I currently have a guest post, Martial Arts and Me: 5 Reasons Why I Love ’em, featured on the Orbit blog—Orbit is my UK/AU/NZ publisher  for The Heir of Night and The Wall of Night series. Here’s the intro for the post:

“Recently, I was invited to attend Natcon, New Zealand’s national Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention as a guest of honour. As such, I was also asked to put forward some panel suggestions. One of the first that occurred to me arose out of an earlier post here on Orbit about the grand symbiosis between fantasy and history. But I didn’t want to just repeat that discussion, so I’ve added in an extra wrinkle, focusing on weapons and armour, battles and military tactics in the historical context—another fascination that arises, not just out of my love of history, but from my martial arts background …”

To read the rest, rock on over to Orbit and and check out the full post, here.

—

Very coincidentally though, yesteday I was working on a chapter in The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two, titled The Sword Ring. It’s all about a tournament—in quite another part of the world of Haarth from the Wall of Night—and in particular individual contests of arms, in this case with the sword. (The joust comes a little later, in another chapter.)

The coincidence made me think about my enduring love affair with both martial arts and fantasy, and it occurred to me that martial arts may be part (maybe even a big part) of why I love writing epic fantasy so much—because epic fantasy gives me the chance to write about duels and jousts, tournaments and battles and feats of arms. And armour, and different kinds of weapons, and horses—and the colour and dirt and sweat, and yes, blood: the sheer physicality that I talk about in the Orbit guest post, as well as the camaraderie and sense of duty …

And tomorrow—tomorrow I’m going to be working on a chapter where the sneakiness that I also talk about in the guest post become rather more important for one of the characters in Gathering. But which character and under what circumstances—well clearly I need to hurry up and finish revising it so you can read and find out!  😉

Well, we did it.

Exactly 1 year ago today I put up my very first post here  ” … on Anything, Really”, titled (appropriately enough, but possibly not very originally) “And so it begins …”

What I said on May 31 2010 was:

” … in terms of content I’ll be focusing on my writing, so expect to see plenty here about both novels and poetry, what’s coming up and what’s happening, as well as the interviews I do on radio—and I hope there’ll be a few online interviews showing up here!

But it won’t just be my creative work: I’m looking forward to having conversations around what I’m reading now, the books I’ve loved reading in the past as well as creative influences from other areas.  I also love food and wine, trees, getting out into wild places . . . as well as having a little cat buddy who likes to have his share in the conversations. So hope to keep that promise of “anything really …”

Well, I think I’ve done all that and a little bit more, including reporting from the suburban front lines of Christchurch’s February 22nd earthquake and its aftermath. In the past year I have also held not one but three blog parties to celebrate the US, Australia/New Zealand and UK launches of The Heir of Night and also run a F-SF Guest Author Series.

Blogging Every Day …

When I began blogging, I also decided to try and blog every day if I could. In total, I have clocked up 406 posts, but I did miss one day: Febuary 23, the day immediately following the February 22nd Christchurch earthquake when the sector of the city I live in was still without power—and a great many other services, but power was the one that prevented blogging. I do feel, though, that this circumstance counts as an extenuating circumstance in terms of my objective to  ‘blog every day.’

A Few Statistics:

• In terms of site visitors, my first month was the lowest for distinct visitors: 1476

• The highest month to date: 5000 distinct visits

• And readership has grown by approximately 50% this year from the end of 2010.

So, very modest compared to the followings enjoyed by Messrs Gaiman and Scalzi and also sites such as Beatties Bookblog, but hey— “… on Anything, Really” is still new.

What Else Has Happened:

An important reason for commencing blogging here on “…Anything, Really” was as a means of communicating more directly with my readers, many of whom are international. So I blog because I’m a writer and the core of the blog is around my writing. So what’s been happening with that while I’ve been blogging every day:

• Thornspell came out in paperback;
• The Heir of Night was published in the USA, Australia-New Zealand and the UK,  with foreign rights sales into The Netherlands and France;
• I completed the first draft of The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Series Book Two to my publishers and am currently completing the final version (a process that was somewhat delayed by earthquake and aftermath, but that, as they say, is life);
• I have had poetry published in the following journals: Bravado; JAAM; the NZ Poetry SocietyAnthology 2010, across the fingerboards; the International Literary Quarterly and broadsheet 7: new, new zealand poetry;
• And through the blog I have become part of the Tuesday Poem community;
• I completed a number of blog and radio interviews with other writers; and
• Contributed a short story, The Fountain, to the recently published Tales for Canterbury anthology, a fundraising project for the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal.

