That Struts and Frets

21st March 2014

I am being honest with you and glossing over nothing - as a Scot this comes quite naturally to me: this time in a writer's life is terrifying. Waiting, waiting, waiting. She who ferrets herself away in closets and rooms without a view, who buries her identity in mythical characters, is suddenly thrust into a fairly pale limelight and asked to justify her hours. The die has been cast. The die lies on the floor in a darkened room waiting for the lights to go on.  Ironically for a book entitled Veil of Time, only time will tell. The dawn will come up on this particular day and all will be revealed. The rabbit who once sat on my snow-obliterated wall during bitter winter mornings, is no longer there. March has brought some relief to her and moved my good omen elsewhere to patches of burgeoning green.
I have a new omen. I have that black cat that wandered into my book launch and sat in the lap of the druidess. In desperate times, we look to our rabbits and cats. The solid wall of reason provides no comfort in these best of times/worst of times. The paradigm has to shift, and it goes to where are ancestors looked - to the whimsy of animals driven better than us along the flow of our universe.
Here's an admission: every month around this time, I sit for twenty minutes listening on-line to an astrologer named Diana Garland, a fellow Brit, sum up the stars for me, not just for me but for any of these scorpio types. We are heavy beasts, we scorpios. Legend has it that the scorpion iconography used to have to do with snakes. We are the original serpents in the first wet garden of Eden.

 We are slithery, sneaky animals with a ferocious bite, well suited to the arts. But anyway, I listen to Diana Garland because I believe the stars and the moon have as much to do with our path as anything else, probably more so. There isn't anything in this mysterious universe that doesn't work in sync with the rest of it. If we realised that earlier we wouldn't put ourselves through so much anguish. I wouldn't put myself through so much anguish.

                                                 D.Rogale 

So in this terrifying ride of a literary life, I listen to the stars - I go outside at night and am quieted by them. My astrologer wasn't giving me a five star month for April, I might add. Pretty much I am in a time of character-building struggle until fabulous July. It all has to do with planet Mars, but don't ask me for the details. I am looking at all of this through a wide-angled lense.
There is a strain of paranoia in me, I am realising, which gets fed heartily by being thrown onto the stage of life under the hot glare of the spotlight....that struts and frets its hour upon the stage...but let's hope not "and then is heard no more." And that's the rub, isn't it? Even in your writer withdrawal, the quest is undeniably there to be heard. So I have no one to blame but myself.

My publicist sends me the good reviews. My paranoid self warns me that she is withholding the bad ones. A Brazilian publisher has bought the translation rights into Portugese, but the jaded part of me asks why it cost so little and where are the other foreigners? The UK, for instance. My Scottish friends who have read the book declare unilaterally that it will do well in Scotland. But it won't be in bookshops there until a British publishers buys it from Simon and Schuster. Personally I think my book will do better over there, because the way the characters are, the way they interact, might be something of a mystery to my American audience. The older man Jim, wry as older Scottish men so often are, might not make as much sense to someone on this side of the The Pond.
So let me leave you with a line or two from one of the good reviews. It is on a site called Two Classy Chics:
Veil of Time is a thoroughly interesting, wonderfully crafted story that takes you through a journey of a thousand years. Very creative and fun!
Read more at http://twoclassychics.com/2014/03/veil-time-claire-r-mcdougall/#ZUa0RapyFBQUMuJ0.99

Omens and Black Cats

March 14th 2014

As you can see, the day of the book launch arrived and was not goIng to be held back. The publisher sent these beautiful posters of the book cover, and we were able to put them up around the room.

Book readings, I find, are often rather dull affairs, so I decided to spice it up a bit by inviting friends to dress up as some of my characters. We have in this picture Maggie's neighbour Jim on the left hand side, then one of the monks who come from Iona to convert the queen. Next is me in my mini kilt (it's the only one I have!) and behind me another kilted person; to my left is a midwife dressed as the druidess Sula, appropriately enough; behind the druidess is the horned god (actually my Cherokee friend dressed as an elk, but, as I say, indigenous religions are all at base the same.)

After several sunny warmish days, it decided to snow on the evening of my reading, keeping people away. Still, there were a fair number of attendees, and the room was packed and overflowing into the next room. So, too many more would not have been managed.
A compadre from the Aspen Writer's Foundation gave me a very glowing introduction and then my Cherokee friend got up and made a toast to a free Scotland (something the English members of the audience probably didn't appreciate.) But I taught them all the Gaelic toast, Slainte Mhath (pronounced Slanje Va) and we all raised out glasses to the country my book is set in. My goal was to read the first chapter (7 pages) and then talk a bit about the story and why I came to write it. The reading part went fine, and my voice didn't even give out. But I had to ad-lib the talking part, and nerves made my brain scattered, so I can only hope people gathered enough about Maggie and her flights into the 8th Century to make sense of the other parts of the reading. When you are thinking about your talk ahead of time, you see the information you have to convey as a straight line from A to B and it seems like it will be no problem to make that journey. But when you stand up in front of people, that line breaks up and turns into butterflies and it is a job to catch them and keep them in any order.
I went on to read two smaller passages, one introducing the love relationship between Maggie and Fergus and the other with Maggie having to say her final goodbyes to him. Phew, I got through all that, and then came the Q&A, which I enjoyed so much I was asking people to ask questions by the end, even though the time was up and plenty of questions had already been asked. I was like a child asking to stay longer at the party.

And then we had a party, with a Celtic band and Scottish-type finger foods and wine. It turned out to be a very enjoyable evening - my only regret is that the butterflies got the better of me. If you find any of them fluttering about your face, catch them very softly, put them in a jar and give them back to me.
The crowning moment of the evening, though, I have to say, is when, quite unprompted, the black cat who lives in and out of this community centre, wandered into the room and parked himself right next to the druidess. I had forgotten all about him.

Now, how is that for a good omen! As they say, you can't make this stuff up. Well, I made it up in the book, but you never know if it is art imitating reality or the other way around. On this night it went both ways.

Time in Slo-Mo

March 7th, 2014

Maths was never a subject I excelled at in school, or even liked, but I am pretty sure if you take 7 from 11, you get 4, which is how many more days until my book launch. Time passes. That's about the only thing anyone knows with any certainty about time. There isn't a philosopher or a physicist out there who can tell you more. One thing I have learned about the workings of the universe is that it pays no heed whatever to time, and why should it since time is a human construct and everything else on earth and beyond does very well without it? Better, in fact. Right now, time for me is in that kind of elongated, slow zone, the kind of slo-mo you experience right before your life flashes in front of your eyes.

When I was five years old, I had a flash of certainty one day in a park in Manchester, England, that one day I was going to take centre stage. How could I know that more years than I care to calculate (let's blame my bad maths) would ensue before this particular premonition came true? Who knows how long my spot in the lime light will last? If the book does a nose dive, then not long. My father died in middle age, and here I am in middle age embarking on a whole new world. So not only does the universe have no time for time, it makes little sense into the bargain.
Somewhere in me a tiny urge is making itself felt to get back to writing. But I can't because I am filling out interviews and writing guest blogs and trying to prepare for the talk at the book launch and the talk at Dan Brown's local bookstore in New Hampshire, and the talk on creativity and Jung I am giving in Boston in May. My editor just found out that Veil Of Time is to be included in an Amazon “time travel” multi-book promotion in May. This will involve a carousel ad on the literature/fiction page, among other spots on the site. Yikes!

You might think this picture is just a metaphor for how my life feels right now, but I actually mistakenly went on this ride a few years ago when I was trying to keep my son company on what he claimed was "easy ride." What the picture doesn't show, and what I didn't see,  is that beneath that cliff is a 1450 foot drop. I think it is the closest thing I have ever come to utter panic. I didn't realise the contraption was going to swing out into empty space. My son was doubled over with laughter, and I was doubled over, too, but nothing at the moment seemed very funny. When you are suspended over a 1450 foot drop, everything gets very slow. Time disappears.
So you live through all kinds of things.  One of the interviews I filled out this week asked me when I feel most like a writer. I don't know. I haven't felt like a writer in a while. There's a good reason writers often choose to write in small windowless spaces, like my closet under the stairs. That's where we feel most like writers, and not in a small capsule suspended over a death defying drop.

