Ho Ho Ho

14th December 2018

To an already fatigued population this year, Christmas might seem like just another demand.  When some of my friends grumble about the whole Christmas season, I empathise to a degree. But I have to remind myself and them, that in this crazy world of self-importance and serial abuse of one kind or another, isn't it fitting just to take a day out and think of others? Even if your relative sends you another pair of socks or another necklace you would never wear, some substantial part of the planet for a brief moment every year turns its gaze outward and thinks of someone else.

Christmas, for me, and for many others, is not a sentimental story of how a baby Christ came in a manger to save a sinful "Wretch like me." It is, as Scrooge learned during his night visits from Christmas ghosts, a liberating truce in the mind-warping, grabbing and self-serving that has become our world.

It allows us, however fleetingly, a sense of magic.  Children get this, because children are more in touch with where they came from - their hearts are naturally open (at least until we, often unwittingly, close them.) We would be much better humans, our planet would be much better off, if, instead of scoffing, we rekindled the natural wonder we had as children.

Let Christmas alone, I say. There is much that is very good in it. Yuletide was, of course, before it had anything to do with Christianity, a celebration of the Winter Solstice, when the dark night of winter started to turn back towards the light. If we weren't coddled in our central heating, and kept awake at all hours by electric light, we would appreciate that much more. This planet still has a lot of turning towards the light to do. We are living through a very dark period in human history. So, let's put up our Christmas trees in wonder, with our eyes wide open for that pale thin ray of hope on the horizon.

Writing Wings

30th November 2018

I have written a novel about Jesus, or Yeshua as he was known in his native Aramaic.  I wrote it, I suppose, to answer a question in my own mind about what this man meant within his own particular historical circumstances and what he might have thought if he could have looked forward into the way Christianity would leave its mark on history. On the whole, it is an inglorious past. That's my opinion, and not one I am expecting all that much support for, especially in the USA, with its 70% of church goers. In my native country and in England, people will not care about that. Only 14% of its inhabitants identify as practicing Christians. As former Arch Bishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said four years ago, the countries that go to make up the United Kingdom are part of a "post-Christian society."

Now I have sent my novel out  to a first round of readers and must wait. This is a very difficult time for any author. In her hopes and dreams, everyone who reads the first page is going to stay up all night until they close the book on its last. Everyone is going to be bowled over, and publishing offers are going to start swirling down out of the ether. Her name will be submitted for the Noble Prize. Authors are very good on this imaginative front, which is why they are authors in the first place.

The reality is that some readers will like that first draft, some of them even a lot, but some won't seem all that enthusiastic. Nothing lives up to expectations, and while the comments come trickling back in, the author is plunged into a no-man's land, unable at this point to work on the revision, and sinking deeper into the quicksand of that glorious imagination slowly turning against him. These months of slog, these flights of optimism, have all been for nothing, he says to himself. He brought the best of what he had to the forum and now he is being pushed to the back of the crowd.

But there's another quality authors have, and its called buoyancy. Without this guilelesssness, a certain floatability, the daunting journey of writing a book would never have been completed in the first place. People who keep going despite all odds, especially in the arts, aren't subject to the same specific gravity. So they don't stay out on that limb for very long. They stand up,  check their parachutes and take another leap.

Composting in the Era of Trump

9th November 2018

It was my birthday the day after the election, and I figured I had won a pretty nice present in the Democrats taking back the House of Representatives, so I was planning a day of smug relaxation. History had other plans, because Donald Trump started another snowball rolling that day by firing his Attorney General Jeff Sessions who was standing in the way of him controlling the scope of the Special Council's investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. As it turned out, my birthday celebrations gave way to the slow background roll of a Saturday Night massacre. Even over a dinner of sumptuous liver in my favourite French restaurant, I was checking in with the news to see whose head would be next on the chopping block. History was being made, and I couldn't pull myself away.

Mark Twain famously quipped that while history doesn't repeat itself, it very often rhymes. Another historian yesterday announced that the Tump scandal is ten times worse than the Nixon one. Here you have a sleazy actor not only trying to eliminate his tracks, but actually conspiring with a hostile foreign government in a coup against America. And now we have a president in a panic, shooting from the hip, backing off into the bar and hiding behind the piano.

American politics at very best is a crazy arena.  Once it opened the door to big money, how could it go any other route than down the sinkhole of corruption? The antics of American politics goes largely unchecked, hence we have gerrymandering in plain sight, and voter surpression, two of the strategies that the Republican party has come to depend upon. Their aging voters cannot any more deliver victory for this backward-looking, nay backward in and of itself, political agenda.

