After writing my previous post, another recollection has been prodding me. I’d had a few things to say about escapism. A fair while ago. I must written that up for the blog, surely? It’s a challenge thrown down in front of fantasy writers often enough.

No… I couldn’t find that on the blog anywhere. So what was I thinking of? Checking the archive on my hard drive, I found my notes for the BFS Fantasycon in 2006. As a Guest of Honour, I was expected to say ‘a few words’ after the banquet, along with the other GoHs Neil Gaiman, Raymond Feist, Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker. (Talk about ‘one of these things is not like the other things’…)

So here you go – bearing in mind what we actually say when speaking from notes is never precisely what we’ve got written down. Regardless, I stand by these thoughts here in 2024.

“I’ve been checking diaries with friends recently, trying to find weekends when we’re all free to meet up, and when this weekend’s come up, I’ve explained I’m going to be away, here at FantasyCon. And they’ve said, with varying degrees of bafflement or envy, ‘so you’ll be escaping for a few days.’

And I am. I’m escaping running the house and the shopping and the laundry situation and organising my sons so they have their sports kit and their swimming gear and ingredients for food tech on the right days so I’m not expected to produce pizza ingredients at 7.30 in the morning and they’re up to date with their homework and all that kind of thing.

But it’s not what I’m escaping from that’s important, it’s what I’m escaping to.

This weekend, on panels, in the bar, in the lifts, I’ve had conversations about about children’s fantasy literature and how books influence a child’s moral and mental development. We’ve been talking about crime fiction and its relationship to fantasy and that takes us into questions of motivation and morality. I’ve talked politics and current affairs and this is important stuff. So this weekend I’ve escaped to a space where I can look at wider horizons for a while and I’ll go home mentally refreshed and feeling the better for it.

I’ve escaped my own work. I’ve escaped the clutter in the study. I’ve escaped the shelf of science fiction and fantasy books that I feel I really must read. And the shelf under that of non-fiction waiting to be read.

I’ve escaped to a place where I’ve been meeting other writers and hearing about how they work and the ideas and impulses that drive them, that inform their fiction. This weekend, I’ve had a revelation. I don’t do horror. I just don’t get it. Yesterday Raymond Feist was talking about horror being a roller coaster ride. That explains it. I can’t stand roller coasters. So I’ll go home with a far clearer perspective and my writing will be the better for it.

I’ve escaped to a place where I’ll get support and new arguments and new reasons to convince people that heroic fantasy is no more about patriarchal, misogynistic heroes offering a consoling pat on the head, any more than horror is just some pervy hackfest with blood, slime and tentacles or hard SF is merely the technobabbling rapture of the nerds. So I’m certainly not escaping to anywhere where I just stick my brain in neutral.

I’ve escaped to somewhere where I’ll have my own prejudices challenged. Last year Simon Green was talking about The Haunting of Hill House as a classic in the horror genre. As I say, I don’t do horror. But Simon was talking about it and then I heard it mentioned in a talk about the development of psychological crime fiction, so I did go away and find a copy and I read it, sitting the garden at midday in bright sunshine and I got some interesting things out of it. Fortunately I only got the one night of waking up in the small hours, wondering what that noise in the hall was and being unable to get out of bed to find out, because if I did the thing under the bed would grab my ankle. So I’m thankful for that.

All of this is why when I tell people that I write fantasy fiction and they say oh, but that’s just escapism, I’m always going to ask why they say that like it’s a bad thing. Because fantasy fiction, across the whole gamut from vampires and werewolves, through swords and sorcery, all the way to ray guns and rocketships is all about just this sort of positive escapism.

Whenever we’re reading a book, we’re stepping away from our own world to a place where we can see what we’ve left behind from new angles; where we can better appreciate complexities that ordinarily we’re too close to, or alternatively, where we can see a crucial simplicity within the bigger picture that we haven’t noticed before. We’re in a place where the normal rules don’t necessarily apply and that means we can look at those rules and maybe even test their validity. And with fantasy fiction, probably more than any other, we’re in a place where we can have fun doing this.

