It’s seems like a very long time ago indeed, June 30 2014 in fact, that I was able to share the initial editorial feedback on the manuscript for Daughter Of Blood, The Wall Of Night Book Three, with words like “tremendous” and “terrific” being bandied about—which was very heartening for me after what had felt like a very long slog.

At the end of last year, I confirmed that the edit stage was also “done and dusted”. In a  subsequent post, titled “The Journey Of (Considerably More Than) A Thousand Words”, I also shared something of the nature of the journey to book completion.

At that stage, I hoped the book would get to readers in the Northern Hemisphere Fall / Southern Hemisphere spring 2015, but the publication date has been confirmed as January 2016.

No one is more conscious than I that this date will be almost four years from the publication of The Gathering Of The Lost. I can only apologise for my part in what I know, as a keen reader myself, is a very long wait. I really, really wish it could be sooner for readers, but when a book has taken a long time to write, you lose your place in the production schedule and so must wait until a suitable slot comes up. 🙁

However, my understanding is that the date is ‘firm’ and so should not change again—unless of course, readers clamour so loudly that it is brought forward. But I suspect that would take a very high level of clamouring indeed.

And trying hard to look on the bright side, I am hopeful that the January 2016 publication date may mean the gap between Daughter Of Blood and The Wall Of Night Book Four is a whole lot shorter. All digits crossed that the Muses may prove kind on that score.

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Meanwhile, for some ‘sneak previews’ on Daughter, if you haven’t already seen the following, you may like to check them out:

A Synopsis For “Daughter Of Blood, The Wall Of Night Book Three”

Another Sneak Preview For “Daughter Of Blood, The Wall Of Night Book Three”

Another Wee Snippet From Daughter Of Blood, The Wall Of Night Book Three

This had been my gym

Today is the fourth anniversary of the devastating February 22, 2011, earthquake that devastated much of my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 185 people and badly injuring many more.

Today, I would like to remember those 185 people and also their families: I am sure the gap left by their loss will always be deeply felt.

I would also like to remember those people who were badly injured, many of whom now have to live with  the constant ongoing pain of injuries, such as that arising from amputations of the entirety of both legs. We hear very little of these people in commemorative reflections and yet I suspect the emotional and physical burden they and their families carry is enormous. So today, I particularly wish to remember the injured and ask that they and their needs not be forgotten.

Post quake footpath

In terms of my personal experience, when my novel, The Gathering Of The Lost (completed during the Year of Awful in 2011), came out in 2012, a large number of interviewers asked how I thought living through such a major disaster would affect and/or influence my writing. I answered then that I did not know, but suspected the effects would take a long time to work through. I believe that answer is still true and the effects are still working through—not unlike the physical landscape of Christchurch, which remains a mix of gaps and the derelict, juxtaposed with the new and exciting rising in some places.

The broken bridge

What I do know is that in some ways the demands of the books, first finishing The Gathering Of The Lost and then writing Daughter of Blood, kept me insulated from the day-to-day of “awful”. However, with completion of the edit of Daughter of Blood toward the end of last year and a respite, time-wise, to draw breath and play catch-up, I have been aware of a deep, pervading sense of sorrow and loss. Although one often experiences a reaction on completion of a major project, I am quite sure that some of that sense of sorrow and loss arises from the devastation—what has been termed a “landscape of loss”—of the earthquakes and the ongoing challenges, physical, emotional, and financial, of the four aftermath years. What effect this legacy will have on my writing I still don’t know. Now, as then, I am still, like everyone in Christchurch, very much in it. And when you’re inside something, it’s very hard to see it with cool, objective, 20/20 vision, let alone analyse and interpret what it all means. But the one thing we can do is observe and record effects, both on ourselves and others.

This was a friend’s neighbour’s home

The personal major” that still lies ahead and that I have good hope shall at least commence in 2015 is the repair of my house, significantly damaged in the February 22, 2011 quake. Although this is primarily a books’n’writing blog, I shall “observe and record” the experience here from time to time, (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) as the Year Of Living Heroically.

In fact, definitely tongue in cheek, because when I return to the remembrances at the beginning of this post and particularly the injured survivors, carrying on everyday despite pain and disability, I know that no matter the difficulties of my earthquake and aftermath experience, I have not been called upon to live heroically at all.

But they have, and do: day after day. So let us remember their everyday, but no less true, heroism today and honor them every day—by not forgetting all about them.

