Back At The Beginning

6th January 2017

After a three week Christmas hiatus, the rewrite of my third book in the Veil of Time series is back up and running. There was a moment when I thought to do a Stephen King and push through the holidays as though nothing was happening. But the bottom line for me is that despite what writers often think, reading and writing are not a substitute for life. The arts, glorious though they be, come second and the world comes first. Too much near-sighted drivel has been written by authors who don't understand that their particular corner of the sky is only interesting in as much as it reflects the light of a bigger universe.

There has been a long tradition of hermit authors spending long periods in recluse, half in and half out of a bottle of strong drink. And so the romantic myth is promulgated.  But first you have to tingle at real life, submit yourself to the barrage of the everyday, take it in, let your heart process it, and then inch it out in scrawls onto the page. A Child's Christmas in Wales resonates because every one has been that child with their nose pressed up against the toy shop window. Art only hums if it joins in the wider hum, and the individual hum is interesting in itself only to the hummer and to those fringers who cast value on oddities simply by virtue of their being odd.

Anyway, after three weeks away, I'm going to have to go back to the beginning of the text and restart the uphill plod. When I was an eager writer in my twenties, so much seemed to be waiting for me at the end of the publishing rainbow: all my debts would be paid off, fame and fortune would be lavished upon me, I would have carved out my piece of history. I would, in short, be vindicated. But these days, it's the small steps I focus on. I have lost some of that "If only," which I think must be a good thing. Even though my debts are deeper these days, I keep turning up at my desk for the next write and the next re-write, for the simple reason that I can do no other. Ich kann nicht anders. 

Reasons to Rejoice Bigly.

30th December 2016

Almost everyone I know has their knuckles dragging at the end of this notable year, notable for the rise of corrupt populist leaders and armies of self-appointed guardians of the white race. Never has the corporate takeover of western democracies been clearer.   I feel as though the stuffing has been knocked out of me; all the hope I have entertained about the progress of humankind has gone muffled into my chest. Democracy - ha! Tell me another one!

But Iain MacWhirter, a Scottish journalist I admire "bigly" gives us a reminder, at this turning of the year, that things aren't as bad as they seem, and so I am going to pass him on to you, because I have scoured the cup of my own optimism and come up with mere dregs.

So, here are the reasons MacWhirter gives for good cheer at the onset of the year 2017:

The number of deaths from war is down three quarters on the mid 1970s. Terrorist deaths have fallen by a similar amount. The number of dictatorships has reduced from 90 to 20 in the last 30 years and democracies are up from 40 to 100.

Poverty breeds conflict, so it is reassuring that global poverty continued its rapid decline in 2016. According to the World Bank, the number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen over the past 30 years from 52 per cent to 21 per cent; that’s 1.5 billion fewer people living below the threshold of survival of one dollar a day at 1990 prices.

Then there's climate change,of course, and yet the news here isn’t entirely bleak either. Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels stopped rising in 2016, according to the climate change scientists at University of East Anglia. In key countries like the United States, such emissions are actually falling. Across the world, renewables are becoming economically viable.

This is a revolution even Mr Trump can’t halt. The cost of solar power has halved in the past decade and is on a par with wind energy. China is undergoing a renewables revolution and is now the largest generator of solar power in the world. Countries like Morocco are building vast solar farms.

The poisoned area around the dead Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine is to be turned into a massive solar energy project. In Scotland, the wind is blowing in the right direction. In August this year, for the first time ever, wind turbines generated more electricity than is used in Scotland in a single day and the country is on course to meet its renewables targets ahead of schedule.

Domestic violence and sexual crime rose last year, leading to headlines about an “epidemic” of rape and sexual abuse. But the increase is largely down to these crimes being reported and recorded in a way they never were before.

In almost every respect, society is becoming calmer, happier and safer, even as there is moral panic about abuse, crime and terror. Longevity has been increasing by a year every five years. Deaths from heart disease and strokes are down by one-third since 2007.

Medical advances tumble out of the laboratories. T-cell immunotherapy has achieved “remarkable” results with leukaemia patients; deep sea microbes are proving “miraculous” in reducing prostate cancer; and 2016 even saw the first successful penis transplant.

Good reasons, so to speak, to keep your pecker up in 2017. Happy New Year.

Ding Dong

23rd December 2016

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas! Ding dong merrily on high. Ding Dong just about sums up my feelings this post-election winter solstice. Ding dong, the witch is dead, is what the conservatives have always wanted to sing about "nasty women." So I put my fingers in my ears and try to drown out the noise. I don't want to face the fact that the electoral college has just voted in Donald Trump for the most powerful position in the world.  I was holding out for divine intervention, so now I am singing Ding dong and La la la.  I am telling myself: Well, anyway, I'm not even American. I belong far away on a solitary Scottish shore with the sea wind chattering inside my hood. Venerating Ding Dongs is after all a very American phenomenon.

