Knowing

You’re lucky,
my mother said
in her long dying,
that you have
someone
who loves you.

So much left unsaid
about her life.

But she was right in this:
I am.     I do.

Wake every day
to your warm
breathing.

Wonder.

© Helen Lowe

Published in foam:e 1 March 2008

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With yesterday being Valentine’s Day, I felt today’s Tuesday Poem just had to centre on love and relationship. 🙂

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To enjoy more Tuesday Poems go to the Tuesday Poem Blog hub here or click on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Last year, I was privileged to read an advanced reader copy of Tymon’s Flight, the first in Mary Victoria’s Chronicles of the Tree series, published by HarperVoyager. I subsequently interviewed Mary on Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM—a fun and lively exchange. Having recently read the newly released Samiha’s Song, the second novel in the series, I was very keen to have Mary here for another interview on ” … Anything, Really”—an interview that I am very pleased to be able to bring to you today.

The Giveaway:

To celebrate the release of Samiha’s Song, Mary is giving away a signed book set of both Tymon’s Flight and Samiha’s Song, to be drawn from those who comment on the interview today. More giveaway details below the interview.

About Mary Victoria:

Mary Victoria was born in 1973 in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Despite this she managed to live most of her life in other places, including Cyprus, Canada, Sierra Leone, France and the UK. She studied art and film and worked as an animator for 10 years before turning to full time writing. She now lives in Wellington with her husband and daughter. Her first book, Tymon’s Flight, was released by HarperVoyager in August 2010. The sequel, Samiha’s Song, has just been launched on February 5 at the Weta Cave, in Wellington. You can visit Mary on her blog, here. In recent exciting news for Mary, Tymon’s Flight has been nominated for for three different Gemmell awards for fantasy: Morningstar (new talent), Legend (best fantasy) and Ravenheart (best cover.)

And now—to the interview!

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Helen:  Samiha’s Song is the second in your Chronicles of the Tree series, following on from Tymon’s Flight. I felt that the scope of the story really opened out in this second book—as the author, was that a deliberate plan on your part, or did the story evolve as you wrote it?

Mary: You’re kind to say so, Helen. Yes, it was a deliberate plan, though it did depend to some extent on matters outside my control. An interesting shift occurred just as I was beginning to write Samiha’s Song, in April 2009. My acquiring editor, Stephanie Smith, contacted me to let me know that Voyager had decided to market the Chronicles of the Tree as adult fantasy. The trilogy had originally been sold as a YA crossover, aimed at ages 12+.

The decision to market to a slightly older audience was a boon and freed me up creatively in many ways. With the shift to an adult market, I was no longer restricted to the classic, coming-of-age palette that defined Tymon’s Flight. Although stylistically, the trilogy is fairly unified – Samiha’s Song does not contain explicit language, for example – books two and three explore a wider range of themes and content, from self-discovery through to the hard choices involved in taking responsibility for your own life. There are several new characters introduced in Samiha’s Song, some of whom are on journeys far darker than Tymon’s. Tymon himself is no longer a child in the second story, having made that switch to adulthood in the first book. The characters can make scary mistakes or come to regret their decisions as people do. Nothing is sacred.

Helen: In terms of nothing being sacred, as well as introducing some new and important characters you have also allowed one central character from Tymon’s Flight to die. How important is it to you as an author, to have this sort of dramatic ebb and flow in your stories?

Mary: It’s incredibly important. I don’t think I’d be able to write well if someone said to me, ‘you must keep these five characters alive at all costs,’ or prevented me from introducing new protagonists where necessary, even at the end of a story. The characters arrive, like Bilbo’s uninvited dwarf guests in The Hobbit, when and where they must, in order to take us on an adventure. And they also die when they must, even if it’s painful to contemplate.

My husband, in the midst of reading Samiha’s Song for the first time, turned to me one evening with an expression of woe on his face. “I didn’t expect you to do that!” said he, referring to an event described in the book. “It had to happen,” I answered, and went on to explain why. He understood; the expression of woe did not go away, however. And I’m afraid to say I was glad, because woe is precisely the reaction that scene was meant to provoke. If it provoked satisfaction, we’d be in trouble.

