Nimue Brown's Blog, page 330

Spells for the Second Sister

I find it hard talking about works in progress. There are reasons. Fear of having my ideas stolen is not actually one of them! Partly it’s because I am a panster, not a planner. In the first draft of any book, I’m flying by the seat of my pants, making it up as I go along. I usually put a lot of time and thought into world and character building before I start, but the story I have to find as I go or I get bored, and don’t finish it. Once I have a first draft, there’s a reason to knuckle down and turn it into something that works. So, I am wary talking about a book while I’m writing it, because a great deal is likely to change between now and when I’m finished.

There’s a superstitious feeling that if I talk about it, some of the magic will get away. However, I’ve pushed that one in recent years because I share my first draft with my husband Tom as I’m going along. I find the instant feedback useful. As we’re collaborating on a number of projects, we have an established working relationship and a sensitivity around not standing on each other’s toes. I can trust Tom not to tell me how to write a story unless we’ve agreed that we’re co-writing.

This is a bigger deal than you might think. One of the reasons I stopped talking about work in progress was a run of several boyfriends who felt entitled to tell me what I ought to be writing. How the story should go. What the characters should be like. People who were readers, but who did not read the books I read, and who wanted me to write the books they wanted, not the books I wanted. A boyfriend is someone who, if they get in your book and start making demands, can derail the whole process, as I learned to my cost. I’ve had it from people who were virtually strangers, too, who asked what I do, and when told, started telling me what I should write about. At best it’s bloody annoying. I’ve never once found that an unsolicited suggestion for a novel plot has done me any favours at all.

I like a challenge though. The editor who asks for a 750 word article by the end of the week, or more recently a request for a 250 word tale (more on that as it comes). A frame and then freedom to create within it suits me well, and a remit from a professional is very different from someone who has never written anything trying to tell me what my book should be about. I try not to be snobbish about these things, but it is a truth that if you’ve never tried to line 75,000 words or so up in a way that makes sense, you really don’t know what writing a book is like.

That work in progress then. I may have settled on a title – Spells for the Second Sister. I’ve probably got some 20,000 words of it now, and a structure, and the plot is just starting to make sense to me. I started with a place and a person, an implied back history and a thing I knew was going to happen. Other characters have sauntered in since. I’ve fed the story by reading a lot as I’m working. I know some authors shun the work of others for fear of being influenced. I set out to be influenced as much as possible by the ideas, creativity and awesomeness of others. I figure, if I can find a dozen things to be influenced by, I won’t come out too much like any one other thing, I will have learned useful stuff and I’ll know where the bar is set.

Spells for the Second Sister currently owes a lot to my admiration for Alan Garner’s work. It owes to fairy tales, and Talis Kimberly’s song about the middle child of three, even though there are only two sisters in this, and every folk song with sisters in it – usually murdering each other – and all the fairy tales with siblings setting out and being tested. It also owes something to Adam Horovitz and his A Thousand Laurie Lees, and to Anthony Nanson’s Deep Time, and the way that took me into writing where the land is personified, and the questions around gender politics and colonialism this raises for me. Which doesn’t really tell you anything about the story, and for now, that might be just as well!

The curious ecology of identity

I saw a charming meme not so long ago. It said: You aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic. How we name, describe and explain our experiences helps create our sense of reality. If we tell ourselves we’re stuck in traffic, we’re reinforcing the idea that our journey was necessary, reasonable and justified. The ‘traffic’ is someone else’s fault, and we are distinct and separate from it. The main effect of the ‘stuck in traffic’ version is to keep us from questioning our own role in *being* traffic.

It’s only when we recognise that we are *being* the problem – the source of air pollution, light pollution, noise pollution, part of the terrible crowd, the traffic jam, that we can change our involvement. So long as we think the problem is other people, we’ll carry right on as we are. Hoping someone else will change and fix things is a weak strategy.

The air pollution in London contributes to a lot of deaths every year. Much of this is due to London traffic. But just as we’re ‘in traffic’ we’re ‘in the air pollution’ – someone else’s car is poisoning us. And yes, every driver will have a good, convincing set of reason s why they couldn’t possibly be expected to do any differently, why they need, and they must and it’s important and really the government or the mayor or someone else should sort it all out. It’s this approach, here and in most other situations, that helps us stay put.

