One More Shot

3rd May 2019

Over the next week I will be in Israel finishing off some research before I take a final stab at the novel I have been writing this last year. After thinking of first century Israel for so long, it's an odd time-warp to be walking the streets of Jerusalem, or setting my pink toes in the sand along the shores of Galilee.

You need X-ray goggles to see past the the New Israel, the Muslim Israel, the Christian Israel. Never has such a small plot of land been overtaken by so many religious plots. I don't have X-ray vision, though. I have to just join the throngs of mostly scholarly writers trying to peal back  the super structure and delve into what could possibly have been there before.

It seems like it was never very far from conflict. The Israelites under the leadership King David threw out the Jebusites, and then after exile in Egypt and under Joshua, took it from the Canaanites. The Romans moved into Israel in 63 BCE, and set up a puppet government which is what empires always do. And then after about 140 years, we enter into another period of exile for the Jewish people while the Christian era took off. Once Christianity expanded out of the Middle East, the vacuum was filled by the new religion of Islam. And then came the Crusaders, who took it upon themselves to giddy off to the Holy Land and defend it against the Infidels. Israel, past and present, is an unholy mess, made messier by the clumsy tromping around of US president Trump. The last thing Israel needed was the rise of the religious nutcase evangelical right in America.

So it is a lot of noise, a lot of voices from the past, all clamouring for their bully pulpit. All you can do is put your head down,  eat your hummus, ignore the fearful patriarchy that finds a seat there, peal off the layers of lamb on your shwarma. and hope your ear plugs will hold out.

I'm taking another shot at telling the history of this place through the lens of a man who was supposed to be a Messiah, but who got himself crucified instead. In the Jewish mind, dying naked in the most humiliating of Roman executions disqualified the man from being "Mashiach," and the next two thousand years of human history has been Christianity's attempt to prove them wrong. The church that grew up in Europe under the aegis of the Apostle Paul came at it from one angle; the church in Jerusalem, led by this man's brother, had a quite different interpretation. Relatively recently modern scholars have been trying to push back the undergrowth to get a glimpse at what this all could have meant.

Me, I'm a novelist. The swirl of my thoughts falls into patterns like a spider filling in the corner of a doorway. I'm not interested in icons and certainly not in the spread of any religion based on fear and shame.
The historical thread is pretty thin: there was a man once who started a movement around the Sea of Galilee, and he was executed by the Roman authorities for sedition. Historically, that's it. But let me fit this Yeshua Ben Yosef into the web I am weaving. Let's take another shot at this.
My book is called The Second Coming.

Pow Wow

19th April 2019

I must have caught something in the air when I was composing my last blog entry about Native America, because unbeknownst to me the first local Pow Wow was being planned in Aspen for the following weekend.  This is the photograph that appeared the  day after the event on the front page of our local newspaper, and it is so telling, I just want to hover for a moment longer on this topic of America and its first peoples. 

I have been to Pow Wows before, and I sit there watching in my all-whiteness, trying to be less conspicuous, but most of all nursing a great pain. I'm not entirely sure where this comes from, though my brain tells me it has to do with the great injustices perpetrated against these peoples. I come from a country that has also suffered under colonial rule, so, I reason, this pain must have to do with a feeling of empathy.

But I sense it is something more. 

Hollywood has provided some visuals here of native Americans and Native dress. At this Pow Wow, too, there was an older man in full regalia: head dress, fringed leg wraps, chest plate of threaded bone. And to some extent we have been shown the audio that goes along with it, the kind of screech/singing and drum beating heard from that band of savages over in the hollow.  

But to witness it is something else: men and women around a large vellum drum, some creating a small rhythmic background while another crashes down with a strident booming beat. And all the time, the high screeching singing that reminded me this time of the cry of coyotes. 

This is where my  pain comes in, I think, from this primal cry. These days of course it incorporates all the devastation that that culture has met with in the last few hundred years.  But I suspect the sound was always the same - it's something that is birthed in the face of a rising moon, of the cycle of the seasons, of the sheer act of survival. It is something we have lost, this connection point of ourselves to raw, unadorned being.  Our religion has separated us from it until we recognise only the safe and sanctified icons, like the one that burned in Paris this week. 

But it's in us, albeit a pale shadow. And it hurts when we watch the Indians in their dance and in their song. This primal urge wants us to know it has not been silenced. It is still there.

