Goodbye Blogspot, Hello Tumblr

 It's been almost a year since I posted here - stuff happened irl - and then Twitter started to look like a place that might collapse at any time, so I looked around for a new home in social media space, and it seemed logical to stop posting here (which I'd already done) and start posting somewhere else.

Since about 90% of the blogs I follow are on tumblr, it seemed the natural choice, so I have now started a blog called morwennastower on tumblr.

My main blog, Life in Hay, isn't going anywhere.

Portal Fantasies

I've just been reading the blog of Phenderson Djeli Clark, at pdjeliclark.wordpress.com. On 11th September she was talking about her experiences of trying to get her novel published - an Egypto-Nubian fantasy with a word count that enabled it to be split into four separate novels, and with a lot of black female characters - the Daughters of Sekhmet sound like fun!
I sympathise greatly with her struggles with agents and publishers - but one of the reasons that was suggested for why the book was not taken up was that it was a portal fantasy.

Now, I spent many hours as a child sitting in my mother's wardrobe trying to get to Narnia, so I'm naturally in favour of portals to other worlds. That's why my own first attempts at serious fantasy involve portals. Some of my characters live in Hay-on-Wye, the secondhand booktown on the Welsh Borders (on the grounds of 'write what you know', as I've been working in bookshops in Hay-on-Wye for around twenty years now), but they have a whole other life in the fantasy world of Ytir - one that they're reluctant to return to, for various very good reasons.

Like Phenderson Djeli Clark, I toyed with the idea of setting my story wholly within the fantasy world, which involved a huge amount of re-writing - but in the end, I decided I wanted the Hay-on-Wye parts of it, dammit, and I was going to have them. Which involved even more re-writing to get it back to the shape it had before (though I hope rather better written after all that work!).* And, despite the kind rejection letters that told me I was almost there as far as professional publishing was concerned, I decided I wasn't getting any younger and I wanted the stories to be out there and available - which is why I went the Smashwords route.
She's had some supportive comments about the portals, so maybe they're not the liability they're thought to be.

*as David Gerrold once said: "Remember, the first million words are just for practice!"

Writing and Real Life Experiences

I do quite a bit of browsing round blogs, and recently I found an interesting interview between two authors. Samantha Holt of samanthaholtauthor.blogspot.co.uk was interviewing Kim Rendfield of kimrendfield.com (for anyone who wants to go and look at their blogs) about her historical romance The Cross and the Dragon, set in 8thC Francia.
The interview was on 18th March, and I hope she won't mind, but I found one of her questions so interesting that I'd like to answer it here.

"Is anything in your book based on real life experiences or purely all imagination?"

When I wanted to start writing again, after a long gap where I hadn't had the time or the energy, I started thinking about one of the characters I'd created in my teenage years. Mal Petroc had a few "beginner's flaws" - anyone familiar with Diana Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland will know the one about magic users and fire ("Magelight or magefire is so common among MAGIC USERS that it is probably what an APPRENTICE Wizard learns to do on his first day.") And he was a Harper - but he had a backstory I thought I could do something with.
So I started to think about what he would be doing if he was now middle aged. At the time, I was trying to get a small business off the ground selling secondhand SF books in Hay-on-Wye, so I thought I might like to see him doing that. It was, after all, something I knew quite a lot about.
So how could I get him from the fantasy land where he grew up to Hay? That was relatively easy - I've always thought that Hay has this feeling of being slightly skew to real life, as if you're almost on the edge of a fantasy world already (I think it's the combined influence of all those books - all those stories - crammed into a small space), and Portals are common in fantasy literature, so obviously he came through a Portal.
But, why would he leave his own world? That was more difficult. At first I thought it would be because of a book, probably a magical book, but as I thought more about the sort of magic used in Ytir, I realised that they haven't got a lot of use for magical books - their magic is an innate talent, and they don't use spells.
So, not a book (a pity, because a magical book hidden in the depths of Richard Booth's famously chaotic bookshop would have been quite fun). It had to be a person - and they had come to Hay because they were on the run from - well, some sort of Dark Lord or something.
That was how it started, and that's why Mal has a bookshop in the middle of Hay, and drinks in the Rose and Crown. By that time he'd become more of an individual character and less of a stereotype - and a single dad, as the person he came through the Portal with was a little girl....

What is Steampunk For?

I was browsing through other blogs today and came upon M Harold Page, who is a writer of fantasy and SF, and he was musing about Steampunk as a literary genre on February 12th.
He compares it to SF and Fantasy, and concludes that Steampunk allows a writer to write about things that are difficult to do in either SF or Fantasy - a world of corporations and industrial development, but without the health and safety rules of the modern world (which would only become more restrictive in an imagined future), and where a writer can pick and mix Victorian elements with feminism, sky pirates and (obviously) dirigibles.

I can sympathise with this view (and it's a very enjoyable blog). I have an idea for a Steampunk story based on something I saw in another blog - Beyond Victoriana: a Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk. Ayleen the Peacemaker told the true story of Mongolian book-selling bandits that made me long to include them in a story. Apparently, in the 19th century, Chinese novels translated into Mongolian were wildly popular in Mongolia. Book sellers would take trains of pack horses through wild country to get the novels to their audience, and sometimes they were attacked by bandits, who would then sell the books themselves!
I am working on my own Steampunk persona, Miss Amelia Harper (named after my real great grandmother - though this Amelia is far more glamorous!) So I thought I'd send her to Mongolia, working undercover for a Victorian Torchwood type institute, with her Chinese friend Li Bic (based on the daughter of our local Chinese takeaway, who used to take my dog for walks), and get her mixed up with the Mongolian book bandits, an inter continental railway line, and mining engineers. In the modern world, and in a future world, my heroines would have to deal with annoying things like passport controls - and my science is definitely of the mad scientist/giant ray gun variety. Place the story in a pseudo-Victorian past, though, and a lady of the British Empire can get away with an awful lot when faced with foreign officialdom!

It's going to be a while before any of this is knocked into shape as a story - I'm stuck in the middle of Ytir for the foreseeable future. One of my characters has cursed the wrong person by mistake, and they're all at the "OMG what do we do now?" stage of dealing with it.