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Apologies for the recycled photos---I wanted to get out and get some new ones 
but the camera is not cooperating.

Yup, we have a new look goin’ down!

After 5 years—yes, da Underground kicked off in 2010—I think it’s probably time for a change. Authors and their writing change and evolve, after all, so why not the sites we post on?

Anyway, I ‘heart’ the new look, which you can see most clearly in the header, but would also love to know what you think. To take a peek, just click on:

Supernatural Underground: A New Look

(I was going to say “A New Hope” but that would have been having a Star Wars moment. 😉 )

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Credit: B Miller

Also, while on matters Supernatural Underground, you can read my complete short story, Bird of Passage, by clicking on:

Bird of Passage, Part 1

Bird of Passage, Part 2

And don’t forget there’s a “Tuckerization” contest: that is,  an opportunity to have your name featured as a character in a future story—but you do have to comment to enter.

On either of the Supernatural Underground posts or right here on today’s post is equally fine.

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So far this month, we also had some other great posts on the Supernatural Underground:

Amanda Arista

Amanda Arista’s “S’more Truth About Sex, Please!”
.

Terri Garey

Terri Garey on “Slipstream Goes Mainstream, Or Why Weird Is The New Normal”

and

Kim Falconer

Kim Falconer’s “5 Reasons To Reread Your Favorite Novels”

All good fun, so do head on over and check out the goodness—and don’t forget, let me know what you think of the new look header. 🙂

credit: PJ Fitzpatrick

Currently, I’m taking a word that means either a “bad guy”, e.g. ruffian or rogue, or a “rough diamond”, such as  a roughneck, and matching it with a character from my novels.

As in the A Geography Of Haarth series, each entry is accompanied by a relevant passage from the books, which could be drawn from one of the two Wall Of Night series novels currently published, or my Kids/YA standalone, Thornspell.

The definitions are taken from Merriam Webster Online, my current go-to dictionary when writing

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Villain: a deliberate evildoer or criminal

Where would stories be without the villains of the piece, those cruel or malicious persons either  involved in and/or devoted to wickedness or crime—or in today’s case, Thornspell’s arch-villain(ess), the:

Margravine zu Malvolin

The Margravine

“The Margravine took a step closer, and he saw that her blue eyes had turned so dark they were black hollows in her face. “Clever,” she repeated, still smiling, “but discourteous to abandon my hospitality when we still have business to discuss.”

“I have nothing to discuss with anyone who traps and then imprisons me,” Sigismund said, his voice rusted metal against her sweetness.

She widened her eyes at him, stepping forward again. “So hasty—but can you be sure of that? What if I offered you peace in your father’s kingdom, an end to the wars in the south?”

Sigismund stared at her, thinking how long those wars had bled his country dry, absorbing the energy of its kings. “In exchange for what?” he asked slowly.

Her smile deepened. “So you are interested,” she murmured. “I thought you might be. And the exchange I ask is such a little thing.” She was watching him closely, and her voice crooned on a singsong note when she spoke again. “Such a little thing.”

She was very close to him now, her perfume delicate yet dizzying, and Sigismund could feel the weave of illusion and magic. He blinked hard, trying to clear his mind. “Then ask it,” he said, his voice hard, and something dangerous flared in the hollowed eyes—but was as quickly gone.”

~  from © Thornspell, Chapter 9 — Substance and Shadow

Donna Tarrt is a significant name amongst American writers. Recently, she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch (2013) and the novel I have just read, The Little Friend (Bloomsbury, 2005 edition; first published 2002) won the WH Smith Literary Award in 2003.

Ms Tarrt is also from the American South—and so, too, is The Little Friend. I have never set foot in the Americas but I have read the works of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Harper Lee, and knew at once that I was in the American South—in this case the Mississippi (Tarrt’s home state) of circa 1979. The culture of the storytelling is as distinctive as a physical landscape.

