I write about other worlds, and other species. In reality, though, are such things likely?
Physics says yes. If life can begin it will begin. NASA says there are over a million hi-tech civilisations in our galaxy alone. Biology says no. Life on Earth had to survive so many setbacks, jump through so many hoops, that the chance of another spacefaring species emerging is almost nil.
And out there we see nothing, hear nothing. No signals, no relics, no ruins, no energy leaks. Zilch.
There are lots of theories as to why. One says that we're alone after all, the single spark of intelligence in the universe. Another says these cultures do arise... but then they fall. All of them. So then we ask why, because we can imagine things that might end a species like that - a nearby supernova, a supervolcano on the home world, a meteor strike, and so on. But none of those would finish EVERY civilisation. That totality points to something deliberate. Something that hunts and destroys.
It doesn't really matter. Whatever it is, it must happen to species just as they emerge into space,because otherwise we'd see some evidence of them. Huge solar sails that change the light signatures of a star, for example. We don't, so disaster must occur before they're built - and that means we humans are barrelling straight at it.
It's not a nice image, is it? A galaxy full of ghosts. Ruins on world after world, haunted by the people who built them and then died out. If humans ever did get out there we'd be crunching bones under our feet with every step. It's very dark, very despairing... but it draws me. Non-human species crying out from the past, speaking through fragmentary inscriptions and the buildings they left, while others try to piece together who they were.
Quite an image, and it works as well in Fantasy as in SF. And in both genres, a bit of creativity in the plot might mean the dead aren't quite that dead after all.
Showing posts with label Fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasy. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 March 2019
Saturday, 5 January 2019
Bad for Good
A lot of the time in Fantasy, the main character is a Good Guy. Not just good, but Good. He's the epitome of noble niceness. Like Rand in Wheel of Time, who to some extent is an avatar of the Creator himself. Or Frodo in LOTR, honourably ignoring his own fears in order to Do Good for the world. Or like pretty much any main character from David Gemmell's books, who often add to it by spouting little homilies about what it means to be Good.
I don't think I've ever known someone as pure as that. One person in a million is awake enough for the spiritual or divine life, as Thoreau said, and he'd never met one ("How could I have looked him in the face?") People just don't work that way, not even in Hollywood - well, mostly. It doesn't ring true to me.
I've tried to make my MC's a bit more nuanced. Kai in Blessed Land doesn't even know what good is, or what's right; he's tormented by doubts all the time. In Songs of Sorrow Calesh does know, but he's clever enough to realise that his certainty might be based on a flawed faith. But I think with the new novel that I've found an MC who's more complex, more of an anti-hero, than anyone I've written of before.
Trist has a terrible backstory, one in which he did something awful out of rage and grief. It was revenge, though not undeserved by the victim. He then left home before retribution came, and in the years since has won the companionship of a phoenix, an intrinsically Good creature drawn to Trist because of the extremes of light and dark within him. This empathetic bond pushes Trist to do only good things, though he can sometimes be violent or cruel in pursuit of them. The greater good is what matters.
Now Trist has been called home, and of course he encounters all the bitterness of past events and his own memories. He's given every reason to commit violence for its own sake, to give as good as he gets. Whether he does so... I'm not even sure myself, yet. The book is quite noir in places, though the mood is changed by the hope and brightness of the phoenix, so it's never quite as dark as The Big Sleep, for example. But I think Trist will find that the darkness inside has never entirely gone away, whatever layers of light have been laid over it.
This has got me thinking about myself. A lifelong loner, watching society from the outside. At a party you can find me off to the side watching other people have fun. (Typical writer, eh?) Except that 5 years ago I met Caz, and we're now married with two wonderful daughters, and I find myself...not so dark anymore.Not so gloomy. And yet there are times, moments when I'm alone, when I can still feel the old dark inside, and I know it will never quite go away.
Write what you know, eh?
I don't think I've ever known someone as pure as that. One person in a million is awake enough for the spiritual or divine life, as Thoreau said, and he'd never met one ("How could I have looked him in the face?") People just don't work that way, not even in Hollywood - well, mostly. It doesn't ring true to me.
I've tried to make my MC's a bit more nuanced. Kai in Blessed Land doesn't even know what good is, or what's right; he's tormented by doubts all the time. In Songs of Sorrow Calesh does know, but he's clever enough to realise that his certainty might be based on a flawed faith. But I think with the new novel that I've found an MC who's more complex, more of an anti-hero, than anyone I've written of before.
Trist has a terrible backstory, one in which he did something awful out of rage and grief. It was revenge, though not undeserved by the victim. He then left home before retribution came, and in the years since has won the companionship of a phoenix, an intrinsically Good creature drawn to Trist because of the extremes of light and dark within him. This empathetic bond pushes Trist to do only good things, though he can sometimes be violent or cruel in pursuit of them. The greater good is what matters.
