Category: Blog

Flaming Sword in Tuscany

image1A kind reader sent me this photo after reading FS on holiday. This is the nearest I’ve ever got to Tuscany, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever been to Italy. It’s a beautiful part of the world.

The glass of red wine is apposite too – my favourite tipple!

Working on third book

I want to say that I’m flattered, touched and delighted by the number of people who have enjoyed the first two books and are asking for the third one. Thank you all,  from the bottom of my heart. These things are very personal, and people who know me have been generally reluctant to look at it, probably out of embarrassment. What has really surprised me is the number of men who have made the effort to take a look, finished it and asked for more! I mean, what with its being a transgender persona.

As I’ve said before, I wrote them because I needed to say certain things and found that fiction was the best vehicle. The first two books wrote themselves; they were my own stream of consciousness in my Vian mode. (I’ve started on Madelin mode in ‘Madelin’s Journal’, which I may well publish soon.) But the third book is different. I can’t just ‘find out what’s going to happen next’ by sitting down at the keyboard. I have to have some kind of ending in mind. Some kind of resolution, tying up loose ends. All loose ends have to have some kind of – well, at least mention – I mean for instance Vian’s parents probably won’t appear again and will be forever an unfinished element in his life. We all have those.

I’ve read that there are two kinds of writer: the ones who write furiously and edit at leisure and the ones who plan everything down to the last detail before they’ve set down a single word. I’m the former type; I don’t have a plot in mind. I respond to what happens and deal with it – or not – Vian’s autistic, and has his meltdowns. And his comfort zone has been pampered by twenty years in the seraphim.

But for book three I don’t even have a title yet. Spoiler alert – it will be a happy ending. I find unhappy endings unsatisfying. It has to be satisfying. I don’t think that’s too much of a spoiler. In the end, life is all about making our own death a happy ending.

So I’m taking a middle way – Buddha-style – and writing what comes to mind but with some background idea of where it will lead. This is a new element and I suppose it’s just about dragging the unconscious kicking and screaming up to awareness. It’s a balancing act, especially for an autistic. Awareness isn’t always a blessing. We’re already aware of so many tiny things. Perhaps the big things get lost in the noise. I need to bring them out and find a place for them. All part of the ongoing spiritual journey. I’m not expecting my kind readers to wait until I’m enlightened before i finish the chronicle of Vian’s journey, that would be a very long wait, and it’s not something that can be hurried. I’ve been creeping up on it surreptitiously for decades. At the moment I’m learning woodturning – poking very sharp things at fast-rotating pieces of wood and hoping that the result won’t be firewood. And spraying myself – every nook and cranny – with shavings, which get all over the house. Not a distraction exactly, the purpose is always there, but you can put a piece of wood on the lathe without a clear idea of what you’ll take off the chuck when you’re done. Just like the way I write. I have a vague idea, but the wood has its own characteristics – typically I put a piece that looks ‘interesting’ between centres and see what happens. I have yet to experience what a fellow member of the local club told me about, being sprayed with fragments of woodworm larvae, although I did cut one in half on the bandsaw once. I examine every piece of firewood before burning it, just in case it might be fodder for the lathe. And I suppose I do the same with the book. It goes in the gallery, or it goes in the fire.

But one thing I won’t do is try to shoehorn what I’ve read, even from the likes of Alan Watts, into Vian’s experience unless i know at first hand what he’s talking about. I will not repeat received wisdom. I did it before, decades ago, and it didn’t feel right. I’m old enough now to know what I know and what I don’t.

Coals of Fire finally ready!

IMG_20150624_142241335When I wrote the first two books, the whole thing took about eight months. Since then, thanks to feedback from kind friends and my own re-reading and learning new things all the time, it’s been extensively edited. They say ‘write drunk, edit sober’, which is very good advice. Thing is, I’ll try to cut out stuff and end up with more words than I started with! The result is that Coals of Fire actually ends earlier in the story than the original stream of consciousness did. This does give me a head start on the third book, whose title is yet to be decided.

Coals of Fire is available in paperback now (apparently) and the Kindle edition is available for pre-order.

Click here for the link to my author page on Amazon.co.uk.

I’d be really grateful for more reviews of both books!

Autistic fiction

The Poor in Spirit series is first of all a high-functioning autistic spiritual journey including a satisfyingly bitter rant about religion and quite a lot of stuff about philosophy, taijiquan and the Dao. But it’s also a romance, and a thought experiment about sustainable living, not a million miles away from the Green Party manifesto as it turns out, except for one radical idea about public money.

Autistic characters make a useful plot device – it’s like a special power. The excellent Millennium series by Stieg Larsson is a case in point. Lisbeth has a memory like a photocopier and uses it to splendid effect. Yes, I read the whole trilogy. Couldn’t put it down.

My main characters include two high-functioning autistics. They don’t have particular savant skills, but they’re just weird enough to have a string of uncomfortable memories (which, I hasten to add, I don’t document in the story). But in the scenario they are in the right place at the right time, and they get it right.

When I got my own diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome my main feeling was ‘that explains a lot’. It explains why my comfort zone so often evaporates unexpectedly; why I haven’t had a career even though I’ve got three degrees; why I still blow it, time and time again; why I’ve always wondered whether I’m spiritually disabled, born blind in the deepest possible way.