That’s how it is with a story: it has its own internal logic. Horrible things happen, and wonderful things too, and it must all be allowed to follow its course or else the result feels stilted and artificial.

Helen: Mary, I think of you as being very much a “citizen of the world.” To what extent do you think your family background and your own life have influenced the ideas and world views at play in Samiha’s Song.

Mary: Thank you, I like the idea of being a citizen of the world, though it’s also a wonderful privilege to have a home in NZ. Neither one precludes the other, of course.
My upbringing and family background definitely influenced the ideas and themes at play in Samiha’s Song. My mother’s side of the family have been inveterate globetrotters for generations, both through force of circumstance and personal choice – because I must say, it does become a habit after a while. They came originally from Azerbaijan, Iran and Iraq. Some of them went into exile in Palestine in the nineteenth century because of their religious beliefs, seen as heretical by authorities at the time. Later generations moved away from Iran in search of an education and livelihood, married people from very different backgrounds and settled in far-off lands. Now, a century later, we’re in North America, Europe, South Africa, New Zealand. I spent part of my childhood in Cyprus, Canada and Sierra Leone, among other places.

A history of moving restlessly about does hone certain survival skills: the art of getting along with strangers, the art of suspending judgment. It’s hard to be a bigot, to consider oneself pure, right and marked out by manifest destiny when one’s ethnic and cultural background is frankly a mishmash. I like to say my left elbow thinks my heathen right ear is going to hell, and my big toe has a fatwa out on my pinkie. Unfortunately for them, they all belong to the same body and have to get along.

That, in a nutshell, is what Samiha’s Song is all about. The story deals with the artificial constraints we like to impose on ourselves, the walls we put up when we insist on ‘a clash of civilisations’ or ‘insurmountable differences’ between religions and cultures. Samiha doesn’t believe the differences are insurmountable and is willing to put her life on the line for that cause. She won’t play one side against another. In fact, she rejects the need for sides altogether. Naturally, her idealism gets her into trouble with pretty much everyone.

Helen: Given the book title, it is perhaps not surprising that this second book focuses more on the character of Samiha, and that the narrative point of view shifts between Samiha and Tymon. This is a change in focus from the first book so how did you find it? Was it easy, or challenging?

Mary: By the time I finished Book One, I was yearning to write from the point of view of Samiha. In that sense it was a natural transition, a logical step demanded by story. But then of course I had to listen hard, to find and define Samiha’s distinctive ‘voice’. I did that by writing her Testament – the passages we see her composing in the very first scene, in the prologue. I wanted to hear Samiha speaking to me through the words she would choose to write herself. (I use the word Testament here in its older form of course, meaning an explanation or statement of belief, rather than the modern legal usage of a will and testament.)

The experiment was a success – when Samiha sat down to write her story in that old fashioned, confessional form, I heard her clearly in my mind, and never stopped hearing her. I began to document her journey and the choices she made, and to understand why she made them. The whole of book two became in essence her Testament, whether told from her own point of view or Tymon’s.

That’s not to say the process was without hiccups. Samiha was challenging to write in that she has very high moral standards, a preoccupation with Truth with a capital ‘T’. It’s extraordinarily difficult to make characters like that come to life, as they can so easily slide into preachiness. I tried to keep her true to herself while showing her humanity – the fact that she has moments of self-doubt, or can be overly-critical of others and ‘difficult to live with.’

Helen: I think you succeeded very well with avoiding the preachiness and still keeping Samiha a very human character. But I didn’t find her overly critical of others—almost the opposite given the circumstances she is dealing with in the book. So can you expand on your earlier comment of “difficult to live with?”

Mary: It’s an old and hackneyed concept, not mine, but one I’ve used as a foil for Samiha’s development. It’s the noxious assumption that a woman who expresses her opinions clearly and dares to go against the common grain is a ‘shrew’ and unmarriageable, or worse yet a bad mother. Examples of this category of opinionated women in literature include Antigone and Medea in Greek myth, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, etc. The notion that education and self-expression make a woman impossible to live with is of course standard fare in sex-segregated societies. Even Samiha is coloured by these concepts to an extent, shedding them one by one as she ‘awakens’ to her own potential.

