Intelligent Designing

Dear everybody, I have a slightly mad fiction thing out at the end of the month. To which end I will be doing a slightly crazy thing tomorrow to help people notice it. If you would like to get involved with the crazy thing, the information is all at the bottom of this post. But, before you rush off there, please do pause for a moment, because what comes next is the opening of said book, Intelligent Designing for Amateurs.

Chapter One
Anthropological observations of the curious habits of personages native to Barker Street

Hopefully there would be dead people next door. That would liven things up tremendously. Ever since the new tenant was first mentioned, Temperance had been trying to imagine what an archaeologist would look like, and had become stuck somewhere between the beard and the muddy boots. Granny said an archaeologist dug things up, which had formed most of her impression. Temperance had never encountered an actual archaeologist before, and until recently, hadn’t even met the word in person. It was one of those large, pleasing, hard to spell words that she liked to roll around in her mouth. There were others. Obsequious. Crepuscular. Epigrammatic. Meanings did not always excite her young mind, but a word that came with a person had more appeal. Granny told her something about digging up iniquities, or possibly aunties. Antimacassars? Digging up definitely suggested mud, and led Temperance to think from there about the likelihood of dead people. Dead people went into the ground, so it stood to reason they could come out of it again. What else was there to unearth aside from coal and ore?

“Nothing at all like a body snatcher,” Granny had insisted, when the subject came up at breakfast, but Temperance wasn’t sure. What else would anyone want to dig up, really? Treasure might be nice, she supposed, but that seemed more like pirate business.
Still, having a new neighbor would cheer the whole street up. The bigger, separate house next to their little terrace had been empty all winter. Seeing the dark windows at night always inclined her to feel sad.

“How’s that sweeping going, then?” Granny demanded from inside the house.
The sweeping had not, in fact, started, the girl having entirely forgotten about the broom in her hand. Pushing curls of escaping brown hair out of her face, Temperance surveyed the twig strewn path to her grandmother’s door. Sweeping seemed so pointless. The wind would bring it all right back in no time. She sighed heavily, feeling very sorry for herself.

Before she could start on the job, the sound of hooves and wheels drew her attention to the street again. All of the delivery people had already done their rounds for the day. Horse-drawn vehicles were otherwise unusual here. The inhabitants of Barker Street were all very decent people, but not equal to carriages, excepting for weddings and funerals. Temperance loved funerals, but the approaching wagon lacked the plumes and splendid display of misery. Instead she saw a neat little trap, followed by a heavily loaded cart where a great many things were piled up behind the driver and passengers.

With a little squeak, she dropped the broom and ran to the garden gate. Then, because she did not want the archaeologist to think her childish, she slowed down. Walking in what she hoped was a dignified way, she soon reached the next property just as the tired horse came to a halt.
The person inside the trap was carefully helped down, and then approached the front door. There was no beard whatsoever, and no obvious signs of mud. Perhaps there had been a mistake? The trap itself took off at a jaunty speed. Temperance wondered if this was the archaeologist’s wife, come on ahead to make their new home nice. The man himself would probably be in a hole full of bones at this very moment, Temperance reasoned.

One of the men got off the cart. He had wild hair and a big coat. On the whole he seemed a better candidate for the adventurous life, and Temperance watched him expectantly.
“All to be unloaded here?” he asked the woman.
“If you please.” She nodded to the girl who was sitting on the cart. “I assume you can find the kitchen, Mary?”

The girl nodded and hurried inside. The two men set about unloading items of furniture from the cart and taking them into the house. Temperance felt rather puzzled by all of this. There weren’t any bones being unloaded just usual, household things. Unless the bones were in one of the tea chests. She supposed that would make sense, even if it was a disappointment.

“Hello girl,” said the tall woman, with an accent that clearly came from another place.

Temperance had spent hours planning how to make her introductions to the new neighbor. She had already established herself as being absolutely essential to Charlie Rowcroft, Barker Street’s resident inventor. Now, she meant to impress the archaeologist, or for that matter his wife, with her clever, useful nature. Thus, she would gain free access to their home as well. Staring up at the new arrival’s face, she couldn’t remember any of the planned speech and found herself instead saying, “Have you got any dead people?”

Now available for pre-order here -
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Designing-Amateurs-Nimue-Brown/dp/1780999526/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368608170&sr=1-1&keywords=Intelligent+Designing+for+amateurs and no doubt other places as well.

So, here’s the planned silliness. Reblog the post, or post the pre-order link and let me know. I can spot a reblog pretty easily, otherwise tag or message me on facebook, @brynneth_nimue on twitter, or drop an email to brynnethnimue at gmail dot com. I will then write a limerick or silly verse about you, and post it wherever the link went. That could be slow and messy with Twitter, but we’ll do what we can…

Steam Druid

For all of you who suffer from folk innuendo syndrome, I should start by saying no, this is not a Beltain related topic. It’s about steam engines and Druids.

Only when I went to the Cambridge (Gloucestershire) vintage car and steam show last weekend did I remember what I was doing there the previous year. It’s a small show – a field of old cars, a steam car (the only car I have ever loved!) a steamroller and a few baby traction engines puffing about. There was also a lot of rain. Last year I was working on Intelligent Designing for Amateurs. It’s a fiction thing and it’s coming soon… and as the title suggests, it is a bit about people playing God.

But I digress. I’d read Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe the previous winter, and that was a big influence on writing Druidry and the Ancestors. I needed to make some kind of meaningful response. A legacy remained. The sheer insanity of revival Druids, the mad energy, shameless disregard for facts, fraudulent invention… that had got under my skin. At the time I couldn’t see any way of bringing that to my ‘proper’ Druidry so I did what I usually do with impossible things, and put it in a story. How to do revival Druids? I didn’t want to work with the actual historical figures, so I needed to invent some equally crazy people to play with.

One of the consequences of this, was Henry Caractacus Morestrop Jones (Archdruid) complete with moustache, a robe that looks suspiciously like a nightdress, and a heightened sense of self importance. I wanted some slightly more sympathetic Druids as well though.

Then, at last year’s vintage car show with traction engine event, I watched the steam roller pootle back and forth, slowly. Inspiration popped into my head. Not the kind of spiritual, fire in the head awen inspiration we normally like to associate with Druids, but very silly inspiration. Druids on a traction engine. The scope for low speed chases struck me at once. I like a good slow chase for comedy value. Jack Barrow does them well, too.

In the process of writing a book, its’ not difficult to lose track of the source material, especially with fiction where I’m not making the same conscious effort to remember what I got from where. As a result I sometimes get the curious pleasure of re-encountering a thing and realising that it set me on an imaginative journey.
Druids on a traction engine.