In the future, in ding dong land, I can see us having enforced nativity scenes at Christmas. Because the twittering Christian conservatives that got Trump into office, think we need more of the little Lord Jesus asleep in the hay. They think we need to bow down before the three kings of Orient and their gifts of Gold, Frankincense and tree resin. Myrrh. The only one of these gifts we really understand, and the Christians are right about this, although they have always been good at grabbing plenty of this for themselves, is gold. Modern man has sold his soul for gold, and his hero is gold-digger-in-chief Mr. Homo Avarus himself. Ding dong.

But the Christians came late to Yuletide. This celebration of the transition from darkness into light has been celebrated since humankind could lift up a sacred object and send it hurtling into the night sky. Modern man looks at the stars and sees a bunch of scientific fact. We don't see anymore the gladiators and the lovers and the celestial beasts. We are full of dry-bone stuff. Facts. Statistics.
In fact, it's not Bethlehem we have lost, but a sense of magic. We don't have much wonder in our hearts anymore, not like our ancestors did.  Only the little children still have a sense for this, with their big eyes and their excitement that Santa Claus is on his way. Truth is, I like Christmas, the tree, the tinsel, the dreaming of snow-covered firs.  I celebrate this one moment in our crazy existence when we allow a little magic in.  
So unhinge yourselves from the gold race tomorrow and the next day. And the next. Remember how it felt to be a child and to thrill to the tinkle of a Christmas bell. To find all wells of mystery in a glittery glass ornament in the shape of crescent moon.

We are myth-makers. That's who we are. Don't be fooled - it's story-telling that drives the scientists, too. Homo-poetica. We need our stories and our moments of magic. That's what makes us human. And that's what Christmas is about.

Standing Tall

16th December 2016

According to Confucius, hearing something a hundred times isn't better than seeing it once. So, take a good look at this picture of veteran Wes Clark kneeling before Lakota Chief Crow Dog at Standing Rock after the Dakota Access Pipeline had been stopped from crossing Lakota lands. The two thousand US veterans who joined Wes Clark to form a human chain around Standing Rock did not play an insignificant role in this victory.

In the picture, Wes Clark is dressed in the uniform worn during the American Indian Wars  and is kneeling not so very far away from Wounded Knee SD where in 1890 the American army went tipi to tipi massacring men, women and children, for which they were awarded more Medals of Honor than for any other military action in American history. Wes Clark  bowed his head symbolically before all of pre-Columbian tribes to ask forgiveness on behalf of the European invaders.   

It has taken almost the entire history of this country to come to this point. Some call this Wendigo psychosis. Others, Collective amnesia. America lives and has always lived in a state of denial about its origins and what it represents. This is the sick and psychotic America that sings its worn song of America's greatness, the same one that has just voted in a sick and psychotic leader. 

It is the nature of selective amnesia that it will not be resolved until it faces up to the things it chose to forget. Wes Clark kneeling before Chief  Crow Dog will go down in history as one of those   moments that spoke a thousand words because perhaps, just perhaps, it indicates that this country is beginning to wake up.  You never know - perhaps it will even do so before January 20th of next year.

  

Rooster Paradigm

9th December 2016

In her recent TED talk, Naomi McDougall Jones, referred to me, her mother, as a "rabid feminist."

https://youtu.be/Gj2pWl1vjCY

I would just like to take the opportunity here to clarify that statement. But first I want to dust off my medals and point out that all of my writing boasts complex female protagonists. My main point of contention with Christianity and other Abrahamic religions is that it has demeaned women. My beef with the academic establishment is that it has driven us out of our hearts, that particularly female organ of fire, into the dry logic of the brain. My greatest vision for humanity says that unless women take charge and soon, there isn't going to be any humanity left to discuss.

While enough praise cannot be heaped upon the first wave of feminism of the sixties and seventies, it's time for an amendment. The problem is that it rose up within the confines of a male model of power and it accepted that as the ground game. Rebecca Traister, young, hip and celebrated feminist that she is, doesn't seem to question this in her book All The Single Ladies: Money equals power, and if you're not out in the workplace competing with men and earning bundles of it, than you haven't got a leg to stand upon. The mantra of her mother and that generation of feminists still rings strong: never ever be financially dependent upon a man. (A corporation, yes; a boss that pays you 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, this is fine.)
So I think we need to drive the feminist argument a little deeper. Women regaining their power does not have to do with taking the next step in the male paradigm. The next big step is to reject that paradigm altogether. Money doesn't equal status or power in any real sense. In the matriarchies that existed on this continent before the whites moved in, men were given so called positions of power - strutting kinds of positions, the kind Donald Trump would be saitisfied with, but it was the women's circles of council that held the real power, that could remove that cockerel from its perch if they didn't like the tenor of its crowing.