Native Peoples And The Right To The Moral High Ground

5th April 2019

Every year the Ute Indians travel to Aspen, formerly known as Ute City, from their place of exile, a reservation in Utah, to perform dances for tourists in Aspen's Gondola Plaza. It would please me no end if what they were actually doing in their native language is placing a curse on these white invaders, but that spirit of revenge is not their modus operandi. The Utes say they are here to offer a blessing, and I believe them.

As with all native peoples in America, Ute history is peppered with broken treaties, land-grabs, relocations and outright massacres. If you google The Utes, you first have to plough through entry after entry from the government approved sites, most of which are put out by the local Indian museums, a decoy to make the invaders feel better about themselves.  I've been to the Ute museum run by little old white ladies, displaying affadavits from natives who want you to know that being wrenched from their families as children and forced into government boarding schools to be guided in the ways of the west was the best thing that could have happened to them.
To this day, Native Americans  may not own land, are marginalised and regarded with scorn when they are regarded with anything at all. As I write, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest, is under flood water while we opine instead about the elocution of a demented president.

The Europeans that invaded this country, known to the natives as Turtle Island, have a lot to answer for, but they set up institutions such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs to make sure they never have to.

That's why this is my favourite picture: During the Lakota/Sioux stand off at Standing Rock in 2016, veterans from the US army came before the Lakotah leadership to ask forgiveness for the centuries of oppression of native peoples. You know what, Chief Leonard Crow Dog granted forgiveness?

I have to admit that when I think of the Indian in his top hat and his desperate attempt to be accepted by those who did not have his best interest at heart, it pains me to see this generation of his people turning the other cheek. But wait a minute, isn't that what the icon of the religion of these invaders stood for? The great irony of course is that the native peoples always saw the world like that. The irony is that the white invaders with their crosses and moral law did nothing but try to undermine it.

Writing For The Eyes

22nd March 2019

This blog has to do with writing a screenplay, because I am currently writing one. But, first off, I have to mention the fact that when I went looking for examples of recent Oscar winners in this category, to a man they were, well, men. In fact, statistics reveal a mere 11% of screenplays that make it to movie are written by women. Seems odd, considering women make up 51% of the population.  We're not talking first responder firemen here. It appears that when it comes to the version of reality projected on the big screen, especially how women themselves are portrayed, then it is, to use a new but apt adjective, "blokey."

I have written screenplays before, but this time, as I try to piece together a screenplay adaptation of my new book, it lays heavy on me that this art is quite, quite different from other forms of writing. I have been in the practice of writing the screenplay version of my books, but I have tended just to transpose the action right off the book page onto the script of the film. I suspect now that that just won't do.
Female writer Darci Picoult said that when she writes for stage, she writes with her ears and when she writes for screen she is writing with her eyes. The craft of the novelist is wordy by nature, and I'm beginning to think that film is much more closely related to the visual arts. Film is a visual medium. Which is why you have to let the visuals speak.
As an example of film not doing this, there's a scene in the Bridges of Madison County, where Meryl Streep is in the bath, noticing that the shower head is still dripping from when the man she illicitly fancies recently took a shower.

It's a poignant moment, but just in case you didn't get it the writer brings in a voice-over telling you that this is what she is noticing. It is for this reason that voice-overs barely ever work in film. If the image doesn't clue you in, you actually undo the emotional impact by explaining it. The worst kind of movie dialogue is where the writer is explaining plot or motive to the audience through the mouths of her characters.

That well-used  dictum about how writers should show and not tell goes a thousand-fold for screen writing. The way I am trying to combat my "word" impulse for this screenplay is to think of the action in terms of music. Music probably does best what poet ee cummings said good art should do: almost entirely misses the intellect. Good poetry does this too.  Not that the audience should be dumb...well, perhaps that is what they should be. Struck dumb.  Speechless.

Evil Genius

March 1st 2019

I have just sent off to my agent the two edited sequels in my Veil Of Time series. Druid Hill is the first and Iona the second.  Some last minute computer glitches took me into a panic known only to the computer illiterate.  Liz, my editor, came to my rescue, and after much sweat and tears, I was able to send off two clean copies. (Too late, I realised later that in my acknowledgements I had mis-spelled my agent's name, but what can you expect from a right-brain dominant person, a person who definitely sees the forest, but the trees not so much.)

At times like this, with both American and British politics swirling in a vortex down a sink hole, it's hard to step out of the chaos and bring anything into focus.  I have always been one to decry myths about a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. In this unprecedented moment in history, however, I find myself rooting for the Good.

