Author Spotlight: The Improbable We Can Do Today by Jon Dixon

In the rain-drenched city of Draffe, where temple bells mark the hours and secrets hide behind every door, Meriva Secaret makes her living finding what was lost. A disabled ex-thief turned freelance researcher and investigator, she is the beating heart of Jon Dixon’s The Improbable We Can Do Today, a collection of six cosy fantasy mysteries where the stakes are personal rather than world-ending, kindness always matters, and there is sometimes magic and sometimes cake.

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Q&A with Jon Dixon

Q: Meriva Secaret is such a vivid lead. What is the book about, and where did she come from?

A: A little over a decade ago, a bright, intelligent, vulnerable, fiercely compassionate face looked back at me from a page of quick, random character sketches I’d been idly pencilling, and I instantly knew I had to tell her story (or stories, plural, as it turned out).

Meriva, an ex-thief now living with a significant disability and running a small consulting investigation agency with her retired mercenary partner, Custos, has been a constant in my life since then, along with her friends and found family, and this book of stories (the first of at least two) is the result.

Along the way, to my surprise and delight, she’s grown and developed immensely. And, in turn, she’s taught me, expanded my experience and understanding, and enabled me to attempt to explore some important themes that I think are ever more necessary, in our world as well as hers. Always, hopefully, with enough jokes, tender moments, red herrings and surprises built in along the way to make the stories entertaining.

Q: You have been writing and illustrating for years. What made this the project you finally published?

A: I’ve written stories for decades. Along with my side-career as a freelance illustrator for books, magazines and role-playing games, the stories I’ve written over the years are a way of giving concrete form to the imaginary people and places that would otherwise only live inside my head, and maybe sharing them with others.

Other writers have given me so much joy over the years with their richly imagined worlds and characters, from Fritz Leiber to C J Cherryh to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to C L Moore to James Blaylock to Tamsyn Muir, and so many countless others. I’ve always wanted to try and give the tiniest fraction of that joy to others, in however flawed a way.

It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I felt I’d developed as a writer enough to dare to publish, and also to accumulate enough Meriva stories to make a book. But I’m very proud of the six stories in this collection, and I’d love it if even a few other people take some joy from reading about Meriva and her world.

Q: Which character was the most fun, or the most challenging, to write?

A: Obviously Meriva was both the most fun and the most challenging.

I adore her as a character and love writing her, especially when she seems to speak to me directly from the page as I’m writing, with that blisteringly intelligent, slightly wry, funny, incisive, self-deprecating but also occasionally rather-too-self-satisfied voice, or when the teasing, affectionate love-language that she and Custos have is in full swing.

The challenge is to do her justice and to have a responsibility to write her as accurately and truthfully as possible. I live with a chronic illness that limits me at times, but even so I am very well aware that writing someone in Meriva’s particular situation requires humility and a willingness to learn and be guided by those with direct lived experience of limb difference. I was extraordinarily lucky to find two wonderful sensitivity readers, whose generosity, kindness and patience I relied on enormously when writing these stories. We worked very hard together to bring Meriva to life, not looking away from the realities of her day-to-day life while still trying to remain within the overall “cosy” tone of the stories’ genre. If she works as a believable, truthful, well-rounded character at all, it’s to their credit. Wherever the depiction of her falls short, it’s my fault and mine alone, and I stand ready to listen and to learn for the future.

Q: What themes run through the collection?

A: I think there are three related themes that run through all the stories:

1. That “agency” is exercised on one’s own terms, and autonomy is something to be fought for, not granted. In all the stories, Meriva is doing something the world assumes she cannot or should not do, and I hope the drama lies less in whether she succeeds than in her insistence on how she does it and on what terms.

2. The vulnerability of mutual care. That love means being witnessed, needed, and occasionally being a burden. The reciprocal anxiety of caring and being cared for is the explicit subject of one of the stories, but it’s also a small background drumbeat through all the stories too. In this collection, love is letting the other person be a whole, complicated person rather than a “role”.

3. Justice as “repair” within a community, against the arc of institutional power. Formal authority in Meriva’s world tends to be relatively distant, disinterested, or (at worst) corrupt, and administered mostly by the wealthy and well-connected. Power differentials of class and wealth are a recurring source of harm, mitigated not by the system but by small, communal, restorative acts, usually engineered by Meriva’s actions.

Perhaps, in the end, they’re not three separate themes so much as three faces of a single preoccupation: what it means to live a full life in a body, a relationship, and a society that aren’t built for you, and how love and community make that life not just possible but rich.

