David Gullen's Blog, page 16

Review – The Beauty, by Aliya Whiteley

An isolated group of men live in a world without women.  Over the years they have learned to accept this fact, and that they will be the final generation.  It has not been easy. Each of them has their demons and they have all had to reconcile themselves to the different ways the other members of the group have chosen to live their lives.

Then,  unexpected and unasked for, the possibility of companionship emerges from the world. And if wanted, love.

Aliya Whiteley has written a compelling, unsettling story.  If you want, read it simply for the strangeness, the near-magical otherness of this tale and its odd and sinister humanity.  If you want more  it is there. The Beauty is a deeply human and thoughtful book that poses absorbing questions: How do we survive when there can be no survival? How do we love when there is nobody to return that love? Is it possible to truly know someone? How do we reconcile ourselves to each others unknowable differences?

In the end are there really no answers, only ways forward?

Unsung Stories continues on its mission to publish original, entertaining, and thought provoking fiction. The Beauty is an excellent example, and a great place to start. Highly recommended.

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Travellers – Writing to my MP

I don’t often write to my MP, and I go public even less often. This petition needed a proper response.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So this is mine.

 

 

 

 

If Paul Scully is your MP and you feel the same way, feel free to use my letter as a template.

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Craftwork – Two Masks

A few weeks ago I ran my first leather craft workshop with the aim to teach some friends how to make scabbards for the bronze swords we made earlier in the year. It went pretty well, except I’d under-estimated the time needed to teach and make something that was a mildly ambitious project. As a result most people went home with nicely dyed and finished scabbard fronts and backs that needed stitching together. The finished items will look similar to this, though everyone came up with their own designs for tooling, and colour.

 

This is something that I’d like to do more of, and the weekend has given me confidence that I actually do quite enjoy teaching leather crafts, and that the people I taught got plenty out of it.

 

I’m now trying to work out how I could do demonstrations or maybe two or three linked one-hour sessions at a convention. It might be fun, but logistics could be tricky. We’ll see.

Back home I got on with the first of the wet-moulded masks I’m making for sale via The Cat & Cauldron shop in Glastonbury. ‘Green Man’, the full-face mask, is a variation of the one I made for myself for Jack, my druid LARP character. This new version is more ornate, better tooled and much better finished.

In particular, I used rags instead of swabs to apply the base dye. This might not sounds like much, but it gives much better control of the dye density. This lets the leather grain come through and if you’re careful it also leaves any stamping grooves undyed. A slower method but I really like it, and the mask looks great.

The half-mask I call ‘Herne’. I’ve made this mask before, and again I’ve spent more time on the stamping, tooling, and finishing. On this one I used swabs to apply the base dye, so there’s no outline to the leaf stamps. I also added an embossed leaf pattern to all the hair curls..

I’m very pleased with both these masks and plan to make more, and other designs.

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Excellent News

I could not be happier! I can now share some news that I have known about for a few days:

My short story ‘Warm Gun’ has been awarded first place in the 2016 BFS Short Story competition.

This is an annual competition that’s growing in strength and reputation and I’m really properly excited to have won this year.

Big congratulations also go to the second and third place authors Rowena Harding-Smith, for “Flotsam and Jetsam” (Second place), and C. L. Raven, for “The Eden Project” (Third place). I’m very much looking forwards to reading both of these when they appear in BFS Horizons soon.

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Review – The Honours, by Tim Clare

This is a bold, brave and brilliant book, just like its hero, thirteen years old Delphine Venner.

It’s 1935 and troubled Delphine, recently expelled from school, goes to the isolated Alderberen estate with her mother and equally troubled father. An odd community live in the great house, invited by the ancient and dying last lord of the estate. Part political commune, part new-age retreat, the inhabitants struggle with the psychological damage of war, paranoia, anger, illness – and something else. Something vast and secret. All is not what it seems.

Left to her own devices Delphine runs loose in the house and the estate. Creeping in the secret passages between the walls, the forgotten tunnels under the estate, and in the company of Mr Garforth, a dangerously pragmatic gamekeeper, she listens and learns, and discovers that nothing at all is what it seems. The whole world is beyond sinister.

The Honours is a brilliant gritty fantasy joining this world and the other. Delphine is a wonderfully well-drawn unhappy child and hero, struggling to hold her family together and her father struggles to mend his mind. When it’s all too much she retreats into the adventures of her own imagination – and discovers those adventures have equipped her well for the real-life dangers that erupt and consume everyone on the estate.

There are layers and layers in this story, Clare is a masterful story-teller writing with colour, emotion, and evoking a haunting landscape. The best books don’t necessarily win prizes, this one wins mine. The Honours is one of the best books I’ve read and if there is a sequel then I cannot wait.