Purple Crayon

28th February 2014

Ten days out from my book launch! My books are out for give-away in Aspen, and people have been bringing them to me to be signed, which is all very giddy and makes me feel as if I have almost arrived! The cynic in me says, enjoy it while it lasts, but that voice is not very loud these days, well not today anyway!
I have been getting requests from book bloggers for interviews, which is what I am spending most of my time filling out these days. Being a long-winded person, I probably give longer answers than needed, but it is sort of fun being in the spotlight. All of these requests have come from out of the ether, and I am not sure whether it is this blog or Twitter that has brought them to my door. All I can say to aspiring writers and those faithfully but seemingly unfruitfully slogging away at social media is, keep on going - somehow this machine works and people find you!
From interview to interview the questions are fairly similar: how did you come to write this book;  how much research did it entail; how long did it take to write it? But one interviewer asked the question, What would be the title of your biography and why? I had to think about that one, and this is what I said: There used to be a cartoon by the name of "Harold and the Purple Crayon," about a little boy who creates  his world as he goes along with a purple crayon. Cosy Sheridan turned this idea into a fantastic little song called Grand Design.
Someone once told me that the song reminded him of me, scribbling away at my life according to my notion of things. Let me say as a qualifier that when you are a doing this and sometimes running over into other people's pictures, people are not so kind about the notion. If they don't know you're going to be a writer or chronicler of things, then it is just plain annoying that this person with the crayon is always saying, "No, not like that, but like this!" You get into a lot of trouble and friends are hard to find when you live your life like this. I'm not going to take any credit for it, either, because it is just the way I came out. My own mother was fine with me until I developed enough grasp to hold the crayon and started doodling. In her world full of other kids, having one that insisted on making their own pictures was too draining. My father, on the other hand, being a bit of a doodler himself, was interested in the pictures, and for a while we were doodling together. My crayon was no good, though, when he bowed out of the picture. It might be a magic instrument but it can't bring back dead parents. Or maybe it can and I am not yet accomplished enough to draw that picture. It might take a different sort of crayon.
Anyway, all of this to say that my biography, nay my autobiography should be called "Grand Design." In the long run I hope my life turns out to have been that. One way or another, probably that's what everyone's life is in the end.

Me Love Cookies

21st February 2014

Things shifted into high gear this week when Simon&Schuster told me they were taking out a 12-day ad for my book in USAToday.com starting the day of publication! The same ad will appear on another site called Eyeonromance.com. Also, I was contacted by the historical novel society in Scotland who want to do a review of my book in May. So, you never know, do you, when you are wallowing in the depths of despair how the gears are somewhere changing and moving the story forward? I like that American expression, "Everything turns on a dime," because it really does seem to be so.
I received my forty free books in three boxes from the publisher this week, as stated in my contract.  The copies are beautiful! I was pleased that the cover had a matte finish instead of being shiny like the pre-edition copies. There is to be a fifty book give-away in Aspen starting now and spread out between the library, the Aspen Writer's Foundation office and the local community centre where my book launch is to be held. The venue is a cosy place with a fire that will make me feel more comfortable than I would in a book shop, and besides it holds more people. (Not that I have the remotest connection to Hunter S. Thompson, but this was an old haunt of his.) Woody Creek is also where Joe Henry, author of the much admired book "Lime Creek," lives. It is a the far flung Bohemian section of Aspen. No money, just art, as the story so often goes.
Two and a half weeks until the book launch! Now all I need to do is choose the parts of the book I am going to read for the event. I have already decided on the first chapter, which at eight pages is short, but sets the book and the voice up well, I think. The trouble is that my speaking voice is only good for about three pages,  and then I am reading my beautiful words but sounding like Cookie Monster. That will set me into a  panic, and people will begin to wonder if I really am an epileptic. And who said I was a catastrophiser? These types of things wander about my head around 3am in the dark amidst the sounds of dogs snoring on the bed and cats chasing each other down the hall.
I think I will talk a little about how I came to write the book at the book launch, but I don't want to be reading off notes, because I should be able to tell that story. I know it so well. I was just last night reading an old  journal which shows how this whole saga has unfolded, from my getting my agent in July of 2009 to securing a publisher in February 2011 and finally being published in March 2014. It has been a five-year trek, although the first two years were taken up with a different book that hasn't yet sold. I think it is a bit like giving birth - if you knew ahead of time how long it was going to take, you just would go down a different alley. But once you're on the path, all you can do is sort of squeeze your eyes shut and keep moving ahead to the next hour, the next day, the next month, the next year.
Some authors don't move with such glacial speed. My progress has been about as slow as it gets, I think. So I can hold myself up as inspiration to unpublished writers everywhere slogging away, feeling as though they are going nowhere. And I am not a patient person! I have been feeling like a racehorse stuck behind the starting gate for a very long time. People and horses like that, let me tell you,  are not easy to live with.

