In Dreams Awake

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

(Henry David Thoreau)

Saturday 22 December 2018

The Damage We've Done

 We need to go to Mars. Not for a footprints-and-flags mission, to take some photos and return with a few Mars rocks, but to colonise, and to stay. It won't even be as expensive as most people think. The SpaceX company can launch a normal satellite today for ten times less than NASA did it with the Shuttle. It's possible and affordable.

 Still, it's a big project. People will probably die to achieve it. So why bother?

 For me, the main reason is that we can't save Earth's environment. That should be obvious by now. For all the international deals, right back to Rio in 1992, the ecosystem is still being destroyed. Forget climate change, even. The bigger problem is the simple destruction of species and habitats, and we can't stop it. Even when we try we just cause a new disaster. Bio-fuel was meant to reduce fossil fuel use, but instead it only smashed the forests where orang-utans live, as land was converted to farms to grow the bio-crops. Now orangs face extinction. We tried to be good, and instead just shifted the disaster to another place.

 The problem is too many people. Everyone born needs - at a minimum - water, food, clothes and a roof. That's before we think about jobs, or cars, or healthcare and all the other basic needs. All of that means humans have to exploit the Earth a little bit more. Globally we now use more than 50% of the fresh water first, before any other species. That means everything else put together has less water than humans, which is a recipe for catastrophe. We make 100 million new pieces of clothing every year, which works out at a bit more than 12 per person - not a huge amount, but the total is enormous. It's very hard to see how these numbers can be reduced without a population drop.

 But that's not going to happen. Nobody will vote for a government that plans to limit births. Even people who know the risks won't. I know a man who understands the risks of over-population, is dedicated to Green issues - and has 4 children. That's how the world reacts to this; they agree we need to reduce human numbers, but then assume the need doesn't apply to them. And the result? The UN used to say world population would be 9.5 billion by 2100. Then 10.2 billion. Now it's 11.1 billion, because birth rates are just not dropping very fast. And remember, we need population not to stabilise, but to go DOWN, or sheer pressure of numbers will see the world driven to ecological disaster.

 And so, Mars. It's so far away that large numbers of people will never be able to move there, however advanced technology might become. But we can move trees there, and animals, and build copies of the habitats on Earth. The various species will survive, and perhaps in a thousand years we could re-seed the Earth, and repair some of the horrendous damage we've done.

 Humans don't learn. Sumerians, early Chinese, Maya, the first peoples of North America... they all pillaged their environment until it collapsed. This time we're doing it world wide, but we have a way to save something from the wreck. In doing so, we can save ourselves too.

Monday 10 December 2018

Cards in the Dark

 Last time I talked about how not having time to actually write has meant lots of new ideas shooting about in my head. And guess what? Got another one.

 This time I have a chap named Trist, who left his home city years ago and has since travelled around becoming an expert swordsman and do-gooder. His companion is a phoenix called Feng, who insists he uses minimum force and always tries to do the right thing. He's in the middle of dealing with a drug dealer when his ring glows, which means his old girlfriend is in trouble and he has to keep a promise to go home and help her.

 I started writing it! Yes, I've snatched time on my breaks at work, a few minutes when I get home, anything to get words on the page. I'm fed up of not writing, and this idea has caught me the way few do. So I'm suddenly writing longhand, which I haven't done for decades. So far I've got one chapter done and am starting on the second. It's quite weird, because the tone is sort of half noir and half tongue in cheek, which is new for me.

 It's also weird because I can't recall ever reading a noir book, so I'm sorta playing cards in the dark here. I'm getting The Big Sleep for Christmas. That should get me in the right place, quite apart from being a bloody good read.

 There are interesting themes, too. Homecoming is one of them, parents another. In the book all phoenixes are female and they're born pregnant, though can choose when to let the eggs develop. Of course they immolate themselves to hatch the eggs, so no phoenix ever knows its mother. Trist had a tough childhood and at one point Feng says she sometimes envies humans their parents... and sometimes doesn't.

 Writing is fun. I'm so glad to be back.

Thursday 29 November 2018

Hunting Rabbits

 You've probably seen all those posts on Facebook and Twitter that go, "You know you're a writer when...". They end with something ironic like "when your best ideas come just as you're dropping off to sleep." Well, here's mine.

 You know you're writer when your brain just will not stop working out ideas and problems, even when you have almost no time to write.

 With my shift pattern at the moment, and with two small children, my time is tight. For the first time I'm not writing every day. I'm doing an edit/rewrite, but even that is catch-as-catch-can, an hour one day and ten minutes the next. So I'm not actually creating new work... and my mind won't shut up.

 I've got a new idea for a story set in a growing empire, one just realising that the old government systems aren't capable of managing the new, larger realm. Blocked that out yesterday. I've got an idea for a trilogy set in a place like ancient Egypt, where a band of adventurers set out to find the source of a foundation myth. There's the Heikegani crab idea, where crabs with shells like human faces turn out to be the carriers of wronged souls. Also I've thought of a story for a tribe of plains folk, who've heard rumours of a new people to the east and who then begin to die of a disease they've never seen before. Ideas all over the place, and no time to write.

 I think the two things are linked. Because my mind isn't occupied with the tangles and plots of a novel, it's spending all that nervous (creative?) energy on ideas. It's better than spinning its wheels to no purpose, isn't it? But it's frustrating as all hell. I'm really keen on the Crabs, that's a great idea, and the Egypt story just bursts with potential. And all I can do is block them out for the future. It's like being a cyclist with no bike, his legs pumping on pedals that don't exist. A dog hunting rabbits in his sleep.

 (Hmm. Saying "I'm really keen on the crabs" could be taken the wrong way.)

 Now, as of this morning, I have an idea for a prodigal son who left the city years ago, but promised to return if the girl he loved (and married someone else) needed help. Now he gets the call and returns, laden with knowledge gained in the world, and finds things are not at all as he thought they'd be. I can juxtapose a normal, humdrum city (sorta) with the mysteries and wonders - and even fantastic beasts - of the wider world. Cracking idea, simple as you like but teeming with possibilities. So it's back to blocking out, even though I won't be able to start it until New Year at the very least, and probably spring.

