Putting Your Tail To The Ground

17th January 2014

I found my book reviewed in my alma mater's magazine at Oxford (called Christ Church Matters.) Nice to think of those fellow students who looked askance at me in those days noticing and saying, "But, God, she was so odd..."  Therein you have one of the less noble reasons writers write. Oh well, only human.
I received a form letter from my publisher a couple of days ago noting that it is only eight weeks until publication, and I had better plug into my Author Portal and make sure I'm doing everything I'm supposed to. I was on the phone yesterday to my agent, talking about such things. He bemoans the fact that there is no forum for book clubs to go to for reading ideas, because a book like mine could surely use one. It's odd that in spite of our high tech age, the movement of any given publication still relies on word of mouth. It's just that word can spread more quickly. But you still need those people in the first place using their mouths and lips to say to their neighbor, "I've just read such a good book, Darling!" He thinks we need to make inroads into communities of readers, like those of historical fiction, feminist and fantasy fiction. I have been attempting this sort of thing very clumsily on Twitter.
Meanwhile, two different book blogs, The Qwillery and My Bookish Ways, have asked to put my book up on their websites and conduct interviews and post guest blogs from me. They must have found me through my blog!
Meanwhile, I have submitted the title of my talk for Muses and the Market Place for May 4th in Boston on Grub Street: Art from the Heart - Getting out of the Way of Your Writing. I think we've been taught to overthink our role as artists instead of just listening, because the first requirement of any writer is to have good hearing. It's what Nietzsche called "psychological antennae." You have to have your ear to the ground, picking up the slightest pulse. The slightest pulse can be a moment of shattering insight. It's when we try to pull our art out of ourselves, particularly out of our heads, that our hands come up empty or sticky with dross. We have to be connected, like the shaman is, like the people in Avatar are when they connect their tails to the mother tree. Carl Jung would have loved that image - it's what he meant by the Collective Man (in the same vein as the collective unconscious. The writer as any other artist is an artisan whose medium is the collective unconscious.) So you can't get caught up in yourself - if you do, you end up blowing out your brains figuratively and in a few cases actually.  So you connect your tail to the tree of knowledge and you listen.

I am really getting out of the way of my writing these days. In fact I am so out of the way, I haven't sat down at my desk in my office since I finished the sequel to Veil of Time. It's been months, and it's beginning to wear on me.  It's not a case of writer's block. It's a case of being caught in the headlights.  I'm not sure which direction to turn, and I am a little frozen in place, waiting for the juggernaut to pass.  It would help if one of the many drivers of this publishing machine would put their head out of the window and shout out a word of encouragement, even the suggestion that I hop on the back and enjoy the ride. But I seem fixed down here at the side of the road, such a peaceful rural country road where I can usually hear the birds singing, the background hum of grasshoppers.
It's at times like this that you need the agent. You need him to say, "It's okay, let's have a party." Which is what we're going to do in Boston in May. A party for my book and for the Boston literati. I will put on my silk frock and sip cocktails and be full of what my book is and isn't and how long a writer like myself sat in the wings waiting for a party to be celebrated at. And then I will pick up my backpack and head back to the country road, smooth out the dirt and hang boxes in the trees for the birds to nest in. I will be quiet and lay my ear to the good earth and the good mother from which all proceeds.

Painting by Steven Cronin: www.steven-cronin-art.com

Judging a Book By Its Cover

10th January 2014

If you can't judge a book by its cover, then you won't be able to tell how good my story is from looking at the images below. But just for curiosity's sake, here's the final cover, back and front, for "Veil of Time."