This is what we lost when the Abrahamic religions came in and said that women should stay quiet and keep their heads covered. We lost the check and balance that this society of cocks needs. We ourselves don't need to be cockerels. The world has enough of them. We need to circle up and realise that real power has nothing to do with whether you stay at home with your kids or let a man bring in the daily bread. Real female power has yet to come into its own; we need a new psychological and emotional paradigm, and then the economic one will follow.

I hope that that young lady in the video above is successful in her push to have women better represented in the film industry. I hope she is rewarded with a house in the suburbs and enough money not to have to worry about paying bills. But more than that, I hope that my daughter represents a new and centered female consciousness that is free of outside parameters, whether they be provided by a decaying rooster hierarchy or even by the strictures of a past feminism.
So, in a way, I suppose I am a rabid feminist. Just as long as we are clear in what respect.

Writing Disorder

2nd December 2016

Time passes.
For the writers and readers of my book out there, I feel I should get back on topic and share a little about what is going on with my book series. As we all know, movement in the publishing industry is glacial, but I finally heard back from my agent to whom I had submitted my last book in the Veil Of Time series. The good news is that he liked the book very much. I believe he used the word "fantastic." Yeah!

The bad news is that he is asking for a re-write.

Between these two pictures is where most of my life resides. You'd think over the years I would have learned, but, no, once I have submitted my work, I sort of go off the reality radar into the belief that the UPS man is going to arrive on my doorstep soon with an enormous bunch of flowers with balloons and a note saying CONGRATULATIONS!! So, when I get my work back and the line, "I love it" is followed by the word "but," I end up for the next week, as I did over Thanksgiving, down in the dumps.

But a new day inevitably dawns. You go back to the lines from your agent after the "but" and you read more carefully. Well, those changes won't take so much time, after all. It's just a matter of a little tweaking. You open up your file and start making the changes. Hey, what do you know? This revision makes my book even better! You write to your agent and thank him for pushing you. Life is good. Yeah!

People might be forgiven for thinking these swings between mania and depression look awfully like  bi-polar disorder. It is an affliction, I'll agree to that. But its name is simply The Writing Life.

A Man's Woman

During the recent presidential race, when it seemed to be apparent that women were going to be voting Trump out of the equation, some female Trump supporters were petitioning to have women's  voting rights rescinded. Susan B. Anthony and Mrs. Pankhurst must have been rolling in their graves.

Stockholm Syndrome describes a phenomenon where captives begin to identify with their captors, what must be an inbuilt survival technique. Something close to this syndrome kept the lower classes of Britain for centuries voting in the very right-wing feudal governments that kept the masses low and lowly. Something close to this is how the Old Boys' hierarchy operates, designed as it is to keep those below it thinking of themselves as inept and dependent.  Any defectors are regarded as  treasonous rabble rousers. The Pankhursts and the Steinems and the Traisters were and are seen as aberrations, treasonous to the system and patently unfeminine.
It is no wonder so many female authors have over the years felt obliged to take on men's names: Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell), Emily Bronte (Ellis Bell), Anne Bronte (Acton Bell), Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), Louisa May Alcott (A.M. Bernard), Amantine Dupin (George Sand), Violet Paget (Vernon Lee). Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen.) More recently, think JK Rowling (she doesn't actually have a "K" initial in her name,  AL Kennedy.

The Old Boy's Club house rules say that if by some rough chance a woman does end up in a position of power, she had better look and act like a man. Pant suits, asexual clothing, thank you very much. Either get back in your box, or if you can't do that, then be as much like a box-keeper as you can.  Imagine if during the campaign Hillary Clinton had taken to wearing clothing that expressed her femininity, her sense of who she is.  But then, she learned early on how to play the man game: many historians attribute her husband's loss of the governorship of Arkansas in 1980 to the fact that she hadn't change her name from Rodham to Clinton.

I think what felt to so many women like a kick in the gut when Trump won the election, the reason that within days a million-woman march on Washington had been arranged, is that we thought that the wave of history should have taken us past all that. Donald Trump personifies in his very orange body the disenfranchisement of women, the blatant reduction of their humanity to a paltry sex-appeal scale of 1-10. The women he surrounds himself with are almost uniformly blond, trying in their Stockholm derangement to conform to his captor view of how a woman should be.
In 2016, I thought we could do better than that. Many, many women thought so, too. I suppose that is what hurts the most.