 Bugger.

 But... the old mill is still churning, eh?

Thursday 15 November 2018

The Weird Ones

There's an advert on TV at the moment which says there are 3.5 billion women in the world, and no two are the same.

 The truth is that almost all of them are exactly the same, in every way that matters. All people are. They want the same things, dream the same dreams, eat the same foods. They fit into society as though moulded to it, which of course they are. Governments spend a lot of time and money teaching children to be good little adults, so we grow up to pay our taxes and not cause trouble. And so we're all made to be the same.

 Strangely, small societies tolerate differences better than large ones. A hunter-gatherer clan of 200 people will accept little Bobby's weird habits, because someday he might see something everyone else missed. But a nation of 65 million is harder to manage, the leaders don't want people shooting off on their own all the time, so they tell Bobby to stop it and be quiet. We're taught to conform. Fit in and don't make a fuss, right?

 But you know, the people who do make a fuss, who shoot off sideways the moment they see something interesting... those are the fun ones.

 They're the ones we write about. JK Rowling once said she stopped the Potter books because nobody wants to read about Ron, Harry and Hermione playing bingo at Hogwarts when they're 60 years old. What's interesting about that? Nobody would read the story of Anna Smith, a Hufflepuff in Harry's year who isn't mentioned because she never does anything. And the truth is we're nearly all like Anna. We're here, but we make up the ranks. The faceless extras of life, filling the background and no more unique than a sardine in a can.

 (Yes, I include myself in this. Henry David Thoreau once said only one man in a million was truly awake, and he'd never met one. Neither have I. And I think one in a billion might be a closer estimate.)

 But the most interesting of all? The ordinary person who is thrown into something big, and finds out he/she isn't ordinary after all. Like Harry Potter, who's just an ordinary wizard (yes, I know), quite talented but no genius, with nothing to make him stand out except Voldemort. These are the people we write about, or read about. They're the ones I like in life too - the wounded, the misfits, people with stories written on their faces and told in the things they do.

 Most of the time they're called the weird ones. You know, the people who make us say, "everyone's got one friend like that." But I like 'em.

 Keep not fitting in, folks. It would be boring without you.

Friday 2 November 2018

Leave no Footprints

 There was a report this week that in the Cerrado region of Brazil, the savanna is being cleared for fields to grow soybeans. Huge areas are being burned all the time. It's doing enormous environmental damage and driving species to the edge of extinction.

 It made me think about the idea today that we can save the world if we go meat-free two or three nights a week. But we can't. If we abandon beef the fields will just be converted to grow soybeans, or sugarcane for bio-fuel. That's already happening - the orangutan is in critical danger because of forest clearance for bio-fuel crops. So we reduced fossil fuel dependence to save the world, and instead smashed the ecosystem of Borneo.

 The truth is that there are simply too many of us. Too many humans. We need too much land, too much water, and using one product instead of another only moves the disaster to somewhere else. We have to reduce our demands on the land, not just change them. And we know it can be done, because there are cultures from the past which did it. Most famous of these are the Plains Indians, whose ancestors slaughtered pretty much everything except the buffalo, leaving a threadbare ecosystem to their descendants. The Indians learned to take what could be taken without damage - "leave no footprints", they said, no mark that you'd been there at all. In a different way the Garamanta of North Africa did it too, living in one city amidst the Sahara as they did. It must have meant tight restrictions on water use and on food, and population control too.

 Those are our choices. We could leave fewer footprints, by taking less from the land. It means a drastic reduction in standard of living; we'd have to use half the energy we do now, half the water, and much less food (at least in the developed world). Or we could reduce population, globally, by several billion people.

 Both options are unpalatable and both are ridiculously hard. No voting public is going to elect a party that limits the right to have children. Even if it did, how do you enforce that abroad, in Africa for example? Or India? As for reducing our standard of living, don't waste my time. Voters opt for whoever they think will give them the most money and gadgets the soonest.

 But here's the kicker. Another report this week estimates that the number of vertebrates worldwide has fallen by 60% since 1970. More than half of nearly every species except humans gone in half a century. And with losses like that the ecosystem will soon collapse, and human beings will see a catastrophic fall in numbers and living standards anyway. And we can't stop that happening, because we won't vote for it.

 In a thousand years there really might be no human footprints left on the Earth.

Thursday 18 October 2018

What Happened?

 What we know about our deep history is outweighed, many times, by what we don't know.

 I'm researching Heian era Japan, as I've mentioned before. The period ended in 1185 AD, not that long ago, yet we know almost nothing about how people lived. We understand most of the social order, the upper echelons of society, but that's about all. We don't even have much of an idea what people ate.

 It's the same everywhere. There's still argument about how the Giza pyramids were built: by thousands of slaves, or by a smaller group of more professional men. No one really knows. People argue over who the Sumerians were and where they came from. Historians and archaeologists bicker over who the Hyksos were, who conquered part of ancient Egypt in 1650 BC and who were "possibly from Western Asia". In other words, the best we can say it that they most likely came from somewhere in one half of the largest continent on Earth. Not exactly precision, is it?

 This tells me that as a species, human beings really don't remember much. Give us two generations and a minor dislocation - a war, a famine, plague - and we forget most of what we knew before. It happens amazingly fast. When Rome fell information was stored in dozens of major libraries across the Empire, but 50 years later nobody knew how to build Roman roads, or even the buildings that had filled every town. The philosophy of ancient Greece was forgotten in Europe completely, and had to be relearned from the Muslims a thousand years later. That staggers me. How can a whole continent forget all that wisdom?

 Part of the answer is that we destroy it deliberately.

 That post-Roman loss was led by the Catholic Church, which set out to destroy any book and all learning that wasn't approved by the clerics. Knowledge came from God, they said, not any other source. The Church did it again in the Americas in the 16th Century, trying to wipe out whatever they could of the former cultures. Rome tried to obliterate all memory of the Druids. History is full of examples like this, and it makes me so angry I can hardly speak.

