Writing a Series: re-meeting my characters …

What’ve you been doing? Haven’t seen you in a while …

Yes it’s been while … Now Christmas is thoroughly over: it came with a pile of reading for the dark December/January evenings … I’ve read for review and I’ve beta read a couple of emerging books. And that’s where I’ve been. I need to write up a couple more reviews. All are Indie novels, some in genres I don’t usually read. (You can read my review of Francis Guenette’s Maelstrom on Amazon, or on Goodreads here) This is a novel by a writer whose ‘Crater Lake’ series I’ve enjoyed, and was a departure for her into something rather different. though stamped with the Guenette interest in landscape, indigenous peoples, and her insight into human psychology. Another was a debut YA fantasy, Philip Davies’ Destiny’s Rebel (available also on Amazon). For contrast, I’m reading (non-Indie) Khulud Khamis’s Haifa Fragments .

As a writer, I’m something of a rebel: for one thing, those writerly myths – the special pen or notebook, the childhood spent with nose in a book, the early stories scribbled in an exercise book … hum … here’s a writer whose serious work began on a keyboard, who drew rather than wrote all those early attempts at storytelling, (the art teacher even at A level was critiquing my work as, ‘Ah – it’s very narrative, isn’t it?’). And my handwriting doesn’t either deserve a special pen or get one. As for the notebook …

Myths aside, when I began writing, (and after those early attempts, two whole novel-length typescripts but not quite there yet) I really wanted to do something different. What is more exciting than the world of life sciences, especially the microscopic world where life begins? The cutting edge of biological science, the ‘how and why’ basics of cells and reproduction?

The Mullins Family novels: Baby, Baby and The Labyrinth Year, an on-going tale …

‘Write what you know’ is a (disputed) piece of advice: interpreting that as ‘write what thrills you’, I invented Jenny Guthrie’s world, set her up with a passionate relationship, and took her on a journey into a world she’d been taught to shun, religious fundamentalism. Research for Baby, Baby was thrilling, (especially being taken to look behind the scenes at fertility clinic, and viewing slides on an electron microscope). I added heaps to my biological knowledge, and got to know much more than I actually needed, and it was all fascinating.

In the follow-up, The Labyrinth Year, Jenny’s attempts at being a ‘feisty female’ academic and a yummy mummy leave her wondering where she went wrong. That was, fictionally, back in 1997.

What might this picture say about how we understand love?

 I’m busy getting to know my characters again. Here’s a writerly myth that works for me: let the characters speak to you, and let them as far as possible lead the story. Research is underway (hence tardiness with the blog), and rumoured to include mitochondria and human embryos. Parents and teenagers are causing problems, and friends are sharing confidences. Stepsister Daze (the artist who crept sneakily into Baby, Baby although the book wasn’t meant to be concerned with art, galleries, and suchlike) will as always try to steal the limelight, though her language has ‘mellowed with time’. Genetics is still in there somewhere, and love is being interpreted by various characters in a selection of ways.

So far, Max is keeping secrets to himself.

Confocal microscopy shows us these organelles, (tiny organisms inside a cell)

I’m now getting excited by the possibility of learning more about the mitochondrial research recently approved by the HFEA . And though these mayn’t appear in the book, I have to find a photo which shows organelles … hopefully in creative commons.

Looking to the future, and in the real world : Hawkesbury LitFest, (known as the HULF) will be back on 23^rd April again this year. I’m booked to read along will many other Indie authors who appeared last year, and some new ones. This year’s Festival will include poetry and children’s authors.

If you’re anywhere in striking distance, (Hawkesbury Upton is a Cotswold village in South Gloucestershire, UK), do consider joining us!  23^rd April is a Saturday this year, and this year’s Festival will run all day. Readings, a selection of panel discussions, and books to browse and buy …

A Writer’s Christmas: Perspective of 2015

So, the writer is about to write the Christmas Letter.

The quite awful letter where parents kvell (I think that’s the word?) about the kids and what’ s

What the kids are doing …

been achieved in terms of music lessons, exams, and riding a bicycle.

Only, as the kids are grown, thankfully we don’t need to join the party with that kind of stuff …

DO I FEEL ‘CHRISTMASSY’ AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHES?

No. Advent maybe: the time of watching and waiting.

 

Once, we waited through Advent, we kids, trembling, almost, with expectation. Gradually the seasons drew nearer and nearer, until on truly magical Christmas Eve, the tree was bought and decorated. We looked up to see the Star of Bethlehem shining once more in the navy-blue sky, over a frosty city, smelling of coldness and slightly of petrol.

The Tree in today’s front room … (2014)

My earliest Christmas memory is of  standing in the doorway of our front room, and there was this amazing sight: the Tree, covered in glittery ornaments.  They turn, slowly,  reflecting the many-coloured lights. The room’s suffused with a gentle warmth. I am stunned, totally. Later, at my grandparents’ house, aged six, I  feel no disappointment or surprise on waking briefly, the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, to see a parental hand placing presents in my stocking.

