Nimue Brown's Blog, page 147

Beginning a creative process

There are some things I create in the heat of inspiration and purely because I want to. This is a perfectly reasonable way of working, especially for small pieces like poems and short stories. It’s not such a good idea for a longer project. It’s not realistic to expect to be able to write an entire book while in a state of creative fever. Granted, Jack Kerouac managed it with On The Road, but it isn’t how larger bodies of work normally happen.

To create something more than a heat of the moment outpouring, takes planning. There’s a process in moving from the initial rush of inspiration, towards a larger and finished piece.

One of the first questions I ask when considering a project is, who am I making this for? There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, it’s a helpful focus. Secondly, if you mean to put a piece out into the world, knowing who it is for is really important. You can’t pitch to a publisher without knowing that. You’ll have a hard time finding readers if you don’t know who your readers might be. It may be tempting to imagine you are making something for ‘everyone’ but that’s not focused enough so either it will be bland, or it will be self indulgent. Maybe both.

Being self indulgent is fine. It is important to know whether you are primarily creating for yourself or for other people because it has implications. I think it’s usually a mistake to imagine you can create something purely for your own pleasure and that this will automatically translate into something lots of other people will want.

I usually identify some larger, broader groups of people – I write non-fiction books for Pagans and Druids, for example. I write fiction for Goths and steampunks, and also for Pagans and animists. I usually also have some specific people in mind. I find that really helps. If I’m writing for just one person, the odds are it will appeal to more people than just that one person. It helps me avoid being too self involved and it helps me focus on what kinds of things those other people might enjoy.

This is also where my bar is set in terms of success. If I write a poem for someone and they like it, I have succeeded. The same is true of a blog post, or even a book. If one person finds it helpful, it’s done its job. This protects me from the inevitable bruises of an industry where the average book sells a few hundred copies, and all the focus is on the people who can sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Why we need to take celebrities seriously

It’s easy to dismiss celebrity culture as trivial and irrelevant, the new opium of the masses and beneath anyone who is invested in being spiritual. However, I recommend taking them seriously because celebrities are symptoms of our culture and also inform it. If we don’t engage with that, there are consequences.

How do we think about mental health and how do we support people who are suicidal? If a high profile person is dismissed as attention seeking, what does that do to all the regular people who see that happening? If you are suicidal, and you see people you might have turned to talking about how attention seeking this celebrity is… will you feel able to talk about your own struggles?

There’s a high profile couple out there with some serious domestic violence issues. Who do you believe and who do you dismiss? How does this impact on the family member who is dealing with increasing violence at home? Are you making it easy for them to ask you for help, or are you saying things about celebrities that might distress them into silence?

It’s not just what we say ourselves, either, it’s what we allow to go unchallenged. It’s every time we don’t say something to the friends who express white privilege in face of a racist book. It’s every time we don’t say anything about an article objectifying and sexualising a high profile woman.

And yes, it’s relentless and yes its exhausting feeling like you have to talk about everything that goes wrong, and no, you wouldn’t keep up with it even if it was your full time job to try. But you can still try, and show up where you can, and be alert to the ways in which celebrity culture impacts on wider culture.

Celebrity culture is culture. It shapes what people think is normal and acceptable. It holds a mirror up to us collectively and tells us what we think is ok. Even if you don’t think it impacts on you, it probably does through the small drips of information you can’t avoid if you are online. It’s so easy to end up thinking ah yes, another vacuous airhead selling her body to get media attention – because slut shaming is so normal, because women who don’t play the right games around appearance don’t get the same opportunities, because we assume that being sexual and being clever aren’t compatible in a woman. If you can’t do anything about celebrity culture anywhere else, keep an eye on what happens in your own mind when these figures go by, and check on what you’ve been taught to think about them.

Watch out especially for the things you are persuaded that someone deserves because of how they have been presented by the media, and how they function as a commodity in our consumer society. We really shouldn’t be consuming people in the first place, it’s not healthy.

Talking to Anna McKerrow

I’ve been a fan of Anna McKerrow’s writing for many years now. So, when she asked if I’d like to do an interview with her, I managed not to go entirely into incoherent fan-girl mode, and I said yes.