I gather Dr Who has sinister cybermice in it, so I may have been a bit prescient with that one. Yes, it’s been a strange year, creatively speaking and the upshot is a strange book.

“The Glass Coffin” and “The Ensorceled Prince”: An Asexual Reading

By Elizabeth Hopkinson

Almost everyone knows the familiar fairy tale ending: the prince marries the princess and they live happily ever after. But does this simple conclusion embody all that fairy tales have to tell us about human sexuality? By no means!

“Intentionally or not, (fairy tales) have been used to enforce what has been termed “compulsory heterosexuality”… But…folktales and fairy tales portrayed anything but a monolithic image of sexuality.”[i]
Even when stories end in marriage, the body of the tale can sometimes be found to explore more complex issues of sex and sexuality, and often in a more honest and helpful way than today’s media, with its sensationalism and mis- or non-representation of minorities. One such minority is that of the asexual (someone who does not experience sexual attraction or desire).[ii] This orientation has been largely ignored by today’s society but is, I believe, represented in traditional tales.
In this essay, I would like to look at two similar tales: “The Glass Coffin” from Grimm’s Household Tales and “The Ensorceled Prince” from 1001 Nights. These two stories seem to me to represent the female and male experience of asexuality, so I wish to present an asexual reading of the tales. I will look at the tales both together and separately, considering two different versions of each. I will also look at the relevance of other “asexual icons” to these stories. This, I hope, will put them in context and help create a greater understanding of the issues involved.

The Tales

Both stories have very similar plotlines. In “The Glass Coffin”, a tailor is sent on a quest to an underground hall, where a young woman lies in a glass coffin, waiting to be disenchanted. She originally lives happily with her brother, until a suitor arrives, who refuses to take no for an answer. He renders her immobile with enchanted music, and when she still resists, puts her in glass coffin, transforming her brother to a goat (or a hound, in another version), her castle to a miniature in a glass case, and her servants to coloured smokes or liquids in glass bottles. Only when the enchantment is destroyed can she be freed.

In “The Ensorceled Prince”, the hero is a sultan. His quest takes him to a secret palace in the mountains, where a young prince has been enchanted so that from the waist down he is made of marble. The spell is cast by his wife, who becomes dissatisfied with him and drugs him nightly so she can have an affair with a slave. When the prince confronts them, she enchants him, transforming islands to mountains, the city to a lake, and its people to fish of four different colours. Only when the enchantress and her lover are destroyed can the prince be freed.

Shared Imagery

There are several points shared by both stories that stand out for me. To begin with, the captor in both cases is overtly sexual, and exercises frightening power over the captive. This could refer to a fear or distaste for sex. In “The Glass Coffin”, this power is really quite terrifying. The enchanter charms the girl with music, which pins her to the bed and removes her powers of speech. He then enters her bedroom and proposes marriage with increasing force, until, “he declared passionately that he would revenge himself, and find some means to punish my haughtiness.”[iii] This almost feels like attempted rape (and perhaps was, in some earlier version?) which is how any advance can feel to those who do not desire it. The ensorceled prince is also rendered helpless, this time by drugged wine, which puts him in a “death-like state”[iv] while his wife indulges her sexual appetites elsewhere. Note that both characters sleep in their beds, rather than using them for other activities, and that the villains exaggerate this sleep, as if ridiculing their lack of interest. Silence also features in both stories. The girl is rendered speechless; the prince cuts the slave’s vocal cords. This could refer to the taboo surrounding asexuality.
Ultimately, both characters are punished for their lack of sexual response by being enchanted. The girl is placed in a glass coffin where she sleeps, “enveloped from head to foot in her own yellow hair!”[v] The prince is made half-man, half-statue, “neither dead nor alive”.[vi] There is an obvious reference to death here: the characters are not sexually “alive” (although neither are they wholly dead, reminding us perhaps that to lack a sex life is not to lack a life). But what stands out for me is the beauty and purity of their enchanted state. Both are physically beautiful in themselves: the girl with her golden hair, the prince with “his forehead… flower-white, his cheek rosy bright, and a mole on his cheek like an ambergris mite”.[vii] In their enchanted state, they become more beautiful. Rather than being degraded, they seem to have been glorified. The underground hall glows “like the glimmering of pearls in the depth of water”[viii] with glass artefacts, coloured smokes and miniature dwellings. The mountain palace has gold-starred hangings, birds in golden nets and lion-shaped fountains, “spouting from their mouths water clear as pearls and diaphanous gems”.[ix] The enchanted ones have almost become works of art in themselves: the girl encased in glass, the prince half-stone or, in one version, crystalline marble. They have become asexual icons: untouchable, intact and unassailably beautiful. Like Pygmalion’s Galatea or Keats’ Grecian Urn[x], their beauty and their unassailability go hand in hand; once they become “touchable” the enchantment is lost.

In traditional versions of the stories, the captives are released to take up marriage partners. (The girl marries the tailor; the prince a daughter of the fisherman who began the quest). We are back to “enforced heterosexuality” and the typical “happy ending”, it could be said. Our characters are not offered the choice of staying unassailable. But it is worth noting the sympathetic and non-threatening nature of their rescuers. Both are a far cry from the over-sexed captors. The humble tailor is a very different man from the cruel enchanter. One imagines he would not force the girl as her first suitor did. “The Ensorceled Prince” takes the matter even further. Here the rescuer is the sultan, who adopts the prince as his heir. It is this father figure (rather than a marriage partner) that seems to be crucial to the prince’s disenchantment: a figure who can maybe offer fatherly advice and support on intimate matters.

Modern versions of the stories, however, offer alternative paths for the ending. It is to these versions that I would now like to turn, along with other “asexual icons”, as I look at the individual stories in turn.

“The Glass Coffin”: The Intact Female
One alternative version of “The Glass Coffin”, complementing that of the Brothers Grimm, is A S Byatt’s re-telling in her novel, Possession. The re-telling is purported to be by one of the novel’s characters, fictitious Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte. Both Christabel and her 20th-century biographer Maud Bailey (motte and bailey together forming parts of a castle) show a strong desire for unassailability as females (Christabel by living reclusively, Maud by keeping her long, golden hair constantly covered). The character Roland, on beginning to read “The Glass Coffin” muses: “He was an intruder into their female fastnesses”.[xi] In this version of the story, the tailor offers the liberated girl the option of not marrying him, and in the end the girl, the tailor and her brother live together without saying for certain whether a marriage has taken place. This could be seen as a validation of an asexual lifestyle. However, both Maud and Christabel do have sexual relationships during the novel, coming out of their fastnesses as the girl comes out of the coffin. (Although Christabel then retreats again). There are two more characters that appear to be asexual — Ellen Ash (who experiences vaginismus[xii]) and her biographer Beatrice Nest. Both these women, however, come across as deeply frustrated characters; their personal castles and glass coffins really do seem like prisons for them. They may in fact desire sex but be unable to engage in it. This is not the same as being asexual.