After all, presents are presents, and secrets kept on both sides so as not to disappoint have a thrill of their own … We all kept up the myth, and Father Christmas/Santa continued to get his sherry and mince pie for many more years.

But oh how deep the disappointment of not having a ‘part’ in the nativity play, aged 7.  Oh how much I wasn’t deceived by the sop of being ‘in the choir’! Of course, we were obviously a group of left-overs … (was that really true? Probably.)

Everything was one: cards, tree, F.Christmas/Santa, crib and carols

Tree Decorating

With the King’s Carols on the radio, as time went by, I got to decorate that tree and create the magic. Cards were displayed on every flat surface: bookshelves, windowsill, mantlepiece. Mostly of the famous mother, father, and baby-in-the-manger. Simplicity, profoundity, replicated in many styles and colours. Delicate Medieval drawings from Books of Hours, High Renaissance paintings, bright sketches by contemporary graphic artists.

The Magi travelled on camels towards a stylised Middle Eastern town, pictured against a pink dawn (or sunset).

The shepherds on their hillside were staggered to witness an angel choir.

Christmas past, the years of security.

Star Cookies

This year the cards we’re sending will be secular: winter scenes, robins, holly, nothing ‘religious’. Not the crib, the stable, the angels, or the little family far from their home: even though that’s horribly relevant this year. It’s all come apart: not personally, but societally. The base-line story, from the food, presents, parties, and Santa (secret or otherwise). Yes, I enjoy the annual get-together of neighbours, and the once–a-year catch-up with far-flung friends and relatives. But  the excess, and expectation to indulge, first communally and then, in the sudden silence of the most magical day, as a nuclear family. It’s no self-indulgent sadness, that today (having avoided the BBC News today) my priorities have been to get some work time, and some peace (to study the MSF website as it happened).

 It’s  more about the watch and wait of Advent

Knitted Nativity

Whatever will be happening on 25th December this year, a pretty picture of the Holy Family isn’t going to solve anything. Realistically viewing the world in December 2015, Christmas pictured  in those cards is a reassuring myth. Maybe I should’ve designed my own cards: ruined apartment blocks, broken lives … under the Star of Bethlehem. That was the reality for Mary (a terrified teenager) and Joseph and their baby – blessed to be born alive, and grow up healthy, despite soon to be running away from a hostile government. The Middle East isn’t a pretty town against the sunset … most of the world isn’t – some of us live in a little corner where some of it is, sometimes.

Flying Angel with Tinsel

Which is an eternal (or at least historical) truth. As a group, humanity hasn’t yet solved the problem of living together under one sky as one global family. Card-wise, there’s the problem: the traditional Nativity scenes belie what we see on the News, turning religious Christmas into a false promise.

As a fiction writer, I engage with this as I work on the third story of the Mullins family. Love You to the Moon attempts at exploring what we mean by love … and what love gone wrong looks like … as in the wider world, everything moves nearer and nearer towards what feels like a worse chaos, rather than a new beginning.

Watch, and wait …

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it …

(This was written during the Commons debate 2/12/15:  #prayforSyria)

 

 

 

 

Standing with Parisians, under the tricolour

Soon after ‘Remembrance Day’ I find myself symbolically dressed

It wasn’t until I added a beret (because it was howling a gale outdoors and I didn’t want my hair blowing across my face) that I glanced in the mirror and saw I was dressed in the colours of the Tricolour. Freudian, you say? Hardly: a navy and white striped skirt demanded a plain jumper, and the cherry-coloured one, bought recently, went perfectly: red and navy, a traditional match.

We have exchanged the red poppies of peace in Europe, produced originally as reminders never to go to war again, for the Tricolour, which arose from the French Revolution. We stand united with the people of Paris, traumatised since Friday’s terrorism. What our leaders decide to do about this may  look like retaliation, or ‘revenge’.

Young adults visiting Paris in the 1930s: hardly a more peaceful time to come? (Source: family history album)

For days I’ve wished the rhetoric would stop, sadness at the consequences of all our clashing histories would sink in, and be admitted, and  recognised in as many ways as possible. Busy deciding on whether to write about ‘Christmas, what does it mean to you?’ or ‘Why I write what I write’ for my next blog, I’ve ‘procrastinated’ by working on my novel.

Novel number 3 in the Mullins Family Saga: Love You to the Moon is themed around the vexed question of  what we mean by ‘love’. Constructed to include a variety of expressions of love, the plot should lead towards a catastrophic gesture in which the love (obvious to its perpetrator but not to anyone else) is certainly debatable.

So what do we mean by ‘Love’?