I reckon this is what winds these people up most, the people who want to dismiss the whole spectrum of speculative fiction. We can explore the intricacies of the human condition with wizards and dragons and dirty work at the crossroads. We can apply ourselves to the eternal verities with zombies and entrails if we want to. If we so choose, we can discuss philosophical, political and psychological development with green-skinned women on planets with four moons. We’re doing everything that the snobbiest literary critic demands of books and we’re having fun and they’re not. So I hope you’ve had fun at this convention because I most certainly have. Thank you.”

We went to the Earth Trust/Dig Ventures festival of discovery on Sunday. We listened to two talks by teams of young, enthusiastic archaeologists discussing the finds from digs around Wittenham Clumps. One was on everyday objects, and the other was on ancient animals. In between, we had a very nice lunch, strolled around the local landscape, and went to the pop-up museum where a small selection of the thousands of finds was on display.

I expect many of us have seen Roman tiles with cat and dog prints left when the clay was still wet. This is the first time I’ve seen a fox leave its mark.

Then there were the mystery objects, such as this. I always ask Husband what he thinks. After studying it for a few moments, he proposed a use that one of the archaeologists confirmed is their experts’ current best guess.

Apparently a feature of Bronze Age sites is ‘pots in pits’, and there’s much discussion about what deliberate deposits of selected items might mean. Rituals linked to ‘end of use’ are generally proposed, though it’s impossible to know whether these marked, for example, a death, the demolition of a dwelling, or moving away from an area. One such pit here is particularly interesting as the objects deposited are a well-used, smashed pot, broken loom weights and a 4 year old sheep. When swords and other weapons are deposited in water or pits, they are deliberately broken to put them beyond use. Is this a similar ritual involving objects associated with textile production? Sheep for meat were usually slaughtered by the end of their second year. Beyond that, they were primarily kept for wool. What does this tell us about spinning and weaving and those who did it? That these women and their skills were respected with such rituals? What does that tell us about these ancient people and their society? Maybe it wasn’t all mighty-thewed warlords defending helpless women and children?

Another speaker observed that ‘hillfort’ is increasingly considered a misnomer for enclosures ringed with ditches and banks, as modern archaeology increasingly indicates they weren’t built for defence, not primarily at least. People could retreat into them at need, but for most people, most of the time, these appear to be trading and gathering centres, possibly seats of power for tribal leaders. Where did the people come from to trade and meet? DNA work on burials on this site is still pending, but at least two skeletons have been interpreted by bone experts as likely of African heritage.

This got me thinking about where that term ‘hillfort’ had come from. Field archaeology pioneers from the 1850s onwards started surveying and excavating these landscapes. The British Empire was at war with someone or other through most decades of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. How much did that background noise of perpetual conflict influence these men to see such earthworks as military and defensive? What assumptions followed? You only build defences when there’s an enemy out there. Therefore anyone new must be an invader! But what if that initial assumption is wrong? The the whole framework collapses. Finds that have been interpreted to fit that world view should be reassessed. This is just one reason why I find current archaeology so fascinating.

Since one of my personal lenses for viewing history is its use in world-building for fantasy writers, it’s apt that the next creative writing article from my archive is on this very topic.
The Uses of History in Fantasy

Is it still called ego-surfing? That term was coined in the 1990s as more and more people got online, and would put their names into a search engine to see what came up. It soon became clear this was hazardous for authors. A few months after The Thief’s Gamble came out in 1999, I found two very negative reviews. According to one, the book proved I was a patriarchy-enabling betrayer of the sisterhood. The other reckoned it showed I was a ball-breaking man-hater. I was all set to respond, to explain, when a friend working in IT told me to take a breath, step away from my keyboard and think this through. I remain eternally grateful to him for explaining my chances of success were minimal, compared to the significant possibilities of things going badly for all the online world to see. As a more experienced writer told me soon after, ‘Arguing with a critic is like starting an arse-kicking contest with a porcupine. Even if you win, the cost to yourself won’t be worth it.’ The decades since have seen memorable catastrophes when authors have challenged reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

So no, checking reviews and comments is not what I’m talking about. But another online saying in the 1990s was three things make a post. So here are three solid reasons for writers to stay vigilant over what’s being said about them online these days.

Generative AI has seen an explosion in misinformation. This year’s hobby among writers has been asking ChatGPT and similar for their biography. The inaccuracies that result can be hilarious, as very-far-from-intelligent software scours the Net for anyone with the same name and produces a mishmash of results. After that initial laughter though, this isn’t so funny. How can someone without any prior knowledge of the subject untangle the truth from the nonsense? How can they fact-check when search-engine results are increasingly poisoned by this rubbish?

