And Then Is Heard No More

May 16th 2014

Snow dropped on Colorado early this week. It fell in the night and was still slumbering in the trees in my garden, pale hands and fingers of the winter dragon, when I woke up and drew back the curtains. Resolute as a drugged sleeper, it clutched every surface, as though someone had forgotten to tell it to go. This is a scene that in late October might inspire excitement, but in the middle of May offends the eye, just another round of white when hints of floral had been mentioned, when daffodils had been spotted and so had a jocund mood. Well, not to elaborate on it too much, but it pretty well reflects the mood of this author in the wings right now - so much promise weighted under frozen uncertainty. Just note this, ye fervent writers and scribblers dreaming in technicolour of being crowned one day. It takes more than tripping through meadows of flowers. There are days and weeks like this when the Snow Queen settles in and puts you back in the refrigerator.

And then the clouds packed up and moved on. The mood lifted. Life, as they say, turns on a dime. And so it does. You draw back the curtains one morning and the scene has moved on to sunshine and bursts of verdure. All the jocundity a soul could ever ask for.

In the words of Wordsworth, "How could one but be glad?" The spinning world turns on. When I was a young writer and attended a weekly writer's group, the world stretched out before us scribblers as the ocean runs out beyond anything the eye can see, falling off but only to come around again on this bouncing cosmic ball. Twenty years later, that picture has faded in many corners. People that were young and vibrant as myself have stepped out of the frame, too many from suicide, others to disease. The world turns and casts a shadow; one more look and it has turned again into the sun. So our moments in the light are finite - we have a moment to squeak our tune and then we are gone.  Much much sooner than anyone thought. In all the vastness of space and the incomprehensible folds of time, we are a sharp shooting star that lights the earth for a moment and then is heard no more (in the words of WS.)
Snow falls and then the flowers. Make the most of it. The seasons come and fall away; nothing, not even the written word, lasts for very long.

The Bully Pulpit

9th May 2014

I just got back from my foray into author-land with five days packed with events in and around Boston. Boston is beautiful in the spring with magnolia trees, cherry blossoms, and parks full of tulips. I was staying at the Park Plaza in a rather ritzy part of town - hence all the flowers. The trip was arranged by my agent Esmond Harmsworth, who, after five years, I finally got to spend more than fifteen minutes with. The one thing he didn't arrange was my book reading at Water Street Book Shop in Exeter, New Hampshire, where some of my in-laws just happen to live. As luck would have it, this is also the book shop where Dan Brown launches his books.

Some artistic soul who works at the store had copied my book cover onto a chalk board by the door! I grew a little nervous as the time for the reading approached and not very many people were arriving. But they did trickle in and soon most of the chairs were filled. I wasn't reading from a script, but gave my presentation ad lib. People asked questions. People bought books (the book store had me sign the copies that were left - nice of them, because otherwise they would be able to return them to the publisher.) Mission accomplished. Afterwards, I happened to notice a pile of Dan Brown's most recent book Inferno stacked against the wall. They were all signed! I was going to buy one, but the kind people in the bookshop gave me one free!

Here's me just after the talk I gave at Muse and the Marketplace about Art from the Heart on Sunday May 4th. Unbenownst to me, my agent's intern was present and tweeting memorable lines - glad she could find some! Here I am standing next to a silly drawing I did to illustrate writer's block.  I was saying that, although this is a popular paradigm of the artist, it isn't a helpful one - the writer shouldn't be trying drag art out of himself/herself like a harakiri artist, but plugging himself/herself into the collective experience of humankind. 

This is one of the Na'vi people of Pandora in James Cameron's film Avatar connecting his ponytail into the Tree of Souls. This image comes over fifty years after Carl Jung coined the term Collective Unconscious, but it is depicting exactly the same thing. 

The night before I left Boston, my agent Esmond put on a literary soiree in my honour (together with the honour of Elisabeth Elo who wrote North of Boston.) Esmond sat us in chairs facing the gathering, and after hors d'oeuvres and too much wine (I should have stopped after the first large glass of Rose) he asked us questions and we entertained, and then we sold books. 

I have signed a lot of books lately - after two glasses of wine, I start mis-spelling names.  But I like to write a little something, too, however incoherent. 

I actually surprised myself on this trip. Despite the nerves, I came through for myself.  Who would have thought? Maybe I could get used to it. Did I say that? No, it must be my evil little twin. I prefer my office and what goes on in there, the ponytail and all that. I feel at ease there.