Possession is a complex novel, and it difficult to know the author’s interpretation of “The Glass Coffin”. What is clear is that she wishes to use it to explore the idea of female intactness. Despite its similarities to “The Ensorceled Prince”, “The Glass Coffin does seem to present a particularly feminine experience.

One unique feature is the girl’s relationship with her brother. In both versions of the story, brother and sister have vowed never to marry, but to live together in a kind of sexless marriage. In Grimm’s version, the brother is transformed to a goat: an animal associated with male sexuality. Perhaps, having experienced the enchanter’s advances, the girl can no longer view any man, even a brother without frightening associations of sex, and this is what she needs to be freed from. The moment when the goat defeats the enchanter could represent a return to an untainted relationship with her brother. In Byatt’s version, however, the brother takes a much more passive role as a hound. It is a piece of the glass coffin itself, in the hands of the tailor, which kills the enchanter. Ultimately, some fragment of the girl’s own unassailability overcomes the intruding male.

This militant virginity harks back to the figure of Artemis/Diana in classical mythology, who punished Actaeon for seeing her bathing by having him turned to a stag. Artemis was the goddess not only of chastity but also of hunting, so it is interesting that the girl and her brother live in the forest, “forever peacefully in the castle, and hunt and play together the livelong day”.[xiii]

In the Christian world, the ultimate virgin icon has long been the Virgin Mary, whose beautiful devotional names include “Tower of Ivory”, an image of inviolate beauty. One analogy for the Virgin Birth is that of light passing through glass without breaking it, reminding us of the glowing light and glass artefacts in “The Glass Coffin”. Mary also became a model for other virgin saints, such as Saint Etheldreda (also mentioned in Possession). Her story has much in common with that of the heroine of “The Glass Coffin”. “Although forced to marry, she felt called to be a “bride of Christ” (and) remained a virgin,”[xiv] (suggesting that she may well have been asexual). She was forced to remarry; her new husband agreeing she could remain a virgin but later changing his mind, forcing her to flee to a convent.

Interestingly, her body was said to have been found incorrupt seventeen years after death. This is a remarkably similar image to that of the virgin girl asleep in the glass coffin, still young and beautiful, suggesting a link between sexual and corporeal incorruptibility.
All this seems very strong and positive as far as the female is concerned. Her unassailability or intactness actually gives her a kind of power against men. She can be incorruptibly female without the need for sex. Of course, that over-simplifies the matter rather — which the fairy tale never does — but it does point to a difference between what asexuality can mean for a woman and what it can mean for a man.

“The Ensorceled Prince”: The Virtual Eunuch
Things are more problematic when we turn to “The Ensorceled Prince” to look at the male experience of asexuality. Even the so-called traditional version of the tale has a complex history. It is believed to originate in either India or Iran and takes place in a Muslim context, but comes to us via the French adaptation of Antoine Gallard (1704-17) and the Victorian English re-telling of Richard Burton, who we are told, “…took pleasure in… stressing, rather than suppressing, any sexual undertones or explicit scenes to be found”.[xv] So it is wise not to expect it to reflect the values of any particular time and culture: even within the story itself we see multiculturalism in the fish of four colours, representing Muslim, Zoroastrian, Jew and Christian. The modern version I wish to compare it with, however, has a definite ideological focus. This is Moyra Caldecott’s re-telling (called by her “The King of the Ebony Isles”) in her book Crystal Legends. Caldecott says in her introduction to the book, “This is a book about the stories, the myths and legends, that use crystals and precious and semi-precious stones as potent and powerful symbols”.[xvi] Therefore, it is worth bearing in mind the symbolism of crystal and jewels when looking at her version of the tale.

One thing that stands out from “The Ensorceled Prince” by contrast with “The Glass Coffin” is the prince’s unhappiness and pain. While the girl in the coffin lies peacefully sleeping, the prince weeps and laments. He also reacts to his potential captor with much greater anger and violence, attempting to kill both the slave and his wife. Whereas, in the Grimm’s version, the girl takes up a pistol only when passive resistance has failed, the prince takes up his sword as a first resort twice (when he finds out about his wife’s lover and when he realises the lover is still alive). This suggests a deep unease with the idea of asexuality in a man, and a sense of shame in having such an orientation publicly revealed. None of this is surprising, given the traditional importance of men’s virility and the association of that virility with masculinity itself. The prince is apparently desperate to prove he is still a man. He will not allow another man to take his wife (whether or not he desires to bed her) and he is active is trying to deal out vengeance. (The ineffectiveness of his attacks with the sword may relate to the idea of impotency in sexual matters and martial matters going hand in hand).

It is extremely relevant that it is the lower half of the prince’s body — that containing his sexual organs — that is turned to marble. The transformation renders him literally asexual. In Caldecott’s version: “from the waist downwards he was pure white crystalline marble,”[xvii] and his palace is made from the same substance. If we look at what Caldecott has to say in her introduction about crystal and jewels, she says: “The real value of the gem… (is) the sense it gives us of wonder that the earth can produce such extraordinary and secret beauty”.[xviii] The prince’s statue body also creates a sense of wonder, and of secret beauty. Whatever it contains is possessed by him alone.
However, the prince suffers continually for keeping his intactness. He says: “every day she (his wife) leaves the side of her lover for a while and comes to my chamber to thrash me with a whip until I bleed”.[xvix] This echoes the violence of the enchanter in “The Glass Coffin,” and could show the wife’s anger in failing to get a sexual response from her husband, or even the cruel attitude of society to a man who prefers to live without sex. It could also show the prince’s own inner torment over his orientation, particularly as a married man, expected to produce an heir. Interestingly, although she claims the story is about female sexual satisfaction, Caldecott leaves the story with an asexual ending. Re-marriage for the prince is never mentioned. In fact, the sultan’s adoption of the prince could even point the way to finding an heir without the need for sex.

