I Am Malala

Next up on my lockdown reading list is I Am Malala.

I know, I'm very late to read this one. I remember my dad reading it when it first came out in 2013 and telling me how it surprised him that her home village sounded so beautiful and green.

Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by a member of the Taliban on her way to school in 2012. She had always been an avid campaigner for women's education. Far from silencing her, this brought her campaign to global attention.

The biography is her story of growing up a Pashtun in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. It starts before the troubles, then takes you through 9/11 and the growth of extremism. It is also interesting to hear about American involvement from a local's point of view.

My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA. Children in the refugee camps were even given school textbooks produced by an American university which taught basic arithmetic through fighting. They had sums like: if out of ten Russian infidels, five are killed by one Muslim, five would be left. Or, fifteen bullets minus ten bullets equals five bullets.

There have been several historic stories of Peace Corps being used to keep tabs in the countries they work in, with volunteers being asked to spy. But being so blatant as to put that sort of stuff in a textbook for school is a move you would only conceive of in a pre-internet era. Someone would have Instagrammed a picture of that right away.

It was also interesting to hear about Pashtun culture. They rarely use the word 'thank you,' because they believe kindness can only be repaid with kindness, "it can't be repaid with expressions like 'thank you.'"

When she was recovering in England, the nurses thought she might like to watch Bend it Like Beckham, because it was about female empowerment, but she stopped watching when the girls were talking in their underwear, the immodest dress a bit of a shock having just come from a strictly Muslim country. 

But there were other parts which were extremely relatable to, showing that the experience of being a child is quite universal in some ways. She loved a children's programme where the character had a magic pencil where the drawing came to life. You could draw anything and make it real. We had a similar programme in the UK called Polly Crayon, and the idea was as appealing to British kids as it was to Pashtun kids. She was also very honest about stealing as a kid, which is something I also did a couple of times, and I think my mum once told me she'd done (probably whilst telling me off about doing it myself). And how you learn about right and wrong by testing those boundaries. You know the theory, but it's only when you put it into practise that the penny finally drops and you realise why you shouldn't do certain things. 

It was also nice to hear so much about her father's life and his campaign for women's education. Her parents both had a strong influence on her and it was absolutely heartbreaking when she was moved to the UK and they were left behind in Pakistan, seemingly because of a politician's lust for publicity delaying their visas. As she was recovering, the hospital had to turn away lots of visitors, both celebrities and politicians. Perhaps they just wanted to be there to offer support, but it didn't sound like they had thought much beyond their own thirst for a photograph. I imagine the last thing you really want after being shot in the head is a camera thrust in your face. 

Anyway, an excellent read, and well done to Christina Lamb who helped bring Malala's story together and create such a readable, relatable and emotional ride.

You can donate to The Malala Fund to help sustain girls' education.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Rightho, the next few posts are mostly going to be book reviews as I haven't done any during #IndieApril. 

Although, this first one isn't exactly a book. It's an audio adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by the lovely Paul Magrs. 

Join Dorothy, Toto and their new friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion as they journey down the yellow brick road in their quest to find the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 

I thought it was just a straight retelling until a few minutes in when they just wouldn't let the murder thing go.

Isn't that a pitiful sight, ay? Those two, poor skinny legs sticking out from under your house. Those two pathetic legs in their stripy tights and those little silver shoes sticking out like that. Just imagine dear. Just imagine what it must be like underneath. Ugh, she must be squashed, completely flat under there. Squashed, flat, like a bug.

Are you saying that my house has squashed one of your friends - to death?

Well, I don't think she's going to get up any time soon, do you dear?

Having only ever watched the film and never read the book, I was surprised to learn the ruby slippers were originally silver shoes, and that the Tin Man's name (from later books) is Nick, which makes sense, as he chops (nicks) wood and, in this case, manages to nick off his arms, legs and head.

It's a very easy listen at four-and-a-half hours, and you get Jim Broadbent (Cloud Atlas/London Spy) as the Wizard.

Very enjoyable way to pass the lockdown.

The Children of Lir for #IndieApril

Here's the last book in my #IndieApril book tour.

This is my latest release, The Children of Lir, which came out last year.

It's actually one of the oldest stories I wrote. I've always loved the original Irish folktale. I first read it in the Irish Folk and Fairy Tales Omnibus Edition by Michael Scott, which I picked up on holiday in the Republic of Ireland with family as a teenager. That book was a great influence as it showed  how quite straightforward characters in fairytales could be brought to life and made relatable. I spoke a bit about this with The Tangled Forest. On a more basic level, it showed me that you could retell a fairytale. That those stories belong to all of us and are there to be interpreted, reinterpreted and retold through the ages.