My editor and I struggled over the back cover blurb till each of us was ready for a divorce (the only time we even came close!), but I think it came out pretty well. My part of the struggle was to keep the hyperbole on the ground, and hers understandably was to fit the book into a marketable niche.  I wouldn't have advertised the fact that my hero, Fergus, is a prince, though he technically is.  It's just that he is not a prince of the white charger stamp. I let it go. Why fight it - we are all in the same game at this point of trying to get as many books out into the world as possible, Scottish princes notwithstanding.
The photograph of yours trully is not the greatest, but that is my fault for not having a good enough one on hand (despite years of fantasizing about having my face on a published novel!)  I have promised myself that for the next book I will shell out proper money for a professional picture.
In retrospect I regret not having mentioned that I also spent four years at Edinburgh University - I was trying to be concise, and I knew Oxford carried more weight, but Edinburgh is my true alma mater (in more than one way, since I was born in that city) and the place I earned my MA (in philosophy.) So let it go on record: I didn't mean to shove it aside.
I do like the fact that the designer repeated the landscape on the back cover. I like to think that if you made an image of me with the right kind of contraption honing in on a specific type of energy wave, you would find Scotland etched on my skin. It's not far beneath the surface. This scene is not of Dunadd and could be of the farthest reaches of Argyll, but it is a bleaker landscape than is typical of my native soil. Dunadd is heavy with bracken and oak forest (at least it was in its original state, and that's the way they're letting it return.)

In other developments, I was sent the "Buy Buttons" to put up on my website (once again I was indebted to a techno-savvy teenager!) Now you can buy my book from a number of booksellers, some of which I hadn't even heard of.  Also, I have been invited to speak at Boston's Writer's Conference, The Muse and The Marketplace in May. It's a big bustling event with 100 faculty and 600 students. Now all I have to do is rip my heart out, squeeze it dry in front of my audience, then replace, still beating, back it in my chest. It might not be as traumatic as that, but this is what comes to mind when I think of the "performance." Being a shy Scottish lass, public speaking is close to harikari on my list of dreads. And yet, and yet. My father was a great public speaker, made his living from it, as a matter of fact. So maybe there is some hidden potential there in my make-up cowering in the dank cave of my insecurity, listening to the hours, days and weeks dripping from here to there like running stalactites. Maybe I will rise to the occasion. Who knows? Things are going to have to change from here on out. Maybe this public life is my new era. Maybe there was a lot more involved in this writing life than I counted on when I set out.

Jupiter is a woman

January 3rd 2014

OMG! It's 2014, and it's going to be a good one. Call me soft in the head, but I think the movement of the planets effects our lives, and Jupiter, the biggest and most powerful of the planets, has just slid into my career sector! What's not to believe? If there is one thing you can say about our universe, it's that everything works together in one great swell of cosmic soup -  the stars and planets and the butterfly wing in China. So I am looking forward to being a particularly big bubble in the pot this year. Mercury, messenger of the gods, is also in my sign, and favors media and getting my message out.  So bring it on! This Scorpio has lived long enough under a rock and needs to take wing and fly. As a new year's game with some others I was asked to predict three things for my life by this time next year. I have never had any problem dreaming big, so here's what I said: 1) Veil of Time will be doing well; 2) The sequel will be well into pre-production; 3) My book will be optioned for a movie.
(The last of these is not something I wish for lightly. A whole host of conditions would have to be met for that to happen. I don't need creative control, but I do need to be in the loop. There are directors out there who value the input of writers - it's just a question of finding the right one.)
Anyway, that's me for 2014.
Nelson Mandela said, "There's no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living." He certainly didn't settle for anything less than he was capable of. During his twenty-seven years of imprisonment he was repeatedly offered his freedom by the South African government, but repeatedly refused to accept the conditions that that freedom rested upon. I firmly believe that it is not our dreams that fail but our resolution. Dreams that are held on to tightly, have a way of manifesting themselves. They may not happen according to our agenda, and we have to be flexible enough to ride the waves, but the key is not to lose sight of the land we're aiming for.
With my book launch coming up at 6pm on March 11th of this year, I have been busy planning. The folks at Aspen Writer's Foundation, bless their little hearts, are putting this on for me. I could have had it at the local book shop (one of the few left in the country, but, this being Aspen, it is owned by a wealthy enough concern for it to be still viable) or at the county library, in some ways an obvious venue. But I chose the community centre in Woody Creek, a sort of fringe community at the farthest reaches of Aspen where Hunter Thompson lived and where John Oates and Jimmy Ibbotson currently have houses.
Woody Creek is mostly a trailer park, a tavern of ill repute, and couple of speed bumps, but it's where I live. The community center has a garden to sit out in in the summer and a fire to huddle around in the winter, and it is a comfortable setting. I'm asking people to come in kilts or in any other ethnic dress (for instance, my Cherokee friend will come in his tribe's regalia.) I want an actor friend to come dressed in a cowl, hood up, waving incense in a censer. Book readings can be boring non-events. They can have you trying to sneak a look at your watch. So, I am aiming to have this one be a happening event. If I could afford a piper, I would, but the closest pipers are in Denver, four hours away. At very least, I might be able to bring in a few local musicians to play Celtic tunes and set the stage. Because the book is about more than just me. It has themes of ethnicity, of Christian religion against pagan. It's about being a proud Scot and celebrating a history that is uniquely Scotland's before it was taken over by a history uniquely English.
The biggest of my book's themes, I think, is that an age of domination and hierarchies, of slash and burn, should pass now, is passing now. The whole world view that that hinged upon, needs to go now - homo sapiens does not control the earth or space or time. Mine is a book about time, because that is the linch pin that this worn out world view rests upon, the piece in the puzzle that if you remove it, everything else collapses. We need a new way of looking at our universe, not one from a conquerer point of view, but one of perspective and humility. The reason my heroine flies like a witch back to 735 AD is that it might be helpful for us to look at the kind of religious perspective we had before the monkish religious perspective took hold. We can't go back to that, obviously, but the denigration of the goddess, of the female, has been disastrous for the world. Willy nilly, Christianity has been a tool used for that purpose. But the sky God has had his turn, and we need to re-embrace the sacred feminine, the earth goddess, whatever form that is going to take in the centuries to come.
At the beginning of this important year, this is my fervent wish, book signing or not, sequel or not, movie or not: that the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know that place for the first time. (Eliot.) In my book, I am trying to find a way there.