In terms of style of fiction, The Little Friend falls into the Contemporary Realism genre: it is a “slice of life” story, that in the customary approach of the genre, takes an indepth look at a period in the characters’ lives, without necessarily trying to explicate events or resolve problems and/or mysteries. In this case, the mystery is the inexplicable and unresolved death of small boy, which twelve years later continues to haunt his family. The immediate family unit has disintegrated: the father living out-of-state, the mother retreated into herself, and the two sisters left largely to their own devices. A grandmother and three great-aunts, together with a housekeeper, intersect with the nuclear family to a greater or lesser degree—but the story focuses around twelve-year-old Harriet’s decision to track down her brother’s killer. In doing this, she focuses on a “poor white” (“trailer trash”) family with a history of criminal activity, who are currently focusing their collective energies on manufacturing methamphetamine. This family, the Ratliffs,  are the second axis of the story, although other characters weave in and out of the narrative. Eventually, the Ratliffs’ activities and Harriet’s investigation enter a collision course…

The strength of the story is the evocation of the small-town, Southern community and the reality of the characters. A comment on the back cover alludes to “Southern Gothic” and there are elements of both the surreal and the macabre to aspects of the story—but more importantly, I feel, this is about the “grindingly real”: whether it is the faded gentility of the grandmother (Edie) and her sisters, or the poverty, criminality, addiction, and psychiatric illness of the Ratliff family. In terms of the reality of the characters, there is no sugar coating or comfortable—and reassuring—cliches on which to hang your reader’s hat. No character is entirely sympathetic, but none is completely unsympathetic either; uneasiness and discomfort abound, and there is no clear moral compass.

Not surprisingly, therefore, I must advise that The Little Friend is not what I would call an “easy read”; sticking with it definitely required perseverance on my part as reader. The aspects of the book I found difficult, however, were not the unvarnished and unattractive realism of the characters, but the intrusion of authorial asides, usually in parentheses, that were superfluous to understanding of the story. Similarly, although the evocation of the small-town Mississippi world was powerful overall, sometimes the story got bogged down in detailed descriptions that, however beautifully written, pulled me out of the narrative flow and dissipated the development of the story. So much so that I was reminded of Ursula Le Guin’s stricture that: “The chief duty of a narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence … [because] the basic function of the narrative sentence is to keep the story going and keep the reader going with it.”

So overall, did I enjoy this book? I thought it was interesting, but not absorbing—I found it easy to put down and could equally easily not have finished it. The strength of the book was character study and while interesting, I did not feel it offered me new and compelling insights. So I suppose my response could best be described as ambivalent: while I would read another book by Donna Tarrt, I will not hasten to do so. Reading, however, is a subjective pastime and the number of glowing commendations from mainstream literary reviewers indicate that my response is by no means universal—particularly, I suspect, for readers who enjoy Contemporary Realist fiction generally and/or the literature of the American South.

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Additional Information:

I read the UK, mass market edition of this book, 555 pages, published by Bloomsbury in 2005.

Heart Health Month

As an author published in the US, I was pleased to be able to say “yes” when the American Recall Center asked me to blog on heart health as part of American Heart Month.

I am very aware of heart health because my father died of a heart attack when he was only 54: far too young, I know you will all agree—and I and all my family would have liked to have had him around a whole lot longer.

When you look at the Recall Center’s feature post on How Bloggers’ Celebrate Their Hearts, you will see some great tips for improving both heart health and your overall health.

As an author, I am very aware that I am pursuing an occupation that involves long hours sitting at a desk and staring at a computer screen. I have my share of big projects and deadlines, too, which often make it feel easier to grab takeaways rather than making a home-cooked meal. I find writing very intellectually and emotionally demanding as well, so frequently want to lie down on the couch in the sun in my down time (the Garfield effect!), rather than head out and do exercise.

Walks in wild places can be good for the heart…

One of my strategies to counteract a  fundamentally sedentary writing day is to “build in activity” to my daily routine, starting with working at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen—so making a coffee, or lunch, or grabbing a glass of water, all require me to move. I leave the cellphone in the kitchen, too, so again I have to move (run, most often!) to answer it. I try to build other, regular activity into my daily routine as well: walking at least once around the garden with that coffee before taking it back to my desk; renting a post office box that’s an easy walk from where I live rather than opting for a bigger center with more services; taking stairs whenever I can, rather than elevators—and in this age when people like to meet in cafes, suggesting a cafe that I can walk to rather than taking the bus or having to drive.

I try and do regular “big” exercise, too, but it’s all the little activities that break up the long, sedentary hours at the writing desk.

Broccoli soup: simple, home-cooked, healthy

The more regular forms of exercise are important, though, no question of that, and one of the best ways I’ve found to persuade myself to do some is to find ways of making the time spent doing it enjoyable–like doing just about anything (walking, running, cycling, the gym) with a friend or two.

