Song of Scotland

May 15th 2015

At the end of June I am going to Scotland for a book reading in my native Argyll. It will be strange to do this amidst all the scenery that is the backdrop for my book. I have only ever done these kinds of events in America, which is a foreign country for me - even after twenty-nine years here, I  am still a stranger in a strange land.  Other Scottish ex-pats of my acquaintance wouldn't entertain the idea of returning to Scotland - they have found their land of plenty, and the idea of moving back into the land of dour faces plunges them into a state of despair.

It is true, Scottish people can be dour. The reasons we all left in the first place are still there. And yet, and yet, there is something about the place of my birth that calls and has a strange magic to it.  There are people in the US who are only vaguely connected to Scotland, who get all droopy by anything Scottish (except for haggis, of course - but I had it just last night via Texas, and I still love it!)
There is just something about Scotland:

                                                 

The history of writers living abroad is long: James Joyce, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot. Even Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the most Scottish of writers, lived in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. How English is that? And this from a Scottish writer who insisted on writing in Scots dialect, a decision which arguably deprived him of a worldwide audience. He deserved to be better known. He is, apart from Burns, the foremost Scottish writer. You can keep your Walter Scott and even your Robert Louis Stevenson. It's Lewis Grassic Gibbon who made the word embody the land. He is the Scotsman of beautiful words.

The film industry has finally caught onto this, and his best book Sunset Song is now in post-production as a major movie. Can't wait. And once they're done with that, I have an entire slew of books just waiting for the making. Hell, I have an entire slew of screenplays of the books just waiting for the making. Lewis Grassic Gibbon died at age thirty-three. He had to fit a lot in to a very short life. I have more time. But I still can't wait!

In a Glass Darkly

May 8th 2015

I talked to my agent this week. He was on the New York subway, but it's always nice to cross that bridge and feel there's someone else in this picture apart from me madly scribbling my way into oblivion. He told me the jury is still out at the publisher on the second book in my time travel series.   A few years ago a writer friend of mine signed on with Amazon Publishing right when it was getting going and because like me she had a backlog of books, they published one of hers every six months. To date she has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. But the policy at the big six publishers, of which S&S is one, is more one of wait and see. So I am waiting. Eventually I will also see.

But the main reason for the talk with my agent was to discuss my current book, which has nothing to do with time travel, Hazel and The Chessmen. He has just finished reading it, and he loves it. Yeah! He loves it, but...Isn't that the way it always goes? He worries my American protagonist is not American enough. That's because I am not American enough. So we agreed then that this book which harps on about Scottish independence somewhat might be more suited to a Scottish audience.  And that's where he's going to take it. Yeah!
He says, even though he already loves it, I could amp up the tension - it's pretty clear, after all, that my American heroine is going to fall in love with my Scottish hero, even though that isn't the main point of the story, and even though she has a boyfriend back home in America.
Okay, I said. I will try and fix that. I will start right away on a rewrite, and then I will write Book Three of my time travel series, even though I don't even know yet if they want Book Two. I will fling myself into the abyss, because that's what writing entails

You can't argue with Nietzsche. He knew all.
Post Script: You can't mess with Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, either.  Congratulations to the SNP on last night's sweep of Scotland in the general election. It's like Newton said: For every action there is an opposite but equal reaction. We didn't get independence last September, but this is sweet retribution on our way to peaceful revolution.



Alba gu brath!

May Day

May 1st 2015

When I was a student in Oxford, May Day was one of the highlights of the year, just because for one silly day everyone went bananas. If you have ever spent so much as a day in an Oxford college, you'll understand how unusual that is. If you have ever sat at dinner night after night in those hallowed halls, you'll understand that bananas are not even on the menu.
But long before the university town of Oxford was founded, there was the pagan town of Oxenforde worshipping at the feet of the goddess Frige.  There are still some archeological remains of her sacred places buried beneath the roads and colleges that were built to rout the sacred woman out. Oxford was into routing women out for many centuries, until it became too un-pc to sustain. But it is still a male bastion. There are still too many bastards. But that's why May Day was invented.  In the pagan calendar it is Beltane - and you'll have to read the sequel to Veil Of Time if you want to find out what our pagan ancestors got up to on the festival of Beltane, and what happens to my female protagonist when she follows the green man to a Mayday fire festival. In brief, Beltane had to do with fertility, the celebration of new life after a frozen sodden winter in your wool rags with not much to eat either.

