Catherine Taylor's Blog
April 1, 2021
New Article
Just wanted to let you know that a new article I wrote about my inspiration for Beyond The Moon has just appeared on the Women Writers, Women's Books site: http://booksbywomen.org/research-for-...
May 21, 2020
Beyond The Moon Bonus Scenes
I have a little treat for you – bonus material from Beyond The Moon! If you read and enjoyed Beyond The Moon, and would like to read a bit more, please head over to my website at https://www.catherinetaylor.net and sign up for my newsletter. I've mentioned elsewhere that I cut back BTM's word count quite drastically when it came around to editing the book for publication. A lot of those cuts were badly needed, but some of the dropped scenes I really loved, and was quite loath to part with. I thought I might put a couple of those loved-but-didn’t-finally-quite-make-it scenes into my very first newsletter, which I sent out today. If you sign up on my website, I’ll make sure you get it.
April 6, 2020
INTERNATIONAL BEYOND THE MOON GIVEAWAY!
Everyone’s shut up inside (and rightly so), but no one can stop you from escaping into a novel! And so I’ve decided to give away four paperback copies of Beyond The Moon. Please feel free to enter for yourself, or on behalf of someone else who you think could do with a bit of distraction – which is just about all of us at the moment, in truth! The competition ends in three days’ time on 9th April, so you don’t have long. To enter please head over to my website at https://www.catherinetaylor.net - and do share the giveaway news with other book lovers. Hope everyone is staying safe and well during these trying times.
March 23, 2020
Stranger Than Fiction
I feel so incredibly lucky to have a garden right now - our own little patch of outside space in London where we can briefly escape from the new, crazy reality. Who on earth would have thought, just a couple of weeks ago, that we’d be in this unprecedented situation, our societies transformed to a much more all-encompassing extent even than the all-out war situations that many of us historical novelists write about?
Even in the midst of the WW2 Blitz, with the Luftwaffe raining down bombs on London, the economy still largely functioned, bars and restaurants were still open, and people still travelled, went out to work, mingled with each other and got on with their lives as best as they could. But daily life at the moment seems like the premise of a dystopian novel. Travelling back in time to 1917 like Louisa in Beyond The Moon hardly feels much more outlandish. Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. And never more so than at the moment.
I’m so grateful to all the key workers in the National Health Service, and to everyone else striving so hard to keep our country going – the police, postal workers, shop workers, food chain employees, utilities workers etc. It’s a hugely worrying time for everyone, especially for those to whom infection poses an extra risk, and those whose livelihoods are affected.
Luckily for me I'm able to work from home, and am used to doing just that, but it’s very strange to feel that I can’t just nip out to the coffee shop as before. We may even get a full lockdown in London in the next few days. I’d like to be able to disappear into writing novel number two to keep my mind off it all, but my children are off school, and need entertaining/home schooling (wish me luck – and a plentiful supply of red wine!).
Anyway, a book club had a couple of interesting questions about Beyond The Moon for me a few days ago, and I thought I'd post their questions and my answers here:
"The idea of how Louisa found Robert was interesting but how she “fell” into the time period and took the place of Rose was quite the storyline. How did you come up with her replacing Rose when in reality Rose was killed the explosion? Is there anything in history that points to this type of reincarnation?
How about the patient who saw Louisa dancing with Robert? I thought something would be more developed there. Or was it to give us the question of reality vs. mental health hallucinations? What’s real in whose mind?"
The idea for Beyond The Moon had been germinating in my mind for over 10 years before I actually sat down to write it. From the very first I always envisaged that it would be different to the “conventional”, genre-type time travel story. I wanted it to be somehow a more meaningful, transformative journey for Louisa, that would be more than her just somehow physically falling through time.
I’ve always been hugely interested in the idea of reincarnation. I’m not really a religious person, but I do think there’s more than an element of the mystical to life. Beyond The Moon was partly inspired by Anya Seton’s Green Darkness, which I read long ago. This is a novel that’s partly about a young woman who travels back to a previous life where she was in love with a monk. As with most reincarnation novels, however (or at least those I’ve read), the heroine was completely submerged in her previous life, and didn’t retain any knowledge of her future life.
I always found that a bit of a let down. How much more interesting, I thought, to have someone go back in time to a previous reincarnation of themselves – but still retain all their memories of their modern-day incarnation. I thought it would be extremely interesting exercise to put Louisa through that experience, where she would be put on her mettle and forced to be a real VAD nurse from 1917. I put a lot of thought into the exact mechanism of how Louisa would end up back in 1917, but still as 2017 Louisa. In the end I realised the only real way I could do it was to kill off “Rose” in an accident, allowing Louisa the ability to take over, simply slip into her life and carry on.
