Nimue Brown's Blog, page 79

Publishers, books and sorcery

About ten years ago, I took some of Tom Brown’s ideas for a comic that never happened, and turned them into a novel called Fast Food at the Centre of the World – which you can find on bandcamp and can listen to for free if you don’t download it.

I’m delighted to announce that there’s going to be a print version, with Tenebrous Texts. This was the fastest and most entertaining experience I’ve ever had around pitching a book to someone. One of the upshots is that the publisher suggested I should consider writing a sequel, which I’m now exploring.

The core idea of Fast Food at the Centre of the World is that a sorcerer who has identified the magical centre of the world opens a cafe there. The fast food in question is about good quality, quickly available food, which is more feasible when you live where food is grown. 

I think the sequel is going to be Fast Fashion at the Centre of the World. I’m also thinking about corruption and overly complex systems that dehumanise workers. My aim is to end up with something funny, because it’s often easier to think about difficult topics while also having a laugh.

Since the first novel, I’ve had considerable experience of the Transition Towns movement. While the first novel clearly aligns with that movement, this was largely just a happy accident. I will be taking more knowledge and insight into this second novel. I also think I’m going to repurpose ideas I’d been collecting for a different project, that I now think won’t be happening. I’d been world building for a novel that was intended to be a joint project, but I don’t think I’ll be working with that collaborator now, and I’m not inclined to waste what I’ve already done. I think I can use ideas I’d been exploring to flesh out the curious city at the centre of the world.

One of the more pernicious writing myths is that a person has an idea for a book. I often hear from people at events who tell me they had an idea for a book. If you’re lucky, an idea will give you a short story. It takes a lot of ideas to tell a story that lasts for sixty thousand words or more. Those ideas need to connect with each other so that themes, setting and character combine into something that makes some kind of sense. Even when books are set in the real world, there’s a lot to know and understand before that can be possible.

A significant chunk of the time it takes to write a novel goes on figuring out how everything works. For me, that involves time spent learning, reading and ideally, experiencing things first hand. The more I know, the more raw material I have to work with. I also reject the image of the author alone and separate from the world, dreaming their book into existence. I do a great deal of imagining, but I also try to root that in things that are substantial.

My main aim with this project is to write something that will make people think about how preposterous modern life is and how much better our lives could be. There will be silliness, because I’ve found that I often do my best and deepest thinking when I’m trying to be funny, and because there’s comfort and relief in laughter and I think we could all do with more of that at the moment.

Happiness is a skill

I had a recent discussion with a friend, who framed the notion with recognition that this isn’t relevant in all circumstances. In overwhelmingly terrible situations, the problem is the situation, not someone’s happiness skills. From there, the scale slides, and the fewer sources of misery there are, the more scope there is to apply happiness skills.

There is a knack to finding joy in things. You have to be looking, and alert to the small moments of beauty, wonder and loveliness that are around us all the time. Those things still exist, even in awful circumstances. However, if you’re having to make your happiness out of tiny things while surrounded by significant sources of distress, that’s a lot of work, and it feels like starving while eating crumbs. No one can sustain themselves that way forever, but at the same time, any small comfort is well worth having.

Not all problems can be fixed by the person afflicted by them. Many of the reasons for unhappiness in the world are systemic and cultural and it takes a team effort to challenge it and to change things. 

Happiness is a skill best shared. When we make our small joys available to each other, we increase each other’s scope for delight. I greatly appreciate the many friends who use social media in this way, simply putting things into online spaces that might improve someone else’s day. When I’ve not been well enough to go outside, those thoughts and images have helped me a lot.

Seeking out small good things to share will in turn help you be more alert to the little joy sources around you. Putting things out there that will lift and cheer others is an affirming process in its own right. I know that when I’m able to cheer other people, I feel better about myself and that can in turn help me overcome depression at least a bit. Laughter is medicinal, making someone else laugh also works. When your own depression weighs heavy, it can be hard to think about what would help with that. It’s a lot easier to think about comforting and cheering other people, often. By heading that way, we can build ladders to get each other out of whatever holes we may have fallen into.

