Guest Post

Guest Post: “Writing in the devastating wake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” by Jonathan Wood

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JonathanWood2To the best of my recollection, the first thing I ever had published was a review of the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. I was ten. I belonged to a local Youth Club that put out a small paper ’zine every month or so. You could write in and volunteer to review movies. I was devotee of the TNMT cartoon, and had been awaiting the release of the movie with growing anticipation for months. I wrote in, and to my shock and delight was selected. I even got free movie tickets. Few ten year olds have known the height s of ecstasy I reached.

This is typically the point in the story where my dreams are all crushed, and I leave the theater shaking my fist at an unrepentant Hollywood heaven. But in fact, the movie fulfilled my every pre-teen wish. I laughed, I gasped, I demanded pizza afterward. As for the review itself… it was a breathless plot summary that descended into excruciating detail. My father cut me off when I was about halfway through – a mercy killing if ever there was one. As I recall, the final immortal line was, “And the rest was great too.”

These days, I’m in my mid-thirties. But sitting beside me on my desk while I write this is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles mug. Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo, and Michelangelo all stare on.

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Again, this should be the point where I launch into a tale of dark obsession involving terrapin pit fighting, and a restraining order. But honestly, the Turtles have actually never been my #1 nerd. They’ve just always been there – clinging tenaciously to their spot in my heart for over 25 years. Like that album that never quite leaves the lower reaches of the Billboard charts, just sitting there year after year, desperately clinging to relevance.

Recently I finally started to wonder why the Turtles have had such lasting appeal for me.

EddingsD-B1-PawnOfProphecyFor a long time, I couldn’t work it out. But then I had another encounter with another old childhood passion: eighties epic fantasy. I’d been going through something of a reading crisis. I just could not find a book I wanted to stick with. And then, one way or another I stumbled over David Eddings’ Belgeriad series. It was the sort of thing I’d have chewed through in a week or two as a kid, but I’d missed it back then. These days, while I still enjoy the occasional epic tome, I don’t read it with the same alacrity I did in my youth. But I devoured this series. All five books in two months, which is a decent pace for me. And I loved it to bits.

And examining that reaction, and staring at my TMNT mug, I realized there was a connection. Both were stories that, at their core, were about a team of friends.

TMNT has lasted for me, not because of the stories, and not even because of the individual characters (Michelangelo is the best, all you Raphael-lovers can suck it), but because of the interplay between those characters. The adventures are fun yes, but seeing the way these characters deal with it, and the way they trip over each other, and then help each other up as they go through everything – that’s what I love. That’s why through all of their various iterations, no one has messed with the basic archetypes of the characters. Raphael is always aggressive, Michelangelo always a goofball. Because seeing the way the four main characters play off each other is what has people like me continuously coming back to the franchise.

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A lot of fiction, these days, seems to focus on the lone hero. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’ve read and loved many books with that focus. But the stories of my childhood, the ones that are all wrapped up with nostalgia and love, they were stories about groups of friends united by a single purpose. The focus was on the group dynamic as much as on any individual character’s growth. I miss that.

And then I realized, that without consciously doing it, that was what I’d written about in my own books. There may be a distinct lack of heroes in a half-shell, but they’re definitely stories about a group of friends, all driving each other crazy, all working towards the same goal.

And, having realized that, it’s actually kind to think that ten-year old me, could actually be proud of the guy I’ve grown up to be.

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Jonathan Wood is the author of No Hero and Yesterday’s Hero – both published by Titan Books. Be sure to follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

WoodJ-3-AntiHeroThe third novel in the series, Anti-Hero, is due to be published in March 2015, also by Titan Books. Here’s the synopsis:

What do you do when your best friend becomes a supervillain? Agent Arthur Wallace is used to dealing with danger that is extraterrestrial, supernatural, or generally odd. But when a drone-strike interrupts his best friend’s funeral, it becomes clear that his next assignment is going to be stranger than usual. When it turns out that the drone was hijacked by a rogue, digital version of that friend… well then nothing is clear to Arthur any more.