—

AND

B is for Blogs, Birthdays and Birthday Presents:

I decided that I wasn’t going to stick to the virtual for “… on Anything, Really’s” birthday. I am still thinking about a present for the blog—and yes, ideas would be welcome!—but I also thought the blog birthday could be time for another grand book giveaway draw.

Here’s how it works:

1. The period of the competition will be from 31 May to 30 June 2010 inclusive;
2. Entries in the competition will be drawn from comments on distinct blog posts during that period: so each time you comment on a new post your name will be entered in the draw again—but only once for each distinct post. (For example: if you post one comment each on 10 distinct blog posts, your name will be entered in the draw 10 times; if you post 10 comments on 1 distinct blog post, your name will only be entered in the draw once.)
3. Three separate book sets are available to be won, each one to be drawn separately:

• The Grand Epic Fantasy Giveaway Set, comprising:
  • a signed UK, trade format first edition of The Heir of Night;
    
  • a hardback, anniversary edition of Sara Douglas’s Battle Axe
  • Trudi Canavan’s The Ambassador’s Mission
  • Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia
  • Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
    

• The Grand YA Fantasy Giveaway Set Comprising:
  • a signed hardback copy of Thornspell
  • Cassandra Clare’s complete Mortal Instruments trilogy: City of Bones, City of Ashes and City of Glass
  • Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief
  • Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan
• The Grand NZ Poetry Giveaway Comprising:
  • AUP New Poets: Harry Jones, Erin Scudder & Chris Tse
  • Ingrid Horrocks’ Mapping the Distance
  • Anna Livesey’s the moonmen
  • Kerry Popplewell’s Leaving the Tableland

If you only wish to be entered in one of the draws, please enter the category you are interested in (e.g. Poetry; or YA Fantasy, or Epic Fantasy) by your name the first time you leave a comment.

The draw will be made on Saturday 2 July 2011 using Random Number Integer.

SING on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough,
Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain,
See aged Winter, ’mid his surly reign,
At thy blythe carol, clears his furrowed brow.

So in lone Poverty’s dominion drear,
Sits meek Content with light, unanxious heart;
Welcomes the rapid moments, bids them part,
Nor asks if they bring ought to hope or fear.

I thank thee, Author of this opening day!
Thou whose bright sun now gilds yon orient skies!
Riches denied, thy boon was purer joys—
What wealth could never give nor take away!

Yet come, thou child of poverty and care,
The mite high heav’n bestow’d, that mite with thee I’ll share.

.

by Robert Burns, 1759-1796

—

Tis not in fact the author’s birthday, but the birthday of the author’s blog—yes, indeed-y, “…on Anything, Really” is one year old today and so today’s Tuesday Poem will be sharing that auspicious date of May 31 with a special blog’s birthday post. But since I’ve been officially part of the Tuesday Poem blog since 8 June last year, there was no way I was going to miss a day: not for anything. So here we are, a birthday poem by Rabbie Burns for the birthday of the blog. 🙂

(And yes, you are quite right to hear echoes/overtones to Ursula Le Guin’s short fiction collection The Birthday of the World.)

Oh—and on the blog’s special birthday post, there are going to be giveaways. 😉

—

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog hub—and to link to other Tuesday Poets posting around the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

I am delighted to be a guest at ConText, the  32^nd New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention, which is to be held in Auckland over the Queen’s Birthday long weekend of 3-5 June.

The international Guest of Honour is US author Catherine Asaro who will also be running a pre-Convention writing workshop on 1-2 June. Catherine is also accompanied by her musical collaborator, Donald Wolcott.  The fan Guest of Honour is Lynette Howell.

Other guests include my fellow writers  Lyn McConchie and Russell Kirkpatrick, Grant Stone and Ripley Patton, as well as artists Frank Victoria and Paul Tobin.