The prince’s beauty is particularly interesting because he is described in a way that seems almost androgynous. Burton quotes a poem:
A youth slim-waisted from whose locks and brow
The world in blackness and in light is set.
Throughout Creation’s round no fairer show
No rarer sight thine eye hath ever met.
A nut-brown mole sits enthroned upon a cheek
Of rosiest red beneath an eye of jet.[xx]

This is a man who is definitely pretty rather than handsome. Androgyny — especially male androgyny — is a double-edged sword as far as asexuality is concerned. For some, androgyny suggests asexuality itself, and the androgynous become “asexual icons”. For an asexual woman in particular, the idea of a man without male sexuality can be deeply attractive. For others, androgyny is viewed in quite the opposite way. An online essay on, “What Tolkien Officially Said about Elf Sex” begins, “Ever since the movie of the book Fellowship of the Ring came out, there seem to be two popular ideas about Elves’ sex lives. Either they are radiantly asexual, or they are all screwing each other madly, along with any dwarves, hobbits or men who happen along”.[xxi] This is true for other androgynous figures too. The castrato opera singers, wildly popular in the 1720s and 30s were famously adored by women. “This may seem to anticipate the safe, sexless allure of 1950s teen idols,”[xxii] but they were also reputed to be great lovers (whether or not this was medically possible).

With his upper body only made of flesh and his lower body cold (if beautiful) stone, the ensorceled prince has much in common with the castrati and other eunuchs. It could be said that the wife has carried out some symbolic act of castration on him in her enchantment. Perhaps she is suggesting that he has, “lost his manhood”, as they had. Even the drugged wine she gives him seems to parallel the drugs used in the castration process. Like the castrati of the 18th-century opera, he then becomes a thing of artifice — part living man, part man-made (or in this case, woman-made) creation. The castrati were known for their emotional outbursts; likewise the prince, “wept with sore weeping till his bosom was drenched with tears.”[xxiii] and going back to the symbolism of crystal, we note that the last recorded castrato, Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) had a voice that an Austrian musicologist said, “…can only be compared to the clarity and purity of crystal”.[xxiv] The purity of the prince is surely another meaning of crystal in this story.

It could be said that the ensorceled prince is a virtual eunuch in his asexuality. In fact, a Greek word for eunuch — spadones — can also be translated as “virgin” or “celibate” and was sometimes used to refer to those who had withdrawn from sexual activity. (In antiquity, some of these practised self-castration). This could also help to account for his pain and suffering: the story does not skirt around the fact that a man is perceived to have lost something vital in rejecting sex.[xxv] Its sadness highlights the painful taboo that has existed around the topic of asexuality for many centuries.

Conclusion
Obviously, the reading I have given is not the only way these stories can be read. But in highlighting the asexual themes to be found in “The Glass Coffin” and “The Ensorceled Prince”, I hope I have may have helped to foster a kindlier attitude towards a world-view many people find hard to understand or to believe truly exists. Within these tales passed down by our ancestors lies a safe place — a secret castle or palace — in which those who desire only unassailable beauty may work out questions of identity, while being assured that this under-represented viewpoint has not been forgotten.

[i] The Greenwood Encyclopaedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales ed. Donald Haase (Westport, Connecticut, London: 2008) Vol.2 p.401
[ii] see http://www.asexuality.org for further information
[iii] “The Glass Coffin”, The Complete Illustrated Works of the Brothers Grimm (London: 1989) p.680
[iv] “The Tale of the Ensorceled Prince”, 1001 Nights trans. Richard Burton (www.sacred-texts.com) p.1
[v] Grimm, p.679
[vi] Burton, “The Tale of the Ensorceled Prince” p.3
[vii] “The Fisherman and the Jinni”, 1001 Nights trans. Richard Burton (www.sacred-texts.com) p.7
[viii] “The Glass Coffin”, Possession: A Romance by A S Byatt (London: 1990) p.62
[ix] Burton, “The Fisherman and the Jinni” p.7
[x] In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion creates his ideal woman, the statue Galatea, with whom he falls in love. In Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” a pair of lovers is fixed forever in the act of being about to kiss, never kissing but never losing love or beauty.
[xi] Possession p.58
[xii] Spasm of the muscles that makes penetration painful or impossible
[xiii] Possession p.64
[xiv] Saints of the Isles: A Year of Feasts by Ray Simpson (Stowmarket, Suffolk: 2003)
[xv] Greenwood Encyclopaedia Vol. 1 p.58
[xvi] Crystal Legends by Moyra Caldecott (Wellingborough: 1990) p.12
[xvii] “The Fisherman and the Genie and The King of the Ebony Isles,” Crystal Legends p.128
[xviii] Ibid p.12
[xix] Ibid p.128
[xx] Burton, “The Fisherman and the Jinni” p.7
[xxi] http://www.ansereg.com/what-tolkien-officially-said-about-elf-sex
[xxii] http://www.thesmartset.com from Drexel University, “Why Castrati Made Better Lovers”
[xxiii] Burton, “The Fisherman and the Jinni” p.7
[xxiv] “Why Castrati Made Better Lovers”
[xxv] There are, of course, numerous positive male role models for celibacy, including Jesus, St Paul and the “Pure Knight” of the Holy Grail, Sir Galahad (who comes across in Thomas Mallory as having asexual orientation). But they do not appear to have direct relevance to this story.

Originally published on http://www.cabinetdesfees.com

Author Biography
Elizabeth Hopkinson has a passion for history, fairy tale and Japan. She has lived all her life in Bradford, West Yorkshire (UK). She has had over 30 short stories published and won prizes in three writing competitions. Silver Hands is her first novel.

Silver Hands is out from Top Hat Books on 26 April. Find it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Silver-Hands-Elizabeth-Hopkinson/dp/1780998724

Find her online here: http://www.hiddengrove.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Supporting Judith O’Grady

The odds are that you’ve not previously heard of Judith O’Grady. She’s a pagan author, of the book God Speaking, published by Moon Books. (pre order info here – http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-God-Speaking-Judith-OGrady/dp/1780992815) I think it’s a very important book, which is why I’m going to be putting in some effort trying to make sure it gets into people’s hands. The trouble is, Judith isn’t famous already. She doesn’t have a TV program, or a movie deal. Most people have never heard of her. This means that most physical book stores will not automatically put her books on the shelves, and most people will never even encounter her book, and this sucks. So let’s not have it be like that.

God Speaking tackles head on that problem about mental health versus religious experience. We live in a society where to hear voices, is to be crazy. Most Pagans sidle carefully around the subject, wanting to claim personal experience but at the same time not wanting to sound deranged. This book explores the issues in a witty and compelling way. Judith O’Grady is a person with a lot of valuable insight to share, and a really accessible writing style. She deserves and audience.

I think a lot of people outside the book industry imagine that what happens when you are published, is that the world magically beats a path to your door, you become wealthy and it’s all good. What really happens is this. Something like 250,000 books are published every year. Many barely sell at all. Something like half the books printed end up in landfill. Most authors, you have never heard of. Most books, you have never heard of. Most will never get into bookshops, or libraries. JK Rowling, Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey represent wild anomalies, not the normal authoring life. Which is a pity really, because there’s a lot of good stuff out there deserving of far better sales than it gets.