Making Lemonade

27th December 2014

You know how the saying goes, "If life gives you lemons, make lemonade"? Well, writing is a great way to sweeten the sour, remove the stinger, defang the asp, take the poison out of any undesirable history, especially personal history. You take those who have wronged you in life and make them the villains in your book!
The reason I bring this up is that I have just run into my first bad review. It hurts, by God. I have been walking around all week with heart palpitations. One of the questions in the Q&A at the back of my book asked for my motto, which I foolishly gave as "Everything at this moment is exactly as it should be." Strange how these kinds of resolutions slip out of the radar when you hit a wall face first. Strange how you can forget that you have ever had a good review. It must be due to some facet of human nature that though you are told a million times you're beautiful, it's the one comment about a crooked nose that goes to bed with you, that gnaws at your skull, tapping like an insane woodpecker until the hole is deep and irreparable.
Before I get into this bad review, here are some good ones for Veil of Time:

“As richly detailed as a fine tapestry, Veil of Time is entrancing and enthralling from the first page to the last. Anyone who enjoys the work of Diana Gabaldon or Karen Marie Moning will adore this book. A jewel of a story! Veil of Time is time travel at its best.”

-Karen Hawkins, New York Times Bestselling Author

“Veil of Time will enthrall you. Claire McDougall’s fine novel is both a meditative exploration on the nature of perception and sanity and a saga of the first order, a wholly captivating journey through time and the variegated yet immutable complexities of love.”

-Scott Lasser, Battle Creek

“From the moment I opened Veil of Time I was instantly swept up in the lush, haunting and wholly credible world Claire R. McDougall has created. Fiercely inventive, steeped in history and emotionally charged, Veil of Time is the gripping story of a grieving woman who is offered a second chance to rebuild her fractured family. The twist? She must relinquish her current life and return to 8th century Scotland. A powerful and thought provoking novel, reading Veil of Time is like falling into a wild, enchanting dream state from which you hope never to awaken.”

-Jillian Medoff, Hunger Point

“At long last a novel that features the mystical aspects of the temporal lobe epilepsy experience. With echoes of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife and Daphne Du Maurier’s The House on the Strand this poetically written novel tells a magical love story that spans the centuries while at the same time describing in striking detail the subjective effects of this intriguing neurological state. A brave, powerful, and incredibly moving debut novel from a very talented writer.”