I am looking forward to meeting old friends and making new, and hope that those of you who are able to be there will say hello. Just to make it a bit easier, here’s my current ConText schedule:

Friday 3 July, 8 pm:

Mapping Out Terrain: The Wild Wild World of the Writing Blog
When XKCD last mapped the internet, literary blogging was a small area of rising ground beside the great plains of Facebook …  So why do writers and readers blog? How do they go about it? What blogs do the bloggers read? And are there any great taboos? Come hear from enthusiastic bloggers Helen Lowe and Ripley Patton about the ins and outs of their blogging habit.

Saturday 4 June:

12 noon: Panel—Keeping It Real:

“SFF abounds with exotic and fabulous worlds, peopled by aliens and demons, magicians and jedi knights, all dealing with powers and sorceries that take readers to the farthest bounds of the imagination—so how do writers keep their characters and societies believable in the vortex of so much wonder”

Panelists: Catherine Asaro, Russell Kirkpatrick, Helen Lowe

3 pm: Panel—The Grand Symbiosis, History & Fantasy
From A Game of Thrones & The War of the Roses, to Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan & World War 1, history and fantasy are clearly enmeshed, not just in terms of the backdrop and the characters who take the stage, but also weapons and armour, battles and military tactics. Hear the panelists discuss some of their favourite historically-influenced works and whether history can be called the dominant influence on the genre.

Panelists: Helen Lowe, Steve Litton, Andrew Robins

4 pm: Kaffeeklatsch

I field a lot of emails and questions about getting an agent and being published overseas, and I thought the kaffeekltsch would be a good opportunity for a little informal Q&A on this–along the lines of “overseas publication, getting an agent, and working with publishers by remote.” But if everyone prefers to talk to me about my books, well hey, I am an author, so that would be absolutely fine as well. 😉

—

Sunday 5 June

2 pm: Panel—Word and Image

A discussion between authors and artists on the creative relationship between writer and artist in speculative fiction, how the idea of the story is given effect through word and image—as well as how word and image spark off each other to generate new creations.

Panelists: Helen Lowe, Donald Wolcott, Frank Victoria

4 pm: Reading

I’ll be sharing this slot with Lyn McConchie, which should give us about half an hour each to read—but just to let you know, as well as my own work, I’ll also be reading from Mary Victoria’s novels Tymon’s Flight and Samiha’s Song, since Mary can’t be present.

—

And of course Sunday evening is the convention banquet and Sir Julius Vogel Award ceremony, where The Heir of Night is up for both the award for Best Novel and Best Professional Artwork, for the interior map. You can see the full list of finalists, in all categories, here.

This week has been a little bit of a poetry week. Being part of the international Tuesday Poem Blog, I always have my Tuesday Poem, but on Monday I was reading broadsheet 7: new new zealand poetry, while on Thursday I featured poet Nancy Mattson, who has just had four poems published in Cardinal Points Literary Journal.

Perhaps not surprisingly under the circumstances, I also have two new poetry collections on my “Just Arrived” table. 🙂

The first, which is genuinely new out, is Barbara Strang’s

The second, My Iron Spine, (Headworx 2008) is the second collection of poetry from my fellow Tuesday poet, Helen Rickerby.  As those of you who follow “… Anything, Really”—and the poetry side in particular—will know, I am a great admirer of Helen’s poetry so somewhat embarrassed that it has taken me this long to get a copy onto the “Just Arrived” table.

But far better late than never and I am very much looking forward to reading both collections and sharing at least one favourite from each as a future Tuesday Poem selection—with the agreement of the poet, of course!

—

And as those of you who follow “… Anything, Really”—and the SFF side in particular 😉 —may have picked up, as a non-attending member of Renovation (the World Science Fiction Convention 2011) I am also planning on reading and blogging on the Hugo Award nominees again this year. (You may recall that last year I posted a series on the HarperVoyager US blog, starting with The Hugo Awards: the Reading Has Begun.)

On May 16 I was lucky enough to have NK Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and Mira Grant’s Feed , both of which are Hugo Award 2011 finalists for Best Novel, arrive on my To Be Read (TBR) table—and today it was Connie Willis’s Blackout, also a Best Novel finalist.