I first attempted to write my own version of The Children of Lir as a script, back in the days when I was an avid Celtx community member. The earliest version I've still got dates to around 2007, so a little before I wrote my first novel, Lucid.

After the prologue, the first chapter begins with the first lines of that script:

Some say my father was the god of the sea, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann who walked these green shores before the age of man. Some say he shaped destinies and carried the dead to their final resting place...

I've always felt it's an incredibly cinematic story with sweeping landscape and mythical beings. 

As with novellas, I soon discovered that scripts just aren't something you write unless you've been specifically invited to do so. There's really not a market for something like that on spec. However, I loved the story so much that I thought, If no one will read a script, I'll write a novel.

It is by far the longest I've ever written, resting at 119,000 words and over 450 pages.

Ghostwoods originally took the rights, offering my first ever advance and developing some cover art, but unfortunately they hit problems and had to stop most of their projects for a while. They asked whether I'd like to hold out for better times, but I decided, having spent so many years developing the story, that I wanted to go ahead and produce it myself.

Alongside Rosy Hours, I consider it to be my best work, though the two books are very different. It's one of the few novels I've written that isn't particularly dark, although there are some dark characters in there. It's strongly founded on the original translation, The Fate of the Children of Lir, by Lady Gregory. It was very important to me that the story followed the structure of the original legend as much as possible, but, within that, there was huge scope for creative license.

You already start out with a few glaring gaps, especially the timeframe. The children were supposedly Tuatha Dé Danann, turned to swans for 900 years, and turned back in the early days of Christianity. The problem here is that the Tuatha Dé Danann are thought to have left Ireland by around 1,700-1,477 BC. Even if the children were turned to swans by the very latest estimate, the curse would not have seen them to the age of Saint Patrick and the dawn of Christianity.

So, already we have to take some liberties.

Another liberty I took was with the ending. The tale was recorded by Christian scribes who had a bit of a habit of repurposing old pagan tales and festivals to promote the new faith. In some versions of the story the children are converted or baptised after they turn back. Having followed their story for so many thousands of words, that just didn't sit entirely right with me. So, I gave it a bit of a different ending. One I felt might be more true to the characters. As everyone else has written an ending to suit their tastes, I didn't feel that was much of a liberty.

For me, it's very much a story of two rivers converging: the old gods and the new. To live a lifetime which sees everything you ever knew replaced by something different, and to see how small we are in the vastness of time. It's very interesting subject matter to me, and the same sort of melancholic appeal that vampire stories tend to have. To outlive all those you love yet be unable to die. Does that make immortality a blessing or a curse? None of us particularly want to die, but what price would we pay to live?

There are also a lot of interesting relationships I stumbled across whilst researching. The original script was only about 77 pages, about 14,000 words including scene tags. To fill a novel, I really needed to go a lot deeper into the mythology. The gods of Ireland don't obey timelines. This is common in most ancient mythologies that predate the written word. Characters crop up at strange intervals and constantly change places, so it's hard to keep track of them. However, if 'mac' indicates a son, then Manannán mac Lir, god of the underworld, can reasonably be presumed to be Lir's son alongside his four children turned to swans. This opened up several interesting possibilities that I explored within the story. It became particularly useful during the 300 years they were stuck in the North Sea. The first half of the book was very easy to write, because it was about their life as humans, in a very tribal Iron Age world. The end was fairly easy too, ushering in the Christian era, which is well documented. But that lump of time in the middle was tricky. 'They sat on the ocean for three-hundred years,' just doesn't make for a gripping tale.

The more I investigated the family bonds, the more pages started to fill. One of my favourite characters is Bé Chuille, Witch of Lámhfada and Manannán sister-in-law, whose name I still can't pronounce. She's since become my favourite character, alongside Joe in Angorichina.  A very complex creature and a bit of a rough diamond - or demon.

I was a bit uncertain how this story would be received, as there have been many retellings of The Children of Lir over the years. However, most of them tend to be short and beautifully illustrated children's books, such as the gorgeous work of Alexandra Soranescu, whereas I really wanted to go for the epic adult retelling. I do feel that's what I've managed to achieve.

It's dedicated to my Irish (naturally) friend Cathryn, her husband Danny and their son Dara. Cathryn and I were VSO together in  Rwanda from 2007-09. We spent a lot of time drinking and talking. I originally wanted to publish this for their wedding, but by the time it finally came out they'd been married a couple of years and had a kid. Like the gods of Ireland, the publishing industry does not run to schedule.