 That was my heritage. It was mine by right, and these bastards took it away.

 It's important we remember this, and try not to let it happen again. Because we're entering a very tough period now, globally, with the horrendous damage we've done and are still doing to the world. 7.7 billion people is too many for the Earth to support for very long. We use too much water, too much land. I think there's going to be a crash, and the longer it takes to arrive, the harder it's going to be.

 I hope we preserve what we can, because if we forget our past there's nothing to stop us doing the same stupid things again in the future.

Saturday 6 October 2018

Any Hints?

 So research for the new (new) WIP is ongoing. There's a lot of it to do, paradoxically because the Heian period of Japan isn't well understood. We only have a sketchy idea of those times, and almost none of life away from the Temples and nobles. That means I can give myself free rein on a lot of things - make it up, really. But it also means I really have to get the basic points right, because those are the hooks that the rest hang on. If the reader is going to understand where the story is set, he needs those hooks.

 So, I'm very busy not writing. (Doesn't help that we've been a House of Plague for a week. When the girls get sick, they really go to town, and soon everyone else is sick too.) But anyway, I've been working out a social structure, including ranks and offices, sifting through various versions of Buddhism to pick the schism that divides the two main sects, and learning about Japanese mythology. Boy, that last is complex. Their gods are sometimes referred to as the Ten Thousand, and they all apologise for being gods, apparently. I haven't figured out why yet, so any hints.... But that gives you an idea of how time-consuming this is. Research is always tedious. This time it's extreme, but still, it hasn't changed its nature.

 So that makes me wonder, again, how some people manage to write, edit and publish a novel every six weeks.

 I could not do it. Not with the nature of what I do. If I took a cocktail of drugs to keep me awake and functioning 24 hours a day, if I abandoned my family, gave up my job, shut myself in a shack to work and did nothing else, I would still struggle. It's only possible if I abandon research and do no background work at all. But that changes my work beyond what I will accept. Imagine if Tolkien had written LOTR but not bothered to devise an Elvish language and culture, or a pantheon of gods, or any of the history of Middle-Earth. Would the story be as strong? Of course it wouldn't. It would be more like something by David Gemmell, where history is covered in two sentences and then someone gets killed again.

 In a way I admire those prolific writers. But there has to be a trade-off, speed in favour of quality and depth. I think they've chosen to make money rather than to make something of quality. Or to try; god knows I'm no Tolkien or Guy Kay, but I do my best to make something meaningful. I want to write books that people will come back to five years later and read again, and maybe find something new inside.

 I don't write for money. I write for the thrill of it, for the ideas and discoveries, some of which are found in the black pits of research. I'll stick with it.

Pip pip.

Thursday 20 September 2018

Patterns of Faces

 Hi all.

 I was researching online the other day, wiffling about as I often do - twelve windows open, you know, and for some reason I'm reading about the nocturnal call of the Mongolian Scented Bat. Not what I set out to do, but so it goes. Anyway, I came across a reference to a battle in ancient Japan in 1185 AD, which ended with many warriors of the beaten side throwing themselves into the sea. All very dramatic, eh?

 Crabs from that coast have the pattern of a human face on their shells. Go on, look it up. They're the Heikegani Crabs and they're a bit creepy.

 If you're a Fantasy author, you can't read something like that without a hundred lights going off in your mind, like filaments burning out in a power surge. The crabs are said to protect the souls of those dead warriors, until they can right the ancient wrong. I had a torrent of ideas about evil rising again, or maybe a force of good trying to return and dispose of the darkness that triumphed that day. Five minutes later I had a secondary culture which knows more of this than the main one, and a band of renegade warriors whose existence has never been proved. Then came the MC, a misfit warrior from one of the military temples, and the one concubine he can afford, who's the brains of the outfit and who harbours a secret she's never dared tell him. That secret relates to the renegades and the ancient battle, and it will change everything.

(Because women do change everything, don't they?)

 All that in less than half an hour. Which is great, I love it when my brain pops and fizzes like that, there's no feeling like it. Except I've been working on a new WIP for a few weeks now, blocking out and researching - which is actually what I was doing when I stumbled on a reference to the battle and these weird crabs. I started to write chapter one just last week. And now I can't stop thinking about the black and freezing water of the bay, the secrets it hides, and the forces which radiate out from it to change the world.

 Usually I'd tell myself to be disciplined, to see one project through before I start the next. But there's that fizz in my brain... I'm a weak man, sometimes. Long story short, I just started the new (new) WIP, with a man treading on fallen blossoms as he walks through a garden. Time will tell if my instincts are guiding me right, won't it?

 Cheerio.

Friday 31 August 2018

Onwards and Upwards

 Self-publishing has changed.

 When I published my first book, back in 2013, people mostly put their books out and talked about them a lot - blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. The aim was to try to create awareness. To some extent it worked, and I sold a couple of hundred copies. I thought that was OK for a debut. Onwards and upwards, things will build from there.

 They haven't - in fact, my sales have fallen away. My latest book, Fanged Fish, is the worst seller I've had so far. That's because online self-publishing is different now. It's not enough to talk a lot on social media, you have to advertise on Facebook and Amazon, buy slots on book promotion sites like Bookbub (good luck with that), and generally spend money. Ironically, I could have done that easily in 2013, but now I've got kids I don't have the money to spare.

 So what to do? I've used GoFundMe and similar sites before, to not much benefit. No help there. My family is a) fractured and b) poor, so that's another dry well. It's frustrating. I've learned a lot about publishing, and improved my writing too I think, and I can't make any serious impact because I don't have money to spend.

 I begin to think that online self-publishing has become as hard to break into as traditional publishing, only the gatekeepers are advertising companies instead of editors.

 To add to the problems, I can't write a novel in a month, as many online authors seem to do. They bang out a book every two or three months - sometimes even less. That seems to work for them, especially in YA. But my work takes too much research, an I want to rewrite and edit too many times, so it doesn't work for me.

 I need to think about what I'm doing, and how to make it productive, because right now I'm not sure I know.

