Samhain and a Blue Moon?

Sounds like the perfect day to release the 13th book in a witchy series.
Oh look, I just did!

Before I go any further, I want to say a massive thank you to all the people who have helped in the creation of the Colour of Light series, especially Icy for covers so beautiful they make me weep, Hannah, Kate and Nadine for all their editing advice and Debbie and Nikki for polishing them till they shine. You ladies are truly awesome - I feel so privileged to have worked with all of you.

So it's proper rare to have a Sabbat and an Esbat on the same day - apparently the last time this happened at Samhain was in 2001, and the next one will be 2039. I certainly hadn't clocked the full astrological significance back in April when I planned this release. My policy is usually to release on Sabbats or Esbats. But adding in the second moon in the same month - that kind of thing only happens once in a Blue Moon. A fitting send off, I feel, for the culmination of nearly two decades with Archer and crew.

What is Catalyst about? Almost impossible to say without giving away massive spoilers. But I will hint about the reappearance of some old friends from the very first series, Nature's Tribe.

And I've had the best fun including a bunch of my favourite characters from the Hengist series - it was a true pleasure to drop in and see how they'd developed since I wrote about their teenage lives. I really felt like I was saying goodbye to some very dear friends.

P.S. Although another couple of series are already waiting in the wings, audition scripts in hand, I cannot see me staying out of the Hengist world for long. Already a couple of short stories are vying for attention, featuring Finn (which means Patricia!) and explaining more about what happened to Maura & Riddick. Maybe when the box set comes out ...

Stockholm Syndrome

Hengist Journey #12

Hard to know what to say about this one without giving away huge spoilers, but if you haven't read Chrysalis before you dive into this one, you will miss out on a huge twist on the last page.
Suffice to say that one of the characters turns out to be a proper psycopath, but there's a whole Beauty and the Beast thing going on (always my favourite fairy story even before Disney took it and made it incredible). Gonna digress here and tell you how we went to Disneyland, Paris in the year after it opened and devoured every single one of the shows. So cool that the place we usually ate was running a B & B show, with the the result that my daughter, Jo, knew all the words to "Be Our Guest" in French as well as English. Not bad for a four-year-old. And of course, we had to buy her the cute dress ...

However, Captive is way dark as poor Rory endures all manner of mental torment before she finally understands the part she has to play in the grand scheme of things. And then he inadvertantly has her tapping into the day Coventry Cathedral was bombed - that was pretty harrowing to write - I hope I've tamed it enough so it's not too harrowing to read.

Beautiful Butterfly

Hengist Journey #11

Finally, we get to hear Rory’s side of the story. Although the second Hengist book is called “Rory,” Archer hogged the mic on that book. Being a serene, patient sort, she hung on, knowing she’d get to play the leading lady in three whole books. Chrysalis scurries from twelve-year-old Rory’s first meeting with Archer, through her teenage years where she crushes on him, to her first year at uni. Along the way, her gifts come in, starting with aura-reading. Under Archer’s patient tuition they develop into something far more powerful.

I will admit to this one being a bit of a travelogue of some of my favourite places, from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to half a dozen sites in Wales, all of which have a special meaning for me. Rory visits each one, discovering, as I did, the magic of each place.

In Edinburgh, she is badly affected by the accumulation of fear from thousands of thrill-seekers on the ghost tour, leading to a convalescence in a magical Welsh pine forest.

In Portmeirion, she meets Geoff, who then turns up in King Arthur's Labyrinth, a craft centre, and even halfway up a mountain. Her training sessions with Archer, in a cave behind a waterfall and atop a wind-swept castle ruin, lead to discovey of a shared past. They also highten her ability to tap into the aura of a place, revealing stored memories. So cool.

Wales: Streams, Mountains, Caves, Waterfalls and Castles

The Recent Past - a nostalgic journey

Hengist Journey #10

While writing the Hengist and Colour of Light stories, I met a number of characters who I thought were merely there as a foil for the principals, be it comic relief, a worthy adversary or a shadow-hugging bit-player who had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the spotlight.
Several of them lit up the stage, demanding attention; some had such engaging/poignant stories. I felt they needed a chance to grab the mic and show us what they were made of. And I was rewarded with some rich background detail, some of which helped shape the following three stories as I got to understand more about the complexities of the links between the characters inhabiting the two worlds. Hence the first Colour of Light book “Context” – strictly speaking a bridge between the Hengist series and the other three Colour of light stories.