Approaching happiness as a skill is a way of feeling more in control of your life. Rather than being at the mercy of events, it gives you something to push back with, and that’s also empowering. This is not about the kind of toxic positivity that insists it’s all about having the right attitude. Shit happens. Awful shit happens that can put you on your knees. You won’t be able to magically turn everything around. But when you seek to cultivate happiness as a skill, you can at least make the best of anything halfway decent that comes along, and that helps.

Being human isn’t easy at the moment. Any joy that isn’t a form of cruelty is well worth seeking.

Nurturing Inspiration

Inspiration can seem like something that happens by magic. However, if you’re not acting because you don’t have that rush of inspiration, you may also find that it doesn’t show up. Inspiration often has to be courted and invited, and it helps a lot of you do that deliberately.

Find out what kinds of things inspire you, and then seek that out.  Live music does a lot for me, and so does reading. I read a lot of non-fiction so that I know things that can become the clay my inspiration turns into forms.

Decide what kinds of things you want to create, and learn about them. Learn the technical stuff, the skills, the forms. Again, this means that if inspiration strikes, you’re ready for it. Nothing is going to happen if I get a really good idea for an opera because I don’t really understand opera and don’t have the technical skills to write one.

Make time for doing the things, you have more chance of being inspired when you’ve got your guitar in your hands, or a notebook in front of you, or whatever it is you work with.

Also make time when you aren’t doing anything too deliberate with your brain. You can pair this with any gentle activity that doesn’t demand your concentration. Walking, gardening, domestic stuff, gazing at the sky, doing some unchallenging crafting… it all works for making the space where you can have those flashes of inspiration and develop ideas.

When you have a flash of inspiration, hang on to it and make time to develop it. It’s not enough to be inspired, you also have to act.

I think this is true, broadly speaking, for anything that looks like magic. There are elements of many things we do that can feel like a flash of lightning out of nowhere. However, in practice if you’re putting in the time – prayer, rituals, spells, conversations, research, etc then there’s nothing random or inexplicable about the inspiration that comes to you, because you have invited it into your life.

Falling in love

Playing music featured heavily in my twenties and was the basis of most of my social life. What drove me at that point was a love of music, and an absolute love affair with the violin.

There’s something about improvising that brings me into an intense state of relationship with both the music and the instrument. Which in turn can create an unusual kind of intimacy with whoever I’m sharing music with. To improvise, you have to be entirely present to the music, the exact way everyone else is playing, the needs of the music, and what it is, exactly that your instrument can do. When music emerges between people in this way it can be incredibly magical.

I really was in love with the violin. It was the voice of my soul, and often the primary way in which I expressed myself emotionally. And then there was no one to play with, and I damaged my shoulder, and the back came away from my beloved violin and despite repeated attempts by various clever professionals to fix it, nothing worked.

This week I realised that I could fall in love with the viola. I could have all those same feelings about it, and throw myself wholeheartedly into playing in the same way. I might still have it in me to give unreservedly, like I used to. I might be able to meet a musical collaborator in a fearless, present, open hearted sort of way, and be able to trust that, and reclaim the magic I used to feel around playing.

Being open hearted is a risky, exposed sort of thing. But, I want to go back to playing the way I used to play. This feels so much more like the person I should be, and want to be. 

Contemplating Joy

People tend to think about misery, looking for its causes and ways to change it. We tend to spend far less time thinking about joy, and if we are happy, we may not question why we are happy. When things are good, there isn’t any pressure to understand why that’s happening to us, so we may not be inclined to investigate the nature and functioning of delight.

If you don’t consciously know what makes you happiest, and why, then it’s harder to seek that out. On a bad day, it helps to know what you can turn to. It’s good to be deliberate about the small things, because those are reliable. A cat cuddle, a coffee, seeing the moon, listening to birdsong, getting outside, moving your body, looking at things you find beautiful – these sorts of things are easy to arrange if you know which of them works for you.

Having a good supply of small, everyday joys is essential for your mental health. What happens if you need more than that? If you crave something more ecstatic, more rapturous, a more sublime kind of joy? How do we cultivate those kinds of feelings?