Most publishers simply don’t have the huge international marketing budgets needed to compete with film, TV, computer games, internet, phone aps and all the other things you may spend your disposable income on. Moon Book certainly cannot buy Judith the visibility she deserves. These days even the big houses fail to manage that. Books depend on word of mouth. That means you.

I want there to be good books. I am very bored of lightweight, predictable, derivative writing, and that’s what dominates the mainstream. I am desperate for substantial, engaging, well written and original material, fiction and non fiction alike. Therefore, if I find something good I am going to shout about it. The thing is, if no one buys an author’s books, they get depressed and demoralised. They maybe can’t justify the time and energy it takes to make another one. They maybe don’t see any point. I’ve been dangerously close to that myself, and this is part of my solution to that problem. If we could establish that there is a market for good, ground-breaking, original, surprising stuff maybe the mainstream publishers and bookstores would not focus so much on the celebrity crap, the obvious rip-offs and all the rest. I want nothing short of a revolution in the industry.

So here’s what we need to do, in this case and in others. We need reviews of Judith O’Grady’s work in as many places as possible. If you have a review site, can review for a publication or have a blog with a LOT of followers, see if you can get a review copy from the publisher. I think people who read this book will be convinced of its merits. I’m doing this purely because I read the book and was really inspired by it. Or, if you can take a blog post or an article, or something of that ilk and put it online and tell people about it, step up. If you leave a comment here I can get your email address from it and pass it to Judith. She’s not really an internet person, but she has a lot of ideas and opinions and will happily write you some content. Also, if you blog her stuff, tell me and I will tout the hell out of that post as well.

If you’re reading this and thinking ‘I know a book that deserves this support’ then get the word out. If you think I can help, tell me. Review on goodreads and amazon. Mention it on facebook. For one, authors do notice this stuff and it really seriously can mean the difference between feeling there is a point to what you do and keeping going, or feeling all is hopeless futility and quitting. One good word. One person who understood and was inspired. That’s honestly how marginal the creative life can be. So if you value something, talk about it.

Jack Barrow interview

Jack Barrow came to me through one of those random online connections. I read his book blurb, thought this sounds fun and grabbed him for an interview. As he’s not yet famous, I thought I should do some of those ‘who are you?’ questions, and the results were fascinating…

Nimue: Hello Jack! Let’s start with an enquiry about the nature of your path…

Jack: What can I say? I tend to call myself a pagan these days but only really because that’s the community that I belong to. Back when I started on this path, in the early eighties, I described myself as an occultist. I suppose magician is the definitive category. My background is probably best described as ceremonial magician, mostly derived from cabalistic or Thelemic sources. I have an interest in Crowley and Spare but not to the exclusion of other sources. I believe that the foundations of paganism lie in the time-honoured symbol systems, particularly the Tarot and astrology. If a practitioner can master those then they have a foundation that can take them anywhere. I once went through a stage of describing myself as an eclectic/comedic magician because I steal from anywhere but don’t take anything seriously. After a while I changed that as I realised that I do actually take the practice of magic quite seriously, at least in terms of my understanding of the mechanisms involved in making magic successful. I’ve been described as a chaos magician but I’ve never liked the term.

Nimue: And in the rest of your life?

Jack: I’ve been making a living out of writing, in one form or another, since the late eighties. In that time I’ve done most sorts of corporate writing (which is what you have to do to survive) including copywriting and technical writing as well as some journalism. I’ve written on all sorts of subjects from advertising features about BBQs (there’s not much you can say after about 200 words) to technical manuals for helicopter engines or photocopiers. I started writing about ideas in 1989 when I heard of an astrological event that caught my imagination. I say ideas because that’s what I write about, paganism or magical concepts are just some of those ideas but my writing back then was as much about politics and philosophy as it was about astrology, and that was mundane astrology which is the astrology of global events. Later I found I could write stories about the sort of people I knew at the time, people involved in the magical scene, and the fiction came from there. Eventually it occurred to me that writing fiction is a better way to communicate those ideas and it gives the opportunity for a few jokes at the same time. I found myself writing about the kind of magic that members of the community practise and I enjoyed getting away from the sparks from the fingertips magic portrayed in the Harry Potter stories.
Otherwise I’ve studied psychology for which I got a very poor degree from a relatively good university. I like African percussion and early blues music (as well as most things in between). After watching a Horizon programme I’m fasting two days a week in an attempt to not turn into my father. I like red wine, and Top Gear, often at the same time, and I have an over romanticised ambition to throw a tent and backpack in my car and drive off into the wilderness with a tablet computer to write my next novel in splendid isolation.

Nimue: Now, when I read the blurb for The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil, I got a strong feeling of comedy, so, you’re writing about wizards, and you come from an occult background, how does the juggling of realities, personal, mainstream, fictional, work for you?

Jack: I would say I’m writing about magicians (rather than wizards) because that’s my tradition (although I try not to push a link between myself and the characters too much). As far as juggling realities goes, I find it comes pretty much second nature. When I perform an act of magic it’s usually in some magickal scenario: in the temple, robed up, after long preparation or some other factor that divides it away from everyday life. The act of dressing a temple, the clouds of incense or candle lit room with shadowy corners; that all creates an atmosphere of magic and changes that reality, generates gnosis if you like.
Being a practitioner of magic (for me) is suspension of disbelief and when I do it just comes naturally. I don’t actually believe that waving a stick around and chanting in some ancient language is going to cause an outcome but I have an expectation that it will generate results, so long as I give it a chance.
In terms of fictional realities, I’m not sure there is any difference to the real world. My characters live in present day England, have day jobs, get drunk, fall over, etc. Their reality is the same as ours. They perform magic in the same way as we do, the only difference is that they get to save the universe at weekends. Otherwise they are just like you and me.

Nimue: Ah, suspension of disbelief, that’s a powerful thing in writing and in being an audience. The ability to choose what to believe.

Jack: I wouldn’t call it choosing what to believe as much as role play. However, I think there are only some roles that will work, or perhaps only some roles (or alternate views of reality) that I’d want to get involved with. It’s difficult to pin down and I don’t want to analyse that too closely as analysis is the province of a different approach to the world from the magical approach. It’s not so much belief as expectation. I really don’t think I believe in magic. I’m a rationalist at heart. However I do use magic and use divinations systems, that sort of thing. Rationally I can’t believe that they can possibly work, however I’ve used them so many times and found them useful that I have an expectation that it these practices will work out for me. Don’t ask me how magic can possibly work because I really don’t believe in it.

