Pancake Day

Lucid Q&A

The following is a promotional Q&A answering reader questions about Lucid. I tried to get through as many as possible in a sensible time.

There are some more interviews on my website, plus an article relating to this particular book:

Mirador Publishing Bucks the Trend in Falling Book Sales and Launches New Imprint

Although this is a recorded interview, there is also a transcript available.

Lucid is available in paperback or for Kindle at Amazon (US/UK/all EU outlets). In all e-formats, including PDF and e-readers, from Smashwords. Or for order at your local bookshop with the ISBN: 1908200642

Enjoy.

Kill the Bill

I've been following the Bahati Bill in Uganda quite closely. In 2008 I interviewed GayUganda for an article on being gay in East Africa. You can find that interview on my website.

That was just before David Bahati, fueled by Evangelical hate preachers from the US, announced his bill proposing the death penalty for homosexual acts.

In 2008, I asked GayUganda what sort of future he envisioned in five years time for Uganda's LGBT community.

He could never have predicted this.

You can get up to speed, and help take action, on the Kill the Bill website.  

Memory Lane

 

Did you know that there actually is a Memory Lane in Leicester?

I've been undertaking a project lately, to re-post a blog that I started aged 26, as part of my travel blog. It's an extremely strange experience, and I'd like to give the dust time to settle before saying what I really thought of Younger Me. 

I think I'm quite lucky to have the chance to do this. It was the first blog I ever wrote, and I took to journaling like a proverbial duck to water. I'm not sure there are many people who can look back in such extreme detail at their lives almost six years ago.

There was one particular post that's struck me so far. I was clearing out the room I rented, Freecycling everything I couldn't put into storage. For some reason there was a box of 'metal cats'. I now remember that as being an eBay venture that didn't work out - buy cheap, sell on. I got the first bit right, but the second bit failed to materialise.

However, it took me a long time to remember this. I read the sentence several times thinking 'Metal cats? What metal cats?' I couldn't even picture them. Then it came back to me. If it hadn't been for that one, detailed (perhaps overly detailed, some might say) line, I never would have thought of them again. That episode in my life would have been completely erased.

The same goes for keyrings described and lost, meals eaten, and even guests who stayed the night! It's absolutely incredible the amount we of life we forget.

I thought I'd share with you a section from my novel Lucid, which is all about memory. Suddenly, it seems to have taken on extra significance.

THE IN-BETWEEN TIMES

When a parent dies, you don’t just lose them, you lose part of who you are. Other people come and go through your life. Most of them you don’t meet until halfway through. But parents are there from the very beginning. They were there through all of the things you can’t remember. They were there even before you had memory. It’s all those conversations beginning with ‘do you remember...’ that die with them. There are parts of your life, of who you are, of what made you you, that cannot be accessed alone; that need someone else to return you to that moment in time.

It’s scary how little of life we remember, and how much relevance we place on those precious fragments that we do. They become our anchor in this void of transient oblivion. 

What did you have for breakfast this day two years ago? If you don’t remember, does that mean it never happened?

The answer might be ‘because it’s unimportant,’ but isn’t it funny the things that are important. Little moments of childhood, the tone of somebody’s voice, the look in someone’s eye, an experience, a heated exchange, and, in between all of those muddy remembrances, the half-imagined things which leave us with only a sense of something having happened. 

Predominantly, though, there is a nothing. A vast, all-engulfing void of things that might as well never have happened, because they are certainly never remembered. Think back over your life, over the days, the hours, the seconds. If you had to give a percentage of how much of your life you honestly remember in glowing multi-colour surround sound, what would it be? Thirty per cent? Forty? Higher? Lower?

This used to frighten her. This notion that, for more than half her life, she couldn’t actually remember existing. She used to lay awake thinking about it until gradually she came to see this as a comfort, rather than a threat. The change began when she read an article in Australian Psychiatry at university. It talked about the aboriginal concept of time, where the things that have the greatest impact on you – the things that you remember the clearest – are the closest in time. You don’t remember eating breakfast yesterday? That doesn’t matter, it happened a hundred years ago. But the bully who hit you in the face at school – that happened an hour ago. Finding that article was like breathing out after holding her breath for so long. A question she couldn’t quite form had been answered. 

As she lay there on her bed with tears streaming down her cheeks, she felt a kind of calm come over her. In aboriginal time, she lost her mother twenty seconds ago. The pain was still so sharp that it hurt every part of her.  In our time, it had been almost nine months. December; a car accident. As the cold dark nights drew in, they suffocated the life out of her mother until, eventually, they engulfed her completely and she was gone. 