I will give you a little advance warning of when the Hugo post series will begin—likely in early July—but I will also post reports on each of the novels here as I complete them.

Yesterday, May 27, I posted the first instalment (i.e. first three) of my personal Six Great Heroines of SFF: namely, Agatha Heterodyne (from Girl Genius Online), Dianora (from Tigana) and Eowyn (from The Lord of the Rings.) There’s a little more background in yesterday’s post, including that these are all heroines originating in books, as opposed to film or tv series—but otherwise, without more ado: Part 2!

And, drum roll:

J is for Jessica from Frank Herbert’s Dune [SFF Genre: Science Fiction]

Francesca Annis as Jessica

The main character in Dune may officially be Paul Muad’dib, but his mother, the Bene Gesserit (think: political-mystical secret society; membership, women-only) Jessica, gets almost as much air time. What a character she is: strong, resourceful, smart—and one of the few women characters that I can think of in SFF who primarily
features as a mother.  And Jessica is determined that her son, Paul, is going to survive despite extreme odds, even if this means that she has to deny thousands of years of the Bene Gesserit tradition to which she belongs. She plays a very active role in helping Paul survive as well, including fighting a martial arts-style duel. I still recall how much I loved Jessica as a teen reader: her vulnerability and strength, her toughness and love for her son. A mother and a mover-and-shaker at the same time: way to go, Jessica, I thought.

—

M is for Mara of the Acoma from Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts’ Daughter of the Empire (and Empire series.) [SFF Genre: Epic/High Fantasy)

In the first book in the Empire trilogy, Daughter of the Empire; in a world where women traditionally do not hold power, Mara is required by necessity to lead her clan, which through treachery has almost been annihilated, in a fight for political—and in her case actual—survival. Again, Mara is a heroine without superpowers, and with very few resouces at her command: the only way in which she can hope to survive is to out-think and out-innovate her many enemies—in a world where tradition is everything and innovation is frowned upon. Mara has to learn to play the brutal political “game of houses”—but also how to play to win without losing her humanity. Not a  cost-free exercise, but Mara, like Dianora, does remain true to herself. She also survives—but it’s mainly because of her smarts and courage, coupled with her humanity, that Mara of the Acoma will always be one of my great heroines of SFF.

—

R is for Raederle from Patricia McKillip’s Heir of Sea and Fire, the second in her “Riddlemaster of Hed” (or alternately, “Riddlemaster of Stars”) trilogy.  [SFF Genre: Epic/High Fantasy)

In a “Six of” series like this, the last choice is always the hardest to make. There are always so many choices clamoring at you for that last spot—and in fact most of them would be highly deserving of a spot. I think we all know that there aren’t just six great heroines of SFF: that their numbers are legion. But six was the number I set myself, so hey, I had to choose. So why did I choose Raederle?

Firstly, I reviewed the previous 5 heroines and realised that I didn’t have a mage—or anything like a mage for that matter. (Tsk!) And in fact, 3 out of my current 5 (Dianora, Jessica and Mara) are pretty much ordinary gals, i.e. no prowess with either sword or magic.  (What was I thinking?) But in fact regardless of magery, Raederle has been one of my favourite SFF characters for a long time.  So why is that?

Well, back in the day when I first read The Riddlemaster of Hed, SFF was mainly about boys, right? (OK, I was very young, but still … I’m telling it the way I found it, picking books from the library shelves.)  Riddlemaster was no exception, but I sill loved it. It ended on a cliffhanger, too, so I was longing for the next book. But for some reason, the next book took a very long time to arrive where I was living. So it was almost five years later when I finally saw Heir of Sea and Fire in the library catalogue and promptly reserved it.

And then, when I opened up the book, it wasn’t even about Morgon, the eponymous Riddlemaster. But I wasn’t disappointed, because the story turned out to be about Raederle, who’d only been this background figure in the first book—and she was like, you know, a chick, but instead of waiting around the for the man she was interested in to come to her, she set out to find him. (He had gone missing, you see, which made the finding part important.) And along the way she had adventures, and met other interesting young women who were also about getting out there and doing stuff, and not about sitting around at home waiting for life to find them. Oh yes, and Raederle also found out that she had superpowers—and not just small, parlour trick magic, but the real deal: the big stuff. She finds out that she is more than awizard even, she is something greater: magic personnified, as it were.