As a slightly sad aside, I had a very good friend called Christiane Desrosiers who died of cancer here in Rwanda in 2015, after just gaining Rwandan nationality. We had also been VSO together. She arrived a year after I did. She was still here when I returned in 2014 and was building an ecolodge in Kibuye, beside Lake Kivu. We shared a love of books, and she was incredibly supportive of my writing. She really believed I should pursue it. Shortly before she died, I visited her in hospital to take her food and books. I also gave her a draft of this one. I know she was reading it, but I have no idea how far through she got before she died, and that stings a little bit. I hope it was a peaceful part, as the story is entirely about time, and death, and loss. I know it's a story that ordinarily she would have loved, but part of me hopes she didn't start it.

When I was editing the final copy, I did some of that on Lake Kivu, just over the water from her lodge. It is an extremely beautiful part of the country, though I don't think there are any swans there.

The cover was designed by Valdas Miskinids, and there was quite a bit of debate about the colour. It was originally in red, then he gave me a couple of other options in green and blue and it was put to a public vote, with green narrowly winning out over blue, though everyone seems to have their favourite.

On release day, my dad bought me some chocolates. Apparently there's a Lir Chocolate Company. They're very yummy.

And, in a strange turn of events, whilst I was writing the book, I visited Cathryn and Danny in London. Walking back to their house from the train station one night, I happened to see this on the wall of a house. Rather fitting.

PURCHASE

The Tangled Forest for #IndieApril

The penultimate book on my #IndieApril book tour and probably the shortest.

This one came out in 2018, the same year as Creeper's Cottage. It began life as a one-off novella called Wolfish. It was a very dark retelling of Red Riding Hood. I've always been interested in myths and fairytales. Philip Pullman's introduction to Grimm's Fairytales has it pegged - they're very two-dimensional and often with quite a blatant moral message. But I love this idea that many of the gods from Vodoun to Norse mythology were based on people who probably walked the earth. The way the Kings of Ireland, Africa and many other areas start out as mythical god-like beings and then suddenly step onto the page as recorded individuals with complete histories. More complete the more time passes.

I love the idea of reaching back into those half-known places and pulling a complete, complex being from the mists. Taking flat fairytales and blowing some life into them. What would those stories be like if those were real people with all their thoughts and feelings, all that messy emotion, along for the ride?

I'm also drawn towards Red Riding Hood for the sexual element. There are so many folk angles in there about what she represents: Mother Redcap with her love charms, or the menarche with its first stirrings of sexual possibility, or forbidden lust for that animalistic side of things, the fight between desire and decorum.

Plus, I'm someone who likes the darker side of literature, so the colour red is always a lure. How did that cloak get so awfully red?

That's sort of the question I set out to answer, so you can probably guess where it goes.

So, I wrote it just for fun in between Rosy Hours and Creeper's Cottage. I put it out on submission and got a very polite knockback saying they really liked the writing but couldn't take a novella... and they weren't the only ones. It soon became very apparent that no serious writer in their right mind ever, ever writes a novella.

Ghostwoods took pity on me and suggested that if I wrote a couple more to go with it, they could perhaps release them as a collection.

So, that's what I did. Two more, that I have to admit I wasn't overly into until I started them, but which quickly grew on me. I went for the story of Snow-White and Rose-Red, which, being honest, didn't come out at all as I planned. It was all going to be told from one sister's perspective and there was going to be a lot of blood-on-snow imagery, which just never materialised. Instead, both sisters got in on the act and it turned into a sort of weird romp through the woods with a bit of dark, cartoonish humour. I ended up thoroughly enjoying myself.

Then I switched back to serious tone for the final telling, Skin, which is based on the French story Donkeyskin (Peau d'Âne). I chose that one because I had a huge book of illustrated fairytales as a kid and one of the most beautifully illustrated was this story, with its dresses sewn of sunlight and stars. Wish I could remember the book, now.

Anyway, I cobbled them together as a collection. Unfortunately, Ghostwoods decided they didn't want them, but that did leave me free to self-publish using the wonderful artwork of Victoria Cooper.

It was just a little side project that got a bit out of hand. 

PURCHASE

James Elkington

For all those stuck inside and unable to go walkabout, here's some photography by my friend James Elkington. I think his stuff is absolutely marvelous, and often contains stone circles and ancient landscapes of the British Isles. You can find more and order prints on his website, Facebook or Instagram.

Master of Audible

Huzzah! 

I wrote a while back about my battle with the Audible App. It had a bug so the Master level got stuck on 'one hour to go' - forever. When I tried the fix Amazon suggested, it wiped about a day and a half off my listening time.

Rather upsetting.

Anyway, I've listened to a few more books since then. When I checked in, Master was back on 'one hour to go,' and looked like it had got stuck again, so I stopped checking. Then, whilst looking at some other stats the other night, I saw that it had finally lit up.

