I was lucky enough recently to have a successful local author review one of my unpublished novels for me. Reb has a good eye, and a good way of making criticisms without seeming negative. But it doesn't make things easy to hear.
I like to start chapters by setting a scene, then bring in the characters. Wrong, it seems; that can confuse the reader. I thought my way worked to be honest, but there's no point asking for advice if you then ignore it, so out go the "soft" chapter openings.
That I use too many point-of-view characters, I can't deny. Once Reb pointed it out I started to think of ways and occasions I can write the same scene as before, but from the main character's POV. That will smooth the text, make it easier for the reader and also, rather importantly, for an editor. So I'll go through my "trunk" novels, those not yet published, and rewrite like a crazy man. Seems like a lot of work to end up with the same book, doesn't it? But it won't be the same book, it will be a better one, if I do it right.
I do need to keep some of those POV characters, though. Not in every book, but this novel, Black Lord of Eagles, tells the tale of what happens to a culture when it's invaded by people it never knew existed. I can't do that from one point of view, or even two. I want to show the central story, but also how it affects the little people, ordinary people caught up in these great events. So I need to follow threads in the country and in the towns, among priests and warriors, some of which never collide - so one POV is not enough. My job, then, is to cut the number of point-of-view characters as much as I can - and I can cut several - but still keep that structure. Tricky, eh?
Some of these criticisms have been made of me before. I listen, I understand... and then slowly I slip back into my old habits, because in the end as a writer you're sat alone with only your own opinion to judge by. The irony is that to stop this happening I need an editor to constantly nudge me back to the road, but in order to get an editor I need to stay on the road in the first place. In common parlance this is known as "a bit of a bugger." It makes the help of a friend doubly important, so thanks Reb, your time and advice is very much appreciated.
It might even keep me on the road until the end of the year... except I have a bit of a distraction arriving in August when I get married. Two cheers for distraction!
Friday, 17 April 2015
Monday, 6 April 2015
Bewilderment
I've broken my reading glasses - typically, on a Bank Holiday weekend when I can't get them fixed until Tuesday. I'm wearing my old glasses as I write this, which is OK but a bit annoying. It sums up the last few days.
You see, my fiancee Caz has been away, visiting friends in Exeter. And I have been lonely.
I'm a bit of a lone wolf. Always have been, and it's been all right. I haven't been happy, usually - but I haven't been unhappy either, and experience has taught me that I should settle for mild contentment, because trying (or hoping) for more just leads to heartache. Feeling not too bad is, well... not too bad. It gets me through the days.
Now there's Caz, and I'm happy. Ridiculously happy in fact, delirious half the time, when I'm not stopping in bewilderment to wonder what the rubbery f*** has happened to me. But when she goes away, oh dear me, things are difficult. I can't do the usual 'being alone is not being lonely' thing any more. I miss her voice, her scent, the awareness that she's next to me even when she isn't speaking, or when I swim halfway out of sleep and reach over to make sure she's still there. Finding an absence is horrible. There's a wrenched place inside me that won't be soothed until she's back, and laughs with my arm around her.
All this is new to me. I managed to reach 46 years old without falling in love, but when I fell I fell hard. Of course it's grist to the mill for a writer, new experiences to use and expand on... but I don't much care. My writing can go hang. I want Caz back before I start weeping in public.
So there it is. I'm a wet end. A sad truth for a man who's always been so independent, but somehow I can't really feel sorry about it. Funny, that.
You see, my fiancee Caz has been away, visiting friends in Exeter. And I have been lonely.
I'm a bit of a lone wolf. Always have been, and it's been all right. I haven't been happy, usually - but I haven't been unhappy either, and experience has taught me that I should settle for mild contentment, because trying (or hoping) for more just leads to heartache. Feeling not too bad is, well... not too bad. It gets me through the days.
