Looking for Mr Goodstory

GUEST POST: THE EVER-CHANGING WRITING PROCESS

2012-02-19T02:00:00.001-08:00

I’d like to welcome author Natalie C. Markey to my blog today for a special guest post. A native Texan, Natalie is the author of CARING FOR YOUR SPECIAL NEEDS DOG, a nonfiction book that shares easy, everyday advice that proves caring for a disabled dog doesn’t have to be difficult. She also writes young adult and middle grade fiction. She is a member of the West Houston RWA, the National Romance Writers of America, Houston YA/MG and YA Sisters. She is also the instructor for Write It Forward’s Writing Moms and Time Management for the Busy Writer.

"You can read blogs, craft books and take class after class but the truth is we all have a unique writing process that works for us. The trick is finding that process, owning it and then starting the whole cycle over again as our life changes. And boy does life change.

In high school and college I freelanced for local publications and dabbled with fiction but was told that writing could never be a career. I moved on to bigger things, I thought.

Five years ago I was working at a prestigious public relations firm in New York City and freelance writing on the side. I loved reading fiction, especially fantasy as a break whenever I got a chance. I called it my “me” time, but between my paying job and side job of freelancing that time was seldom.

After I married, I ran a creative services department for a CBS Television station. I still freelanced but with a shorter commute I had more time to read and I began to think about writing my own fiction. And the ideas began to flow. I heard voices and I began writing late at night.

Soon my husband was out of graduate school with a great job, I wanted to see if I could take my freelance side career and make it a full time thing. It worked and with that freedom I began writing. My flexible time didn’t last long. I had our daughter and life got even more interesting.

Now as a writer from home that cares for a 19-month-old and a special needs dog I find myself busier then I was in my New York City PR days. Since beginning this schedule I’ve published one non-fiction, over 500 freelance articles and I have a young adult novel out on submission. I’m currently finalizing my second non-fiction and writing a middle grade novel that I will be pitching this summer at a writing conference along with my YA.

My point is that everyone, especially writers are busy. We have kids, jobs, family drama, etc. If you want it, you can make it happen.

My key is to wake up early. Yes, I’m talking 5am and after a 20-minute yoga wake up session I write until 7:30am, which is when my daughter gets up. As a mother, it is tempting to nap when she does but my desire to write is greater. I set early morning, morning, afternoon and evening goals for myself. I keep them small and reasonable. Don’t take on more than you can handle. If you accomplish more then planned then celebrate it. Don’t fret over what’s left undone. As Scarlett O’Hara says, “Tomorrow is a new day.”

No matter what your writing process is, remember to prioritize your goals and don’t get too caught up in the glamour of social media. Keep your goals your top priority and stick to those little goals you make to reach the bigger picture.

The best thing you can keep in mind is that it is ok to be flexible. As I pointed out earlier, our lives change. Our schedules change and when that happens, our writing process could benefit from a change too. Being a writing mom is overwhelming and stressful. Writing is stressful enough but writing moms (or dads) must focus on flexibility and a loose schedule in order to gain the balance for success.

I will be teaching another course of my Writing Moms: How to do it all without losing your mind Write It Forward Workshop this March. It is a month long workshop focused on busy writing moms, something I know a lot about. Click here for more information.

How has your writing process changed over the years? How has your writing benefited from the change?"

For more information visit www.NatalieCMarkey.com and her blog http://www.pentopublish.blogspot.com/

FEAR OF FLYING PART 2

2012-02-17T02:00:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday we were discussing my fear of flying - a phobia about the kind of people who end up sitting next to me on planes.

So far we've talked about the Drunk, the Ear Popper, the Sickly Child and the Talker. But wait, there's more!

THE SWEATY VIRGIN

These people may or may not be virgins in the biblical sense. No, what these virgins have never done is flown in an aircraft. As with all virgins they make themselves conspicuous by trying to look experienced. But they give themselves away when they actually listen to the safety demonstration and then try to plug their headsets into the overhead air vent. Sweaty virgins are the least troublesome of all possible companions. The only time to really worry is when they are wearing a blue uniform and a pilot’s cap.

photograph: eva rinaldi

THE HIGH FLIER

High fliers are sweaty virgins with experience. They have flown many times, but they are still terrified. Consequently they prepare themselves for the coming ordeal by ingesting Valium, Scotch, marijuana and beer before boarding the aircraft. They can therefore easily be mistaken for a Drunk.

When they take their seat they gibber nonsensically for about ten minutes and then pass out on your shoulder. In the arrivals lounge of any large airport you can always tell the person who got the seat next to the High Flier because they’ve got a large dribble patch on their shoulder. The best tactic is to remove their seat belts and just let them flop forward onto the tray table. They should be stowed in an overhead locker during turbulence.

THE CAR SALESMAN

These guys are easily identified; they’re the ones with the emerald green tie with the motif of a naked redhead. They drink Scotch straight the whole flight and try to drown out the hum of the engines by talking over them. After some small talk they will try and sell you a car. All you can is ask too much for your trade in.

CALM AND COMPOSED

They look like normal people until a few moments after take off, when the undercarriage is retracting. Then they suddenly go stiff and scream: 'Don’t panic, don’t panic, the plane’s falling to bits!’ The trouble with this type is that they are unpredictable. One small air pocket and they are thrashing around under their seat looking for a parachute.

THE TOTALLY HOT WOMAN/ GUY

They are immediately recognizable because they are always sitting next to someone else. Until you get married.

THE FRUIT OF YOUR LOINS

There’s only one thing worse than sitting on a plane next to someone else’s children and that’s sitting on a plane next to your own. Many new parents make the elementary mistake of getting seats adjacent to their offspring. NO. Get separate seats and then disown them until you get to the other end. Hide behind a copy of the inflight magazine and let someone else try and control them for a change.

photograph: Boeing Dreamscape

THE BARGAIN HUNTER

Of all possible flight companions this is the one most likely to ruin your flight. Their first gambit will be to ask you how much you paid for your ticket. You tell them. 'One way?!' they squeak. They then tell you they paid half of that. ‘There was a special and I also got a free night at the Hilton thrown in - the penthouse suite - with breakfast, a massage, and a bottle of complimentary Veuve Clicquot.' Now try and have a pleasant journey.

photograph: FLY!

THE BELCHER

Belchers have a digestion problem that manifests during meals, which they consume without making use of the utensils provided. They laugh out loud with their earphones on while watching the movie and then fall asleep and snore like overfed bears. They also scratch themselves. The best way to avoid this type, I am told, is not to travel with your husband.

FEAR OF FLYING PART 1

2012-02-15T02:00:00.000-08:00

I’m moving address on Wednesday. It’s not a major move by Australian standards; just two thousand eight hundred kilometres across the desert.

During that time you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t answer comments straight away; I won’t have access to the internet for most of the trip. In fact, I have to make the right stops or I won’t have access to fuel or water either. There will be camels and wedge tail eagles, though. And wombats. You know about wombats from the quiz, right?

Australian Removalist Company

I would prefer to have flown, but I need to get the car back and she's too low slung for the train apparently. It’s kind of a relief though, because I have a fear of flying. Not the oh my god we’re all going to crash and die sort of fear. What scares me about getting on a plane is not knowing who I will have to spend the next three and a half hours with.

I have concluded that about half the world is relatively normal and the other half are allocated the seat next to me from Adelaide to Perth, or from Sydney to London, or wherever I'm going. I have made a study of the phenomenon and come up with the following classifications.

See if you recognize any of them:

THE DRUNK:

Drunks are always the last to board, carried on by friends, singing either a heavy metal or a Michael Bublé song at the top of their voice. As they collapse into the seat next to you they will try to kiss you or fight you, depending on which song they’ve been singing. The main problem with drunks is they are (a) amorous, (b) liable to vomit (c) unpredictably violent or (d) all three. Cabin crew routinely ignore them, even after they’ve started a fist fight in row 28. The only recourse is to raid the drinks trolley and get drunk yourself. Then it won’t seem so bad.

photograph: Steven

THE EAR POPPER:

Ear poppers have problems with cabin pressure. They chain suck candies; they yawn and swallow constantly, and during ascents and descents they try to clear their ears by holding their noses and blowing, often inadvertently blasting their Wurthers Original into business class. They create a constant symphony of subtly different clicking noises; it’s like being underwater next to a submarine. Put on your headset, close your eyes and try not to get shot in the arm with a butter rum lifesaver.

photograph: Adam Zivner

THE SICKLY CHILD

This is the kid that gets bends from getting out of the bath too fast. The main problem with sickly children like this, of course, is that you just know, one hundred per cent, that they are going to vomit. The only variable is when and in what direction. For some reason the mother of the sickly child always sits on the other side of the aisle and/or in a different section of the aircraft. Try and swap places with an ear-popper.

THE TALKER

They start talking to you halfway down the aisle, even before they have stowed their hand luggage - for some reason Talkers always have at least two overnight bags, an umbrella, a guitar, and a shopping bag with a green overcoat in it.

By the time they sit down you know their name, the names of their children/grandchildren, their tax file number and the colour of their bedroom curtains. I once sat next to a woman who talked non-stop from Dubai to Melbourne, even whispering during the safety demonstration and hardly pausing for breath during heavy turbulence over the Bay of Bengal. She later shouted at me through the lavatory door, a dreary monologue about her husband’s problems with his prostate gland, while we somewhere over the South China Sea.

In this situation the headset is virtually useless. A halfway competent talker can shout over Nice n Easy and even Luciano Pavarotti on 10 ...

Look out for part two of the post on Friday, when we talk about Sweaty Virgins, High Fliers and Belchers. Feel free to suggest any of your own. Hopefully by the time you read this I'll be out of the desert and not stranded in the Nullarbor thinking about having to cook up a wombat to survive ...

ROSES ARE RED

2012-02-12T20:11:00.000-08:00

No one knows where Valentine’s Day comes from. There are actually three Catholic saints called Valentine; one of them is supposed to have stood up to Emperor Claudius II, who thought men made better soldiers when they were single - like one of those ‘no sex before the game’ football coaches.

Valentine took pity on these womanless warriors and married several of them in secret. When the Emperor found out he had him martyred on February 14th.

On the evening before his execution he wrote the first Valentine’s card, to his jailer's daughter. Roses are red violets are blue, I’m dying tomorrow but I love you. Or something like that. He is supposed to have signed it: from your Valentine.