Nimue: So would you say that a Pagan reader will find something familiar about your characters and their lives? Might these be the people you run into at the local moot?

Jack: Yes I hope so. When I started to write the book I didn’t really know how the magic was going to work out and I was writing it sequentially, originally publishing a chapter a month on an obscure pagan web site. When it came to describing the first major act of magic I just described it as I would have approached it. Well, okay, I wouldn’t normally try to start a car with magic but you have to put your characters is different situations from people in everyday life. So I was left with the dilemma of how to resolve this and decided that I’d just have the car start without too much explanation, as if by coincidence. Isn’t that how magic works for pagans?
There are one or two completely impossible things that happen in the story but when I realised how the rest of the magic was working I decided I wanted to keep the obviously supernatural to a minimum. Therefore there are no Potteresque sparks from wands or people flying on broomsticks, apart from that one major obviously impossible event in the first half of the book but I’m not going to give that away as it’s got a fairly significant gag attached to it.
Could Nigel, Wayne and Clint be at the moot? Most probably, if they know about the moot but I’m not sure how much they get out, perhaps Wayne does as he spends a lot of time in pubs. They are certainly not some special breed of hero that never mixes with the public. They tend to meet in Nigel’s house on a Tuesday night to drink dark rum, or whatever they can get hold of. You might think of it as like a coven meeting but they are not witches, I’d just call it a group meeting. That’s all explored in The Esbat, that’s the title of the first chapter and a chapter title that will probably appear in all future stories featuring the Hidden Masters.

Nimue: Speaking as someone who would like some Paganish fiction to read, it sounds to me like a very promising balance. Harry Potter is fun, but it’s too much fantasy, I hanker after something a bit more like magical realism, things I can almost believe.

Jack: I think my fiction might be described as magic realism, just I don’t use the term. And of
course there is that one major event in the story that couldn’t possibly be true.

Nimue: Who are your influences, on the writing side?

Jack: Influences, definitely Douglas Adams and Robert Rankin. Otherwise I have very eclectic tastes and I’m as much into non-fiction as fiction. In the last few months I’ve reread The Hobbit, a few books by Bill Bryson, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and I’m currently reading Gandhi’s autobiography. When I’ve finished that I’m planning to read Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails as research for my next novel which starts on a mountain top with an end of the world cult. Otherwise I’m just not sure what my influences are, the Open University perhaps.

Nimue: Where can people find you?

Jack: http://www.jack-barrow.com/books/unspeakable_evil.htm

(Book review to follow, because I’ve now read, and loved Jack’s writing… watch this space…)

Pathworking with Dunsany

Yesterday I read several Lord Dunsany stories that involve transitions into the otherworlds. I decided to try them as a pathworking, dabbling along the edges of sleep as is my preference.
Here’s the pathworking, loosely…

First you must find Go-By Street, which is an obscure little side street in London. Along that narrow street you will find a shop where they sell all manner of things. You must ask for something they cannot provide. (I went for a pint of compassion recently milked from a Tory). Then, when the shopkeeper acknowledges that it cannot be done, you can ask the way to the cottages. The shopkeeper will show you the way, past a room full of sleeping gods, to a backdoor. You come out into a street where the pavements are normal, but all else is covered in grass, and there are no other buildings. You follow the path until you find the witch’s cottage. The windows on one side of this cottage look out over the fields we know and from the other windows you can see the purple mountains of faerie. From here, a person can go forwards.

I only got as far as the witch’s cottage, she told me to stay the night and progress at dawn. I slept, and I dreamed, and when I woke from those dreams I was back in the witch’s house. I went a whole night dreaming that I was dreaming and waking there. It was one of the most startling, and vivid experiences.

I pathwork along the edges of sleep sometimes with the aim of it feeding into my dreaming, but this is the first time in a long while that has worked, and worked surprisingly well. I feel very odd today, but in a good kind of way. I think the combination of reading several stories and then working deliberately with said gave me a real boost, but I rather felt I was going by some tried and tested route.

Dunsany did not claim to be a Druid. I’m not sure he claimed to be anything in particular. There are layers in his work under the whimsy and fantasy, layers of human meaning and also layers of something other, something resonant and wild that really calls to me. One way or another, he went somewhere. Call it imagination, or journeying, or the mad flights of a poet’s fancy, but he went, and as ways of crossing into other places, this is a fine one.

The stories were… A shop in Go-By Street and The Avenger of Perondaris and the odds are good that both are online somewhere.

A case of mistaken identity

“What the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds “aha! This is my story. This is something I had always wanted to say but wasn’t able to say.” There has to be a dialogue, an interaction between the seer and the community.” Joseph Campbell.

That was my “aha!” moment, and with it came a stunning realisation about what it was I’d got wrong. I thought I wanted to be an author. I thought that from the age of about five, with flirtations with wanting to be other things along the way (Batman, rock star, teacher, traveller, the usual really). I’d always imagined that I’d find a way of being an author that was useful but never really put in the legwork there.

I don’t want to be an author after all. I want to be a seer. I want to put into words things that need expressing but that people don’t have words for yet. I want to be like a Troubadour of Mediaeval France, introducing the idea of personal love to a society that didn’t have that idea, and doing it mostly via songs. Only obviously I’m going to have to find some other concepts.

All the recent trauma and loss of direction makes sense to me now. I understand why I wasn’t happy. I was trying to do the wrong thing. I had misunderstood what it was that I wanted to be in the first place, and having that clarity now, I can better see where I need to be and what I need to be doing. I shall be chipping away at the non-fiction work (several in the pipeline now) and stepping back from the fiction a little. I need to spend more time trying to be the seer, not the author, and then come back when I have tales to tell. It’s going to be an adventure and I feel good about that prospect.

I’m also going to keep reading Joseph Campbell. I’ve got The Power of Myth on the go at the moment – a transcript of the interviews he did with Bill Moyers including bits that did not make it onto the TV. I’d not read any Campbell before, I confess, but am blown away. Some of it is dated, inevitably, but I have such a sense of finding a kindred spirit there, I’ve been coming to so many of the same conclusions on my own. It feels a bit like coming home. I’ve got a lot of reading to do, and that’s an excellent prospect.

Why I don’t like bookshops

As a child I read everything I could get my hands on. I did a degree in English literature, reading is one of my main leisure activities, I’ll buy books as my occasional luxury when money is tight, and buy them a lot when it isn’t. I buy books as gifts for other people, I write books, review books. They are at the heart of my life. But I hate bookshops, and have come to the conclusion that perhaps I need to air this.
Walk into a bookstore. The front tables are laden with shiny things. Celebrity books and TV spinoffs frequently dominate. I want to buy books. I don’t have a TV and have no interest in the vast majority of celebrities, so seeing this kind of thing on paper makes me feel sad and like I’m in the wrong place.

