get people to think along those lines, to to transpose? Well, yes, this is ridiculous. Let’s have a look at the original source of that.

 Well, that is actually quite ridiculous, expecting us to go back to times when, you know, people were more restricted in what they could and couldn’t do. When people were limited in what they could do just by virtue of who they were, that is ludicrous on the face of it, but we’re kind of expected to sort of accept that to an extent. So holding that up and and going, yeah, here’s a reflection of it. Here’s another angle on it. It’s still ridiculous, but maybe it’s easier to digest and easier for people to link those things kind of in their own heads. Yeah.

Kelly:

This is the way that speculative fiction allows you to take these ideas to the most absurd conclusions and to kind of just keep extrapolating and extrapolating until it becomes not unbelievable, but becomes beyond reality, yes, in a way that you know comes all the way back around the core of it. What do you feel that the comics medium offers that other forms of narrative don’t?

Chris:

So, I mean, the obvious thing is that comics is the perfect marriage of writing and visuals. It is the most obvious thing, but it’s something that that kind of gets overlooked by people outside of the medium, people who are working outside of the medium, but there’s so much that we can do. We can, the dialogue becomes part of the art. And the way that we place the dialogue in in our panels, the you know, the fonts that we use, the way that we break up the speech bubbles that has a huge impact on how we call attention to things, on how we make things emphasized or ironic, or we can sneak in so much subtext just in the way that the dialogue is handled. 

I also really enjoy the fact that there’s a very tight control over the pacing in comics that you really can’t get in any other medium. Each panel is its own unique moment of drama, and you can use that to heighten a message, you can use that to linger on something that you want the audience to pay particular attention to. And you know, there’s a difference between, say, comics like film, media or television, where you can do that same kind of lingering shot. But the real strength of comics is that you can allow your readers that moment to scrutinize a parallel to packet with detail so that they can do that kind of is a strong environmental storytelling method. It also allows you to focus in on something you want the reader to absorb, and that is the real strength of the of comics as a storytelling medium.

Kelly:

And I imagine for something like speculative fiction, especially in the context that we’re talking about that is particularly useful and particularly important that you don’t, you don’t want these things to be missed, but you don’t also don’t want to sort of box in the reader too much? 

Chris:

Yeah, you can, you can provide the extra information without cluttering things too much, because you can always go, it’s easier for somebody to go back through a comic book and get something more out of it by reading it again and again, again, similar in the way that you can do that with books or with film, but with comics, because each and again, I’ve given myself a very highfalutin concept here. I call them quantized dramatic moments panels. But they really are. 

You can have a panel last as long as you actually want. It can be a few seconds. It can be an entire minute. It depends on how you treat that within, within the artwork, within the pacing of the dialog. And you know, for speculative fiction, because we’re creating these new worlds, we’re creating these worlds that don’t exist. We can pack a lot of that, you know, the storytelling without explicitly telling the reader what we’re doing or what the characters are doing, where they come from. We can drop little hints in there. And, you know, it’s a very powerful thing to have the reader come to their those conclusions on their own, because, one, it makes them feel smart, because they enjoy feeling smart, but it also makes the message a lot more powerful when you can connect all those loose ends together and come to the same conclusion as the author had, or maybe your own conclusion that the author never intended, but you know, you’re still reading into it, there is complexity and depth in comics because of that marriage of dialogue and visual storytelling.

Kelly:

Yeah, well, in your conversation, you also, you know, you work a lot with speculative fiction, but you also base a lot of that in folklore, and, as you say, in tradition. And I was wondering, how do you think we can look to folklore to keep us going in terms of constructing and seeking liberatory futures, especially in comics or a visual narrative medium?

Chris:

Yeah. I mean, I’m mixed race, mixed culture. I am part of the diaspora. The strength that I find in folklore is it’s the same stories that, you know, my, the Chinese side of my family, or even the Scottish family, you know, I draw a lot from Scottish folklore as well, but they’re the same stories. They’re the same cultural experience. And, you know, I’m a firm proponent of, you know, I’m not half of each of me. I am all of me. But for me, connecting with the folk stories is important, kind of for my own identity, but for connecting with others as well and working it into my comic work, it kind of happens naturally. 

It’s something that that I find myself doing kind of quite without, without thinking about it too much, and I think it’s something that is becoming kind of more more commonplace, obviously, in kind of indie comics, which is a sphere I work in, it’s it’s quite common for creators to to connect with that in their work, because we feel strongly about it, and there’s little in the way of kind of editorial oversight that will stop us from doing that, but we see that happening in mainstream kind of comics and associated media as well. As no doubt you’ll be quite aware that Japan is quite good at doing that in manga. 

