White Raven

I found this picture on the Goddess Central page on Facebook. White ravens are rare (though apparently there's a flock of them in Alaska, near Juneau). In Welsh, the word for White Raven (or White Crow) is Branwen, which is also a girl's name.
When I was looking for a name for one of my main characters, Branwen was the one I chose, partly for the Celtic raven associations, but also as an homage to Mary Gentle's character White Crow, who appears in several books.
In Rats and Gargoyle, Valentine/White Crow is a practitioner of Hermetic science and magic in a Renaissance city where human sized Rats also live - and I loved that book from the moment the rat with a rapier appeared!
In The Architecture of Desire, along with Lord-Architect Casaubon (who is hopelessly in love with her) White Crow is in a Restoration London where Queen Carola rules and Protector-General Olivia opposes her.
Left To His Own Devices brings White Crow and Casaubon into a modern day London slightly skewed out of this universe. This one has one of my favourite opening lines: "Eighty feet above the London pavement, rapier strikes against dagger."
It's obvious from the writing that Mary Gentle knows exactly what it feels like to handle a sword - and she includes a re-enactment group that portrays Elizabethan Wars of Religion, to give a context for the swordplay in a story which is more about computer hacking.
And in Scholars and Soldiers she takes us back to the city of Rats and Gargoyles in a short story collection.
They're all rich and rewarding reads, full of lush detail and interesting characters (she has a Rat Queen Victoria in one story, a nest of eight telepathically linked giant rats, tied together by the tails!)- and they're books I keep coming back to re-read. Which is not something I do much unless there's really something special about an author.

Wassail

"Wassail, wassail, I give you wassail - it comes in bottles, brown and pale.
Comes in bottles so bring some here - and we'll have a Happy New Year"

Or so the Kipper Family sang (comedy folk singers from Norfolk).

This is apple growing country, so wassail celebrations are going on in orchards all over Herefordshire and the Marches.
What usually happens is that there's a torchlit parade to an orchard (usually starting at a pub). At the orchard, bonfires are lit, and songs sung. Often the local morris dancing side will dance - and the climax of the evening is firing a shotgun through the branches of a chosen apple tree to scare away evil spirits and ensure a good apple crop for next year. This means cider apples, of course. It's all to do with alcohol!
Then it's back to the pub. Often the morris dancers will perform a mummer's play, featuring St George fighting a Turk, but the scripts vary enormously, and are often written for the occasion. It's a bit like panto - the general structure of the story is there, but improvised around.
It's an old, probably pagan, ritual, which is becoming more popular again now - and that's probably one reason that Phil Rickman used wassailing to start off his mystery series about Rev. Merrily Watkins. All his novels have a basis in local traditions and superstitions. In that story, The Wine of Angels, there are bodies in the orchard - and a rather messy suicide.
Mostly, though, it's more like this:

This is last year's Dorstone Wassail.

THUNDERBIIRDS - FAB "The Next Generation"

Thunderbirds Are Go

This comes under the general heading of "Things that make me happy".
I grew up watching just about everything that Gerry Anderson produced - it didn't bother me then that just about the only women around were Venus and Lady Penelope; it was all about the hardware and, as Neil Gaiman said just before he performed the Fireball XL5 Theme song on stage with Amanda Palmer, the space scooters!
When I lived in Norwich, I once went to the local theatre to see a show where mime artists pretended to be Thunderbirds puppets (and Captain Scarlet). They wore the uniforms, and there was a sort of plot to follow - but the best thing was the Thunderbird models they wore as hats, and the best thing about the models was the sequence where Thunderbird 2 took off. Complete with palm trees.
And here it is!

Alex Beecroft and LGBT Fantasy

I like to read blogs, when I'm not busy doing something else, and I have a long and ever changing list of blogs that I visit fairly regularly - about once every six or eight weeks. What I especially like is finding blogs that describe people's lives or interests that are different to my own, or which talk about my own interests (which are fairly varied) in an interesting way. Over the years, I've followed the blogs of gay men who knit, American Buddhists, several women priests and ministers, craft blogs, history blogs, writing blogs....and it was a writing blog that I was reading yesterday. This was the LGBT Fantasy Fans and Writers blog. Well, I'm a fantasy fan and writer, so that was my own interest, and I wanted to see fantasy looked at from a different angle.
That's how I came across Alex Beecroft, one of the writers of the shared blog.
It was the post about morris dancing that piqued my interest, and how dancing is used or ignored in fantasy novels. Alex Beecroft is a morris dancer, so she knows what she's talking about - and she posted a scene from one of her novels which talked about morris dancing and English folklore and wells, and I immediately wanted to know more. So I looked at the books she has written, and found the cover pictures for Bomber's Moon: Under the Hill and the sequel, Dogfighters. Bomber's Moon has a Lancaster Bomber on the front cover, and Dogfighters has a Mosquito fighter/bomber - fighting a dragon!
This brought a huge grin to my face without me needing to know anything else about the story. I love Mossies! I used to go to airshows when I was a kid, and I loved the World War Two aircraft. I've seen the City of Lincoln fly (the Lancaster) and the Battle of Britain flight with the Spitfire and Hurricane, and a Mosquito. I grew up watching films like 633 Squadron and The Battle of Britain, and the one where John Mills is a Lancaster pilot, and the Dambusters (this is in addition to the swashbucklers, of course - I'm sure anyone reading this blog is starting to get the impression that I was never a 'girly' little girl).
The thing to remember about the Mosquito is that it is a wooden plane. It's made of a wood frame with canvas stretched over it - and this writer has the pilot going up against a dragon. That speaks of extreme foolhardiness, or desperation - and I wanted to know more.
I bought Bomber's Moon yesterday evening, as an ebook, and I'm already up to chapter nine. The plot is intriguing - the main character's house has been attacked by fairies/elves and he needs protection, while the other main character's lover is trapped in the elven world, trying to get home. The characters are interesting - and I have no idea how the story will be resolved, so I'll have to keep reading! My guess is that it will take more than knocking down the new extension to Ben's house and putting some bowls of milk and honey out to appease these elves!