Then there are the coffee table books, and ok, some of them are pretty, but on the whole I don’t want a big display item, I live in a small space. I’m looking for richness, depth content, you know, the stuff you get in books?

Move along. There are the gift-cum-toilet-reads. The sort of thing you had over as presents to people you don’t know well enough to be confident of what they’d like. I’ve been bought them down the years. Loosely funny, light on content, destined to provide light relief in your toilet. Not actual content though, or a story or any of that other stuff. I’ll pass on those, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Eventually I will get past all of these sources of misery, to the book shelves. I may venture to pick up a few books and read the backs. The trouble is, I don’t want a thing that is basically a rip off of the last big hit, and I don’t want a story I can predict from reading the blurb or the first paragraph and so I drift onwards, past the stand of comic books that is 90% men in tights thumping each other and 9% Tokyo Pop. The 1% of good stuff is copies of things I already own. Sometimes, in the non-fic section when I get past the TV books and the famous people, there’s something I want to take home. Mostly by this point I want to sit down in the aisle and weep at the sheer, unutterable tragedy of it all.

I want to buy books. I love books. Bookshops make me want to cry. Surely as someone who wishes to buy books, I am the bloody target market? Except apparently I’m not. But I wonder a thing… do the people who love celebrities and TV stuff actually buy that many books? Because book shops keep closing and generally the internet is getting the blame, but, there’s a thing… When I go online I can get niche content, small publisher content, books I want to read. Is it the fault of the internet that the majority of books in book shops are not the ones I want to buy? I wonder if perhaps it isn’t, and the whole assumption about who wants to buy what, and what will sell, and where the ‘sure fire hits’ are coming from may be wrong. Am I the only book lover being turned off by what’s actually available?

This is why I feel moved to speak up, because perhaps it’s not just me, and perhaps some noise can beget change. Worth a shot, I feel.

Ancestors of style

Finding a voice as an author isn’t easy. How formal are you going to be? Academic style? Objective third person narrator, authority laden and confident? Are you going to be present as a person? And then, what form are you going to write? Poetry? Non-fiction? Fantasy? Literature? Conventional wisdom will tell you that to make it as an author you have to do one thing (usually a rather narrow thing) and stick to it so that readers know what to expect. That never felt comfortable to me. I get bored too easily.

I’ve been working on trying to find my own voice for a lot of years, but ended up tending to have different voices for different jobs, not one, coherent sort of me. However, there are two authors who have been increasingly influential when it comes to how I’ve developed on the style front: Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. If you aren’t familiar with them, I heartily recommend checking out their books. Both are of a pagan persuasion, and both are awesome.

There are a number of things about their work that hold true for both chaps, so I’m going to talk about them collectively. Both Kevan and Robin mix things up in a way that conventional wisdom has it, you shouldn’t. Books of poetry that also are about poetry. Mixing the academic and the experiential, the personal and the objective. They range widely, both writing fiction and non-fiction work – Robin’s fiction tends more towards the story telling. Kevan writes adult and YA. Their books aren’t easy to pigeon hole because they ignore where convention sets the boundaries, so that the intensely personal can sit alongside deep literary analysis, and other wonderful juxtapositions. Both men write with humour, and expose their thoughts and feelings in a way that I find utterly compelling. Last but not least, neither seems averse to irritating the hell out of people! If they feel or think something, neither tends to pull any punches with the delivery.

I don’t want to write academic style books. It’s not a style that comes easily to me and I think it puts off more people than it turns on. I also don’t want to write fluffy, lightweight content. I’ve learned through this blog and other teaching work that writing from personal experience is the strongest way to go. I’ve learned to work with my own doubt. In terms of how I present my thoughts to the world, the two writers I am especially keen to emulate, would be Kevan and Robin. Both in terms of the diversity of work, and the tones they strike. I want that blend of intimate, erudite, playful and confident. I have a LOT of reading to do if I mean to get anywhere near either of them for eruditeness… erudicity…. Eruditude…? It’s good to have something to aspire to, though.

So, picking through influences on current work, I thought of Kevan Manwaring and Robin Herne. There are a lot of people who have influenced what I do, over the years, but no one else I have set out quite so deliberately to follow. I think both of them have a great deal of style, and not only in their writing. It may be a bit much calling them ‘ancestors’ though, because neither is that much older than me. Although that’s one of the great joys in picking your ancestors of tradition… anyone is fair game!

Author Interview: Aaron Dennis

I found author Aaron Dennis as a consequence of asking around online for places to promote my own work, and as we got talking it became apparent he’s a very interesting chap, so I grabbed him for an interview here…

Nimue: What brought you to writing about the paranormal?

Aaron: My staple is actually Science Fiction but I include quite a bit of spiritual growth in both my characters and their universe. Naturally, the spiritual side in me needed a release once I started writing and that’s where Shadowman came from. I can’t really pinpoint where it all started but I was always drawn to spiritual growth and development. I started with martial arts and read about Tai Chi Chuan when I was about 12. From there I moved on to Buddhism and then Taoism, maybe it was because of listening to Bruce Lee speak on TV or from reading his books, but I eventually moved on to other areas. Eventually, I found myself reading the entire works of Carlos Castaneda, that was at age 21. His stories of his experiences with the Yaqui shaman really sparked something inside me. Once I started writing, only about a year and half ago, I knew I had to implement some of my beliefs, if only loosely. Then Shadowman sort of presented itself to me and I started it as a short story. As the character began to grow and develop his own spiritual powers, the stories kept coming. So the culmination was a novella with four shorts comprised of the protagonist’s dealings with the otherside, or a world where spirits reside.

With Castaneda’s works having such a huge impact on my life, I had no alternative but to incorporate a small fraction of my experiences into my stories, but then, that’s what makes my descriptions and conflicts feel so real. I’m not trying to teach anyone a lesson on proper living in my books but that doesn’t mean my characters shouldn’t learn.

Nimue: From where I’m sitting, that sounds a lot like how the bardic tradition works for many of us! Are there any specific shamanic traditions that you’re drawn to?

Aaron: Dreaming definitely. I started when I was a kid with dreams of events that came to pass, mostly things at school like assemblies that weren’t announced previously. Eventually, I started waking up in what I thought was a catatonic state. Turns out it was just astral projection, so I took an 8-week online course where I developed quite a bit. From there I took to lucid dreaming and finally total control over dreams Most of it has fallen to the wayside with my ever busy life. That, coupled with a great lack of sleep in general, has put a damper on my practices but most of my stories are derived from my dreams. If not the entire story, at least several chapters/events. I would like to, at some point in my life, design a room devoted to dreaming practices and subsequently, practice every day. Maybe my books will take off and I’ll be able to afford it. Apart from dreaming, I’ve grown indifferent towards life in general. Not to say I am depressed, far from it, I just accept everything as an inevitable guiding hand towards an unseen end I have no control over, you’ll see some of that spill over into my stories in one form or another.