Friday 17 August 2018

Make the Light Last

 A question lots of people seem to want an answer to is, "What makes a great book?"

 Well, it has to fascinate the reader, draw him in, so he reads pages without noticing the clock ticking away. He has to finish the book and wish there was more, while also feeling fulfilled by the end of the story arc. There are lots of things, and they're different for each of us, aren't they? One man's meat is another man's poison. I know many people loved "The da Vinci Code", but I thought it was dull and predictable.

 So the question is meaningless, really. But it can have relevance for an individual.

 Myself, I like "The Lions of al-Rassan", by Guy Gavriel Kay. It's a story set against hatred and coming war, but deals with people who find friendship and love across those dividing lines. It's simultaneously filled with hope and terrible sadness, a grief I felt physically when I re-read the book (for the fifth or sixth time) last week. Kay's novel "Tigana" is excellent too, but not as layered, I think.

 Sheri S Tepper has produced several books that I go back to again and again. "Grass" and "Sideshow" are two of them. The one I iike best though is "The Awakeners", which is about a world of humans and a flying species called the Thraish, living in an uneasy peace after a war long ago. Neither side likes the peace and some people are working to end it, on both sides. There are monstrous secrets, too; the novel is largely a shouted warning against religious extremism. Again it's sad and hopeful at the same time, but here the hope is stronger.

 "It", by Stephen King, is the most brilliant evocation of childhood I've ever read. The recent film is very good, but the book is a hundred times better, full of the aches and uncertainties of the time just before puberty. I've read it ten times or more and it still has the power to unsettle. When we're speaking of great books, isn't that key? The ability to cause an emotional reaction years after it was first read is priceless. Wish I had a tenth of that ability.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but three is enough for now. The books are different but share some themes, notably sadness and joy running side by side. In all of them people have to learn how to make the light last through their dark times. It's a struggle I've had in the past, which is probably why I react to these novels the way I do. Like I said, it's different for each of us, isn't it?

 Writing changes lives. It changes you and me, and it can change a whole culture, on occasion. Or create one, as Tolkien did. Me, I'm just telling stories, and that's enough.

 Pip pip.

Thursday 2 August 2018

Wired in our Bones

 In Britain, the Labour Party is currently tearing itself apart over anti-Semitism within the Party. The British Council of Jews has recommended that none of its members vote Labour. Meanwhile in Italy, the government has announced that it wants to make a census of the Roma in the country - a first step, often, towards persecution.

 It doesn't take much to reawaken hate, does it? A few years of hardship, a bit of struggle, and people start looking for someone to blame. And it's always the outsider they pick on. Jews, Roma, the Huguenots, whoever's convenient. Right now the EU is beginning to fragment and Britain is leaving it, which has brought controversy and pressure to them both. The reaction, among a shameful few, is racist.

 My wife had to tell me that Meghan Markle is mixed race. She also told me that one main character in the children's series "Go Jetters" is black. I honestly didn't notice. Probably this means I'm just not bothered enough about other people to pay attention (my wife's words again, hehe). It certainly means I'm not bothered enough about colour to notice. And how can you tell, by looking, if someone is Jewish? Or Muslim? Or Catholic?

 A few hundred years ago, people almost never left their home villages. The town twenty miles away might as well be on the Moon. Then, people distrusted anyone they didn't know, anyone from Away. They were racist towards folk just like themselves. Sometimes it seems that hate is wired in our bones. Wherever we are, in any society, we'll find someone to look down on, sneer at, belittle and besmirch.

 I try to portray a measure of reality in my worlds. I'll have a character scarred by polio, or someone stunted by a childhood with too little food. I'll even have racism. But I don't think I can plumb the depths of hate I see around me. Anti-Semitism, expel the Roma, Trump's dangerous demeaning of the Latino population. And yet I have to try, because that's a writer's job. I have to show enough of this horror to be realistic, and honest, but not enough to repel the reader.

 So I've found something about writing I don't like. Apologies for the bleakness of this post. Sometimes we need to face up to the ugliness though, because otherwise the ugliness wins.

 Take care.

Saturday 14 July 2018

The Punchline

 What is myth? Where does it come from?

 I don't mean stories like the fables of the Brothers Grimm, which are just warnings. Don't go into the woods alone, little girl; or don't be so strange that ordinary people get nervous. They're code for  'Do what society expects', and not much more. I mean the real myths,the ones that have come down from so far back in time that they were old beyond imagining when they were first written down.

 They're code too, of course. In pre-literate societies they were how knowledge was passed on. Embed it in a story, then spread the story so widely that the whole culture remembers it. People always change a story, though, even when it travels from village to village. We add a tweak here or there, change an oak into a willow because we happen to live near a stream where willows grow. Have you ever told a joke that wasn't quite the way you first heard it? Every repeat sees the story change.

 But I bet the punchline of that joke was still the same.

 Myths are encoded information. Our problem today is that we live in an empirical society, where we believe what we can touch and hold and not much else. We live in a world of science and objectivity, and the writers of those fables didn't. There's evidence that their brains were built differently, with a larger corpus callosum that meant greater exchange between the left and right halves of the brain. That meant the lines between reality and fantasy became blurred. They thought differently, in short. It means we have to understand what their myths meant to them, while not understanding how their minds worked.

 This is quite tricky.

 It's a little easier to work out where the myths came from. You find identical motifs, similar tales with the same numbers used in the same places, all over the world. I talked about this a little in my last blog, Memory and Myth. Because the stories are spread so widely, it means they must have originated in one place and then travelled with peoples as they migrated. So the creators of the stories must have lived during the last Ice Age, 12,000 years ago or more. Sea levels were 400 feet lower then and humans might have flourished in the tropics, places like the Persian Gulf and Yellow Sea, and sailed east and west along shores which no longer exist. When the water rose the cultures were drowned, but the stories they'd sowed survived, in outposts on higher ground, or maybe among more savage peoples who began to look for better lands in the changing world.

 I think I could write at least three or four stories set in a world like that, without even trying. And there's one more interesting thing.