I’ve always been really people-orientated when it comes to being happy. Much as I love the wildness in the world, natural beauty, ideas, spiritual principles and so forth, people do it for me like nothing else. Early on as a student of Druidry, I was encouraged by one teacher not to focus on this but instead to focus on my relationship with nature. That was a mistake. My relationship with the living world has a particular shape, but my soul needs interaction with people and that’s not open to negotiation.

I’m going to start a thread of posts exploring joy in a more deliberate way, because I am one of the people who spends a lot of time trying to make sense of distress and I need to balance that better. I say it in enough other contexts that you’d think I’d have worked it out a lot sooner… but it isn’t sustainable just to be fighting against something, you have to be for something. This is just as true for mental health issues, I realise.

There have been times in my life when focusing hard on the small joys and beauties has been everything for me. I’ve had a lot of years dealing with really awful levels of depression. Being depressed can make joy unthinkable. Without the resources that support and enable joy, most of us struggle, so this isn’t always a solitary consideration and the quest for happiness will often involve a community aspect. 

From here I intend to be active about seeking joy and more alert to where the scope for joy is in my life.

Osiers in winter

I love willows, with their incredible resilience and capacity to keep going. Willow will grow, and regrow from almost nothing, they’re remarkable survivors.

There are many different kinds of willow, all with their own distinctive qualities. The one in the photo is an osier willow, and these are particular favourites of mine. In the leafy part of the year they aren’t very self announcing, but in winter, the narrower stems show up dramatically with their red and orange hues. In untouched trees, this is mostly to be found in the twigs, but pollarded trees are more dramatic, as the photo shows. The lighting for this doesn’t really convey the colour intensity.

One of the things I tend to find hard about winter, is the greyness. I find the lack of colour impacts on me emotionally. Seeing the osiers always gives me something of a boost,

Enchanted reality

Recently I saw someone online comment that they felt reality is overrated. It stayed with me as a comment, partly because that’s just such a tragic way for a person to feel, and partly because I suspect it represents a much bigger issue. If most of your life revolves around work, travelling to work, preparing for work, recovering from work and maybe watching some television, reality can’t have much to offer. If you’re not working and are instead dealing with grinding financial pressures, it’s even worse.

We’re facing a climate crisis, and a human-driven disaster on a scale that it’s hard to think about. As a species we aren’t doing very well at resisting this to protect ourselves from looming calamity. But then, what are most of us fighting for? What is there about modern life for many people that suggests it could be worth saving?

Even at my most depressed, I’ve managed to stay a bit in love with the world. I have access to trees and green spaces, there’s birdsong outside my windows and a stream a matter of yards away. The wild world isn’t an abstract notion for me, it’s the world I live in, which is of itself a huge privilege. Urban spaces can be much more soul destroying. If all you’ve got is a few straggly bushes and a sad square of worn grass, it’s not going to be so easy to imagine the natural world as something to care for.

We’ve alienated the majority of humans from nature and the life of the planet. We’ve turned the wonder of existence into a depressing grind where the promised rewards are planet-harming things we can’t afford and won’t get time to enjoy. Is it any wonder that we aren’t collectively squaring up to the climate crisis in a meaningful way?

In some ways, this feels like a mobius band of issues, where tackling the climate crisis would call upon us to deal with our toxic consumerism and change our cultures. Without changing our toxic cultures, how can we find the means to respond to the disaster we’re creating? And round it goes, each feeding the misery of the other. How can we change systems that breed despair and apathy?

Small joys have never seemed more important. Small wonders, acts of kindness and moments of beauty that make life and reality seem precious, are key. We need re-enchantment, so that we can encounter our living planet with care and delight. Somehow, we need to lift the people who think reality is overrated and find the means to inspire them and bring them hope. 

Humanity and technology

I have a recollection of a scene in a Star Trek NG film, where there was a comment on our relationship with machines. The speaker was making a complex textile piece and expressed the feeling that when we replace anything with technology, we reduce our humanity.

Certainly when things are made by hand, to be kept and cherished we have a very different relationship with them to items made industrially to be thrown away. Ideas of fashion and consumerism depend on having no longevity in our possessions. 