Now there's Caz, and I'm happy. Ridiculously happy in fact, delirious half the time, when I'm not stopping in bewilderment to wonder what the rubbery f*** has happened to me. But when she goes away, oh dear me, things are difficult. I can't do the usual 'being alone is not being lonely' thing any more. I miss her voice, her scent, the awareness that she's next to me even when she isn't speaking, or when I swim halfway out of sleep and reach over to make sure she's still there. Finding an absence is horrible. There's a wrenched place inside me that won't be soothed until she's back, and laughs with my arm around her.
All this is new to me. I managed to reach 46 years old without falling in love, but when I fell I fell hard. Of course it's grist to the mill for a writer, new experiences to use and expand on... but I don't much care. My writing can go hang. I want Caz back before I start weeping in public.
So there it is. I'm a wet end. A sad truth for a man who's always been so independent, but somehow I can't really feel sorry about it. Funny, that.
Thursday, 19 March 2015
Glissandos
I've been absent for a bit - this is my first blog for a month. Mostly that's because I have a new job which has me working ridiculous hours, starting at 6am some days, finishing at 4am other days. I'm exhausted pretty much all the time. But I still shouldn't have left it a month, so for those of you who've missed me (thousands of you, I'm sure), I'm sorry.
Anyhoo.
It's very upsetting to read a book so good that you know, whatever you do, that you will never write anything to match it. Sadly there are many such novels. Stephen King's IT, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of al-Rassan, Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, to name a few. The one on my mind today is Six Moon Dance, by Sheri S. Tepper. I've read it before, but as with the other stand-out tales I'm drawn back from time to time, to immerse myself once more in the world and the characters as the story plays out.
That, my friends, is the definition of that elusive term 'good book'. It's my definition, anyway - a novel to which you keep returning, to read again and again, and each time find yourself caught up in the passions and fears just as you were before.
I covered some of this in a post last year, Telling Stories, so I won't bother rehashing every point. But I'd add that literature has an edge over other art in this sense, because if you hang a painting on your wall then sooner or later you stop really seeing it. Same with a sculpture. But writing, and also music, have the capacity to keep drawing us in with the same words and notes, the same segues and glissandos. I'm not sure I know why.
But isn't it interesting?
Anyhoo.
It's very upsetting to read a book so good that you know, whatever you do, that you will never write anything to match it. Sadly there are many such novels. Stephen King's IT, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Lions of al-Rassan, Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, to name a few. The one on my mind today is Six Moon Dance, by Sheri S. Tepper. I've read it before, but as with the other stand-out tales I'm drawn back from time to time, to immerse myself once more in the world and the characters as the story plays out.
That, my friends, is the definition of that elusive term 'good book'. It's my definition, anyway - a novel to which you keep returning, to read again and again, and each time find yourself caught up in the passions and fears just as you were before.
I covered some of this in a post last year, Telling Stories, so I won't bother rehashing every point. But I'd add that literature has an edge over other art in this sense, because if you hang a painting on your wall then sooner or later you stop really seeing it. Same with a sculpture. But writing, and also music, have the capacity to keep drawing us in with the same words and notes, the same segues and glissandos. I'm not sure I know why.
But isn't it interesting?
Thursday, 19 February 2015
A Bit Every Day
Much is changing. I have a new job, for a start - though here in my first week I've got the flu, or possibly Ebola. But never mind that.
Caz bought her wedding dress today. Which I'm not allowed to see, by the way, and how is that fair? I'm excited too y'know. Anyway, yesterday we booked the venue - the Guildhall in Barnstaple, which is an old-fashioned colonial sort of room, full of pictures of the men who built Barnstaple when it was just a shabby little port on the estuary. Given that at low tide a large rabbit can wade across the river, you'll know that was quite a while ago. It's a nice place though. I'm going to enjoy getting married there.
So... preparations for the wedding, a new job working in the kitchen of a very busy seafront pub, and not much time to write.
