Lavinia Collins's Blog, page 14

THE EDITING DIARIES (PART 4)

(Originally published as a guest post at Chapterhouse UK)

Bestselling author Lavinia Collins talks about the process of editing her second trilogy, published with Not So Noble Books, out now!

The time has come for me to edit the final part of The Morgan Trilogy. I’ve never been good at goodbyes. I was actually astounded that I managed to finish my first novel series without the process of bringing it to an end waylaying me endlessly. But perhaps it was because I already knew I was about to move on to this, and goodbye was just au revoir.

Then came Morgan III, The Fall of Camelot. This whole series took longer in the writing than Guinevere ­­– which I wrote in six weeks in a kind of heat and cider fuelled stupor/trance one baking summer – and I think I got more attached.

This had the unexpected (and indeed undesirable) effect of meaning I had terrible trouble ending it. I didn’t know if I was going to come back to those characters, to that world ever again (as it is, I still have WIP) and letting go was hard. I wrote one ending. Then I wrote two more chapters of ending just not wanting to let go. You know that famous dreadful ending of Lord of the Rings? The one where you keep getting up to leave in the cinema and it’s not over? Basically the end of my book.

The crazy thing is, the ending the editor (wisely, as per usual) suggested is the original ending that I wrotebefore I went mad and added loads of extra.

I’ve always found it hard to stop writing. To step back and say, done is done. It’s difficult for a writer, I think, to feel that their work is ever complete, but my ending made me think of CoCo Chanel’s famous fashion advice – always take off the last accessory you have put on. In my case, always take off the last bit you have added to your ending.

I’d love to hear about how everyone else writes endings, if anyone finds it easy, and if so how they manage that!

Thanks so much to everyone who has followed this story along with me.

Morgan III, The Fall of Camelot, out now!

Click here for The Editing Diaries (Part 3)

3 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Arthurian Legend

1. There was more than one Merlin

The friendly grey-bearded helper from The Sword in the Stone is somewhat simpler and less ambiguous than the Merlin (or as he appears in the older Welsh versions ‘Myrddin’) of the early Arthurian Legends. This Merlin appears in three forms; Merlin Silvestris, a madman who wanders in the woods, Merlin Taleisin, a poet and practitioner of magic, and Merlin Ambrosius, the prophet.

2. There was also (possibly) more than one Guinevere

Some reports, including some of those linked with Arthur’s purported tomb at Glastonbury, refer to Guinevere as Arthur’s second wife. Although confusingly some of these versions claim the first wife was called Guinevere as well… It actually wasn’t uncommon for queens in early medieval Britain to change their names upon marriage in order to integrate better with the country they had married into. This probably made things easier for the husbands as well…

3. Lancelot turns up pretty late in the game

Lancelot was invented by the French and made famous by Chretien de Troyes in the twelfth century, who wrote the romances of Lancelot to amuse his powerful patroness the aptly named Countess of Champagne. While he and his affair with Guinevere quickly became part of the staple of Arthurian Legend, he was potentially so popular among the French because he provided a way for them all to have a good laugh at our English King Arthur. Something along the lines of, so your English King conquered France and Rome, but our French knight, he had sex with his wife, ha ha ha.

I Used to Believe in the Friend Zone

  

Like most people my age, I first learned of the mysterious “friendzone” from Friends when Chandler explains to Ross that if you are friends with a woman for too long then they end up seeing you as only a friend rather than a romantic partner. Since then, the idea of the “friendzone” has had a somewhat unattractive makeover courtesy of angry Internet MRAs and jilted reddit-users and come to express the particular entitled frustration of a man whose overtures of kindness do not earn him instant sex from a particular female friend or friends. 

But I wasn’t always this cynical about the ‘friendzone’. 