Young people in America, like young people in Scotland, and actually all over the world, who have education and a web-wide global community at their fingertips, will not support the politics of old white guys. Their day is done, and in the future, not even their corrupt tactics will be able to hold off the tidal wave of progression (I don't say progressives on purpose because even they themselves can exhibit prejudice and blinkered optics.)
The wave that is coming will change our world, and it is neither blue nor red, but simply fresh. I have hope that the young will turn the world around, and when they do, these players we have to suffer through now will be rotting on the garbage heap of history. The Mitch McConnells and the Donald Trumps and the Lindsay Grahams and the Paul Ryans are going to create such a stink, but in the long run, some pretty impressive fertiliser.

Edinburgh March

26th October 2018

I like to put my money where my mouth is, so I bought a ticket to Scotland to walk in the march for independence earlier this month.

My unionist relatives asked me on the way out the door to the march if we were expecting 300 participants. Many more than that, I responded, but frankly I was a little nervous. I didn't know.  When I joined the marchers just below Edinburgh Castle, it was immediately apparent that this was a huge rally. Later that night, the police report stated that it had amounted to upwards of one hundred thousand marchers.  The BBC reported that same night it had been only twenty thousand. So, ye, who think the BBC is the epitome of good taste, and will sit for hours (like me) sighing in front of good programming like Planet Earth, just remember the political work the BBC does in the interest of the Westminster (London) government.  The British Broadcasting Corporation and The British Establishment go hand in glove. For the most part in your daily viewing habits, that doesn't matter. But it does matter when a respected TV station acts as a propaganda machine, which the BBC is all too willing to do.

And then there were the small number, maybe ten or fifteen, unionists along our march down the Royal Mile with a loudspeaker jarring what was otherwise a very peaceful and happy occasion. I told those I was marching with that tomorrow we could expect those few union jacks to be the cover picture on the newspapers. And sure enough.  Despite the tens of thousands of Scottish flags, the cover of the Daily Record showed equal representation.

Mainstream UK media in general has lost touch with the truth. It seems to be a growing trend in the West. Donald  Trump once quipped that it doesn't matter if you tell a lie, you just have to keep saying it and people will eventually take it as the truth. His whole platform looks like this. It's why he fits so neatly into the sinister agenda of  the GOP.
Of course, the British Empire has a whole history of lying, and that's how empires are built. You move among the natives of the New World, trying hard to pose as honest dealers, and then when they turn around to trade you their Wampum beads, you stab them in the back. You do that all over the world and you gain the biggest empire the world has ever seen.
So, nothing new here.
Scotland has but one newspaper that supports Scottish Independence. The National. A large portion of the other 164, and all the major Scottish newspapers, are published by companies based in London. Guess whose side they are on?  The media, has become, as Iain MacWhirter has said, more than a reporter of news and is in fact these days a cultural curator.
So before a referendum on Scottish Independence, it can easily whip up vulnerable sections of the Scottish public, like the old age pensioners who were informed that voting for independence would put their pensions in jeopardy. Now that independence has come to the fore again, they are up to the same tricks.  Fear is the biggest weapon  any dishonest government has in its arsenal.

But be not fearful, my fellow Scots. Don't be taken in. We have in Scotland always stumped for truth over pretension and lies. It is a national characteristic. Some will always be duped, and there are still many among us who are holding fast to the colonial lie that sticking close to the powers that be is our only path to survival. It has worked well in the past, but we have been bitten once too many times.   It is time to stand tall on our five million pairs of feet and realise we have a voice that neither the colonialists nor the media can silence. As Scots looking for a fairer and more supportive Scotland, we  are much much better than that.

Ladies, No Talking, Please!

There is of course a direct correlation between democracy and the status of women in any given society. So it should come as no surprise that in a country such as the USA that is, and has usually been, run by a minority group of older white men, women are not only badly represented, but are actually in danger. According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, America is the tenth most dangerous place in the world for women, with only places like Syria, Yemen and Somalia ahead of it. S, if your hormones run along a differential between oestrogen and progesterone instead of being defined by testosterone, America, according to the best statistics, is just a dangerous place for you to live.

This is the backdrop for the spectacle that has been dancing all around our living rooms for the last few weeks in the nomination and then investigation and then confirmation and then congratulatory slap on the back from the old guys for supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Despite evidence from several women and his former room-mates that this is not the kind of honourable person that is supposed to sit on the supreme court, the Republican senators chose to turn a blind eye and confirm him anyway.  Before the final act played out, I absconded to Scotland, where, much to my dismay, the same spectacle, courtesy of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was doing its dance all over my native country too.