If it all sounds just too trite, you’re absolutely right. There is absolutely no truth in this story.

Anyway, Valentine was actually deleted from the General Roman Calendar of Saints in 1969 by Pope Paul VI, because the Vatican admitted they knew nothing at all about him except that he was buried on the Via Flaminia.

Other theories say Valentine’s Day is based on the Roman feast of Lupercalia, a riotous event where members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then cut the hides into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take to the streets, whipping young married women across their bare backs to make them fertile.

It was like Bondage Day and May Day rolled into one. It was later outlawed in the fifth century, being deemed “un-Christian”.

It was Chaucer who first associated Valentine’s Day with romantic love in his Parlement of Foules (1382):

‘For this was on seynt Volantynys day/Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.’

(For this was Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird comes there to choose his mate.]

The poem was written to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia, whose marriage treaty was signed on May 2, 1381. But birds don’t generally ‘cheese their makes’ in February, they’re too busy shivering in trees; and May 2 is the saints day for Valentine of Genoa. So it’s likely we’ve all somehow got the wrong day.

Blame Chaucer for not being clear.

The earliest surviving valentine is a 15th-century rondeau by Charles, Duke of Orléans to his wife, which he wrote while being held in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt.

Roses are red, violets are handsome, if you really love me, you’ll pay the ransom. No, I’m guessing. (The real greeting is now part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London.)

photograph: Chordboard

Valentine’s Day really took off in England in the eighteenth century. In the Victorian era printers began producing cards with verses and sketches, called "mechanical valentines.” (See the pictures above and below). Improvements in the postal system boosted the tradition’s popularity and made it easier to send the racier versions anonymously, which appealed to the prudish Victorians. (Roses are red, violets are blue, Queen Victoria doesn’t, but I hope you do.)

In America, a woman named Esther A. Howland - the so-called mother of the Valentine - produced the first mass-produced valentines, elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures.

photograph: Chordboard

These days Valentine's Day is the second largest card-sending holiday of the year, and around 1.3 billion pounds are spent yearly on cards, flowers, and chocolates in the UK alone.

Not everyone likes it. It has been dubbed the Hallmark Holiday because big companies make such huge profits selling cards, flowers and confectionery. Some people feel that being pressured to show their love is no kind of love at all. For others it can be a painful reminder either that they’re unwillingly single or their current relationship is past the romantic stage.

But thanks to a concentrated marketing effort, it has taken off in Asia. In South Korea, women give chocolates to men on February 14, and men return the gesture on March 14 (White Day). On April 14 (Black Day), those who didn’t get anything go to a restaurant to eat black noodles and mutter into their lotus buns.

photograph: newone

In has also become popular in India, probably boosted by the economic upturn. Hindu and Islamic traditionalists don't care for it, they say it is a front for Western imperialism, neo-colonialism, and the exploitation of working classes. They also say it is alien to Indian culture, which shows outstanding ignorance of their own history; such sentiments are surely an affront to the artists who sculpted the passionate frescoes on the temple walls at Khajuraho or worked on the biggest Valentine’s gift of all, the Taj Mahal.

But as most protesters are middle-class Hindu men one suspects they are actually just trying to protect Hindi institutions like arranged marriages.

History does repeat; Valentine’s Day offended the religious right in Rome’s day, which was why it was banned in the fifth century. In Saudi Arabia, today's religious police still try to prevent the sale of Valentine's Day items. The Authority for Enjoining Good and Preventing Evil - the Moslem version of the Inquisition - raids shops looking for Valentine's Day paraphernalia. Florists have taken to delivering roses in the middle of the night to avoid detection.

In Malaysia, Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has said the celebration of romantic love was "not suitable" for Muslims. Officers of the Malaysian Islamic Development Department have been known to raid budget hotels between midnight and six around this time of year arresting anyone who looks like they might be in love.

photograph: Lemur12

Me? I thankfully live in a free country and being a romantic at heart I’ve never felt any kind of pressure this time of year. A dupe to the megalopolies, I do send roses on Valentine’s Day. I’ve yet to be handed over to the Authority for Enjoining Good and Preventing Evil, though I wouldn’t rule it out just yet. I'm still working on it.

But I’ve found certain people of the opposite gender seem to appreciate flowers. Call me a bourgeois reactionary, but I dare say I may send some again.

THE SONG OF BERNADETTE

2012-02-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

It is 154 years to the day that a peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous, while out gathering firewood, saw an apparition of the Madonna in a cave called the grotte de Massabielle.

Since then the nearby town of Lourdes has grown into a major pilgrimage site for Catholics from all over the world. A million people flock there every year. At any one time the transient hotel population exceeds the number of residents by six to one.

Few people were convinced of Bernadette’s visions at the time; not even her own mother. In fact no one else saw anything and five months later the visitations ended as abruptly as they began. What swayed opinion at the time was a spring of water that appeared from a rock inside the cave; the water is now credited with miraculous powers of healing.

It is a curious story because ultimately Bernadette could not cure herself. She died in her thirties of tuberculosis of the bone, which ate away her right knee.

photograph: Hugo Broeder

I went to Lourdes a few years ago. It is a picture postcard village nuzzling up to the skirts of the Pyrenees. Tendrils of mist cling to the lush valleys. From the railway station, a single street lined with bright-painted cottages leads to the town, though the effect is spoiled by a Golden Arches.

The Rosary Basilica dominates the valley. It looks like something Walt Disney would have drawn. If it seems kitsch, then the souvenir shops are just downright offensive. Everything comes with an apparition; there are apparition t-shirts, apparition key rings, apparition shot glasses, even glow-in-the-dark apparition rosary beads. I am not kidding.

photograph: jean-noel lafargue

On the main street I am startled by a hologram of Jesus winking at me from a shop window among the apparition snow domes and apparition thermometers. At one o’clock Mary appears briefly from an apparition cuckoo clock.

Praise the lord and pass the apparition.

photograph: Jean-Noel Lafargue

I sit on an old stone wall by the Gave and am rather more moved by the sight of hundreds of wheelchairs and gurneys being wheeled towards the shrine from the hospitals on the far side of the river.

I make my way to the grotto myself. There’s a queue. Three diminutive nuns, dressed in navy blue and looking like little R2D2’s with moustaches, push in front of me. There is a lot of shoving here, as I imagine there will be trying to get into heaven.

Once used as a pigsty, the cave seems almost sterile now. The walls have been worn smooth by a million fingertips. The sacred pool is preserved under glass like a rare botanical specimen.

photograph: Emmanuel Brunner

I try to take it all in but a quick glimpse is all that I am allowed. The force of the people shoving from behind carries me through the cave like an offshore rip.

More remarkable to me is the less-visited Museum of Miracles. No less than 7,000 miracles have been claimed for Lourdes but only 66 have been recognized as such by the Church; their stories are enshrined here. The rules for having a miracle allowed by the Vatican are more complex than the offside rule in soccer so we won’t go into them here. But the investigation of all claims by a highly qualified panel of physicians is rigorous.

Interesting fact; only 38 of these cases involved bathing in the Lourdes water, and six of those claiming miracles did not even go to Lourdes.

The most recent miracle was reported by Jean-Pierre Bely, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1972. By 1987 he was totally incapacitated. His description of his healing is particularly telling: “The Lord cured my heart first and then my body.”

photograph: DarreenVT

Delirzia Cirolli discovered a tumour on her knee in 1976. Doctors in Sicily told her she would die unless the leg was amputated. After she visited Lourdes her condition continued to deteriorate. But she steadfastly refused medical treatment and continued to pray, even when she was told she was dying; but then quite suddenly her condition reversed itself. She went on to become a nurse and have three children.

The most curious is miracle number fifty-four, Evasio Ganora, another Sicilian diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and told by doctors he had only a few months to live. He was taken to the waters in a wheelchair and there effected an almost instantaneous cure. Two years later he ran himself over with his own tractor and died. Explain that one to me.

photograph: mcxurxo

I am intrigued by the story of Bernadette. These sixty six examples may not prove her authenticity, but they certainly demonstrate the awesome power of faith, regardless of religion.

Lourdes is testament to our belief in the possibility of the impossible. Miracles clearly do happen, just not very often. But the laws we live by say they shouldn’t happen at all. So how did those sixty-six do it? Everyone will have a different answer.

How many of us allow for miracles or have had personal experience of one? Perhaps they are more common than we think. If nothing else, the visions of a child named Bernadette give us hope that in some mysterious way we are not alone.

'The Song of Bernadette' is sung by Jennifer Warnes; the lyrics are by the inimitable Leonard Cohen.

LIFE LESSONS

2012-02-08T01:11:00.000-08:00

There he goes.

Eighteen years old and really, he doesn’t have a clue. He has such grand dreams and none of them make any kind of sense.

He’s left school and got a job in an office in London. He hates it. The shortcut to the train station takes him through the local churchyard and this morning he has stopped to study the gravestones. Some of them are mossy with age, others are relatively new. They all have one thing in common though; the people under them are all dead.

photograph: Stonepapa

This kid - he isn’t even shaving on a regular basis yet - makes some quick calculations in his head. All these folk under the stones had a certain time allotted to them and when you add it up, it really doesn’t amount to much; and some of them, when you do the math, well it doesn’t add up to much at all.

So then and there he makes a decision. He is going to live a life quite different from his parents. He is going to quit his job and go to Morocco with his mate.

photograph: Jerzy Strzelecki

He is going to stay there until the money runs out and then he is going to come back and become a best selling writer. He promises himself he is going to love passionately, travel widely, and cram as much into his life as he can before he ends up just another stone in the ground.

Looking at me standing there in the churchyard as a sallow youth I am filled with a kind of poignant regard. I feel kinda sorry for him. There’s so much I would like to tell him, but it’s too late now, and anyway, he wouldn’t have listened. But I am also quite proud of him; for despite all the spectacular screw ups he made, he stuck to his guns. I admire him for that.

Hemingway: the closest I got was naming my pet parrot after him

But this is what I would like to have said to him:

Firstly son, I know that sometimes you ask yourself - Am I good enough? Well, let me reassure you on that one. No, you’re not. You have talent, that’s all. Who hasn’t? Everyone has some kind of talent. But the point is this: it doesn’t matter that you’re not good enough now. You could be one day if you have the balls to persist, and if you are prepared to work at it. I mean really work. And that's the same for everyone. So quit worrying.