She had held her hand as she slipped away. That moment, when her mother finally breathed out, was so enormous that it eclipsed everything else that had happened in her life before then. It was the clearest moment in time that she had ever experienced. 

And that’s when she got scared. It made her realise how much she didn’t remember, and how much of who she was, and the things she’d done, were locked up in her mother’s head. All of those conversations came flooding back: ‘Do you remember Rachel, you were such good friends at nursery..’, ‘Can you remember the time we went to Portsmouth and saw the big ships...’, ‘…and you remember, you never let go of that teddy, whatever happened to it?’ Most of it she couldn’t remember. Not until her mother had reminded her. Then it would come flooding back and she would wonder how she had ever forgotten. 

Therein lay the answer; the comforting point: just because she didn’t remember, didn’t mean it had never happened. Just because she didn’t remember being three, didn’t mean that she had never been three. 

This is how she came to think of death, or ‘non-life’. Just because she didn’t remember before she was born, didn’t mean that she hadn’t been conscious. It didn’t mean that she wasn’t there; that there was nothing. 

So why shouldn’t the same be true after death? When she thought of death, she thought of a big black. Like a sheet of felt paper in art class at school when the teacher would give you white chalk to draw with. Only this black you can’t draw on, because it swallows everything you try to think or do. That’s a pretty scary thought on its own, but when you think about someone you love, like your mother, going there all alone... 

The world’s woe flowed through her. Sobs choked off her thoughts like a trip-switch for her own protection. For a long time she thought about her mother disappearing into that black paper until she became black paper herself; nothing left. That’s when she really started to think about memory. That’s when she realised that being dead must be very similar to not being born yet, and that not being born yet must be very similar to the majority of your life that you just don’t remember. That’s when she started to feel a bit calmer. They were all just in-between times. The parts we remember, or think we remember, they’re actually special, because they are rare.

Science to Art

Isn't this fantastic? Classic Painters Pinned and Dissected. Created as adverts for the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) Art School and Facebooked by Science to the Power of Art: ''a microbiologist and artist... using scientific methods to create art about the beauty and poetry found in science." Check out his Day-Glo Velocirabbit.

Evaäia

Meet Zieb^Dum, a character that first appeared in a very early novella I wrote, and has since popped up again in my current novel. I'm trying my hand at Fantasy. Just blocking out the story at the moment. It's the first story I've ever written where I have to open not only the .doc but also a glossary and a spreadsheet of characters, places and races! 

Have to do a ten minute catch-up before setting to work each time. 

Just coming up to the 50k mark - about halfway there.

One thing I like a lot about the genre is its ability to parody our true history and circumstances. Terry Pratchett is master of that, with shopping malls and women's rights thrown into the mix. It's a very flexible medium, easy to apply to comedy, tragedy, romance and speculative fiction.

Sometimes it does take a bit of getting into character. I've attempted to find music to spur me on. Suzanne Vega's Queen and the Soldier has been on repeat for a while. On one occasion, I even elfed-up. Think I need to source some pixie ears from eBay.

Those of you who are writers will already have spotted that what I've actually been doing is distracting myself from writing, under the pretence of helping myself to write. Easily done.

Let's see whether I get any further by this time next week.

Snowed In

Hmm. This was the view from my bedroom window today.

We've had rather a lot of heavy snow. 

I always find snow inspiring. That something so beautiful can be so destructive. The two great polarities that led to A Song of Ice and Fire?

We have our own little juxtaposition going on here at the moment, with the cold snow outside, and a warm sauna inside. Just what you need in this weather.

I must admit that the writing retreat is not going as well as anticipated. After a few days of furrow-browed concentration, I went off horse riding instead. Riding by day, blogging by night. My word count has hardly budged. I have a week to make up for that now that the weather is too cold to go out as much.

Thoughts on a Frozen Window...

Icicle my tooth, as frost shall be my touch
The coldest heart you've ever known
Buried 'neath the frozen crush

Reflections in great sheets of ice
Suffocate the fish below
As hail and hoar and snow
Hide the things we used to know

I know you, and you know me
The crying thrush, the barren tree

Nothing grows, and nothing lives
Nowt to love and nowt to give
I'll call the heavens down to earth
'til all the world is white as dust

Many of my poems seem to centre around Winter.

Like The Crone of Winter, they always tend to turn a little bitter.

I promise, the moment the thaw comes and the first spring flowers appear, I'll post the most sickeningly sweet poem I ever wrote - then you'll be grateful for the frost.