They say an author should write something every day. Maybe not thousands of words, or even hundreds, but he should open the document on his PC (or whatever) and type in a couple of lines. Or think about the plot and where it's going, though that has to be in his writing chair, at his work desk, because you have to make a place for the Muse to come. So the advice goes. I nearly always do write, but sometimes it's just not possible. When I do a 10 hour day, rushing every moment, it can leave me just too weary to summon the energy. Writing is art, it takes emotional input to do it, and when your battery is flat the spark just won't catch.
Which is why this is only a brief blog. I'm just too tired and flu-ridden to do much. I think I'll go to bed and sleep for a bit. Night all.
Caz bought her wedding dress today. Which I'm not allowed to see, by the way, and how is that fair? I'm excited too y'know. Anyway, yesterday we booked the venue - the Guildhall in Barnstaple, which is an old-fashioned colonial sort of room, full of pictures of the men who built Barnstaple when it was just a shabby little port on the estuary. Given that at low tide a large rabbit can wade across the river, you'll know that was quite a while ago. It's a nice place though. I'm going to enjoy getting married there.
So... preparations for the wedding, a new job working in the kitchen of a very busy seafront pub, and not much time to write.
They say an author should write something every day. Maybe not thousands of words, or even hundreds, but he should open the document on his PC (or whatever) and type in a couple of lines. Or think about the plot and where it's going, though that has to be in his writing chair, at his work desk, because you have to make a place for the Muse to come. So the advice goes. I nearly always do write, but sometimes it's just not possible. When I do a 10 hour day, rushing every moment, it can leave me just too weary to summon the energy. Writing is art, it takes emotional input to do it, and when your battery is flat the spark just won't catch.
Which is why this is only a brief blog. I'm just too tired and flu-ridden to do much. I think I'll go to bed and sleep for a bit. Night all.
Monday, 2 February 2015
Enough Drama
I've just finished the rewrite of Troy: The Ancient Dead, the concluding part of the trilogy. Bit of a relief, to be honest. The latter half of the book is full of talk of the end of civilisations - the Hittites have fallen, Troy is ruined, and there's a leftover fragment of the Minoans that gets Odysseus thinking about all this. It's got me thinking too, about all the dangers our own 21st century culture faces.
Meteor impact, for example. There are claims that a "shotgun" impact destroyed the Indus valley people, when pieces of an asteroid rained down in the Indian Ocean. But in the past civilised areas were too few and small for this to happen often. Today we know the risk better, and the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter on 1994 shows us how bad it could be.
Or super-volcanoes. Toba in Indonesia was the most recent to erupt, about 75,000 years ago, but the best known is probably Yellowstone, in the USA. It erupts every 600,000 years or so and is due anytime. The results would be catastrophic - vast clouds of ash settling on the ground, more in the air blocking sunlight to create a volcanic winter, sulphur mixing with water to produce sulphuric acid which we'd breathe in, and so on. It would likely affect the whole Northern Hemisphere, and kill billions.
Or a pandemic. You can take your choice on this one; Ebola, swine flu or bird flu, Marburg, Sabia, Mapucho - or something else we haven't noticed yet, perhaps. Our mobile lifestyles mean that air travel provides thousands of very rapid vectors along which a disease would spread. Back in the 1500s the Spanish brought smallpox to the Americas, and in the ensuing decades up to 80% of the local people, with no immunity to the virus, died from it. Something similar is quite possible today. Any serious virus to which humans have no immunity could do it, and history shows pandemics break out quite often.
All of these three threats are almost certain to happen, given time. But even so, the greatest threat to human cultures is probably still ourselves. I don't mean nuclear war, or biological weapons run amok. I just mean the seemingly endless, crippling stupidity of people.
Got an unspoiled wilderness? We'll strip-mine it for coal, or mine tin and leave the tailings to poison the river. We'll use pesticides on our fields which are made using oil, so we leave a petrochemical sheen on rivers. When we need new housing we'll overlook the brownfield sites in cities, and build instead on fields outside. And worst of all we'll breed and breed, without any apparent thought for the consequences.