That said, apparent rebelliousness or intractability defines Samiha more in the first book than the second. By the time the events in Samiha’s Song are playing out, she has left behind any judgmental attitudes and stands for something wider, freer, and infinitely more dangerous to the status quo. It’s one thing to rebel against a power structure and quite another to step outside the bounds of the confrontation altogether, suggesting an alternative advantageous to all. Samiha does not allow herself to be defined by the priests’ polemic and as such she is the ultimate threat to them.

Helen: To celebrate the release of Samiha’s Song you are hosting a guest author series on your blog on “Writing Strong Women.” I feel it would be fair to say that strong female characters, not just Samiha but also the Oracle, Jedda and Jocaste, take centre stage in this second book in the series. What made you take the story in that direction, having started with the focus on Tymon, and other—male—characters such as Oren, Laska and Solis in the first book?

Mary: The “Writing Strong Women” series was a natural extension of the themes in Samiha’s Song, and it’s great fun and very instructive to hear what everyone has to say on the subject.

As for me, after an entire book devoted to that very classic boy’s coming-of-age tale in Tymon’s Flight, I wanted to tell at least part of the next story from a female perspective. Although the character of Gardan, the very capable female Freehold judge, does exist in book one, I felt I needed to expand my palette of women characters. So I introduced two strong new contenders in Samiha’s Song: Tymon’s fellow Grafting student, Jedda, and his powerful and enigmatic teacher, the Oracle of Nur.

A rebel and a survivor, Jedda defies convention in every way. She’s a pragmatist, rather than an idealist like Samiha. And she possesses more raw talent for the Grafting than Tymon. How she uses that talent is a key story point and I think makes her a complex and believable person. She is also, with Samiha, the strongest supporting character in the overall story.

In developing the Oracle’s personality, I deliberately chose traits that would be highly disturbing to a raw or inexperienced person meeting her for the first time. The Oracle is hard to pin down. Is she good, or is she evil? Is she helping or hindering her students? I wanted a character who turned those easy notions on their heads. The Oracle ‘Sees’ the future all the time: as a result her attitude towards life is unusual, to say the least.

There are several other important female characters who make an appearance in Samiha’s Song. Gardan returns, along with Noni, Oren’s sister, who made a very brief appearance in Book One. And we meet Jocaste – but to say more about her would be a spoiler!

Helen: You also expand the “universe” of the Tree in this second book in the Chronicle of the Tree series. Can you tell us more about the “what” and “why” of that?

Mary: Tymon’s Flight introduces the concept of the World Tree and paints a picture of human life in the Central and Eastern Canopies. It’s very much a practical, physical world, thought out as if the events described were taking place in our own universe – the laws of physics remain unbroken, apart from a few notable exceptions to do with the Grafting, and care is taken to present life in a giant tree as more or less believable and possible. The ‘magic’ of the Grafting is there, but as yet unexplained. We don’t know whether it is sorcery in the classic sense, some form of meditation or spiritualism, or another phenomenon entirely.

In Samiha’s Song we, along with Tymon, discover some of the rules governing the Grafting, and the fact that the physical World Tree is not the be-all and end-all of the universe (or multiverse, a more accurate description in this case.) There are other worlds besides Tymon’s – mental worlds a Grafter can use to step outside his or her body and the bounds of space-time, effectively predicting aspects of the future. But these other worlds are not simply fancy divination tools or destinations devoid of life. There are creatures native to them and who meddle in turn with the physical world, for good or ill. And the mystic Sap, the force that gives both Grafters and sorcerers their power, may itself be alive …

As you can imagine, tackling all this metaphysics was no easy task in an adventure story. I didn’t want the Grafters’ trance to become a dry and cerebral affair, without sensual immediacy. So I worked hard to make the world of the Sap visceral. The parallel planes of existence Tymon steps into are just as ‘real’, tactile and dangerous as his own.