Kelly:

They can’t stop doing it. 

Chris:

But I really I admire that, like the so I’ve been trying for very long, a very long time, to find a kind of Chinese equivalent to Inuyasha, because I find the way that Japanese kind of media connects with that aspect of their kind of folklore and history isn’t really done in this to the same extent with modern Chinese media, we still have, you know, a lot of references to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Kelly:

The period fantasy dramas. Yeah, my mother loves them.

Chris:

And I love that. I love that I feel like we could still do more kind of modernization with that fresh insights, kind of new twists. And I think that is happening now that we are seeing more exposure to kind of modern takes on Chinese mythology in kind of more popular culture. And I think that’s a good thing. And ultimately, at the end of the day, using folklore taps us into a shared narrative, and having that shared narrative puts us so much further along in a kind of common understanding, and it allows us to tell more complex stories. 

I mean, probably one of the biggest examples for kind of western culture is the Nordic myths. And people tend to understand, if you’re referencing kind of Nordic myths, which is part of my own heritage as well, what the Mansons are, are actually Danish or Norwegian, I think, in origin, and like, when you tap into those larger sagas, those stories, people kind of understand what you’re talking about, because, you know they’re they’re common characters, they’re common kind of story threads. And you can look at something and go, Oh, I kind of know what’s going to happen here with this particular character in this particular situation, and then the author can surprise you by doing something different, or can satisfy you by kind of following that thread but applying a more modern spin on it.

Kelly:

That too, in terms of talking about liberatory futures, that has the advantage of starting to get people to sort of start from that more collectivist viewpoint, doesn’t it? Yeah, when you because, as you say, it’s a shared narrative. It’s that shared experience and that shared knowledge.

Chris:

And it belongs to everyone from that culture. There’s nobody that can tell you you’re doing okay. There are people who will try and tell

But yeah, there will be, as with many things, there will be gatekeepers. But the thing is, whether you’re in that kind of cultural hegemony or not, you’re still part of that culture. So like by definition, whatever stories I tell are a continuation of that culture. Folk stories have been morphing and mutating for thousands of years. That’s kind of their deal. So why? Why can’t we insert, you know, more modern sensibilities on it? Why should we have this kind of conservative, traditionalist aspect to everything, where nothing changes? Because, one, that’s not realistic. And two, that’s not how anything has ever been. These stories have been evolving. You know, as long as human language has probably even before that. I’m willing to bet there is a way that people before language are somehow telling stories. But yeah, it belongs to everyone within that culture, and I think there’s very little people can realistically do to restrict that. And that is, you know, like you say, it’s, it’s very liberating. It’s, it’s empowering,

Kelly:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think you’ve answered some of this already, but I was wondering, how does, how do you feel the act of world building, specifically, whether that’s you know, it’s all out there on the page, or whether it’s you know, all sort of implicit. How does that help shape what’s possible in the future? 

Chris:

Which is something I hadn’t actually thought about until you kind of like, asked the question, but it’s something that I do often. Not too often, fortunately, but like, more often than I would like, I am asked, Why is this character Chinese? Why is this character, you know, this that or the next thing and like, well, because they are, I didn’t really think about it. 

A lot of characters are in my work are going to, by default, be Chinese or mixed Chinese, because that’s who I am, and every character [you] create embodies a little part of you, right? 

Kelly:

Sure, and aren’t a lot of people in real life Chinese?

Chris:

Yeah, yeah, statistically speaking. But I kind of realized what I was doing was a lot of the cast of characters that I create for my work reflect the friends that I have. They reflect the world that I live in. And again, like kind of, by definition, I’m going to have a very diverse kind of range of friends. And, you know, that’s not just ethnicity or culture. That’s, you know, neurodiversity, sexuality, you know, I’m an artist, I’m a comedian, I do music and theater. I have a really broad range of friends, and that forms the kind of baseline for me in my work, and so I put that into my world building, because the worlds I’m shaping are the worlds I want to see. 