Bones to Pick

May 2nd 2014

Here I am in Boston (down at sea level drunk on oxygen!) on the brink of starting my weekend at Muse and The Marketplace. This is a huge writer's conference in Bean Town put on by The Grub Street creative writing center which offers year round classes and once a year a conference with a big faculty of authors, agents and editors. Authors like myself give lectures, as I shall be doing in two short days. My talk is entitled "Art From the Heart. How to get out of the way of your own writing." I have to speak for about half an hour, which is many pages of type, let me tell you. I drew up a draft last week and sat some friends down to hear it. Well, the consensus was that it was a bit too much like a university thesis, so I had to go back to the drawing board and come up with something more accessible, which I think I have done. I am a tad nervous that no one will ask a question, and then my audience will have to go out and drink coffee to fill up the time. By next week's blog I will be able to tell you how it went over. It's my first foray into lecturing, and I am sure this will get easier as I go along.
One of my duties today is to have lunch with some conference attendees, which isn't much of a chore.  Free lunch, talking about my craft, who can complain? This evening there is a party for the faculty sponsored by my own agency, Zachary, Shuster, Harmsworth. Tomorrow morning I have a reading up in Exeter New Hampshire, stomping ground of Dan Brown. Sunday afternoon after my talk, I am going to the beach to commune with the ocean. Monday night my agent Esmond Harmsworth is putting on a literary soiree for me and another of his clients, Elisabeth Elo. We are going to be interviewing each other and talking about writing popular fiction in a literary way. Elisabeth's book, "North of Boston," was published in January of this year, and is one of the best written books I have read in a while. It's a mystery and a compelling read. So, I am looking forward to meeting her.
Meanwhile, if you are in the vicinity, Grub Street is putting on a fabulous weekend of activities - Come on down!
                                                             

Last week I had a comment on one of my blogs from someone who wished not to be identified that said they had really enjoyed my book but it disturbed them that all the villains were Christians.  I know I am going to come up against this a lot ( not so much from "Christian Britain" so sayeth Prime Minister Cameron, but from Christian America.) No doubt the Christian right wing nuts will be gathering my books and flinging them on fiery heaps just like the religious right wing nuts always have - especially when the offensive subjects in question are women and especially wise women or witches. Historical fact.
So I want to state my position on this now: I have no problem with individuals and their simple faith. We are all struggling one way or another to feel connected to something larger than ourselves. Therein lies our humanity. I only have an argument with the Christian establishment with its hierarchies of men and its terrible history of demeaning women and of shaming in general. (Just for the record, I am against any male hierarchies, because men were not supposed ever to be given this much power - it's dangerous. Look at the world today - that's what you get. (Just for the record, I am also against Pitkin County Open Space and Trails which is another of these male hierarchies which demean and shoot down opposition. Fear not - I will exact my revenge!! Next book, all the villains will be on the Pitkin County Open Space and Trails board.)
What my book does is raise the question of what we lost when the Christian patriarchal system took over the pagan religions. Christianity demonised the pagan right from the start to insure that it got its start. But here's what we lost: seeing divinity in every aspect of life, a healthy humility in the face of nature, a healthy attitude towards our sexuality, a healthy sense of wonder. In short what we lost was the Sacred Feminine. That's why in my book there are villainous monks trying to drive out my good druidess Sula. That's why they are Christian. Because that's the way it happened.

Book Clubs and Broomsticks

25th April 2014


Since the last blog, a few things have happened to do with my book and promotion that might be of interest to anyone still following this blog as a map of how the process unfurls along the road from just-contracted author with a big publishing house to publication and (hopefully) beyond.
The book club at my local library read my book this month, and I showed up at the round table in the turret of said library with champagne in hand and snacks in a bag to celebrate. So we drank bubbly in paper cups and ate cheese popcorn in paper cups and the literary ladies (ladies all - doesn't that tell you something about the publishing industry?) asked me questions, not so much about the book, but about myself as a writer, how the whole thing came to be and what my writing routines were etc. A good time was had by all - I do like the question part of these events and feel a bit sad when it is over. Bottom line is, everyone likes talking about themselves. It's as close to relishing the limelight as yours trully will ever get.