No wonder May Day means "Help!" Actually, that usage comes from the French, "Venez m'aider!" so nothing to do with bananas at all. I hate bananas, cannae stand 'em. Can't stand the smell of them. I suppose Freud would a have a heyday with that. But everyone going bananas once a year was the one sigh of relief in my whole Oxford experience. Help!

I wasn't about to jump off Magdalene bridge into the River Cherwell at 5am in the morning, but I wasn't able either to become a cog in the blue-blood machinery. My blood wasn't blue, for one thing - just tartan, I suppose. I bought the Oxford bike and the gown and cap and I attended tutorials with my near-dead tutor. But the drummer was nowhere near. The drum I was moving to even in those far off days lived on a hill where the rowan bent down to the chattering stream. The wind in my head was much too loud to let in the litanies of an emasculated priesthood.

Gitting nekid

24th April 2015

Last week, readers seemed to relish my notion of running naked through Kensington Gardens. During the 70's there was a craze for streaking in public. The 1960's and 70's were all about shaking up social conventions. But it doesn't take long, perhaps ten or eleven streakers and the radical itself becomes convention. If you're streaking across Kensington Gardens because other people are doing it, then you are just as far from saying anything important as you would be sitting in a Victorian parlour buttoned up to your chin. It's not a question of what you do so much as who you are when you are doing it. As the Robin Williams character in Aladdin whispered into his master's ear, "Just beeee yourself."

It turns out that being yourself is just about the hardest task we ever set ourselves, and that's surprising considering we come out of the womb as ourselves and we step into the grave as ourselves.
In the morgue, it doesn't matter how much you're worth, what accolades you have garnered, or how prestigious your entourage might be. On the cold slab, you're just a naked body with a tag on your toe. Perhaps that's what the streaking rebellion was all about.

More than anything else, getting "nekid" in this way should be what the writer is about. You can't write what is so about the human heart if you are draped in sheaths of pretentious cloth. When I was a young student, I took to smoking a pipe for a while - as a philosophy student, it was good for my image. But as a writer now, let's say a mature writer, none of that dross should matter. You need to cast off the clothing, because it only obscures the heart. And the human heart is what we should be  going on about.

Whacky thoughts in April

17th April 2015

My agent is at the London Book Fair. It's held in Kensington. And the British Museum is just across Kensington Gardens. How appropriate then that during the day he is wheeling and dealing at the fair and in his time off he is reading my book "Hazel and The Chessmen," which is about a crazy Scottish nationalist's plot to steal a a group of Scottish artifacts from that prestigious museum. Yeah! My active little mind pictures my agent tearing across Kensington Gardens on his lunch break, my book in hand (not possible because it is still living in the ghost world of unaccepted, unpublished stories) and checking out those ancient chessmen. In my fevered brain, he is already selling the damn book at the fair on  the strength of my unedited virtual manuscript. Even more, there is an bidding war going on, with publishers offering higher and higher purchase deals. It goes into six figures and then seven. Good God! I can buy off the mortgage. I can go on a cruise!

No, actually. The truth is, he is in London, and he is reading my book, but all the rest is fiction. I can't go on a cruise, and the mortgage will not yield. Thank god for the long-suffering hard working husband who pays the bills. If it had been left to me and my earnings, I would be living on welfare -  aagh, another subsidy junkie. May the GOP choke on my consumptive vomit.
I went to a book reading yesterday by one of the big names the Aspen Writer's Foundation pulls in over the winter.  From their line-up, you have to conclude that there are a lot of women writing out there. Like myself they are the squeaks that made it out of the age of male hierarchies. Now they have a voice, but they are more comfortable with squeaks. My fellow women writers and I are squeaking from the gallery. Ruth Ozeki was her name, and her editor at Viking was the interviewer. There are a lot of women editors in the publishing business. Perhaps it's because women were the original story tellers. I think they were, and now we are coming back into our own in the Age of Aquarius (Pisces be damned, we're taking our voices back.)