-Anthony Peake, The Labyrinth of Time

So, the bad review was written by a woman who shall be nameless and goes like this: I am a longtime fan of Diana Gabaldon, and the love story in Veil of Time between Maggie and Fergus is nowhere near as good as Gabaldon's Jamie and Claire. My reviewer is very disappointed in Fergus. She can't love him. Gabaldon's hero Jamie, she says, would never have dry-humped the goddess in front of Claire the way Fergus does. How can you love a hero who dry-humps a goddess in front of his girlfriend? She places my story in 765, which is wrong (735, if you please) and she puts my heroine Maggie in a village in Scotland - wrong again. (Maggie moves to a rural cottage surrounded by nothing but the wind and the bracken.) Did she actually read my book or just skim it for dry-humps? She says the method of time travel (i.e. epileptic fits) stretches all credulity (like falling through a standing stone does not!)
Any reviewer worth their salt does not judge a book by how it matches up to another book.  I have never claimed there was any comparison between myself and Gabaldon, though, as you can see above, other reviewers have made the connection. My book is about the ephemeral nature of time, and about this particular moment in history where Christianity took over the goddess religions. As Scott Lasser says, it is an exploration on the nature of perception. All dry humps aside, this book isn't a simple romance, though it includes one.  

So I reach past the lemons for those tweezers and snip the stinger off the end of this particular scorpion's tail. The scorpion has already struck, but heart palpitations only make the poison spread faster. The lemonade part of me says that so many people will be intrigued by the idea of a "dry-hump," they'll want to read the story.
My hero Fergus is complicated and yet still alluring, thank you very much, Miss FacileReviews.com! (Just for the record, Maggie does have a problem with the dry-hump.) What I am doing is  asking the reader to step into a different time, a different set of morals, a different religious sensibility. Fergus belongs to a different era, which makes him  a little complicated for our modern day heroine.  Do you want historical fiction or just a paper-thin story? I have my own agenda, my own literary voice, and I don't need to borrow anything from another writer. This is a book written by Claire R. McDougall. It says so on the front cover, something our reviewer appears to have missed. It's a good book. A jewel of a story!
So, hand me that glass of lemonade, will you?  I will pull up my chin, and I will try not to choke.

Back Covers and Wrinkly bums

20th December 2013

Long ago before I was a published writer, I used to think about how I would like to be portrayed on the back cover of my book. I thought about this quite a bit. In fact, I even went ahead and had a photo taken by a photographer friend (just in case.) Every so often it got updated. This one was taken about four or five years ago:
( I am now going to wow everybody by putting a picture in here.)

Oops, it didn't go in here (I'll explain this later.) It went up there, but I am no computer whizz, let me tell you. Just to prove the point I am going to add another, more updated, picture here:

It was supposed to go here, but it went even further up the page (I'll explain this later, too.) Look, you should marvel that I moved any picture around at all. (I was idly flicking through the icons and came across one that said, "insert image," a no-brainer, even for me.)
Early this week my editor told me I had until Friday to send them my back cover picture.  Not a problem, I thought. After all, I had been preparing for this moment for years.  So I sent off the black and white one. It came back - not enough pixels. I sent off the other one. It came back - not enough pixels either. Panic ensued. We need 300 pixels, Claire. They might have asked me to dance a Flamenco.  One day out from the deadline, still no photo, and the pixies were not being kind.
Okay, said my wise and wonderful editor, find yourself a teenager and ask them to help you. Teenagers know nothing about life, but they know all about clicking on this icon and that and saying, "There's something toggled in your set-up." I speak two other languages apart from English (and have tried to learn Gaelic, I have, I have, but it evades me) so why can't I learn computer-ese?
Look here's another picture:

That's the cover art for my book, but it isn't where it should be in the blog, because...wait a minute, a teenager just walked by, and now I know how to sort the problem. "Just click and drag," they say. Click and drag. Of course, why didn't I think of that? Now all the pictures are where they should be, and I have a blog this week with images! Here's the back cover picture that finally made it through with enough pixels:

Just for good measure, here's a random photo of people who probably know even less about clicking and dragging then I do. I do not know these people, and I can only look at his picture for so long, but you get the sense that they are posing and must never have seen themselves from the back.