 Our world might be about to change just as radically, now mightn't it?

Wednesday 27 June 2018

Memory and Myth

  I don't have time to write at the moment. It's the first time that's happened to me in my life, and I don't like it.

 There's just no way around it. Caz, my wife, works early mornings, and I work late afternoons until midnight. We have one shared day off a week to do all the laundry, clean the house and so on. The rest of the time I'm either looking after the kids, at work, or trying like hell to get enough sleep to last through the next day. There's simply no time to write. Nothing. I could do five minutes here and there, but that's not enough to keep my head in the story. I'm hemmed in and can't find a way out.

 I can't write, but I can still think, and read, and I can still research.

 Currently I'm going through Hamlet's Mill, an essay on the importance of numbers in ancient myth. The thesis is that myths were stores for information, particularly on the stars. So if myths from Iran, Finland and Mexico all have a hero who rises to heaven without dying, and in all three cases makes his last journey with six companions and a dog, then there must be meaning behind it. For me, the most interesting thing is that the myths must all derive from a common source - an ancient culture that spanned the world. Or a group of such cultures, or maybe just survivors from civilisations that fell. We don't know the details, but there must have been someone watching the stars back then, during the last Ice Age maybe, ten thousand years before the first pharaohs.

 Whoever it was measured the movement of stars so accurately that they knew the Earth wobbles on its axis over a 26,000 year cycle. Impressive, eh? But they didn't mine coal, or gold, because we'd have found their pits if they did. They weren't industrial. Their culture was built on different values to ours. Maybe they thought in different ways. They may be as alien to us as dinosaurs.

 Isn't that interesting? My wife watches Black-ish, a show that makes it pretty clear that for all the progress society thinks it's made on civil and race rights, for black people the same issues still remain. As a white European man I can't really understand their experiences. So how am I supposed to comprehend a culture lost so long ago that the only relics we have are myths?

 Well, I can't do that, either. I can incorporate some of this into my work, whenever I can start working again. Meantime, this ancient culture seems to have flourished without writing anything down. They used memory and myth to record the things they thought were important. They kept every word in their minds, and still created tales that have lasted for thousands of years.

 In these days when I have so little time, that's an encouraging thought.

Monday 11 June 2018

Parts and Pieces

 OK, so I have my new WIP pretty much blocked out now. There are some details to work out, especially concerning the traveller people who drift through the story a couple of times, but the gist is done. The world is defined and the characters are drawn in detail (two of them are very strong women, missing in most Fantasy). And I've noticed something.

 My first novel, The Risen King, had no magic at all except in how the story was set up. None in the actual events. My next two had hints of magic but not much more, and then Troy didn't have any - no gods, either. My idea there was to return the tale of Troy to what it was - a plain, straightforward story of love, heroes and betrayal, magnificent in scale but historically accurate. I hated the David Gemmell version which had cavalry galloping about, at a point in history when no horse was strong enough to be ridden. He might as well have included muskets, or aircraft. Anyway, little or no magic, is my point. Not many of the more common Fantasy tropes. Straightforward stories of mortal men and women trying to make their way.

 Not so much, now.

 My last work (unpublished, yet) includes prophecy, an alien species and a mad king, and journeys to magical lands. This one, tentatively called Tears of the Child, is just packed with Fantasy tropes. Elves, Dwarves and Orcs, mighty sorcerers, seers, eldritch creatures and so on and so forth. I seem to be moving more into mainstream Fantasy ground, though on my terms. I don't want to borrow races from other books lock, stock and barrel, so my Dwarves aren't much like Tolkien's, and he wouldn't recognise the Elves or Orcs at all. But still. There's a definite trend in my work to include magic and other species. Other ideas for future stories show the same tendency.

 Why? Don't know, don't much care. Nobody ever got anywhere trying to break down art into its parts and pieces. Sometimes we just don't know, and the only good answer is because. I'm heading in this direction because these are the stories that excite me, the ones I want to tell, and that brings me to the other emerging theme.

 My newer work are more reflective of our society today. Not greatly so - that might ruin the work. But some. How The Stars Shine deals with the danger of handing too much power to too few people. In Tears the society is very divided between rich and poor, privileged and downtrodden, so social cohesion becomes a theme. Hopefully I'll handle it well enough that the reader doesn't feel like I'm thumping him on the head with a morality stick. And that, mes amis, is the point. I don't think I could have handled this five years ago. Now I think I can. Nice to feel we're growing as people, isn't it?

 Five years ago is when I met my wife. I wonder how much of this new me is owed to her... but that's a question for another day.

 Pip pip.

Monday 28 May 2018

Carried off by a Dragon

 Age is a funny thing y'know.

 When I hit 20 I didn't care much. I wasn't a teenager anymore, and so what? Same when I hit 30, and then 40. I didn't really understand the idea of a mid-life crisis. They're just numbers. If we counted in base 60 like the Sumerians then nobody would worry about these multiples of ten.

I reached 50 last month, and I've slowly realised I feel different this time. I mean, 50. Half a century. I don't even think I want another 50 years, slowly declining into senescence and confined to comfy chairs in a home somewhere. But that might lie ahead. There's a voice in my mind that's lost and alone, and a little afraid. Only a small voice, but it's there.

 I am already on the downward slope, over the crest of the hill and closer to the finish than the start.

 Wow. Just... blimey. I mean, I have two infant daughters, and after all this time I've got reasons to want to live. And yet at the same time I've come to understand that I'm probably at a point where my energy and stamina begin to fade. Doesn't seem fair, does it?

 Now, my twisty won't-stop-twittering brain has taken all this and wondered what it would have been like five hundred years ago, when 50 would have been a pretty grand age. The average might have been 30 or so. Does that mean people had mid-life crises in their twenties? Did men of twenty-four have a sudden urge to get a tattoo and buy a really fast racing mule? A man like that might have been married at 17, seen his wife die in childbirth and married again at 22, have three kids that lived and two that didn't. If anyone had the right to dream of freedom and a more exciting life, he did.

