A long, dark night...

There are moments, usually around 4am for me, when anything that can be imagined could be real, when the shadows hold many secrets, when out of sight is not out of mind and when there really could be monsters beneath the bed...

These are the times when logic and rational thinking abandon us, when instinct and imagination hold court in the chaos of our minds and that is why I lay awake forty-five minutes ago wondering if all the fears of our ancestors were coming to pass; that the longest night of the year would never pass, leaving us forever plunged in darkness; that the Mayan prophecy predicted the end of the sun...

With all the lights on and my rational brain stomping around cranky and tired, pointing occasionally and laughing like Brian Blessed at my dinosaur mind as it huddles in the corner, whimpering and muttering something about eternal darkness being the start of the end... It's hard to pin point where imaginative possibility and common sense departed, but certainly somewhere during a failure to sleep there was a parting of minds.

Logic dictates that the likelihood of the sun failing to rise later this morning is incredibly unlikely. Admittedly there's a chance that the weather could be so crappy that we might not really be that aware of the sun being there, but daylight would grey the edges and we could certainly scientifically prove that the sun rise had occurred.

But the feral mind, the part that tells us when fight or flight are the best options... it's not so big with the thinky-think. The unchanging darkness represents all of our worst fears from every age of man, right from 'there are things in the dark waiting to kill me' and 'I will never be warm again' right up to, 'there is no God' and 'if it's forever night the energy will eventually run out and how the hell will I get on twitter?'

This morning at 4am, I realised how easy it must have been for people to fear that the sun would fail to rise. Just because it has always done so, it doesn't mean it always will... And before the world was known, it's shape and travels, when the gods were around us and petitioned for luck, love and harvests... When superstition was rife and cunning men and women lived in every village offering genuine cures for much and reassurance and advice on the rest... these were times when you could easily believe that the sun had failed us, or that we had failed the sun...

How far we've come... After all, we no longer believe the words of soothsayers or oracles, we're unhindered by outdated calendar systems, unshocked by meteor showers and superstition holds no power over us... :)

Did the Mayan 2012 prophecy have traction because it spoke to the parts of our brain that are instinctual and key to our survival when things don't go as our rational minds plan? And if so, isn't it a little reassuring that that part is still there and that the engine is still ticking over, enough to make me pause in the middle of the night and say 'Hold on a minute...?'

And hasn't the idea of an endless night or a never ending season become time and time again the seed for some incredible stories, not mentioning 30 Days of Night or A Song of Ice and Fire...?

Do some of the best ideas come from our tiny, survival obsessed dinosaur brains?

Well, there's at least two more hours before dawn, if it comes, so I'm going to lure my dinosaur brain out of the corner with a plate of bread and milk, pat it on the head for persevering and then crawl back under the duvet until the alarm goes off. I may have that momentary fear that the sun isn't going to come up, but at least I'm rational enough to realise there's bugger all I can do about it... Right? Right?

Ah, damn it. I'll just go and light a candle and burn some incense before bed...

The other yellow brick road...

I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago and although I couldn't recall what I'd been dreaming about, the scent of Adelaide lingered in the air; a strange sweetness a little like jasmine, warm and with a tang of the sea.

I've been back in Norwich for over a month and have been meaning to write a blog about Australia ever since my return, but work has been busy and I was actually stunned by how bad the jet lag was. For the first week back I literally could not keep my eyes open beyond 8pm every evening. Okay, so I can hear you wondering what kept me from writing the second week? Well, life... The gentle slap in the face of reality when you realise that the holiday is over and normality has been resumed. And the more time that passes, the more Australia feels like a dream...

A very fun, very technicolor adventure of a dream...

It has a lot to do with our perception of Australia as a hot barren place of orange earth and constant sunshine... We arrived in Adelaide at the tail end of spring and spent Australia’s spring equinox driving around the Adelaide Hills, visiting a German founded township called Handorff and the highest point, Mount Lofty. So I had two Spring Equinoxes this year which is a shame as I love the Autumn Equinox! But anyway, being spring everything was green. Much of the country around the cities and towns looked like the epitome of Tolkein's idea of Middle Earth, perfect rolling hills and pastures of middle England. The vines in the many vineyards were just starting to leaf, the grass was a vivid bright green beneath a sky that seemed a deeper and more perfect blue than I'd ever seen in England. Surely this wasn't Australia?

And it wasn't just the climate and landscape, central Adelaide seemed very much like any other city in many ways other than the fact that I recognised none of the chains other than Borders (sadly closed) and MacDonalds. There were no Costas or Starbucks... It just felt like a dream construct, like my subconscious making everything seem familiar and keeping the details vague...