I’ve seen nothing in history about this kind of reincarnation – apart from the few historic examples mentioned by Ralph Bronstein in Beyond The Moon, ie the Chinese legend of Meng Po and Plato’s Myth of Er. That’s what made it so interesting for me to write about – the idea was wholly mine to play with. And it allowed me to make Louisa’s time-travelling experience all the more mysterious and extraordinary than it’s usually portrayed in books.
And it’s interesting that you mention Pam seeing Louisa and Robert dancing together. Pam was due to have a somewhat larger role in the novel at first. I decided to leave her vision of Louisa and Robert together largely unexplained. But hopefully the reader can accept it as true at a more subliminal level. This is where the idea of the mystical, irrational elements to life come in. There aren’t always answers to these questions, and explanations for experiences.
Louisa went back to the past as Rose, and Marisa appeared in the past as Flora. Something similar, clearly, was also going on with Pam. But it is up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. I also wanted to use Pam’s vision to explore the idea of mental illness, and how we perceive it, a little. What if Pam couldn’t simply be signed off as “delusional”? What if she, too, had lived a previous life (one somehow connected with Louisa’s), and was not simply hallucinating, but in fact recollecting events from that previous life? You are exactly right: “What’s real in whose mind?”
Even in the midst of the WW2 Blitz, with the Luftwaffe raining down bombs on London, the economy still largely functioned, bars and restaurants were still open, and people still travelled, went out to work, mingled with each other and got on with their lives as best as they could. But daily life at the moment seems like the premise of a dystopian novel. Travelling back in time to 1917 like Louisa in Beyond The Moon hardly feels much more outlandish. Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction. And never more so than at the moment.
I’m so grateful to all the key workers in the National Health Service, and to everyone else striving so hard to keep our country going – the police, postal workers, shop workers, food chain employees, utilities workers etc. It’s a hugely worrying time for everyone, especially for those to whom infection poses an extra risk, and those whose livelihoods are affected.
Luckily for me I'm able to work from home, and am used to doing just that, but it’s very strange to feel that I can’t just nip out to the coffee shop as before. We may even get a full lockdown in London in the next few days. I’d like to be able to disappear into writing novel number two to keep my mind off it all, but my children are off school, and need entertaining/home schooling (wish me luck – and a plentiful supply of red wine!).
Anyway, a book club had a couple of interesting questions about Beyond The Moon for me a few days ago, and I thought I'd post their questions and my answers here:
"The idea of how Louisa found Robert was interesting but how she “fell” into the time period and took the place of Rose was quite the storyline. How did you come up with her replacing Rose when in reality Rose was killed the explosion? Is there anything in history that points to this type of reincarnation?
How about the patient who saw Louisa dancing with Robert? I thought something would be more developed there. Or was it to give us the question of reality vs. mental health hallucinations? What’s real in whose mind?"
The idea for Beyond The Moon had been germinating in my mind for over 10 years before I actually sat down to write it. From the very first I always envisaged that it would be different to the “conventional”, genre-type time travel story. I wanted it to be somehow a more meaningful, transformative journey for Louisa, that would be more than her just somehow physically falling through time.
I’ve always been hugely interested in the idea of reincarnation. I’m not really a religious person, but I do think there’s more than an element of the mystical to life. Beyond The Moon was partly inspired by Anya Seton’s Green Darkness, which I read long ago. This is a novel that’s partly about a young woman who travels back to a previous life where she was in love with a monk. As with most reincarnation novels, however (or at least those I’ve read), the heroine was completely submerged in her previous life, and didn’t retain any knowledge of her future life.
I always found that a bit of a let down. How much more interesting, I thought, to have someone go back in time to a previous reincarnation of themselves – but still retain all their memories of their modern-day incarnation. I thought it would be extremely interesting exercise to put Louisa through that experience, where she would be put on her mettle and forced to be a real VAD nurse from 1917. I put a lot of thought into the exact mechanism of how Louisa would end up back in 1917, but still as 2017 Louisa. In the end I realised the only real way I could do it was to kill off “Rose” in an accident, allowing Louisa the ability to take over, simply slip into her life and carry on.
I’ve seen nothing in history about this kind of reincarnation – apart from the few historic examples mentioned by Ralph Bronstein in Beyond The Moon, ie the Chinese legend of Meng Po and Plato’s Myth of Er. That’s what made it so interesting for me to write about – the idea was wholly mine to play with. And it allowed me to make Louisa’s time-travelling experience all the more mysterious and extraordinary than it’s usually portrayed in books.