Nimue: How do you view the dream world? As an inner state, another reality, something else?

Aaron: Originally, I figured it was an alternate state of reality, a place where the mind experimented with itself through some kind of link with the universe. After becoming acquainted with astral projection and lucid dreaming, I thought it was more like a training ground wherein I could learn about the universe by crossing a threshold into another dimension. Perhaps a dimension where beings that have no physical body exist. Once I learned about “sorcery” through Carlos Castaneda’s books I came to understand that every reality, at all given times, is just the solidification of the “assemblage point’ on a particular band of energetic fibers and that a “dream” is a new position of the assemblage point. A lucid dream is a more stable position wherein the assemblage point does not shift about the bands of energy, which comprise our “spirit” or energy body and astral projection is the actualization of moving in the world using only the energy body. This implies that when we are in our “ordinary” state of reality, we are in fact all “dreaming” together because all of our assemblage points are on a particular spot, or common spot, where we all interact. In part, this is why I became indifferent. I’m no more awake or asleep than when I am having a dream. Instead I’m only more “sober”, or rather, have my assemblage point on an accustomed position in the energy body where it does not shift erratically. Through rigorous practice, I became able to follow certain steps in order to achieve that same stability in dreams, or through dreaming. A normal dream, I believe, is just an erratic shifting of the assemblage point but we can solidify its position and attain a state of dreaming, which is to say, actively living in a complete state of alternate reality. This can be somewhat confusing due to the fact that when dealing with this new reality, we have no inventory, or no analogy for comparison, or no compass to guide us, the way a toddler has no real compass to guide him/her through the “real” world. If we practice, we can find a point of origin and function in alternate realities. Scientifically speaking, this crosses the border in to string theory, or M theory, where several membranes of reality can be accessed, all of which are complete and total realities where we all exist every day. We just don’t realize it. I’ve been at this about 7 years now and have not been practicing the way I should be but my “every day” life has to be treated as the only reality, otherwise I’d be insane and unable to accomplish even the smallest feats. Why would I worry about paying bills if this is all just a dream anyway? So I pretend that my waking life is the only real one. Fortunately, my other lives, or realities, supply me with an infinite amount of experiences, which I then translate into stories. This is why my books are so awesome. *winks*. If I may add, there was an episode of Star Trek TNG where Picard went into a dreamworld and lived an entire lifespan. When he returned to his normal reality, he had all those experiences. I too have lived complete and total lives in dreams and treat those dreams as truths.

Nimue: Tell us about your books?

My first real book was Shadowman, which started off as one short story that everybody seemed to like. I finished it around June of 2011 and was looking to get it published in a magazine or something. At that time, I didn’t know the first thing about being an author or publishing and found a self publishing company. They touted that no one nowadays can get published, it’s all self publishing, it’s the only way to go, real authors get self published and panderers with lots of money hire literary agents and they only care about money. Well it seemed fine to me. Figured I’d go self pubb’d first and learn the ropes. First I needed to expound on the story. Since I left it open-ended, it wasn’t difficult.

Shadowman is four consecutive shorts revolving around an unnamed protagonist and the story is told from his perspective. It starts with our man hanging out in New Orleans, where he witnesses a murder. The dead man relinquishes some power and it possesses our protagonist, who we will call Adja. The young man wakes up in the house of an old Creole woman. She explains the practice of Voodoo to Adja and guides him throughout his journey.

As it turns out, the dead man was her grandson. Once he passed his power on to Adja, he became a Shadowman and took on her grandson’s quest, the quest to kill Snake, an evil Shadowman. With each story, Adja gains new abilities and some new friends. Together, they go in search of objects of power, spirits, and all kinds of crazy things. So my neat little book was finished. Keep in mind I only started writing a few months prior. Some 5 thousand dollars, I sold about 90 dollars worth of my book, it was poorly edited, poorly promoted, and too expensive.

So I took to writing some Science Fiction. I have had enough dreams involving aliens and their complete worlds and chose one piece in particular that I’ve always liked. When I was 12 I had a dream that I was partnered up with a team of aliens, who were looking for a second race of aliens in order to battle a third race of aliens. This became the premise of Lokians, which was not originally a series. The more I played with it, the more I was able to add pieces of other dreams. The Lokians became the insect-monsters, which once chased me around an enormous and empty lab of sorts. A mindless antagonist has its benefits. You know you can’t reason with it. just kill it. From another dream, I created the Thewls. Originally, their heads and faces were different but too difficult to describe, so we have our Skeleton-faced Thewls now. The travelers I took right out of the original dream, a blue, ape-like people frozen in ice. After the original ending, I re-read the story and decided I had much more to tell, so I changed it, and started the series, the first being Book1 Beyond the End of the World. I tried to get it published for months but no one was biting. Finally I found Eternal Press and they were kind enough to say Hey, it’s a little info dumpy at the beginning, So I said, No problem and moved a few things around.

The sequel, Book 2 They Lurk Among Us, will be released November 1st. It picks up a few months after our heroes curbed the Lokian threat. As the name implies, the main topic is aliens ensconced inside Earth government. For this novel, I used some of the well known alien races, such as the Grays, the big-headed gray guys, and the Reptilians, large, lizard-like aliens. This one, unlike the first, has much more suspense and intrigue. Beyond the End of the World is more of an action/thriller, so I tried to write it at a pace that was nearly overwhelming. They Lurk Among Us is provided from many perspectives, which was a challenge, but I think I nailed it. There are so many things going on all at once, and everyone is slowly moving towards a conflict, so I thought a different perspective from chapter to chapter was interesting. We’ll see how people like it.

Finally, I’m working on the third Lokians novel, Book 3 For War and Glory. This is not a trilogy but I will take a pause for the cause once the third one is done to work on some other projects. One of these is a full-length novel based on one of my own shorts, Expedition, available at smashwords.

Nimue: Aaaaand point me at some websites

Aaron: Forgot to add, I have since cancelled my POD contract for Shadowman and it is now available through Damnation Books. At any rate, thanks for everything and point people to my website. Everything is available there. http://www.dennisauthor.com  this was fun

http://sciencefictionwriters.wikia.com

Find me on Twitter @authaarondennis
http://towriteawrong.blogspot.com (where the interview with me is going!)

Thanks Aaron!