Now the man Arthur counted on most is set on destroying humanity in a grand scheme to save the natural world. And the CIA is set on destroying that man. And Arthur can’t work out who the hero is any more. But he has to work out the all the answers fast, because now he’s staring into the bloody maw of the zombpocalypse itself.

Guest Post: “Where Writers Get Their Groove” by Sebastien de Castell

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deCastell-AuthorPicBy far the most common question you get asked as an author is, “Where do your ideas come from?” Of course, my ideas come from the same places as yours do: the crazy parts of your brain intersecting with the crazy parts of the world around you. Human brains are hard-wired to find patterns even when there are none and those little synaptic misfires are part of what makes us creative beings.

Now, the question I never get asked is, “Where do you get your groove from?” Maybe this sounds like a silly question. After all, books don’t have a groove, do they?

Think about those big moments in a story when your eyes are racing across the page to find out what comes next. If the author is doing their job every line should be moving the story along at the perfect speed for the action taking place. Remember back to one of those heart-rending passages where your eyes suddenly freeze on the last three words of a sentence as the implications of an emotional turnaround hits you. That strange, almost magical timing is pacing. It’s rhythm. It’s groove. My first experiences with storytelling were as a touring musician, so I often go back to music for the inspiration in finding the right pacing for key scenes in the books I write. Here’s a few that helped put Traitor’s Blade onto the page. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “On Trying a Trilogy” by Tom Fletcher

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Gleam is the first book of The Factory Trilogy, which is my first trilogy. My first three novels – The Leaping, The Thing on the Shore, and The Ravenglass Eye, are horror novels that shared a universe, but are essentially standalone. And so writing the first book of a trilogy was an entirely new experience for me – one that I was apprehensive of, but have found thoroughly enjoyable.

I wanted to experiment with developing a particular protagonist – or, as it turned out, group of protagonists – across a series. I wanted to have a go at presenting the readers with a character who would grow and change from book to book, and whose whole past could be explored. Obviously, this required a series built around a character. So I knew from the beginning that characterisation would be central to this trilogy, and that the protagonist would need a motivation compelling enough to propel them forwards through three whole books, and a personality that would carry the readers.

FletcherT-AuthorPicI didn’t want the trilogy to be open-ended; that is, I didn’t want to write three merely sequential novels that might become the first three in a long series of sequential novels about this one character (see: Sookie Stackhouse or Rincewind the Wizard). I wanted it to be one story told across three books, the final book of which might leave the door open for further novels set in the same world, or featuring the same characters, but would simultaneously resolve the story set up in the first book. This meant I couldn’t just-write-and-see-what-happens, which is my usual approach to novels. (Don’t tell anyone). I needed a proper central story, with three acts, and the events of later books seeded in the first. I needed to decide which questions would be raised when, and when to provide the respective answers. And of course, anything written into the first book – and published – couldn’t be changed. This wasn’t like a novel, where you could get to the end and then go back and make changes to the beginning. Anything that forms part of the first book is locked in. So right from the get-go, this required careful planning. New territory for me – as I say, I was apprehensive. But excited, too.

One of the reasons that I’ve long wanted to write fantasy is the opportunity to create and play around in another world. Although I don’t believe that writing, say, realist fiction restricts the use of the imagination in any meaningful way (the real world being so full of things, characters and happenings that none of us has the time or brainpower to imagine all of them) it would be disingenuous of me to claim that writing second-world fantasy does not provide the scope for a wholly different type of imagining.

Working out the history, politics, economy, society, physicality and atmosphere of another world can be a lot of work. And once the work is done, it can be tempting to try and convey all of the detail; after all, the reader isn’t as familiar with this world as they are with their own, so they might need some familiarisation. (And you spent so much time on it…) This is one of the reasons (though of course not the only one) that fantasy novels can get so long.