Long ago, back through the mists of time when I was a wide-eyed innocent at university I had a good friend in college – a male (chorus of gasps) – with whom I spent a lot of time. We were good friends. One day we were chatting about his recent (messy) breakup and he happened to mention how frustrating it was that women didn’t tend to like “nice” men but only wanted the “bad” boys and he couldn’t catch a break. At the time, I heartily agreed with him. It was a shame. Poor all those other women who are less smart than me, why can’t they make good choices? Silly women, I thought to myself. Of course. I had never had a “bad boy” (or bad girl, for that matter) complex, I told myself. It all seemed to make sense. Everyone I had ever dated had always been nice to me. This fed perfectly into my inflated undergraduate sense of myself where I not only got to pat myself on the back for being a massive medieval smartypants but I now also got to bask smugly in how smart I was not being like all those stupid other women who were so stupid and did not even realise that nice men were nice and unkind men were unkind. What fools. How I rose above all my sex in the understanding of all matters love. 

But of course, like all undergraduate delusions of grandeur this was shattered. And it was shattered by the very ‘nice guy’ with whom I had heartily agreed. Two things happened; one was, he got a new girlfriend. All very nice. But the moment he did, he stopped talking to me entirely. I played back our entire friendship in my head. Yes, I’d often knocked on his door for midnight conversations when I couldn’t sleep and I knew he would be up. But I had done the same with several other friends of various genders. Yes, we had spent plenty of time just the two of us, going for walks in the parks or just chatting about video games or films or books, but again, this was not so unusual. He knew I was involved with someone else at the time, and he knew that person pretty well, so I’d assumed that we were both safely within a friend zone (if you like). I mean, there had been an emotional Christmas card one year, but I had shown that to the person I was dating who had shrugged it off. So I was confused, and I was hurt that I was denied the friendship as soon as a girlfriend came along. 

So far, so par for teenage friendship politics, right? Only a few years after we all graduated stuff started coming out of the woodwork. This nice guy whose endless niceness stopped him getting the girls had been sleeping on and off with a mutual friend during his time with the ex girlfriend. He no longer spoke to her, me, or another mutual friend whom he had asked out between girlfriends. When I learned this, I felt like my eyes had been opened, just a little, to what goes on in the mind of the kind of ‘nice guy’ who believes in the Friendzone. Unwittingly, it seems, I had friendzoned him. 

And you know what I say to that? Good. 

 

I wasn’t smart or special for only being attracted to people who were nice to me. Other women weren’t much stupider than me. I was stupid because I bought into that whole ugly narrative that women don’t know what’s good for them, and poor nice guys like my friend are hard done by because women are hard-wired to like douchebags. It was a toxic narrative, and I felt so much better when the scales fell from my eyes and I could see my friend for what he had been. Ultimately, he had never really been my friend. 

I used to believe in the friendzone because it fed my smug desire to be smarter. Now I am smarter, though only smarter than my eighteen year old self. I know that good friends make good lovers and there is no such thing as the friendzone, only an ugly entitlement fed by irrational anger that other people are capable of independent thought.  

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5* “I loved every bit of this book”

“Wonderful book. Great follow up to The Witches of Avalon.”

Hooray for the Supreme Court

So it’s not often that I feel inspired to post about something that makes me happy, so I’m taking that opportunity now with both hands.

I was so overjoyed to learn of the SCOTUS’ decision to make marriage legal in all states for anyone and everyone who loves one another (and isn’t already married to someone else).

As for many other moments in life (ho ho ho), there is an apposite quotation from Malory that illustrates how I feel about this matter:

Why should I leave such thoughts? Am I not an earthly woman? And all the while breath is in my body I will complain of it, for I do believe that I do no offence to God, though I love an earthly man, for He made me for this, and all good love comes from God.

Sir Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur

(I confess that this is a favourite of mine that I have used before)

As someone who has had a troubled but nonetheless engaged relationship with religion, I am particularly fond of this quote, and think it is particularly appropriate now. I would love to think of a supreme being who is love, and who – if you like – provides and supports an endless flow of it. And I think Malory’s image here (I mean, it’s a little ambiguous in the context but I am not going to spoil it) is a beautiful one. That all the love in the world is good. And that is something I strongly believe.