Coyotes

February 14th 2014

I wish I could be like Nora Ephron, with wise and witty things to hide my face behind. As she says, if you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you, but if you tell someone you slipped on a banana peel, the laugh is yours. It's one way to stay in the game, to stay on the rolling log and not belly flop into the water. Robert Lupone (Broadway star and producer and brother to Patti Lupone) was here in Aspen last week, and he was talking about surviving in NYC as an up-and-coming performer. He said you have to do what it takes to protect the vital you, the creative centre, so that when you get rejected for the thousandth time, you can pick yourself up and go on to the next one. As the Chinese proverb goes: Fall down seven times, get up eight.
Still, I don't want to fall down anymore. I gave up skiing recently for that reason  - after thirty years of skiing and finally running into a tree and finally breaking my shoulder, I said enough. And I have paid my literary dues - by writing unpublished for twenty years, by writing in the goddamn cupboard under the stairs; by getting enough rejections to paper a good sized bathroom. I don't want to have to lay myself out before the reviewers. I might just not be tough enough.
I think I might have to become an American citizen just long enough to make like Woody Allen and just not listen; I will take the fifth amendment rights and remain silent. I have always known that reviewers were harsh and how a writer needs to grow an extra layer of skin to cope.  But I didn't take it seriously. After all, my work has been criticised before: I attended a local writer's group for ten years, where we were brutally honest. But this is something else. This is people commenting who don't have to look you in the eye, who, if they like, can rub you into the dirt and never look back. And the good reviews don't really make up for the bad. The wounds inflicted by a callous comment or two or three or, geez, a whole paragraph, are never outweighed by the same number of soothing whispers. They go right to the heart, and there's nothing you can do about them.
During the storm whipped up in Woody Allen's life by a vindictive ex-partner, he received a valentine's card from her with a knife and long pins stuck into a picture of their family. (Shades of Fatal Attraction!)  But that's how it feels, dear readers, who are in the blissful era of churning out art behind closed doors. You will eventually have to walk around with daggers sticking out of your chest, and that isn't something you can easily hide.
When the arrows started flying at Steinbeck from reviewers in this country under the consensus that he should never have been awarded the Nobel Prize, he never wrote another word. (How wrong they turned out to be!) Steinbeck had Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat and any number of masterpieces under his belt, but it hurts, by god. It wounds, and you bleed out.
So I think I am just not going to read reviews, good or bad. I am going to close the envelope and turn down the flap on the arrows.  I have failed the humour test and the tough skin test. Whether my book sinks or swims will depend on how many copies it sells over about a year. That's all. That will have to be all. A published friend of mine has figured out that the publisher only needs to sell about five thousand copies to recoup a small advance and their costs. To me that sounds like a lot of copies, but he tells me it's not. I have another published friend who has just passed the hundred thousand mark.
So, anyway, enough of that. There's a rabbit that sits on a bank of snow outside my window for about two hours every morning. Due to a large coyote population, rabbits don't last very long around here. But there she sits (let's say it's a she and let's hope she's a muse.) It snows, but she sits on until the two hours are up and then she is suddenly gone the next time I look up. The next morning she is back. Today I bought a bag of Timothy hay to keep her going over this endless Narnia of a winter. You need your muses and you should do everything it takes to nurture and protect them.
Coyotes be damned.
                                                                             

Just For the Record

February 7th 2014

It is very easy for an author to get lost in the publicity and promotion surrounding a book launch, so I want to state for the record now how I see my book Veil Of Time, aka Dunadd, just about five weeks out from publication.
I remember thinking last year about this time, when I found out the publication date had been postponed until February 2014 that it was too far in the future to even think about. I sat on my chair in my office, head in hands and cried. I lost sight of the big picture for a moment. But here we are. Time waits, as the proverb tells us, for no man nor woman nor anything here under the sun.