Adelaide seemed to be a strange gangly offspring of England and America, with all the spring green of England and the wide roads and building design of America... And I suppose it kinda is in many ways. Both Australia and America are younger settlements than Europe, both have the luxury of an almost unusable amount of space and both are packed with the descendants of Europe and England. In both locations many people have recreated the parts of European life and design that they liked...

You know how in some dreams you recreate a location that's close to something in reality but not quite the same and you can never quite put your finger on what's different? Welcome to Adelaide...

But my most enduring memories of Australia are of the significant differences; as I mentioned before, the very air of Adelaide smelt different, sweeter and lighter. The wildlife is incredible and although, thankfully, I didn’t experience any of the Huntsman spiders and it was the wrong season for the Redback spider, there were kangaroos to be hand fed, koalas to be stroked and pythons to be worn nervously around the neck like big cool muscular scarves. The sound of exotic bird song could be heard coming from every tree and there was something utterly enchanting about hearing parrots in the trees whilst waiting at the bus stops in central Adelaide!

Kangaroo Island was a phenomenal day trip and although being a tourist gives you a warped perspective of places, I could totally see myself living on KI. But to fit in and be a useful member of the community, I’d better brush up on farming, eucalyptus oil production or wildlife conservation. Only 155km long and underpopulated, it had the feel of rural Britain, but between the cultivated fields of glowing yellow rape seed and farmed eucalyptus trees, a third of the island is natural bushland with gum trees filling the horizons, orange dirt roads threading off into the distance, seal and sealion colonies dotted around the coast, wild koalas and kangaroos to be spotted and wallabies dozing in the sun by the side of the road. The Remarkable Rocks, eerie and alien, are naturally formed from the same geological roots as Ayers Rock/Uluru and Admiral Arch displays the power of the eternal sea, eating it’s way through rock and creating a sun filled frame for the clear green sea. With the variety of landscape and wildlife, KI began to feel like a compact sample of natural Australia and it’s stunningly beautiful.

It could be said that our trip was too short to really see much of Australia and that by visiting outside the summer season we weren’t seeing the place at it’s best. But that begs the question, if Australia is beautiful in the spring, how stunning is it during the summer? To get a true gauge of a place, to get a true experience of the landscapes and life, surely you need to experience it through all seasons? To take the great summers with the wet winters, the green spring with the golden light of autumn...

It is a place too immense to digest in one trip or one season and you leave in the knowledge that you’ll need to return, if only to get another breath of the sweet scented air that lingers in your dreams.

* * * * *

My trip would never have happened or been as wonderful without my mum’s generosity, my family’s gentle sense of adventure and the hospitality of my amazing Australia relatives, Mike, Jenny and Steven and their friend Trevor. Malaysian Airlines were generous and caring. And barring the bus drivers, everyone we spoke to in Adelaide was warm, welcoming and engaging. I guess that means bus drivers potentially could be the same worldwide...

You might have noticed a lack of mention of the indigenous population and to give the Aborigines their dues would need to be a whole other blog post and I’d need to do a lot more research before I wrote it, especially as Adelaide cannot be considered a true representation of the whole of Australia. The Aborigines we spoke with were warm and happy to talk, but those we saw around Adelaide looked downtrodden and ignored. The wing of the South Australia Museum devoted to Aborigine history and culture was stunning but sadly empty of visitors and engenders the same mild sense of guilt at cultural thievery as the British Museum in London... And the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection of Aborigine art was pitiful. I sense that the native people’s oppression and integration into the modern Australian society that the western world has created is fraught with politics, history, anger, guilt and shame... I think I’ll never know enough about it to really adequately comment. My dimes worth? Sometimes humans suck and we do the wrong things to each other. Kinda sums a lot up... I guess we’re still learning.

Feel the fear and pack a sword...

In fifteen hours I will be boarding a plane with most of my immediate family and traveling literally half way across the world to a place which holds fifty percent of the worlds poisonous species... And I'm getting a little nervous...

It's not just that I'm leaving my husband behind and ever since we've been together, the only times we've been apart for extended periods of time have been for soul crushing, sad reasons, which subconsciously lends this separation some confusing emotions... And that very, very recently we've had to survive just that kind of a separation, which makes me feel guilty about leaving him on his own, with only our mardy cat for company...

