Something Fresh

 Ignoring politics is hard. Especially now, when anyone can post anything on Facebook, true or not. The lies I've seen... if every claim that Labour has risen in the polls was true, they'd be at 200% by now. People are claiming the Tories want to close the NHS and starve primary school children. It's ludicrous, the politics of deception and deceit - but it works. People do believe it, and when the claims come thick and fast they reinforce one another. Repeat a lie often enough and people will begin to take it for true.

 But I have work to do, so I'm trying to limit my involvement. I'm afraid that the voters in Britain is no smarter than the American electorate which voted for Trump. They'll fall for deceit and fake promises. Well, that's their business. I'll take care of my family and my writing, and leave the great social movements for others.

 I'm still editing Fanged Fish. 70,000 words are done now, so there's not too much left to do. My plan is to finish that, then rewrite The Death of Ghosts, which needs a few tweaks early on. I wrote it in such a flurry that I didn't give enough emphasis to a couple of things that become significant later in the series. Or I should say... that was my plan. Because I've had a great new idea.

 I'm still thinking through the structure, and a lot of the background isn't clear yet. But the basis of the idea is a portal Fantasy, in which magic interacts with the world we know. People can cross here from their world, and return. Intelligence services track them too, so there's a thread of modern surveillance and the suspicion of terrorism as well. The terrorism matters, because portal fantasies have been done before and if I'm to do this, it will have to feel different to them, something fresh. There are other things in the story to do that - but I'm not going to tell you what they are. You'll have to read the book, kiddos.

 I have to write it, first, and with a new baby due soon that might not be so easy. Oh well.

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?

Revolution Baby

 Now and then, the world changes.

 Sometimes it's sudden and obvious. The nuclear bombs in Japan in 1945, or the attacks of 9/11 in 2001. Other times it's harder to see, the effects uncertain for a while, like when Muhammad started preaching in 610 AD. Who would have said his teachings would spread so far and last so long?

 Or you can look at the 1960's, which are still seen as a sort of epochal change in attitudes. The decade gave us greater equality and Civil Rights, but in the end faded away with its dreams unfulfilled. That happened before, in the 1840's for example. People can live through social upheaval and think it's changing the world, only to find at the end that the same people hold the same power in the same places.

 That might be happening now.

 Americans are so disillusioned with politics that they elected a President who was never a politician. France might yet elect Marine Le Pen, of the far right. Later in the year Italy could elect a Five Star/Northern Alliance government that will take the country out of the EU. Of course Britain recently voted to leave, and we're now holding a general election that will either cement that decision or undermine it. All looks very impressive, doesn't it? The old power bases are crumbling. Change hangs in the air.

 Or does it? Big political movements come and go, and big political parties outlast them. Upheaval passes to leave the largest companies untouched, as secure as ever. The sons of rich men still go to the best schools. The gap between the richest and the rest still widens. What, exactly, has changed? Anything fundamental?

 This is how society works. Any social organisation starts because the people need it, but pretty soon it reverses, and the organisation uses the people to survive, to perpetuate itself. Close behind that comes coercion. Everyone is coerced. You, me, the neighbours, everyone who voted for the other guy... all of us. We always will be, though maybe not as badly. We can bring change. But it means tearing up society's rules and starting again, because otherwise the new boss will be just the same as the old boss.

 Understanding this is key to writing about ancient cultures. (See? Writing does come into the blog if you stick with it.) When threatened the holders of power always strike back. Maybe not at first, maybe not in plain sight, but they don't give up their wealth and status and walk away. So when a story's protagonist stirs the pot, someone always gets burned.

 By the way... watch out for the power brokers to react to today's populism. The Establishment Strikes back. It will.