The Pinhoe Egg

I'm a huge Howl's Moving Castle fan. I think if I could be any character in any story, I'd be Sophie. We were talking Diana Wynne Jones a while back when my friend Harri told me that I'd also like The Pinhoe Egg.

Then, a few weeks back, nearing what would have been DWJ's 80th birthday, I walked into Nakumatt and there, on the shelf, was the book! 

How could I not buy it?

Anyway, due to crazy amounts of day job and other fantastic reads (including The Swan Thieves and The Shadow of the Wind) it sat on my shelf for a while. Also, because it's a hardback, which is my most favourite type of book to look at, but my least favourite for reading. I'm very much a Kindle convert. I like to carry a library in my bag without fear of damaging it. Also, I find reading in bed with a hardback cumbersome. If you don't hold it right you get hand cramp or hit yourself on the nose with the cover. 

For the past week though, I've taken it everywhere with me. It's surprisingly light for a hardback, and I only hit myself on the nose once.

Cat Chant and Marianne Pinhoe have discovered something incredibly exciting, truly precious, and very strange—an egg.

This egg was not meant to be found. Chrestomanci himself, Cat's guardian and the strongest enchanter in the world, is sure to find it particularly interesting. And that's the last thing Marianne's family of secret rogue witches wants.

But the Pinhoes' secrets are falling to pieces, and powerful spells are wreaking havoc across the country-side. Marianne and Cat may be the only two who can set things right—if Marianne accepts her own powerful magic, and Cat solves the mystery behind the mystical Pinhoe Egg.

I'd never read any of the Christomanci series before, but now I know that I must. DWJ never held back on telling a truly earth-based pagan tale, which is why I think so many love her.

"A new religion came to this country," Millie said, "full of zeal and righteousness - the kind of religion where, if other people didn't believe in it, the righteous ones killed and tortured them until they did. This religion hated witches and hated the hidden folk even more. They saw all invisible folk as demons, monsters and devils, and their priests devised ways of killing them and destroying their magic that really worked."

My friend Paul, who runs The Northern Antiquarian, has often theorised that what we call today 'modern paganism' and Wicca are the broken remnants of what was once a pre-Christian shamanic tradition. Basically, the conclusion of The Pinhoe Egg says something very similar, that there came a period of bloody violence in history, after which those who were left could only pick up the pieced of what they remembered and try to sew it back together as tradition.

Very interesting stuff, and, although my heart always belongs to Howl, Christomanci's quite dashing too. Though I think all those dressing gowns might get a bit overwhelming!

Book With No Pictures

Emergency Poet

I love this.

Own Worst Critic

JOB = Just Over Broke

Thanks to my friend Celia for sharing this one. Very talented Jamaican poet Kevaughn Ellis, telling it like it is with his poem Why?

Book Spine Poetry

Oh, this is just far too clever!

I've only just discovered Book Spine Poetry. There's a competition each year, and if you Google Image it you'll find some wonderful examples. The idea is to take three or more books and place them on top of each other so that the spines make a poem. Unfortunately, I only have three books in my entire house at the moment, and none of them form anything close to poetic. Hopefully by next year...

If you've made a poem of your own, please include a link to a picture below!

Flying Through

Just passed 10,000 words and have that old, familiar feeling that tells me this one is going to be a novel. That's a relief, after so long wondering whether I had another in me.

Work is really taking off at the moment, and I've been snatching time to write between signing development contracts. Today has been my day off, and I woke lazily, with the specific intention of writing. I did this for about an hour, then decided to go out and get a few real-world thing achieved (such as pricing a water tank - it's ironic to be writing about gods of the sea when I have no water coming out of my taps...). Got back just as the heavens opened. Tucked up in my office writing again to the sound of the rain.

I've been approaching this story with clinical determination. Unlike Rosy Hours, I have made little attempt to remember the ancient words I'm using. Each time I get to a place or a person whose name is tricky, I simply insert a question mark and continue. At a later date, armed with a Notepad list of each, I will go through and copy/paste them in. Doesn't sound much like the romanticised ideal of losing oneself in the characters, does it?

It was getting to the point where researching the period was making me afraid to write anything at all: did they have candles, tables, cheese - anything recognisable? I realised this type of obsessive research was hindering, rather than helping, the story, so I decided just to go for it. I'm lucky in that one of my trusted beta readers is a Gaelic-speaking Irishman with a love of folklore. I'm sure he'll pull me up on anything that doesn't feel right.

I've also just ordered a set of tin whistles to be sent out from home, as my next door neighbour expressed interest in learning, and I am missing music. There was a piano for sale in Kigali the other week, for far more than I could afford. The acoustics in my tiled house are fantastic, and it seems a shame it should go to waste. 

Hopefully whistles, with a little help from The Pogues and The Peatbog Fairies, will get me into the swing of things. Re-telling an old tale is nice in a way. It's a therapeutic form of novel writing, in that you don't have to think too hard about where it's going - everybody already knows that - yet you still take time for detours and sightseeing along the way. It's the picnic of prose, enjoying the tasty bits and discarding the crusts.