Oh, and there is also gay sex, which is not a subgenre that I had really looked at before. As a young teenager, I read several novels by Mary Renault set in Ancient Greece, where the main characters were gay - her Alexander the Great trilogy, for instance (and I remember reading The Persian Boy, the second of the trilogy, while hoping my gran didn't look over my shoulder to see what I was reading in case she was shocked!) But that's really been my whole knowledge of gay and lesbian literature until now, apart from Captain Jack in Doctor Who and Torchwood (in some ways I have led a sheltered life). In this book the main characters are gay men, but the romance goes alongside an action filled plot - it's just that the romance happens to be between the male characters. I'm not a great fan of slushy romance, so this was much more to my taste, and I can't wait to see how it will work out for them!

Holidays in Mordor

I've been re-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in preparation for going to see the Hobbit at the weekend. At the same time, I've been following a discussion about The Hobbit on Ship of Fools forum - and there is one exchange that is too good not to share!
The discussion had turned to people who had learned Elvish script or Dwarven runes in their youth, sometimes to write secret graffiti, or to fill school rough books with bad poetry....

"Writing in Tolkein runes? I remember it well. Unfortunately I also remember a GCSE French project in which we were asked to make up identities and write about where went on holiday etc...
"Je m'appelle Frodo, Je suis un hobbit".
Oh my.(embarrassed smiley)"

Followed by....

"During my holiday I visited Mordor with a good friend and we went mountain climbing. We were followed by this really creepy guy who kept talking to himself! The spiders are really huge in Mordor and the food isn't very good. We had to bring our own. I lost my ring somewhere on the mountain but by that time I was feeling a bit unwell and all I wanted was just to get home..."

Read More - Read Better

I was looking at onlinebookclub forum the other day, which is quite a good book discussion site, and someone was asking for advice. Aspiring writers are often told to "read more", and this particular aspiring writer wanted to know what sort of books they should read to be a better writer.
I gave some advice that had been useful to me, and I thought I'd like to expand on it here.
The first thing to do is to choose a book that you have already read, but which you didn't think was all that good. (Don't try to do this with a book you really, really like - you'll never be able to read it in the same way again!). It doesn't matter what the book is about, or who it's by - just choose a book that you finished, and then thought; "Well, that was average."
The next thing to do is to start re-reading it, and this time pick it apart. Did this particular scene confuse you? Why? How could it have been written better? What would you have included or left out to improve it?
And what about that character - the one who suddenly does something that makes no sense. Why did they do that? How would you have written it to keep the character consistent?
Or that description? Did you feel you were really there, in that place? If not, how could it have been re-written to improve it?

A good example of this for me (though this is a book I love, rather than one that I consider to be merely average!) came when I re-read Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff as an adult.
When I was in my first year at grammar school (so eleven or twelve years old), we studied Warrior Scarlet in English lessons. In those days, there was no national curriculum, so teachers were more free to choose books to read as a class than they are now. That year, we read Little Grey Men, by BB, Edward Lear's poetry - especially The Dong with the Luminous Nose and The Jumblies, and Warrior Scarlet. Nobody thought about the fact that an all girls' school was studying texts which hardly included any female characters (there are female characters in Warrior Scarlet, and one girl has an important sub-plot, but in the other texts we studied that year, female characters were invisible) - but it was the 1970s and things were different then.
Warrior Scarlet is about a Bronze Age boy becoming an adult of his tribe - and for the boys of the tribe, this means hunting and killing a wolf. Failure to do this means that the boy cannot be accepted as an adult of the tribe, and becomes part of the "servant class" of the Small Dark People who live on the fringes of the tribe. And they only get one try at it.
So an important scene in the book is the wolf hunt.
I remembered this scene in great detail from my first reading of the book - I was there, in my imagination, creeping through the undergrowth with my bronze tipped spear, examining wolf footprints and looking for wolf hairs caught on bushes. It was all very vivid.
When I came to the scene as an adult, none of that was there! It had all come from my own imagination, with only a few sparse descriptions from the text itself. There's the mark of a master storyteller - telling just enough for the reader's imagination to take flight and fill in the gaps for themselves!