Floppy Disks, look!

A bit of a change for me, focussing on the nasty aspects – every one of these stories features characters who are the absolute antithesis of the “Mary Sue” characters critics have accused me of writing. Can I help it if I like to see the good in everyone?
Be warned – some of the scenes are not ones you’d want your maiden aunt reading.
I’ve given the book blurb a bit of a Fairy-tale-retelling spin, but it’s kinda tenuous – it certainly wasn’t a conscious effort on my part to do this. But, as people are fond of saying, there are only so many basic story types!

The aspect requiring most research was the timing. In order for the final books to be set in this century, it meant mothers like Lynette and Maura had to have their tales set in the last millennium. It was a challenge to get accuracy with the level of technology available in the eighties and nineties – particularly anything to do with phones, computer games and the internet.

I had to get proper tricksy with some of the scenes – like in the first one where Maura/Fiona researched her escape route in an internet café – these did not exist back in the mid 80s. Hence the short spiel at the start of each story letting you know which decade (or world) it was set in.
I have a complete file devoted to this so I could figure whether Archer could actually use a sat-nav in Catalyst to track Rory. In the original (written back in 2002) no such thing existed. And the entire thing ends before smart-phones came on board – so I had to re-write all the scenes where people consulted their phones in the middle of the pub. So it won’t feel completely modern-day, but it’s a great reminder of how we used to cope back in the day.
It was a proper nostalgic journey for me, remembering all the stuff which seemed cutting edge – Polaroid Instant cameras, hand-held computer games and my very first mobile phone – a hand-me-down from my daughter. And how reductionist of us - all the functions of the equipment on this page are now performed by a single device! Proper Star Trek, that is.

Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves

Hengist Journey #9

My favourite Cher song couldn’t be more perfect for the fifth Hengist installment. Again, being last in the series, it had a bit of a job to do, bringing together a number of the characters featured in the previous books. But it’s a story of two halves, beginning with “Geraint,” the son of the powerful Renegate leader Rattrick, who gave Reagan and Kalen a bit of bother in the third book. What's a Renegate? Pretty much what we call a Gypsy - hence the post title and Cher reference.

Finally, we get a proper romance – in the form of a Romeo and Juliet tale. Siany, daughter of a rich headmaster falls for the endearingly shy Geraint. Only right after he fell out of a tree and broke his leg trying to pick the biggest apple for her. Too cute really. When he meets her parents for the first time, he is humiliated by his perception of their opinion of him, and then he is forced to disown Siany to save her from danger as they are ambushed crossing a bridge. She cannot forgive him, until he once again rescues her – and her parents – from a vicious Renegate gang. Their romance is hindered further still by people determined to keep them apart, until the final threat that they will die together.

Map of Medieval Oxford

The second part of the story focuses on so much more than their beleaguered love-story as evil incarnate threatens the entire Hengist world, beginning with a massive siege of Oxford. This part saw me poring over medieval maps of the town for many weeks, trying to fathom the complex battle strategies - I could have done with one of those maps with counters representing all the factions like they had in all the WWII movies. And one aspect of the tale bigged itself up beyond all proportion such that it not only featured in the second Colour of Light book, but got its own stand-alone tale, Fletch’s Arrows (only available as part of the boxset).

Being a really sad geeky type, I have the start/end dates for all my books. I started Archer on 25/3/9 (and finished on 17/4/9 – only 3 weeks from start to finish!), and finished Geraint on 7/4/9 – 5 books in just over a year. And I was teaching full time, too. Crazy stuff.

Two Tribes

Hengist Journey #8

Avebury Henge

The fourth book takes the concept of time-travel and goes large. No less than the story of how Stonehenge and Avebury Henge were built. Nothing to do with Frankie Goes to Hollywood (although it is on my playlist), but the idea that two tribes – the Durren (Durrington Walls, where the people who built Stonehenge lived) and the Kenit (from the river Kennett near Avebury) were at war. Each built massive temples to their Gods, competing to make it bigger, better and more imposing than their rivals’ efforts. “Slater,” goes back in time to these places, connecting with the powerful shamen in charge of these complex creations which boasted so much more than the normal bank and ditch (the henge itself), enclosing a circle of stones.

Stonehenge

Just in case that wasn't enough scope for a story, poor old Slater has to find himself in proper pickles as the tribes' powerful shamen seem set on outdoing each other when it comes to who can create the scariest way for him to die. Whether it's ritual sacrifice with the beautiful Sun Princess, being buried alive in a tomb with the rightful prince or being burned alive atop a massive beacon bonfire, Slater has to tap into levels of ingenuity he never knew he had. Luckily, he is aided by some delightfully spunky females along the way. But it takes the aid of Albion himself to settle the age-old rivalry as the two tribes go head-to-head in the final battle for supremacy.

The main challenge of this book had nothing to do with all the technical stuff I found out about building these monuments or the complicated math in the alignments. Nor having authentic descriptions of the mechanics of dowsing, having done Maria Wheatley’s amazing course and gotten to grips with it.
The hardest bit was most definitely getting credible speech for my stone-age characters. I read a bunch of stories where people had written about this period and most of them barely even made a nod to it. I tried my best, and am still looking for any kind of language expert prepared to read it through and critique. Believe me, in the interests of accuracy, I have tried. But to no avail. I hope my compromise does not detract too much from your enjoyment of the story.
And who knows – some of the stuff in my version, could be right.

Crop-circle Central

Hengist Journey #7

Reagan

In the third Hengist book, “Reagan” is the boy closest to my own heart – a total geeky math-nerd. Comes in handy when you have to solve complex puzzles involving numbers, patterns and geometry. This picture was from the original cover of the paperback and I had poor Connor sat at my kitchen table surrounded by magical artefacts to get this piccy - photoshopped beyond recognition to get all the cool magical effects.
Like Archer, Reagan gets bullied by Edlyn, and has a couple of cute girls fussing over him. But unlike Archer, he's not naturally bristling with courage - although he finds it from somewhere when he needs to. Like when he's threatened by fierce Renegates - just as Archer was. The supporting cast in this one are particularly fun – an equally geeky mentor (with a side-line in using torture to hammer points home), an irascible female blacksmith and an irreverent painter – the spit image of a young Brian Blessed/John Rhys-Davies.

Wessex White Horses

I saw my first crop circle back in the early naughties when I took my kids on an adventure which included Avebury, Stonehenge and Woodhenge – a real whistle-stop tour. I’d never been up-close and personal with a White Horse, and while scrabbling down to see the one at Pewsy, there it was in the adjacent field. We didn’t have time to walk all the way down to it, but it was not the last. I later discovered that this day was actually Lughnasadh (1/8/2) – pretty cool huh? And yes, there is a bit of a theme going on (see previous post about Beltane in Glastonbury).

Doug - aka Tu-Bardh

Exactly six years later, I was in Edinburgh for the fringe festival and saw the most incredible drummer band (Clanadonia) who provided me with the idea for Archer’s favourite band Celtic Sound. Check out one of the vids on their website and you’ll see Doug in all his glory. Early on in Archer, we sow the seeds with Archer and his friends talking about having a song sung about them, and this has proved to be a fun part of pretty much every book since.
Still with the dates (yep I do have a file called holidays which starts in September 1985), I planned a visit with my Dad in September 2009 where we followed a dozen or so of the sites in Hamish Miller’s awesome Sun and Serpent book about the Michael and Mary alignments. I made myself a couple of dowsing rods and was chuffed to little pieces when they worked. Our visit coincided with the Autumn Equinox (Herfest).

Crop circle designs

So, about these crop circles.
I discovered a database, from which I extracted cool facts like a huge percentage of the world’s crop circles occurred within a small radius of Silbury Hill – which is coincidentally UFO-central.
For those non-believers, one book shows a guard at Stonehenge gazing out a nearby field where a design appeared within minutes of the time-stamped photo. I'm not saying they're all kosher - hoaxers create poor-quality designs using boards to flatten the crops, but they invariably result in messy, geometrically imprecise knock-offs.
Farmers report that on the authentic designs, all the stalks are neatly bent in the same direction and all have identical holes at the bend as though a tiny explosion weakened them. They continue growing and the seeds from those plants produce a bumper crop in the following year(s).
Many investigators have noticed peculiar effects, and there are definitely some weird energies around. On a couple I visited, my dowsing crystal went totally amok and my phone stopped working. I reckon you shouldn't write them off as fakes without checking them out first.