This gets much worse when some inaccurate statement could have negative professional consequences. Tobias Buckell recently discovered he was being cited as an author praising AI for helping him finish writing a novel, in a lengthy and entirely made-up quote. He was justifiably furious. The excuse that the article was AI-generated so no one is to blame is ridiculous. A human decided to put that lie online – unless no one checked what was being posted, which just makes this worse.

There’s also been an upsurge in online impersonation, especially of literary agents, editors and other people working in publishing. Hopeful writers are being contacted with wonderful offers, and some will be too naive to know this is not how the book trade works. Generative-AI makes these scams more plausible and more common. Writers are being impersonated by scammers creating supposedly new stories in much-loved and long-ago completed series. They find themselves listed as authors of books they have never heard of on Amazon and other sites. These ‘books’ are AI-generated garbage, but how is a reader to know that before buying one and finding out that it’s trash? If the reader doesn’t know what’s happened, the danger of reputational damage for that writer is very real.

Not all of this misinformation can be blamed on generative-AI. I have been checking in on a particular Wikipedia page for over a month now, since I noticed a major rewrite that stripped away an individual’s positive achievements and inserted highly critical and inaccurate material. By which I mean paragraphs that no newspaper’s lawyer would let go to print as some statements would be legally actionable. The person making these edits was doing so under a pseudonym, while Wikipedia culture does not accept the subject of a page making changes themselves. (I have written before about issues with Wikipedia.)

I discussed this with several friends who are active on Wikipedia, who were naturally concerned. They undertook to take a look, and assured me that Wikipedia does have systems to deal with such situations. I have observed these systems in action, and I am glad to say that the page now offers fair and balanced content. But resolving this has taken quite a while, and there have been periods when that seriously inaccurate content remained visible. Two things follow from this. Firstly, if you are the subject of a Wikipedia page, check it from time to time. You need to know if inaccurate material has appeared before you can find help to get the facts straight. Secondly, if you are using someone’s page as a source, and something doesn’t seem right, do click on the Talk tab to look for any current disputes between Wikipedia editors.

In conclusion? All these things strengthen the arguments for an author maintaining and updating their own website, to ensure there is at least one source of accurate and up-to-date information about them online, which they control.

The first exciting news of 2024 is Amazon Kindle have The Cleaving ebook on offer from 15th – 21st January. Check your local price.

This Arthurian retelling follows the tangled stories of four women: Nimue, Ygraine, Morgana, and Guinevere. These women fight to control their own destinies amid the wars and rivalries that will determine the destiny of Britain. The legendary epics of King Arthur and Camelot don’t tell the whole story. The chroniclers say Arthur’s mother Ygraine married the man that killed her husband. They say that Arthur’s half-sister Morgana turned to dark magic to defy him and Merlin. They say that the enchantress Nimue challenged Merlin and used her magic to outwit him. And that Arthur’s marriage to Guinevere ended in adultery, rebellion and bloodshed. Why did these women chose such dangerous paths?

As warfare and rivalries constantly challenge the king, Arthur and Merlin believe these women are destined to serve Camelot by doing as they are told. But men forget that women talk. Ygraine, Nimue, Morgana and Guinevere become friends and allies as decisions that shape their lives are taken out of their hands. This is their untold story. Now these women have a voice.

In local news, this household and assorted guests had a very enjoyable festive break. Now we’re adjusting to life since my husband retired on 31st December. So far, this January has seen a major and long-overdue sorting out of cupboards, drawers and wardrobes which has proved remarkably stress-free and very constructive, so that’s a big tick in the plus column, and a good few other things have been ticked off the Domestic To Do List as well. When the weather improves, we intend to make good use of his free time to travel around the country and to catch up with visiting friends we haven’t seen nearly enough of over this past couple of years.

In between sessions of shared household chores, I’ve been reading random books on folklore and a few other things. That’s prompted mulling over ideas for the next Green Man book in a relaxed, unfocused fashion as I sort and tidy. I now have several pages of notes outlining what promises to be an exciting story to write and to read later in the year.