So as a young but already avid SFF reader, Heir of Sea and Fire was a watershed work for me: one where the woman and her journey were the centre of the book, not confined to the periphery, and one in which the woman had power, but also integrity, honor and courage—i.e. a very far cry from the “weak as women’s magic” and “wicked as women’s magic” that had shocked and alienated me so much in A Wizard of Earthsea (much as I otherwise loved the book.)

Two other aspects of Raederle’s story particularly spoke to me: one was that, although her power initially frightened her—for good reasons—she had to learn to understand, accept and embrace it, rather than giving it up (i.e. she’s no Arwen.) The second was the genuine friendship, camaraderie and friendship between the women in the story, which resonated with my own experience of the world, rather than those stories where women are always competitive, backstabbing and manipulative (e.g. the sort of relationships that I discussed in relation to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, here.)

So there it is—or rather, here they are, six of my great heroines found within the covers of SFF:

• Agatha Heterodyne (Girl Genius)
• Dianora (Tigana)
• Eowyn (The Lord of the Rings)
• Jessica (Dune)
• Mara of the Acoma (the Empire series)
• Raederle (Heir of Sea and Fire: The Riddlemaster of Hed series)

All these heroines are drawn from those I found inspirational in my SFF reading and formative in terms of my own writing aspirations. But there are so many more—and just in case you thought I was just being diplomatic about that “almost” list, here’s a few that could very easily have had a spot (I hope in alphabetical order):

• Alanna (Tamora Pierce’s “Lioness” series)
• Amat Kyaan (Daniel Abraham’s Shadow In Summer)
• Aravis (CS Lewis’s The Horse & His Boy)
• Hari/Angharad (Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword)
• Jame (PC Hodgell’s Godstalk)
• Jenny Waynest (Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane)
  
• Katniss (Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games)
• Lyra Belacqua (Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass)
• The two Morgaines:
  • CJ Cherryh’s Morgaine in The Chronicles of Morgaine; and
  • Marion Bradley’s Morgaine in The Mists of Avalon
• Peri (Patricia McKillip’s The Changeling Sea)
• Signy Mallory and Elene Quen (CJ Cherryh’s Downbelow Station)
• Samiha (Mary Victoria’s Samiha’s Song)
• Starhawk (Barbara Hambly’s The Ladies of Mandrigyn)
• Tattersail (Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon.)

And many more …

So how about you? Who’s not on this list that you think definitely should be? 😉

On Friday 1 April, I posted on the Supernatural Underground (where I post on the first day of every month, incidentally) about “Three Fabulous Moms of SFF”—the moms in question being Jessica (in fact, not Atreides, although she was the concubine of one Atreides and mother of another) from Frank Herbert’s Dune; Briar Wilkes from Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker; and Jenny Waynest from Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane.

Even at the time, I thought that I should also do a post on my own personal heroines (i.e. characters, not writers) of SFF. And then when I did the “So—Is Epic Fantasy Misogynist?” series of posts earlier in the month I indicated in a comment that I was “… planning two “Top Six” posts for both SFF heroines and heroes.” (As an author, I’m also going to restrict the list to books, by the way, not film or tv—so alas, no Buffy just yet—although that could be a later post. 😉 )

So—here goes: here are the first 3 of my top six heroines of SFF (and just for added fun, in alphabetical order):

Miss Agatha Heterodyne, Girl Genius

A is for Miss Agatha Heterodyne of Phil & Kaja Folio’s Girl Genius graphic novel series—comprising Romance, Adventure and Mad Science [SFF Genre: Steampunk)

So why do I like Agatha? Firstly, she’s a really fun character, as well as  independent, creative and with a can-do attitude (especially to mad science.) Like Buffy, she’s into rescuing as opposed to waiting around to be rescued, despite a life of wild adventure (and did I mention the mad science?) Mostly though, although Agatha is really a “spark” par excellence in the best steampunk style, she comes across as a very “ordinary girl”, with strengths and weaknesses, foibles and failings—which definitely makes her a character I can relate to.

