tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55217329259663608652024-03-13T03:59:37.429+01:00Marcus SedgwickYou will be directed to Marcus's new blog site...Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.comBlogger126125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-14070905993216536592016-08-29T11:08:00.000+02:002016-08-29T11:08:06.022+02:00Moving houseI've moved my blog over <a href="http://marcussedgwick.wordpress.com/">here</a>, to Wordpress, just because it looks so much nicer.<br />
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<br />Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-44734192112377141162016-07-12T18:00:00.000+02:002016-07-13T21:29:17.128+02:00Pigalle, then and now...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">I have a new book coming out this week, set in Paris in 1899, and as a fair old chunk of it is set in the district of Pigalle, I thought it would be worth sharing one or two interesting things I came across during what I prefer to pass off as 'research'.</div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvVqiyyDpQchyphenhyphenW46_YaOgrEyMNOn0A_DG9MeOcSsdpImyaNrDB-E28x-Opmm1sLR6af_IEZZgG6TBcoRHGUf1c8ekjA-E9FDAZPT-3kIMzJ4_6QekVywOq9sYtXwGvhkJZFY5COpBd6XX/s1600/Lenfer-cabaret-montmartre-1900.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvVqiyyDpQchyphenhyphenW46_YaOgrEyMNOn0A_DG9MeOcSsdpImyaNrDB-E28x-Opmm1sLR6af_IEZZgG6TBcoRHGUf1c8ekjA-E9FDAZPT-3kIMzJ4_6QekVywOq9sYtXwGvhkJZFY5COpBd6XX/s400/Lenfer-cabaret-montmartre-1900.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="237" border="0" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: start;">Paris, as everyone knows, is the city of light. But such simplicity can never be all there is to say about a place with such a long and intricate history, and Paris has its share of darker things too. For one hundred and fifty years, one area of the city has been synonymous with scandal, vice and covert thrills – Pigalle. </span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: start;">Today, the centreline of Pigalle – the Boulevard de Clichy – is commonly known as the sex district of Paris. It’s lined with garish vulgarity, and at Place Blanche is home to the most famous cabaret of all, the Moulin Rouge. In researching <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/mistermemory.html">Mister Memory</a>, however, I came across an almost forgotten world of strange cabarets and bizarre clubs in the area at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, and read about some things that could make one’s hair curl, even as jaded as we perhaps feel we are in the 21st century. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: start;">So which Pigalle is the more extreme? Which the naughtier? Which one would be more fascinating to spend an evening in? That of 2016, or that of 1899?</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: start;">Where else to start but the <a href="http://www.moulinrouge.fr/?lang=en" target="_blank">Moulin Rouge</a>? Opening in 1889, the Moulin has changed its nature several times over the course of 127 years. Originally it was conceived as a place in which the French Cancan (then called the Quadrille) could be danced, and if you’ve seen the <a href="http://gb.imdb.com/title/tt0203009/" target="_blank">Baz Luhrman film</a>, you’ve had a closer glimpse of its original nature than you might have imagined. The Moulin was closely consulted by the filmmakers and one or two of its more outlandish features are based in reality.</span></div>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">The façade of the Moulin Rouge, 1889 © Moulin Rouge</span></td>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Le bal d'ouverture, 1889 </span><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">© Moulin Rouge</span><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">
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At the time, the Moulin consisted of a ballroom for the performance of various dance crazes announced on a little sign above the dance floor, and boasted a garden next door, in which there really was a giant model elephant. And though this monumental pachyderm did not sport a boudoir on its back, there was a belly dancer in one of its legs – admission to gentlemen only, naturellement.
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Le 'Jardin de Paris', the Moulin Rouge </span><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">© Moulin Rouge</span></td>
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Later in its life the Moulin was transformed into a concert theatre – home to the new concept of the revue, it became a nightclub and then a cinema and in 1951 reopened its doors in something close to its current format – a large scale cabaret theatre for the production of large show routines – hundreds of kilos of feathers and sequins being the order of the day then and now. Today it’s hard to think of the Moulin Rouge as extreme. A few topless dancers aside (this is France, after all) the show on offer today is an over- or after-dinner affair, a ‘family show’ (the words of the Moulin’s Press Officer), and at least half the punters are tourists from outside France, arriving by the coachload and queuing rather incongruously just before kick off along the seedy Boulevard de Clichy.