So I hope the series gives some insight into what it’s like to be ‘my kind of autistic’, as well as being enjoyable to read.

And in the end, I’ll find out whether I am actually spiritually disabled, and I’ll deal with it if it turns out that way. So far, it’s an open question. But now in my early sixties, it doesn’t matter so much any more. I just have to say this stuff while I still can.

By the way, you can pronounce his name how you like but I pronounce it to rhyme with ‘Brian’. As in life of.

Print version now available in the US!

The final proof has been approved and you can now buy the print version of Flaming Sword, in the US via CreateSpace, here.

If you’re in the UK or Europe, it will be available in a few days here, so please be patient.

Meanwhile, Coals of Fire will be available next month. Watch this space.

 

Print version coming soon!

FS proof copyThis is the first proof copy of Flaming Sword. We’ve made a couple of corrections so the second one will be here soon. Then we’ll put it up on Amazon at the princely sum of £6.99.

I am vastly impressed by the Amazon CreateSpace service. They can print a book within a few hours, on demand. So I’m not reduced to having to store a garage full of books. Fantastic! Good for the planet, good for everyone. I love technology.

The Kindle version in the UK can be found here.

We have a publication date!

altcover 300Finally, we have got our act together and the first book in the series will be published on Amazon Kindle on 15 February 2015. The cover image has been updated and there are a few last-minute updates to the book, but the story is essentially the same as before. Main difference is that now the book is to be published via Amazon, it is no longer available as a free download. It will be priced at £1.99. We are also preparing a paperback version via CreateSpace, which will also be available soon.

The book is an angry rant, because it’s a spiritual journey and Vian has developed a lot of bitterness over the years, owing to his ‘invisible’ autism, or, as anyone else might put it, his weirdness. It’s also a story about the chance to build a nation from scratch, based on sustainability and community spirit.

I realised the other day that the book is very close to the Green party manifesto in many ways (though by no means all). The idea is to have a society that includes everybody, allows everybody to live a decent life, but doesn’t degenerate into a communist nightmare.

Could it happen here? Probably not, but only because we’re not starting from scratch. All the Greens can do is to try to vote against the money and fend off the idea that they’re a bunch of crackpots. Vian doesn’t have that problem; there isn’t any money – yet. There aren’t any Greens either; there are no political parties. And the ideas aren’t crackpot, because they arise from necessity. We’ll see.

Gender issues

I promised a post on gender issues, but the one I put up was based on an upset in my own head that didn’t really have a lot to do with gender issues, more with being preached/moaned at yet again. I need to work on that – it’s emphatically not something I should expect everyone else to tiptoe round and I’m always sorry when I’ve flung back the offence or emotional discomfort that I myself experienced. Even at the age of 61 I still get these old memes in my head and certain things really infuriate me. So i’m as guilty as the people I rant about. This version is a little more measured.

I loathe misogyny; it’s a form of hypocrisy, and of projecting all your problems on to another group so you can walk through life with a clear conscience. But the same goes for misandry, which here in the free, affluent West is the mainstay of feminism, along with the idea that all women are innocent and vulnerable but at the same time should be given jobs as CEOs of big companies.

The idea, perpetrated in all the Judaeo-Christian traditions, that

women=sex,
sex is bad
ergo women are bad and must be crushed utterly

is to me one of the most insidious and vile of the memes to have emerged in human consciousness.

But just as insidious and vile is the meme that goes

men=power over women
power is bad
ergo men are bad and must be crushed utterly.

One is about sex, the other is about cruelty, which is no more or less than abuse of power that you happen to have over another person or creature.

But spend time in an all-girls’ boarding school run by bitter old virgins, whether nuns or not, and you’ll see that cruelty is not confined to one gender.

No, these memes are symptomatic of something much deeper, and i don’t mind saying that I don’t know exactly what that is. Perhaps, like money, it’s an attempt to stave off whatever you’re afraid of, whether it’s pain, shame or death itself.

I was never taught to walk in fear of men, of being attacked in a dark alley. I was taught to walk in fear of shame – being manipulated, ridiculed and/or judged. That is my principal phobia, and sure enough, like the pink elephant you mustn’t think about, that is what I walk straight into, time and time again. Which is probably why I get so upset at feminist rants and other preaching on social media about issues that bother other people and I just find insulting. Other people I know have different patterns in their lives, different things that happen to them, time and time again. It seems to be about what your own particular brain has learned to look for.

Gender is not an important part of my identity. For a long time I wished I was born male, but the more men I meet the more I understand that it’s just a case of the grass being greener on the other side. Men are no less vulnerable than women, and no more powerful either. I see myself as androgynous, from my ‘tomboy’ childhood to my enthusiastic participation in the local woodturning club. And because I’m not bothered about it, I don’t get persecuted for it, at least not by men.

But I am beginning to understand (autism slows this process so it’s very late in life) that every one of us has our own patterns of fear that are so entrenched that they are almost impossible to eradicate. Once bitten, many times bitten. It’s the feeling of being bitten in the first place that makes you twice shy. I’m finding that autistic people are teaching me a lot; they demonstrate this phenomenon more clearly than most. But the phenomenon is universal. Which would suggest that the thing to work on eradicating is the fear, not the thing your brain has focused on as a threat. I think I’m finally getting to grips with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous comment in his inaugural address: the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself.