In Dreams Awake

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Monday 23 October 2017

More of our Time

 I wonder what my writing says about me, and how I think.

 Look at Stephen King. We all know his work, right? King himself says a lot of it is driven by his belief in good and evil, in forms that we encounter every day. He believes that in the end we all have to take a stand with light against the dark. (I think he's right. If you hear overt sexism on the bus, or you see racist bullying in a bar or nightclub, don't walk by. Not unless you want to live in a world where such things are accepted.)

 But King's work was coloured heavily after his accident. For a while it was full of crippled characters - in Dreamcatcher and Duma Key, for example. King's own pain seeped into his work. So some of it is conscious and some sneaks through without us poor writers noticing it. How then can we tell how much of us is in our work?

 Well, I try not to repeat ideas or memes, but I've noticed that I have. Alar in Risen King and Calesh in Songs of Sorrow are both reluctant warriors, drawn into battle as young men and now returning to fight again. There are big differences between them too, but that lies at the heart of both their characters. More broadly, several of my books are about the struggle to be free. Risen King and Sorrow feature here too, as well as Black Lord of Eagles. The situations are very different, and the stories change - those are three very different tales. But I can't deny there are similarities. So it seems I've returned to a theme without even realising it. I must be as dumb as a horse going to the same old watering hole, sometimes.

 Maybe I have an itch about the question of freedom. I admit, I've never been especially persuaded by the way we define freedom in the Western world. It seems to boil down to being free to vote once every four or five years, while also being free to be exploited by the wealthy, to be denied health care, and free to be cold in winter because we can't afford to turn the heating up. The gap between the richest people and the rest of us is wider than at any time in hundreds of years, and it's getting wider. We can't eat freedom. What good is it when it's just a word?

 Bizarrely, in some ancient societies even slaves were more free than we are today. A debtor in ancient Greece could work off what he owed, as a slave, but then regain his liberty. Serfs in England might work as little as one day a week for their landowner, and have the rest of their time to spend on their own crops. All right, these were grindingly hard lives, I know that. Still, on the road between then and now we've managed to give away more and more of our time, often for less compensation, and we call this freedom.

 Yes, I have a bee in my bonnet about this. It can only continue for as long as we let it. So in these days when Greeks are scavenging food from bins in Athens, when British people are fined for going to the dentist, and when Americans are being stripped of health insurance they paid for, why do we let it go on?

 In all my research into ancient cultures, I've learned one important thing. People build the culture they want. But then it changes, the society stops serving its people and the people begin to serve it instead, so the system (whatever it is) can be perpetuated. It's why change is so hard.

 But boy, do we need change.

Monday 9 October 2017

Good, eh?

 So, I've been doing research for a new project recently. It involves finding the names of the three roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse myth. Just poke my nose onto the web, I thought, and the answer will pop up.

 It did not pop up. It continued not to, until after a month I quit looking. This doesn't usually happen. As I'm sure you know, you can find the answer to almost anything online - well, you can find an answer, at least. It might be utter nonsense, or an outright lie written by a swivel-eyed fanatic in the cellar of his Mum's house, so you have to check whatever you find. But still, answers are there. Except in this case.

 It surprised me, because I do a lot of internet research and the web very rarely lets me down. If that wasn't true I simply could not write my books, not in the form they take. The setting matters a lot. The people's myths, their habits, what they eat and how they speak, are important. Black Lord includes drinking venues called machanas, for example. Other books include Celtic superstitions about elves, the Greek belief in glory after death, and a heretical Christian concept of flesh as the domain of the Devil. I couldn't learn these things, couldn't add the colour they bring to my stories, without the internet.

 Yes, libraries would help, but no library can host the millions of sources you find online. In effect Google can take you inside every library in the world at the same time. So if a month of effort doesn't turn up the names of Yggdrasil's roots, I begin to suspect it's because the names aren't there to be found.

 Therefore I've made some up. After all, I'm writing Fantasy here, not a history of the Norsemen. Good, eh?

 Story is king. I draw from real cultures, and real history, but I take what I want and ignore the rest. I'll even invent something and throw it in if I need to - like Kai, the kamachi at the centre of Black Lord of Eagles. There was never a Servant of the teacher god among the Inca. But there Kai is, because I needed him to help me answer the question of why the Inca empire held together. It shouldn't have done. It was made up of dozens of cultural groups scattered across eight or nine climate zones, and ought to have collapsed in a few decades. It didn't, and nearly threw the Spanish back at the end, too. How? How could such a motley, divided empire turn out to be glued together so tightly?

 I researched that question. I read books and tracked down files, and found zilch. Nothing. But I knew that the Spanish dedicated a lot of effort to wiping out Inca culture, which means that for everything we know about them, there are a hundred things that were lost. So there's a great big void which I could fill with Kai. It means the novel isn't a history, but then it never was. It's just (I hope) a bloody good yarn.

Have a read and see if you agree. Pip pip.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Lord-Eagles-Blessed-Land-ebook/dp/B06XZCB61G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507574162&sr=1-1&keywords=ben+blake+black+lord+of+eagles