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<div>In fact, I was <em>very</em> firmly told that the Moulin’s official position is that they are not even <em>in</em> Pigalle, but the ‘foot of Montmartre’, not wishing to be associated with the more sordid sights to be found in the Boulevard. This makes the Moulin not so much an anachronism but an anatopism – something that is out of place, rather than out of time. If the Moulin were in the Champs Elysees, for example, as its main rival <a href="http://www.lido.fr/" target="_blank">Le Lido</a> is, no one would think twice about it.
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">A dancer at the Moulin Rouge today </span><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">© Moulin Rouge</span></td>
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Back at the end of the 19th century however, scandal often clung to the Moulin. Though topless dancers did not officially arrive in the district till 1920 (when a still-extant rival down the road, <a href="http://www.lanouvelleeveparis.com/en/" target="_blank">La Nouvelle Eve</a>, started the trend) there would be from time to time something a little too much for polite Parisian society to ignore, for example, at the art student’s ball, Le Bal des Quat’z’Arts, of 1893, the presence of numerous nude women (and the occasional naked man) in parades depicting scenes from history and mythology was enough to result in a lawsuit.
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<div>And all this is to say nothing of the near riots that the students themselves inaugurated as they wound their way up from the Latin Quarter to end up cavorting in Place Blanche, in full costume (such as gladiators, cavemen, Native Americans etc etc) and libated to an extreme. Accounts of such outings make wonderful reading in the biography of an American art student of the day entitled <em>Bohemian Paris of Today</em>, from which it’s clear that, at the time, some Parisians enjoyed the thrill of spending an evening in Pigalle, as distinct from an evening in Montmartre, which was also fun, but nothing like as scandalous. Or as dangerous. Pigalle was, at the time, home to ‘Les Apaches' – gangs of thugs who steamed down the boulevards, robbing or fighting, and were certainly to be feared. They had their own gang style, as did their women, who would often be pimped out by their own boyfriends.
The frisson of daring to rub shoulders with such people was all part of the ‘fun’ to be found in Pigalle, but there were other, more bizarre attractions too and the Moulin Rouge’s elephant was not the only strange site along the Boulevard de Clichy.
Some of the other places one might decide to venture into on an excursion to Pigalle were Heaven and Hell.
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Le Ciel and L'Enfer cabarets</span></td>
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Here’s a closer look at Hell…
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMqvj0O1bK7cXgj8gxllXGLceBmQhGxP4Ui_Nv7NM30wQ82I27J0a2R32IcXbylyUGt7afTlKHeSAPpBOC-pSoQsbvRqX9vQ24WGTgCsz2mpftdtmDGTWugpl2M8hZJ-J-nziW3BPOn7xR/s1600/Cabaret-Lenfer.jpg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMqvj0O1bK7cXgj8gxllXGLceBmQhGxP4Ui_Nv7NM30wQ82I27J0a2R32IcXbylyUGt7afTlKHeSAPpBOC-pSoQsbvRqX9vQ24WGTgCsz2mpftdtmDGTWugpl2M8hZJ-J-nziW3BPOn7xR/s320/Cabaret-Lenfer.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="254" border="0" /></a></td>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">L'Enfer cabaret, Pigalle, early 19th century</td>
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Yes, Saturday night might see you visit both the Cabaret du Ciel and the Cabaret d’Enfer, which were handily placed right next to each other. Inside each place patrons would be greeted by appropriate characters; St Peter or the Devil, for example, and sip themed drinks. The same spot today is a Monoprix (a cheap supermarket), which some local wits compare to Hell anyway.
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Just down the road was the Cabaret des Truands (‘hoodlums’) (today the Théâtre des Deux Ânes), which looked like this. . .
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Cabaret des Truands - exterior</td>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Cabaret des Truands - interior</td>
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. . . and not too far away, my favourite; the Cabaret de Néant – the cabaret of nothingness, where customers would be assailed with a range of sights and experiences to make them ponder our flimsy mortality – lying in a coffin for a few brief moments being one of the attractions on offer.