Another big deal for me, both with regards heart and overall health, is that I love to cook. Not only that, but most of all I love to bake: cakes, cookies, and desserts of every description. There are two main ways I balance the great enjoyment and relaxation I get from cooking with heart and general health awareness. The first is to focus the regular meal making on creating delicious, simple (i.e. easy and quick to make), but also really healthy meals.

Making & sharing homebaking can also enhance wellbeing

The baking I keep for occasions when I can share what I make, so I get to have the pleasure of making something delicious, but also the delight of sharing what I’ve made with others—and numbers ensure that everyone, including me(!), only eats a small quantity (on an occasional basis.) Again, I also set myself the challenge of finding and mastering recipes that taste great and yet are not super rich.

Now some might argue that I should give up the baking altogether. But my belief is that if you have no specific health conditions to manage  and are doing the other stuff—living actively and eating moderately and healthily most of the time—then the pleasure of making something you really enjoy and sharing it with friends and family, in moderation, is also good for your overall wellbeing.

And here’s the American Recall Center’s Heart Health infographic, featuring tips and risks:

Thinning

We age in birthdays and anniversaries, gatherings
of welcome and farewell. “You’re looking good,” we say,
despite receding hairlines, bellies rounding by the year –

too little exercise, too much time
spent in front of screens. Babies
are now children; children, amazingly, teens,

embarked on their own, mysterious journeys.
With offspring pairing up and parents fading,
we will soon be grandparents, elders,

joining Grey Power, plotting world cruises,
or clinging on bravely till a resentful State
throws spatters of coin at our needs.

Once there was a world of manual typewriters
and Gestetner stencils. We were the coming thing, and then,
the moment varying for each of us, history rolled past

and left us in its wake. There are more gatherings
ahead: phone calls, arrangements.
It will be sudden. It will be long-expected and

(we say behind our hands) really, a relief.
At the funeral home. At St Mary’s. On the short,
springy grass next to the family crypt.

Afterwards, coffee, comfort food, a few
discreet but welcome drinks, the chatter
resuming once again. The relatives

puzzled, trying to work out who we are.
“You’re looking good,” we say, the conversation
conducted in whispers, in echoes, thinning.

©  Tim Jones

~ from Men Briefly Explained, Interactive Press, 2011

Reproduced here with permission

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I originally featured Thinning on October 25, 2011 (yes, in that year), as part of celebrating the release of Tim’s third collection, Men Briefly Explained (Interactive Press.) As I observed at the time, I “like the poem’s form and also its universality—a commonality of human experience that I instantly recognised at a “gut” level. “Thinning” also made me appreciate the versatility and depth of Tim’s poetry yet again, especially when juxtaposed with other recent featured poems such as Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach, (on the Tuesday Poem Hub on August 16),  Men at Sea, and happened to meet.”
.

About The Poet:

Tim Jones is a New Zealand poet, author and editor who was awarded both the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature and a Sir Julius Vogel Award in 2010. His latest book, co-edited with PS Cottier, is The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry (2014).

For more, see http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/

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To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.

Martin Springett cover

Recently, I have been taking a look at a few favourite book jackets and reflecting on what makes these covers “speak” to me as a reader.

The initial post was:

SFF Cover Art Love: Some Favourites—& Reflections On Why They “Work” For Me

The second, posted just last week, was:

SFF Cover Art Love: More Favorites

which included the covers for Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar trilogy created by artist Martin Springett. When I checked out the artists’ website I found  a sub-page titled:

Pauline Baynes Page

Original, Pauline Baynes’ cover

I was instantly hooked because the art of Pauline Baynes, both the jackets and interior illustrations, have always totally defined CS Lewis’s Narnia series for me. On opening the page I was correspondingly delighted to find both a few examples of Baynes’  lovely Narnia artwork and Martin Springett’s personal tribute to and remembrance of her as a friend and fellow artist.

A lovely little jewel of a site and the more so for being happened upon so unexpectedly.

In many ways, too, it reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s tribute to his friend, Diana Wynne Jones:

Being Alive: Mostly About Diana

Among many other projects, Pauline Baynes also undertook illustrations for JRR Tolkien and did the original jacket art for Watership Down. To find out more about her wonderful artistic legacy, click on:

Pauline Baynes, 1922 – 2008

Gail Carriger

First up, some personal library goodness, via Paranormal-Steampunk author, Gail Carriger (who may be coming to our part of the world this year, I believe) and the site Apartment Therapy:

“Curl Up in One of These Cozy Libraries”

Wouldn’t you love a library like these? I know I would!