And again, even kind of looking at a comic like F providence that I did with country press, which is quite cyberpunk. It’s got that kind of distant dystopian future ruled by wealth hoarding robots. But the people in the story, you know, they’re, they’re mostly working class. They are from all walks of life. One of my favorite panels is this marketplace that I based off various markets of questionable legality that I’d been in in Hong Kong, but they’re filled with everyone, like there are people from everywhere there, and again, Hong Kong probably a little more kind of homogenous now and kind of when I was going back there than than it may have been in the past, but I elected to take that kind of busy feeling, that sort of chaotic market feeling, and populated it with, you know, kind of the diversity of people that I know, because that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to draw everyone identical, because to me, that’s dull, that’s really boring, but it’s also it reflects, you know, even, even in this imperfect future, I still want to see this. Yeah, there’s still problems for the characters to overcome. It’s still a terrible place to live, but we can still find little bits of hope in there. We can find little bits of, oh, this, you know, at least, this is, you know happening. This is better. They’re taking care of each other, that sort of idea, yeah. 

Kelly:

And you know, when you said you base them on your friends, or they’re inspired by your friends, it makes you think you know whose future is this, liberation for whom? And it, you know what I mean, what it sounds like to me is it’s not just liberation for you, it’s liberation for you and those around you, anyone you know, like anyone like them. 

And so these, these futures that you’re envisioning, of course, they’re in it. Because that’s, you know, that’s the whole point of imagining the liberation that they can be in it. They can be.

Chris:

Exactly. And, you know, there’s a, there’s a phrase that I’m very fond of, of using because I believe in it very strongly, is we will all succeed together. Because you can do everything on your own. It’s far too difficult, particularly, you know, we need to be able to rely on each other and to reach out and extend that helping hand to people who need it, and to not be afraid to reach out and grasp that hand when we need the assistance as well. 

A lot of the kind of politics I’ve involved in is very kind of smaller scale, community driven. I won’t go into the genesis of that too much here, but I genuinely think that is how we succeed in general, as whether it be culturally, industrially or globally, it’ll be because we looked after each other when, let’s say, the people who were supposed to be looking after us maybe didn’t. 

Kelly:

I think there’s a lot to be said for this, you know, for liberatory futures, focusing first and foremost on who is there, and how can we make sure that they are? How can we do our part to make sure that they are? 

Yeah, absolutely, I’m gonna combine, I know I said these to you as two different questions, but I’m gonna combine them into one, which is, what do you want your writing to say about hope? What else do you want it to say about hope? And also, what would you say to fellow writers and creators who have lost hope, whether that’s in terms of what they’re writing or just in the current landscape in general? 

Chris:

And again, fantastic questions, because it’s so easy for us to not think about hope or optimism when we’re writing. I think it’s something that I do naturally, without actively thinking about it. Because despite all my self deprecation, I am actually quite an optimistic person. I like to think that we continue working because there is something to be had at the end of it, something good for all of us. I think, you know, it’s important for us to realize that hope is not just an emotion or an abstract concept. It’s a target. It’s something to aim for. It’s something to keep us going. Because if we have, you know, that end point in sight, we can work towards it. We can organize towards it. We can motivate ourselves to kind of travel along that path, and I think particularly now, we want to understand that hope represents the fact that something can be done. 

The times may be difficult, the times may even be bad, but we can do something about it, and incorporating that into our storytelling is vital, because, you know, wins can be few and far between in reality, but we can still imagine a better future, like you said, for all of us, and to make sure that everyone is included where you know, it may take decades of organization and lots of resources that we don’t immediately have access to, but as long as we have that end goal in sight, we can still motivate ourselves, and we can still tell ourselves it’s worth doing this because we know what the future can look like, and we need to realize as well that, you know, the path isn’t going to be easy, but we need to seize that for ourselves, unless we have the motivation to do that, unless we know even in our minds that it’s possible, it can be difficult where everyone’s lacking energy or, like I said, resources, But having that glimmer of hope makes a massive difference. Which is just the human nature. It is in the human nature to hope. It is in human nature to think the better times are possible, because we wouldn’t, you know, we wouldn’t have progressed as a new species, I guess, without understanding no things can be better. 

