Research Notes

Why These Novels Start With the Archive, Not the Story

None of these books began as plots. They began as documents — a manorial roll, a regimental record, a studio contract, an expedition log. The story only arrives once the paperwork has been read closely enough to ask an uncomfortable question: what does this record leave out, and who paid for that silence?

The Blank Roll grew out of the surviving court rolls and poll tax records of 1377–1381 — the bureaucratic residue of a kingdom that taxed a peasantry it had already stopped listening to. Panel 22 follows the documented service record of a real Belfast man, Corporal Samuel Rosbotham, through an institution — the British Army — whose paperwork survives in far greater detail than the men who filled in the forms. Rio Incognitum works from the chronicled account of the Orellana expedition, where the official record kept insisting on order long after the river had stopped agreeing to provide any. And The Orbits of Stars is built from the contractual machinery of the early Biograph studio system — an institution that filed everything except the cost to the people inside it.

The pattern isn’t accidental. Every one of these books is, at heart, about an institution processing a life — and what survives once the institution has finished with it. Fiction lets us sit inside that processing in a way a bare record never can. But the fiction only works if the record underneath it is sound.

That’s also where The Black Archive comes in. It’s the same method — source hierarchy, provenance, contradiction mapping — applied in public, to cases that never became novels. If you want to see how the research actually gets tested before it becomes a scene, that’s the place to watch it happen.

More research notes, deleted scenes, and the occasional dead end that never made it into a book are going out through the Substack newsletter — free, occasional, no hard sell.