Other projects on the Work To Do List include the Ampyrium shared-world project I’m part of alongside other ZNB authors, and the collection of my short stories to be published by NewCon Press in their Polestars series. There’s another potentially very interesting possibility under discussion – more to come on that in due course, hopefully. Then there’s Eastercon, WorldCon in Glasgow, and Fantasycon to come. I will also be continuing my work on the Society of Authors’ Management Committee, in the interests of all writers.

So we’re set fair for 2024. We are also keeping a weather eye on those folk beset by the many storms, real and metaphorical, that are swirling around so many people these days, and helping out where we can.

I’ve had a good year. Not an amazing or an astonishing one. I’ve not won any awards or had a book optioned for film or TV or had anything else happen to make the SF&F world go wow! And you know, I’m absolutely fine with that, especially after the past few years that have been so hard all round.

I’ve had two books published in 2023: The Cleaving, and The Green Man’s Quarry. Both have won enthusiastic reviews from readers who’ve understood and appreciated what I was intending to do with those very different stories. I’ve done interviews about both novels, including a whole lot more video than I’ve been used to doing. I’ve been to enjoyable and interesting conventions where fascinating conversations with readers and other writers started with those books and spun off into any number of absorbing topics. Sincerest thanks and all best wishes for the fans and event organisers who devote so much time and dedicated effort to making SF&F fandom the best possible place it can be.

Those two novels bring my published total to 25 books in 25 years, since January 1999 saw the publication of my debut novel, The Thief’s Gamble. This is extremely pleasing. Looking back to that very different world as far as the book trade goes really makes me appreciate the friends I’ve made along the way, and the friends who were there at the start and who are still supporting me. It’s been two and a half decades of constant change, with some major ups and downs, and there’s no way I would still be writing if I was trying to do this on my own. Once again, sincerest thanks and best wishes to all.

I’ve revised a short story that will be published in a great anthology next year, and I’ve done the preliminary work on a shared world project that will be ongoing in 2024. Another very interesting prospect is on the horizon and I’ve spent the last month or so working on that. Plus I’m currently musing on various ideas for the next Green Man book. This is all very satisfactory, as I take a break from online spaces as well as from work until the New Year.

As I say, things are good here, and good shouldn’t be underrated. I am content to live in this moment, just for now. That doesn’t mean I don’t see things are not good for far too many people, for far too many reasons to count. Being in a good place isn’t something I take for granted. So I do what I can, where I can, to help out those who aren’t. Let’s hope for better days ahead for all.

And now I shall go and make some tea, and sit down to continue my first reread of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence in literally decades. I never owned these books as a kid, but read them from various libraries, along with many others. I have long promised myself that I would buy my own set one day. Last week, I decided that this was that day.

I see in the news that reparations have been paid to the relatives of the Maids Moreton murder victims. This is the case recently dramatised on TV as The Sixth Commandment. That’s right. A real crime with legal proceedings still ongoing following the killer’s conviction has already been turned into entertainment. This makes me very uneasy, and no, I didn’t watch the series.

Of course, a major source of inspiration for writers has always been the daily news, in print, on the radio, on the TV or now the Internet. In the 1950s, the cop drama Dragnet on radio and TV promised “The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” The TV show Law & Order began ripping ideas from the headlines in 1990. Regular watchers would pay close attention to episodes carrying the disclaimer that “The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.” That would be entirely true. It would also often be possible to identify the real-life case raising key issues which this week’s story would address. The same can be true for crime and mystery novels going back decades. I’ve often heard authors talk about the specific case that stirred their imagination.

These days though, direct dramatisations of real crimes are everywhere. Actors play killers and victims who were real people. Some of these killers and victims are still alive. Their families and friends often still live in the areas where very real horrors occurred. They’re seldom considered or consulted. Occasionally an article highlights the distress some docudrama has caused these blameless people. However those affected can expect little sympathy. Consider the often aggressively hostile response online and in the media when Amanda Knox highlighted the way her life and trials have become common property for writers and film makers. They can reinterpret and rewrite some thinly veiled version of events as they see fit, without any reference to her.