There are things machines do very well, and I find I’m wholly in favour of using technology for things we otherwise have no means of doing. Medical technology is an excellent case in point here. Using machines to make life possible and comfortable for people strikes me as being a really good idea. Using devices to do the bits of jobs that are efforty but don’t give you much is worth a thought. Cooking from scratch but having a food blender can make a lot more sense than having to hand mash or whisk everything. Having workarounds for things your body can’t do opens up more possibilities.

I love the internet, and I greatly appreciate the things computers allow us to do. Books work far better for being easier to distribute and I see no advantage in books being something you have to meticulously copy out by hand. Clearly sometimes the slowest way is not the best way.

It seems to me that there’s a question to ask here about whether mechanising a process gives us something truly helpful, or takes something away from us. I think it’s also worth asking to what degree the ‘mechanised’ things really are that, and to what degree work is actually being done by people obliged to work like machines. I’m thinking about workers in Amazon warehouses and clothing sweatshops here, to take some obvious examples. The way in which people are deployed to support tech driven industry can be brutal.

Clothes are to a large degree made by people. Mechanised clothes making involves dangerous work places, long hours and little pay. We haven’t spared anyone any drudgery or misery by this means. Factory floor work is often tedious and the environments are unpleasant – it’s not work I’ve done personally, but I know people who have. While mechanising can reduce the number of jobs in such spaces, it doesn’t result in nice working environments, necessarily, or well paid jobs, or meaningful jobs, which inclines me to think that we’re going about it all in entirely the wrong way.

Severn sisters…

Mark Hayes – bless him – waded into the madness that is Spells for the Second Sister, and blogged about it. He’s a splendid chap and if you’re into the steampunk fiction side of life, do sign up for his blog.

If you’re looking for the book in question, you can ick it up for free over here – https://ko-fi.com/s/f312aa059a

The Passing Place

Somewhere along the banks of the river Severn there is a small tumbledown stone cottage, with a patchy thatched roof which I suspect the local swallows have been stealing away for nesting material for a decade or so. A small plume of wood smoke from the crooked chimney lets you know it’s occupied rather than abandoned. You know there is a stove below that chimney and something is slowly bubbling away on it…

The garden that has lost a battle with weeds and brambles, if not the war, made it hard to be sure if that was the case. Though the trio of large sunflowers, tied to bamboo canes, should have been a clue. Strange mosses gather on the old stones and an old stump in the middle of the garden has long been given over to interesting fungi, which is either delicious, deadly or both. There is also an…

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Misleading stories

CW rape and suicide

Recently I watched a film in which a young lady committed suicide because she had been raped. The whole thing was presented as a massive tragedy. Afterwards, it struck me how deeply misleading and problematic this kind of story is.

Rape is common, as is sexual assault. I know a depressingly large number of women who have been raped, most of whom have experienced no justice whatsoever. None of whom have killed themselves, or even tried to.

At the same time, suicide is most often an issue for young men. While there’s a general feeling that this is because it’s hard for men to talk about their feelings, I’m not aware of much real research into the question of why this happens or what we can do to prevent it.

The stories we tell each other inform how we think the world works. A lot of people get more of their ideas from entertainment than they do from non-fictional sources. People who believe that the global majority played little part in history often get that impression from the whitewashed American films of the 20th century, as an obvious example of this in action. Entertainment impacts on life and is not a morally neutral activity.

As a storyteller, the temptation is always to go after the most dramatic story you can imagine. It’s also tempting to tell the story you think you know, not the one rooted in reality. The way in which stories about female experience are told by a very male dominated film industry has troubled me for some time, and this film underlined it for me. There are too many films where realistic violence to a woman is used to justify and to centre unrealistic male violence. There aren’t many films that examine in a realistic way what it’s like for a female survivor. It’s there in the book version of The Colour Purple for example, but not really in the film at all. We don’t mostly go on Kill Bill style revenge missions. Mostly we just live with it.

Rape as a plot device often actually serves to make rape seem rare, dramatic, and the basis for other kinds of violence and drama. Part of the true horror of rape is the banality of it, the widespread, widely ignored nature of this kind of violence.