Veu do Tempo

3rd February 2017

Around the time my book Veil Of Time was published by Simon & Schuster, a publisher in Brazil bought the rights for a translation into Portuguese. That was only for Brazilian Portuguese, though. If Portugal wants the book, they will have to negotiate the rights separately. At the time, my editor told me that eventually a book with my name on it and a Portuguese title would arrive on her desk and when it did, she would pass it on to me. Forward to a few days ago, when a Tweet in Portuguese appeared in my email box, and since so much time had passed since the original purchase, I thought this must be a Portuguese comment on one of the many Tweets I put out in the name of Scotland and her interests. I didn't understand the Tweet itself, of course, but good thing I thought to click on the link, because it was about the launch of Veu do Tempo in Brazil.  What do you know!

I actually like this book cover a lot. Rather than trying to sell with sex, it is fairly faithful in representing what the book is about: a woman with her cup of tea dreaming wistfully of bygone times in Scotland. The castle in the picture is from a much later time in Scottish history than my book is set, but still, it is on a rocky mound overlooking the sea, and I appreciate that they took the time to convey the sense of the book. What lies between the covers is anybody's guess, since no Brazilian translator ever contacted me to ask, "What is this: when someone is asked a question, they just look away to the hills?" Goodness knows what they made of the Gaelic lines or of the dour Scottish temperament in general, quite different I imagine from anything you might come across in Brazil.

Anyway, perhaps Veu do Tempo might sell well down there. Perhaps the book-count may go up on my "Recent Activity" page on the author portal at Simon and Schuster that I try so hard not to click on. It's life, and, whether American politics or your opus magnum, pretty much everything is just a feather weight away from tipping the balance.  

Overcombing the Facts

27th January 2017

We spend a lot of our time pulling ourselves into tight little worlds, fearing dissolution, dreading death. The Buddhist sees death as a little drop of water dissolving back into the ocean, and that image has not always seemed too alluring to this substantial ego. 

But then you get dropped into a seething mass of humanity 200,000 strong, and it makes your heart soar. It makes you cry. 

It's where you belong, not in your own little corner but as one beat in a massive moving human pulse.  E Pluribus Unum. It's loud, and it's uncomfortable, but it is wonderful. 

I had all but given up on the chance to walk in any of the women's marches last Saturday. My plans for DC fell through and then true to Colorado form the weather closed in and made driving to the nearest city of Denver a scary prospect. But at the last minute someone couldn't go on a bus I was eleventh on the waiting list for, and off I went at 3am, hardly knowing what I was going towards, only knowing that I had to go. I had no sooner got off the bus in Denver when someone from a radio station put a microphone in my face and forced the issue: Why on earth was I there?

This is what I said, not eloquent, because it was freezing at 8am in the Mile High City, and anyway, I hadn't really formulated the issue for myself. I said, "There's nothing much to be done about Donald Trump now but show solidarity against another male hierarchy. Woman have lived under male hierarchies for two thousand years, and it's time for a paradigm change."

I was wrong, of course. I vastly underestimated how long the male hierarchy thing has been going on. You have to go back to the moment in history those Israelites decided to take on their war god, El, as supreme God and make him plural, Elohim. Ex Uno Plures. Male God, male hierarchy. Across the world this happened. The goddess was seen as weak and discarded.

But, hey, she's back! 

There was nothing weak about the three million women who took on Predator in Chief Trump this last weekend. They came in the name, not of one male god, but with one female voice. I was there, and it was a wonderful. 

Marching as to War

20th January 2017

A star just appeared on my horizon, and it enables me to boycott the inauguration of Humpty Trumpty altogether and focus on what matters more to me, which is the independence bid of Scotland from the same rotting right wing factions that are taking over America. This week, the British prime minister defined her war zone and it doesn't include the single market within any community of foreigners, nor does it include any recognition of Scotland which has been screaming its dissent from the sidelines for at least a year and for the last three hundred years if you take the entire takeover of my lovely little country into consideration.



Get back in your box, says the British establishment. These boots are made for trumping.

Hard Brexit in Britain and Trump's inauguration today is a sad moment for progress. But for Scotland Brexit comes with a silver lining because it bolsters the arguments for independence. I am already seeing stickers for YES2018. If subersvience hadn't been pummeled into these occupied nations (a necessary strategy to keep the natives at heel), if the Scots hadn't been taught to keep their eyes on the well-heeled shoes of the masters, then the argument would have been over a long time ago.


You look at Trump handing Tillerson his in-route to the Russian economy and with the same utter disbelief you watch your fellow Scots handing Theresa May their allegiance. It's sheer ignorance, this Stockholm Syndrome, this kowtowing to the overlords, this adoration of the Windsor Magi.

I have been watching The Crown, a TV series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth the second of England and first of Scotland. These royals seem like nice enough people, but the takeaway is: what an utterly ridiculous insititution and how blithely it severs even those among them who dare to find a voice.

I say that I am turning a blind eye to Trumpantics today, but here I am about to make the four hour journey to Denver to join the thousands of women marching against the stinking offence called the old boy's club of America.
But in doing so, I will be taking a stand too against the self-interested shenanigans of the English government under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher Mark 2.
On either side of The Pond, we have the same sickness.

The Fall of the Titans

13th January 2017

History barrels forward with Humpty Dumpty elect, and Americans, who seem to have a psychological predisposition for gilding the lily, are going along with it. The question I keep asking myself is: how does this man and his party, this blatant takeover of America by collusion with its adversary, think they are all going to go down in history? We might have asked the same question of Nixon and his minions, but, frankly, Nixon would be welcome at this point. Come back twisted lier-in-chief, all is forgiven.

Kelly Anne Conway, adviser to Humpty Dumpty wants history to view him like this:

But take off the funny mask, and he is more like this:

The thing about any Humpty Dumpty is, he's set for a great fall. And that's how history will record Donald Trump and the strong-arms he surrounds himself with. Future high school students will look aghast at pictures of Trump and Tilllerson, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.  They will shake their heads at the rise of autocracy in this moment in American history, and teachers will have to explain how like any fascism it happened from power-grabs, unbound egoism and lies. Trump will end up on history's garbage heap with all the egoists who have made their ultimate goal power.
Our only solace, as we curl our toes around the edge of this precipice, is that when the fall is over, and we are dusting ourselves off, not  all the law suits, not all the kings horses nor all the kings men will ever be able to put this Dumpty together again.

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.