Pictures, portraits, nudity, no real salient point - this blog could go viral (and even I know what that means!)

Shades of Nonsense

13th December 2013

I wonder how you judge books for prizes. What is there in writing that is quantifiable in any way? Woody Allen never attends Oscar ceremonies. He says, "They're political and bought and negotiated for - although many worthy people have deservedly won - and the whole concept of awards is silly. I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don't." 
Allen has a point there. 
Yesterday they announced the judges for the new and re-vamped (expanded to the Americas) Mann Booker Prize, among them an American professor, an Oxford professor, a neuroscientist, a philosopher, an American critic, and the director of the British arts council. There are four men and two women - could they honestly not find another random person who happened to be female? Madonna? JK Rowling? Jane Goodall? Or did they just have to show that men know best when it comes to handing out prizes?
At any rate, in their gender-lobsidedness, their goal, as stated, is to pick "the very best work of literary fiction." They will whittle down the numbers to twelve in July of next year and then to six by September. You just wonder what the operating criteria are: buzz-worthiness? Surely now that the Booker prize has been extended to the Americas, we are not going to see Shades of Grey get any shades of recognition. Still, they don't want to pick anything too obscure, too unsold, no matter what its literary merit. The truth is that very often Booker Prizes like Pulitzer prizes go to authors that are never heard from again. If you look at the lists of winners through the years, hardly any are recognisable. How about Bernice Rubens, Stanley Middleton, Roddy Doyle, to name but a few?
Is the panel going for location, location, location? The prize is almost certainly going to go to an American writer next year, otherwise why expand the prize's geographical boundaries?  Shades of Grey might be brought out of the shadows for the literary spectacle that it is. Did I say, "literary"? How clumsy of me. Perhaps the panel might decide to show the world how terribly hip and in touch with the times it is. E.L. James, take out your black dress and diamonds! 

Fellow Scottish writer, A.L.Kennedy, who was a judge in 1996, called the prize "a pile of crooked 
nonsense" with the winner determined by "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, whose turn it is".  E.L. James, get out your notepad - there is a story here. Only you might have to call it "Shades of Nonsense." (A.L.Kennedy, it's "whom.")
I should probably have called myself C.R. McDougall to even be considered for a Mann Booker prize. I should definitely be sleeping with someone - mmm, decisions, decisions, the neuroscientist or the philosopher? But now I understand why there are four men and two women on the panel!
On another note, but a similar shade of nonsense - last month was National Novel Writing Month. The slogan?: "Thirty days and nights of literary abandon." It's a big notion and a big deal, too. Such notable books as "Water for Elephants," were composed during a month of literary abandon such as this. As if literary abandon were a place you could go, an urge with a destination similar to feeling like a burger and trotting off to McDonalds. "Literary abandon" is as silly a phrase as "Reading is sexy," which you hear bandied around these days. It's meant to provide some allure to people with otherwise little literary inclination. Reading isn't sexy.  It would be sexier to stay in the realm of possibility and engage with another human being. And writing might involve abandon, but there the similarity to sex ends.  All I can say is Freud must have been right - sex does sell, but it is only the idea of sex, just like these literary honours might just be the idea of literary perfection: it founders on the doorstep of the real world. 
It just makes writing sound like the mystical experience that it isn't, as though it is a romantic process, like writing on a valentine's card. There is just something in us that needs to think halos shine above the tellers of stories, above those who judge them. It makes us want to see the prizes as glittering, handed out by wizards, and not what they are: human, all too human. 
(N.B. If any lob-sided panel wants to give me one, I am willing to be shiny for a day!)

Dark Matter and the Bothersome Rant

6th December 2013

Coeur de lion Nelson Mandela! All men die. Not all men truly live. But Madiba did!

Sometimes you have to take stock. You have to ask yourself why you do what you do. I have to wonder why I spend my life as a pen-pusher (as Kazantzakis would have said.) Why do I bother writing? Why do I bother with the books and the blogs, with the tweets? Why do I bother at all?