Grass roots action can make real change. If enough people take responsibility for making change, everything changes. There’s no point waiting for someone else to get the ball rolling, either. However small your gesture seems, however futile in face of all the other people doing it wrong… act. Stop being traffic. If enough people choose it, congestion could be a thing of the past. If enough people choose clean energy providers, if enough people cut down on household waste, if enough people refuse to buy bee killing chemicals… that’s all it takes.

BOOK REVIEW: PAGAN PLANET

There are few things more exciting for an author, or, it turns out, the editor of an anthology, to have someone totally get what you were trying to do. This is not a review, because James Nichol was also part of the Pagan Planet anthology, but it is a reflection on the project as a whole that makes me very happy indeed…

contemplativeinquiry

“For this reason I am doing what I do, working towards …. the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible”. Simon Wakefield is a biologist, Druid and contributor to Pagan Planet: Being, Believing and Belonging in the 21st Century. He talks about the “most profound experience of my life” when observing a nesting sea turtle on a starlit Greek beach. “Putting aside all the requirements to measure and monitor I decided just to be present, and I opened up to an experience of deep time and an ancient longing by another creature simply to be, to express its uniqueness, which has never left me”.

For me, Simon has expressed a point of unity in this diverse collection of essays edited by Nimue Brown and published by Moon Books. The authors come from a variety of Pagan traditions, though with a tilt towards Druidry. Many stand witness to a…

View original post 805 more words

Remarkable encounters

The streams have been swollen for a while, making little tinkling brooks into gushing floods – although thankfully still keeping inside their banks. We stopped at the bridge, and movement in the water caught my eye. A splashing. My first through was that something had fallen in, and I tried to work out a rescue plan. Within seconds, a second splashing followed, and I could see small things moving – quite some yards away. Low in the water, they looked to be the size of ducklings, but it’s January. Water voles? Rats maybe. Can squirrels swim? I kept watching, and by this point my husband and son were watching and speculating alongside me. What on earth is that?

After a minute or so I felt sure I was seeing the heads of mammals. I started to wonder if it might be mink – I’ve seen them on the canal, and these looked to be about the right size. At the back of my mind was a word, that I kept pushing away. When you long to see something with all your heart, it can bias your perceptions, and so I mistrusted myself.

One of the possibly-mink upended itself, tail coming up straight out of the water. A broad, sturdy, rudder-like tail. That’s when I started crying. Mink have puny little tails, like a weasel, whereas the otter has a powerful swimming tail and I knew from years of reading books and going to otter talks, that if you can’t tell what you’re seeing because of the distance, the tail is the best indicator, there is no confusing the arse end of an otter with the bum of a mink.

I started looking for otters in earnest about 30 years ago. They’d almost gone from this land when I was a child. I heard of otter sightings when I lived on the canal, I know the Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetland trust gets wild ones, I’ve met people who’ve seen them in the Stroud area. But until yesterday, I had never seen a wild otter.

There were two of them, and it eventually dawned on me that this is why they looked smaller than expected. British otters are antisocial. If you’ve seen big groups of otters in captivity, you’ve seen Asian otters. The American/Canadian otter will live in small family groups (there are three in an enclosure at Slimbridge). The British otter prefers to be alone. There’s no hanging about for the adult males, they start the breeding process and move on. More than one otter means a family. I think what I saw was two large cubs, playing – either mum was around, or they’d not long left her.

While we stood and watched, they carried on to give us a remarkable display of the most inherently otterish behaviour imaginable, including surfacing with small fish, and eating them while afloat, chasing each other, sticking tails up, and showing the pale underside of their chins and necks. Any ideas that they could be mink were entirely dispelled.

It was a profound, emotionally affecting thing to see them, and, I will hopefully see them again. Otters tend to work a fairly large territory, but families don’t range as far, and are likely to come back. It’s a wonderful prospect. It’s also a total validation of the value of paying attention to small details. A splash, an unfamiliar movement. Had I not stopped to check it out, I would not have seen them.

Map Work

In this era of sat nav, it seems as though the entire map is known and that you can just get the bit you need coughed up on request. Here to there, with smooth precision. You are more likely to make mistakes and get lost when using a physical map, especially if you’re inexperienced, so why be old-school about it when there’s technological solutions to be had?