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The third 'cave' of the Cabaret du Néant</td>
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You know an area has become hipster-level trendy when it gets its own four-letter acronym – Sopi (the network of streets South of Pigalle) may only have recently achieved this status but it’s long been an area of radical and varied nightlife. Opening its doors in 1897, in a dead-end alley off Rue Chaptal, the <a href="http://www.grandguignol.com/history.htm" target="_blank">Théâtre du Grand Guignol</a> was perhaps the most extreme of all the shows on offer, probably anywhere in the world, possibly ever. A sample of titles from the shows on offer will give a little indication of the horrific and sometimes downright bizarre fare on offer: The Dungeons; The Merchant of Microbes; Adultery; The Hanging; The Mark of the Beast among some of its more lurid pieces.
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The raison-d’être of the theatre was to perform plays to shock and amaze, and if no one fainted, was sick, or left during the evening, they hadn’t been doing their job properly. The work of the Théâtre du Grand Guignol predates the advent of extreme horror films by several decades, and great use was made of all kinds of special effects to simulate (we hope) torture, branding with hot irons, the letting of blood and even acid attacks to the face. Such was the realism of these effects that barely a night passed without incident in the audience, either in horror, or outrage – another signature tactic was the risqué nature of some pieces, frequently pushing the boundaries of how much nudity was permissible. Unlike so many of the other cabarets and theatres of the time, this one is still at least a theatre, and a good one at that; the <a href="http://www.ivt.fr/">International Visual Theatre.</a> </div>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The International Visual Theatre, once the site of the Grand Guignol</td>
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So which Pigalle is the more extreme – the one of today or of the late 19th century? Largely it depends on your point of view. Certainly it’s hard not to feel that today’s Boulevard de Clichy, for all its sex shops, the museum of eroticism etc, is rather one-dimensional and anodyne. It’s hard to think of anything less erotic than a ‘sex supermarket’, of which there are several along what it’s easy to think of as the Boulvard de Cliché. There are sex shows here, but little of anything that appears genuinely erotic, though that is after all such a personal matter.
It’s a view shared by local historian of Pigalle, <a href="http://histoiredeparis.wix.com/sylvaniedelutece" target="_blank">Sylvanie de Lutèce.</a> Working on archives in the Sorbonne, she’s researched the old times and the old shows, and works sometimes as a guide, sometimes as a producer of shows that hark back to something more real and honest. Once a month or so, a group or performers gather upstairs at <a href="http://www.maison-pigalle.com/">Le Pigalle</a> brasserie on the north side of Place Pigalle to perform routines that might not have been out of place a hundred years ago.
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<td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px;">Upstairs at Le Pigalle</td>
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Here, they dance the Cancan in the traditional way, a dance that Sylvanie points out was originally full of meaning, and political meaning at that – the various poses of the dance symbolising, and mocking, all sorts of establishment figures; legs joined in an arch represented the Church, legs held (rather impressively) up at the shoulder stood for the soldier at arms, and so on. None of this, of course, is known to the causal visitor to Pigalle or the Moulin Rouge today. Sylvanie thinks that’s a great shame, and is happy to talk to us for a long time about the area, and the way in which it’s changed. And is still changing, though one thing remains true across the decades; this has always been a defiant corner of the city. ‘Pigalle,’ she says, ‘is not a easy girl’.
As yet, there’s not so much sign of the rapid recent gentrification of the area that Soho in London has seen. But it’s on its way; as rents rise and as more ‘respectable’ enterprises creep eastwards along from Place du Clichy, the area will certainly change. That’s something that both the Moulin Rouge and Sylvanie de Lutèce will appreciate. The Moulin will no longer find itself stranded in a seedy sea of sex shops, and there’ll be more tourists willing to come and find more creative performances, plays, mise-en-scènes and the like by Sylvanie and her friends, things that might remind us of the wonderful variety, now long gone, but which was once upon a time found in Pigalle.
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<div><em><a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/mistermemory.html" target="_blank">Mister Memory published 13th July, 2016, by Mulholland Books.</a></em></div>
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<div>My thanks to Sylvanie de Lutèce, and Fanny Rabasse of the Moulin Rouge.</div>
</div>Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-83212424085965972742016-07-12T16:44:00.000+02:002016-07-12T16:44:26.491+02:00Kubrick again...I wrote <a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/stanley-kubrick-genius-on-tour.html" target="_blank">a while back</a> on the Kubrick exhibition that's steadily making its way around the globe, and what a treat it is for the fan of the great filmmaker.