It's not just the twenty-two hour flight, which has me jumping forward in time, turning a day's journey into something more like two and (I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but what the hell!) will be my first flight... Visions of hitting some weird magnetic storm, the plane being ripped in two and crash landing on an island with polar bears, sentient black smoke and a less than fulfilling plot outcome are popping into my head from time to time...

Shudder...

It's not just the fact that there are spiders large enough to eat birds in Australia and tiny ones with enough venom in one bite to kill about three people, crocodiles that can leap from the water and snap you up in the blink of an eye, dragging you under never to be seen again...

Mmmmm, Nix...

It's not just that book prices are astronomical due to import and travel costs and weight restrictions mean that even if I found something wonderful like an Australian edition of Sabriel by Garth Nix in HB to complete my set (although the UK covers were simply beautiful, the Australian editions had truly stunning fantasy painted covers and were published about a year ahead of the UK - this was great when you read a proof of Sabriel and had to read the rest of the series as soon as possible...) there might not actually be room in my bag for it unless I wanted to pay a luggage surcharge...

And it's not just the fact that just as I'm going they're starting to show two episodes of Supernatural a week in the UK... Universe, that just seems petty...

It's not just these things, it's also the fear.

The fear of the new. The fear of the unknown. (The fear of the potentially poisonous spider that could be hiding beneath the loo seat...)

But then at 5:30 this morning, when the mardy cat woke me up wanting company and/or biscuits and I realised, hey - losing sleep now might mean sleeping better on the plane tonight and not noticing the turbulence/chunky guy with curly hair/pretty petite brunette in handcuffs/shambling drunk English rock musician/hobbit hiding in the toilet as the plane goes down...

At 5:30 this morning I realised I'll probably only do an Australian trip the once... This might be the only time I get to experience two Spring Equinoxes in the same year... There will be things I see in Australia that I will never see anywhere else in the world and thankfully the spiders will be some of those things.

At 5:30 this morning I realised that I am going on a really big adventure. A really BIG adventure.

And at 7:15 I realised I used repetition too much, but that is a far smaller adventure that we can discuss another time. ANOTHER TIME, okay...

So... Yeah. Wow. Big adventure time.

I just hope I can find me a talking, morphing dog, a rainbow unicorn and a whole village made of sweet and dessert people. A magical sword could come in handy too. :)

Step right up, the show's about to begin...

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images... We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we are sitting in... We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vital and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right)and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.”

John Gardner - On Becoming A Novelist

Very rarely have I read a book that made me feel like I was dreaming and that made me cry upon awakening at the end of the tale, in despair at the end and joy that I knew part of me would forever remain in that world.

The Night Circus is one of those books and it is the plot, the style, the magic, the everything of that book that makes it so wonderful.

On the surface it is the tale of two men of magic, both with different techniques and beliefs. Unable to prove the other wrong, they train a student each, with the intention of competing one against the other: a rivalry which seems fated from the start every time the competition starts anew. Celia and Marcus are bound to the competition and each other, their lives and magic centred around the forum of their gentile and enchanted battle – the Night Circus.

It is a simple enough plot but it's the Night Circus itself that glows at the centre of of the tale, a character all of its own. Full of wonder, weirdness, enchantments, magic and beauty, the circus is lavishly described, from the white and black powdered grass, each amazing and unbelievable tent and to the tips of the fluttering black and white flags. This whole world is spellbinding, so well has Morgenstern described it. And perhaps it helps that the whole of The Night Circus is black and white – not only does the experience for the characters and readers become dream-like, but it works intuitively with us as readers, after all everything we see on the page as we read is as black and white as the circus itself.

The book even structures itself like a dream, hopping from character, location, time period and perspective with abrupt ease and somehow managing to make it work beautifully, because in the back of our minds we trust and let the dream lead us where it will. And like dreams there are things we don't know, can only intuit, especially towards the end...

But despite the things left unsaid the ending is exactly what it should be... With every book or film I hope for the same things, the rising crescendo of music or emotion at the completion of the tale, the resolution as the characters stand in the real or metaphorical sunrise/sunset – that pay off that is at once a little saccharin and cheesey but ultimately fulfilling none-the-less... And The Night Circus has this in buckets, managing somehow to supply us with a rewarding, heart swelling end without resorting to stereotype or any form of cheese or artificial sweetener.

The final chapter with its implications for us as an individual reader... Morgenstern makes us part of the story, a continuum of the tale, forever immortalised and enchanted. And to do that and make you feel it, make you believe it – that is one of the greatest gifts an author can bestow,

In The Night Circus Morgenstern has even created her very own cult/appreciation society; the followers of the fictional Night Circus who travel with the circus, following it as it flits across the western world, wearing monochrome like the circus itself, the black only being broken by splashes of red, a scarf here, a glove or rose there, marking them as Reveurs, the dreamers who have made themselves part of the dream.

As you watch this author, as you follow her tale and watch her rise above the other words and worlds, appearing at signings and award ceremonies – look out for her Reveurs, for they'll be there showing their appreciation with smiles and scarlet.

If you liked Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell read this book. If you like Neil Gaiman's or Angela Carter's work, read this book. If you love or have lingering affection for childhood fairy tales, the brothers Grimm or Anderson, read this book. Simply – just read this book.

It is a hauntingly beautiful lullaby of a story, full of love, theatre, beauty and enchantment. Read it and you won't want to wake up. Read it and you won't know whether your real life or the Night Circus is the dream.

If I close my eyes I can hear the flags catching the breeze in the starlight, I can hear snowflakes rustling against canvas and the caramel popcorn smells so sweet...

I originally wrote this blog way back in September 2011 and have been lax in posting it. Since then I've attended a signing with Erin Morgenstern as a Reveur, have seen The Night Circus hit the best-sellers chart during the festive season and yearned to read it again.

Erin Morgenstern's next book is going to be a film noir re-telling of Alice in Wonderland, complete with seamed stockings and smoking guns... I can't wait.

2.83 pages...

The last time I posted I had hit the 50,000 word mark in NaNoWriMo and was fast approaching the end of November with a fair old chunk of story left to write... The larks of a Christmas in retail and the recovery from Christmas in retail have kept me away from the blog, but now I've caught my breath back... I guess you're wondering if I succeeded?

At 10pm ish of 30th November I validated my word count at around 60,025 words, (and here I and the word count widget at the NaNoWriMo web site will have to agree to differ...) with at least 15,000 to 25,000 words left to write to complete the tale... and the Champagne remained unopened...

Although I'd 'won' I didn't feel like I'd really done it as I hadn't actually completed the novel in a month... I'd hit the word count, but not completed anything... And so I kept going. I kept the 1,667 words a day goal and kept up the pace, finishing 'From The Library Of Parker Prentis' on 12th December at a total of 87,470 words written in 42 days...

I was like nothing I've experienced before... That amount of wordage in such a short time and wholely focussed on moving forward, never looking back, never re-reading and never editing... It felt like a blank cheque for creativity, it felt like every excuse to not do something had been taken away and all that was left was the drive to put a world on the page.

So, what worked?

Well, the pep talks from NaNoWriMo made officially registering completely worth it, especially the ones from Chris Baty. Every time he sent a pep talk I felt like part of the community, I felt like a brother-in-arms, I felt like he could feel my pain on the bad days and share my triumph on the good. The last page of his NaNoWriMo support title, 'No Plot? No Problem!' (ISBN 9780811845052) genuinely brought tears to my eyes with its motivational, reach-for-the-stars joy...

The NaNoWriMo sites stat pages for your progress were incredibly motivational too, offering a graph with the ideal word count zooming up the middle. I swear the notion of falling below that word count curve made me break out into a cold sweat... Especially when right next to it, in cold hard black and white pixels were the number of words you needed to catch up to regain your ideal word count... Seriously, a cold sweat... 

But best of all, and I can recommend this to anyone with a short term or long term goal; have a chart on the fridge and buy sticky gold stars... The boxed kit of 'No Plot? No Problem!' (ISBN 9780811854832) came with a month long chart with holes for daily word count and spaces to stick stars or sad faces for FAIL days. Of everything, this fridge display of daily fail or success, on display to anyone who comes into your house, helped me keep track of how well or badly I was doing and shamed me into writing even on the days when the new Assassins Creed game came out and the duvet called to me. I never thought yellow sad faces could chill the very blood in the veins...

And so, what now?

Well, it's been just over a month since I typed the last words of the first draft, eyes full of tears at leaving behind these characters, their world and the whole god-damned glorious experience of it all! And, well, it's probably time to consider editing... So, I'm going to read the whole thing through in the next week or so and then start editing and based on previous experiences, I know I should probably have a deadline and break the whole thing down into daily chunks. I find editing a slower and more complex exercise than writing, so I probably should give myself a couple of months to edit/re-write... It's 150-170 pages depending on formatting which at most brings me to the daily target of 2.83 pages a day...

Oh, here comes the cold sweat again...

Wish me luck and mighty Seshat, make it not shit... Please?