Once upon a time, when a map maker didn’t know everything about the map, they’d add creatures, and the wonderful ‘here be dragons’. Older maps show the known and the unknown. On your sat-nav route, almost everything aside from the roads or paths you’re following, become unknown. Unremarked upon, and invisible to you. Set out to drive in this way (something I’ve done many times as a passenger – I can’t drive!) and no one mentions the dragons. The countryside and the cities whizz by, devoid of features aside from the little that can be gleaned from signposts.

A map tells you what’s behind the hedge, what happens if you take the scenic route, and what you might want to stop for. The sat-nav journey is all about getting from A to B at the greatest speed. This is not the only way to travel, and we may be losing the art of poking about, being curious, stopping for a look. The journey is no longer about the journey, and we are the poorer for that.

Maps hint at the unknown. They show the places you won’t see from the road. I’m a big fan of the ordinance survey, with its habit of including ancient sites. I’ve had many a walk to a spot found on a map. Around here, there are many hidden valleys – places it’s hard to see from anywhere else. The map reveals them, as does the willingness to get out and ramble without a fixed route in mind. Where motorways and railways cut up the land, it is maps that you need to reveal the secret passing points, the ways of defying progress to cross the road.

Maps can be a source of delight without even having to leave your home. They raise questions and offer imaginative journeys. They reveal place names, and often in those names is a dash of history, or a hint of the stories that might be held within the land. Old stretches of Roman road are immediately visible, information about the relationships between places, too. Road networks can have a really distorting influence on how we understand landscape. They inevitably restrict journeys to certain kinds of routes and places, missing out the steepest, the wettest, and with that often the most direct. Maps show us the possibilities before we get out there and take the risks.

The map can invite over-planning. Too much insistence on careful use of the map can remove the scope for adventure, and the curious pleasure of getting lost. There are landscapes in which getting lost is a bloody stupid idea, but in tamer places, a little low risk confusion is good for the soul. If we become too focused on the map, and the pre-determined route, it stops us from following whims and asking what’s over there… For the nervous and inexperienced walker, the physical map may at first be a necessary crutch. For the person in a wholly unfamiliar landscape, it may seem vital – there are other ways of dealing with this, and I’ll be back to them later.

My preferred method is to pour over the map at home, and leave it at home while I test off to test what I’ve understood on the ground. Then, on coming back, I’ll go back to the map to see what I did, how it related to what I’d intended, and to find out what I’ve learned.

The price over everything and the value of nothing

Christopher Blackwell comments regularly on this blog, and I greatly value his sharing of insights and experiences. He recently responded to a post –What is your worth? with such a long and thoughtful comment that I felt it ought to be given a bigger platform. So, I’m re-blogging the comment, with Chris’s permission. Over to Chris…

Here in America it is often said that we Americans know the price over everything and the value of nothing. To some extent this is true as this is very much a consumer society. I watched a two year old in a grocery store rush to get a cola from a cooler, already trained as to which brand he wanted. I mentioned to his mother so young and already knows the brands to want.

But even if trained and taught to behave this way from a young age, one should start to question as one sees that money and having things owned does not guarantee happiness. One begins to note that being happy with ones life in general is rare in our world and start to ask the question of what would make me happy in various parts of my life. Once you start asking the question then you can step out of the slavish consumer framework that you have been trained to follow.

The first thing that you learn is there is never a one size fits all, contrary to the advertisements on the Telly. Each of us is different with quite different needs. It is in discovering what our true needs are and fulfilling those needs that we stand a chance of becoming happy. That means first that we have to discover just who we are, not the imaginary person that we have been told that we are suppose to be.

There is some risk to doing this in that many of the people around you may think you are strange because you do not slavishly follow the herd from advertised need of ownership and changing fads like everyone else. But there is no real happiness if you become a fake to fit in. Letting others determine what you should be gives them too much power over your life and no matter what you do, or how much you give up to fit in, you will find that you never will be good enough for some people. It is control of you and your life, not your happiness that they want for you.