I for one believe that only good can come from people – no matter their gender – being able to celebrate their love in public. Hooray for all love, and hooray from me

The Trials and Tribulations of Reworking a Much-Loved Story

I knew that I was taking on something dangerous and potentially emotionally fraught when I decided to write my own version of Arthurian Legend. It’s something that is very dear to a lot of people – myself included – and reworking something like that always elicits a strong response.

Mostly, that response has been positive. Without exception, all the review blogs who have been kind enough read and review the various instalments of Guinevere have loved it, and responded very positively to what I have done with the Arthurian legendary material. Even the notoriously hard to please (and very funny) Smart Bitches Trashy Books reviewers enjoyed it, and posted a very thoughtful and interesting review on their sister site, Geek Girl in Love. I’ve even had a wonderful review from Bex Lyons, who is an academic at Bristol University working on Arthurian Legends (and I was the most nervous of all applying to her site for a review).

But has much as I have been heartened (and relieved!) by the positive responses to what I have done with this much-loved material, there have also been a few reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads who have not agreed so heartily with what I have done, and when they disagree, the reaction is very strong. With stories like this, everyone has their own idea of what the main players are like, don’t they? And I think sometimes it’s quite an emotional process reading something in conflict with your own idea of what a character should be like. And I’ve made quite a few of them not very nice, which a few people, again, have been upset about. But I was expecting that – I was prepared for a polarising reaction.

What has made me a little sad are the reviews that say “not as good as Bernard Cornwell” or “not as good as The Mists of Avalon.” First of all, I love both of those versions of Arthurian Legend (and I think they’re both very different from what I was trying to do with the material), and I never intended to try to occupy the same space as them. It makes me sad because it’s strange this idea we have that that there can be one “best” version rather than many different versions. In a way it’s an honour to be compared (even unfavourably) with these two different versions that in their various ways were such an inspiration to my own writing. But I also thing, especially with legendary material such as this, there certainly is room for many different interpretations. I think of the medieval versions I have read; Malory, which is very England-focussed, very epic and comprehensive, providing this big tragic sweep, and then the Welsh versions in the Mabinogion which are so beautiful and simple, and the French versions by Chretien de Troyes and I think all of these different understandings of the same story enrich one another.

And I think in the modern world of copyright law we’ve lost this wonderful medieval idea of mouvance, of the text in motion between different versions, different readers. And in a way, only in legendary material like this does that survive – it’s like a moving river we can dip in and out of, each taking something unique but from the same source. I’ve been so happy to have been part of it, and I love every (almost every) other adaptation that I read. I’d love to get some of the sense that there isn’t just one right version and we’re all part of a conversation.

I’d love to hear what other people think of this – are there other stories that you’ve seen adapted in different ways? Or do you prefer one version of your tales?

Tim Hunt Does Deserve to be Punished for his Comments, but that Doesn’t Mean He Doesn’t Deserve to Work in Science Again

Against my better judgement, and the pattern of history, I am going to weigh in on the Tim Hunt debacle (and debacle it surely is).

The furore at his comment that labs should be single-gender because if you work with women “you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry!” have understandably and completely appropriately drawn the outrage of not just the female scientific community, but also pretty much all of the women in the world who have heard it. It’s just an astonishingly stupid thing for such a clever man to say.

The problem is, I actually felt immensely sorry for Tim Hunt when I heard these comments. To me, it seemed like the ill-formed, glib, socially tone-deaf remark that someone who was fifty years out of date. The sort of person who writes into the newspaper beginning ‘Dear Sirs’, under the assumption of an all-male audience. And I think Tim Hunt was assuming an all-male audience, one who would laughingly and good-naturedly agree with him with a little “women amirite?” nod. As well as being remarkably offensive, the comment was remarkably naive. It assumed that science was still an old boys club, and indeed that the media was as well, and that everyone would fondly agree with him how silly and hormonal women can be. It’s like something my grandfather would say after one too many sherries. My grandfather who once memorably said to me, “I understand women queers, Lavinia, because men have been very bad to women over the years, but just what is it about women that male queers are afraid of?” My father interrupted me before I could proceed to explain that gay men weren’t afraid of women, they just really would rather have had sex with someone with a penis.