And it’s interesting that you mention Pam seeing Louisa and Robert dancing together. Pam was due to have a somewhat larger role in the novel at first. I decided to leave her vision of Louisa and Robert together largely unexplained. But hopefully the reader can accept it as true at a more subliminal level. This is where the idea of the mystical, irrational elements to life come in. There aren’t always answers to these questions, and explanations for experiences.
Louisa went back to the past as Rose, and Marisa appeared in the past as Flora. Something similar, clearly, was also going on with Pam. But it is up to the reader to draw their own conclusions. I also wanted to use Pam’s vision to explore the idea of mental illness, and how we perceive it, a little. What if Pam couldn’t simply be signed off as “delusional”? What if she, too, had lived a previous life (one somehow connected with Louisa’s), and was not simply hallucinating, but in fact recollecting events from that previous life? You are exactly right: “What’s real in whose mind?”
January 16, 2020
New Book Tour Features
Hi all
You may have noticed that Beyond The Moon is on blog tour again, this time with the fabulous Rachel's Random Resources. I’ve done a few interviews/Q&As about my writing process and WW1 medicine, etc.
Here is the first Q&A I did, with Els from the B For Bookreview blog:
– When and where do you prefer to write?
I write during school term times, when my incredibly lively and noisy children are safely out of the way at school and the house is lovely and quiet. I don’t do at all well with noise and distractions. I write in my “office”, a lovely, light room in our old Victorian house in west London. My desk is opposite a large sash window that looks out onto the back garden and swaying trees. I love to sit here and contemplate the changing weather while coming up with story ideas.
– Do you have a certain ritual?
Once I’ve dropped my children at school I head off to the shops and do the shopping for dinner, then I head off to the coffee shop with my rather battered Thermos mug…
– Is there a drink of some food that keeps you company while you write?
…where I buy the largest, strongest white Americano they have, along with a granola yoghurt. I then take these home with me, sit at my desk, and slowly consume them over the next couple of hours. I am a real creature of habit. And I find this little routine sort of ‘meditative’. It definitely relaxes me (despite all the caffeine!) and puts me into a creative and writing frame of mind.
– What is your favourite book?
I’ve loved Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds since the 1980s, when I first read it as a teenager. It was the book that first taught me what an incredibly emotional experience reading fiction could be, and how you can feel personally touched and affected by a story. I remember so many of Colleen McCullough’s beautiful descriptions about the Australian Outback to this day.
– Do you consider writing a different genre in the future?
I would quite like to write a romantic comedy one day, but I must say that the ideas for such a book don’t spring to mind as readily as all the ideas I have for historical fiction
– Do you sometimes base your characters on people you know?
Not entire people, but parts of some characters’ make-up might well be influenced by certain people – either those that I know personally or have read about. But having said that, as an author I think there is something of yourself (more than a little, a lot of the time) in every character you write.
– Do you take a notebook everywhere in order to write down ideas that pop up?
It’s not quite as “authorly” as a notebook, but my mobile phone goes everywhere with me and I usually put any ideas that I have on the fly into an email on that, then send it to myself. I must admit I do like the idea of a notebook (and maybe a beautiful fountain pen or quill to go with it), but my handbag already weighs a ton.
– Which genre do you not like at all?
That’s a really good question. I don’t like the horror genre, either in book or film form. I just see it as a form of “cheap thrills”. That’s very much a personal opinion, though. I also would never choose to read crime or detective fiction. It just doesn’t interest me.
– If you had the chance to co-write a book. Whom would it be with?
How about Lord Byron? That would probably be tremendous fun!
– If you should travel to a foreign country to do research, which one would you chose and why?
I’ve always longed to visit Israel and see all the historical religious sites over there. If I could combine a trip there with research for a novel that would be just perfect.
Here are the links for two more features I did, in case you'd like to look them up.
https://lunaslittlelibrary.wordpress....
https://bookreviewsbyjasmine.blogspot...
Until next time!
Catherine
You may have noticed that Beyond The Moon is on blog tour again, this time with the fabulous Rachel's Random Resources. I’ve done a few interviews/Q&As about my writing process and WW1 medicine, etc.
Here is the first Q&A I did, with Els from the B For Bookreview blog:
– When and where do you prefer to write?