Helen: I really enjoyed the way the world widened out in Samiha’s Song and the fresh layers of understanding around the Tree ‘verse—you have definitely whetted my appetite for more! I know I will have to wait, but to be honest, I don’t mind waiting for ‘something good.’ I feel certain, too, that like me, a lot of readers out there are going to be enjoying Samiha’s Song in the meantime. So to finish, is there any one thought you’d like to leave with Chronicles of the Tree readers?

Mary: Expect the unexpected! As much as things are turned on their heads in Samiha’s Song, I believe they are punched inside out, shaken briskly and hung up to dry in book three – tentatively titled Oracle’s Fire, and due for publication in September.

Your kind words regarding Samiha are much appreciated… All I can hope for as an author is that others will enjoy reading the books as much as I enjoyed writing them. Which is to say, a great deal!

Helen: Mary, thank you for agreeing to be interviewed here on “ … Anything, Really.” It has been a pleasure working with you to put the interview together and I wish you all the very best for your continued success with The Chronicles of the Tree.

Mary: Thank you very much for inviting me, Helen, it’s a joy to be here.

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Giveaway Details:

To celebrate the release of Samiha’s Song, Mary is giving away a signed book set of both Tymon’s Flight and Samiha’s Song, to be drawn from those who comment on the interview before I post my Tuesday Poem at 6.30 am NZ time, tomorrow 15 February,(that’ll be  ca. 12.30 pm on Monday 14, US Eastern Standard Time.) The winner will be drawn by Random Number Generator and posted at 6.30 am on Wednesday 16, NZ time.

Please don’t forget to check back after the closing date to see if you’ve won. If the prize has not been claimed by 6.30 am on Saturday 19, I will re-draw.

Work in Progress: WALL2

Mainly what I’m doing write now is reading the manuscript for The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night Book Two) with my editor’s comments in mind—and in general it’s rocking along, which is great. I remember reading the ms for The Heir of Night at a similar stage, when I had been away from the story for a time—and finding, when I got to the final confrontation in the book, that I was holding my breath as I read. “How does that work?” I thought. “You wrote this, you know what’s going to happen!” But I took it as a good sign that I found  the story exciting reading! And I guess it always is a good sign—for any book, but especially for your own manuscript—when you find yourself caught up in the story’s flow!

But I still need a book to read and at the moment it’s French author, Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Hedgehog is not SFF or speculative fiction of any stripe at all, but I have been meaning to read it for quite some time—and in fact, I don’t exclusively read speculative fiction; far from it! The Elegance of the Hedgehog comes highly recommended—the first three pages of the book comprise glowing reviews and the legend on the cover proclaims that it spent “over a year on the New York Times Bestseller List.” So it has to be good, right?

Well, not necessarily, but I did find the first few pages intriguing, which is always a good start. I have found the subsequent chapters a little slow going, but I am only about a 1/5 th of the way through, so it’s early days.  ‘Watch this space’, as the saying goes.

Speaking of ‘watching this space,’ tomorrow I am interviewing Mary Victoria, author of Tymon’s Flight and the Chronicles of the Tree series, about Samiha ‘s Song, the second book in the sequence—which I have read and talked about here. I have very much enjoyed putting the interview together and been fascinated by the discussion around both the world of the Tree and the characters so am excited to be sharing it with you at last.

Interlitq 14

Issue 14 of the International Literary Quarterly (Interlitq), A New Zealand Literary Showcase is now published and contains my poems, Australia Post and One Day (from the Ithaca Conversations sequence.) The complete line-up of poets is as follows and includes the  current NZ Poet Laureate, Cilla McQueen:

• Marisa Cappetta
• Laurice Gilbert
• Helen Lowe
• Cilla McQueen
• Harry Ricketts
• Ron Riddell
• Richard von Sturmer
• Niel Wright

Interlitq also contains works of short fiction by:

• Coral Atkinson
• Sue Orr

I understand that Interlitq Issue 14: A New Zealand Literary Showcase will contain further installments.

But to read the first installment “hot-off-the-press’, click here.

Guest posts — you can still check out my post on “All About Character: Writing Strong Women in Fantasy” as part of Mary Victoria’s guest author series.

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Interviews — last week’s blog interview was with debut romance author, Beth Anne Miller, and on Monday I’ll be talking to Mary Victoria about the newly-released Samiha’s Song, so be sure to check back for that.