Quite apart from the creative urge, here is why: it matters to me that we as a race need a new paradigm. I should probably say, we as Westerners need a new paradigm, but there isn't much of what is not the West that has not been infiltrated. Only a few untouched outposts in the rain forest remain. But the bulldozers are on the way, and I don't just mean tractors, I mean this disease we call western civilisation which is a moving body with no heart.
But then there are the physicists in the West who live in an entirely different universe than the common person. They are working at the level of sub-atomic particles and the result is a new paradigm. Once the word gets out. I have to ask who is holding it back? Once we get it, we will not be able to view experience in the same old way, and that will change everything. Thousands of years ago, sages from all corners of the world were saying, there's not really anything there, and it doesn't matter because that's not what is important! That was the ancient paradigm. Now the physicists, those former slaves of materialism, are saying essentially the same thing.
I just don't understand why there exists this enormous gap in time from the father of quantum physics, Einstein, almost a hundred years ago, to us now walking about the streets with our staunch belief in solid space, solid time, solid politics, solid religion. We are a constipated mass of humanity lacking the fluidity that those in the rain forest might still have, those for whom the earth is still infused with the heavens. Everything for us is fixed. If you live in America, then the conservative party will play on this notion of constipated inertia by running around screaming about the dangers of new-fangled socialism, as if half the world isn't already happily socialist. Much more happily socialist than capitalist America, if you go by the surveys.
So we need a new paradigm, one that involves circles and not pyramids. The pyramid power structure belongs to the days of kings and explorers and popes sanctioning extermination of native populations and creating manifest lies like manifest destiny. We need a new paradigm where the people of the world negotiate and cooperate. We need the circle of elders, not the kings, not the presidents, not the CEO's, not the popes or the priests.  And, just as a matter of historical fact, those circle of elders so romantically portrayed in Hollywood as gatherings of pipe-puffing gentlemen in feather head dresses was just as likely to be comprised of women. It was only when the male powers-that-were who conquered this land insisted on negotiating (or so they said) with men from the indigenous people, that the male "chief" arose, the one we recognise who held up his hand and said "How," who spoke uggy wuggy for Hollywood audiences - that's when the women of the native peoples lost their status.
Here's what I think, and why this all matters to me: a plane load of people on  9/11 were held hostage by two guys with box cutters. The world today is being held hostage by a bunch of powerful box cutters at the top of the pyramid. And we need a new paradigm, folks.
I don't write for the prettiness of words, though I often read for that reason. I don't come up with plots because they might be mildly amusing, because book groups might decide that I know how to put a sentence together. What I want is for people to say: I'd never thought of that before; I'd never thought how the world would look differently if we as a race hadn't bought into the pyramid scheme. We can have all the technology we want, and it would have come anyway, but we need to find a new place for the sacred circle. There is a very big reason that the  circle was sacred to our far ancestors. Our entire survival might rest on our seeing that.
We need a new paradigm, because the old one simply doesn't work. Here we are on the brink of 2014 with the ice caps melting, with the deserts spreading, with the earth's clean water in serious jeopardy, with the Middle East about to implode, with rampant human rights abuse. We need to stop listening to the old paradigm, which says wealth equals happiness. We need to stop seeing ourselves as consumers and take back our humanity.
I know I harp on about loss of the sacred feminine and about Scottish independence, but really, both are about this same change in paradigm I am speaking of.  My book is about holding a light to the so-called "dark ages." Dark because of what? Because it lacked the "pure light of reason?" Because it was pagan and not Christian?  Look where the pure light of reason has brought us? It has divided our world into black and white, into heart and head, into a sterile atmosphere where "heart talk," or "spirit talk" or "woman talk" is thought of as inferior.
We need to stop arguing about oil, and we need to stop listening to the heart of darkness that says man lives by bread alone, by the Rolex watches and the fast cars and other icons of male prowess. I'm not letting women off the hook, because there are many women who have bought into this insanity. But it is not in our nature: we are creatures of the circle, not the pyramid, as I think my book shows. And the sequel shows even more.
Scotland - well, that's a whole rant unto itself. Tune back in next week. (Maybe.) Suffice it to say that one small voice in one corner of the world saying "Enough!" to colonialism and imperialistic greed can move mountains.
Here endeth the rant. But somebody has to take a stand. Mendela did.
This is why I bother.