I write during school term times, when my incredibly lively and noisy children are safely out of the way at school and the house is lovely and quiet. I don’t do at all well with noise and distractions. I write in my “office”, a lovely, light room in our old Victorian house in west London. My desk is opposite a large sash window that looks out onto the back garden and swaying trees. I love to sit here and contemplate the changing weather while coming up with story ideas.
– Do you have a certain ritual?
Once I’ve dropped my children at school I head off to the shops and do the shopping for dinner, then I head off to the coffee shop with my rather battered Thermos mug…
– Is there a drink of some food that keeps you company while you write?
…where I buy the largest, strongest white Americano they have, along with a granola yoghurt. I then take these home with me, sit at my desk, and slowly consume them over the next couple of hours. I am a real creature of habit. And I find this little routine sort of ‘meditative’. It definitely relaxes me (despite all the caffeine!) and puts me into a creative and writing frame of mind.
– What is your favourite book?
I’ve loved Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds since the 1980s, when I first read it as a teenager. It was the book that first taught me what an incredibly emotional experience reading fiction could be, and how you can feel personally touched and affected by a story. I remember so many of Colleen McCullough’s beautiful descriptions about the Australian Outback to this day.
– Do you consider writing a different genre in the future?
I would quite like to write a romantic comedy one day, but I must say that the ideas for such a book don’t spring to mind as readily as all the ideas I have for historical fiction
– Do you sometimes base your characters on people you know?
Not entire people, but parts of some characters’ make-up might well be influenced by certain people – either those that I know personally or have read about. But having said that, as an author I think there is something of yourself (more than a little, a lot of the time) in every character you write.
– Do you take a notebook everywhere in order to write down ideas that pop up?
It’s not quite as “authorly” as a notebook, but my mobile phone goes everywhere with me and I usually put any ideas that I have on the fly into an email on that, then send it to myself. I must admit I do like the idea of a notebook (and maybe a beautiful fountain pen or quill to go with it), but my handbag already weighs a ton.
– Which genre do you not like at all?
That’s a really good question. I don’t like the horror genre, either in book or film form. I just see it as a form of “cheap thrills”. That’s very much a personal opinion, though. I also would never choose to read crime or detective fiction. It just doesn’t interest me.
– If you had the chance to co-write a book. Whom would it be with?
How about Lord Byron? That would probably be tremendous fun!
– If you should travel to a foreign country to do research, which one would you chose and why?
I’ve always longed to visit Israel and see all the historical religious sites over there. If I could combine a trip there with research for a novel that would be just perfect.
Here are the links for two more features I did, in case you'd like to look them up.
https://lunaslittlelibrary.wordpress....
https://bookreviewsbyjasmine.blogspot...
Until next time!
Catherine
December 13, 2019
Interview about Beyond The Moon
Beyond The Moon is on blog tour this week with the fabulous Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours, and I’ve been super-busy writing up interviews and Q and A’s for all the fantastic bloggers hosting me on their websites. I did a fairly in-depth Q &A with Jathan, of the Jathan and Heather website a couple of days ago (https://jathanandheather.com/), and I thought it might be nice to repost it here on Goodreads for you all to see. And by the way Beyond The Moon is currently on sale (just $1.99, down from $3.99) on Amazon US until Monday, so grab yourself a bargain! It’s also reduced on Amazon UK.
J&H: What drew you to this kind of story and what difficulties did you encounter while writing it?
CT: As a child and young person I was always strongly drawn to Gothic historical fiction —think Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I just adored the idea of ghostly, shadowy old manors, misty moors and brooding heroes (nearly all the novels I’ve ever loved have been romances). I’ve also always loved books with elements of magic and/or time travel in them, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Charlotte Sometimes. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always wanted to be an author, and as I’ve gotten older, my passion for Gothic and speculative fiction has stayed constant. I’ve also always been fascinated by the First World War, ever since first reading Wilfred Owen’s heartbreakingly beautiful poem, “Strange Meeting,” at school. Out of all these passions, Beyond The Moon was born. At its heart it’s a love story—and a story of hope. I think the most difficult part of writing it was probably actually trying to marry all the different elements of it together in a satisfying and respectful way: the seriousness and gravity of Robert’s WWI experiences and the magic elements.
J&H: The hero here is World War I First Lieutenant Robert Lovett. He’s true leading man material, despite the fact that he is suffering from “hysterical blindness.” What is it about him that made your heart beat faster and what did you learn about this little-known condition while researching the book?
CT: Robert Lovett is, I think, a composite of the many young, Edwardian gentleman officers, whose intelligent and sensitive accounts of WWI I’ve read over the years. This so-called ‘Lost Generation’ were truly a class apart. They came almost exclusively from British private schools, and believed in the qualities taught by such institutions, such as courage, patriotism, selfless service, leadership and character, and signed up for active service with a desire to fight for the noble cause of “freedom,” expecting a heroic adventure. Read, for instance, Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That, and Siegfried Sassoon’s Diary of An Infantry Officer. Like Robert Lovett in Beyond The Moon, they cared deeply for their men—in fact the welfare of the men under their command is usually their chief preoccupation—and their main fear was that they might fail to be brave, and let down the soldiers serving under them. I suppose it’s easy to idolize a generation in hindsight, but I honestly feel there was something special about this generation of young officers, whose accounts and diaries are full of poetry, drawings of the birds and animals they saw around them in the trenches, and poignant musings on life and the war.
And it’s incredible to think that a condition like hysterical blindness could exist, isn’t it? That one could be so mentally shocked by one’s experiences that one could be rendered blind. But the horrors of WWI, manifesting as shellshock, actually did cause this kind of mental injury. Not only blindness, but loss of the ability to speak, paralysis even. Of course one of the saddest things about WWI was that, at first, those suffering from shellshock were deemed to be shirkers and malingerers. That mindset eventually changed, thank goodness, albeit slowly. And now we are well aware of the prevalence of PTSD among those who go to war.
J&H: Louisa Casson is an empathetic heroine from the start. Her grandmother dies, she suffers an accident due to her grief, and suddenly finds herself basically committed to a psychiatric hospital because her physician feels she is a suicide risk. How is it that a person could still find themselves in this predicament in 2017? And were you hesitant to portray a mental health facility in this story in the manner that you did?
CT: It seems crazy that this could possibly happen, doesn’t it? But I’m sure that it not only could happen, but does happen. Diagnosing someone with a psychiatric illness is a very subjective thing—a psychiatrist can only go on what he or she is told by the patient, or what he or she observes about the patient. Do look up the Rosenhan Experiment, conducted in the early 1970s to examine the accuracy of psychiatric diagnosis. In the experiment, eight perfectly sane people attended psychiatric hospitals feigning hallucinations. All were diagnosed with mental illnesses (schizophrenia in all but one case), admitted to mental hospitals as inpatients and even prescribed anti-psychotic drugs. And so why couldn’t it work the other way around too? Why couldn’t someone presenting as mentally healthy just as easily be deemed (like Louisa) as mentally ill?
And no, I wasn’t hesitant to portray Coldbrook Hall as I did. I can appreciate that the facility might seem outlandish to some, but in the modern-day UK, patients are too often subjected to appalling conditions in privately-run mental hospitals.
J&H: Robert and Louisa first meet when she stumbles across his room and steps back in time a hundred years. What major differences did you find yourself navigating around when it came to weaving a story that spans a literal century?
CT: I had to try to make sure that the two very different worlds of each time period stayed related to one another, so that the book didn’t end up as two completely separate books in one novel. I was aware that the “tone” of the WWI story is quite different from the modern-day story. Robert is a young Edwardian gentleman, the product of a privileged Edwardian world. The ‘feel’ of his parts of the story is quite different from Louisa’s. It can often, in fact, feel more elegant, elegiac and literary, than the parts set in the modern day psychiatric hospital. Louisa, of course, is in a very different environment, a modern-day hospital full of often rather terrifying mental patients, who swear and fight against the system, and can be quite intimidating. And not only that, there is also a lot of ribald humor going on between Kerry and Louisa. Sometimes it was quite hard to ensure that these two very different worlds and narrators meant the book still felt like a unified whole.
J&H: Can true love conquer the problems that arise when mental illness rears its head in a relationship? And if so, what does it take to overcome such an obstacle?
CT: I don’t think I’m really qualified to answer that question. Of course one would like to think that one would do everything possible to help a loved one suffering from a major mental illness. But I’m sure that sometimes it’s simply not possible, however well-intentioned one might be, and that perhaps people simply have to walk away from someone on a determinedly self-destructive path in order to save their own sanity. I have the greatest admiration for people who work in the mental health field. It must surely be one of the most difficult fields of medicine of all to work in.
J&H: When researching and visiting various World War I sites for your story, which was your favorite and why? Also, what were three details you would have loved to intertwine into your story but which may have fallen to the cutting room floor?
CT: I visited the Somme in France with my own private guide, and it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life—it felt like a pilgrimage. I think that possibly the most moving experience of all was visiting Wilfred Owen’s grave at Ors Communal Cemetery in northern France. It really brought a lump to my throat.
And oh my gosh, I cut literally tens of thousands of words from Beyond The Moon. It started off nearer 200,000 words than the 134,000 where it stands today. I had all sorts of advice from editors and agents—pretty universal advice, as it happens—to cut it back drastically, to 100,000 words or less. Above that point, apparently, no traditional publisher would even look at me. One publisher even assured me it should be cut back to no more than 80,000 words!
But I couldn’t cut it back any more without making it a completely different book from the one in my heart, and so I stopped at 134,000 words and published the book on my own. “Publish, and be damned,” they say. Well I did. And if I’m damned, I really don't care.
Some of the cuts I made really do make the book better, I think. But others I was far more reluctant to make. It’s all so subjective. Some readers would happily read on and on about WWI (and I’m one of those who can’t get enough historical detail in the fiction I read), whereas others want to cut right to the chase. As an author you have to try to strike a balance. There are some parts of Beyond The Moon that I liked very much, and worked very hard on, which ended up on the cutting room floor—for instance in the first draft I originally described Robert’s train journey as a POW across Germany. Also I cut out a dinner party scene when Louisa is staying at Flora’s London house. But there was also a very long scene about a torpedoed troop ship (which was originally going to be the mechanism by which Louisa traveled back to 1917) that was probably best—on balance—cut out of the novel. Maybe at some point I’ll publish some of the deleted scenes. Or I’ll use them in a future book!
J&H: What drew you to this kind of story and what difficulties did you encounter while writing it?
CT: As a child and young person I was always strongly drawn to Gothic historical fiction —think Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I just adored the idea of ghostly, shadowy old manors, misty moors and brooding heroes (nearly all the novels I’ve ever loved have been romances). I’ve also always loved books with elements of magic and/or time travel in them, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Charlotte Sometimes. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always wanted to be an author, and as I’ve gotten older, my passion for Gothic and speculative fiction has stayed constant. I’ve also always been fascinated by the First World War, ever since first reading Wilfred Owen’s heartbreakingly beautiful poem, “Strange Meeting,” at school. Out of all these passions, Beyond The Moon was born. At its heart it’s a love story—and a story of hope. I think the most difficult part of writing it was probably actually trying to marry all the different elements of it together in a satisfying and respectful way: the seriousness and gravity of Robert’s WWI experiences and the magic elements.
J&H: The hero here is World War I First Lieutenant Robert Lovett. He’s true leading man material, despite the fact that he is suffering from “hysterical blindness.” What is it about him that made your heart beat faster and what did you learn about this little-known condition while researching the book?
CT: Robert Lovett is, I think, a composite of the many young, Edwardian gentleman officers, whose intelligent and sensitive accounts of WWI I’ve read over the years. This so-called ‘Lost Generation’ were truly a class apart. They came almost exclusively from British private schools, and believed in the qualities taught by such institutions, such as courage, patriotism, selfless service, leadership and character, and signed up for active service with a desire to fight for the noble cause of “freedom,” expecting a heroic adventure. Read, for instance, Robert Graves’ Goodbye To All That, and Siegfried Sassoon’s Diary of An Infantry Officer. Like Robert Lovett in Beyond The Moon, they cared deeply for their men—in fact the welfare of the men under their command is usually their chief preoccupation—and their main fear was that they might fail to be brave, and let down the soldiers serving under them. I suppose it’s easy to idolize a generation in hindsight, but I honestly feel there was something special about this generation of young officers, whose accounts and diaries are full of poetry, drawings of the birds and animals they saw around them in the trenches, and poignant musings on life and the war.
And it’s incredible to think that a condition like hysterical blindness could exist, isn’t it? That one could be so mentally shocked by one’s experiences that one could be rendered blind. But the horrors of WWI, manifesting as shellshock, actually did cause this kind of mental injury. Not only blindness, but loss of the ability to speak, paralysis even. Of course one of the saddest things about WWI was that, at first, those suffering from shellshock were deemed to be shirkers and malingerers. That mindset eventually changed, thank goodness, albeit slowly. And now we are well aware of the prevalence of PTSD among those who go to war.
J&H: Louisa Casson is an empathetic heroine from the start. Her grandmother dies, she suffers an accident due to her grief, and suddenly finds herself basically committed to a psychiatric hospital because her physician feels she is a suicide risk. How is it that a person could still find themselves in this predicament in 2017? And were you hesitant to portray a mental health facility in this story in the manner that you did?