It’s always tricky trying to talk about Druidry. I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to figure out what Druidry is, and I’m still not sure I know. We’re a large and diverse community, and I try and get that across as best I can, but inevitably what I think Druidry is gets coloured by my personal experiences.

The books I should have mentioned when talking about Welsh deities were

Gods and Goddesses of Wales – Halo Quin

Pagan Portals Rhiannon – Jhenah Telyndru

Pagan Portals Blodeuwedd – Jhenah Telyndru

Cerridwen, Celtic Goddess of Inspiration – Kristoffer Hughes

What feeds you?

What inspires you? Where do you find nourishment for your soul? What lifts your spirits or eases your heart?

The glib answer for Pagans is often ‘nature’ but by ‘nature’ we often mean something dramatic and exotic. It’s a horrible irony that nature is often a place we have to drive to. Many people in the UK are desperately short of access to green spaces close to home.

One of the reasons for following a spiritual path is that it can provide nourishment for our souls. This is easier, I think in contexts when you can either get out to those wild places, or get into circles with other Pagans. We’re lifted as much by what we can share as a community, as we are by communing with nature. Many of us engage better with ritual as a group activity rather than a solo practice. And honestly, working with other people makes us more accountable and more likely to show up.

The internet gives us options for sharing personal practice in a way that means we can inspire and uplift each other. Photos of the lovely walk, the beautiful altar, the devotional art, videos of your chants and songs, blog posts about prayer and meditation… There’s a lot of good to be found in this, and it’s something I’ve been glad to participate in. For me, it really brings into focus how much the effectiveness of spirituality in our lives can be about our relationships with people.

I’ve taken plenty of people into the woods (not in this last year, though) who were only spending time with trees when there was a seasonal ritual to show up for. It was the community they were showing up for, and through that connection, they had tree time and meaningful encounters with the land.

However much we might long for interactions with Gods, spirits, fairies, guides etc, these are unreliable. Not everyone gets called. Not all offerings are answered. Not all dedications lead to powerful interactions. People are a lot more reliable and will often show up when you invite them. People will witness you and hold you to account. They will be moved by the beauty of work your spiritual practice has inspired you to create. With that feedback, it is simply easier to show up as a spiritually minded person.

I think this is something to embrace and work with. It’s not just a spiritual issue, either. Many of us do our best parenting when there’s another adult about to impress. We may well do our best creating, our best activism, our best ethical choices when we have people to witness us and either nourish us with their approval, or make us worry about not looking good. We are fundamentally social creatures, and this year of pandemic has deprived us of a lot of that contact. Things that used to feed you may not work so well as solitary activities. There should be no shame in that. It’s just easier to be, and enjoy being your best self when you’ve got a supportive and appreciative audience.

Water Witches

Water magic is all about healing, and emotions. You place bowls of water in the moonlight to gather enchantment, and take healing baths.

Slowly, you learn to listen to the water. You discover that the water is full of sorrow.

There is plastic in the water, and pollution of all kinds. Death flows where there should be life. There is thirst in the land and in its creatures. You stop wondering about how to use water for magic, and start asking how to do magic for water.

You become a water witch. You go to the edge of the desert to make desalination equipment out of rubbish you scavenge from the dumps. You set up camp at the edge of a poisoned lake and dedicate years of your life to fishing out the plastic, filtering out the oil, bringing the plants back. You make sand dams. You try to become a beaver. You make wetlands and plant reeds and dream about hippos.

In a land of intermittent rain, you build barriers across places where the water floods. Your back hurts all the time from bending and digging, but when the rains come you are ready, and some of your dams hold, and ponds form. The soil will not wash away this time, and some of the water will seep back into the earth rather than evaporating.

When you weep for all that has been lost and damaged, you understand that water is all about healing, and emotions.

(Art by Dr Abbey – these are concepts and sketches I’m playing with, but i think we’re going somewhere with all of this…))

Contemplating resilience

I’m writing this on a Friday morning. This is part of a new cunning plan about how I organise my time, and it has paid off well. I’ve shuffled about so that I don’t have to be online at any specific time in the morning. Anything that needs to happen before lunchtime is set up the day before, or earlier. This has worked out well. It means if I have a sleepless night, or am otherwise ill, I can get to the computer whenever, and nothing is messed up.

