Magic and memory, the sea and the stones, red and reader...

So, I wanted to go back to Culbone, to the tiny church in an isolated Exmoor valley that helped inspire my first attempt at fiction, WalkerBut memory plays strange tricks and the path I was sure would lead up into the woods, led instead down to the beach...

And the pebbles were speckled and spotted, seal-smooth pelts.  And water-washed wood, with all the weight sucked out by tide and time. So we turned back and found the true path, tucked away where it shouldn't be, where it wasn't, at the back of the pub.   

Through tunnels of green, the kind of hidden hollow-way, the kind of secret steps that have joyed my heart since childhood. What is it about that play of green on green, of shadow and light, of moss-embraced stone?

The path climbs up through woodland, sometimes you glimpse the sea, mainly it hides and you just hear its sluice and shunt.  And I worried.  Would the magic remain?  Could it? And oh...oh...the little wooden hut (the one which let you make your own cup of tea, take your own biscuit and maybe buy a book or two; the one which trusted you to leave your pennies in the pot) was now disavowed...forbidden. A stern sign announced that this was Private Property - and that one should Keep Out. 

And Vivienne had warned me that it had changed.  And she was right.  It was all fenced off and signed away and oh, oh, oh...how we humans love to fence and surround and name and own, don't we? 

And even in the church itself, it was somehow all about private property and keep out.  Thou shalt not.  

And I felt bereft.  The magic had gone. Lost under strictures and rules, fences and knots. Trespassers Will be Persecuted. 

 But then, as I sat at the foot of the cross, I started noticing different things. Things I hadn't seen before.  Magical things. A face peeping out of the green on an old, old window.  Can you see it?  A merry imp?

The red red lichen on the gravestones - and so many of the people whose memory they marked were named Red.  My Name is Red.  Good book, btw - have you red it?

And it struck me that it's folly to expect magic to remain the same.  How could it?  Places change. People change. Everything changes (while still, in some way, remaining the same). We cling to our memories of how things/people/places are - we demand that they remain - but that entombs them.  And maybe, just maybe, when we cling to old magic, it prevents new magic from being seen?

Anyhow.  It struck me that I was being precious about Walker.  I'd taken it down from Amazon because I felt dissatisfied with it, unhappy with my writing.  I thought I'd maybe revisit it, rewrite it, re-magic it.  But then, sitting in the tiny church, watching a shaft of sunlight on the list of rectors, that long line of rectitude scripturing-stricturing back to the 14th century, I changed my mind.  Let it be.  

Click on the cover below to buy and see if I made a mistake.    

New Adult? A genre too far?

Recently on Twitter, I saw a young writer I know asking for recommendations for ‘new adult’ books.  New adult? WTF?  And that was pretty much what I said to Becca. She told me not to be snippy (and I said I wasn’t; I was just deeply puzzled) and she sent me some links.  St Martin’s Press are doing it, she said.  So I took a look.

St Martin’s Press reckon this is a new, ‘previously unidentified’ genre and go on to explain that, ‘New Adult is about young adulthood, when you are an adult but have not established your life as one (career, family, what-have-you)’.

Apparently it’s all about ‘transition’; about ‘coming of age’, about people who, while legally ‘adult’, are still finding their way.  According to blogger Cally Jackson ‘The protagonists in these books are too mature to be considered YA protagonists, but they’re not worldly enough to be considered Adult protagonists.  They’re too old for YA but not old enough for Adult fiction. So where do they fit?’

It seems to be chiming a chord.  Blogger Jessica Lawlor laments the lack of these adult inbetween novels. ‘While I love YA books and adult books, I can’t help but feel like an entire demographic is missing,’ she says. ‘I’ve yet to come across a really great book about someone in their 20′s dealing with the issues twenty-somethings deal with; their first couple of years out of college, starting their first real jobs, finding an apartment, dealing with issues of drifting friendships, relationships starting to get serious…the list goes on and on.’

Hmm.  So we need another genre, yet another subsection to slot books into? I had a quick Google and, yes, it seems that new adult fiction, also known as ‘post-adolescent literature’ (oh my!) really is starting to happen. Wikipedia says:

‘This category is intended to be marketed to post-adolescents and young-adults ages 14 to 35. This age group is considered to be the lucrative 'cross-over' category of young-adult titles that appeal to both the young-adult market and to an adult audience.’

I don’t know about you, but the word that sprang out there was ‘lucrative’. How desperate are publishers becoming? I know it’s tough out there but… Do we honestly need another brand of ‘youth’ writing?  And up to age 35?? Oh, come on!  In fact, targeting anyone over 16 is pushing it, as far as I’m concerned.

When I was 16 I was reading Dostoevsky, Hesse, Hardy, Goethe, DH Lawrence (and no, not just the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley), Le Carre, Susan Howatch and so on and so forth.  I was being a pretentious little shit and lapping up Gide, Maupassant, Balzac and Mauriac in French and Lorca and Valle Inclan in Spanish (yeah for fun – at school it was all Moliere, Racine and Corneille).  And yes, I used to write letters to my best friend in Latin but hey… you know what I’m saying. If someone had suggested I read books for ‘new adults’, I’d have given the mother and father of all eyerolls. 

When I left university, I devoured modern literature as fast as I could.  I wanted to catch up; I was just seriously turned on by people who caressed, shocked, beguiled with words – Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, Russell Hoban, Patrick White, Knut Hamsun, Lawrence Durrell, Mervyn Peake, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Fowles, Angela Carter, Milan Kundera, William Golding…the list goes on and on.  I wanted to read about everyone and everything - about old people, young people, people in all kinds of places and all kinds of situations. I was living my wild twenty-something life - the last thing I wanted was to read about how other people just like me were living theirs. Shit no.