—

D is for Dianora (officially di Certando; secretly di Tigana) from Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana: [SFF Genre: Epic/High Fantasy)

When I think about great heroines of SFF, Dianora is always one of the first names to spring to mind. Here’s the thing:  traditionally, women were either non-existent in SFF or existed primarily as background characters and/or ‘the love/sex interest’, (depending on the type of story being told.) As that began to change, women-as-heroine have tended to become superheroes, either in the guise of butt-kicking chicks in chainmail (alternately in stilettos-with-katana in paranormal urban fantasy) or as powerful magic wielders.

Dianora is neither warrior nor mage, in fact she is a gentle personality who has no superpowers at all—and yet for me, she is one of the most compelling characters I have encountered in fiction. The reason Dianora compels is because of who she is rather than what she can do. She is caught between conflicting loves and loyalties that eventually doom her, and which may, on the surface, make her seem like a weak character—but I never felt that when I read the book. I knew Dianora was strong, because the path she walked through the terrible conflict that beset her was that of being true to herself—and she did it with dignity, pathos and grace.

—

Miranda Otto as Eowyn

E is for Eowyn from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: [SFF Genre: Epic/High Fantasy)

OK, now I’m going to crib, just a little, from what I said about Eowyn in So—Is Epic Fantasy Misogynist? Part 2—The Lord of the Rings since I don’t think I could re-say it any better:

Eowyn is the sword-wielding chick par excellence, but I also remember how very real she always seemed to me as a teenager: the way she felt trapped within her limited role and aspired for more; her crush on Aragorn (what teenage girl wouldn’t understand that?); but also the fact that she challenges the limited choices on offer to her because she is female and chooses to follow her own path. And because she does so, she is the right person in the right place at the right time to do something vital  for the positive outcome of the story.

Ultimate sword-wielding heroine she may be, but in the end Eowyn also chooses life over death and healing over the sword. In the context of  a book where the values of civilization and peace, learning and healing and gardening, are set above the sword for all characters, this is not a sign of weakness but of growth and strength of character.

—

I’ll be back tomorrow with the second half of my personal “Six Great Heroines of SFF.” But in the meantime, who are yours? And why?

Nancy Mattson

Last year, when I was editor on the Tuesday Poem Hub, I featured  a work titled Compasses: A Triptych by Nancy Mattson.

Compasses: A Triptych forms part of Nancy’s forthcoming collection Finns and Amazons, Arrowhead Press. Finns and Amazons is a collection that celebrates early 20th century Russian women artists, such as Varvara Stepanova (the subject of Compasses), who were featured in the exhibition Amazons of the Avant-Garde, eds. Bowlt & Drutt, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1999. Many of these women towered above their age in artistic terms, but much of their work was lost, buried or overlooked until the 1990s.

The other woman who informs Finns and Amazons is Nancy’s (Great) Aunt Lisi who first emigrated from Finland to North America and later to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s; she was lost in 1939. A sequence of poems in the  Finns and Amazons collection is based on letters written by Lisi to her sister Anna, who remained in Canada. Four of these poems, together with excerpts from the letters, have just been published in the current issue of Cardinal Points, a New York-based literary journal of  Russian-focused literature. To give you a taste, here is an excerpt from the first poem:

Letter from Somewhere, 1932

In the unmapped centre of the uncut forest
before we came somewhere from Uhtua
happy workers hustled up the first buildings
in the fourth year of a five-year plan
time moves so fast whatever our purposes
restaurant sauna laundry-hut bakery shop
warehouse stables office red corner to hang
faces of leaders posters photographs banners
charts to drill this alphabet into our wooden heads
prepare us to work for the common good
as our leaders so often remind us but
our plans our wishes our feet go dragging …

(c) Nancy Mattson

.

To read the full feature, including Nancy’s introduction, please click here.

A while back you may recall that I posted about one of the favourite posts I’d read otherwhere recently—in this case on the Orbit blog—which was by Patricia Briggs and titled Mercy and her Friends in My Back Yard.

I also wrote that ” …  I found something very evocative in Patricia’s description of the voices of coyotes, dogs and wolves in and around her prairie backyard—her writing really made me want to hear them for myself.”