All we need to do now is realise we don't have to wear scarves to belong to the gang. Every woman writer I go to hear is wearing a conservative top covered by a Pashmina scarf. It's the uniform. But don't be uniform. Be a story teller. Run naked across Kensington St. Gardens waving your book, and grab those damned artifacts that the British Museum (another of those hierarchies swiped when no one was looking. Do it. Just do it.

Letter From America

Riding The Wave

10th April 2015

I am often waxing lyrical on this blog about the tortures of the writing life. The creative life does have its elements of pain, there can be no denying. But then so does the farmer's and the clerk's and the teacher's. And the point is, we choose our reactions to a large extent. We are the authors of our joy as well as our sorrow.  And the writing life is certainly not all pain, not all frustration.  When we are doing what we do best, this life of creativity is full of bliss. As creative people, we gravitate towards bliss.  Its the flame to the circling moth, and we can't help but fly in its orbit.

My own particular writing path has been circuitous and demanded patience of a person to whom this does not come easily. But the writing path is not always long. Let's not forget those who rocketed out of their dark corner - the JK Rowlings, the Diana Gabaldons, the Stephen Kings - the authors who are sitting around their private pools sipping Margueritas, and not, it might be noted in the examples I gave, for any great literary merit. They just got caught up on a wave and happened to be the writer on the crest that gave voice to the upswell.

They are all Beatles of their particular art. "A good little band," says Sir Paul McCartney. The best little band in history, say the rest of us. A few scribblings in a notebook, says JK Rowling. The restorer of magic to a dry dust age, says everyone else.
Paul Harding who won the Pulitzer for Tinkers caught a rocket of his own. A small book (full of literary merit this time) published by a shoe string outfit housed in a former loony bin, with minimal distribution, went into outer orbit and won this country's most prestigious prize.
So the writing life is not without its rockets, fireworks and explosions. We hang onto the prospect of taking off - literarily and literally. Sometimes the search for our bliss gets rewarded in a big way. It's not why we walk this path, but it would be nice, that feeling of riding the wave. It's what some part of us is after, and we, and mostly I, shouldn't complain when we get a little uncomfortable along the way.

Tight Spaces

April 3rd 2015

Authors are a strange bunch. (I will count myself among those, just so it doesn't seem like I'm pointing the finger.) I was reminded of this when I started watching interviews with Donna Tartt author of The Goldfinch. Tarrt stands a mere five foot, looking oddly masculine in her suit and tie, but like a creature that has been brought out from the dark and dazzled by the light. A self-described hard drinker, she is rarely seen except for the odd book tour - and they are odd because she doesn't publish that often. Of course, the tradition of authors and reclusiveness stretches far and wide - all those hours spent daily by oneself has a way of turning authors in on themselves.
Among these is of course JD Salinger, who famously locked himself away in his New Hampshire hideaway, turning a gun on intruders, admitting only lonely young female reporters (well, one, to be precise - but she stayed for a while.)  Proust was another. He slept during the day and wrote at night and people described him as looking like he lived under a rock. Tiny Emily Dickinson never left her house in two decades, speaking to visitors through the door if she had to at all. Faulkner, Harper Lee. Why are the bulk of these American, the nationality that prides itself on its sociability? One that actually defines itself that way? I suppose it has to do with the pressure to be social.

That would make of me something of a recluse, too, because there is nothing that makes me recoil faster than an invitation to stand around making conversation. Hell for me might be an eternal cocktail party. It's partially why I don't do well in cities, in those tight-packed spaces of humanity. On several occasions while I was in New York, I was forced into a subway carriage that couldn't hold another being, not even a mouse, squeezed in there like a sardine in a can, pushed in from every angle by a burden of humanity.

So, back to the recluse - It's Newton's third law: because there exists these tight bundles of humanity, there must be by necessity stragglers on the outside, those little women hiding away in houses. I'm not sure about the hard drinking part - that may just be a cultural proclivity. I don't drink. My vices are few, except for a neurosis about public bathrooms (same reclusive disease, I think) and a need to adopt every stray animal I come across (kept in check, because I only have four animals, as it turns out.)
Anyway, it keeps the literature flowing. An oft repeated axiom in my country is that still waters run deep. Stillness isn't much valued in American society. Neither therefore are still people. So that must be why the country has its fair share of reclusive writers. Pulling out altogether is sometimes the only way of preserving the still point.