Okay, so I loved literature, I adored words.  Maybe I’m being a crashing lit-snob here?  Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe we need to help ‘young people’ (yup, even those 35-year old babes) get into reading?

But, but, but… isn’t it just a bit, condescending? Are modern ‘young people’ so lamentably poorly educated and unimaginative that they can only read books written especially for them, with characters their own age, going through their precise ‘life transitions’?  Where does that leave the rest of us?  Are they going to come up with a genre just for me and my ilk – neurotic middle-aged women living in gloom and penury in the countryside?  Neurotoruralpremenopausal lit?  Seriously, where would it end?  No, let’s not go there.

Since when did books have to be shoe-horned into such precise categories?  At this rate, all books will end being written like Mills & Boon – to a precise, paragraph by paragraph, formula. Literature by numbers. Are we getting to the point where a writer of ‘adult’ fiction won’t be able to employ a child POV or that of a ‘new adult’ (up to age 35 – sorry, still blinking wildly at that). 

Though, hang about, there is a bright side to this.  If a 35 year old is a new adult, that makes me…?  Probably not even middle-aged.  Positively sinfully youthful in fact. 

Anyhow, what do you reckon? Am I being a miserable old bag?  While you're pondering how to say 'yes' without being unutterably rude, I'll leave you with a short suggested reading list for ‘new adults’…fabulous books that felt absolutely no need whatsoever for a special category. Bet not one of them would make a ‘new adult’ list from a modern publisher.

 

Catcher in the Rye – J D Salinger

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

The Magus – John Fowles

The Group – Mary McCarthy

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (and Jane Eyre by Charlotte)

All Jane Austen and a shedload of Hardy

I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

Angela Carter – The Bloody Chamber

The Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell

Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake

Bet I missed loads, huh?  What would you put on the list? 

And, on re-reading, I find myself arguing with myself (again)...just a bit. But, no...let's leave it like this.  Tell me what you think. 

Eco-literature for teens? Can books help save the planet?

I wrote my teen novel, Walker, several years ago.  

It’s the story of a boy who dies and who comes back to life as a shaman, a walker between worlds. 

It’s aimed at the mid-grade/YA market (hard to be precise as reading tastes vary so much but I’d say if someone likes Percy Jackson, Michelle Paver, Rick Riordan etc., they should like this.)

Walker had an agent and did the rounds of publishing houses.  It also made it through to the shortlist of The Wow! Factor competition run by Waterstone's and Faber.  Yet, despite all this it never quite found a home.  It got onto the editor’s desk at Authonomy and the feedback I received from the editor at HarperCollins made me rethink the book quite radically. So I rewrote it. Rewrote it twice, actually.  Well, gazillions of times really, but ended up with two main versions – a ‘boy’ version and a ‘girl’ version.  Which appealed to me for all sorts of shamanic reasons.   

Cow Castle - built by pixies

So. Why Walker? 

Firstly Walker is set on Exmoor and really this place is one of my constant muses.  Can a place be a muse? I think so. There are just so many legends here; so much history and prehistory, magic and mythology.  Nature is so darn...elemental. Its mood shifts round every corner - whether on the wild bleak moorland, in the deeply forested combes, the swift running rivers, the crashing waves against cliff or sultry slap against shore. I wanted to try to capture/encase/enchant in words some of its tricksy, tempestuous, rugged charm (yeah, I like my muses like that). *smile*

Secondly Walker is about shamanism. 

I love shamanism. 

I wanna talk about it more, in more detail, later as it’s part of the Labyrinth. But, for now, for starters, think of a practice where you can journey into other worlds, other realms – where you can find spirit guides and animals; where you can go for healing, for self-knowledge, for wisdom, for inspiration, for education. It’s not always a gentle process. Spirits often play rough, pulling you apart before putting you back together. It’s a journey of self-awareness and also a journey of connection – with other people, animals, places, times. Above all, shamanism is about the Earth – and this brings me onto the third point…

Cos thirdly, Walker is about the Earth. It's got an underlying environmental plea for sanity running through it. It’s not a worthy book; it doesn’t ram points down your throat but it does have the life blood of the planet running through its pages.  

This is eco-lit…just as much as any fist-thumping non-fiction tome on climate change.

Fourthly, finally (fine ally), Walker is a yarn. I wanted to write the kind of book I loved as a child; the kind that lures you in and makes you turn page after page, reading by torchlight under the covers. The kind written by people like Alan Garner, Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliff.  When I met one of my total heroes, Alan Garner, a couple of years ago, I told him that his book The Weirdstone of Brisingamen was my lodestone, my template for Walker. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Is that really a good idea?’ J Jeez, I love that guy. You've never read Alan Garner? For shame on you! 

Anyhow, there you have it. Walker is my paean to Exmoor, my homage to storytelling, my head-bowing to shamanism and my earnest hope that we can learn to love our world and respect it before we pull it to pieces.  

Did I succeed? I dunno. You tell me. One of these days I may get my act together and self-publish, in a lovely edition made from paper harvested from sustainable forestry of course.  In the meanwhile, if you happen to be an editor or publisher who likes the idea of this then...get in touch.  

You can read more about shamanism and the world of Walker on its own blog – here…

You can read the first few chapters here…

Oh, oh and, is this part of the Labyrinth?  Of course it is.