Well, I couldn’t do that for two reasons—firstly, good old EnZed, i.e. no coyotes. Secondly, it’s an awful long way to the US, attractions of hearing coyote choruses or no, and I do have that GR to finish.

So I did the next best thing—I acquired a copy of Moon Called, the first book in Ms Briggs’ Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series, about a coyote shapeshifter, and began to read.

Now I know I may be a little late to the party here, because Moon Called did first come out in 2006, but I loved it. Mercy is such a smart, feisty and good-hearted character that it’s very hard not to like her—and even though there’s the obligatory love triangle I felt it was pretty well done … In terms of the urban fantasy world Patrica Briggs has created and the “anthropology” (for want of a much better word) of coyote, werewolf, and to a lesser extent vampire (yup, there’s vampires and fae, too) societies within our larger society, I thought it had a nice feel of authenticity to it.  And the story, which fits into the category of ‘good light read’, rocks along.

So that’s my report: really enjoyed it; glad I read the post on Mercy and her Friends in My Back Yard and got interested; and yes, I will be reading the next-in-series, Blood Bound (probably quite soon 😉 )

The Ballad of Sir Bors

WOULD I could win some quiet and rest, and a little ease,
In the cool grey hush of the dusk, in the dim green place of the trees,
Where the birds are singing, singing, singing, crying aloud
The song of the red, red rose that blossoms beyond the seas.

Would I could see it, the rose, when the light begins to fail,
And a lone white star in the West is glimmering on the mail;
The red, red passionate rose of the sacred blood of the Christ,
In the shining chalice of God, the cup of the Holy Grail.

The dusk comes gathering grey, and the darkness dims the West,
The oxen low to the byre, and all bells ring to rest;
But I ride over the moors, for the dusk still bides and waits,
That brims my soul with the glow of the rose that ends the Quest.

My horse is spavined and ribbed, and his bones come through his hide,
My sword is rotten with rust, but I shake the reins and ride,
For the bright white birds of God that nest in the rose have called,
And never a township now is a town where I can bide.

It will happen at last, at dusk, as my horse limps down the fell,
A star will glow like a note God strikes on a silver bell,
And the bright white birds of God will carry my soul to Christ,
And the sight of the Rose, the Rose, will pay for the years of hell.
.
by John Masefield, 1878-1967

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Carcanet Press, in presenting a bio of John Masefield in relation to their publication Sea Fever: Selected Poems of John Masefield, ed. Philip Errington, 2005, says the following:

“John Masefield (1878-1967) is one of the great storytellers of English poetry, a spinner of yarns and ballads of tall ships and exotic seas, of the deep-rooted life of the rural England in which he grew up, and of the great narratives of Troy and Arthurian legend. Some included here – ‘Sea-Fever’ and ‘Cargoes’ – are among the best-loved poems in English …”

The reason I chose a relatively unknown poem, The Ballad of Sir Bors, rather than Cargoes and Sea Fever which are indeed favourites of mine, is mainly because of having featured the Riders of Rohan’s Poem, from JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, last week. As I said then, the Riders’ poem is an adapation of the Anglo Saxon poem, The Wanderer, although Tolkien used more contemporary iambec meter for his adaptation, in keeping with English epic and heroic poetry of the past 500 or so years. This, of course, got me thinking about English epic and heroic poetry generally (did you know that I’ve been waiting to spring Paradise Lost on you all? 😉 ) and some specific examples I’ve loved over the years.  (Tim Jones’ already gave us Tennyson’s Ulysses last year.)

The Ballad of Sir Bors is one of those poems. I love the richness of the rhythm and rhyme, but I also agree with Carcanet about the “story” element of Masefield’s poetry, in this case as reflected in the persona of the Grail knight, Sir Bors. On the one hand the poem shows us Sir Bors’ dedication to the grinding, unrelenting, unendurable quest for the Holy Grail that has become his life. Yet even in the midst of the hell that his quest has become, Sir Bors is also a poet—both through his physical eyes on the world surrounding him and the vision of his soul for the Grail, he sees Beauty.

The other reason I chose this particular Masefield poem is because something in the rhythm and tone of the opening lines reminds me—in the best possible way—of WB Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree that I featured for Mother’s Day. (Because it was me mum’s fav’rite, ay!)

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