Another book club,  I am told, and in Scotland this time, is going to be reading my book in the near future.  Scotland is where this story belongs, of course, the ins and outs of it, the history, the interchange between people, the landscape. It will be a sort of homecoming. Even though I don't live in Scotland anymore, this part of me shoots out and finds its home in the old country, in the bogs and the moss and the rain on the window. After all, it comes from a part of me that has no home here in the old US of A. What do I know about homecoming queens and gatorade and the fourth of July? I belong in the wet country, eternally green, damp but never that cold, where a nod passed between people says as much as anyone needs to know. Small country that Scotland is, there is little sense as you stand on a hill overlooking the sea with the wind doing its best to topple you off, that man and his    ambitions have any currency there. It's just the land doing what it has always done, with species laying a footprint on it in cycles until they pass on and new footprints emerge. From the perspective of the trees and the lochs and the bracken, man is just one more small indentation in the soil.

On Tuesday, I participated in my first Tweetchat with some other authors who will be attending The Muse and the Marketplace with me in Boston next week. The chat was moderated by one of the faculty from the Grub Street Writer's Foundation. It's an odd thing, a Tweetchat, sort of like being hit from all sides by a meteor shower and not knowing which way to duck. 

We were discussing (all at once, like a rowdy but silent town hall meeting) the topic of publishing and the effects of social media on the various genres. There seemed to be some consensus that self-publishing is really hard for literary fiction, but less so for genre fiction which has a built-in platform and audience. Next time I will just have some pre-written pearls of wisdom to insert whenever possible in the hopes that they get retweeted. That's the gratifying part. In retrospect, I would like to have made the comment that separating literature into various genres might well just come from a recent Lit-snobbery. I might have pointed out that were Jane Austen to be published these days, you might find her in the paperbacks along with other "chic-lit." And Charles Dickens, iconic writer of all time, stocked on the shelves with other historical fiction. Point is, no need to sweat being thrown into one genre or another. A book stands or falls on its own merits. I see that now.
So, you live and learn. Whatever else the publishing process is, it is that.

TS Avatar

18th April 2014

I am only two weeks away from delivering a speech in Boston about the nature of writing. Not being a public person, this feat has been looming on my horizon like a fusion of threatening clouds, and yet the more I get into the topic of this speech, the less nervous I become, because I really feel passionately about what I am saying. It turns out that passion can conquer fear, as though you were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, and the passion position was able to envelope the self-conscious one and score a point.
The topic of the speech, as it is advertised, is actually about getting out of the way of your writing by looking at the creative process, not as one of pulling stuff out of yourself, but by hooking yourself into the creative ground. If you're facing writer's block, I argue, then you are standing in your own shadow and need to shift your position and let the light in. But there is more at stake here, and this is what gets me going, what floats my boat, as the saying goes.
We are living in a time of paradigm shifts. This is how I begin. This paradigm of the tortured artist/writer which has given rise to the tradition of the writer and psychotic bouts, the writer and heavy drinking, needs to shift, too. A better image for the artist of any type is this one from James Cameron's film Avatar.

In the film, the Na'vi people connect themselves to The Tree of Souls by connecting their ponytail to one of the trees branches. Isn't that a better paradigm of what happens in the creative process than this?

Carl Jung says that art (meaning all creative functions) is "a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument." The artist "is 'collective man' - one who carries and shapes the unconscious psychic forms of mankind." I argue that in the modern era, art (more obviously in the visual arts, but also in music and the written word) has lost sight of this universal function and has instead reflected the mind of the individual artist, not the subtext of humanity at all: If you don't understand Jackson Pollack's motivation for splattering paint on canvas, you don't get the painting. If you don't get the tradition of dissonance in modern music, you won't appreciate Benjamin Britten. 

Anyway, judging by the post-modernist thrust into a new realism, I think I am not the only one to make this observation. It seems to me it is never the way to go backwards, however, so I think that the pendulum swing will eventually find its rhythm slightly off the realist track. Religion is doing the same thing - we can't go back to the goddess, but we can touch base with it again and come to something new out of the old. 

In TS Eliot's timeless line, "The end of all our exploring will be to arrive at the place where we started and know the place for the first time."

The Promised Land

12th April 2014

"Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs, about the lilting house and happy as the grass was green...."
This apropos of nothing - they are just magical drooling lines by Dylan Thomas that emerge every so often when I put my mind to writing....even a blog.
On to the topic of said blog:
Given our advanced technical age, it's funny how after the book launch everything really still comes down to word of mouth.