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However, I’m not very good at writing long novels. I’d already chosen to put character first, so when it came to the setting I decided to just drop my characters into it and let them discuss or elaborate on it as and when seemed natural. This had the beneficial effect of arousing plenty of curiosity in the world of Gleam itself – it’s that old unanswered-question trick again. What are ‘bugs’? Why are Pyramidders bled by their superiors? What is the Clawbaby? What happened to Alan’s home settlement of Modest Mills? What was the factory ever for? Some of the questions readers might have are answered in the first book, but some are not, because the characters either don’t think to ask the same questions, or they do ask the questions and don’t have the answers. Indeed, answering some of the questions about the world of Gleam becomes one of Wild Alan’s primary motivations. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences of writing Gleam has been exactly that – the way the story has arisen naturally from the juxtaposition of the world and the protagonists.

All of which is to say, I’m very excited about spending some more time in Gleam, and so I’m very glad that Gleam is only the first book of a trilogy. And I hope that when you’re done reading it, you’ll feel the same.

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Gleam was published yesterday in the UK by Jo Fletcher Books.

Guest Post: “Setting as a Character” by Patty Templeton

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PattyTempleton-AuthorPicI have a great many tattoos. Entire appendages are coated in ink. One of my favorites is a small arsenic bottle and a sprig of blackberries on my left arm. It was inspired by the book We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

Shirley Jackson. Geez. That woman. Though We Have Always Lived in the Castle is my favorite novel of hers – and the novel that inspired the tattoo, The Haunting of Hill House is what Jackson is most known for. Made famous by two movie adaptations and lauded by Stephen King as one of only two “great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years,”[1] The Haunting of Hill House was the first novel that made me aware of Setting as a Character.

If you are unfamiliar with The Haunting of Hill House, the main story thread is thus: four psychically-inclined characters (two women and two men) visit an 80-year-old mansion named Hill House to study the supernatural activity that may or may not be happening there. Strange. Events. Occur. Is it all in the minds of the slightly terrified inhabitants, do ghosts roam the halls, or can a place actually be alive and evil?

Ever been in a place that gave you bad vibes? I have. There is a certain portion of south Chicagoland woods that I will never go to again. I shit you not, I had a murder of crows follow me (and my mother) on a walk for 15 minutes. Weird. Creepy. Ew. Scary woods. Scary crows.

I loved Shirley Jackson’s notion of a setting truly becoming a character. Hill House is alive… and possibly two steps down its own path of madness. Hill House is something more than even a setting as a character. The term Genius Loci is Latin for “the protective spirit of a place.” Modern usage has dulled the term to meaning the atmosphere of a place…but screw that. I like the idea of a setting being wholly and completely inhabited by a personality.

PrintIn my debut novel, There Is No Lovely End, I tried to stretch the bounds of what a setting as character could be. I wanted several places to be so infused by history and experience that they were completely animate. They do not speak in human languages, but they communicate with characters – who may or may not be used to their settings acting out, rather than just housing their daily lives. That being said, not every setting is a character. There are dead zones. Not every place you walk by in real life gives you glee or the willies, why should the places in a book be any different?

Here are questions to think about when you are debating writing a setting as a character:

Do you want your setting to comfort your main character?

The Watchbird Theater houses a congregation of oddballs led by Arrol Wester, the theater’s owner. The Watchbird itself is known to reveal hidden passages and sleeping rooms for actors it adores. If the Watchbird were a person, people would describe her as kind, caring, and completely unusual.

Do you want your setting to confront your main character?

PrintSaint Anthony’s Academy of Wayward Sons is a Dickensian slumhole of an orphanage. It’s run by Franwell Doogood, a beastly woman with a beastly son, neither of whom would blink an eye over throttling a ragamuffin with a coinbag or broken chair. Consequently, Saint Ant’s is an antagonistic place that often trips and traps the orphans. Were Saint Ant’s a bloke at a bar, he’d be described as a rotten SOB.

Here are a few more questions to get the brain boiling about what your setting can or can’t do:

· Do you want your setting to mirror the personality of those that own it (like above) or do you want your setting to break all bounds and “be itself.” If so, how will this drive your story forward?

· Can a setting save a character?

· Can a setting destroy a character?

· Can your setting speak? Is it a human language? If not, what form does its language take? Can humans understand it?

· Can a setting be the main character?

· What are some of your favorite books and movies that best exemplify “setting as a character”? Think about one. What would you have done differently to amplify or add subtlety to it?

This is what I do when I am at home alone. I nerd out while listening to Slim Cessna’s Auto Club and think about literary and cinematic Genius Loci. It all comes down to this: the only rule is what works. Now get on it. Make setting as a character work for you. Become the new Hill House. Eris knows, I sure as hell will read you.

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[1] The other novel being Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. (Danse Macabre, 270.)

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Author Bio: Patty Templeton is roughly 25 apples tall and 11,000 cups of coffee into her life. She wears red sequins and stomping boots while writing, then hits up back-alley dance bars and honky tonks. Her stories are full of ghosts, freaks, fools, underdogs, blue collar heroes, and never giving up, even when life is giving you shit. She won the first-ever Naked Girls Reading Literary Honors Award and has been a runner-up for the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Award. There Is No Lovely End is her first novel. Here is the synopsis…

Apparitions! Outlaws! Mediums!

1884. Nathan Garlan hears and sees the dead. Using his uncanny aptitudes to assist society and its specters, he has become the most acclaimed medium in Boston. But not all esteem him. Nathan Garlan’s own mother craves her boy butchered — and she’s not the only one…

Misery! Lust! Murder!

New Haven. Sarah Winchester is the heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune and a haunted woman. She has searched for release from familial phantoms for two decades, yet found no respite. However, she has heard of a medium in Boston who regularly administers miracles…

Wit! Wonders! Outrage!

Who is the Reverend Doctor Enton Blake? Why does the lawless Hennet C. Daniels search for him? What form of profane curio is a trick box — and what, precisely, does one inter within it? Will Sarah Winchester find serenity through Nathan Garlan’s services? Or will Hester Garlan find her son first?

Guest Post: “Saying Goodbye” by Tom Pollock

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So that’s it then, it’s done.

It’s a strange thing, finishing a trilogy. It comes with a sense of dislocation. I’ve spent the last five years – a sixth of my life – in a dream world: a London where the streets are lit by glass-skinned dancers with phosphorescent blood, and where the statues conceal a priesthood entombed by their Goddess in stone and bronze as a punishment, a London where the scaffolding can slide from the face of a building, rearticulate itself into a snapping, snarling steel wolf, and pounce.

It’s not letting go of the world that’s the strangest thing, though it’s letting go of the people. Because I’ve also spent the last five years in the heads of two teenaged girls. I’ve done my best to feel what they felt as they fell in love, and fought with their friends and were kidnapped by sentient barbed-wire parasites and took on the powers of urban gods. I’ve pretzel-twisted my thoughts into the shapes of theirs. To put it simply, within the bone enclosure of my skull, I’ve been them. And it’s been a trip.

I am little sceptical of the claim that writing is ‘hard.’ I mean, it is, but so is everything. By nature, I’m a monkey that wants to sit in the sun and eat bananas and unselfconsciously scratch unsociable parts of myself when they itch and… that’s it. There is no deviation from that state of simian bliss that doesn’t count as hard for me. However I’m pretty sure writing doesn’t compare to the difficulty, and let’s be honest – the courage – of doing something really difficult, like farming, or teaching or soldiering or midwifery

Still, it’s not all been fun and games and hijinks with blood-chilling monsters. Side effects of fantasy writing may include: fever, cramps, dizziness (from lack of sleep), diahorrea (verbal, about your book, which when it’s half-conceived no one else cares about), hallucinations, an inability to talk in complete sentences and the growing worry that you may not in fact be human.

That last comes from core activity of writing: grubbing around inside yourself for the truest and most important and most human thing you can lay your hands on and putting it on the page, and then showing it to other people. Because there’s a very real possibility they’ll look at that page and say ‘nope, doesn’t seem human to me’ and then what do you do? Like a lot of writers my ego is the size of the Yukon but has the damage resisting qualities of a Kleenex caught outside on a stormy day, and I think that would have felt like the most undeniable judgment, a kind of reverse Turing test, a double-blind, clinical trial of my soul.

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Until now, that was the scariest thing about writing, but now I’ve got something to top it: letting go. I need to stop being these people now, and make up someone else to be. After five years, I won’t lie, that’s a little intimidating.

I’ll do it though. I have to. I’ll put one sentence in front of another until I’m back gibbering incoherent bits of plot to innocent tourists who stop me on the tube to ask for directions. You know, back to normal.

It’s either that or learn to be a teacher, or a soldier, or a midwife. And you know what? I’m not sure I’m up to that.

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Inventor of monsters, hugger of bears, Tom Pollock is the author of the Skyscraper Thrones series – The City’s Son (shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle); The Glass Republic (shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award); and Our Lady of the Streets, which is out in August. All three are published by Jo Fletcher Books in the UK. The City’s Son is also published in the US by Flux Books (cover below).

For news on Tom’s novels and next projects, be sure to check out his blog and the Skyscraper Throne website, and follow him on Twitter. AND, if you’re in London, be sure to go to Tom’s signing at Forbidden Planet, on August 7th.

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Guest Post: “Writing Dystopians – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” by Melissa Davenport

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MelissaDelport-AuthorPicIn recent years, dystopian fiction has taken the world by storm. Series such as The Hunger Games, Divergent and Delirium have exploded onto the book market and paved the way for this speculative genre, which explores social and political structures and is set in a societal structure that is headed for an irreversible oblivion, where justice, freedom and happiness are suppressed.

A speculative genre is commonly found in science-fiction, and the underlying concept is often an analogy for real-world issues. Some people even read these books as a political warning of things to come, should humanity make the wrong choices.

Today’s society is exposed to a particularly violent culture through television, gaming and rising crime. Dystopia’s are characterised by a “high stakes” scenario, with plenty of action and adventure, but they typically have a “hopeful” ending – and above all, people crave the presence of hope in a world where there is little to be had.

The Australian reports that dystopian fiction asks big questions: What is Freedom? What is love? What is human? Dystopias offer a variety of answers, while providing the reader with an epic journey of pure escapist fantasy, far removed from the harsh reality of our real lives. The genre is thought-provoking and has more substance at its core than many readers realise.

Personally, I have always loved stories that relate to struggle, be it survival after a nuclear war, a catastrophic natural disaster, or the collapse of industrial and social systems. There is something captivating about mankind’s will to survive, the fascination of our “fight” or “flight” response. And when there is nowhere to run, you will find dystopia at its very best.

Movies like The Day After Tomorrow, The Matrix and 2012 (which proved that with John Cusack and a limo, you can survive Armageddon), highlight the dystopian genre.

MelissaDelport-ApocalypseMovies

Of course, authors strive to capitalise on the rise in popularity of a particular genre or topic. After the success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, the market became inundated with books about vampires, of all size and shape.

Similarly, with the explosion of The Hunger Games a new trend was born, and many authors have stepped forward, attempting to take up the mantel and oust the mighty Suzanne Collins from her throne. A few have come close, but Ms. Collins is still the master of her craft.

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Sadly, too much of anything is never a good thing. Dystopias now teeter on the edge of becoming clichéd and losing their originality. Readers do not want to read the same story, regardless of how well it has been retold or repackaged. They key with anything is to develop a novel concept – to break the mould and, in the case of fiction, to write your guts out!

I have no doubt that dystopias will be around for a long time to come. I, for one, am a huge fan and my appetite is nowhere near sated.

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Author Bio: Melissa Delport is the author of The Legacy Trilogy and the stand-alone, self-published eBooks Rainfall and The Traveler. She graduated from the University of South Africa with a Bachelor’s Degree in English in 2000 At the age of twenty-four Melissa started a logistics company from the spare room of her flat and built it up to two fully operational depots in Durban and Johannesburg. Ten years later, she has sold her business in order to write full time. Melissa lives with her husband and three children in Hillcrest, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

The Legacy and The Legion (the first two books in the series) are available now. The final book, The Legend, will be released early 2015. Here’s the synopsis for The Legacy…

World War Three lasted twelve days. Twelve days was all it took for mankind to devastate the planet and almost eradicate the human race. No victor emerged from the ashes and billions lost their lives.

We survivors lived through the bleakest of winters. A primal existence became the new order, and the little that remained of our humanity hung in the balance.

Then one man stood up and changed the world. I believed, as did everyone else, that he was the hero of our time, the man who had saved us from our own demise. His name is Eric Dane and he is the President of the New United States of America.

He is also my husband, and my greatest enemy.

I grew up oblivious to the truth, until my father found me when I was nineteen years old. He told me about the many horrifying facts that our new leader kept hidden from us. And he told me that beyond the borders the Resistance grew and fought for freedom from the oppression that Eric Dane had imposed on us.

My name is Rebecca Davis. I am twenty-six years old, and in me the Resistance has found the ultimate weapon.

Find out more about Melissa Delport’s novels and writing on her blog, series website, Facebook and Twitter.

Guest Post: “‘You’re doing what?’ – Why I Decided to Self-Publish My Next Series” by Rachel Aaron

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RachelBach-authorphotoWhenever a New York published author decides to self-publish, there’s always the implicit assumption that Something Happened. Why else, after all, would an author who was presumably happily settled in a nice, big publishing house suddenly strike out on her own, like a child running away from home? Clearly, something terrible must have occurred. Was there a fight? A hot tempered editorial phone call where bridges were burned like kindling? Or perhaps it was the book itself? Maybe the story failed to meet the publisher’s expectations, and now the slighted author is unloading drek onto her fans for a quick buck?

Whatever imagined tragedy you prefer, they all start with the same opening: Something Happened. Something fundamental went horribly wrong in the publishing relationship. There’s simply no other plausible explanation why an author who’d already “made it,” who’d cleared the slush pile, gotten the agent and the book deal and gone on to write multiple series would give it all up and go it alone in self-publishing, the last refuge of the desperate and rejected. Continue reading →

Guest Post: “Whosoever touches the Tarot of Eternity…” by Rachel Pollack

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PollackRachel-2014THE USE OF TAROT CARDS IN THE CHILD EATER

Tarot cards appear in my novel, The Child Eater, in a number of ways, in particular a mysterious pack called the Tarot Of Eternity. In the story, the original has been lost for many centuries, so that the pack is known only through “a copy of a copy,” or even “a copy of a copy of a copy.” At the same time, the pack is seen as so significant that even these copies several times removed, but hand-created by magicians, have great power.

The book moves back and forth between two worlds, the first a medieval-style land ruled by wizards, the second a contemporary small city America. In the medieval world, an abused boy named Matyas runs away from his violent father to study magic. In the second, a lonely boy named Simon Wisdom desperately tries to suppress his deep psychic abilities, partly because he knows that no one likes him “reading” their minds, and more, because they bring him terrifying visions—dead children begging him for help, severed heads that live on in pain, and a gray man with an ancient stone knife. Matyas has similar visions, and he too does his best to forget them.

What bridges the two worlds, or rather crosses between them, is the Tarot of Eternity.

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This use of the Tarot is not what many people expect when Tarot cards appear in a story. The pack in the novel has almost nothing to do with fortune-telling. There is a point in Simon’s story where a girl brings a set of Tarot cards to school and announces she will “read” everyone’s future. Simon is contemptuous. He can just see the future—though he tries not to—what does he care about some dumb deck of cards? Later, Simon discovers a set of Tarot that the reader suspects may in fact be the Tarot Of Eternity (or at least a copy of a copy), but he does not even consider using them for divination. It’s not the future Simon seeks, but a refuge—doorways to worlds where he might escape the severed heads of children begging for help.

Matyas too seeks something when he encounters the cards. He has seen a man fly, and even though everyone, including his teacher and all the other wizards, tell him it cannot be done, he believes that he is destined to do it, if only he can find the secret. He tries to find it in the cards only to discover that for him, all roads lead to the man with the stone knife.

Readers who only know of the Tarot as a tool for divination may find these more fantastic uses of the cards as far afield from what they expect. In fact, the idea that the Tarot contains mystical power completely separate from any psychic function is deeply rooted in Tarot tradition. At least, in the occult Tarot tradition, since 1781.

First, a bit of history. The Tarot was not created for fortune-telling. In fact, there is no documented use of the Tarot as a divinatory tool until after 1781 (more about that date in a moment). Extensive research over the past thirty or so years has demonstrated that the Tarot began its life in Northern Italy around 1430, as a card game called at first Il Trionfii (The Triumphs, or Trumps), and later, Tarocchi, which the French shortened to “Les Tarots.” The various titles refer to the pack’s unique feature, an extra suit of elaborately painted images, some secular (an Emperor and Empress), some moralistic (virtues such as Justice and Fortitude), and some religious (a Pope, various angels). In Tarocchi these cards will triumph over the regular suit cards.

The first known use of the Tarot not as a game—only a few years after the earliest packs—was as inspiration for poetry. People in salons would make up poems about the figures in the cards, but everybody knew they would be satires on people at court.

So what happened in 1781? A pair of French occult scholars set forth a daring idea. Antoine Court de Gébelin and Comte de Mellet announced that the Tarot, assumed to be a trivial game, was in fact the coded wisdom of Ancient Egypt, disguised as a game so that it might survive the Dark Ages of ignorance until it might be discovered by the sages of the future—that is, Court de Gébelin and de Mellet.

From a strict historical perspective this was wrong, both about the cards and about Egypt, but it didn’t matter. A new myth had taken hold, what we might call the Tarot’s secret origin. For the next 200+ years people would argue about which great secrets the cards concealed, but never about the basic idea. In The Child Eater the Tarot of Eternity draws on the secret origin idea but in fact goes further, suggesting that the Tarot was involved in creation itself.

One of the major influences on the novel is Jewish myth and folklore, in particular several Talmudic and medieval tales. The terrible ritual in the center of the novel, the reason for the Child Eater’s actions, derives from a bizarre belief that an evil magician can lure away a boy just before his bar mitzvah, kill him, and keep his head alive as a tool to…predict the future. In my story the heads of the murdered children serve a different purpose entirely. Perhaps I unconsciously wanted to divorce Tarot from its assumed purpose in order to re-create it.

Possibly the most daring use of Tarot in the book also comes from Jewish myth. The rabbinic tradition sees the Five Books of Moses, the Torah, as more than just a sacred text. Some say that before God created the universe, S/He (yes, the Jewish God is hermaphroditic; this too is an ancient Talmudic idea) created the Torah. Then God consulted the Torah on how to make a universe!

This idea has fascinated me for many years, only, instead of the Torah I imagine the Tarot, that is, that God created the Tarot before the universe. This is not meant as a serious suggestion, but as a way to open our minds. I once did a reading in which I asked the cards “Show me the reading you gave God to create the universe.” (It appears in a book titled The Forest Of Souls). The same idea occurs in the novel.

There is another power in the cards that is unique to this book. The first time Matyas encounters the Tarot, or rather, a copy of a copy of a copy, the old wizard who lets him see them says a very strange thing, an ancient saying about the original. “Whosoever touches the Tarot Of Eternity, he shall be healed of all his crimes.” Matyas will not understand this until the very end of the book.

***

Rachel Pollack’s The Child Eater was published by Jo Fletcher Books last week.