 It's interesting, but hard to see how it could be incorporated into a Fantasy story. Modern readers won't sympathise with a twenty-something with an identity crisis, they'll just think he's a self-indulgent cockwomble. You can't really write a true account of how life was for people back then, or in a similar world. Too much of it would be dealing with plague or smallpox scars, and working a twelve-hour day of backbreaking labour only for the crops to be eaten by greenfly. Or the cows carried off by a dragon, but that doesn't change much. An author needs to create the right mood, but not too right. An overdose of realism kills the mood.

 The genre is called Fantasy, after all.

Thursday 10 May 2018

No Pressure, Then.

 I've been thinking about battle in SF and Fantasy.

 In SF onscreen, it's usually rubbish. Star Wars has fighters that behave just like planes in World War I, dogfighting around planets. Space: Above and Beyond was the same. Moonraker and others feature marines who drop from orbit into battle. But all these things are nonsense. Our technology is already so advanced that we can pick aircraft off from miles away with homing missiles, so why use lasers that miss even from a few hundred metres? Why drop assault infantry from orbit when micro missiles would shred them high in the atmosphere?

 Fantasy is bad too. Partly that's the LOTR tradition, in which the Good Guys come through massive battles without a scratch, leaving a trail of dead Orcs or generic Bad Guys behind. I know a bit of history, and nobody comes through a battle that way. You suffer burns where your shield ring rubs, or blisters, or bruises from your armour taking a hit. In medieval days people died when their armour was driven into flesh and jumbled up their organs. No scratch? That means no one hit you, so you're either luckier than gods or faster than light. Silly either way.

 As for magic, mostly we find what I think of as the Terry Brooks approach. Mages who throw spells around, usually beams of red or green like lasers, sometimes illusions. And this, friends 'n neighbours, is the one that really annoys me. Is that really the best way a mage can think of to fight?

 I have a new WIP which involves a good bit of magic. It's used to fight, which means I need to work out how. I don't want to have this mano a mano approach. I'm looking at illusion, mages changing their appearance or fading into the background, so you don't know they're there until they strike. But what else could a sorcerer do? Slice time, perhaps. Divide a second into smaller and smaller segments, allowing himself to move more quickly than an opponent and so counter his moves before they develop. They might win by crushing the rival's mind. Someone watching would see the figures blur, and not much else, except that maybe the ground around them bubbles or cracks with the force unleashed.

 These are broad strokes, and I don't have details yet. But I like the direction of ideas. It's a little different from the usual, and that's a good thing I think. Let's give the reader something new to look at. It might be better, might be worse (that up to me, so no pressure, then). But at least it will feel new, and that matters.

 That's all for now. Pip pip.

Saturday 21 April 2018

We All Wear Levi's

 There's a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government at the moment, with the acronym CHOGM. Catchy, eh? They're deciding who'll replace the Queen as head of the Commonwealth. As a Republican I could care less, but there's another issue too, which is that 70% of Commonwealth countries apparently still ban homosexuality.

 Now to my mind, who sleeps with who isn't my business. If two men are in love, or two women, that's fine. Love is very rarely wrong. But still, do we really have the right to lecture other countries, other cultures, on what to believe?

 That's cultural imperialism. There's still a good bit of it about, unfortunately, sixty or seventy years after the end of the European Empires. People get upset because Saudi Arabia, among other countries, punishes thieves by cutting off their hands. They get angry because homosexuality is illegal in Zambia, or women have few rights in Pakistan. Those things seem strange to me too, even a bit backward. But I know that's because of my perspective as a man raised in the increasingly liberal West. I'm not sure I have the right to lecture other peoples on issues like these. Their cultural histories are different from mine, so their outlooks are too.

 The world wasn't like this, once. Marco Polo could travel to China and be amazed by the differences. Ibn Battuta covered the world from Morocco to China and wrote of the wonders he saw. Now we can travel from Britain to Cuzco or Samarkand, and most likely find a McDonald's on a street corner and a little shop that sells Pepsi. Everything has to be made the same. I think that's a pity. I'd rather live in a world of myriad cultures with different rules and traditions, than one in which every pub is a Wetherspoons and we all wear Levi's.

 I'd like to see homosexuality accepted everywhere, and women's rights too. I'm liberal to my bones. But if the price of that is losing the things that make us different, losing much of the world's cultural identities... well, then I don't know, because I love those differences too. It's the sort of conundrum which liberals have failed to deal with in the past. We all defend a woman's right to have as many children as she wants, but we also know that overpopulation is killing the ecosystem, so which belief do we abandon? Which holy cow do we shoot?

 Instead of trying to sort through this, at CHOGM they've spent days deciding that the next Commonwealth head will be the heir of a hereditary monarch. Imperialism, still kicking after all this time.

Friday 6 April 2018

Cursed Earworms

 I just finished watching Altered Carbon on Netflix, and the first thing to say is - watch it. And Netflix, make another series, please. It's graphic and sometimes brutal, but also brilliant. It reminds me a bit of the Blade Runner films, and there's no higher praise.

 The key, as always, is the writing. There were surprises all along, in every episode. In this future world consciousness can be kept in a Stack, an electronic box at the back of the neck, and it's from this that all else flows. The whole society is shaped by what that one idea leads to. I don't want to throw out spoilers, so I'll limit myself to saying that life is cheap for most while the wealthy have achieved immortality. All very topical, eh?

 Isaac Asimov once said that when he read a particularly good book he'd get frustrated, and throw it across the room because he hadn't thought of it himself. (He said the same about a bad book, which he threw in disgust. Writers are a funny bunch.) I feel like that about Altered Carbon. It's the best SF series I've ever seen on TV, and there has to be another run. But then, I thought that about Defying Gravity, and that was never renewed. So don't let me down again, and as Homer Simpson said, let me bask in television's warm glowing warming glow.