And give as to like, to give advice to fellow writers who’ve lost hope. We’ve all been there. We have all been there. Burnout is very, very, very real, but it’s the most important thing is, don’t be afraid to do nothing for now, rest take time to do nothing and to clear your mind, which sounds kind of very meditative, and it kind of is, in a way, a large part of the creative process is to do nothing. And you know, in our information rich world, it’s so easy to constantly be thinking of things. In our productivity focused world, it’s so easy to feel I need to be doing something. I need to be actively doing something. Whereas, like some of the best ideas I’ve had have been on the bus or on the train listening to music and doing nothing, because your brain is actually working the way underneath your active thoughts and trying to make logical sense of things can often kind of interfere with the writing process. Sometimes you just need to disconnect a little bit and just calm your mind so that your kind of your natural ability to tell a story links things up together. You know, there, there is value in the concept of sleeping on it. So I think people, if they can realize that and give themselves permission to not be frustrated with themselves, to not despair, but instead to just take a few minutes, just to themselves, hours, if you can. 

It is an important part, and also it’s to remember why we’re doing this. We all want to be able to earn a living doing this, that that is the ideal. Not gonna lie, it’s difficult. It’s getting harder, but we’d all still be doing this anyway, even if we weren’t being paid. Yeah, we need to pay bills. I want to make that very clear, we should be paid what we’re worth, but most of us aren’t doing this for kind of fame or glory or anything. We do this because we want to tell stories. Hold on to that like, hold on to that feeling of pride, of satisfaction, of doing something that only you could do, of telling your stories and creating your characters and forging these worlds because it’s fun, it’s, you know, it’s enjoyable. And you know you can, you can communicate messages that way as well. And you know it’s even, even though the times are difficult, you can still do that, and you should take pride in that, even if you have to take a rest and step away for a little bit. 

And the last thing I’m going to say is make sure you find your people. We’ve spoken a lot about community through this, and you know, well, that was largely in the kind of broader sense of the communities we live in. But find your creative community as well, because they’ll often be the kind of broader sense of community that we’ve been talking about as well. But if you find people that you connect with at a creative level, you can talk to each other about what you’re doing, how you’re telling stories. You can talk to each other about how best to continue doing that, and most importantly, you can talk to each other about whatever you like. Some of the best times I have had have been with the comic artists in and around Glasgow talking about ridiculous films that we’ve seen. And that the relaxation that comes with that, knowing that there are people like you out there who are into the same ridiculous nonsense as you are. It builds you up. It keeps you going. So that, if there was one thing to take away from this, it would be, find your community.

Kelly:

Yeah, definitely. The last thing I’m going to ask is because I do want to get this in there again. I’m going to combine these into one question. We’ve talked about this actually quite a lot already, but I was wondering a Is there anything more you want to say about how can speculative fiction, especially in comics, but also in general, galvanize readers to envision new, liberatory and more inclusive futures. And what do writers need to keep in mind to make sure inclusion and liberation stay at the forefront of their worlds when they’re creating these futures?

Chris:

I think it’s talking to people, talking to people, reading broadly, finding experiences, authentic experiences that aren’t your own. Again, obviously, being kind of mixed race, mixed culture exposes me to a lot more kind of life experience than, say, somebody who’s from a single ethnicity or culture. But you know, I’ve spoken quite at length about my friends and talking to them, hearing their stories, learning more about their cultures, about their shared narratives, has done wonders for me, not just in like storytelling, but just in in story appreciation, because I’ll be able to watch TV shows or films or read comics by people who who don’t have my life experience. I’ll be able to go, Oh, I know that story. I know what they’re talking about here. 

Oh, there’s subtext going on here, and kind of appreciating that, or even just kind of when, when talking to other people from different life experiences, being able to to understand their frames of reference as well. It is very important. I mean, the old adage is good. Writers read a lot, right? But that is important. I’m going to substitute reading because I actually I’m very bad at reading. I only recently started reading prose again. But you know, wherever you find your narratives be, that in television, film, video games, there is an amazing plethora of video like indie video games out there that tell amazing kind of stories that would otherwise be marginalized. Seek out these experiences, look at the blogs of the people who made these things and understand where they came from and how they got to making that particular story and kind of related to that is when you’re building your worlds, when you’re building the worlds that your science fiction or fantasy stories are taking place in. Do think about cultural consultancy. It’s a fantastic thing, like, I’ve reached out to and hired cultural consultants in quite a few of my own comics, and it’s something that I’m trying to do more of now. And, you know, they bring a richness to that that, you know, that absolutely cannot be compared or cannot be substituted by doing research on your own. 