That show still hasn't come to London, but I went to see the new <a href="http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/daydreaming-with-stanley-kubrick" target="_blank">Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick</a> yesterday, at Somerset House, and am reporting back to anyone interested and wondering whether it's worth the trip. The show is described as a 'new exhibition, curated by Mo’Wax and UNKLE founder, artist and musician James Lavelle, featuring a host of contemporary artists, film makers and musicians showcasing works inspired by Stanley Kubrick.'
Interesting idea, but are the results any good?
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Having been advised to pre-book a ticket, I thought the place might be rammed. As you can see from the picture above, it was pretty quiet and one could have just wandered in without a reservation. It was good that it was so empty, from the visitor's point of view, because many of the pieces in the show are immersive installations that really benefit from being alone in them.
Here's the second thing you see (the first being a portrait of the man in question by his wife, Christiane):
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This piece, by Mat Collinshaw, projects the face of a chimp over the image of a skull, all inside a space helmet. It's called Alpha-Omega and is of course a response to 2001.
Beyond this subtle beginning to the show, you enter this corridor, which fans of The Shining will appreciate:
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Around 20 rooms line this spine of the show, containing a total of 45 pieces of work. Some are very explicit references to Kubrick works, some less so, and take a moment or two to spot the connection to the film (or films) being alluded to.
Here are one or two pieces I enjoyed the most.
Room 7 (and it's a shame they didn't contrive a room 237) contains work by James Lavelle himself, amongst others, and includes this oversized teddybear referencing A Clockwork Orange, as well as numerous boxes from Jack's imprisonment in the pantry of The Overlook hotel. The colour in this photo is more or less accurate, the room being lit by eerie red neon.
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Visual and aural disturbance is a clear theme in the show, with many pieces reflecting this nature of much of Kubrick's work. There's a room by Haroon Mirza and Anish Kapoor for example, which I challenge you to stand in for more than a minute with your eyes open. Strobing light and sound producing nausea rather rapidly, if not entirely meaningfully.
However, just at the end of the corridor nearby, is this:
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This is a terrible photograph of something it's impossible to capture in a still shot anyway - it's a strobing LED light which is rather blinding in the darkness where it lies. There doesn't seem much to it, so you look away quite quickly, and that's when something weird happens. As you look away, a ghostly image flashes into your vision so fast it's hard to be sure you haven't imagined it. But repeating the experiment proves it - for the LED is designed to project a face into your peripheral vision, meaning you only see it as you glance away. The face is, of course, that of SK himself, immediately recognisable once seen.</div>
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In fact, Kubrick's face (and in one case, whole body encased in snow), is another recurring them of the show. And why not? It's nice to be reminded of the man behind the lens.</div>
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The two rooms I enjoyed the most were, firstly, this one, by Doug Foster, which is not the slitscan sequence from 2001, but a modern version of it, and very beautiful it is too. Sitting on a bench in a dark room, it would be easy to while away a couple of hours in a trance in front of it. </div>
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...And the second one was this, by Jane and Louise Wilson, based on one of the most famous of the movies that Kubrick never managed to make; Aryan Papers. Using stills from Kubrick's infamously intensive research process, the Wilsons simply project image after image with a simple voiced description of what the photo contains. Many of the images and film clips are of Kubrick's chosen actress, Johanna ter Steege.