Discover what is different about yourself, what makes you unique and then develop that difference and enjoy it. Sure some things will be similar to the people around you and that is fine, part of being human. However there are differences that you need to develop and cater to if you are going to be generally pleased with living your life. Becoming a happy person is the real success. It is not only important for you, but for the people around you as you give out what you have. If you are miserable, then you tend to spread misery around draining the happiness out of anyplace and person. If you are happy, then you start to light up the people around us. Become the person that you would like to be around, and others will likely want to be around you as well. Those that don’t can always move to be around the people that they are comfortable with. You are not required to please everyone.

The Living Mountain

“Something moves between me and it. Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.” Nan Shepherd, in The Living Mountain.

The Living Mountain is a small book, written somewhere in the 1940s but not published until the 1970s, despite the author’s previous success with three fiction titles. It’s a meditation on the Cairngorms, a hymn of praise and love to the mountains and the life of the mountains. Beautifully written, truly poetic, it’s about what happens when you get over the simple lust for the summit and start engaging with the land. I’m not a mountain person at all, I belong to the hills and valleys, but the sense of being changed by the landscape, of becoming part of it, and becoming more yourself by walking – that all made a lot of sense to me.

I bought The Grampian Quartet (cover to the left, includes The Living Mountain) simply because Robert MacFarlane refers to it so frequently in his books. I’m fast becoming a dedicated MacFarlane fan and wanted to see why he was so in love with these books. I have not been disappointed.

The three novels – The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse and A Pass in the Grampians are all short books originally published individually. They have romantic elements, but defy the habits of romance fiction. All three centre on the adventures of a young female lead coming into her own sense of self, but around those central characters, a whole host of other people gather. In many ways it’s the background people I find really draw me into these stories. There are a lot of vignettes illuminating the lives of women who are not young romantic female leads. The lonely realities of widowhood, the hard labour of working women, the misfits, the aging, the disappointed – all too real, and seldom otherwise represented. In all three stories, the landscape itself is a real presence. A sense of place permeates everything.

At the moment I’m trying to learn how to better write about the land, and my experience of landscape. I’m curious to see how other authors express their own relationship with place. Reading about Scottish mountains makes an interesting contrast with Laurie Lee and Adam Horovitz writing of the valleys of Stroud, and with Anthony Nanson and Kirsty Hartsiosis writing down the local folk tales of Gloucestershire, and Alan Pillbeam writing local landscape history. There are many ways into a landscape, and I keep looking for my own path.

More about Nan Shepherd here – http://www.edinburghliterarypubtour.c...

Druid Camp from the depths of winter

As I write this, I feel a long way away from the summer fields of the Forest of Dean, and Mark Graham’s Druid camp. It’s an August event, and here we are, shivering in January. No going barefoot in this weather, no exposing skin to sun, no grain ripening in the fields. It’s less than a week – under 2% of a year, but it’s become over the last three years something of a key part of my summer.

Druid Camp is a community space, which means I get to spend time with a bunch of people I really like, and seldom see. Being a community space, there are inevitably other people I don’t get on with as well, and about whom I feel anxious. I’m not the most socially confident life form, and generally avoid people who rub me up the wrong way. The field is big enough, and there’s always enough going on that there’s no obligation to be in close proximity to anyone else. Which is as well. It takes a lot to make me fall out with a person butI’m not all peace and love and light, by any stretch of the imagination.

In more involved, more intense spaces, relationships can be forged that endure. There’s room at camp, and time, and situations that encourage openness, emotional intimacy, even physical closeness. As a person who really struggles around all things physical, that’s always a big challenge for me. Over the last three years, there have been people who knew what was going on with me and have done all manner of things to help me move forward, to be more confident. So now I feel secure enough to use the showers, I can get in the sauna, and I’m much better at hugging people. And at not hugging people and feeling able to say when I’m too sore or otherwise out of sorts.

In workshops, in ritual, in dance spaces… people find opportunities to test themselves, to take risks, and to encounter other people doing the same. It can be really exposing. Encountering another person in this way, you rapidly learn things about whether you want to move closer, or step back. As someone who tends to feel obliged to appease, it’s been an important experience for me, to realise that I don’t have to suit everyone. I don’t have to be totally acceptable to all comers in all ways. I can be an awkward misfit in some contexts, and still have a place.