Psst: I really liked this too:

17 Ways To Squeeze In A Few Extra Books

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In quite a change of pace, I found this article by Garett Reppenhagen on Salon extremely thought provoking:

“I Was An American Sniper, And Chris Kyle’s War Was Not My War”

(I’ve put it against the image of Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise because I think the two are complementary in terms of themes.)

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Linda Herrick’s  feature interview with Christchurch-based Crime writer, Paul Cleave, was also interesting:

Death Becomes Him

(Btw, we share a friend-in-common: the Paul mentioned in the article.)

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And I loved this, via the wonderful Brain Pickings site:

Lewis Carroll’s Rules Of Letter Writing

which Maria Popova believes would make email more civil and digital communication kinder—and I suspect she is very right!

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And I think that will do for this week!

David Mitchell is probably best known for his novel The Cloud Atlas but as I observed on 31 January, has (allegedly) said he’s writing an uber-novel, so I thought I’d better start with his first book, Ghostwritten.

And although The Cloud Atlas may be Mitchell’s best-known work, Ghostwritten was (is) no slouch either. It debuted to critical praise in 1999, went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for the best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.

So what is Ghostwritten about? Well, there, dear ...on Anything, Really readers, is quite a question: what is it about?

The novel comprises a series of ten interlocking sequences, told from the points of view of ten distinct characters. As the reader, one gradually becomes aware that each of the sequences  intersects with one of the earlier parts, even if only in the most tangential way. So much so that for some time I was not convinced I was reading a novel, as opposed to a set of interlinking novelets in the style of Charlotte Grimshaw’s short story collection, Opportunity. Gradually, however, those slender threads do come together, to the extent that on reaching the end of the book I was able to look back and see the delicate but still relatively linear connections that added up to a “novel.”

I realize, however, that I have told you what the novel is, rather than what it is about. I think that if I tried to tell you what it’s about, I would effectively have to tell you the story, so suffice it to say that the narrative begins and ends with an incident closely resembling the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, by a group reminiscent of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. It ends in the US with a late-night radio DJ and a self-aware, Doomsday AI. In between, the story weaves back and forth in time, following protagonists as diverse as a jazz musician, a Chinese tea house proprietor, a Mongolian ghost, and an art gallery attendant in the Hermitage (St Petersburg)—amongst others. Each protagonist’s story sequence feels complete in itself, but in the end the threads running through them do, as noted, add up to a cohesive whole.

As you’ve probably gathered from the presence of the ghost and the AI, interwoven with the more realistic sequences, Ghostwritten is something of a genre-bender. More importantly, the genre-bending worked in a seamless way, which was one of the aspects of the novel I most enjoyed—although, in fact, I enjoyed the entire read. I liked the way each sequence worked in its own right as well as being part of a larger whole, and I always enjoy the mystery of wondering exactly where that whole is taking me—so long as it does end taking me somewhere, which Ghostwritten did.

Interestingly, although I was always absorbed by the characters and the story while reading, once I put the book down I never felt compelled to rush back to it. In this sense, I would not call Ghostwritten a page turner. It’s more the kind of story that dogs your mental footsteps, so you find yourself reflecting on and wondering about it a lot—and the fact that I was “still processing” in this way may be why I never felt compelled to immediately dive back in.

If I have an internal question mark, it hovers over the book’s final sequence, which I could see was intended to link the end of the story back to its beginning. But I wondered—and still wonder—whether in fact, the story had not really finished at the end of the previous section. The fact that I remain undecided, however, suggests that I must come down on the side of trusting the author’s judgment.

Overall, as I said above, I enjoyed Ghostwritten. The writing is accomplished and while reading I was always absorbed and—also as mentioned—the story stayed with me afterward, provoking considerable reflection. I would not call it an easy read and would go so far as to describe it as unsettling in places, but it is accessible and should appeal to readers who enjoy stories as diverse as those of Nick Harkaway, Audrey Niffenegger, Charlotte Grimshaw, and Hannu Rajaniemi.

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Additional Information:

I read the UK/Aus/NZ mass market paperback edition, 436 pp, of Ghostwritten, published by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton.

I also note that Hodder & Stoughton, like my UK publisher, Little Brown,  is a Hachette Book Group company, but I purchased the book for myself rather than requesting a free copy for review.