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Work in Progress: WALL2

Editing The Gathering of the Lost (Gathering for short, aka The Wall of Night, Book Two)— yup, editing this big pile of paper is all mine to do at the moment! So far, so good …

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Looking forward to the UK launch of The Heir of Night, which is scheduled for March 3 — not many sleeps now! And again — watch this space for fun to come.

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Cover fun — And even though I’m still only at edit stage with the book, we’re already starting to talk about the US cover for Gathering … amazing!

” All About Character: Writing Strong Women in Fantasy“ is the title of my guest post on Mary Victoria’s blog today.

To celebrate the release of Samiha’s Song, the second in her Chronicles of the Tree series, Mary is hosting a guest author series on her blog around the theme “Writing Strong Women Characters in SFF.” Previous guests have included Nicole Murphy, Gillian Polack, Glenda Larke, Kim Falconer and Tim Jones.

“It’s All About Character …” is my take on the “Writing Strong Women” theme and begins:

For me, the key to writing strong women characters lies in the words “writing” and “character.” As authors, we must focus on writing characters who are credible and real. Male or female, we are primarily writing personalities that must be believable emotionally and in terms of their motivations. But we are also Fantasy authors, which means we have license to play around with the “truths” of the “real” world and devise our own rules …

To read the full post, click here.

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As well as participating in the “Writing Strong Women” series, I will also be interviewing Mary about Samiha’s Song here on “..Anything, Really” on Monday 14—so watch this space!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done an “Influences on Story” post—21 July 2010 in fact—but Tarantella, my Tuesday Poem post for this week, made me think about the influence of other writing in sparking new stories. Tarantella may be a poem, but it still contains stories—and questions a-plenty around those stories.

At first reading, the poem is the story of a dance and an inn in the “High Pyrenees.”  So instantly we have location, in the border country between France and Spain. We also have the dance and the dancer:

” … the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in —
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!”

The language is so evocative that we can see and hear  the dancer moving—“the snapping of the clapper to the spin.” We can also see and hear, smell and feel the scene at the inn:

” … the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)? …

… And the hammer at the doors and the din?”

Doesn’t it just take you there?

Yet the story doesn’t only lie in the colourful and evocative descriptions of dancer and inn. The poem begins with a question:

“Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?”

The question is repeated throughout the first part of the poem and leaves us with our own puzzle, as readers: Who is the narrator? And who is Miranda? What is their relationship to each other? What were they doing at this rough inn in the High Pyrenees?

If we have a storyteller in us, we will want to answer those questions—and the appetite to first speculate and then spin answers is sharpened by the second part of the poem, which begins with the lines:

“Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.”

We learn that the inn and the dancer and the muleteers, and all those who created a din and hammered at the doors, are gone:

“Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound …

… No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.”

Why? As readers, we wonder: Why are the inn and the people all gone? Why does  only a powerful and isolate nature remain? Given the location, and the life span of the poet, Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), my first guess was that the story might have had something to do with the Spanish Civil War, which was savage and bloody and swept many communities away. But the publication date for the poem is 1930, predating the Civil War of 1936-1939, so an easy historical answer is not forthcoming. And poetry, like the novel and short stories, is often completely fictional. Yet still the questions persist: What is the narrator and Miranda’s story? What happened to the inn and the people in it, and why?

The moment, lacking “real” answers, that we begin to weave imagined answers into story we are spinning a new thread into the fiction web, one which may—and likely will—be profoundly different from whatever was in Belloc’s mind when he wrote Tarantella, for example. But I believe it is a truth worthy of “universal acknowlegment” that every time we read a book, or  a poem, or a short story, and feel a “but what if” sparked, that spark has a profound influence on our own stories.

In its most immediate from, this influence becomes fan fiction, but often we recognize the “spark” in stories that are decidedly their own fiction. “What if”, for example, Arwen could have married Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings and not become mortal? In David Eddings’ Belgariad series we find an immortal woman who believes that she must and will lose her immortality if she marries her mortal love—but finds, to her considerable surprise, that he is raised to immortality instead. Most of us who have read The Lord of the Rings appreciate the irony, without ever mistaking one story for the other.

