Revisiting History

18th March 2016

I am drawing close to finishing my third book in The Veil Of Time series.  I hope it will be the last book -  some series keep on going long after they should. I never dreamed I would have followed the first book with a second, and now a third - but then I found I had more to say. Because there is far more to this series than a simple love story between modern day Maggie and 8th Century Fergus. Much more than I had even envisioned when I set out on this quest. My initial impulse was simply to set a story at Dunadd in Argyll, Scotland. Why not, I had stories in every other corner of that gorgeous countryside where I grew up roaming the hills like some heroin in a Bronte novel.

But the more I pondered the time-setting of this novel, the more I realised that I was dealing with a watershed moment in the history of Scotland: the crucial advance of a religion that bore its creed within the structure of the Roman empire. The "Christians Soldiers Marching out to War" were out to conquer those "others." And once you have divided the world into "Us" and "Them," sanctified and heathen, no holds are barred, especially if you have papal bulls sanctioning your "Doctrine of Discovery."

(And if you think this dirty side of the American experiment is consigned to the past, just listen to the rhetoric of Donald Trump.)

So, I began to ask myself what would have happened if the "heathen" in Scotland had not been "reformed" but had pushed the invading religion out? What if Scotland's native pagan religion had not been expunged but had evolved and advanced into the future? For one, that scandalous heathen practice of honouring the earth would not have been overridden; that tendency for the males of the species to form hierarchies and subjugate everything beneath them, including the entire female population, would have been held in check. The bloody Crusades in the Middle East, the Highland Clearances in Scotland and the American genocide portrayed in the picture above would have existed only in the worst nightmare, and only if that dreamer was particularly sick.

What I have left to write in the final chapters of this third book (aptly titled "Dark Matter," if I do say so myself!) is the final battle scene. Spoiler Alert: the pagans are going to win. And if they had, what would our present look like? This is the question I am toying with in this final book.  Keep your eyes on the shelves: I hope you'll get to read it.

Eeyore

11th March 2016

Once in a while, you receive a piece of fan mail that makes your day. Makes your week or month. I got one of those endorsements a couple of days ago, a very welcome cheer from the wings.  "I'd forgotten what a good book is," it said. It made me smile, I cannot deny it; it lent a buoyancy to my step.

Being in publishing limbo right now, it can be easy to follow the path down to glum meadow.

"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately."

And then some kind soul tells you how great your book is, how they can't wait to read your next one, and, as Piglet says, "Suddenly it's a much better day."

Mark Twain once received a fan letter that began: "Writing this letter is one of the pleasantest duties I have to perform before leaving for 'Hell or Hadleyburg' - which the doctor tells me must be soon now."
It's a comment worthy of Twain himself, but I'd guess he didn't know what to make of it.

I know a writer shouldn't depend on praise, but it would be dishonest to say it doesn't help. We're only human after all. Once you get over it, you'll be trudging through the mud again, brooding on the face of the uncreated flux, as a bird on a dark sea. (Lawrence)
Maybe Lawrence was suffering from a case of Eoyore-itis. and a kind word from a fan might have brought him out of it. Or maybe he was just being what the writer tends to be, one of God's more broody and insecure creatures.

Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

4th March 2016

As I was young and easy under the apple boughs, I was granted a place on a summer exchange program from Edinburgh University to Dartmouth College. I think the film "Animal House" was based on life at Dartmouth in New Hampshire, though it is not atypical of Ivy League colleges, and I inevitably ended up at one point in a fraternity - a new concept in itself for me - where a group of frat boys gathered round to hear my "funny" English.
    "Say something," they goaded.
    "I don't know, how about the rain in Spain," upon which they fell about in hysterics (the green Frat juice being passed about might have had something to do with it, too!) But it was my introduction to the phenomenon George Bernard Shaw described as "Two countries separated by the same language."
"Or what Dylan Thomas called, "Two nations divided by a common language." 

,

Acknowledging creator of this poster

When I was working through my book with my editor at Simon&Schuster, most of what I had to correct was my British English. And I have to say it grated on me. I kept feeling something like, "Look, we invented the bleeding language!"  Just like I resist American citizenship and cling to my green card, I refuse to adapt to the English spoken in my adopted country. 
So, although you say tomaydas, I will always say tomahtoes, thank you very much. 

                              


I have to admit there are certain things I have had to change: for instance, nappies to diapers, but only because it is too unproductive in the supermarket to ask for  "bin liners," etc. Say, what? Trash bags, then. 
And then by necessity, you can't help but go with the flow when it comes to rubbers. No, not those - I mean erasers. I suppose I should follow the Trump mandate and just go home. To which I say, "Chance, old pal, would be a fine thing."

Sacred Art

26th February 2016

In any age, you only have to look at the highest buildings in a city to see what is most important to the people: for the better part of the last two thousand years, it was churches. If you walk around the big cities nowadays you come across these  old icons of the past squeezed in between mammoth buildings built to the new god of trade and commerce.

Similarly, you can tell a lot about a culture's values by looking at the things it has burned in a ritual fashion. Religious icons have always been consigned to the flame by invading armies; smash and burn was the MO of the Crusades; a bit later in history, religious leaders turned holy fire on women. Books have always been an easy target: the Spanish Inquisition burned 5,000 hand-written manuscripts.  The Nazi's burned over 40,000.
The books the Inquisition burned were from a different religion; the books burned in the modern era are not necessarily religious, but they are still holy.