Now Trist has been called home, and of course he encounters all the bitterness of past events and his own memories. He's given every reason to commit violence for its own sake, to give as good as he gets. Whether he does so... I'm not even sure myself, yet. The book is quite noir in places, though the mood is changed by the hope and brightness of the phoenix, so it's never quite as dark as The Big Sleep, for example. But I think Trist will find that the darkness inside has never entirely gone away, whatever layers of light have been laid over it.
This has got me thinking about myself. A lifelong loner, watching society from the outside. At a party you can find me off to the side watching other people have fun. (Typical writer, eh?) Except that 5 years ago I met Caz, and we're now married with two wonderful daughters, and I find myself...not so dark anymore.Not so gloomy. And yet there are times, moments when I'm alone, when I can still feel the old dark inside, and I know it will never quite go away.
Write what you know, eh?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, 9 November 2017
Temporary Deafness
Hi all.
I've had yet another conditional offer for Death of Ghosts. This one is from Austin Macauley publishers. I turned it down, for the same reasons that I refused Olympia back in the summer. AM then emailed back to say they really do want the book. Trouble is, I am not going to pay £2,500 up front. If they believe in the book they can push it themselves, and if not, I'll keep looking. I'll try to negotiate, but don't have high hopes.
Still, and once more, it shows that I'm pretty close. The doors opening are the wrong doors, but soon (with luck) it will be the right one. I just have to keep working, keep improving, and keep ringing the bell.
That's made easier because we bought a laptop last week. With two small children in the house it means any and every room is likely to be occupied, and if not now, it will be soon. So wherever I put the desktop I get interrupted. Now I can just slope off to another room and keep working. I've already written in the lounge, in the bathroom, and on break at work. The result is more work finished in ten days than the whole of the previous month - despite Evie deciding that whenever Mummy isn't there, she'll shriek at jetliner volume until a) Mummy is back, or b) Evie collapses in exhaustion.
That takes about two hours. The first time I didn't get hearing back in my left ear for days. You can see why the laptop is important.
I've also had an idea so stonkingly good that I can't shake it. In essence I've been wanting for years to write a story about Easter Island, or a Fantasy version of it, but my trouble is there's really nothing to say except what really happened. That's just history, not a Fantasy. So I needed something different, and couldn't think of anything original and interesting. Now I have. It will have all the things I wanted, like outrigger canoes and moai, but also include some elements of my own. I'm a little bit indebted to Terry Pratchett's Nation to be honest, for starting my mind down the path of thinking about the culture and people more than monuments and events. That's an outstanding book by the way. Meant for children, but excellent for adults too.
See what happens when I have time to write? Although my temporary deafness might have played a part. It's hard to be distracted when you can't hear a bloody thing on one side.
Bella has just arrived and is trying to work out what they keyboard is for. Her method involves hitting the keys with hands and feet. This may be a hint that Daddy's blog time is over.
Pip pip.
I've had yet another conditional offer for Death of Ghosts. This one is from Austin Macauley publishers. I turned it down, for the same reasons that I refused Olympia back in the summer. AM then emailed back to say they really do want the book. Trouble is, I am not going to pay £2,500 up front. If they believe in the book they can push it themselves, and if not, I'll keep looking. I'll try to negotiate, but don't have high hopes.
Still, and once more, it shows that I'm pretty close. The doors opening are the wrong doors, but soon (with luck) it will be the right one. I just have to keep working, keep improving, and keep ringing the bell.
That's made easier because we bought a laptop last week. With two small children in the house it means any and every room is likely to be occupied, and if not now, it will be soon. So wherever I put the desktop I get interrupted. Now I can just slope off to another room and keep working. I've already written in the lounge, in the bathroom, and on break at work. The result is more work finished in ten days than the whole of the previous month - despite Evie deciding that whenever Mummy isn't there, she'll shriek at jetliner volume until a) Mummy is back, or b) Evie collapses in exhaustion.
That takes about two hours. The first time I didn't get hearing back in my left ear for days. You can see why the laptop is important.
I've also had an idea so stonkingly good that I can't shake it. In essence I've been wanting for years to write a story about Easter Island, or a Fantasy version of it, but my trouble is there's really nothing to say except what really happened. That's just history, not a Fantasy. So I needed something different, and couldn't think of anything original and interesting. Now I have. It will have all the things I wanted, like outrigger canoes and moai, but also include some elements of my own. I'm a little bit indebted to Terry Pratchett's Nation to be honest, for starting my mind down the path of thinking about the culture and people more than monuments and events. That's an outstanding book by the way. Meant for children, but excellent for adults too.
See what happens when I have time to write? Although my temporary deafness might have played a part. It's hard to be distracted when you can't hear a bloody thing on one side.
Bella has just arrived and is trying to work out what they keyboard is for. Her method involves hitting the keys with hands and feet. This may be a hint that Daddy's blog time is over.
Pip pip.
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
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
Thursday, 11 May 2017
Do It Yourself
Like Sci-Fi, Fantasy can sometimes hold a mirror up to our own world, by showing one in which things are nearly the same, but often worse. A writer can get away with Mad Mage of Zog Empire saying something you can't have the President say.