In my school days there were 4 billion people on Earth. Today there are more than 7 billion and the number is still growing. All of them need food and water, clothes to wear, a home, the prospect of a job and some kind of decent life. How will we sustain them? How we will cope when the number reaches 8 billion, then 9?
Civilisation throughout history have fallen because they outgrew their ability to feed themselves. The Mayans of Guatemala, the early Chinese of the Yellow River area, probably even the Achaean Greeks I've just been writing about. We're not immune, just because we have computers and neon lights, and tell each other that "it couldn't happen now". Of course it could. The rules which applied to them still apply to us.
It's a bit less dramatic than seeing a culture wiped out by invading dragons, or by invaders with wicked spikes on their chariot wheels. But I suspect that living through it would feel quite dramatic enough.
Meteor impact, for example. There are claims that a "shotgun" impact destroyed the Indus valley people, when pieces of an asteroid rained down in the Indian Ocean. But in the past civilised areas were too few and small for this to happen often. Today we know the risk better, and the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter on 1994 shows us how bad it could be.
Or super-volcanoes. Toba in Indonesia was the most recent to erupt, about 75,000 years ago, but the best known is probably Yellowstone, in the USA. It erupts every 600,000 years or so and is due anytime. The results would be catastrophic - vast clouds of ash settling on the ground, more in the air blocking sunlight to create a volcanic winter, sulphur mixing with water to produce sulphuric acid which we'd breathe in, and so on. It would likely affect the whole Northern Hemisphere, and kill billions.
Or a pandemic. You can take your choice on this one; Ebola, swine flu or bird flu, Marburg, Sabia, Mapucho - or something else we haven't noticed yet, perhaps. Our mobile lifestyles mean that air travel provides thousands of very rapid vectors along which a disease would spread. Back in the 1500s the Spanish brought smallpox to the Americas, and in the ensuing decades up to 80% of the local people, with no immunity to the virus, died from it. Something similar is quite possible today. Any serious virus to which humans have no immunity could do it, and history shows pandemics break out quite often.
All of these three threats are almost certain to happen, given time. But even so, the greatest threat to human cultures is probably still ourselves. I don't mean nuclear war, or biological weapons run amok. I just mean the seemingly endless, crippling stupidity of people.
Got an unspoiled wilderness? We'll strip-mine it for coal, or mine tin and leave the tailings to poison the river. We'll use pesticides on our fields which are made using oil, so we leave a petrochemical sheen on rivers. When we need new housing we'll overlook the brownfield sites in cities, and build instead on fields outside. And worst of all we'll breed and breed, without any apparent thought for the consequences.
In my school days there were 4 billion people on Earth. Today there are more than 7 billion and the number is still growing. All of them need food and water, clothes to wear, a home, the prospect of a job and some kind of decent life. How will we sustain them? How we will cope when the number reaches 8 billion, then 9?
Civilisation throughout history have fallen because they outgrew their ability to feed themselves. The Mayans of Guatemala, the early Chinese of the Yellow River area, probably even the Achaean Greeks I've just been writing about. We're not immune, just because we have computers and neon lights, and tell each other that "it couldn't happen now". Of course it could. The rules which applied to them still apply to us.
It's a bit less dramatic than seeing a culture wiped out by invading dragons, or by invaders with wicked spikes on their chariot wheels. But I suspect that living through it would feel quite dramatic enough.
Friday, 16 January 2015
Hard Truth
Fantasy and Science Fiction on screen is nearly always awful. Yes, I know - big statement to make - but it's true.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy was OK, but I think it weakened as it went along. Partly that's because the last book has so many threads that it makes it hard to squeeze it all into one film, but the point remains that the first film was good, and the last pretty bad. As for The Hobbit, I'm with the majority who say the films are too flabby, too long-winded and, above all, too long. Such a slim novel doesn't need 3 whole movies.