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A Song for 2016

Oh, the world is full of anger,

That ain’t nothing new.

It’s why I cold-brew coffee,

To get a smoother brew!

Those islands of cool reason

Feel far between and few.

That’s why I learned to swim;

Trusting neither boat nor crew!

Who are all a bunch of chancers

Who refuse to take and do

The advice of seasoned experts

Sifting falsehoods from what’s true.

They think they all know better

Fear and anger made them fight

For what they want, not what is best

Vote winnners must be right.

Now we have a world where reason

Is to blame those who warned you not

To do the things you shouldn’a done

For the pain that you’ve now got.

And it’s a pain that I can now

In truth and honesty say

(Whatever the fuck those things are)

I’m sharing day by day.

My advice? I’m not an expert,

So therefore can’t be wrong,

Is don’t get your philosophy

From this rather silly song

And though there’s contradiction

In that verse what I just wrote

It’s the egos of bigots on left and right

And their lies that will sink our boats.

So do yourself a favour

That it all don’t end in tears,

Whatever your gender or sexuality or race or age or faith or politics or economic prospects (which I do admit are bloody important and I sometimes lie in bed worrying about that myself… Where was I? Oh yes, gender, sexuality, race, age, faith, or politics.

Don’t be driven by your fears.

So, Ouch and ouch and fucking ouch

As we spiral round the shitter

And ouch to this and ouch to that

At least the coffee isn’t bitter.

The Egg Timer of Science Fiction

That egg timer in the picture has some history.  I am its new keeper.

I’ve been to the Milford SF conference three times now. Every time was different, every time I  learned new things about being a better writer. Every time was fun, hard work, and in the company of an interesting and varied group of people.

This year I left Milford as the new chair of the committee. When I told Gaie she said, ‘So being a Clarke Award judge wasn’t enough for you?’ It made me think, and my internal answer was ‘Kind of not, no.’

Milford is hugely useful in less immediately obvious ways. My SF novel, Shopocalypse, might never have been published without Milford, because I met someone there who introduced me to someone else. If you’re a genre writer I really recommend you try to go at least once*. This is what you’ll get: fifteen writers, one week, a whole lot of reading, critiquing, and conversation.

The first time I went it was pretty scary – there were WRITERS there. They had AGENTS and had been PUBLISHED. By PUBLISHERS. I soon discovered they were pretty normal really.  The second time was different, I knew the ropes, I learned different things. I came away re-energised, just like the first time. The third time, a couple of weeks ago was the same, and it was different again – I learned more new things, and got some great advice. And I realised something else too  – It felt a bit like coming home.

I’ve been to my fair share of conventions but I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider. I’ve never felt excluded but I also never really felt like I was really part of the thing itself.  Maybe it’s my version of imposter syndrome, maybe it’s because Milford is smaller, maybe I just like hanging out with other writers. So when I heard Sue Thomason was stepping down after several years as Chair, I thought I could take that on and help contribute to running Milford.  Thanks for being such a good Chair, Sue, I’ll do my absolute best to be the same. So, I am a chair, but according to some philosophers chairs don’t even exist. Others say nobody actually knows what a chair is. If I find out I’ll let you know.

We’ve got some plans to do more at Milford over the next couple of years, ideas for some extra events around the country. Longer term, maybe even extending to two full Milfords a year if there are the numbers.  And of course there’s the Milford bursary**. Check out the web site for details, sign up to the blog, or keep an eye out on Twitter. See the end of this post for more details.

SO, that egg timer… At Milford everyone gets three to four minutes to deliver their crit. These days we time people with a mobile phone, but back at the first UK Milford in 1972 it was an egg timer. That’s the one in the picture, and it’s in front of me on the table now.  It’s interesting to hold it and think about all the people who have been timed by that egg timer. In no particular order they include:

James Blish, Neil Gaiman, George RR Martin, John Brunner, Liz Williams, Christopher Priest, Anne McCaffrey, Brian Aldiss, Alastair Reynolds, Samuel Delaney, Jacey Bedford, Robert Holdstock, Gary Kilworth, Kari Sperring, John Clute, Jaine Fenn, Geoff Ryman, Diane Wynn Jones, Colin Harvey, Gaie Sebold, Colin Greenland, Charles Stross, Bruce Sterling, Cheryth Baldry, Paul Kincaid, Mary Gentle, Maxim Jakubowski…

The wood glass and salt of that egg timer must be imbued with some kind of SFnal talent vibe by now. If I’m lucky some of it will rub off. If not, the next Milford I go to, in 2018, will help do the job. Maybe see you there.

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* Going to Milford – All you need to know

** The Milford Bursary is a fully-funded bursary for self-identifying science fiction/fantasy writers of colour, i.e. of black or minority ethnicity

Follow the Milford Blog

Redensive Epiphanies – A New Anthology

I’m happy and proud to announce the birth of my second* publication/editing project – The Redensive Epiphanies of Pouty McNavel.