This shift also means that if I’m having a bad day for concentration, I’m under no pressure. This is as well – this is a blog post brought about by being short of useful ideas, written on a day when I’m in a lot of body pain and don’t have much energy. It’s a slow process, having ideas and writing.

I’ve become much more possessive of my time and energy. I’ve had to, there just isn’t enough of it to go round. I’ve started asking ‘what’s in it for me?’ What do I want? What do I need? These are not questions I am good at answering, but I’m going to keep asking them.

Flexibility helps. Giving myself more wriggle room for the really bad days, helps. Slack in the system helps. We live in a society that prizes efficiency, but, what efficiency really means is nowhere to go if something goes wrong. Efficiency doesn’t give you enough hospital beds in a pandemic. It doesn’t give you resilience in face of sudden change. It doesn’t give you options. Working when ill isn’t as efficient as taking time off to recover, but an overly efficient system won’t let you have time off. Ironically, trying to be efficient isn’t efficient as soon as the situation changes. There’s a lot to be said for trying to be resilient in the first place.

For me, resilience looks like being able to afford to stop and rest whenever I am too tired to continue. Days off at need would be helpful, but I’m not quite up to that, yet. I can work very short days when I need to, and on the day of writing this post, I’m contemplating that choice. I could push on with an interesting piece of work I have on the go, but I’ll do a better job if I’m not so tired. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t tired, but it was probably more than a year ago.

Working hard doesn’t save anyone. It just grinds you down and reduces your quality of life. If your financial situation is so bad that you have no choice but to work long hours for little pay – that’s truly awful. I’ve done some of that kind of work, and I know that we need radical political change. No one should have to break their physical or mental health to be able to afford to eat. No one should be worked to death so that the billionaires, the shareholders and the people who profit from other people’s labour can keep doing that.

I want everyone to be able to take time off when they need it. I want everyone who is ill to be able to afford to rest and recover. Financially vulnerable people working when ill have certainly been part of how covid is getting around and a kinder, fairer system would have protected us all from the consequences of that.

Interview with Michael Daoust

Today’s post is an interview with Pagan author Michael Daoust. I think right now we could all use more cute, warm-hearted and uplifting stuff in our lives, and this is very much what Michael is about – especially creating that kind of warm content for people who may be especially short of it…

Can you tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?

Hi! First of all, thanks so much for doing this! I really appreciate your time and effort.

About me-> I’m a pagan trans man, happily married to the love of my life. I live with chronic anxiety and PTSD, and am lucky enough to live in the countryside as of two years now! I am an avid gardener, though that doesn’t mean I’m good at it! I’ve always loved fairy tales, and they were my favorite childhood books. All that comes into play with my writing. When I started approaching my writing more as a profession and less as a hobby, I really wanted to represent LGBT+ communities in a positive and happy way. When I started this, I was at an extremely low point, mental health wise. I couldn’t handle reading many books, as I would get too anxious about what would happen next in the story. So, I decided to write fairytale-esque books that would be easy to read when in a bad spot mentally. At the same time I started drawing the TwoLoveBirds, as a way to bring more cheer into my life and to cope with my crippling depression.

How does your Pagan path inform your creative life?

My pagan path comes into play with the importance of the world in my writings. I bring in magic, symbolism, and even more magic in a playful way, which I find echoes the playfulness of nature, and the way that certain areas have certain ‘vibes’ to them. In my fantasy Farfadel writings, the world is what makes the story, as much as the characters. In my TwoLoveBirds writings, nature and setting is equally important.

What is it about fairy tales that attracts you to working with them?

Great question! I never wondered about that, I always thought everyone liked fairy tales! I guess it’s the way that fairy tales seem to say something ‘more’ about life and the world they were constructed in. They tell you how to interact with deities, land spirits, and other people properly. They aren’t just stories, but often lessons as well.

Can you tell us a bit about your two novels? Who are they written for?