Secondly - you’re absolutely right. We don’t have long down here. Hold on to that thought; in fact, I know that you will. It will stand you in good stead later when you come to make important decisions in your life. Most of all, don’t worry about making mistakes. They are guaranteed. Even if I told you in advance the truly idiot things you are going to do, I know it won't do any good. But in the end, it’s only the times you did nothing that you’ll regret.

Try to keep your head in the clouds but your feet on the ground. I admit that sounds like a stretch and it is. But just because you like creating stuff, don’t think you can turn your back on the business world, or at least, your business sense. All right, don’t listen then. Yes, I know you're in a hurry and you’ve got a train to catch, you stubborn bugger.

my old man

Before you go - two more things: I know you won’t learn this until it’s too late , but try and learn to value your old man, will you? I know it seems like he was born on another planet sometimes, but stop focusing on all his faults. Don’t forget he is also brave, tough, loyal and gentle and these are rare qualities. You could learn a few things from him on that score. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Last of all: hold onto your dreams. You’re going to find out soon enough that loving passionately is not as straightforward as you think and that traveling the world is not all palm-fringed sunsets and camel rides. And this dream you have of writing a manuscript, sending it off and becoming instantly rich and famous; well, you’ll learn. But don’t let life’s hard lessons make you bitter or cynical. Toughen up. Wise up. But don’t ever stop dreaming. Some days dreams come true.

photograph: Aaron Escobar

What else should I tell him, do you think? I’m sure you can think of plenty of things I’ve missed. I just scratched the surface really. What would you have liked to have told yourself at eighteen?

Anyway, feel free. He won’t listen, of course. He'll have to learn the hard way.

I guess that’s why they call them life lessons.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE WYRD

2012-02-06T04:36:00.000-08:00

You can call me weird. I really don’t mind.

In fact if you said I was in the way of the Wyrd, about two thousand years ago, it would have been a huge compliment. It would mean I was - the contemporary word is enlightened - one with all things.

Yeah, I wish.

Wyrd is an old English word - and a feminine one, which is interesting, when we consider its true meaning - that comes from the word weorthan, to become. It is related to the Old Saxon word wurd.

Wyrd is the forerunner of our modern word weird, meaning strange or odd or freaky. It is mostly used in a pejorative sense. Some scholars believe the word was deliberately corrupted by early Christian missionaries to discredit the ‘heathen’ religions of old Europe.

So what does it mean? The Wyrd, to the ancient tribes of Europe, was not a thing. It was a concept, an idea.

The Anglo Saxons believed everything was connected to everything else by thoughts, emotion, spirit; and by everything they meant trees, stones, animals. Everything.

Now before anyone scoffs at this; remember that what the ancients were describing was Quantum mechanics. It took the rest of us two thousand years to even start to grasp this idea.

The notion that we are related to all things is not as .. well - wyrd - as it seems. It was recently discovered that there are only 30,000 active genes in human DNA and we share five of those genes with a banana. (I believe I share a lot more than that with Jim Beam Black Label. )

a distant cousin: photograph Darkone

The Wyrd was something so deep and so pervasive and so central to the mystery of life that it was inexpressible. It was, if you prefer Star Wars parlance, The Force. And believe me, you want it with you.

The best analogy is a vast multi-dimensional spider’s web. Each section of the web is a part of the whole, so the tiniest interference at the furthest point sets the entire web vibrating. (These days we call it chaos theory.)

Life, it now appears, is much more subtle and mysterious than we ever imagined - and the curious thing is that the Anglo Saxons appreciated this before the Romans came along. Almost daily, a new discovery is made that draws into question our worldview about the nature of the Universe, the nature of man, and the nature of Nature. We are re-learning what we already knew.

Each of us spends the first fifteen or twenty years of our lives suppressing our natural curiosity and consuming ‘knowledge.’ We are told this is the way things are. But it is not the way things are; the 21st century is going to be about discovering the way things aren’t. Our universe may even turn out to be a multiverse, the paranormal may become normal and historical novelists writing about the Wyrd risk venturing into SF.

And if we really do live in an expanding universe it will at least explain where all my missing socks have gone.

The Physics our grandfathers learned was heavily dependent on the works of Sir Isaac Newton. Newtonian Physics is neat, tidy, and certain. You can calculate things, and know what to expect.

But the world is not totally governed by Newtonian physics. At the sub-atomic level, everything is turned on its head. This is when things start to get really wyrd. Because inside an atom there is no certainty to anything, things exist in multiple states simultaneously and all outcomes are viable and do occur.

The Wyrd of the ancients also encapsulated an extremely sophisticated concept of time. Most of us - except Einstein and Quantum physicists - think of time as linear; a river rushing from our birth to our death carrying us inexorably with it.

But the Wyrd - 'that which happens' - is a fluid three dimensional matrix. You can choose the path you go down and that in turn will affect what the Wyrd hands back to you. So the Wyrd is also Destiny; but not the "inexorable fate" of the ancient Greeks. It’s not an ending, it’s a continuum. We are living our destiny today, as we lived it yesterday and as we will live it tomorrow.

And so your destiny can be ‘worked,’ to some extent anyway.

Confused? Me, too. But remember I’m not talking about quantum mechanics, I’m talking about paganism. This is history. This is life before the so-called Dark Ages.

So if anyone calls you weird, take it as a compliment. They probably mean you’re extremely curious and a free thinker.

And if you do happen to uncover the secrets of this wyrd and unreliable universe - can you see if you can find my sock?

GOOG HELL: POST SCRIPT

2012-02-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

I don't normally post on a Sunday, but I'm breaking the rule just to say a huge thank you for all of you who sent comments of support when I had my brain snap on Friday. I have answered all the comments and I'm hoping you can all see them. If not, please let me know via Twitter. (@colin_falconer)

I also wanted to say a HUGE thank you to Patrick Thunstrom, (@pathunstrom) who sent me a couple of tweets to tell me what to do to get around the whole problem. His blog is here: http://pathunstrom.wordpress.com/ I'd never come across him before but I figure you'd do a lot worse than follow a guy like this. Thanks, mate.

If you're curious, this apparently was the problem: like I said if Google/blogspot had told me this was happening, it would have helped a lot.

My daughters are in London and it's freezing there right now. I believe a few of you might also be shivering through a long winter right now. So I thought you might like this to make you smile:

GOOG-HELL

2012-02-03T04:01:00.000-08:00

I don’t like to rant. These days counting to ten and taking a deep breath seems to me a better way of dealing with difficulty. But today I’m giving myself license. David is going to take his slingshot and a very, very small pea and launch one against Goliath Google, Amazon, Apple, anyone you can name who has our digital futures in the palm of their hands. Because I suspect, Cap’m Butler, that they don’t give a damn.

photograph: Daria

It started off innocently enough. Blogger changed my domain name from a dot. com to a dot.com.au. They didn’t ask me if that was all right. They didn’t tell me why they were doing it. They just did it. Because, you see, they can.

Of course, now I can’t get an Alexa ranking on my site for the US, even though it is very important to me. Still, minor irritation. Demands no more than a little muttering under the breath over morning coffee.

me not over-reacting

But then all my comments disappeared. On all my posts. I know I’m getting them, they are piling up in my email tray, but I can’t answer them on the blog, because they are gone. Now I’ve worked really hard to encourage people to write in and comment, as most bloggers do. I really enjoy the comments, the discussions and ideas that are knocked around. It's why I got this outside widget thingo a few weeks ago, (sorry for all that technical jargon), called Intense Debate. I felt it would provide a better commenting system as well as track back to commenter’s blogs, so people could also follow each other.

But now someone has just casually screwed it all up.

I didn’t like Blogger’s useless comments system - so I don’t think they care that I can't use an import. It may not be Google's fault; but there's no way of finding out. There’s no help desk at Blogger, just a forum for other poor benighted souls like me, (just like at Facebook!) lost spirits wandering about in Cyber-Limbo looking for the light. For example:'graembyburgh' posted this:

Since my blog's URL changed to .au, many hundreds of images on my older posts (2006 and before) are no longer showing. The images just show as red crosses.

I'm devastated. My blog is my most treasured possession.

You can imagine, right? Like losing all your photograph albums. And no one to help him. There’s other messages like this: ‘My blog is gone.’ Another: ‘My blog has been deleted and I don’t know why.’ What if that was you?

It occurred to me then that we are all living in a false utopia. We think we’re liberated, but we’re not. Our blogs, our eBooks, our precious contacts all around the world are at the mercy of some arbitrary faceless executive who can strike out all that effort at any time. Amazon could cut royalty rates from 70 to 10% overnight and then where is this new eBook revolution? Blogger can decide they don’t like us and strike our blog. There’s no one you can turn to, no customer relations department, no court of arbitration.

The internet is not a democracy. It is (so far) a benign dictatorship. But for how long will it remain benign?

photograph: Kahsfi Halford

There’s many blogs out there talking about how we must all strive to produce value for the new consumer in the digital age, connect, care about our product and the service we provide. Yay that. Now we're talking.

Except.

Except the very biggest companies don’t necessarily strive to do that. You can tell, because their back-up service is a public help forum.

Maybe my problem is with my Intense Debate widget. I really, really hope so, because they have a support desk. But whatever the reason for this little glitch, it’s taught me that this brave new world is a very scary place.

photograph: CoolCaesar

But for all those of you who have posted comments - I assure you, they mean a lot to me, every one of them. If I can’t get the problem fixed before Sunday I’ll post them all manually in my blog and reply to each one of them that way.

So please keep commenting - because even if I can’t see them on the blog, I get them in my email and I will make sure they are posted.

Why?

Because my name’s not Google, that’s why.

MEMORIES OF ANASTASIA

2012-02-01T02:58:00.000-08:00

When I wrote Anastasia ten years ago there was still a lingering doubt about whether she had survived the botched execution in which the rest of her family were murdered. What was more certain was that the man who organised this bloody episode, Yakov Yurovsky, was a couple of cadres short of the full committee. He must have been off sick when they did Assassination 101 at Secret Police School.

Yakov Mikhailovich Yurovsky

On his orders, the family were herded into a basement and shot with revolvers through the doorway by him and his men, the gunpowder from their revolvers burning their eyes and creating a fog in the tiny room. They had to fire over each other’s shoulders and Yurovsky claimed he came out deaf in one ear.

This method was not efficient. Also, the women had hidden their jewels inside their corsets and these acted as virtual bullet proof vests so Yurovsky recorded that they then had to be dispatched with bayonets. It was beyond brutal.

These circumstances left open the possibility that someone survived this bloody chaos. There were rumours (later proven false) that for days afterwards the Bolsheviks searched trains in the Urals looking for a young woman fitting Anastasia’s description.

For years the story of the missing princess captured the public imagination. Anastasia soon had more impersonators than Elvis Presley. The most notable, Anna Anderson, pursued her case in the European courts for over thirty years. After her death it transpired that she was not only NOT Anastasia, she wasn’t even Russian.

Anna Anderson

The remains of the Romanov family were finally discovered near Ekaterinburg in 1991. Intriguingly two skeletons were missing, those of a young woman and the boy, Alexei.

Even then, it was impossible to imagine how Anastasia could have escaped, even if she survived the gruesome debacle in the basement and was still alive when they threw her on the cart with the rest of her family to be buried in the forest. And Alexei; just impossible. He was a haemophiliac. Any serious wound would have made death inevitable anyway.

But it wasn’t the mystery of Anastasia’s fate that motivated me to write about her. It was a story I read in the newspaper about a man in Liverpool, England who had been found unconscious in the street a year before and was still languishing in a public hospital. He had severe amnesia. Authorities published his photograph hoping that someone might know who he was and come forward and identify him.

I subsequently discovered that severe head trauma, when suffered simultaneously with severe emotional distress, can bring about a rare and long lasting amnesia. (The most famous - and saddening - case is that of ‘Benjamin Kyle’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjaman_Kyle)

I imagined that if Anastasia had survived, the shock of seeing her family murdered and afterwards being battered with a rifle butt would have turned her into another Benjamin Kyle.

This made me reflect on the nature of identity.

If we don’t have our memories then who are we? We still live and breathe, yes, but we no longer retain that which makes us ‘who we are’.

If we don’t have any remembrance, what is left of us?

Anastasia on Kindle

For the story, I imagined a woman appearing in Shanghai in 1920 suffering from traumatic amnesia. People take her to be Anastasia - in order to fulfill their own agenda. Over time she struggles to become the person they want her to be - becoming someone else's idea seems better than being no one at all.

Is this what some of us do anyway - spend our lives becoming what others want of us? If so, how do we then discover who we really are - so we can follow our own course?

The question of memory has become more poignant to me over the last year. My mother is rapidly losing hers - sometimes she struggles to remember the man who was her husband for 52 years. She even takes a while to recognize me or my brother now.

Who we are if we are not the memories we have accumulated and the name someone gave us is an interesting question. It intrigued me far more than whether Anastasia survived or not. She didn’t, by the way: in 2008, two more skeletons were discovered, 200 yards from the original grave site, and were positively identified as the missing two Romanovs.

But the puzzle of our true identity, that mythical twenty one grams, may take much longer to solve.

FOXIE WITH MOXIE - BECAUSE THEY'RE NOT THE OTHER GUYS

2012-01-29T18:23:00.000-08:00

Today, I am thrilled and honored to be hosting the wonderful Piper Bayard and Kristen Lamb on this leg of their presidential campaign trail!

If it wasn't for homophobia and mud slinging there would be no political debate thus far in the electoral process; Piper and Kristen have been the only light in the darkness. I hope this interview helps you decide where your vote goes in November!

CF. One of your rivals, Senator Rick Santorum, has bemoaned sex 'being deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure.' What's your stand on that?

B/L: He’s doing it wrong.

CF. The death penalty. Too harsh for health insurance company CEO's or too quick?

B/L: That depends. Will the CEO’s get a bullet to the brain or that famous faulty electric chair in Florida?

CF: Do you consider cupcakes a terrorist threat? If not, what do you think should be done about the TSA?

B/L: The TSA is a travesty. Those radiation scanners were a sweetheart deal between our government and Bill Chertoff, the former Director of Homeland Security. As Holmes says, “They can’t tell balls from bombs,” and the radiation dose has not been properly studied. In fact, TSA agents, themselves, are now being tested to find if they have been over exposed by just standing next to the machines. The machines will go, and we will institute reverse profiling, seeking out clear stereotypes of people who are not terrorists. We’ve mentioned our Granny Plan Health Care? This will be our No Grannies Plan.

As for the cupcakes, we believe they are only a threat to the security of our belt buckles, and we believe all airlines should provide complimentary cupcakes on every flight.

a plate of terrorist threats - photograph by Joy

CF: Sarah Palin appeared recently with a new do - a bumpit and curls. Are you two considering any such makeovers? Beehives? Afro wigs?

B/L: No. We will continue to maintain our simple hair with red and blonde highlights. We will be too busy running the country to spend the time it would take to do anything that doesn’t involve a scrunchie.

CF: The GOP candidate Willard Romney uses Mitt as his monicker, which is very charming and homesy. There's even a Newt. Have you thought about using nicknames. Pip? Kris?

B/L: Kristen feels very strongly against using monikers. We both believe that the American people should know who is leading their country and not get us confused with escapees from conservative 80s sitcoms.

CF: This one was forwarded to me by someone at Camp David, where I guess you'll be spending most of your time once elected. What's your golf handicap?

B/L: Our biggest handicap is that we don’t play golf, but you could find us on the shooting range, and we’ll allow useless bureaucrats to redeem themselves by holding our targets. As for spending all our time at Camp David, we didn’t even know where it was until you asked us this question, and we looked it up.

another tough day at Camp David

CF: Iran. Invade or go nuclear?

B/L: Iran is already being invaded by China right now, but the mullahs are too stupid to know it. China wants Iranian oil, and the mullahs think they can somehow control the Dragon. China would love nothing more than for there to be a ruckus between Iran and the US because that would weaken Iran and damage the US and Western nations. This would facilitate their own takeover of the oil-rich region. However, China, unlike Iran, is too smart to go to war with us. It also has no particular axe to grind with Israel so, unlike Iran, it won’t be starting a war there either. Therefore, it is to our advantage to let Iran continue to become China’s b**ch for the moment. Our approach will be to sneak in our popcorn and watch the show.

CF: Are you worried about the challenge from Governor Rick Perry? One, he appeals to many ultra conservatives. Two, he probably has the state of Texas all wrapped up. And three, ... three ... point number three .... oops ... sorry, I'll get back to you on that one.

We all saw how Herman Cain's campaign got derailed. Before it all gets nasty do you have any secrets that should come out now? Have either of you ever sexually harassed anyone, for instance?

B/L: It’s only sexual harassment when people don’t want the attention, and trust us, our husbands want all the attention they can get.

Hey, Baby. Want to play rogue TSA agent and naughty cupcake girl?

As for other secrets, it’s no secret that Kristen and I have led colorful lives. We prefer to say we have “street cred.” Will we share every gory detail with you? No. We do what good Southern ladies should do. We keep those details private until we can put them together for our memoirs once we’re out of office.

CF: Governor Rick Perry claims to have shot a coyote while he was out jogging. Do either of you carry guns when you're jogging and if so, have you ever shot any wildlife with it?

B/L: We would both rather suck broken glass up our noses than go jogging. However, Piper has a concealed carry license and is prepared to deal with any coyotes that attack her in yoga class or on the elliptical at the gym. Kristen, on the other hand, is convinced she is doomed to shoot herself while looking for her lip gloss. Her husband, being a good hubby, is taking her to shooting classes so that those coyotes in yoga class will need to fear her, as well.

Governor Rick Perry sans coyote. Photograph: Ed Schipul

CF: Finally, Governor Rick Perry wanted Texas to secede in 2009. Are there any US states you would encourage to go once the people have spoken in November?

B/L: We will encourage Mexico to secede from the Union. We realize it is not technically a state, but when a country’s second biggest chunk of its economy is American dollars, it might as well be a state. Rick Perry is welcome to take I-35 south to spearhead that cause.

The fact is that most of the soldiers fighting with Sam Houston in the Mexican-American War were, in fact, Mexicans who recognized that the people in power in Mexico were not interested in building a strong Mexican State. They couldn’t get out fast enough. The same was true in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. In fact, it is still true today. Mexicans can’t seem to run north fast enough.

We would love for the government of Mexico to take responsibility for the well-being of its people and build a great economy. With all of its oil and other natural resources, there is no reason Mexico shouldn’t be one of the strongest economies on the planet.

However, the powers that be support ravagers like Carlos Slim, the man who became the richest man on the planet with his monopoly on Mexican phone service, which charges the highest rates on the planet. The Mexican powers that be also perpetuate a hard core culture of corruption by collaborating with the drug cartels rather than devoting themselves to shutting down the criminals and making Mexico a decent place for her fine citizens. We will pressure the Mexican government any way we can for it to become independent of American jobs and American money and instead do what’s right for their own people for a change. Mexicans deserve much better than they are getting from their own country.

We would like to thank Colin for hosting our Campaign Blog Tour Stop today. It’s been fun and an honor.

If you would like to host the Foxie with Moxie pair for a blog stop, please contact Piper at piperbayard@yahoo.com. We would love to come around to your blog.

Bayard/Lamb 2012 – Because We’re Not the Other Guys

I hope you enjoyed the post! If you don't already know their work, you must see Kristen at http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/ and Piper at http://piperbayard.wordpress.com/

HISTORICAL OR FICTION?

2012-01-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

I received an email the other day from a reader who had come across HAREM, liked the first chapter, and wrote to me: ‘... before I read any more, I want to know if it’s all factual and true.’

Now I understood where she was coming from; she wanted to know if she was reading history or fantasy before she started out on quite a large book. Fair question. And yet ...

It made me think. Like all my breed I pride myself on the level of research that goes into my books. It's exhausting. Sure I make mistakes occasionally, but generally minor ones and hopefully not very often. But though I know I will never stray from this discipline, I do sometimes wonder: why does it matter more in a book than in a film?