My published friend tells me that after her first book came out (one that I should add has in the ensuing year sold over a hundred thousand copies - "The Bloodletter's Daughter," check it out!) it took months for it to start selling. Malcolm Gladwell in his book "The Tipping point,"talks about how movements depend on the 80/20 rule - that eighty percent of the work will be done by twenty percent of the people. And these people tend to be movers and shakers and well in touch with the zeitgeist. Oh, it all sounds very complicated! Who cares how many people it takes and what they are called and what they do, just so long as they get the job done. But I am at their mercy.
I suppose I am haunted by that phenomenon where an author who subsequently does very well (an understatement if I mean by such authors someone like Dan Brown, and I do) comes out with a dud initially. Dan Brown's "Angel's and Demons" did not do well until after "The Da Vinci Code" broke all records; there was an author in Aspen last week called Maria Semple whose book "Where Did You Go, Bernadette?" has done fabulously well, but who also had to suffer through a first stinky fish. She described that time as "public humiliation."
Well, I am much too vain and egotistic to want to go there myself, so may all Gladwell's Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen do their stuff and lead me into the Promised Land.

                                                            Karen Gilllis Taylor

The problem with promised lands is that they don't hold up too well to reality. It can be like Bert's chalk paintings when it rains in Mary Poppins. They tend to dissolve into globs of dreams and empty pavements. Still, being publicly humiliated is like never getting to jump into the painting in the first place. I'm not expecting this first book to be a block buster, but I think the series as a whole could do well, because the more I get into the story, the more it is exploring questions that we face in sterile modernity, namely what we sacrificed for this world of ours with its fading patriarchal religions and materialist vacuity.
I believe that this Homo Erectus that we went on to rename Sapiens ("wise" - don't make me laugh!) should have been named Homo Religiosus in the first place, and then we wouldn't have got everything so wrong. The "erectus" element has played much too big a role in how things have played out for our species. Time to turn the kaleidoscope and let the patterns re-emerge in a more satisfying order for this homo religiosus, this Femina Religiosa (that's what we lost, way back when the kaleidoscope got stuck on the erectus thing.)
There's a great song by Capercaille called "Waiting for the Wheel to turn," which is actually about Scottish nationalist hopes, but the wheel is a good metaphor for any paradigm that needs changing. Homo Erectus effectively threw out the wheel with the bathwater, and it's time for it turn again.
Check it out!
http://youtu.be/-K0tQRYv8tw

All Quiet On The Western Front

April 4th, 2014

..After the buzz and spectacle of the book launch, my world has turned very quiet. I suppose it is the nature of the beast at this point; I was just talking to another recently published author who was experiencing this same lull. And yet it isn't something I had anticipated. So much of this publishing experience has been that way. The book launch was like the publisher throwing me into a pool, where I made a big splash and people noticed, and now I am under the water waiting to see if I will come up again.  But it is quiet down here. I ought to like it, and I think I do. This is my domain, the stillness that is the creative touchstone, the thing you keep going back to when you start a new piece of work. I know Stephen King plays raucous rock and roll while he works, but I suspect that it is just a circuitous route to the still centre. Most writers like to shut out the world, so they can hear nothing and then hear everything. I am giving a talk about this in Boston next month - about how the writer or any artist needs to be a good listener, how the creative process is about tapping into the still collective and not a teasing out of images from our own stock.
I really miss writing. My creative space has been too noisy for too long. But it is a self-imposed exile. I've been up front of the shop listening to the cha-ching cha-ching, worrying about numbers and abandoning what I do best, which is listening to nothing.
To compensate I am filling my head with thoughts that split open my horizons in another way. I am reading Anthony Peake's book "The Infinite Mindfield," and Bernard Haisch's book "The God Theory." I think it is very difficult for a creative person to be a no-God ("God" in the broadest understanding) materialist believing that nothing exists outside the mechanical workings of the mind-machine, that consciousness is simply an epiphenomenon of evolution.  Because the creative process is a shamanistic ritual, isn't it? You're already in no-man's land when you put paint to a canvas or ink to paper (or finger to keypad.) You've gone beyond the material and you'd have to believe in materialism to a religious degree to think of what you are about as the mere workings of mechanical parts. The creative act is already drowning out the noise of turning cogs and is instead whispering to the ghost in the machine.

                                              Robert Price

But only like this picture if the ghost is a bearded lady. We don't need any more men in the works. The ghost in the machine is definitely feminine. Right, Dan Brown?