Some of these dramas carry a second disclaimer at the start, to the effect that events and individuals may have been altered for dramatic effect. This doesn’t only apply to crime dramas. Biopics can offer a version of someone’s life that doesn’t tie up with events as remembered by those who were around at the time. As a decades-long Queen fan, the movie Bohemian Rhapsody leaps to mind. Why do screen writers do this? Because real life almost never offers up a coherent, well-constructed plot with the characters required to make it truly effective. One reason I rarely watch these true crime dramatisations is because far too many sink into a morass of second-rate drama that’s also factually incorrect. That’s not only bad television. Where criminal convictions and prison sentences might still be appealed, some fudge that creates misleading impressions for the sake of ratings is callously irresponsible.

The line between exploitation and exploration is extremely narrow. As writers, we must tread very carefully. Our stories must reflect real life, if readers are to relate to our work. However I remain convinced that the most effective way to explore emotional truths is to stay firmly in the realm of fiction.

I normally sign out of social media around Christmas Eve with a look back at the year just gone and pick things up on New Year’s Day with a few thoughts about what may lie ahead. The sign-out didn’t happen this time because my December was so very busy with Stuff To Do. None of this was particularly dramatic in either a dire or an exciting way; it was all just time consuming. So prep for the Christmas-to-New-Year break was going on right up to the 24^th December. That’s okay, because that focus on getting everything done meant we could have a relaxed time with family and friends over the holiday, eating, chatting, playing cards and board games, and watching a bit of telly in the evenings. I really appreciate the way digital recording and streaming has banished the tyranny of TV schedules to the dustbin of history and the Christmas aggravation that went with it when I was a kid.

I got a good haul of reading gifts, and three very different books have turned out to have an elegiac atmosphere in common as I’ve settled down to read them since Christmas. That was no great surprise from “Terry Pratchett, A Life With Footnotes.” This biography was entertaining, illuminating, and makes me fiercely cross about his untimely death all over again. The other books looking back at lives well(?) lived were the new Michael Connelly, “Desert Star”, and the new Ian Rankin, “A Heart Full Of Headstones”. Very different writers, very different books, set in California and Edinburgh respectively. But both Harry Bosch and John Rebus are now ex-policemen, coping with retirement in very different ways, and facing up to the fact that they are now old men. Well, we’re none of us getting any younger. After all, I’ve been enjoying both writers’ work for around thirty years now… I still find them excellent reads, not least because these characters grow and change.

It’s a bank holiday here today what with New Year’s Day falling at a weekend, so the rest of the household go back to work tomorrow. Accordingly, I’m picking up the threads and making a few notes rather than getting right back to my own routine today. I can look back on the past 12 months, satisfied with my achievements. I wrote ‘the Arthur book’ as well as three short stories. I also wrote Dan Mackmain’s most recent adventure and my steampunk novella for NewCon Press was published. Wizard’s Tower Press and I are delighted with readers’ enthusiastic reception for The Green Man’s Gift, and The Golden Rule has been much admired. My alter ego JM Alvey also had a book out. “Silver for Silence” is a 10k word story for the BOTH Press ‘quick reads for dyslexics’ project and that has proved tremendously popular.

One thing high on my priority list for the New Year is a newsletter. Yes, I know I’ve said this before, but the way Twitter has deteriorated makes this a Must Do. I’ll unlock my Twitter account for a while when that’s ready, but for most of the time I’ll be keeping my account protected unless and until there’s some major improvement. That said, a recent pleasure has been reading answers to a thread on ‘what was your first Discworld book’, so some of the old, fun Twitter lingers. I will always accept follower requests from new people whose accounts show they are real and interesting folk. As far as other social media goes, you can find me on Facebook and Mastodon.

What else have I got planned for 2023? There’s the next Green Man book to research and to write. I have an intriguing idea for a new challenge for Dan and I’m keen to see where that takes me. “The Cleaving” (aka the Arthur book) comes out in April, and it really will be fascinating to see what folk make of that view of the mythos. Those three short stories I mentioned will hopefully see the light of day, and – well, I’ll see what else comes up. There will be conventions to go to and new books to read as well as new people to meet, as well as new vaccinations and boosters to hopefully keep Covid at bay.

Because the pandemic’s by no means over, while flu and other health problems are overloading health services on the edge of collapse. The UK government are proving utterly incapable of meeting such challenges, even if they wanted to, and there’s no sign of that. There’s no way to ignore the hardships and stress that are so prevalent at the moment, at every level from the international to the personal here in the UK. So I will do what I can, where and when I can, to help out – always mindful of the advantages which keep me and mine from such tribulation.