Also on CR: Interview with Rachel Pollack

Guest Post: “Writing Real Women” by Jon Wallace

Civilian Reader Guest Post , , , ,

WallaceJon-AuthorPicI reckon that one of the hardest things in the world, when you’re starting out as a writer, is when a friend critiques something you’ve written. You’ve put (what you regard) as a lot into it, you’re convinced it’s unparalleled genius, and when you meet to discuss your work you sit there confidently expecting praise.

Your friend normally starts off by giving you what you want: “I loved this, that bit was cool, I really enjoyed the way you did such and such”. You sit there, nod in agreement that it’s all great and think: Excellent, my skill is acknowledged. Then come the words:

“The only thing is…” Continue reading →

Guest Post: “‘Don’t Worry, It’s not My Blood’ – On Tough Guys” by Snorri Kristjansson

Civilian Reader Guest Post , , ,

KristjanssonS-AuthorPic2At this moment in time, human interaction is very heavily coded. We learn from a tender age what’s good, bad, not allowed and WHY ARE YOU POOPING UNDER THE DINNER TABLE?! (Which is, in retrospect, also ‘bad’.) We can talk for a while about where our behaviour comes from – some say ‘nature’, some say ‘nurture’, some say ‘a very small shed in Hatfield’ – but there can be no doubt that at the moment we are animals with highly complex behavioural patterns that start with ideals at an early age.

Now, I am a ‘man’. My generously padded 6-foot frame gives it away, as does the beard and the deep voice. And as a ‘man’, I’ve lived with the ideal of the Tough Guy all my life. He is tall (usually), mysterious (sometimes) and handy in a scrap (always). The Tough Guy might not be best suited to navigating the treacherous waters of, say, office politics or teenage girl drama, but with every roll-back of learned behaviour, with every step backwards to the rule of might, the Tough Guy’s role increases. Basically, when the going gets tough I will happily take my big ol’ manly frame and hide in a very manly fashion behind a proper Tough Guy.

KristjanssonS-SwordsOfGoodMenAnd if we were to start grouping and ranking Tough Guys, my ancestors the Vikings would be up there. In Viking times Tough Guy-ness was currency. It created your reputation, and your reputation made sure that people stayed the hell away from you and yours. Tough Guys survived, so becoming a Tough Guy was essential.

On the face of it, writing a whole book about Tough Guy Vikings could have been just grunting and snow. However, the Tough Guy act can be just that – an act. I was very interested in the genesis of the Tough Guys, the place they came from, and not least smashing them all together and seeing what happened.*

In the great debate on the one true way to write I fall mostly into the ‘Architect’ camp, looking down my nose from my Outline Tower at those madcap ‘Gardeners’ and their organic, story-growing ways. However, in writing Swords of Good Men I found that what did grow organically in my very heavily outlined story was the relationship between various Tough Guys. I found that it was a fairly egalitarian thing, too – if you could do the work and stand your ground, the Tough Guys didn’t care about nationality, gender or anything else.

KristjanssonS-2-BloodWillFollowI found out that the Tough Guy was simple – but he could be complex, too, and not necessarily just layered on top. Thinking back, some of them may be layered sideways. The Tough Guy could also just be a tool, in all senses of the word, and the Tough Guy could also be thoroughly unpleasant if he revelled a bit too much in his toughness. However, even the worst of the worst still had friendships and connections, and to my surprise the characters in Swords of Good Men became much more real than I had expected and possibly intended.**

However, I am nothing if not true to my roots. There are also punch-ups, punchlines and definitely a couple of Tough Guys who are too old for this shit – because writing tough guys is fun.

*Possibly somewhat predictably, a lot of death happened.
** Which was a kind of Lethal-Weapon-with-Swords kind of thing.

*

Snorri Kristjansson is the author of Swords of Good Men and the recently-released Blood Will Follow – both published in the UK by Jo Fletcher Books. Reviews coming soon!

Also on CR: Interview with Snorri Kristjansson, Excerpt of Blood Will Follow