 Speaking of good writing, Netflix has also done a show called The Good Place. I watched both series of that and they were fabulous, funny and creative all along. As different from Altered Carbon as you can imagine, but very nearly as good. Watch that too, if you can. I don't often watch TV as a habit, though these days I seem to see an awful lot of kids shows, and find myself humming the Mister Tumble songs, which are the most cursed earworms ever. But I do watch Netflix some of the time. Some of their shows are original, clever, and well written. By comparison the shows on the BBC or ITV seem pretty tired.

 I keep seeing adverts on Facebook urging me to submit writing to Netflix, Amazon et al. They're making a lot of new programming and they need scripts. Could I convert one of my novels to a TV show? It's a tempting thought. I've never written a script before, but as I always say, God hates a coward.

 Pip pip.

Tuesday 27 March 2018

A Chapter of Authors

 Well, you win some, you lose some.

 The book launch in Tiverton was a bit of a disaster. Snow started falling in the morning and nobody left home, the whole town centre was empty. I turned up anyway - I'd hate to default and then have people come to the event - but nobody showed. Given the snow I'd expected it. God was not playing ball.

 Still, it was great to meet Kayleigh, who runs liznojan bookstore. I'll be going there again on May 4th for a sort of mini-Comicon of Fantasy and SF authors, several local indies all in one place.Either heaven or a nightmare, right? I don't even know the collective noun for a group of authors. A bicker, maybe. Or a chapter of authors. That sounds pretty good, actually. But I digress (again). In June we hope to have an event at liznojan, and perhaps elsewhere, as part of Tiverton Literary Festival. So the launch itself was a bust, but some good things have come of it.

 Meanwhile, I've had two weeks off work and decided to focus on writing How The Stars Shine. I wanted to get through 15,000 words in that fortnight and actually managed 21,000. When the work flows like that it's as though words are drifting down from the skies, falling out of the ether onto the page. It's why I write, for that buzz. It even makes editing and redrafting worth the effort.

 Well, sort of. I've really had to fight Stars for much of the draft. It's wanted to screw off in directions I hadn't planned but it's good, it works, even though it's been like trying to wrestle a bear. I'm coming towards the end now. It's a first draft and obviously rough at the edges, but it's the best thing I've ever done, by far.

 So it should be, eh? If I don't sometimes make a PB I might start to think my best is behind me, hehe.

 When this is done, I'm going to spend some time working on the publicity side. The books aren't selling especially well, so I need to advertise better than I have done. Not what I want to be doing, but it is what it is. As an indie you have to take control of every side of publishing (that's a hint, traditional publishers, help me out here). Ho hum. I just hope that I can be back on a draft again soon, wrestling that bear.

 Have a good spring holiday, everyone, and take care.

Tuesday 13 March 2018

An interesting Idea

 Well, the new novel debuts on Saturday at liznojan bookstore in Tiverton, England. Here's the cover,

 As ever, I'm indebted to Mark Watts for the cover art. I think this one's a cracker too. We had a bloody handprint on it too at first, but then it looked too crowded, so we took that out. Good thing, too. This is a nice clean cover, I really like it.

 Covers matter. I know several indie authors who work like Trojans on the novel itself, but don't spend much time on covers or back page blurb. But that's what sells the book. The first thing a browser sees is the cover, and if that catches their eye they'll read the blurb. Still like it? They'll read the opening page or two, and if they're still interested they'll buy. If any of that turns them off, though, they're gone. Spend a bit of time on the details, people. It does help.

 Liznojan is a new indie bookstore, which I'm happy to support by holding my launch there. Indie book shops are important, a bit like libraries, they're a place for people to meet and chat about... everything, really. I like the name, too. 'Liznojan' means to learn while following a track, and isn't that just what reading is? You follow the story arc and who knows, maybe learn something along the way. A phrase that stays with you, an interesting idea, a character who inspires you. Aren't books terrific?

 Mine is maybe not terrific, but I think it's pretty good. It finishes the story of Kai and the Ashir, as they struggle to defeat the invaders and hold onto their culture. There are surprises along the way, and some grief, before we reach the end. It will be available as e-book or print copy on Saturday, the 17th of March, so get a copy and come along on the journey.

 Cheerio.

Thursday 1 March 2018

You'd Have to be Hemingway

 Hi all.

 Yesterday I got involved (unwisely) in a Facebook thread about how quickly indie writers produce books. The fastest publish one every five or six weeks, meaning some ten a year. It reminds me a bit of NaNoWriMo, when some people reach the 50,000 words target on the first day. In honesty, I don't think anyone can write that fast and keep the quality. I could do 50,000 words a day, but most of it would be bleh bleh bleh, complete rubbish.

 So what about 20,000 words per day (wpd)? Not really possible either, to my mind. And down we go, until we reach a point where we start to think it can be done. Now, I realise that the world is full of wonders, and everyone writes in their own way, but still... 20,000 wpd? No. No, I don't think so, not with any quality.

 I said this in the FB thread, and promptly got shot to bits by lots of irate authors. Told you I was unwise

 But the thing is, I've never heard of a traditionally published author who writes ten publication-ready novels in a year. Never. OK, publishers don't want more than two a year anyway, and the process takes time as well, but even so it's a hell of a leap from two to ten. Are we really saying that just by being indie, authors can suddenly write five times faster than anyone else, and still keep their quality?

 I don't think we are. I suspect what usually happens is that authors dash off a book as fast as their fingers can go, publish it, then move on. Very little editing or rewrites, not much concern for standards. Just bang the book out and follow it with a few adverts, then start the next novel. So lots of words, but poor quality. I've read some of this stuff. It's not great.

 Of course, the key word is "usually". I'm sure there are one or two authors who can pull this off - ten books a year and still quality. But you'd have to be Hemingway or Stephen King to do it. If these authors can, then kudos to them. For myself, I know I'm no Hemingway, and I'll stick to the old-fashioned way. Write, revise, revise, edit, edit, and then (for the first time) ask myself if the work is finished. Or does it need another edit?

 Boring, eh? Too true. But it needs to be done.

 Pip pip.

Friday 16 February 2018

Before and After

 Life's a funny old thing, y'know.

 There are people who want to live forever. I don't really understand that. Even in forever there will be something you didn't see, and anyway your regrets will pile up and pile up and maybe in the end choke you. In any case, if the old never die, what jobs will the young people do? How will they get a job at a physics department or shoe shop if the people who have those jobs never retire?

 Immortality means stasis. Nothing changing, nothing new. I think people take risks because they know their time is limited anyway .Even if you die, it's only popping off a bit earlier. But if you have forever in your sights,well now... why take a risk? Why go near a road if you might be run down, or board a plane that might crash? Immortality just means you don't die of natural causes. It doesn't make you immune to bombs or bullets.

 On the other hand (and how many lunatic ideas started with "On the other hand", do you think?) there's so much I want to see. I long to walk on Mars. Did you know the sky there is pink? I want to see my daughters get married and have kids, or become artists or activists or thinkers. Or serve coffee at Starbuck's, if that's what they want to do. I want to see Liverpool win the league title again. So many things, and I won't see them all. (Especially Liverpool... sigh) Life flits by like blown leaves, every leaf a year, and suddenly you're on the edge of fifty and wondering how the bloody hell you got there.

 But it's strange, because I like the different perspectives I've had as I've grown older. I've learned not to be certain of things, because much of what I once thought was obvious and clear turns out to be shades of grey. I've found that experience (and maybe a little wisdom) are better friends than energy and hot blood. I like myself, too. That took some learning, and a lot of forgiving myself for mistakes made and hurts done to others. I think I can face that final curtain, when it comes, with a little bit of a smile.

I'm not afraid to die. What matters is the life lived, not the avoidance of death. I want to teach my daughters what I can, and send them out into the world confident and brave and loved, and ready to sort out their own shit. I want to love my wife, who's broken my life into Before and After like I'm two different men, one emerging from the shell of the other. And after a bit of these things, as much as I can deal with and life allows me, I'll die. That's no cause for sorrow. Not if we can say we lived our lives well.

 Pip pip.

Friday 26 January 2018

Magic And Derring-Do

 The new novel, How The Stars Shine, seems to have stronger love themes in it than I'd planned, or than I've done before. It's not a romance, by any means. I can't say much without risking spoilers, but I'll note that love takes many forms, and more than one appears in the story.

 It wasn't planned. Stories take their own shape sometimes, just as characters do - or should, if they're any good. I'll reach a certain point and a character will want to do something I hadn't considered before. That's good, it shows the tale has life thrumming through it, and unexpected things may happen. If I don't know for sure what's coming down the line, the reader isn't likely to. But this time, it's got me thinking. Stars is the first from-scratch novel I've begun since I met my wife. Everything else was at least blocked out before then, and largely written. Its broad form was set. Stars was not, and it's changing in my hands.

 Could this be, do you think, because I have love in my own life at last?

 I remember I said to Caz, before we were married, that I wasn't sure I felt love in the way that other people do. There have been signs of it. Me not crying while my whole family wept at the funeral of my grandfather, things like that. I'm known as a distant man, unapproachable as one of my friends called me - and if that's what my friends think, how must I seem to people who have only just met me?

 Caz broke through these walls of mine without trying. I noticed one day that she was already inside my castle, having a good rummage about and putting pictures on my walls. And I didn't mind. Hmm, I thought. Interesting. Again, not love as most people know it, eh? Then came the babies, Bella and Evie. Bells will be two next week. And with them, no doubt at all, I have learned to love the way everyone else does. Overwhelmingly, swept-along-in-a-flood helplessly loving them. I know now that all my doubts about love were rubbish. I can feel it fine. I just hadn't found the right place and time before.

 So love is a part of me now, and I guess it's finding its way into my work. That's OK. I'm not going to end up being Barbara Cartland. My stories will still be Fantasies, there'll be magic and derring-do and hopefully some strange cultures that the reader hasn't seen before. But maybe there will be a softer tone, just now and then, and you know, that's OK too.

Friday 12 January 2018

How The Stars Shine

 Hi all. Hope the New Year has started with promise for you.

 I'm getting right into the new novel, 22,000 words done now. I've renamed it How The Stars Shine, from a quote by Bertrand Russell about how he yearns to know so many things. Part of the story (before, it was called Eternity) deals with a scholar called Mani, whose job is to talk with the Sea-Goats who live in the lagoon and glean information from them. He's a man of learning in a culture where almost everyone works in farming or the military, who takes one simple step and finds that it throws him into the heart of events sweeping across the cities.

 Trouble is, from there the story has grown into something so ambitious that it scares me. There's a non-human species, the Sea-Goats, who are a bit like mermen but have a distinct culture and keep secrets all the time. There's a mad warlord who wants to live forever, and an almost equally insane High Priestess who thinks she can ride his coat-tails to power. There are betrayals and revelations galore. All this makes the story difficult to write in a structural sense, because there's so much going on and I have to keep it all tight and sleek so it isn't confusing.

 At the heart of it all is the longing for power, and the things people do to achieve it. We're driven by pride and ambition, even if we don't know what we'll actually do with power once we've got it. A bit like Donald Trump, who seemed to want the Presidency so he could boast to foreign leaders about how big his button was (metaphorically, hehe). The warlord in Stars is like that. He wants to live forever not so he can achieve good things for his people, not so he can understand mysteries, but just so he doesn't die. A little man holding great power is dangerous.

 Then there's Mani, who wants to understand all the mysteries, know all the answers to questions he hasn't even thought of yet. That's foolish too, because if we know everything we have nothing left to learn, or achieve. The Arabs have a proverb; "May all your dreams come true but one." Having one thing left to dream of means we remain dreamers, and isn't that good?

 I'm as guilty as anyone, by the way. I'm a bit like Mani, wanting to know all the answers, even though I know it's a fool's longing. But I do know there are limitations on what we can do. I've typed this blog with one hand while cradling a sleepy-struggly baby in the other, and boy, that teaches you the limits of what you can do.

 Is writing How The Stars Shine beyond my limits? Maybe. But if the project doesn't scare you it's not big enough, and as I've said before, God hates a coward. I think I can manage the story. Finding out is deliciously scary.

 Pip pip.