I usually log off on Christmas Eve with a bit of a retrospective on the year just gone. Then I pick up social media after the New Year by looking ahead. This year? I was very busy on Christmas Eve – but could I have found the time? Possibly, but I found I didn’t know what to say.

It’s been another year of uncertainty and stress for us all – and that looks likely to continue for some time to come – but what’s the point in stating the painfully obvious? And compared to so very many others, we have nothing much to complain of hereabouts. We are all still healthy, all still in work, and if we still haven’t had a proper holiday since November 2019, that’s because we have chosen not to risk the hassles and unpredictability of trying to go away anywhere, even in the UK. We still miss our aikido training, but that just can’t be helped.

On the plus side, I have had another new book out, and The Green Man’s Challenge has been very enthusiastically received by satisfied readers. That’s encouraging me as I gather ideas for the next one. I’ve also worked on three other interesting projects which have yet to be announced, so I’ll have assorted news to share pretty soon. I went to two conventions in person in the autumn, and did other events online through the year, all of which were great fun and kept me connected with readers, writers, and friends old and new. I’ve also been elected to the Society of Authors Management Committee.

So that’s showing me what to focus on, going forward. I’ll work with the SoA to support writers through these difficult days. I’ll concentrate on my own work, share good things from other authors, and share thoughts on the writing process and business. That will mean making a definite effort to read more for relaxation alongside the reading I do for work. I’ve been sitting down with my Christmas-present books this week, and that’s forcefully reminded me of the benefits of getting out of my own head on a regular basis.

Making time for that will mean cutting back on the doomscrolling and that can only be a good thing. I’ve not reached the point of ditching social media like a good few others I’ve seen, but I’ve felt the benefits of keeping Twitter in particular more at arm’s length over the last month or so.

So here we are. That’s what I have to say for the moment anyway. Let’s hope for a happier and healthier year ahead for us all.

Readers on Amazon and Goodreads are really enjoying Dan’s latest adventure, as you will see if you take a look. If you’ve posted a rating or review, thank you! Yes, these things boost visibility and that’s important, but most of all they boost author morale and that’s absolutely invaluable.

Amid the reviews and comments in various places, some readers have noted the background presence of the pandemic. As I’ve mentioned previously, I have been wondering how people would feel about this, since a writer can never know how a reader’s personal situation will colour their response to a book. Only one reader who has mentioned this seems to have found it a major deterrent, and I am genuinely sorry for that – in the sense that I really hope they have not had some dire experience that I have inadvertently made worse.

Other commenters have certainly been surprised to a greater or lesser extent. Thankfully, once they’ve got past that, they have decided that I made the right call/found the right balance. I am pleased and relieved, as it was an aspect of the story that I thought long and hard about, and where I took a great deal of care in the writing.

So that was an interesting experience. I had a lot of fun catching up with pals I haven’t seen for far too long in Gathertown – but I was evidently running the optimum software on a relatively new, hi-spec computer – I know other folk had serious issues with access.

I had some interesting panels which turned into really good conversations – but online panels are much harder work than in-person events, and having no sense of an audience was disconcerting. Plus lack of info on the tech requirements beforehand and ongoing tech issues made for added stress I could well have done without, especially given the heightened level of background stress we’re all living with at the moment.

I watched some very good panels and talks, and being able to catch up with recordings of panels I’d had to leave early because of my own programme commitments was a real plus – but it’s very frustrating trying to decide how long to spend looking at a black screen when you have no idea if the thing you want to see is going to happen in the next two minutes or not at all.

The online art show was wonderful! My reading went very well, and seeing there were actually people there plus a bit of Q&A made for a thoroughly enjoyable session.

Please note – none of these observations are in any sense a criticism of the phenomenally hard working programme, tech and ops teams who did an amazing job in the face of multifarious challenges. There would have been no event without them.

Please also note I’m not getting involved in any of the debates about how things went, here or elsewhere. There are more than enough conversations ongoing. Let’s hope those lead to future conventions capitalizing on the good as well as learning where different decisions beforehand would have led to better outcomes.

Right, back to work 🙂