Brett Kavanaugh and his dance with the white-haired men of America is not anything new. It is  simply the most recent iteration of a tedious two-step that is really a one-step in which women are consigned to seats along the wall and the dance continues without them.
Anita Hill sits there, as do any number of overlooked female personages of note. It is not for no reason that the term "wall flower" connotes the feminine sex. Now Dr. Blasey Ford sits there too, sipping her punch, which we hope has not been spiked, not talking, because that apparently is not allowed. We are silent wall flowers in this dance. We have been silenced.
But, Ladies, the good news is that these jokers and waltzers, these wizened emperors-with-no-clothes  perning in their gyre, are old. Their dance is wearing thin. We must bide our time. The passage of history is in our favour, and when it curves back towards us, we will dust ourselves off, clear out the dead bodies, and we will perne in our own gyre and be the singing masters of our own souls.  

Holding Out For Hope

21st September 2018

According to the Buddha, all of life is suffering, and the world seems to want to drive that point home right now. Democracies are giving way to autocracies, governments look more and more corrupt; the poor seem to get poorer and the rich get richer. There's Trump, the world's current emperor with no clothes, and he's not even the worst you can say about the USA - he's simply the fool being used by a highly corrupt party that has very little sense of the good, and a whole lot of allegiance to what is most expedient to its own survival. There's horrible racism and misogyny and just plain inhumanity, and that's still within the fifty states.
In addition, you have Russia using insidious means to expand its influence and its borders; and throughout Europe we are seeing the rise of authoritarian regimes. In England there's Theresa May and her party about to lead not only England off a cliff with Brexit, but Scotland, too, which expressly voted for this not to happen. The world over, we are witnessing vestiges of imperial power still wielding its ugly sword in the faces of those who would dare to oppose it.

Nothing in the world seems very stable at the moment, and it has you glued like a maniac  to your online news or your twitter feed.  It keeps you awake at night, because, perhaps the Buddha was right after all, and the whole turning globe we live upon is just a mess and complete mayhem.

                                    

But not so fast. Though it doesn't make for urgent headlines, not all the news is bad. Despite the gloom that the autocrats in power like to feed to their minions, things have been on the uptick in the world for quite a while now. I'm going to list a few of  these things here, because every time I come across them, I'm able to catch a breath and actually enjoy the process of being human for a while.
Here's how the world is improving:
1) The incidence of war and people dying of war in the world is at an all-time low. Violence of all kinds in the world is down.
2) Death rates are falling globally. Better sanitation and advances in medicine translate into longer life-expectancy.
3) Infant mortality rates are down 15% in the last decade.
4) Maternal mortality has halved since 1990
5) The rate of global illiteracy has gone from near one hundred percent in the year 1800 to under fifteen percent in our time.
6) 721 million fewer people live in extreme poverty now compared to the year 1981

So, smile and be happy. The world isn't actually falling apart. In many ways, it is just starting to bring itself together.

Hooks 'n Agents 'n Things.

7th September 2018

For those people who read this blog to keep abreast of my book(s), I have some news: the last time I talked to my agent at  the beginning of this year, I had already begun my latest book, and I was feeling like I just wanted to clear the runway for it, by getting at least the last two unpublished parts of my Veil Of Time trilogy (Druid Hill and Iona) out into the world. After four plus years, Veil Of Time continues to sell, and I continue to get requests for the sequels, causing the original publisher Simon and Schuster to want to hang on to it for the time being.  My agent has taken the other books out to publishers, most recently in Scotland, but the upshot is that no publisher wants to take on two parts of a trilogy. So, I have been in a bind over it, and I told him a week or two ago I would rather just go straight to Amazon and publish there under an agreement my agency, Aevitas, has with them, rather than have these books gathering proverbial dust on my virtual shelf.

So, he has sent me the templates for book covers, and that's where that stands. He told me he has also sent out to Scottish publishers another of my books, Hazel and the Chessmen, about the theft of the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum by a raggedy bunch of Scottish Nationals. All good. Movement has been detected.

In the beginning, when I was in my late twenties, my goal was to write five novels, so that if one of them hit the big time, I would have four others in reserve to come out in quick succession. By now, I have nine novels, quite apart from the one that is burning a hole in my head and heart, this new one, entitled, "The Second Coming."

No one can fault me for lack of persistence. I have long since put in my thousand hours. Ironically, my actual published book is probably not the most well written of my canon. But it has a hook. Being a heist, Hazel and the Chessman also has a hook.

But I have written other novels that are not bright and shiny for the gatekeepers of the publishing world - for one, my story about the Mustang. Everyone who reads it cries, but a horse story these days is not what a horse story was in Steinbeck's day. What, no sex? What, no high speed chases? What no mule with questionable gender?
Every book for the aspiring writer is going to be her next big thing. This new book doesn't have so much a hook as a whole lot of controversy. I didn't write it to dangle anything like a hook. I wrote it to answer a question in my own head. Maybe this time, that will be enough.