On Saturday, a quote from Martin Luther King was circulating on Facebook. The message, basically, was love can conquer hate. Meant as a message hope, this carries within it the sad fact that hope is so crushable, so disposable, and so easily forgotten.

Martin Luther King was a preacher, and knew his Bible: in the words he chose, he had adapted a phrase, well known and read at most Carol Services. Soon it will be Christmas, and all over Britain crowds, whether normally churchgoers or not, will hear it read: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Sometimes the original Greek phrase is translated as ‘the darkness has not comprehended (understood) it.’ Here’s something so significant for our time. Light shining into darkness illuminates, penetrates, and makes everything clear to see. When we further translate, using love for light, then love being shown to those who do not understand love, and whom we believe to have acted through hate (translated darkness) should be a powerful weapon, or rather, a powerful overcomer, for love doesn’t seek, in overcoming, to destroy.

However … were it that easy!

My motivation for looking at ‘love’ in the next Mullins family series is to try and tease out, in story,  the meanings, and the interpretations, of this so widely and over-used word.  ‘Altruism’ or unselfish acts, given freely beyond duty or  expectation of ‘payback’ has been dismissed, debunked, or denied existence  by thinkers like Richard Dawkins: we all know about The Selfish Gene or we think we do. Every unselfish act is really me-directed. (Really …?)

Alongside that belief, ‘love’ is used when ‘desire’,  ‘instinct’ or ‘desire to control’ would fit the context better. Literature is filled with such uses and excuses. A  banner at a demonstration against domestic violence, especially rape, reads ‘Love shouldn’t Hurt’, but  the obviously contextual meaning  was ‘Sex shouldn’t hurt’. Which was somehow also sad since love, as in generosity, does quite often hurt,  but in a very different way.

The bothersome questions

So, back to Paris, Friday 13th, and the sudden atrocities in the city perhaps most associated with Love (equals sex/romance)?  Emotions poured out, candles and flowers, expressing sorrow, horror, fear: immediate reactions.

A few days on,  if we collectively self-identify with the light/love quote expressed in that and, adopt a Tricolour solidarity as our Facebook profile, what does this mean to us, to  those who were caught up in the events, or to on-lookers?  We need to ask ourselves this question.  Long term, what is this solidarity? And to answer with honesty and integrity. Would we agree to do everything in our power to seek revenge, or to see that the collective reaction of Europe is not one of hatred, and if so, what actually does getting involved mean?  Are our collective hands clean anyway, in historical terms, are we white as pure light, or have we, as  nations, thrown elements into the international pot which is now boiling over?

Are we also fundamentalists, our current fundamentalism being free speech, strangely coupled with a strong cultural preference for secular values? Historically the religious cultural background of Europe, brought over from the Middle East itself, are not control, empire-building or capitalism. Ironically, they are based on a teaching of ‘love towards enemies’ with a bias towards the poor and the disadvantaged. It was for our founder to be the basis for condemnation and execution.

The shadow of revenge

While realising that in pragmatic, realistic terms, air strikes and retaliation may be forced upon the international community, it is horrifying to hear the rhetoric from some international leaders. At the same time, standing back we wonder at our own reactions, hope these are more than ‘knee-jerk’ and whether our love is real enough to stand testing. What do candlelight vigils and bouquets really mean, once the candles burnout and the flowers wither and fade? When the street cleaners clear it all up – which they will inevitably  have to.

How ironic that the attack took place only 2 days after the anniversary of the Armistice: is anyone left alive who can recall that day, and how felt? ‘Remembering’ was instituted so that there would ‘be no more war’, and not to ‘glorify the military’. SInce then, weapons and devices have increased in power and in use.

I return to writing my novel themed around what is love, using that phrase which, analysed for meaning would be found to be meaningless: Love You to the Moon.

Related Articles (which I’ve read in the past few days) you may find interesting:

From The Guardian’s Middle East Editor, Sunday 15th November  (The information here is referred to in Arab Digest, a blog which collects together articles from journalists and experts on the Middle East from around the world)

SheridanVoysey’s blog on Turning the other cheek in an age of terrorism

People-Watching: so what would an alien conclude?

Random jottings for the blog – which then became the blog …

Not being Moleskine-notebook person, I scribbled these in a very small, uncharacteristic notebook late at night, a notebook for shopping and to-do lists

I have begun: the first three pages of novel No. 3 (theme: What is Love?) exist outside of my brain. I’ve re-engaged with the characters. So, thinking about what we mean by love, and how is it shown, encourages me to look even more at how human beings think, behave, function towards each other, under a virtual microscope.

Of course, thinking about people is what fiction writers do all the time: we do it by nature, we are amazed, frustrated, delighted, appalled, by people … Observation presents random thoughts all the time: but now, how do they add up ?

Some Examples: is the other person ‘real with needs like me’?

Are you real like me?