Here's a short list of some authors whose books  have  been burned: Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, DH Lawrence, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Emile Zola, Nikos Kazantzakis, Salmon Rushdie, JK Rowling, Dan Brown....to name a few.
They are holy because they are reaching for the truth, and as a species this is the most sacred thing we do.  This is what was in play at the genesis of most religions.  And this is what is also going on when the writer picks up his or her pen,
As John Milton wrote, "Anyone who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself."

Tread Softly

19th February 2016

When we writers sit at our desks staring off into middle earth, we should bear in mind that we are not just creating something of beauty, but of force with untold power. I don't mean because art is a place for proselytizing - it's not - but because a certain configuration of words has the power to move hearts, and the heart, as was so elegantly stated in The English Patient, is an organ of fire.

So choose your words well. Tread softly, says Yeats. I am still going on about WB Yeats this week, because he understood how to distill words and create a flammable potion:

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

In 1921, Ireland was granted its freedom after years of bloody resistance. But before that, in 1903, Yeats and Lady Gregory founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to become a centre for a national revival of the arts. They weren't putting on chest-beating nationalistic plays in there. But they were kindling Irish artists, and, as we all know, eventually kindling is liable to combust.

In 1995, two years before Scotland voted to have its own parliament, Braveheart hit the cinemas, revealing to Scots their history, to some for the first time. No manifesto could have stirred the hearts of the Scottish people as that film did. The arts are a weapon, let no one mistake it. Conquerer nations don't mistake it. Kill the language, kill that organ of fire. So languages are removed; history goes out the window, too. 
As you sit at your desk fighting for focus, don't mistake what you are dealing with: what you have in your hands, what the gods have gifted you with, is holy fire. 

Perne in a Gyre

12th February 2016

Irish born WB Yeats is my favourite poet. I have gone through his complete collection of poems, one doggedly after the other. Just as in any artistic output, there is a substantial amount of dross in this collection, but then there are the jewels, and those are shining and unmatched. Yeats had theories about the nature of time and reality that, although largely poetic, will I think in the future be shown to have some accuracy to them. He thought that reality was a series of spirals that interact rather like ripples of sound. This image of the turning "gyre" comes up again and again in his poetry. His term "perne in a gyre" pops into my mind often, more as a paradigm of how to approach life - not as a path moving forward from point A to point B, but more of a dance and a circling. This is the sacred circle that humankind has so often used to imagine the holy.

At the atomic level, we can see this "perning in a gyre" in the most fundamental structures of our being, in our very DNA.  Recently, I took a DNA test, because, I suppose, of the human need to uncover the stuff of our being, what it all means, how I as an individual fit in to the great "gyre" of the universe.

The results of the test showed that I am much less European than I thought. A mere 73%. And even if you take that 73%, it divides up into British, Finnish and Basques ( I like this latter: another Celtic people with its own ancient language trying to slough  off the stranglehold of empire - it must be genetic!)  The Finnish element probably comes down from the Vikings.
Anyway, though I do descend through my name from the Lords of the Western Isles, I am not who I thought I was. But then, none of us really is. I only know one person who qualifies as Pictish, ancient and original to Scotland. We're all a conglomerate of helices, an interfering match of turning cones, just as Yeats pictured it. It's what makes us human, and what, if we are artists of one stripe or another, we choose to hold up a mirror to. The best of us, which is the poet, is simply drawing circles with a  finger in the sand.

Robert Burns Is Hot

5th January 2016

Things heated up on the publishing front for me this week, when my agent announced his intention to  send my work out to two publishing houses in Scotland and then to attend the Edinburgh Book Festival in March to pitch one of my books in particular!  Things were feeling a little stuck there for a while, but we're up and moving again. Such is the writing life!

And on the theme of writers: I pretty much skipped over the birthday of our national poet Robert Burns on January 25th, so I am going to back track here and give him his due, "Heaven sent ploughman" that he was. I attended a Burns Supper in the USA and read Robert Burns to a bewildered company - Burns is hard enough for we heaven-sent Scots to penetrate, but to Americans, it must be like speaking in tongues. It's a shame, because there is so much that is rich and true in Burns.

Here are a few interesting facts about him:

1. Among non-religious figures, only Queen Victoria and Christopher Columbus have more statues to their name.

     2. Auld Lang Syne is in the Guiness Book of Records for being one of the three most popular songs of all time, the other two being Happy Birthday and For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow.

3. The Russians love Robert Burns (how confusing must his "tongue" be to them?) They call him “the people’s poet,” and are the only ones to have issued a commemoration stamp in his honour.

     4. Abraham Lincoln was a huge fan of Burns and learned many of his poems off by heart.

5. Bob Dylan claimed that the Burns poem, “Red, red rose,” is his greatest creative inspiration.

      6. Michael Jackson was also a big fan of Burns, and supposedly his hit song “Thriller,” was based on Burn’s poem. “Tam O’Shanter.”

The following lines are from one of my favourite Burns poem, in which he is criticising the overlords (and must have got him into a bit of hot water, just eighty years after Scotland was subjugated under the Union Jack. But then Burns liked it hot) :

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord,                  (birkie= a cool guy) 

Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that;

Tho' hundreds worship at his word,

He's but a coof for a' that:                         (coof=fool)

For a' that, an' a' that,

His ribband, star, an' a' that:

The man o' independent mind

He looks an' laughs at a' that.

And here is Paulo Nutini (a musical Scot with an Italian name!) singing it: