Wonderwool

Every year the Royal Welsh Showground at Builth Wells is host to a celebration of all things yarn related - Wonderwool was on last weekend, and I was able to get a lift with some other ladies from the local Stitch and Bitch group to make a day of it.
And you do need a day. I'm very organised, and start at one end of the vast hall, and walk up and down the aisles until I reach the other end - and it takes around an hour if you're only glancing at the stalls for a quick recce to start with. When I know roughly what's there, I go back to the ones that caught my eye to have a closer look.
This year I was looking for things I could use for re-enactment. I'm going to my first medieval show of the year next weekend, at Droitwich, and I wanted to have a good display of medieval dyes to show people. I already have madder (which makes red) and weld (which makes yellow). I managed to get St John's Wort (a versatile plant that can make brown, maroon, yellow and green, depending on what mordant* you use), walnut husks (brown), Dyer's Greenweed (yellow, but when used with woad it's half of Lincoln green), cutch grass (yellow), and dyer's chamomile (yellow again). I got all those from the Mulberry Dyer and Fiery Felts. All I'm missing now is some woad for the blues.
One of the reasons I do this is to demonstrate that medieval people didn't go round in mud-coloured clothes all the time. Dye plants were free to pick - all it took was time and a lot of boiling in a cauldron. In fact, peasants were more likely to be wearing pastel shades (because those were cheaper), while richer people wore stronger colours. The word "migraine" originally meant a bright scarlet dye - strong enough to give you a headache!
I was also after lucets, so I can use them to teach the basics of cord making. I got some nice ones from Hedgehog Equipment, and I found a book on more advanced techniques for myself (always stay one step ahead of your students!).

*a mordant fixes the dye so it doesn't run when the cloth is washed. Common medieval mordants included salt and urine!

Writing Magazine - "It must be magic"

The Writing Magazine does a regular column about writing different sorts of fiction, and this month the "Fiction Focus", by Margaret James, was on Fantasy writing.
Now, fantasy writing is something I think I know a bit about. I've been reading it since childhood, and trying to write it for about ten years. The article is a beginner's guide - but so disappointing, even when that is taken into account.

She starts off gradually, for those people who are not fantasy readers at all, with some examples of alternate history. Robert Harris's Fatherland is very well known, of course - but where's Harry Turtledove? He's written a lot more excellent alternative history than Robert Harris ever did.

Then Margaret James gets into the meat of the article. "There are at least three gradations of fantasy writing," she says, "from reality-based fiction, through to fiction which links our world to an alternative reality, to heroic fantasy set in an invented world in which not even the laws of classroom physics need apply."

For reality-based fiction, she mentions The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, which is based on a Russian fairy tale. All very fine - but where is Charles de Lint's Newford, for example?
She goes on to talk about time-slip fiction, with no examples of that sub-genre at all, so how about Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer, a children's story set at a girls' boarding school? That story was so good it got onto Jackanory, the children's BBC series that read a book a week for many years. In fact, when I look at Goodreads, there is a list of 617 time travel stories, and just among the children's examples there is Moondial by Helen Cresswell, The Children of Green Knowe by LM Boston, and Johnny and the Bomb by Terry Pratchett, all of them made into TV serials. Or for adults, how about Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, or Tim Powers' Anubis Gates?

"As for stories set in both our own world and in a fantasy world, linking the two, the Harry Potter and Twilight series are the obvious contenders here," Margaret James says. But surely Twilight should go into her first category of reality based fiction set in this world only? And what about Narnia and the most famous wardrobe in all fiction, or Alice in Wonderland? Or for adults, Neil Gaiman's London Below in Neverwhere, or Guy Gavriel Kay, or Barbara Hambly's Darwath series?

And for heroic fantasy, she chooses Lord of the Rings. She says herself it's the "obvious role model" - but heroic fantasy has come on a long way since all those sub-Tolkien quests with Halflings, elves and dwarfs, and if a writer wants to start writing heroic fantasy now, they'd be better advised to read some of the more recent work. What about Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, or even Robert Jordan's immensely long Wheel of Time series, or Raymond E Feist, or Tad Williams, or Robin Hobb, or George RR Martin...?

Some of the advice she gives is good, however - but it doesn't just apply to fantasy. The reader has to be able to identify with the characters, even if they're in love with a sparkly vampire or three feet tall with hairy feet. "[We need] to believe we're reading about beings which share our human traits, both the good and the bad, and with whom we can empathise," she says, and later, "We need these stories because they explain us to ourselves."

If someone who has never written fantasy, but would rather like to try, takes this article as their guide, I'm not at all sure that what they produce would be publishable.