So, the first book to be written was ‘A Tale of Two Queens’, then, ‘The Tale of Adelaide and Shadow’, but chronologically, Adelaide’s tale comes first! The Tale of Two Queens was inspired by my wife, and very much guided by her. She often wanted to read more queer romance novels, and they were hard to find! So I imagined these two epic, badass Queens, and threw them into a Sleeping Beauty-esque storyline, and let the chaos unfold. It’s a cute and romantic tale, with no real evil in the story, just miscomprehension and different goals. It’s very playful, and I’ve been told it’s laugh out loud funny and very cheerful to read. I’ve also been told it’s like Terry Pratchett meets Lord of the Rings (what a compliment!).

As for the tale of Adelaide and Shadow, I don’t quite remember how it began, actually. I drew heavily on my experiences as a trans person, and what I would want to see in a novel, as the prince Shadow is trans. I wrote this one mainly for myself, and so it’s a more playful novel, full of silly events and frogs. I drew on the ‘princess and the frog’ stereotype here, and decided to make it even a bit more silly!

I had originally intended these books for adults, and that’s mainly what my audience has been so far, but I’ve been told that they read like middle-grade children’s books. Considering that those are also my favorite genres to read, it makes sense!

How did you get into colouring books?

I had originally started coloring books for my TwoLoveBirds, but kept making sketches and doodles and art for my Farfadel world. I’ve always imagined Farfadel having coloring books, art books, and all sorts of extra fun stuff to go along with the books. So a few months ago I decided to actually sit down and make one!

What’s the relationship between the novels and the colouring books?

The colouring book is based on the world of Farfadel, and not any novel in particular. The fairies play a very important role in both novels, as troublemakers and trouble fixers, and they were so cute and fun to draw that I decided to make the whole colouring book about them! There are no particular characters in the colouring book, it’s more of a glimpse into the ‘feel’ of the fairies of Farfadel, their daily life, and what they are like in the novels. I did try and bring some queerness into the colouring book with two female bodied fairies proposing to each other with a flower, as well as mixing the body shapes with their gendered clothing. It’s subtle, maybe more so with my style of drawing, but I really wanted to make it so that a queer child could see themselves in this book.

For all things farfadel –
https://kingdomoffarfadel.wordpress.com 

@mdaoust245 on facebook

These are the twolovebirds links
https://twolovebirds245.wordpress.com
@twolovebirds245 on instagram and facebook

Writing fantasies

A while ago, back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you could sit in a pub garden and be mansplained… A man sat near me in a pub garden and told me how he was going to make his fortune writing short stories. Not a living, a fortune. He was going to put some short stories online and there they would be found by someone important at Netflix, or Amazon. Films would naturally follow, and that would be his life all sorted.

I tried to explain to him that this is not how things work. He was having none of it. I mentioned twenty years of writing and publishing industry experience, and he was still confident that not even having written a short story yet, he knew more than me – but then, he was the one who had brought the penis to the conversation, and that’s always proof of superior insight for some people.

I hit him with some industry stats – that only about 10% of authors make anything from their work and that a good income from writing is about £10k a year and most of us will never even get close to that. He was unpersuaded that The Society of Authors might have meaningful industry stats in the first place, and certainly did not imagine any of that doom and gloom stuff applied to him.

I’ve had similar conversations before. I’ve heard from people who were new to writing, there was one, memorably, who thought her NaNoWriMo fantasy trilogy was bound for fame and fortune. After all, Water for Elephants started on NaNoWriMo so clearly she was going to have the same experience.

As is often the way of it in many aspects of life, we only really hear from the authors who succeed. We hear about the best sellers, the international hits. Most of publishing does not look like JK Rowling. 90% of writers earn little or nothing from their work. For the rest of us, £10k a year is hitting the big time. There are lots of factors – timing, luck, gatekeeping, who you know, how you come across, whether you have a following already. It’s much easier to get published if you’re already famous – it’s not a meritocracy out there. Most of my favourite authors aren’t famous and many of them are a good deal better, in my opinion, then many of the published mainstream authors. There’s more diversity, originality and surprise out at the margins.