Before I proceed, though, I'm going to give a nod to a friend of mine who jumped off a bridge this last weekend. Whether you knew him or not, we should all take pause, because except for the smile of fate and the graces there go we. He was a fine journalist here in Aspen, someone who had given generous time and space in his writings to me and mine. In fact, the last article he wrote, which came out on the day of his death, was about me and mine. He had recently read my book, and he described it in the article as a dark family drama. It isn't, though. The darkness must have been in him. But I didn't recognise that darkness, and never pegged him for the kind of person who would go to such desperate measures. But, even though no man is an island (and I will stop with the clichés soon), individuals can often act like them. And I suppose feeling isolated like that with no hope of rescue, a person might opt out. I can't get there even conceptually myself, but I cannot judge him either. Stewart Oksenhorn, friendly, upbeat, handsome, driven, with a quiet presence. You leave it hard for me to breathe. 8am in the first break of sun on a world just buried in two feet of snow, you took off your jacket and left it with your backpack on the bridge. And I keep wondering, perhaps because my mind has nowhere else to go, why did you take off your jacket?

So Veil Of Time is not a dark family drama, though it has elements of that. It is not a Romance, though it has elements of that, too. It is not Time Travel Fantasy, though, of course, that is part of it. And it didn't even end up only being what I started out to try and write, which was just some kind of homage to this magical place called Dunadd in Argyll, Scotland, a place only a few miles from where I grew up. Dunadd was for me in those far-off days a school bus stop where a couple of boys got on. I was more interested at the time in the boys than in this ancient fort that loomed behind them. Like most teenagers, the ancient past was only a blur around the edges of my world. But, of course, Dunadd stuck with me. When I moved to America, all these remnants of the past that had been shouting out to me down the years suddenly came into sharp focus.
Dunadd is a hillock, like an elephant's back in a flattened-out valley studded with rings of standing stones and marks in the rocks too ancient for anyone to know anymore what they mean. If you climb up the path to the top of Dunadd, you walk through a narrow slit in the rock that you don't know was where the great oak gates were once hinged, but you begin to feel the presence of the people that erected them and even more so as you walk around the rubble of the once ten-feet thick walls that ringed the hill. There's the ornate Pictish boar carved into the rock and a stone footprint. On the very top is a partial wall of a once round shelter built into the side of the hill, and from up there, the wind rushing up from the sea makes you gasp. But on any clear night from Dunadd, just around sunset, you can see the islands set on a wash of brilliant reds and oranges. It is probably the most beautiful sight in the world. In my world it is. So, I wanted to write about it. That was the impetus for Veil of Time.
As I wrote the book, though, other things started to push their way in. The first was Sula the druidess. These people were matrilineal, and I don't believe just druids once ruled here. And I started to think about where that line of wise women was going to go - to the stake eventually. When I considered  why this was so, I had to think of the advent of Christianity in Scotland, eventually to John Knox and his Calvinism, which brought with it these insane periods of Scottish history when councils of men were out to eliminate any hint of women-once-in-control. Our evangelist John Knox wrote "The First Trumpet Blast against the Monstrosity of Women Leaders," and all hell broke loose.
So, druidesses, Christianity, the interface between the two, and time, of course. That's where I disagree with anyone nominating this fantasy. Time travel isn't fantasy to physicists these days. Time is smoke - who can say definitively what its direction? Newton and Kant thought time was a thing. But Einstein said, No, No. It's not. In the quantum world, it is just part of the soup.
So all of this crept in. By the time I was writing the sequel, these elements had pretty much taken over. I let them because they need a voice. In this material world, we need a new paradigm if we are to go on living. So, that's what I am about in this trilogy. That is my raison d'être.

Stewart lost his for a moment there.  But let's not forget. It's the crux we all struggle with, the allure  of a bridge on a sun sparkle morning in the snow.