1. People are weird. No doubt about it. For example, how does another person hear what we say? Through a filter of past experiences. A straight remark can be heard as sarcasm, a word of praise taken as ironic, an enquiry about whether a person is free on a certain day or has a certain skill as the precursor to a demand for that they should help or be available to the speaker. We are afraid each other!

2. People, after what seemed like period of historical peace, are on the move again. Vast numbers of people, displaced and driven out from countries where life is becoming unliveable are taking almost unbelievable risks rather than remain where they were. We joined our local demonstration.

Oxford Demo ‘Refugees Welcome’ September 2015

It was maybe March when we  began to increasingly hear about  ‘migrants’ on the News. It wasn’t until late summer, and finally until someone published a photo of a drowned toddler, that the international community began to talk loudly enough to be heard. Yes, these people did indeed need somewhere to be. They were after all ‘refugees’: fleeing for refuge.  Were the demonstrators serious? Or will it soon look like emotion, the sunshine, and a Sunday afternoon out with a banner? I hope not.

A parallel: last year, in about March, supporters of aid organisations, especially of MSF, were made aware of the crisis in West Africa caused by a massive outbreak of Ebola. It wasn’t until  August that the WHO ‘declared the emergency of international concern.’ At last the whole thing sounded as urgent as it had always been. And then, development of possible vaccines and treatments was stepped up … a shocking  example of how tropical illnesses don’t usually receive the same interest and research grants that typically Western disease does.

It’s not a global village: there’s little care or knowledge about people in really troubled places. It is however, very definitely a global village: infection can travel faster than ever. So can terrorists and weapons of war.

How Rules are Applied … is this compassionate?

3. Another scenario: health and safety. So, a patient is admitted to an acute ward in a mental hospital – disturbed, frightened, maybe aggressive, panicking … their cigarettes, on which they depend for comfort, are taken away,  …Basically, smoking is harmful … But, a baby is being left at nursery for the first time: would we snatch away a pacifier or favourite toy, right away?  It’s possible to argue for the protection of the staff from passive smoking: but shouldn’t this ban be explained, later, to the patient, when they are feeling calmer, and able to understand? (My info. source: mental health nurse on acute ward)

We implement rules without applying sensible, but pragmatic, thought to individual situations. It’s so much easier to treat people as things, as a mass to be processed.

Is nothing special now …

or I thought going out was the now way to meet with friends? 

A coffee too ordinary

4.  Coffee comes in many forms: cappuccinos, lattes, flavoured coffees… we used to get these when we’re out. They were special. Do we really need a coffee machine in the home, which performs all the same tricks? Beans to cup? Steam heated milk included? Going out and staying in are getting so samey? What happened to treats?

What happens to people who have, in material terms, everything? What actually is ‘love’?

New novel, new theme, familiar characters …

Wedding Cake

‘Love’ is possibly one of the most indiscriminately used in the English language. Whatever do we mean – and what do others mean when they hear or read the word we’ve spoken or written?

Valentine’s Day Cookies

As the twin towers burned and fell, messages of I love you were sent across from desperately trapped employees of the companies who worked in those buildings. A child reluctantly writing a thank-you letter to a hardly known relative, for a badly-chosen present, learns to send love from …

We commit our lives to one another – or we express merely our lust of the moment … calling both acts prompted by love … There was once a popular phrase in some circles, Smile, God loves you …present-day preachers constantly refer to God’s love or even God’s unconditional love …

We love this beach

We’re told we shall love or hate a film, a book, a political candidate’s agenda … we love chocolate, reading, your new hairstyle, your hat.

I also love belonging to ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors) … and I loved being part of the first Hawkesbury LitFest back in April so much that I’ve committed to joining the ‘pop-up LitFest’ at the Hawkesbury Annual Show on 29th August … and we also love our cats … even on the desk (no, not on the desk…) …

‘We love to eat … but here are 2 of life’s puzzles: biscuits, but where?’

Enough examples: we say we love, yet we deceive. We say we act in love, but act selfishly, or out of despair. We use loving our children both to protect them from harm and to push them academically.

We endlessly use the L-word as a reason, or excuse, for emotionally driven behaviour.

In the Mullins family story, book 3, I want to look at how our concepts of ‘loving’ is operating in Max and Jenny’s family and extended family, and in another family, their friends Shaz and Elliott, parents to Alice’s friend Charlie. Elliott is also a partner in Max’s medical practice. How does Elliott use love?

How do the characters ‘love’ each other? How does this ‘drive the plot’?

The Mullins Family novels: Baby, Baby and The Labyrinth Year, an on-going tale …

If you’re anywhere nearby, why not visit

Hawkesbury Upton Village Show, Hawkesbury Upton, South Gloucestershire -gates open 12.30pm Saturday 29th August 2015

Hawkesbury Upton Show