I think it’s very normal to come to writing imagining that your originality, and skill and whatnot will shine through and lead to results. People will notice you. I was like that with my first published piece, many years ago. Only it turned out that the publisher didn’t really mean to promote it beyond putting it on their website, and there wasn’t much word of mouth advertising, and I started to see why other authors in ebookland were trying so hard to sell their work.  It’s ok not to know, especially when the stories you hear are only ever the success stories. It’s important to tell those other sorts of stories, too, so that we all have our feet on the ground and aren’t going to be unreasonably hurt by this dysfunctional industry.

I don’t know if the man from the pub garden ever got as far as writing stories and putting them online – he might have done, but I do know he hasn’t landed at Netflix deal yet.

Different flavours of panic

Not all panics are the same. I’ve been exploring the different ways in which panic shows up for me and what the implications are for dealing with it. Panic can happen for all sorts of reasons, and my list won’t be exhaustive or true for everyone but I hope by sharing it I can give someone else a place to start.

Hormone panics. I’m somewhere in the menopause sea (I have no idea where). I get intense hormone blasts sometimes, and they tend to make me panic. Recognising them as hormone-induced helps me weather them. Otherwise, soothing drinks are about the only thing I’ve found useful.

Overload panics. These happen when I’m exhausted, mentally or physically. Just hitting exhaustion can be enough to do it. If some extra thing needs doing when I’ve already hit my limits, this will also really panic me and make me largely useless. My best coping methods are to be clear with the people around me when I’m approaching the edges, and to be clear that I’m having overload panic if it kicks off. I have to accept that I can’t push through these to do the things, I have to wait until I’m better resourced and calmer.

Panic caused by triggers. These are often much harder to explain to anyone else while they’re happening because they bring up intense intrusive thoughts and flashbacks. The first priority is to get away from whatever seems unsafe. I’m working on being clearer with anyone who might come into contact with these that I need them to help me feel safe and to be quick to react if they’ve accidentally triggered me. Feeling safer will bring the panic down, and without that I’m stuck and can spiral through panic, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks for hours.

Triggered panics fall into two broad categories. One is where I feel to blame over things that aren’t my fault, or responsible for everything. The less power I have to sort things out, the more triggering this is. The second area is around loss of body autonomy. The conventional wisdom around this sort of panic is that it is down to the person experiencing it to work on recovering. On the whole I think I’d do a lot better without being triggered in the first place, so, I’m talking more about my boundaries, what its fair for me to take on, and what I need to have change. I’ve dealt with people in the past who triggered me and were very clear it wasn’t their job to do better. I’ve come to the conclusion that if anything of that shape happens again, I will remove those people from my life with all speed.

Part of what got me damaged in the first place was people ignoring boundaries and forcing unreasonable responsibilities on to me. This in turn makes it hard to flag up distress in those areas, making it harder for anyone who wants to not get into that kind of mess with me. With a back history full of being trained that people who hurt me were entitled to do that, I’m re-drawing my lines. People who want my time, care, energy and resources are going to have to treat me in ways that make that possible. Anyone who tells me they can’t be walking on eggshells all the time, or anything similar, will be out of the mix. I can’t afford it, and I recognise, finally, that no one is entitled to treat me as disposable in that way. Feeling worthless is part of what underpins the panic, but I do not have to accept being treated as worthless and I can say no.

Water in the landscape

While we haven’t had heavy rain here for a while now, there’s a lot of water in the landscape still. The rivers and streams are fast flowing and high in their banks. Streams that only exist when it’s wet are very present, and there are a number of new springs that I’ve seen, and probably many more that I haven’t. The odds are many of those will disappear, but there’s no knowing when.

As I live on limestone, the secret, underground life of water is very much part of the landscape. The spring line on the hills informs where the villages are and where the oldest houses were built. With the weather so unpredictable and so much more heavy rain than is normal, springs can pop up all over the place. I love seeing them, and the arrival of a new one is exciting to me – but that may be in no small part because I don’t live close against a hill and they aren’t in my foundations. I have no idea how big an issue that might be for people locally.

Yesterday I saw a field that had previously had a lot of standing water on it. It’s low lying, it should be a flood meadow and I wonder about its history. Perhaps once it was proper wetland, and carried water through more of the year. We’ve lost so much wetland from the UK, and I often wonder where it was and how differently the landscape would have looked with more of those watery, liminal places.