Q: Did real life shape Meriva and her world?

A: Yes. One of my oldest friends has a very similar disability to Meriva’s. All too often in fiction, disability has been used as a shorthand for villainy or victimhood. It’s rare that someone with a significant or visible disability is the “hero”, and rarer still that someone with mobility issues is the driving force of the narrative. The idea of creating a character with a disability like my friend’s as a proactive, dynamic protagonist, central to their own narrative, arose naturally over the years (in fact Meriva’s distant “ancestor” was a character created for that very reason in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign we were both a part of). Meriva, living her life with a disability but never wholly defined by that disability, tries to subvert those negative tropes.

Q: Is there a question about the book you wish readers would ask?

A: Perhaps slightly self-serving, but “Are there any more stories about Meriva?” The answer to which is “Yes, there are!” A second volume of stories from Meriva’s casebook is on the way, in which we meet more of Meriva’s friends and acquaintances, including the skippers, the eight child thieves whose lives Meriva saved in the incident that injured her, and who in turn saved her life and became her little found family in the years that followed. Now grown up, they’re still a huge part of Meriva’s life, and get to feature in at least one of the new stories.

There’s also a longer story to be told about those dozen or so years between the destruction of the College of Thieves and the older Meriva that we meet in these stories. There are already a couple of existing, unpublished stories from that time, one of which, A Touch of Class, might form the seed of a “prequel” novel that explores how Meriva built the life she has in the present day, including how she and Custos met for the first time!

Q: Do you have a favorite moment from the book you would like to share?

A: So many! But maybe this one. It comes in the aftermath of a brief moment of peril in one of the stories, where Meriva has done something unexpected and risky in order to turn the tables and win the day:

[Custos] said, “You scare me, Meri.”

She blinked at him, caught off guard.

“Not because of what you can’t do,” he went on, “but because of what you can. And what it costs you.”

Meriva swallowed hard against a sudden knot in her throat. “I choose to,” she said simply.

“I know,” he said, and his face showed something so raw and tender it almost undid her.

Meriva’s “I choose to” is the defining statement of the entire collection, encapsulating agency, cost, determination, and self-knowledge. At its heart, each story is about Meriva choosing, whether it’s affirming her physical agency and capabilities, or exercising moral and ethical autonomy. Always knowing the price. Always paying it. And Custos’s half of the exchange completes it. He doesn’t question her choice, or frame it as inspirational or reckless. He simply sees her, loves her, and accepts her right to choose. Those five reciprocal words, “I choose to” and “I know”, are the heartbeat both of their love and of the book.

Q: What was the biggest challenge in writing or publishing it?

A: Probably the same as many other indie (or even trad) authors.

Writing it? Imposter syndrome. A constant nagging worry that I’m either not capable or not worthy of writing this story and doing it justice. And, when the words just won’t come, questioning whether I’m even a writer at all. Distraction. Too many other projects and interests constantly calling for my attention, and I’m not the world’s most disciplined person! Energy. Managing a chronic illness takes a lot of my available energy, and sometimes the tiredness and the brain fog have to be accepted and the writing set aside until my reserves have built up again.

Publishing it? The marketing and selling. I’m not a particularly extrovert or gregarious person, and I have to set aside a natural reluctance to put myself out there on social media. I find that aspect of the business excruciating, to be honest, despite recognising how necessary it is. So much harder than the writing!

Q: What is next for you as a writer?

A: I’m currently about halfway through the second set of six stories from Meriva’s casebook, to be titled The Impossible May Take Slightly Longer. Two stories are finished, two are in editing, and two still being written. Hopefully, that will be out around the end of the year, fingers crossed. I’m also working on the background notes, outline, and structure for a prequel novel, which will tell the story of Meriva’s earlier life, how she and Custos became an item, and how she came to be the established, relatively successful consulting investigator we meet in the story collections. There’s disaster, triumph, friendship and found family, a slow burn romance, disguises, deceptions, and a big heist, all taking place over about 10 years!

Author Bio

Jon was a professional actor for 20 years, before moving to a less exciting but slightly more secure career in IT. Along the way he also moonlighted as a freelance illustrator for magazines, books, and games.

He lives in the almost exact centre of the UK with a library of books that’s ridiculously too large for his rather small house, as well as a collection of guitars he doesn’t play enough, model kits he never seems to have time to build, and cosplay outfits that don’t quite fit any more. He is currently between cats.

Buy the book here: Amazon (Kindle & Paperback) · Author website: jondixon.co.uk