In Scotland, the ONLY newspaper that is not run by British forces, the National, just published The McCrone Report which was commissioned by the English government in the 1970's in order for them to get an idea as to just how wealthy an independent Scotland would be. This, I have to point out, before anyone struck oil! The conclusion of the economist, by name of McCrone, was that Scotland would have an "embarrassment of riches."  So, for forty years, Westminster labelled the report top Secret, and no one got to see it, especially not the Scots with their upstart notions of making a break for it.
That's corruption. In my cosmic model, that is a whole lot of negative karma awaiting the Good to overturn it. Deep down, I suppose, I do believe that Good should win out. Good should pay back a British colonialism that massacred women and children in Tranent, Scotland, because they wrote a letter of protest. And the Good should oust an American president who was put in place by an American adversary. It just should.
So, I guess I believe in cosmic forces, after all. I just hope they are forceful enough to squeeze that evil genie back into the bottle.

Love and Roses

14th February 2019

In Scotland, as in the rest of Great Britain, Valentine's Day is the celebration of romantic love.  In USA, in true American homogenizing fashion, everyone is supposed to be included. Grandmas and mothers receive Valentine's cards alike. Every Valentine's Day of my youth was spent in expectant desperation, checking the mail, checking my desk at school, just in case some boy had slipped in a card when I wasn't looking. It was all quite depressing, because my notion of what my life would be was not characterised by chastity or loneliness of any kind. To those boys who actually did fancy me (and there were some, I later learned), I spit on your timidity. I would have rejected you, of course, but you should have given me the chance!

But then that lack of substance is one of the many problems with the notion of romantic love we have fostered in our culture. "Love is not love that alters where alteration finds," saith the Bard. But what is love? One thing I am fairly sure it is not is anything connected to red roses and heart bleeds. I spent much of my youth swooning (for years at a time in some instances) over one male person or another. Often, I had very little contact with that person, so I have to think whatever I was feeling (to point of death, it seemed  - I was a very dramatic girl!) it had more to do with me than them.

Because romantic love is something of a fabrication, it is by nature insecure and requires constant reminders that it exists. It's all a bit neurotic and needy, and yet this is what the film and music industry,  together with the industry of Romance books, perpetuates.

I think love is a conundrum and may have almost nothing to do with how we feel. As the modern bard Paul Simon sings, "Love is not a game, love is not a toy, love's no romance." There's an old saying that love is not two people staring into one another's eyes, but two people staring in the same direction. So, maybe that's why I don't celebrate this day, Valentine's Day. I wish I had realised earlier in my life that love might just be the equilibrium between two egos, not an Egoism a Deux (Fromm)

For Writers

February 1st 2019

I am nearing the end of the re-write of my current book set in Israel. I sent out the first draft to a few friends and got very mixed results back. What became clear, though, was that I had committed my usual sin of starting off a novel trying to pack in pages and pages of backstory.  In this particular case, I thought I was justified. But it should be clear to me by now that, as a teacher once told me, you have  to "stay in the room," not just once the story gets going, but from the very first sentence.  You have asked that reader to step into your office and you need to keep him or her there by showing them a few pictures.  "Let me show you my etchings," used to be an old funny pick-up line, but it really is how you keep a reader engaged.  I know that. But I always forget it.

So, I got depressed. There were about fifty or so pages I would have to completely redo. Throw the old ones out the window and start from scratch.
I kept procrastinating. I'd written the damn book, and I didn't want to re-write a whole new section. You'd think I would have picked up along the way (I did, but I forgot) that, as the adage goes, "Writing is Re-writing."  Don't you just hate that?
Eventually I pulled myself back into my desk chair. I opened my computer, and lo and behold, it wasn't that hard. I knew it wouldn't be. I just forgot. Instead of simply "telling" my story, as another old adage goes, I began "showing" the reader who these characters were.
The great thing is, if you do that, you begin to draw yourself in, too. By the time I had reached a crucial plot point in my story, I was in tears - which hadn't happened before when I was telling and not showing.

I guess what I am trying to tell you writers, is not to be discouraged.  Okay, be discouraged. There is nothing that stings as much as a rejected manuscript. You want to cry out, "But I wrote every word in my own blood."  Okay, but that has to show on every page, and if the reader ain't smelling it, you need to go back and bleed a bit more.

Lovely thing, this writing life....