CT: It seems crazy that this could possibly happen, doesn’t it? But I’m sure that it not only could happen, but does happen. Diagnosing someone with a psychiatric illness is a very subjective thing—a psychiatrist can only go on what he or she is told by the patient, or what he or she observes about the patient. Do look up the Rosenhan Experiment, conducted in the early 1970s to examine the accuracy of psychiatric diagnosis. In the experiment, eight perfectly sane people attended psychiatric hospitals feigning hallucinations. All were diagnosed with mental illnesses (schizophrenia in all but one case), admitted to mental hospitals as inpatients and even prescribed anti-psychotic drugs. And so why couldn’t it work the other way around too? Why couldn’t someone presenting as mentally healthy just as easily be deemed (like Louisa) as mentally ill?
And no, I wasn’t hesitant to portray Coldbrook Hall as I did. I can appreciate that the facility might seem outlandish to some, but in the modern-day UK, patients are too often subjected to appalling conditions in privately-run mental hospitals.
J&H: Robert and Louisa first meet when she stumbles across his room and steps back in time a hundred years. What major differences did you find yourself navigating around when it came to weaving a story that spans a literal century?
CT: I had to try to make sure that the two very different worlds of each time period stayed related to one another, so that the book didn’t end up as two completely separate books in one novel. I was aware that the “tone” of the WWI story is quite different from the modern-day story. Robert is a young Edwardian gentleman, the product of a privileged Edwardian world. The ‘feel’ of his parts of the story is quite different from Louisa’s. It can often, in fact, feel more elegant, elegiac and literary, than the parts set in the modern day psychiatric hospital. Louisa, of course, is in a very different environment, a modern-day hospital full of often rather terrifying mental patients, who swear and fight against the system, and can be quite intimidating. And not only that, there is also a lot of ribald humor going on between Kerry and Louisa. Sometimes it was quite hard to ensure that these two very different worlds and narrators meant the book still felt like a unified whole.
J&H: Can true love conquer the problems that arise when mental illness rears its head in a relationship? And if so, what does it take to overcome such an obstacle?
CT: I don’t think I’m really qualified to answer that question. Of course one would like to think that one would do everything possible to help a loved one suffering from a major mental illness. But I’m sure that sometimes it’s simply not possible, however well-intentioned one might be, and that perhaps people simply have to walk away from someone on a determinedly self-destructive path in order to save their own sanity. I have the greatest admiration for people who work in the mental health field. It must surely be one of the most difficult fields of medicine of all to work in.
J&H: When researching and visiting various World War I sites for your story, which was your favorite and why? Also, what were three details you would have loved to intertwine into your story but which may have fallen to the cutting room floor?
CT: I visited the Somme in France with my own private guide, and it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life—it felt like a pilgrimage. I think that possibly the most moving experience of all was visiting Wilfred Owen’s grave at Ors Communal Cemetery in northern France. It really brought a lump to my throat.
And oh my gosh, I cut literally tens of thousands of words from Beyond The Moon. It started off nearer 200,000 words than the 134,000 where it stands today. I had all sorts of advice from editors and agents—pretty universal advice, as it happens—to cut it back drastically, to 100,000 words or less. Above that point, apparently, no traditional publisher would even look at me. One publisher even assured me it should be cut back to no more than 80,000 words!
But I couldn’t cut it back any more without making it a completely different book from the one in my heart, and so I stopped at 134,000 words and published the book on my own. “Publish, and be damned,” they say. Well I did. And if I’m damned, I really don't care.
Some of the cuts I made really do make the book better, I think. But others I was far more reluctant to make. It’s all so subjective. Some readers would happily read on and on about WWI (and I’m one of those who can’t get enough historical detail in the fiction I read), whereas others want to cut right to the chase. As an author you have to try to strike a balance. There are some parts of Beyond The Moon that I liked very much, and worked very hard on, which ended up on the cutting room floor—for instance in the first draft I originally described Robert’s train journey as a POW across Germany. Also I cut out a dinner party scene when Louisa is staying at Flora’s London house. But there was also a very long scene about a torpedoed troop ship (which was originally going to be the mechanism by which Louisa traveled back to 1917) that was probably best—on balance—cut out of the novel. Maybe at some point I’ll publish some of the deleted scenes. Or I’ll use them in a future book!
September 2, 2019
A couple of book recommendations
A couple of book recommendations for those of you who love a beautiful love story that’s complemented by gorgeous prose and sensuous descriptions of nature – my favourite type of novel! The first is The Mysteries of Glass by Sue Gee, which is about a young Victorian curate who falls in love with the wife of the vicar he’s been assigned to. Oh, how I love this novel! The two main characters’ yearning for each other is beautiful and palpable. Sue Gee’s writing is among the most lyrical I’ve ever come across, and I don’t know how her work isn’t more well known. I also loved her novel The Hours of the Night, about an unconventional mother and poet daughter living deep in the English countryside, whose lives are transformed when a new neighbour moves in. It’s not so much of a love story (or rather it’s an unconventional one), but still very much worth reading, just for the sheer loveliness of the world she creates.