Admittedly, I have a certain privilege that I can afford to hire people to do this work, but if you can, it’s well worth doing. And you know, I’m certainly not like focusing other people’s experiences as a centre of my stories, largely because that’s not what I’m interested in doing, because I have enough of my own experiences to do. But when I’m constructing the worlds that my characters are living in, it makes it more authentic to you to be able to say, Oh, well, this character wouldn’t react that particular way. Or this character would, you know, they would kind of do this, or actually did one that was set in the Western Isles of Scotland. And it was fascinating how little I know about the Western Isles, because of the consultant that that hired who works in housing in well, Jura is an inner isle, but it was off the west coast of Scotland, and, like, immediately, the notes that she gave me on, like the ferry operator that I had, because I had, like, written this guy who was, like, in a cable knit sweater and like a hat, and she’s like, no, he’s going to be wearing a high vis vest, like just the little bits and pieces that she gave were were so important to making the story authentic, and that was that was a kind of slightly horror story, but the advice that she gave to me allowed me to pivot away from because it was a folk horror story. 

There’s always the risk of going, oh well, and the islanders did it all. 

Kelly:

Like in The Wicker Man. 

Chris:

Yeah, and I managed to make it not The Wicker Man, the guidance of the cultural consultant who said, No, the islanders are going to be wary, but they’re not going to be hostile. Have them be interested. Have them doing things. Don’t make them part of the scenery. Don’t make them props for the main characters, which is actually a note that I’ve got, is make sure that you’re treating people as people in your story. 

Kelly:

Which I think, in general, is a very, very good, yeah, for anyone who, who makes stories. 

Chris:

Absolutely have people react as if they, you know, as if they were actual people. Don’t just have them, like, acquiesce to whatever your hero is doing. Or, like, okay, yes, you can have all my money go on your way and save the world. Have them react realistically. Have them behave as communities, but behave because everyone wants to live their life relatively quietly and on their own terms. 

Have them react that way, and don’t treat them as props or scenery. They should be believable as people. I think that is a very important thing to take into your worldbuilding, to your speculative fiction. And you know, you don’t need to have a whole history for these communities of people. Just have them act like you would expect, you know, a group of people to react in reality, that is one of the most important fundamentals. I think. 

Kelly:

Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. And really, I think this goes back to where, anyway, where we started from is that if we talk about people as people, and we treat people as people in our world building and in our in the futures that we envision, both on the page and away from it, then I think we are well on the way to at least imagining futures that are more liberatory and where definitely more of us can be absolutely yeah. So yeah one thank you again so much for this. This is so much fun. I genuinely could have gone on for at least, like, another hour. And before we sign off, I was just gonna ask, are there any upcoming projects from you that we should look out for, and where can we find you on the internet?

Chris:

Oh, definitely I like a plug. I can’t remember when this is going out, so this may have passed by by that point, but I’m going to plug it anyway. I will be interested.

Kelly:

Yay. Are you going to Thought Bubble this year? Yes.

Chris:

So I’m really looking forward to that. I will be debuting some new stories there.

Kelly:

Oh, where are you going to be?

Chris:

I will be in Bubble Boy Hall, in Table c5 so I’m really looking forward to that. That’s going to be an excellent time. The weekend after that, I will be at Edinburgh Comic Art Fair, which is in the out of the blue drill Hall, which is kind of along Leith Walk. The weekend after that, I’ll be at Browns Lane Market in Paisley, and then the weekend after that, I will be at TAGS Fest back through in Edinburgh, which is, it started last year. It’s a combination of visual storytelling and storytelling through tabletop games. It’s run by Eve Greenwood of Quindrie Press and Brian from Stout Stoat Games. It is a fantastic show. I think it’s back in the Fruitmarket. I need to check, but I will be at all of those, and I have some new books. I did a psychological horror collection with my friend Amanda Griffiths, and it’s just it’s very experimental. It’s kind of long lingering shots of kind of like creeping building terror. We’ll see how it does. And I will also be launching my book Siren, which is, I’m describing it as a kung fu fairy tale. It’s about arrogance and guile. I was really pleased with how it turned out.

Kelly:

Where can we find you online? So your website, yes.

Chris:

So my website is probably the place that you can get links to everything else, which is just that, www dot chrislau manson.co.uk, I am on Bluesky, which is a relatively new social media platform. I just Chris Lau Manson on there. If you search for me, I should turn up. I am also on Instagram as at Chris Lau Manson, but that’s mostly food pictures. 

Kelly:

Yeah, I think, yeah. I think that’s it for us. Um, one last time. Thank you so so much for joining us, and hopefully we’ll be seeing you again in the future, hopefully.

Chris:

So I would love to talk more.

Kelly:

Bye, thank you.