Epiphanies is an archetypal slim volume. It’s not made of genre, but it’s spiced and seasoned by it. One story is most definitely SF, others have touches of the fantastical, the horrific, the strange and weird. And there are also stories of contemporary everyday life and its hot bright redensive epiphanies.

Stories including work BFS-nominated Gaie Sebold**, and Sunday-Times best-selling author Helen Callaghan!

We have illustrations too – the anthology is illuminated with collodion photography from award-winning Gordon Fraser.

As ever, without the contributions of all the contributors, this would have come to nothing. Thank  you, one and all!

Available from all the usual places, including Kindle & epub formats, standard paperback, and square print format (recommended).

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* The first was Mind Seed, in memory of T Party writers group member Denni Schnapp, with all profits to charity, and co-edited with Gary Couzens.

** Gaie’s latest book, Sparrow Falling, is out this month from Solaris. (July 2016).

Leatherwork – A Scabbard

 

I used to make a lot of leather costume, armour and accessories, mainly for LARP, including my ‘famous’ toblerone™ scabbard. That was a few years back and I needed to knock the rough edges off my neglected skills. I’ve been playing around with scraps, some half-finished things I found in a bag, and also made a few belts.

A few weeks ago I posted about bronze sword casting. Now I’ve also built myself a lovely big craft bench it was time to make something in leather that was a bit more ambitious – a scabbard for the sword. Here it is, along with one of the leaf-bladed bronze swords we made.

The sword is made to a bronze-age style, copying an actual bronze-age sword. You can see the hilt has a round notch where it meets the blade. Style or substance, nobody is really sure, but it does offer a nice way to keep the sword snug in the scabbard.

Here’s a close-up showing how the hilt notch fits against the scabbard top.

The scabbard is made of two pieces, front and back, plus a little shield-piece at the hilt which i thought would look nice. The main knot-work carving is a copy from a standard design which I modified so I could run the design down the scabbard in a simple way.

Hand cut, dyed, tooled, stitched  and finished, as always. About 5-6 hours work.

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Unintended Consequences of Brexit

I’ve thought at length about this post for days. I don’t want to take advantage of anyone’s grief. Not writing until after Thursday’s vote would be too late, writing nothing at all feels like an act of cowardice.

I don’t believe the great majority of people who want the UK to leave the EU are bad people. I think they are worried for the future, they want the best decision to give the best long-term future for themselves, their children, this country. Maybe come Thursday they will win, but I desperately hope not. I hoped not a week ago, I hope even more so now. I think their choices are wrong but I don’t think they are bad. I neither want to nor will think of them like that. One of them is my sister.

Thomas Mair may be ill, he may have acted on his own initiative. We do know he had contacts with at least one neo-Nazi organisation in the USA, and that there is photographic evidence suggesting he was directly involved with Britain First. Try as I may I can’t imagine anyone committing a similar atrocity to his and crying “Remain!”

I’m not scared of the UK leaving the EU. I’m sure it’s the wrong decision for a whole range of reasons that have been well-explained in sufficient detail many times over the past few weeks by experienced and educated individuals and organisations focused not on what they want but what are most likely the best choices for this country.  Unlike Michael Gove I’m not tired of listening to the experts.

In The Women’s Room, one of Marilyn French’s characters says she’s part of ‘the lunatic fringe that gets the middle to move over a bit.’ We need to remember that movement can be in any direction, from or to the left or the right, tolerance or intolerance, green or capitalist, xenophobe or xenophile.  We must remember that movement is not always a good thing. This vote isn’t just about notions of self-determination, wealth, independence, and sovereignty, it’s also one of morality. How, after this vote, will we behave towards each other and to people in other countries? How will we treat the needy and disadvantaged, the people with nothing at all?

If the result of the vote is to leave the EU then everyone who voted to leave gets what they want, what they think is best. Congratulations, you won in a free and open democratic referendum. The thing is, that other group of people, the one Thomas Mair belongs to, they’ve won too. So will Britain First, and so will UKIP, the political party that is perfectly comfortable using images almost identical to those the Nazis used in their own racist propaganda campaigns.

The unintended consequence of an exit vote is that it brings validation to the people who think like Mair and believe his methods were right and his goal reasonable. It will bring it to the members of groups like Britain First on the fringes of our politics, and to other similar people and groups beyond. They will have won. They always knew they were right. For them this is empowerment.

And it is something we are all going to have to confront. We’ll have to live with it, and so will our children. This is the lunatic fringe we will have edged a little closer to and this is what scares me.

Choose wisely on Thursday. Be careful what you wish for, people.

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