Another book I highly recommend is Katherine by Anya Seton (which I mention in my Goodreads author profile), the story of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, set in 14th century England. The two of them are the ancestors of most of the British royal family. I’ve heard the book described as the original Cinderella story, which I think is very apt. Published in 1954 it’s one of the most marvellous love stories I’ve ever read. The depth of Anya Seton’s historical research is an incredible thing to behold, and she sweeps you into a world so beautifully and realistically-constructed that you feel as if you’re actually living in the 1300s. Another novel of Seton’s, Green Darkness, involves ideas about reincarnation, which partly inspired Beyond The Moon.
Okay so that was more than two books, but they’re all really worth checking out.
And by the way the e-book of Beyond The Moon is currently discounted on Amazon at $1.99, down from $4.99 for a limited time.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
Catherine
Another book I highly recommend is Katherine by Anya Seton (which I mention in my Goodreads author profile), the story of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, set in 14th century England. The two of them are the ancestors of most of the British royal family. I’ve heard the book described as the original Cinderella story, which I think is very apt. Published in 1954 it’s one of the most marvellous love stories I’ve ever read. The depth of Anya Seton’s historical research is an incredible thing to behold, and she sweeps you into a world so beautifully and realistically-constructed that you feel as if you’re actually living in the 1300s. Another novel of Seton’s, Green Darkness, involves ideas about reincarnation, which partly inspired Beyond The Moon.
Okay so that was more than two books, but they’re all really worth checking out.
And by the way the e-book of Beyond The Moon is currently discounted on Amazon at $1.99, down from $4.99 for a limited time.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
Catherine
July 30, 2019
There really are psychiatric hospitals as awful as Coldbrook Hall
It's been an incredibly scary thing for me to put Beyond The Moon, my first book and 'baby' out into the world to be judged, and I am absolutely delighted to have received so many positive reviews and kind comments from readers. What an amazing bunch you are!
Some reviewers have mentioned that they find it difficult to believe such a terrible place as Coldbrook Hall Psychiatric Hospital could really exist in the twenty-first century. And indeed, one would very much like to think so.
Sadly, however, while I was researching Beyond The Moon, I was shocked by just how easy it was to find stories of dreadful abuse suffered by patents in mental facilities. Just this morning, this story appeared in The Guardian newspaper in the UK:
"Care Quality Commission [the UK regulator] places two Priory Group hospitals in special measures"
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2...
And this story appeared a few months ago in The Times:
"Firms cash in on psychiatric care crisis"
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ne...
It is terrible that those people in society who are among the most vulnerable and who are the most deserving of kindness, find themselves so badly treated. And if I, in my very small way, am able through Beyond The Moon to help shine a light on this scandal, I am glad.
Some reviewers have mentioned that they find it difficult to believe such a terrible place as Coldbrook Hall Psychiatric Hospital could really exist in the twenty-first century. And indeed, one would very much like to think so.
Sadly, however, while I was researching Beyond The Moon, I was shocked by just how easy it was to find stories of dreadful abuse suffered by patents in mental facilities. Just this morning, this story appeared in The Guardian newspaper in the UK:
"Care Quality Commission [the UK regulator] places two Priory Group hospitals in special measures"
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2...
And this story appeared a few months ago in The Times:
"Firms cash in on psychiatric care crisis"
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/ne...
It is terrible that those people in society who are among the most vulnerable and who are the most deserving of kindness, find themselves so badly treated. And if I, in my very small way, am able through Beyond The Moon to help shine a light on this scandal, I am glad.
July 1, 2019
So happy to be here
So excited that Beyond The Moon has now gone live on Amazon in both e-book and paperback versions, and that I am an official Goodreads author. Wow! Couldn't have done this without all my amazing friends and family. And I can't wait for everyone to meet Louisa and Robert. They've been inhabiting my head for so long, it's hard to believe they've finally gone out into the world on their own. I hope everyone will love them as much as I do.
I've put 100 e-book copies of Beyond The Moon into a Goodreads giveaway, so head over there if you want a chance to win a free copy.
I've put 100 e-book copies of Beyond The Moon into a Goodreads giveaway, so head over there if you want a chance to win a free copy.
