In Times of Trouble

 A bit of personal news first. Caz and my second daughter was born last Sunday, July 9th, and we've named her Evelyn. A pretty annoying mistake by the midwife meant she was back in hospital on Thursday with jaundice, but she's home now and much better. And I, being who I am, dealt with all this by writing.

 Well, editing and proofreading, really. A bit of original stuff, but not much. It comes to the same thing though. I was at the PC, immersing myself in the worlds and characters of my stories; in other words, writing.

 That's what I do in times of trouble. Sometimes I think I write to escape the mundane world we live in, which is so often bitter and sour, or plain scary. It's a way to shout that no, that's wrong, this is how things ought to be. A lot of it comes down, I think, to people wanting to live as they choose. Alar in Risen King, Calesh in Songs of Sorrow, and almost any of the Ashir in Black Lord of Eagles, are all like that. For them it's about freedom. For me, it's about a need to write my issues out in novels (or blogs, hehe). A book can sometimes be a rooftop we can stand on to yell out a message.

 So I get irate when people say "I could write a book, if I had the time."

 You do have the time. Even if you have to make it by giving something else up. That's your choice. You have the opportunity, I'm sure you have the talent because most people do. But you obviously don't have the dedication, or the endurance, because if you did you would already have written your book. I might as well say I could be world darts champion, if I had time to practise. Well, I do. I'd have to give up everything else I do, that's all, and I choose not to. Just as these people have chosen not to write.

 Hell, I have two daughters under 18 months old, who need games to play, time to cuddle with Daddy, and putting to bed when play is over. They need feeding almost constantly, and produce more laundry each day than I do in a week. I've got a job to keep and a wife who needs to see me now and then. And I still write. Don't tell me you could write if you had time.

 Writers aren't people who write. Usually they're people who have to write, whose palms itch when they don't. Like mine do.

Lives of Their Own

 Yesterday I held an author event at South Molton Library, not far from Barnstaple. South Molton's a small village, but the library is surprisingly large and very well laid out. Half a dozen people came to listen to me speak (the fools).

 I don't much like speaking in public, it makes me nervous. As I've said before, writers tend to be solitary types, who enjoy quiet hours sitting at a screen. To us, talking with six or seven people in a library is a bit too much like roistering. I like a good roister, mind you, but only when I can drink beer and talk nonsense. It's different when I have to talk sense.

 I'd like to say that the trouble is people who don't behave like characters in the books I write. Real people say odd things, they surprise me, whereas the characters go where I tell them to. The trouble is that they don't. My stories are forever being rewritten because Calesh (or Suchi, or Talac) comes to a point where he just wouldn't do what I want him to. I know the chap better by then, I've been telling his story for the past 80,000 words, and the blighter just would not do what the story needs him to do. I end up with him shaking his head at me with his arms folded, and I have to say Okay, Okay. I'll rewrite your back story, I'll bin four chapters and do them over, edit five more, and waste half the sodding work I've already done. Happy now?

 And he is. He goes cheerily down the new story path with his hat at a jaunty angle while I bang my head on the desk.

 But you know, when your characters do this, they're taking on lives of their own. They're not real, never can be, but they're close enough to fool me.. and so I guess they'll fool the reader too. We can believe they're real. And those are the good characters, the ones we root for and grieve with, and maybe share the triumph in the end. When the people in your book start saying Nope, not doing that, then you know you've written something genuine. Not a cutout figure with as much emotion as wet paper.

 So I try to be happy when I have to rewrite half the book, because I end up with a better story and truer characters in it. And that's pretty good.

Kind Readers

 I'm not terribly good with social media.

 I didn't grow up with it. I see kids today, and people in their 20's, writing text messages so fast I can't follow the words. I go on websites which advise me to link to this or that and I don't know how. I learn, bit by bit, but of course the platforms change so fast that I never seem to catch up. It's hard for my generation. In my youth we were all amazed by the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64, which played games from tapes that took ten minutes to load and made a screeching noise that drove us out of the room.

 So, I'm not good. But I'm trying, because for an indie author writing the book is only half the job. The rest is publicising it. I have a website and a Facebook page, of course, but I'm going further. I've joined Twitter now, despite avoiding it for years because of the people who tweet things like "Just bought lettuce!" 45 times a day and somehow have thousands of followers. I'm considering putting some videos on YouTube - if anyone's tried that, any advice would be gratefully received. Unless it's about lettuce.

 Still, I've already figured out how to make a poster with text and images, to publish online. Next I need to learn how to overlay pictures, so the cover of one novel can be partly visible behind the cover of another. Probably there's more I ought to learn too, but as yet I don't know enough to understand what it is. All this is most vexing.

 Not least because doing all this media work takes time away from writing - time which is already tight because I have a wife and daughter who need to see me now and then as well.  I know of one indie author who writes and does online advertising for 14 hours a day. I just don't have that time. I've got the commitment, got the desire, but I can't manufacture hours out of thin air.

 So I keep going, keep learning, and hope one day it's enough. And there's one thing you kind readers can do for me. If you've read one of my books, leave a review on Amazon. Short, long, good or bad, just leave a review. Please.

 Thank you.

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.

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.