The sheer number of retellings of the King Arthur cycle and The Illiad and The Odyssey stories—and more recently Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia, which is an alternate take on the Aeneid—are an enduring testament to the power of one story to influence and shape others. My own Thornspell is just such shaping, seeking to answer the “what if” of the prince’s backstory in the traditional Sleeping Beauty—and the “why” behind both his actions and those of the wicked fairy.

So what do you think? Do you have a favourite spin-off of an old story? Or is there a “what if” or “why” from a novel, or short story, or poem, that you would like to see addressed through new fiction?

Issue 14 of the International Literary Quarterly (Interlitq) will comprise 3 installments showcasing what the Editorial Board has described as “the depth of literary talent coming out of New Zealand.”

The first installment of “A New Zealand Literary Showcase” will be published in February  ” … with contributions by Coral Atkinson, Marisa Cappetta, Laurice Gilbert, Helen Lowe, Cilla McQueen, Sue Orr, Harry Ricketts, Ron Riddell, Richard Von Sturmer and Niel Wright.”

I am very pleased to have poetry included in Interlitq’s “A New Zealand Literary Showcase,” in company with so many fine New Zealand writers. The poems you will soon have the opportunity to see are:

• Australia Post
• One Day (from the Ithaca Conversations sequence);

Tarantella

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in —
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.

Hilaire Belloc, 1870-1953

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I was first introduced to this poem at High School by a teacher who not only loved it, but read it aloud with great energy and enthusiasm—and I believe that it is a poem that repays being read aloud, to see the way in which the effect of the rhyme and rhythm, and the use of onomatopoeia, work together to  imitate the sense and sound of the dance and the whole frenetic energy of the evening in the inn. The repetiton of words and phrases also reinforces the energy and the way action, whether of the dance or the young muleteers cheering and jeering, tends to repeat in that kind of scene.

Although this was not a poem that we ‘learned by heart’, key phrases have always stayed with me from that one reading:

“And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any …”

What Year 9 student wouldn’t love that concept?

And the more elegaic lines such as:

“And Aragon a torrent at the door”—what a powerful image (she shouts, joyfully!); possibly the reason that it has stayed with me for so many years.

Apologies for the delay—the sorting hat has now sorted and the book giveaway of Thornspell and The Clockwork Angel, from my release day interview with Beth-Anne Miller, has been won by:

Gwen Roman.

Congratulations, Gwen!

You may recall that to be eligible for the giveaway readers had to comment and share their “preferred historical period & location for a romantic time-travel getaway.”

Gwen’s choice was:

“One time period that always strikes me as hearbreakingly romantic is Paris between the world wars. Ooh! Or the Gilded Age in New York. *sigh* Yeah.”

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The other times/places put forward were:

“I think I’d like to be able to revisit times within my own life (ala Henry in The Time Traveler’s Wife) so I could appreciate people and places I miss, and see the things I didn’t pay attention to then.” — Wen

“I’d like to visit the 1500s in England or Italy, and be well-off enough to be romantically comfortable, but not so close to thrones to be in serious danger of getting caught up in dangerous political machinations! It would be lovely to have been an inspiration for Michelangelo, Titian or Holbein … “ — Heather

” … my favourite historical period for a romantic getaway would have to be New York during the Roaring Twenties, which was also called the Jazz Age. Jazz, flappers, the Charleston, speakeasies—it’s the stuff of which romance is made, but also adventure, with such a heady sense of “the new, the new.” — Helen

“The earlist I could go back was 1960s. Preferably America as it seems an exciting time in history. And the time travel would do something to my moleular structure so I’d be a tall, skinny blonde with a never ending supply of cash.” — Jan

“We’d love to holiday in Liverpool, England in the early 1960′s – maybe 1961 – to catch “The Beatles” when they play at the Cavern. Seeing the other bands who didn’t quite make it would be an added bonus. The food, the clothing, and the language would all be retro relaxing experiences – sort of familiar but more real.” — Kay

Interesting that the majority of the historical periods chosen were so recent. But there it is—and I think we can now say that Into the Scottish Mist is well and truly launched. 🙂