I recently watched a re-run of 'The Untouchables.' Structurally, it’s brilliant and it has one of the best suspense scenes, for my money, in the history of film-making. There is that wonderful set up at Chicago’s Grand Central Station where the gangsters walk in, armed to the teeth, just as the mother is pulling the baby up the stairs in a pram.

photograph: Vincent Desjardins

Yet a novelist could not get away with the story line. For instance; Frank Nitti never fell to his death after a fight with Elliot Ness - he committed suicide in an Illinois rail yard when he was 57. Ness’s accountant Oscar, who Nitti shoots dead in an elevator in the movie, was loosely based on Frank J Wilson, the Treasury department agent who was the one who really had Capone convicted. He died in his bed at 83.

And so on.

That giant of English literature, William Shakespeare, got away with murder more times than Capone. The Bard had the same view as de Parma: the play’s the thing.

Some people see "Richard III" and believe in life that he was deformed, conniving and immoral. But the unbiased evidence of various chroniclers, both before and after Richard’s reign, describe a just ruler, a caring uncle, and a loyal brother.

And the hunchback was purely Shakespeare’s invention.

If Hollywood kept to the script, no movie would ever get made. The Deer Hunter, for example; there is absolutely no basis in fact for gambling clubs acting as venues for games of Russian Roulette in wartime Saigon. The film used it as a metaphor for war and did it brilliantly.

It is still ranked as one of the best films ever made. It is certainly one of my favourite movies.

But historically accurate? No.

Or there’s Braveheart; its historical inaccuracies are legion. (William Wallace could not have had a union with Princess Isabella of France and sired a son with her, as she was just nine years old when he died; the Scots did not wear kilts until much later.)

But as Michelle Miller at HISTORICAL FICTION CONNECTIONreminded me, she enjoyed the book so much it made her want to search out the facts for herself. And she, along with millions of others, loved the movie.

It's a point that was also beautifully illustrated in Donna Russo Morin's wonderful post on this subject here.

photograph: Kjetil Bjornsrud

In movies the story is the thing; whereas Ken Follett made one very minor error in 1100 pages of diligently researched material in Pillars of the Earth, (poor people, someone pointed out, did not eat breakfast in the Middle Ages) and was found out. Novelists finagle with history, intentionally or not, at their peril. Books are subject to quite different criteria to film. It is both the genre’s strength and its weakness.

When someone reads a good thriller, they don’t ask: is it well researched - they only want to know - is it exciting?

I'm not complaining. I have no desire to shapeshift history. I think it's exciting enough as it is.

But how far do we go? For example, if we used absolutely historically correct language no one would be able to read it; Middle English is more difficult than Mandarin. And then there’s the social milieu; women for much of western history were regarded as chattels.

Treating a woman as a domestic slave or a breeding machine is great for the villain in your story. But how will twentieth century audiences react to such behavour from your hero - even when it's historically accurate?

A lord of the middle ages could have helped himself to every female servant in the castle without reproach from his peers, but it would be hard to make him sympathetic to a modern audience.

Stephanie Dray wrote wonderfully about some of these conundrums in this great post here.

Make no mistake, I advocate good research and historical accuracy wholeheartedly and I won't be relaxing my own diligence when it comes to research.

So I have no agenda on this subject; I am just inviting discussion on this one.Why do we have a double standard with historical fiction and historical movies; are authors and readers too obsessive? Or are we not obsessive enough?

If you like my post please press my Stumbleupon button below.

And at last some sanity returns to the Presidential Race! Mitt? Newt? The Bayard/Lamb presidential ticket has two women with proper first names and great ideas, and they'll be stumping up here on Monday and answering the hard questions. Don't miss it!

Until then, I look forward to your comments!

WHAT'S YOUR AQ? (Australia Quotient)

2012-01-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is Australia Day in my adopted country. Despite my strong ties with England, I have spent most of my life here and I shall be celebrating along with everyone else. The national day of Australia commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove in 1788 and the proclamation of British sovereignty over what was then called New Holland.

The first fleet was eleven ships that sailed from Britain in May 1787 with about fifteen hundred people aboard, half of whom were convicts. They were sent to establish the first colony here, using the convicts as labour. It was also a way of freeing up the prisons; an early example of outsourcing problems.

First Fleet re-enactment, Sydney Harbour 1988

January 26, is a national public holiday marked by public exhibitions of fireworks, concerts and tournament-level drinking. Not for everyone though; it is of course controversial to some Australians. (Some in the aboriginal population refer to it as Invasion Day.)

photograph: JWC Adams

Now many people in the world can’t even find the place on a map; they get us mixed up with Austria. How much do you know. What’s your AQ? (Australia Quotient).

Here’s a quick quiz to find out:

1. An easy one to start with: What is the capital of Australia?

(a) Sydney

(b) Melbourne

(d) Vienna

2. Australia is often referred to as “The Land ...”

(a) That Time Forgot

(b) of a thousand blowflies

(d) next to Germany

3. What is this building?

photograph: Phil Whitehouse

(a) the national parliament

(b) the state of the art nuclear facility at Mount Buggery

(d) the house where the von Trapps lived

4.) Which journey is it possible to drive in less than a day?

a) Iron Knob to Humpty Doo

b) Salzburg to Canberra

c) Sydney to Melbourne

d) Burrumbuttock to Nowhere Else

5) What is this a picture of?

photograph: Brandy Frisky

a) a kangaroo

b) a koala bear

c) a wombat

d) a bull ant

6.). In 1954 a gentleman by the name of Bob Hawke set a world record by sculling two and a half pints of beer in 11 seconds. He later became ... what?

(a) the Australian Cultural Attaché to Paris

(b) a famous artist

(d) Archbishop of Sydney

7). What is this?

photograph: tristan b

(a) toast covered in sump oil

(b) toast covered in bicycle grease

(c) toast covered with a black sticky food spread made of the gooey waste from the brewing process that is a staple for every Australian child at breakfast

(d) ... people eat that?

8. Which two animals appear on the Australian coat of arms?

(a) the shark and red back spider

(b) the box jellyfish and deadly taipan snake

(d) the crocodile and the blue ringed octopus

9. What is Australia’s system of government?

(a) a republic

(b) a benign dictatorship

(d) anarchy

10. What is a pie floater?

(a) ice cream scoop in a glass of coke

(b) a dead cow floating down a stream during the monsoon floods in far north Queensland

(d) a round inflation device used in public swimming pools and so-called because it looks like a pie

Before we get to the answers, here's a video of a typical Australian 'barbie' (barbecue), which you'll find just about everywhere in Oz on Australia Day.

All the answers were (c).

There is no nuclear facility at Mount Buggery. But there is a Mount Buggery. In fact, there’s two, both in Victoria. One lies on the end of a ridgeline known as the Crosscut Saw between Mount Speculation and Mount Howitt, the other is on the Buffalo River.

Question 4, in case you were wondering, you can’t drive from Burrumbuttcok to Nowhere Else, because the Tasman Sea is in the way. And Iron Knob to Humpty Doo is a journey of about 1700 miles, so it will take you around thirty two hours of driving.

The picture in (5) is a wombat, a curious animal which is like a cross between a pit bull and a badger. I’d give you half a point if you said bull ant. If you come to Australia and see the ants here, you’ll know what I mean.

In question 7, (c) is technically correct but I’ll accept (a) (b) or (d). It's called Vegemite. It's an acquired taste.

Question 8, the kangaroo and the emu are the only two wildlife in Australia that will not poison you or eat you, which is why we have them on our coat of arms.

If you liked my post, please give me a thumb up on Stumbleupon.

I'll leave you with a picture of a pie floater. Happy Australia Day!

FOR A MOMENT OF TIME

2012-01-23T23:24:00.000-08:00

Thirty four years ago today, on 23 January, 1978, Terry Kath, the original guitarist and lead singer of the rock band Chicago, died after a party in Los Angeles. Famously, his last words were: ‘Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.’

But of course, it was. He had been fooling around all evening with a .38 revolver but the 9mm pistol with an empty clip and a live round in the chamber was his undoing.

That final utterance is probably only rivaled by Civil War General John Sedgwick, who was warned not to show himself above the Union parapet during the Battle of the Wilderness. "Nonsense, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist ...

Famous last words can be painfully ironic; at other times they are heart-breakingly poignant, and sometimes even funny. Some of the most famous ones are just not true.

For instance, Humphrey Bogart’s last words were supposed to have been: "I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis." But in a TV interview Lauren Bacall, his wife, contradicted the claim. She said that she left the house briefly to do some grocery shopping, and the bedridden Bogart’s last words to her were: "Hurry back."

It sounds more realistic to me. And infinitely more poignant. Although Tallulah Bankhead’s last words really were: ‘Codeine ... bourbon.’

But many supposed last words sound just too ... well, contrived. Bill Bryson asserts in his book, Mother Tongue, that when Dominique Bouhours, the French priest and grammarian died in 1702 his last utterance was: ‘I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: Either expression is used.’

Well, it’s a good story. Did he have that planned? Some people die with plenty of time to rehearse their exit lines. Like the convicts on Death Row, for example:

James French, the last person executed by electric chair in Oklahoma in 1966, shouted to the journalists assembled to witness the event: ‘Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French Fries’!

There was a precedent for such gallows humour. James W Rodgers, sentenced to death by firing squad in Utah in 1960, was asked if he had a last request. He is supposed to have said: "Why yes, a bulletproof vest!"

Bank robber and convicted murder Frank ‘Two Gun’ Crowley was a touch more prosaic before his execution in 1931. "You sons of bitches! Give my love to Mother."

Another way to write your own epitaph is to put it in your will, like Rabelais, the Renaissance writer and doctor who died in 1553. “I have nothing. I owe a great deal. The rest I leave to the poor.’

But most last words are not quite the final words. Horatio Lord Nelson, for example, did say ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ while he was dying but said a lot of other things too. His last moments were well recorded and his actual final words were: ‘Thank God I have done my duty.'

Oscar Wilde’s remark: 'The wallpaper is killing me - one of us has to go,’ is true, but they certainly weren’t his last words, which were probably mumbled to a priest while heavily sedated with morphine - not the best conditions for the wit for which Wilde is so famous.

There seems to be some pressure for the rich and famous to say something memorable on the way out. There was a legend that Pancho Villa the Mexican revolutionary said: ‘Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.’ In actual fact he was gunned down in a hail of bullets and died instantly.

Often what is remembered by those gathered are not the last words, but the words worth remembering. Lady Astor, for instance, woke briefly during her final illness in 1964 to find her family gathered round her bedside and murmured: “Am I dying or is it my birthday?”