The Importance of a Good Book Cover

One of the pieces of advice often given to self published authors is to get a good book cover. There are now artists out there who will produce a cover for that work of genius for quite reasonable rates. They can avoid the pitfalls, such as making sure that the images used are not copyrighted to someone else (there are websites of royalty free pictures, too, or images for which the license can be bought very cheaply).
Of course, I discovered this after I'd made the attempt to produce my own book cover - I did know about copyright, which is why Raven's Heirs and Ice Magic have a royalty free picture (of a raven and an ice cliff respectively), and Like Father, Like Daughter has my own photograph of an archway at the ruined monastic buildings just off Widemarsh Street in Hereford.

My skills are extremely basic, and a professional could have done a much better job - but are book covers really so important?
I started to wonder about this when I found two different blogs. One is called Good Show, Sir, and the other is Caustic Cover Critic, and they both deal with images of book covers which they proceed to ridicule - usually with good cause! The thing is, these covers were produced by professionals who were paid for their efforts, and some of them are hilariously bad - yet the books were still bought in at least modest numbers. Some of them were even by quite famous authors - like Michael Moorcock, for instance. A collection of his book covers from the 1970s look like psychedelia gone mad.

So I'm happy to accept that a good cover is an asset to a book's sales, but ultimately I think it's the story that counts, and if an author can get word of mouth recommendations, the cover doesn't matter too much (as long as it doesn't completely suck!)

Daredevil

I came to graphic novels in a strange and roundabout way. I love the work of Neil Gaiman, who started in comics and moved on to novels - I'm aware of his Sandman stories, but I don't think I've ever sat down and read one all the way through. However, he came back to comics with his friend Dave McKean to do a re-imagining of the Marvel universe in a story called 1602.
In this parallel universe, the year is 1602, and many superheroes familiar to comic readers are being born early - so the story includes the X-men and Fantastic Four and Nick Fury and lots of others. One of the characters is a blind Irish minstrel called Matt Murdoch, who had a devil-may-care attitude that I rather liked. I discovered that he was based on Daredevil (who I'd never heard of) so I went off and found a Daredevil story to see what he was like in the present day.
The graphic novel that I found was by Mark Waid, and deals with Matt Murdoch's return to his lawyer's practice in New York, where he is also a costumed vigilante. Fortunately, enjoyment of the story doesn't depend on knowing too much back story! I found the depiction of Daredevil's echo location skills and his super sensitive hearing fascinating, and I liked the way other superheroes made guest appearances. Captain America turns up, and the Fantastic Four are mentioned - and so are Latveria and various super villain organisations. I also liked the way that Daredevil can talk his way out of a difficult situation because he is clever, rather than just hitting people very hard (though he can do that too).
I think I'll be looking out for more Daredevil stories.

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....

Welcome to Sherwood!

It's one of the great foundation myths of England (the other is King Arthur, the just king) - the Outlaw of Sherwood Forest, bold Robin Hood, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. He's one of my favourite fictional characters - I grew up loving Errol Flynn and Richard Greene in the role, and I enjoyed the addition of paganism in the 1980s Robin of Sherwood (Richard Carpenter, the creator of Robin of Sherwood, is probably also responsible for all those Muslim characters who have cropped up in films ever since, with his inclusion of Nazir in the band). I was delighted to see Captain Picard as Errol Flynn in the Next Generation episode Qpid (though the best line in that episode went to Worf, and his "Sir, I protest. I am not a Merry Man.")

The point is that there is a strong undercurrent in the British psyche about fairness, and standing up to tyranny and unfair taxes.

That's why I was delighted to stumble across the blog of Damh the Bard, at www.paganmusic.co.uk/blog - it's called The Bardic Blog, and on 2nd April, he posted a free download of a song called The Sons and Daughters of Robin Hood. It's a protest song against our present Sheriffs of Nottingham and Prince Johns, and I think I've found a new favourite folk musician.
His blog is well worth a read, too, for anyone interested in Paganism.

Serenity's Shepherd

I may not have a brown coat in my wardrobe, but I loved Firefly - and I was always intrigued by the mystery surrounding Shepherd Book.
When I went into Waterstones in Hereford yesterday, I found that the graphic novel section had got bigger - and they had The Shepherd's Tale.
I had to treat myself.
It's always nice to see a character in fiction, especially SF, who takes religion seriously, but is not a caricature. Book has a real faith and takes it seriously in the series (and it's not often you see the St Francis prayer "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace" in a comic book).
The story has an odd structure. It starts with what we know, from the film Serenity, right at the end of Book's life, and gradually works backwards, scene by scene. Of course, he lived through the war - and he wasn't always a priest (was he ever actually a priest at all? Devoutly Christian, certainly, and he'd come from a monastery when Kaylee persuaded him to travel with the Serenity crew), but what had he done with the rest of his life?
Well, this story tells all - everything that led up to the appearance of Book in the series, anyway.
Zack Whedon tells the story, from an outline by Joss Whedon, and Chris Samnee is the artist - and I shall be looking out for more of their work.