Sci-Fi films usually promise a lot and fall short. There are so many like that - I, Robot; Ender's Game, and Mission to Mars are all good examples. Sci-Fi has always been event-driven, rather than built around characters, but there have to be engaging people in the story as well. When a novel is filmed it too often loses whatever empathy the story had in print, and the film makers replace it with extra explosions. So what we get is stock characters rushing from one near-miss to another, and not much else.
(This means YOU, Desolation of Smaug. Oh yes. Never saw a whole film that was just people running away before.)
TV is no better. Star Trek is self-obsessed by its own idea of human goodness, and most of its aliens are either humans with facial oddities (Klingons, Vulcans) or not carbon life at all (conscious dust clouds, puddles of tar). That's just lazy. Where are the aliens with their own evolutionary history - aliens who are not just from another world but are alien, like the Piggies in Speaker for the Dead or the Traveller Fithp in Footfall? Babylon 5 was just as bad. And Fantasy? Given that I've never seen Game of Thrones - I don't have cable - I can't name a single Fantasy series I liked.
The series I do like all seem to be cancelled after one run - like Space: Above and Beyond and Defying Gravity, both of which were excellent. It's no coincidence that both featured aliens who we humans simply did not understand, either in motive or behaviour. The films I like are forgotten - astonishingly, Silent Running isn't even available online, as far as I can find. How can tripe like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica endure, spawning new series and films as they go, while quality vanishes so fast?
Simple. Viewers don't like it.
That's a hard truth, because it means that those of us who want to take a reader or viewer into another world are in a quandary. If the public won't watch thought-provoking F/SF on screen for a few hours, they're not going to devote days to reading that sort of novel. So we can write it, but very few people will read it, which makes the process a bit of a waste of time. I want to make people think, but I can write the most insightful Fantasy novel in history and it won't matter a jot if nobody buys it.
So we have to balance the two things. Write something new enough to feel fresh, but familiar enough to feel safe. I'm trying to work out a way to do that, in a story which combines old Fantasy memes with things never seen before, but it's pretty tricky.
Wish me luck.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy was OK, but I think it weakened as it went along. Partly that's because the last book has so many threads that it makes it hard to squeeze it all into one film, but the point remains that the first film was good, and the last pretty bad. As for The Hobbit, I'm with the majority who say the films are too flabby, too long-winded and, above all, too long. Such a slim novel doesn't need 3 whole movies.
Sci-Fi films usually promise a lot and fall short. There are so many like that - I, Robot; Ender's Game, and Mission to Mars are all good examples. Sci-Fi has always been event-driven, rather than built around characters, but there have to be engaging people in the story as well. When a novel is filmed it too often loses whatever empathy the story had in print, and the film makers replace it with extra explosions. So what we get is stock characters rushing from one near-miss to another, and not much else.
(This means YOU, Desolation of Smaug. Oh yes. Never saw a whole film that was just people running away before.)
TV is no better. Star Trek is self-obsessed by its own idea of human goodness, and most of its aliens are either humans with facial oddities (Klingons, Vulcans) or not carbon life at all (conscious dust clouds, puddles of tar). That's just lazy. Where are the aliens with their own evolutionary history - aliens who are not just from another world but are alien, like the Piggies in Speaker for the Dead or the Traveller Fithp in Footfall? Babylon 5 was just as bad. And Fantasy? Given that I've never seen Game of Thrones - I don't have cable - I can't name a single Fantasy series I liked.
The series I do like all seem to be cancelled after one run - like Space: Above and Beyond and Defying Gravity, both of which were excellent. It's no coincidence that both featured aliens who we humans simply did not understand, either in motive or behaviour. The films I like are forgotten - astonishingly, Silent Running isn't even available online, as far as I can find. How can tripe like Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica endure, spawning new series and films as they go, while quality vanishes so fast?
Simple. Viewers don't like it.
That's a hard truth, because it means that those of us who want to take a reader or viewer into another world are in a quandary. If the public won't watch thought-provoking F/SF on screen for a few hours, they're not going to devote days to reading that sort of novel. So we can write it, but very few people will read it, which makes the process a bit of a waste of time. I want to make people think, but I can write the most insightful Fantasy novel in history and it won't matter a jot if nobody buys it.
So we have to balance the two things. Write something new enough to feel fresh, but familiar enough to feel safe. I'm trying to work out a way to do that, in a story which combines old Fantasy memes with things never seen before, but it's pretty tricky.
Wish me luck.
Tuesday, 30 December 2014
2014: The Good and the Bad
So, it's that time of year when I look back on the last 12 months and share my opinions on everything from films to books. Some get a thumbs-up, others... don't. I'll start with films, and a bit of Sci-Fi.
Ender's Game was a big disappointment. I love the novel, and the first sequel too, but the film managed to cover all the key events but somehow lose the soul of the story. I'm not honestly sure why. I've heard the project spent a lot of time in production hell, so maybe there were too many rewrites, too many fingers in the pie. But another day it was raining, my fiancee and I couldn't do what we'd planned, so we went to the cinema and ended up watching any old junk to pass the time. That junk was Guardians of the Galaxy, and it turned out to be the best superhero/ comic book movie I've ever seen. Everything was spot-on, from the action scenes to the comedy. The whole theatre was laughing one moment and engrossed the next. Fabulous film, if you haven't seen it you should, even if it isn't your usual thing.
Another excellent movie was Hunger Games: Mockingjay. The book was the weakest of the trilogy I thought, but the film is the best of them all. Very well done, and it's unlucky not to be #1 for the year. But do not, and I mean NOT, watch Transformers 4. It's the highest grossing film of the year apparently, $1.1 billion, but it's a turkey. Worse by far than the 2nd Hobbit film, which was my least favourite last year. It's just a rerun of previous Transformers films, this time with Dino-bots at the end (which makes it different, apparently). Avoid at all costs.
I don't watch much TV, but I do like Doctor Who because it's usually so well written. This season fell short though, partly because Peter Capaldi makes such a surly Doctor, and partly because the writers don't seem sure how to best use that. Normally there are one or two episodes which stand out, but not this year. It wasn't a disaster, but a schoolteacher might write "Must do better" on the report card.
And so to books...
I finally got round this year to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It's creative and imaginative, but for me it just didn't have the X factor of Harry Potter, or the Hunger Games. I think it just lacked depth of detail. The wizarding world especially is brilliantly realised by J K Rowling, brought to life with all its little quirks, and Panem feels real too. Pullman's alternate worlds didn't, not to the same extent. It's still a decent series but to my mind is left behind a little by other recent works of fantasy for younger readers.
One very good book I've read this year is Rebecca Alexander's The Secrets of Life and Death. It's a Fantasy set partly in our world and partly in the past, and the two stories alternate chapter by chapter until both reach a crisis at the same time, and everything is explained. It's desperately tricky to do, and the author pulls it off very well indeed. Also I read Ruso and the River of Darkness by R S Downie, which uses an even more fiendishly difficult trick - a detective, Ruso, in Britain during the Roman period. He has no forensics, no fingerprints or blood sampling, nothing to link a person to a crime. Ruso has to work only by asking questions and working things out, and to do so he - and so also the author - needs a tremendous knowledge of the details of Roman life. Ms Downie manages that and still keeps the story interesting, so kudos to her for it.
Beyond these I've read a lot of factual books, often for research reasons. Babylon by Paul Kriwaczek, Freedom Next Time by John Pilger, and The Forgotten Arts by John Seymour are just three of those. The last of them is very useful; it details things like how to make charcoal and horseshoes, and tells how to take ash and fat and turn it into soap. A very helpful book for getting details of ancient cultures right.