And Ramon Maria Narvaez, when asked by a priest on his deathbed if he forgave his enemies, replied: "I do not have to forgive my enemies, I have had them all shot."

Some leave us with last words that are neither witty or peculiar, but are nonetheless deeply moving. Napoleon’s last word was ‘Josephine.’ Charlotte Brontë died at just 38, along with her unborn child, possibly from dehydration caused by hyperemesis. She whispered to her husband of nine months, Reverend Arthur Nicholls: “Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy ...”

Just as poignant were the last words of James W Polk, President of the US from 1845-1849. The presidency took a terrible strain on his health - there was no Camp David in those days - and he died soon after leaving office. His last words to his wife: “I love you Sarah. For all eternity, I love you.”

I’ll leave the last word on last words though to Queen Elizabeth the First. ‘All my possessions for a moment of time.’

Poignant indeed. Think about that one: for at this very moment you and I are richer and more powerful than the Queen of England - we have those moments of time, however many they are.

... I wonder what we will do with them?

THREE BOURBONS, TWO BIKERS, ONE STRAW

2012-01-20T20:01:00.000-08:00

After I announced my blog awards recently and posted my seven random details about myself, I was asked in the comments section how I ended up naked and handcuffed in a bar with two bikers.

So here's the story.

To be fair to my ‘mates’, I was not quite an innocent victim. There was a tradition in the little country town, where I lived at that time, to commemorate each other’s birthdays with practical jokes.

In the year leading up to my abduction, I had been fairly active in these celebrations. I guess it may have been my idea to paint Arnie’s cows pink; I was certainly present when we put a pink tu-tu on one of Andy’s sheep, threw him and the sheep in the cage on the back of his ute (tray top), and left him at the town shopping centre on the holiday weekend with a sign saying NEW ZEALAND WAR BRIDE hanging on the back; I confess now that it was me - as everyone suspected - that kidnapped Thommo’s garden gnome, photographed it in compromising positions with Barbie dolls and then sent Thommo ransom notes using letters cut out of the newspaper; I may have been there when we shackled a concrete block to Pelican’s ankle and left him in a mall parking lot in his underwear.

So I probably had it coming.

I never expected my wife to betray me though. She let my ‘mates’ in the house while I was in the shower; they had the Agran bag all ready. (This is a kind of sack that fertilizer is sold in.) They had cut a hole in the top to put my head through and it fitted very snug especially once my hands were tied behind my back with a ratchet strap. I was then blindfolded and transported naked in Andy’s ute.

The blindfold was removed in the Animal's Bar of the local hotel.

Despite my somewhat devious turn of mind I thought this was to be the extent of the joke.

photograph: David Shankbone

They bought me three double bourbons, lined them up on the bar and thoughtfully provided a straw for me to drink through as my hands were tied. They then wished me a Happy Birthday and toasted my future health and happiness.

I was halfway through my second bourbon when they finished their drinks. I looked around and discovered they had suddenly and surreptitiously disappeared.

I was alone in the bar except for two local bikers, Harley and Dog, who were playing pool in the corner and smoking, stubbing their cigarettes out on their own forearms just for fun.

photograph: Roy Lister

It was a situation that was never covered in my Boy Scouts Survival Training course when I was a kid.

They looked at me. I looked at them. Then Dog winked at me and I decided it was time to leave.

To my credit I did finish my other bourbon first and then did the Penguin Walk out the door. (If you’ve ever been handcuffed inside an Agran bag you’ll know the Penguin Walk.)

photograph: Michael Griffey II

It was Andy who took pity on me and was already headed back in his ute to rescue me. I jumped in and we headed off to the birthday party leaving Dog behind the eight-ball to dream of unrequited love.

So that's the story. And if Andy, Thommo, Woody, Arnie, Pelican, Bakes, or Wally are reading this; wherever you are, I still miss those days, fellas. Thanks for all the laughs. It really was a lot of fun.

TWENTY ONE GRAMS

2012-01-19T01:03:00.000-08:00

(This post was carried over from yesterday because of the Internet strike against SOPA)

On this day sixty four years ago, Mohandas Gandhi called off one of the most famous hunger strikes in history.

Shortly after partition, sectarian violence rocked India, resulting in thousands of deaths. Gandhi went on his hunger strike in Calcutta, where the rioting was worst, an act that generated such public shame that the rioting ceased. Gandhi broke his fast as weeping rioters laid their machetes at his feet.

This extraordinary man - Mahatma was not his name but a title he was given meaning Great Soul - was the counter intuitive opposite to the world. He faced down violence with determined non-violence and as such is the antithesis to all our modern thinking, which says that force must be matched with force.

Yet one of the greatest proponents of non violence was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (It’s thought the Nobel committee didn’t want to upset Great Britain.)

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"

But if he was a saint, he was also an enigma. He was not afraid of the British but he was afraid of the dark, and always slept with a light burning by his bedside; he lived as an ascetic yet he was financially dependent on the sponsorship of industrial millionaires; he once used a hunger strike to force employees to call off industrial action against one of his patrons.

“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”

He also conducted the infamous "brahmacharya experiments," where naked young women would be obliged to sleep with him so that he could prove that he had mastered his sexual urgings. He was obsessive about his own bowel movements. In other words, he may have been a saint, but he was not perfect.

Yet his stand against violence and advocacy of simplicity in life led him to be eulogized by a world that consistently espouses the antithesis of this message.

"There is more to life than simply increasing its speed."

Gandhi conceded later in life that passive resistance might not work in every situation; he admitted the British had responded to non violent protest because their government and society had a collective moral conscience. Nazi Germany, he agreed, would not have been so easily persuaded.

"The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within."

Did non violence bring about independence anyway? There are those that argue otherwise. The British had been bankrupted by World War Two, and were already losing their grip on the Raj during the thirties. And despite Gandhi’s protests the revolution did become violent anyway, so much so that he stayed away from independence celebrations in protest.

"As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance, cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side."

And what of this new India? The Hindu nationalism he protested in Calcutta is now rampant in the form of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The country is fast tracked to modern capitalism and hyper nationalism. It is a nuclear power. This was not Gandhi’s vision. It was Nehru’s.

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."

His message resonated far beyond India. Albert Einstein was one of many to praise Gandhi's achievement; Nelson Mandela converted to pacifism in freeing South Africa from apartheid (and similarly watched his own legacy trampled under his successors in the ANC.)

Perhaps Gandhi’s lesson was not for India but for us; that we really can’t change the world - all we can do is change ourselves.

“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world – that is the myth of the atomic age – as in being able to remake ourselves.”

If you believe it, then all we have is what we bring in with us, that mythical twenty one grams of ethereal vapour. It’s all we take out with us, too, and the only thing always under our control.

But that’s no small thing, as Gandhi’s life shows.

THE FULL MONTY

2012-01-16T04:06:00.000-08:00

If the mourning for North Korean despot’s Kim Jong Il’s death was largely staged, there was at least one man who genuinely grieved his passing; and that was his look-alike, Kim Young-sik. For years Kim had perfected the wave and the bouffant hairdo, and his close resemblance to Dear Leader led to TV appearances in Japan, a part in a South Korean movie and even a spot in a Middle East chocolate commercial.

Kim was dedicated to his art. He permed his hair every three months, and even went on a diet when the late leader lost weight following a 2008 stroke. Now he says it feels as if a part of himself has died. It is time to hang up the Elton John glasses and go back to being Kim Young-Sik again, engraver of Oriental seals in his little shop in Seoul.

You can pirate books. You can pirate films. You can pirate Gucci handbags. It seems you can also pirate people.

photograph: Paul Smith/Mark Fox

A company called A-List Lookalikes in London specialises in providing inexpensive imitations of famous people for public events. People just like Kim, in fact. They say the most requested celebrity doubles are Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley - who are both dead, so perhaps Dear Leader II should not throw out the olive green leisure suits just yet.

The latest demand is for faux Kate Middletons - if you’re in London and you see the latest Princess Bride waving to you from inside Buckingham Palace don’t get too excited - it could be just a lady called Louise Lyn hard at work.

UK Big Brother contestant Chantelle Houghton also worked briefly and unsuccessfully as a Paris Hilton look-alike, earning the nickname "Paris Travelodge."

Steve Sires, a dead ringer of Microsoft’s Bill Gates came to public attention when he attempted to trademark "Microsortof", and subsequently got roles acting in Microsoft commercials.

But the oddest job in the business has to be doubling for Callum Best. Callum makes a living by being the son of Manchester United football legend George Best, and is paid to attend lots of parties. But you can get sick of that; so Callum sometimes hires a double to go partying when he’s suffering from overwork. Imagine; there is a living to be made looking like someone no one recognizes. It’s a strange world.

But being someone’s double isn’t easy; competition is fierce and always has been. In the twenties Charlie Chaplin went into a Charlie Chaplin look-alike competition and didn’t even make it to the finals.

third place

Today, competition is probably still fiercest in Hollywood. But it's not face look-alikes that are in demand, but body doubles. I don’t want to disappoint you, guys, but that was not Natalie Portman’s butt in the thong in 'Your Highness.' They were not Isla’s breasts in Wedding Crashers. They were not Julia Robert’s thighs in the opening scenes of Pretty Woman.

They may though have belonged to Alisa Hensley, a blonde blue-eyed American beauty who was named one of the 20 Most Fit Women of All-Time by Muscle & Fitness magazine and is one of a handful of women making a very good living keeping the gifts God gave them in perfect order.

Alisa has body doubled for Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz and Nicole Kidman. But she’s not just a pretty butt. She is also one of Hollywood’s most decorated stunt performers, as well.

But sometimes doubling is not entertainment and big bucks; it can be deadly serious.

Stalin employed no less than four look-alikes to mislead potential assassins. They were badly needed; there were two attempts on his life at Yalta alone.

"you don't even look like him."

Just before D-Day ME Clifton James - who looked uncannily like British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery - was sent to Gibraltar and Morroco to try and deceive the Germans about the location of the upcoming invasion, talking loudly in hotels and restaurants about bogus plans. James had lost his right hand middle finger so he wasn’t the full Monty. The Brits provided him with a prosthesis for his right hand.

His exploits were recorded in a film I was Monty’s Double in 1958. He played himself in the movie along side Cecil Parker and John Mills.

