Bit of a Shame

 Since Google+ folded up, this blog's readership has collapsed too. Bit of a shame.

 The thing is, I'm in the middle of reorganising my books and online presence, since what I've been doing hasn't really worked. Just not enough sales. So I'm going to use WebNovel and Patreon to try building awareness, and funnel profits from that into advertising for the novels already published. So since I'm changing things anyway, it might be that I drop this blog and instead write shorter, snappier pieces on my Ben Blake Facebook page, and on my website.

 It's not decided yet, not for sure. But there's not much point writing this blog for 40 people, really. It's been going for years now and if this is as far as it's got so far, it might mean this is as far as it will ever get.

 We'll see. Pip pip for now.

Bones under our Feet

 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.

Nine Bad Guys

 Hi guys.

 I want a bit of advice today. I'm still writing the WIP, and still loving every word. My lord it's popcorn, but it's fast and bounces from one crisis to another. There are surprises and twists, a few really grotesque characters, and in the middle of it all is Trist, back home after years away, and his friend Feng, a phoenix.

 Phoenixes only bond with humans once a century, maybe twice. They're rare, and seen as the best of the creatures of faery, the queens of it- all are female. Now, Trist is a conflicted guy (we don't know why, at the start) and the bird, an emblem of purity and rebirth, guides him towards doing the right thing. It doesn't always work, and when it does Trist has his own approach to being a goody - he'll burn nine bad guys to save ten innocents. Still, he's guided by Feng, which really makes the phoenix the main character in the book.

 Here's where I need advice. The working title for the novel is Firebird. Self explanatory, brief, a decent title. But another possibility has occurred to me, which is Queen of the Fae. A bit of mystery in that one, and it might be better. Or not.

 So, which do you prefer? I seem to have fewer readers now Google+ has toppled off this mortal coil, but I'm sure you loyal lads and lasses who remain can help me out. Which title is better? Drop me a comment if you can.

 Cheerio.

Playing Froggit

 Time to be honest, cos God hates a coward, right? OK. My publishing career has not been a success.

 I'm of a generation which doesn't have an instinctive grasp of the internet. I didn't grow up with it. When I were a lad (thanks Monty Python) the cutting edge of the home PC was the ZX Spectrum, or the Commodore 64. Games came on cassette tapes which screeched for ages and then crashed, so you had to load them again. I was very good at playing Froggit but I'm not great online today.

 The result is that I don't know how to market. I miss changes in how indie writing works, the changes come too fast and too quietly. It's like trying to nail smoke to a wall. As soon as I get hold of an idea (which is unusual) it morphs into something else. I think I have a good product. certainly the reviews of my work, few as they are, have been very good. But I haven't been able to translate that into a significant number of sales.

 I'm going to try something different.

 I'm going to publish chapter by chapter, through an author website. Readers can pay 50 cents, or 10, whatever they want, depending on how much they enjoyed the chapter. Some of that will go to my marketing guru, Josh, who used to run a company doing exactly this. He'll organise the whole commercial side of things, leaving me to write like a bastard.

 This means I can rapid release, which is a key facet of indie publishing these days. But I won't have to produce a novel every four or five weeks, as some writers do. I can't help thinking, however talented they are, that such speed must reduce the quality of their work. (See my blog post "You'd have to be Hemingway".) Doing it chapter by chapter gets around the problem. I can release say two chapters a week, working out at a novel every five months or so, and then have a four week break for advertising before the next one makes its debut. Or three chapters a week, if I prefer; it's all good. See what works best.

 I like this idea. Josh knows his onions and I know mine. It's very much worth a try.

Fire in the Hole

 My current WIP is a bit noir, a bit mad, a rock and roller of a story that runs at breakneck speed. It's utterly different to anything I've done before, and it'll need a lot of editing once it's done. It's really fun to write though, I'm bursting with it, so I thought I'd share a sample with you.

 This is the opening of the story, in which we meet the MC Trist and his peculiar companion;


       The tall man stepped over a smouldering rug. Around him fires flickered and bodies lay on the carpet, in the chairs, one even half out of the window.

“Might have been a bit over the top,” he said.

“You do the sword, I do the fire.”

“Yes,” Trist said, looking around. “I just hadn’t expected quite that much fire.”

“They’re down, aren’t they?”

“The problem, Feng, is that not many of them are likely to get up again.”

He found a little blaze that was feeling its way towards the curtains, and stamped it out in a billow of sparks and ash. Next to it was the man in the window. Trist pulled him away. Glass crackled and fell to the floor. A shard six inches long was lodged in the man’s throat, and Trist grimaced.

Looking out, he saw the garden below was deserted. Well, not quite. A lone gardener fled for his life and vanished as Trist watched.

“Trouble?” Feng asked.

“There will be. The servants will go straight to the Watch. We’ll have company very soon.”

“We knew that would happen.”

He shrugged. “Maybe not so fast.”

“Lucky you’ve got me then,” Feng said.

Movement drew Trist’s eye. One of the slumped figures had begun to stir. A young man, hair singed and clothes sooty, his back turned. He pushed up on his hands and then froze as Trist’s blade kissed the skin under his throat.

“Had a nice rest?” Trist asked. “I’m so glad. Fresh minds find answers so quickly, don’t you think?”

The man was young, probably a few years short of twenty. A fold at the outside of his eyes, which swivelled around the room. When they fell on Feng he gave a little whimper.

“Let’s start with some easy questions,” Trist said. “What’s your name?”

“My – my name?”

“Don’t you have one?”

“Uh… Anterl.”

“Well, good evening, Anterl. I trust you’ve had a good day? Up until the last few minutes, anyway. No? Well, here’s another question. How do you like working for Margon Sleeth?”

“It’s all right,” the youth said.

“You like working for Sleeth,” Trist said. “The drug dealer. The man who brings waste and death to hundreds. You like it.”

No answer. The youth trembled.

 The scene goes on, but that's enough for now. The story seems to have more dialogue and less narrative than usual for me, which wasn't a conscious choice (well, not at first). It also has a proper anti-hero, and later a strange lot of characters, some human and some not so much. And it's really huge fun.

 Hope you liked the taster. If you see anything obviously wrong or clanky, please let me know. I reckon I can take it y'know. Come to that, let me know if you enjoyed it, the old ego could always use a stroke...

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.