My current listening time is 22 days, 22 hours and 15 minutes, though, as I say, I lost about 36 hours when the app crashed.  

Either way, that's a whole lot of hours and some mighty fine reads. 

Creeper's Cottage for #IndieApril

Next stop on the Indie April book tour is Creeper's Cottage.

This was written entirely for the fun of it.

Through my publisher, Ghostwoods, I made the acquaintance of the lovely David Southwell, who turned out to be a fan of Rosy Hours. He provided a quote for the back and has been extremely supportive of my writing.

Around the same time, he was working on his project called Hookland. Or The Phoenix Guide to Strange England. I've explained what Hookland is before, but in brief it's a mythical county in England where folklore lives and breathes. Any weird stories, old wives tales or creepy occurrences from across the British Isles have a home there. A fantasy world which all sorts of artists can add to by writing stories, posting photographs and artwork.

I was strongly drawn to this as I'm a huge fan of things like #FolkloreThursday and anything a little Fortean. I'm also a huge fan of MUDs and collaborative worldbuilding. So I leapt at the chance to look over an early edition of the Hookland Guide for Writers, which laid out the geography and key folklore.

It just felt very natural to set a novel there.

Rosy Hours had taken a lot of research. There had been inter-library loans, documentaries, photographic archives... a labour of love. Once it was done, I didn't really feel like diving straight into another book that would require more research. I wanted to write something fun, with all the creative license I wanted.

Hookland was perfect. I grew up in a small village famed for its witchcraft. The guide reminded me of all those moonlit back lanes and empty pubs with the creaking boards above the door. It was any rural English backwater, and at the same time it was not. It was whatever else you wanted to throw in there.

I'm also a huge Peaky Blinders fan, and round about that time I went on a trip to the Black Country Museum with dad and Marilyn. That's where they filmed parts of it. It's one of a handful of 'living museums' across the country. There's another one in Wales. The idea is that listed buildings that are in danger of dereliction can be taken apart brick by brick and rebuilt on museum land, so that future generations can visit them. You can wander through the houses and they bring the past to life with actors and farm animals.

It was whilst at the Black Country Museum that we went inside an old squatter's cottage, where itinerant workers used to live. I just stood there thinking, they transferred the bricks, but what else did they bring with them? All the hopes and fears, memories, tears and laughter those walls must have absorbed over the years. It wasn't just a house they'd brought with them, but all the history that went with it.

Perfect premise for a ghost story. 

The inspiration for Creeper's Cottage at the
Black Country Museum

So, the story is about a lord living in Hookland who is trying to start his very own living museum, only things start to get a little creepy. It's a ghost story.

The whole thing was so much fun to right. I didn't really set off with much more of an idea of the plot beyond the living museum, so the characters surprised me as they turned up. You don't need to know a single thing about Hookland to enjoy it, but, as with Rosy Hours, if you do know the background there's a few Easter eggs in there.

I took the liberty of transposing one place I know from my home county to Hookland. The Marchers's wooden house is a real place. And yes, in summer, musicians sometimes turn up and jam, and we go swimming. I call it 'my local pool.' And it is an old brick-maker's reservoir, so it's safe to swim because there are no pipes below. Places are powerful, and I wanted to preserve this one.

Picture courtesy of Sean Boustred

To say there was no research involved is a fib. I contacted living museums to learn about the process of moving houses, to try to make it authentic. Looked up a lot of building practices and even how to put in a root barricade, which weirdly served me well the other day as my landlord had to put one in my garden to protect the wall from the roots of a palm tree. I stood there, hands on hips, and in my most knowledgeable voice suggested how far the barricade should be from the tree - because I'd read all about it for no other reason than to make half a paragraph seem like I knew what I was talking about.

Writers are all professional diletantes. We learn so much stuff we'll never need again, but every now and then, a situation presents itself where you look like the smartest kid in school. So long as no one asks a follow-up question, you're sorted.

And, although the Hookland Writers Bible was fictional, it took almost as much research as writing about an actual historical place, because I had to make sure that what I wrote didn't directly contravene anything David wrote - it's his world, after all. The book needed to compliment what he had created rather than compromise it.

This was also the first book I ever decided to self-publish. I didn't think it was likely to find a publisher given the niche market and fan base, so I finally got to grips with typesetting. It was tough going, but I'm glad I did it. It's given me a greater respect for publishers, but also more freedom as an author that I don't have to bind myself to what I think a publisher might take. I can write what I like and still have a decent POD product at the end.

So far, I've had a small amount of really lovely feedback from citizens of Hookland, though not many reviews. I'm happy though. It was fun to write and design. And a big 'thank you' to José Bethencourt Suárez for the cover, which rocks.  

PURCHASE