Hollywood ran with this idea in the 1993 film 'DAVE', about a look-alike who is hired by the White House to impersonate the President. At first he is cover for the President's extra marital curriculum, but then panicked staffers keep him on after the President suffers a stroke and is left in a coma. The impostor then discovers and helps take down corrupt officials in the government, (far-fetched, I know), including the President that he is pretending to be ...

If you liked my post, please click here to give me a thumb up on Stumbleupon!

Blogger Awards

2012-01-16T03:11:00.000-08:00

Well really, you shouldn't have. Firstly I'd like to thank my mother and my agent and the director ....

Actually I'd just like to thank Prudence at VALKYRIE RISING and Alicia and Roy Street at http://aliciastreet-roystreet.com/ for this award:

Thank you! I'm also honoured to receive the Liebster Award from Serena Dracis at BREAKING AWAY FROM ORDINARY

As part of the award, I have to share seven random facts about myself: Okay, here goes:

1. My hand writing is totally illegible. I write in block capitals and sometimes I can't even read those.
2. I ran four encierros at Pamplona. Two of them I was sober.
3. Me and my mates once painted a friend's herd of cows pink
4. These same 'mates' once kidnapped me from the shower, tied my hands with duct tape and drove me to a pub in country Australia stark naked except for an Agran bag.They put three bourbon and cokes (and a straw - nice of them) on the bar, and left me there with two bikies playing pool.
5. I danced with a voodoo queen in a favela in Brazil
6. I suffer badly from hay fever. I got it from my Dad. He once sneezed twenty seven times in a row. I remember because I was a kid and I stood there counting. I'd only just learned to count (I was eleven) and it was great practice.
7. I once accidentally knelt on a shark.

I'd now like to give my Liebster Award to Marcy Kennedy .

And my Versatile Blogger Awards go to Susie Lindau, DebraEve at Later Bloomer, Amber West at A Day Without Sushi and Jessica O'Neal.

Head on over to their blogs and tell them they won!

FRIGGATRISKAIDEKAPHOBIA

2012-01-13T02:32:00.000-08:00

Today, according to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, around twenty million people in the US will be so terrified that they will struggle to get out of bed.

They have something called friggatriskaidekaphobia - fear of Friday the thirteenth. (And yes, that is a real word!)

Why? Well, the two of you who haven’t read The da Vinci Code may not know that this superstition arose because Friday the thirteenth was the date that the Knights Templar were all arrested in Paris. It was a day that 'lived in infamy' even though no one really paid much attention to it for the next five hundred years.

In fact, some scholars are now convinced the stigma attached to Friday the Thirteenth is a thoroughly modern phenomenon exacerbated by 20th-century media hype. (Like this in fact!!)

The phobia only seems to have taken hold on the popular imagination some time late in the nineteenth century and is rather the melding of a day considered unlucky - Friday - with an unlucky number -13.

This pre-occupation with Friday the Thirteenth spiked after the publication of Thomas W Lawson’s novel of the same name in 1907. It is about an unscrupulous broker (and how far-fetched is that!) who takes advantage of the superstition to create a Wall Street panic on that day.

photograph: Agamitsudo

But what is it with Fridays? It is supposed to be an unlucky day because it’s believed Christ was crucified on a Friday. (And so why do we call it Good Friday?) In England, the sixth day of the week was also once reserved for public executions: "Hangman's Day."

And the number 13? Well, opinions vary.

A Norse myth says that having thirteen people sitting at dinner will result in the death of one of the diners. And if you’ve ever eaten Swedish rollmop you’ll know the feeling.

Another theory says that the earliest reference to thirteen being unlucky or evil was from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi where the thirteenth law is omitted. In fact, the original Code of Hammurabi has no numeration.

There’s also a Christian tradition that says Judas was the 13th to sit down at the Last Supper. However, the Bible itself says nothing about the order at which the Apostles sat.

So nothing conclusive there. But whatever the source, it definitely bothers a lot of people; Belgian Airlines recently had to repaint their planes because their logo was made of thirteen dots. Due to public complaints they grounded the fleet to add one extra dot.

And many buildings and hotels do not have a 13th floor.

Those who consider 13 unlucky will quote the example of Apollo 13. It launched at 13:13 from pad 39 (three thirteens) and its oxygen tank exploded on April 13.

And then there’s all the serial killers with thirteen letters in their names; Jack the Ripper, 13 letters. Charles Manson, 13. Jeffrey Dahmer, 13. Theodore Bundy. 13.

Bernard Madoff, 13 letters.

Colin Falconer. Uh-oh.

The gangsta rapper, Tupac, was shot dead on Friday, 13 September, 1996. And on Friday, 13 November, 1970, a massive storm killed approximately 300,000 people in Chittagong, Bangladesh, and created floods that killed as many as one million people in the Ganges Delta.

Yes but. What about Kennedy? He wasn’t shot on the 13th. The Boxing Day Tsunami happened on ... Boxing Day. Pearl Harbour was on a Sunday. And 9/11 happened on ... 9/11 not 9/13.

So really - what’s so bad? In 1881, an group of New Yorkers led by U.S. Civil War veteran Captain William Fowler formed a dinner cabaret club, called the Thirteen Club, to show that superstition was just that - superstition. The first meeting was called on Friday 13 January 1881, when 13 people sat down to dine in room 13. The guests had to walk under a ladder to enter the room and sat among piles of spilled salt.

All of the guests survived.

Future members included five future U.S. presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt.

Of course, whether Friday the Thirteenth really is unlucky depends which country you’re in. In Spain and Greece, for example, Tuesday the 13th is unlucky. (Judging by the Greek economy any day’s unlucky if you happen to live there. )

And in Asia there is widespread fear of the number four (many apartments and hotels do not have floors with that digit) because the pronunciation of the word for "four" in Mandarin is very similar to that of the word for "death".

photograph: Giovanni Giuseppe Nicosia

And in Afghanistan they fear the number 39. People in Kabul never go to work on Friday the 39th.

But if you’re still worried about this, help is at hand. Traditional folklore offers remedies; one recommendation is to climb to the top of a mountain or skyscraper and burn all the socks you own that have holes in them. Seriously.

Another is to stand on your head and eat a piece of gristle.

So there’s your answer to Black Friday. Of course if you get arrested for causing a public nuisance or choke on the gristle don’t blame me.

Perhaps you’re just unlucky.

If you liked my post, please click here to give me a thumb up on Stumbleupon.

CLEOPATRA, LOOKIN AT YA

2012-01-11T02:01:00.000-08:00

If it wasn’t all true, it would be hard to believe; thirty years before Jesus, an eighteen year old princess tried to take over the world? Outrageous. But that's what happened.

She was the seventh Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra but really - there is only one. She has been variously portrayed as virtuous suicide, exuberant lover, professional courtesan, scheming manipulator, and femme fatale. Was she Shakespeare’s cruel and lazy siren, George Bernard Shaw’s man-eater or Elizabeth Taylor’s alluring beauty?

Hollywood has never had any doubts. In the thirties Cecil B de Mille offered the role to Claudette Colbert with the words: "How would you like to play the wickedest woman in history?"

Was she history's wickedest woman? She was certainly a woman with cojones. She took on Roman military and political power at the apogee of its power. If she had succeeded – and she very nearly did – the world today might look a very different place. God really might be a woman - called Isis.

photograph:George Shulkin

It is true that she scandalized the Roman world, but much of what was said about her at the time was mostly misinformation used by her enemy, Augustus, to rally his fellow Romans against her. He used her to turn the tables on Anthony, who was his rival for power in Rome, leaking rumours about her bathing in asses’ milk and having sex with her slaves in order to make Anthony look ridiculous.

And it worked; worked so well in fact that his propaganda still informs much of popular opinion about her, even today.

She was certainly not the sexual virago of legend. She did not copulate with crocodiles, (it's dangerous and probably not that much fun) or with her slaves (beneath her dignity). In fact, it seems she only slept with two men all her life, and both of them were husbands.

Well, not her husbands, admittedly - but in fairness, she did marry them later, according to Egyptian rite, if not theirs.

The real Cleopatra was a consummate political animal, a woman far ahead of her time; she had the marketing acumen of Lady Gaga, the ruthlessness of Margaret Thatcher and the charm of Lady Diana.

Yet we don't really know what she looked like. But surely, you say – she looked like Elizabeth Taylor? With a bob, and a beauty spot, reclining on an antique sunbed?

Well, no.

bust of Cleopatra in the Berlin Museum

Some historians even speculate that Cleopatra may have even been blonde. As she was part Macedonian, there's a fair chance, so to speak.

I toyed with the idea of having Cleopatra as a blonde in WHEN WE WERE GODS, to show that I had done my research and to distance myself from the movie. But my publisher said to me: you can't do that. They said: Cleopatra is now far too deeply ingrained in our consciousness as a bobbed brunette, it will jar in a reader's imagination.

She may not even have been that beautiful. There are few existing likenesses of her extant. (A coin from the period shows her in profile, and it’s a pretty terrifying image too, not unlike Mike Tyson.)

There are only two ambiguous accounts from her contemporaries; Plutarch was at pains to describe her 'pleasing personality' - which is damning with faint praise - and only Cassius Dio lauded her looks, but did he say that because he had to?

And anyway, does it really matter? In the context of her story it was her spirit not her looks that really mattered. Despite overwhelming odds, she almost became ruler of the entire western world using her intelligence and her daring. In the end she scandalized the Romans not because of her sexual conquests but because a woman almost beat them at their own game.

She was truly one of the most extraordinary women in history.

WHEN WE WERE GODS:Kindle US,Kindle UK; Smashwords

JOAN OF ARC 'S HAIRCUT - and other things you may not know about her

2012-01-09T02:56:00.000-08:00

On Sunday, Joan of Arc celebrated her 600th birthday.

There were huge celebrations in France. She may have died six centuries ago, but she lives on in the spirit of an entire nation. Her name has been immortalized all over the country in street names, in village squares, on churches and on monuments. Even today, both sides of the political spectrum are locked in a battle to hijack her appeal for electoral gain.

Yet her life is shrouded in myth and mystery. How much do you know about her? Here’s a quick quiz.

I’ll start with an easy question first.