It's a bit hard at the moment. I can't see how we could have a Fantasy allegory of today's politics, it would be ridiculous. Readers wouldn't believe it. I'd do better with Mad Mage and the Zogs. Good name for a 60's pop band, now I think about it.
In truth, it's very hard anyway. Politics is labyrinthine, a mess of ironies and contradictions that only make sense to us (well, a bit of sense) because we live in the middle of it all. We pick up the little quirks as we go along, so we have a frame to fit everything into. It's not like that with ancient Rome, say. We might know some important figures like Emperors and writers, but we don't know the hundreds of minor issues that cropped up day by day. We can't really imagine them, so it's tricky to write a political Fantasy novel unless you go into tedious detail explaining everything all the time.
Robert Graves did a wonderful job of this with I, Claudius, by the way. Read it if you can.
The best we can do is broad strokes. I do some of that in the Songs of Sorrow books, which tell of the struggle to survive of a small religious group threatened by a much larger one. One character here to show such-and-such, one character there to show blah-blah, and leave it at that. Sometimes in writing the trick is to leave detail out and let the reader fill it in for himself. That way every reader has a subtly different mental image of the story, but isn't that why a book is nearly always better than the film version?
I'm going to try to ignore the real world's politics for a while. Tough ask, in the middle of a General Election, but I'll give it a go. I think I prefer the struggle of the Ashir, and speaking of that, I'm closing in on finishing the final edit of Fanged Fish. The cover's being designed as I write this and we have a tentative publication date of November this year - a scant 6 months away. Meanwhile Kai is trying to change his people's culture to help them survive, and others are trying to stop him and cling to what they know.
Politics, eh?
Tuesday, 11 April 2017
Something New
My last post, about the Inca nearly winning against the Spanish, got me thinking about times when history changed course. It's an old theme for me, but there are not many times when we can point to it clearly.
The loss of the Native American civilisations is one, though. What if smallpox hadn't ravaged them? It would have been very hard for Spain to defeat them then, and we'd now live in a world with distinct societies and religions in the Americas. Maybe not Inca, but their cultural descendants. A second occasion is the Battle of Tours in 732AD, when Charles Martel defeated the Islamic Caliphate and stopped forever its expansion into Europe. If he'd lost, and France had fallen, Rome would have been taken soon after and that might be the end for Christianity.
But then, we can always play 'what if'. Maybe the asteroid doesn't hit earth 65 million years ago, and dinosaurs evolve into birds before mammals can grow strong. The world now might be one of large flightless birds, small birds scavenging their eggs, and so on. You can play that game every time a species goes extinct, or a new one appears. History has only a few points when it might have changed in some fundamental way, but evolution has millions.
This gives huge opportunities to Sci-Fi writers, who invent new species every time they create a new world. So why not Fantasy?
We've got stuck in a rut. Non-humans are nearly always the same. Wise elves in the deep forests, grumpy dwarves under mountains, swarming goblins, dragons... seen it before. We've read those stories. Why not something new?
A species descended from birds, all twitch and quiver, who roost in great halls. Maybe creatures like fish which come onto land every few years to breed, and while there hold councils to decide whatever issues they have. If expanding human peoples build a town on the council grounds, whew, that would get nasty. What about a collective consciousness, like a vast plant that can bud off parts of itself to move around? Sci-Fi is comfortable exploring races like these. Fantasy should be too.
The loss of the Native American civilisations is one, though. What if smallpox hadn't ravaged them? It would have been very hard for Spain to defeat them then, and we'd now live in a world with distinct societies and religions in the Americas. Maybe not Inca, but their cultural descendants. A second occasion is the Battle of Tours in 732AD, when Charles Martel defeated the Islamic Caliphate and stopped forever its expansion into Europe. If he'd lost, and France had fallen, Rome would have been taken soon after and that might be the end for Christianity.
But then, we can always play 'what if'. Maybe the asteroid doesn't hit earth 65 million years ago, and dinosaurs evolve into birds before mammals can grow strong. The world now might be one of large flightless birds, small birds scavenging their eggs, and so on. You can play that game every time a species goes extinct, or a new one appears. History has only a few points when it might have changed in some fundamental way, but evolution has millions.
This gives huge opportunities to Sci-Fi writers, who invent new species every time they create a new world. So why not Fantasy?
We've got stuck in a rut. Non-humans are nearly always the same. Wise elves in the deep forests, grumpy dwarves under mountains, swarming goblins, dragons... seen it before. We've read those stories. Why not something new?
A species descended from birds, all twitch and quiver, who roost in great halls. Maybe creatures like fish which come onto land every few years to breed, and while there hold councils to decide whatever issues they have. If expanding human peoples build a town on the council grounds, whew, that would get nasty. What about a collective consciousness, like a vast plant that can bud off parts of itself to move around? Sci-Fi is comfortable exploring races like these. Fantasy should be too.
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