In Dreams Awake

Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

(Henry David Thoreau)

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.