1. Which hairstyle did Joan of Arc inspire?

a. the Donald Trump comb-over

b. the bob

c. the Sarah Palin pouf

d. the buzz cut

Photograph: Mila Zinkova

Actually it was (b). In 1909, a Paris hairdresser created the bob, citing Joan as his inspiration. These days it’s just another hairstyle; back then it was a revolution, ending centuries of taboo against women wearing their hair short.

It became a symbol of rebellion among women in the nineteen twenties, and was adopted in the US and Britain by the ‘flappers.’ The haircut is still known in French as coupe à la Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc's haircut)

2. Which of the following did she survive in the course of her military career?

a. a stone cannonball blow to the helmet

b. a crossbow bolt through the thigh

c. a glancing blow from a mace to her bob

d. An arrow wound to her shoulder

Her entirely military career only lasted a year but in that time she had a cannonball dropped on her head, and was shot with an arrow and a crossbolt. In each case she continued to fight on until the action was over. This was one very, very tough and courageous young woman.

She claimed to have been divinely inspired, having been visited on many occasions by the Archangel Gabriel, and Saints Catherine and Margaret. The Catholic Church now claim these two saints never existed; whether they did or they didn't, they moved Joan to do the impossible.

Oh and in case you were wondering re (c) : As far as historians can tell, her bob was never damaged in combat.

Q3: Where was she born?

a Arques

b. Orleans

c. Paris

d. Domremy

She was born in Domremy, the daughter of Jacques d’Arc and Isabelle Romée in modern day Lorraine. Her father was a farmer, who supplemented his income by collecting taxes for the king.

Her life, from the age of seventeen, is preposterous; ‘a peasant girl experiences divine visions telling her to lead the French armies against the hated English, in defiance of every limitation placed on a woman of the late Middle Ages.’ If that was your pitch for an historical fiction novel, you’d get thrown out of the publisher’s office.

Yet that’s what she did; lopped off her hair, put on armor and roused an exhausted and demoralised army into a string of victories that changed the course of the Hundreds Year War and of history. How she did it beggars belief.

4. Which of the following actresses never played Joan of Arc on the screen?

(a) Ingrid Bergman

(b) Jean Seberg

(d) Whoopi Goldberg

Ah-ha! You thought I was going to say Whoopi, didn’t you; in fact, Whoopi played Joan in a 2010 TV campaign for Poise adult underwear. Vanessa Redgrave was the red herring there.

5. Why was she put to death at the stake?

a. Because she was a witch

b. Because she was a heretic

c. Because she was a virgin

d. Because she voted for the Euro

Her trial was staged; the Duke of Bedford had claimed the French throne for his nephew Henry VI. Joan had given her imprimatur to his rival, Charles, so he wanted to burn her as a witch to undermine the reigning king’s legitimacy. It was a politically motivated smear campaign (How medieval. Thank God those days are behind us!)

Unfortunately, the Duchess of Bedford inconveniently confirmed that Joan was as a virgin and virgins cannot be witches (the Church’s position was that a real witch had real intercourse with the Devil.). So they had to think of something else.

Her show trial dragged on for over a year. Uneducated as she was, Joan was too smart for the best the Church could bring against her. In the end they resorted to falsifying documents, convicted her of heresy and then burned her at the stake.

Their verdict was overturned thirty years later but vindication came a little late for Joan.

No post about her would be complete without this: I think it is one of the most beautiful songs ever written, and was composed by Canada’s national treasure, Leonard Cohen. It is sung here in duet with Jennifer Warnes.

If you liked my post, please click here to give me a thumb up on Stumbleupon.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW, HUCK FINN KNEW FIRST

2012-01-06T03:40:00.000-08:00

My last post was about how hard it is to work the truth into a good story.

“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”

I didn’t say that - Mark Twain did.

He was the guy who has arguably already written The Great American Novel ('The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'.) He was also regarded as the greatest American humorist of his age and Faulkner even called him the ‘father of American literature.’

He was also a very smart guy.

Here’s five of the things he said that I think are good guidelines for life.

1. “Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

It’s a great saying, it has a lot of bravura about it, but it’s hard to do.

I think it’s not just that we get so caught up in the responsibilities of living that we forget to live - though sure, that’s part of it.

But I think sometimes we also unknowingly create our own roadblocks for ourselves. Why?

Here’s a thought; how many of us want things so bad but privately, perhaps even unconsciously, tell ourselves we don’t fit the mold of the kind of person that great stuff happens to?

My very first novel, a crime thriller, was a huge success in the UK and Australia. My publishers, one of the big boys in London publishing, were hoping I would follow it up. Instead I wrote a fairly old fashioned war story and all the momentum was lost.

At the time I told myself it was artistic freedom. These days I call it self-sabotage. Looking back, I see I've done it to myself many times in many different ways. Am I the only one - or does that ring a bell with anyone else out there?

2. “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

Look at Keith Richards. He looks like they just found him in a dumpster at the back of the recording studio. Surely he’s too old to be playing rock music? Well Keef doesn't think so.

Look at Ryan Giggs. At 38 he’s been playing top flight football in England for twenty years, from the midfield, where most players are done by the time they’re 30. He’s just been handed another season’s contract.

George Bernard Shaw broke his leg at 96 - he fell out of a tree he was trimming in his backyard. Michelangelo was 71 when he painted the Sistine Chapel. Harland Sanders founded Kentucky Fried Chicken at 62.

For more great examples see Debra Eve’s blog at

http://www.laterbloomer.com/

3. Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.”

This is a hard one. But the truth is, the longer you spend wallowing in a swamp the harder it is to get out. I’m not preaching; I’m one of the worst at this.

But I also know what he says here is right; you can’t afford the luxury of the wallow. Keep your eyes on the prize.

And Mark Twain should know; he lost the equivalent of seven and a half million dollars - all his royalties from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn - backing new technology and went bankrupt. But even though he was not obliged to do so, he took to the road on a world speaking tour and earned back every cent he owed and then some.

4. “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”

Well this sure is hard too. But isn’t it also one of the secrets of the new social media? As Kristen Lamb says; we are not alone. Sometimes the best way to get over bad news is to RT someone else’s stuff or write a nice review on Amazon. Pay it forward and sometimes it comes back, in surprising ways.

photograph: Billy Hathorn

5. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Exploring, dreaming, discovering; this is a big risk. There will be people standing on the dock saying don’t do it and they may be right; so many dreamers have been shipwrecked.

But by my dead reckoning it’s more disappointing to stay on the shore and die wondering. And every now and then someone sails off to find their brave new world. If you don’t go, you won’t ever know.

So do it. Dare to dream. The only thing regret you'll ever have is if you don't.

If you liked my post, please give me a thumbs up on Stumbleupon!

And the answer to the question in the last post; it was the Golden Triangle.

Debra Kristi sent me the right answer and she wins the first three books in the five book Opium series. Congratulations Debra!

Another free eBook for anyone who can tell me what a five book series is called! Email me at colin underscore falconer underscore author at hotmail dot com.

TRUTH IS JUST TOO GOOD FOR FICTION

2012-01-04T02:39:00.000-08:00

“Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.” - Neil Gaiman

I write historical fiction now so I don’t have the temptation to slip in first-hand contemporary anecdotes. And it would be a temptation; imagine if you could time travel and Khubilai Khan leans over to you during a banquet in Shang’tu and whispers: "You’ll never believe what happened to me once when I was pillaging the Chinese ..."

And you rewrite your plot just to fit in his story.

I recently re-edited and re-released some books I wrote about the genesis of the drug trade in South East Asia. (Because they had never published in the US before.) When I wrote them, I went to Thailand, Laos and Vietnam for the research but I needed some inside information on the Triads so I ended up in Hong Kong. With some persistence I found a detective inspector with the glorious monicker of John Chetwynd-Chatwin, a man of infinite charm and patience who offered to help me. He introduced me to a number of his friends and colleagues in the Hong Kong police force.

photograph QWB656

One of his fellow DCI's - a brilliant character and a lovely bloke who looked a bit like Magnum PI down to the S&W down the back of his pants - took me under his wing and showed me around. He was great company and also a fantastic story teller.

One of the stories he told me was about two triad henchmen who were at a loss with what to do with a body one night - as can so easily happen - and so they broke into a dumpling factory and tried to force the corpse through a mincer. Yum cha anyone?

But the body jammed, and when one of them tried to release it he got his hand stuck in the machine and lost two of his fingers. After his mate retrieved them he took his pal and his mangled digits to the local emergency department. The doctor who tried to re-attach them was quite puzzled. His patient had lost an index finger and a thumb. What they had brought in with them to the ER was a pinkie and part of a toe.

His suspicions were aroused, as they say.

And that’s how the cops made the arrest. The two hitmen were caught red-handed.

The other story involved a couple who leased a 26th floor apartment in Kowloon and decided to reinvigorate the sadly neglected window box. It was massive, probably the size of a small car.

When they started digging, they discovered to their great surprise that it contained an acquaintance of the previous tenant. The last occupier, to the surprise of no one in the Hong Kong police, had recently emigrated and left no forwarding address. He was known to them, as the saying goes.

Didn’t even try and get his bond back.

photograph: Eckhard Pecher

Naturally, I found a way to work both these stories into my plot, thinking I was being very smart. But I discovered there is a danger to doing this.

Several friends read the book and afterwards they took me aside: "Look, loved those books you wrote about the triads ...but that bit about the meat mincer ... and the window box ... wasn’t that a bit far-fetched?

The only things they found incredible, in fact, were the two things I never actually made up.

Oh, in terms of research and historical accuracy, the books were sound. But the business, the action, the incidents - all invented. Plausible, possible - but imagined. Except for these two stories. And they were the two things they picked up on.

So it’s true; truth always is stranger than fiction. Truth doesn’t need a reason to exist. But your story – well everything there has to make sense in terms of the entire fabric.

So from now on I try very hard to make my fiction realistic; but not so realistic that people think that – well ... think that that I’m just making it up.

The OPIUM series traces the growth of the heroin industry from the days of Corsican pilots throwing sacks of opium into the backs of Cessnas to the multi-million dollar business of the nineties. And today I’m giving away the first three ebooks in the series to the first person who can email me and tell me the name of the area where most South East Asian opium poppies are grown. Clue: it’s not Bermuda. Write me at colin underscore falconer underscore author at hotmail dot com.

http://tiny.cc/co7ha

http://tiny.cc/2tphe

http://tiny.cc/24vth