January, for me, is a most obvious time to be thinking about Druid Camp. I’m waiting for Mark to announce the speakers and music list so that I can run around and tell people. I know some of what’s in the offing, and am already excited. Tickets are already on sale, because I’m not the only person who gets to January and wants to make plans for the coming year. With the way events work, it’s important to be doing that. I will be at the South West Pagan Federation conference in April, I’ll be at Festival at the Edge in July, and at Conscious Connection Camp, I’ll be at Asylum – the huge Steampunk event in Lincoln on the August Bank Holiday weekend. And of course I’ll be at Druid Camp, and nearer the time I’ll figure out what I’ll be contributing. I’m not a main speaker, so there’s more time to pin that down.

In the meantime, if you’re keen to get things moving, tickets, as previously mentioned, are already on sale… http://www.druidcamp.org.uk/

 

Cairns in Britain

One of my plans for this year is to spend more time as a reader than as a writer, and to do more to support other writers. To this end… a reblog of something I enjoyed reading recently.

Elen Sentier

From what I know cairns have been built by peoples all over the world for probably hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps as long as humans have been on Planet Earth, after all their not rocket science to build. They are getting well known through the apacheta South American shamanism which is currently popular and the Tibetan cairns which are also well known … but who knows about the cairns all over our own country, Britain, or considers them anything more than modern memorials?

I was born on Dartmoor and brought up on Exmoor from age eight. My dad and relations were country folk and followed our old ways so I learned with mother’s milk too. One of the things I learned about was cairns. Dad and my uncles would take me walking on the moors. You often come to cairns as you’re walking and always they would remind me…

View original post 629 more words

What is your worth?

How do you rate your own value? What do you think other people are using as their basis for valuing you? Too often, the answer is money – the paycheck and the bank balance. It’s not helped, in the UK, when our government keeps coming up with policies to reinforce this idea. The latest is that only non-UK citizens earning over £35k are to be allowed to stay. What this tells us is that they do not value lower income people, assume that the skills of the lower income person are nothing special. It doesn’t matter what you might do, or what you’ve done, it’s just your paycheck at the time of assessment.

People who start businesses, and creative people often start small and work up. What we’re worth financially today is no indicator of our potential financial worth in the future. No one would have picked JK Rowling out of a cafe when she was too cold to write at home, and seen the benefit she would single handedly bring to the UK economy.

There are so many reasons to resist making a person’s value dependent on their wealth. In practical terms, low paid workers are essential to both the production and consumption sides of the economy, and always have been. In a world of fat cats sat in plush offices, nothing gets done. So much work – especially the child raising, care giving work of women – is unpaid and unrecognised. A great deal of essential stuff in this country is undertaken by volunteers, with the charity sector dealing with the gaps in care, research and support for the vulnerable because neither government nor the private sector are bothering.

We’re taught to seek out signs to demonstrate our wealth and success – usually signs appropriate to our class and background. Every time we switch on a TV we’re exposed to a lot of images of how we, and our homes, cars, children should look. What we should be buying to keep up. Every day, through visual media and advertising we’re bombarded by images of what success looks like plus information about where to buy the appearance of success. There are plenty of people going into debt to do just that.

When it comes to messages from the government and the media, poor but happy is never on the agenda. Choosing to live lightly and happy isn’t offered. A worth in terms of kindness, generosity, gentleness, service to others, contribution to human knowledge and spiritual richness – these never come up. In terms of career worth, we always prioritise the ones involved with the big bucks for media attention. It’s rare to hear anything about people who’ve spent many years doing something small but essential really well.

Being rich can make you famous. We take on trust that the reason a person is rich is that they contributed something worthwhile. We don’t look at what they inherited or who bailed them out (and I gather Donald Trump’s claims to be a fantastic businessman could use some scrutiny on that score). We don’t ask who they exploited, whether they’ve destroyed any ecosystems, displaced indigenous people, cheated, lied, back stabbed to get where they are. We put the financial worth ahead of their behaviour.

How do we challenge this? The answer is in many ways to start small, by noticing other kinds of worth in the people around us and championing it. By questioning assumptions that tie worth to money. By not buying the things we are told we need to look the part. By daring not to manifest the agreed signs of affluence and success. By not measuring our own worth in terms of cash held and cash anticipated.