Of course, the best thing of all this year is my engagement to Caz, who by this time in 2015 will be my wife. Sort of makes all the other things feel unimportant, really. She encourages me to write, rather than taking time away from it, so at the end of next year I'll probably be doing another of these "best and worst" blogs ("yay!", I hear you cry). Meantime, enjoy New Year, and have a great 2015. I hope it's good to you all.
Ender's Game was a big disappointment. I love the novel, and the first sequel too, but the film managed to cover all the key events but somehow lose the soul of the story. I'm not honestly sure why. I've heard the project spent a lot of time in production hell, so maybe there were too many rewrites, too many fingers in the pie. But another day it was raining, my fiancee and I couldn't do what we'd planned, so we went to the cinema and ended up watching any old junk to pass the time. That junk was Guardians of the Galaxy, and it turned out to be the best superhero/ comic book movie I've ever seen. Everything was spot-on, from the action scenes to the comedy. The whole theatre was laughing one moment and engrossed the next. Fabulous film, if you haven't seen it you should, even if it isn't your usual thing.
Another excellent movie was Hunger Games: Mockingjay. The book was the weakest of the trilogy I thought, but the film is the best of them all. Very well done, and it's unlucky not to be #1 for the year. But do not, and I mean NOT, watch Transformers 4. It's the highest grossing film of the year apparently, $1.1 billion, but it's a turkey. Worse by far than the 2nd Hobbit film, which was my least favourite last year. It's just a rerun of previous Transformers films, this time with Dino-bots at the end (which makes it different, apparently). Avoid at all costs.
I don't watch much TV, but I do like Doctor Who because it's usually so well written. This season fell short though, partly because Peter Capaldi makes such a surly Doctor, and partly because the writers don't seem sure how to best use that. Normally there are one or two episodes which stand out, but not this year. It wasn't a disaster, but a schoolteacher might write "Must do better" on the report card.
And so to books...
I finally got round this year to reading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. It's creative and imaginative, but for me it just didn't have the X factor of Harry Potter, or the Hunger Games. I think it just lacked depth of detail. The wizarding world especially is brilliantly realised by J K Rowling, brought to life with all its little quirks, and Panem feels real too. Pullman's alternate worlds didn't, not to the same extent. It's still a decent series but to my mind is left behind a little by other recent works of fantasy for younger readers.
One very good book I've read this year is Rebecca Alexander's The Secrets of Life and Death. It's a Fantasy set partly in our world and partly in the past, and the two stories alternate chapter by chapter until both reach a crisis at the same time, and everything is explained. It's desperately tricky to do, and the author pulls it off very well indeed. Also I read Ruso and the River of Darkness by R S Downie, which uses an even more fiendishly difficult trick - a detective, Ruso, in Britain during the Roman period. He has no forensics, no fingerprints or blood sampling, nothing to link a person to a crime. Ruso has to work only by asking questions and working things out, and to do so he - and so also the author - needs a tremendous knowledge of the details of Roman life. Ms Downie manages that and still keeps the story interesting, so kudos to her for it.
Beyond these I've read a lot of factual books, often for research reasons. Babylon by Paul Kriwaczek, Freedom Next Time by John Pilger, and The Forgotten Arts by John Seymour are just three of those. The last of them is very useful; it details things like how to make charcoal and horseshoes, and tells how to take ash and fat and turn it into soap. A very helpful book for getting details of ancient cultures right.
Of course, the best thing of all this year is my engagement to Caz, who by this time in 2015 will be my wife. Sort of makes all the other things feel unimportant, really. She encourages me to write, rather than taking time away from it, so at the end of next year I'll probably be doing another of these "best and worst" blogs ("yay!", I hear you cry). Meantime, enjoy New Year, and have a great 2015. I hope it's good to you all.
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