And actually that’s another thing about Tim Hunt’s comment. It assumes that a single-gender lab would prevent anyone from falling in love with anyone else ever. Now, I’m no scientist, and I only have a few close friends who are scientists, but working on the assumption that – in the main – scientists are people, too, I am going to go ahead and assume that some scientists are gay. And if falling in love is an impediment to science (which it’s probably not since Marie Curie discovered polonium while working with her husband) then single-gender labs ain’t going to solve that problem, matey. But we’re back again to how Tim Hunt is completely out of touch. He comes from a time when you could assume that everyone was heterosexual because anyone who wasn’t would be too afraid to tell their co-workers.

But now a new voice emerges from the outcry. A voice that says, Tim Hunt has been ‘hung out to try’. Actually, it’s Tim Hunt’s own voice, and a few others have taken up the strain, including everyone’s favourite feminist activist big bonking Boris who pretends to be offering a balanced approach saying “Whether you say it is a function of biology or social expectation, it is a fact that — on the whole — men and women express emotion differently.” I mean… yes, but men still have emotions and express them, and everyone should be allowed a degree of human emotion at work. What has somewhat dulled the edge of my pity for Tim Hunt has been his own attitude to the affair, and his recent comments:

“I am finished,” Hunt told the Guardian. “I had hoped to do a lot more to help promote science in this country and in Europe, but I cannot see how that can happen. I have become toxic. I have been hung to dry by academic institutes who have not even bothered to ask me for my side of affairs.”

If he had said, I’m sorry, I understand what I said was deeply wrong and deeply offensive. I fully support women in science and I will now re-evaluate my outdated beliefs and try to come to this with some degree of open-mindedness, I think I would have fully supported his return to the roles he had been stripped of. But he’s painting himself as the victim here, and he’s not. He’s only a victim of his own words, and his own inability to use his brain/mouth filter.

As far as I am concerned, someone can say something stupid and prejudiced, and as long as they wholeheartedly withdraw it and make a commitment to understanding why people were upset and do something to fix it, then that’s all the punishment they need. It doesn’t hurt to be humble, to admit that you’re wrong. Tim Hunt doesn’t deserve to be hounded out of science, but he did deserve to lose the prestigious positions that he held because implicit in those was that he would be the voice of the scientific community, and he let down one half of that community by showing that he had little support or understanding for women in science. That doesn’t mean that he can never come back, but it should mean that before he does he should think about why people were so upset, rather than thinking about how this was a big injustice for him. We shouldn’t destroy people who say things that are foolish and ill-informed. We should encourage them to re-evaluate. But that doesn’t mean that they still get to be the figureheads of their community.

THE EDITING DIARIES (PART 3)

First published as a guest post at chapterhousepublishing.co.uk

Bestselling author Lavinia Collins talks about the process of editing her second trilogy, published with Not So Noble Books, out now!

Book II

So, The Witches of Avalon is safely out, and an honourable length. Hurrah! So now I turn my attention to Part II, The Curse of Excalibur. I’m in the mood to cut. I’m in the zone. Spurred on by how unexpectedly satisfying I found cutting Part I, and the comments of my new Twitter author friends on my last blog post (Carol Hedges, Terry Tyler, Rose Edmunds and EJ Frost) I was in the mood and ready to go.

So I looked over what the editor had suggested. Great! Let the cutting commence. Ha ha. But by the time I got to the end, I was sure there was more to do. I had noticed the way that I had developed this anxious habit in my writing and editing of thinking things weren’t clear and trying to explain too much. A bit of mystery never hurt any novel, in my opinion.

I’ve cut almost 20,000 words from Part II and without hesitation I would say it has made my work 20,000 words better. I am certainly getting into the swing of it and now feel like I am developing as a self-editor, but I don’t think I would have been brave enough to make that first chop if someone else hadn’t been stern enough with me to make me do it!

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