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What lifts this simple idea to something mesmerizing are the mirrors on either side of the projected images, leading to a curving infinite repetition on both sides as you gaze at Kubrick's work in progress. When the shots becomes those of Jews in the ghettos of Poland, and one thinks of the horror that befell many, many individuals, the weight of this infinite repetition starts to give a tremendously unsettling tone.</div>
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In brief, yes, if you're a Kubrick fan, and can make the trip to London easily enough, it's worth the time spent. While some pieces feel overly contrived and lacking power, many are successful, to me at least, and pleasingly develop ideas and emotions you feel while watching the films. That's surely the aim of a show like this. But I still want the <a href="http://www.stanleykubrick.de/en/ausstellungstour-exhibition-on-tour/" target="_blank">Tour itself</a> to come to London...</div>
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Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-35509753053155093032016-06-29T12:36:00.000+02:002016-06-29T13:10:35.040+02:00My six favourite European novelsI am supposed to be working on something else (quite urgent) this morning, but the <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/mr-b-s-pledges-support-translated-fiction-post-brexit-338221" target="_blank">open letter from Mr B's Emporium of Books</a> has urged me to write this post instead, because nothing else seems as urgent right now. (This post is unashamedly personal, and contains public displays of political affiliation, as well as affection).<br />
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I have been in one of those pessimistic moods of late (and this was <i>before</i> last Thursday), where I question the value of being a writer; that my job doesn't save lives, or put fires out, or shape economic policy. It's one of those times where I can't shake Mishima's statement that the writer is the ultimate voyeur; that we sit around on the fringes of the action, making prurient notes in our notebooks, and then spilling our thoughts, whether they be of schadenfreude, or of joie de vivre, for our own private benefit.</div>
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I am lucky. My father founded and ran a group of EFL schools in Kent in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Since my mother worked there too and since my parents couldn't afford a baby sitter, my brother and I would often happily be dragged along to functions of various kinds. I'm sure they felt it was good for us to meet people from other cultures, growing up as we did in a very white part of England, but the accidental wisdom of this cannot be underestimated. My brother and I would stand around while we were shyly introduced to young students from around the world who'd come to learn English at my Dad's schools. I have fond memories of meeting many German, French, Italian, Swedish, Russian and Greek students amongst others from Europe, as well as people from further away: Iranians, Iraqis, Saudis, Nigerians, Egyptians, Japanese and so on and so on, and without fail, all I can remember are happy faces, warm smiles, and friendly handshakes. I learnt very early on that there is nothing to fear in the Other, <i>per se</i>; that there are kind and generous people across the world.</div>
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So today, and focussing for obvious reasons on Europe, here are my favourite European novels.</div>
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FINLAND (written in Swedish)</div>
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The Summer Book - Tove Jansson</div>
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As wonderful as Jansson's Moomin books are, my favourite of her works are The Summer Book and The Winter Book - both depicting life on one of the myriad small islands in the Baltic between Sweden and Finland, and the relationship between an elderly artist and her granddaughter. Somewhat autobiographical, utterly touching, with deceptively simple writing that lingers long.</div>
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ITALY</div>
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Foucault's Pendulum</div>
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His best known novel is perhaps The Name of the Rose, and as 'fun' as that book is, Eco's ability to combine elements of the thriller, the literary novel and historical fiction are never better displayed in this story that's what the Da Vinci code might be if it was (way) smarter and had its tongue in its cheek. The book every tin-foiling, bunker-building, survivalist-loving conspiracy theorist ought to read.</div>
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FRANCE</div>
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The Outsider - Albert Camus</div>
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Sadly, I have only ever managed to read a handful of books in their original language, one being The Summer Book, above, and another being this classic French novel of existential horror, and simmering racism. You'll notice that what links them both is that they are very short. But short novels are often the most powerful - their content is distilled, and hit you harder as a result.</div>
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SWITZERLAND</div>
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The Vampire of Ropraz - Jacques Chessex</div>
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Loosely based on the true story of a serial killer in the Jura Mountains in the early days of the 20th century, this is another short book that punches above its weight, using distancing prose in an almost reportage style that somehow makes the events it describes even more horrific. </div>
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Who was David Weiser? - Paweł Huelle</div>
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So much more than a coming of age story - this mysterious tale is a book about tolerance, friendship and faith. Set in the Poland of the late fifties, a country still very much living with the outcomes of war, it's the story of a strange, charismatic boy with powers no one understands and whose disappearance is never satisfactorily solved. </div>
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In my humble estimation, this is the finest novel ever written and I am going to say nothing about it (or we'll be here all day) apart from the thought that this masterpiece is set in the seven years up to 1914 and therefore the approach of war that will see Europe run with an ocean of blood – to paraphrase Jung's nightmare that was a premonition of European conflict – is never too far away. Look away now if you don't want to read the final line of the book (in the translation by H.T. Lowe-Porter).</div>
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<i>"Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?"</i></div>
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Think it's too much to intimate that we could see war again in Europe? That's what they said after the war Mann was writing about. It's what we said after the second war too. And after that horror, we founded a European community in which conflicts would be settled in debating chambers and courtrooms, as opposed to gas chambers and battlefields. Actual warfare was assumed to be a thing of the past, and then came the genocides of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and that was only 20 odd years ago.</div>
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To end, I've just returned from the American Librarian Association's conference. It was heartening to see how many people were not follwing the EU referendum, but as horrified (and amazed) by the result. They see the obvious implication for their looming presidential election this November, and realise that the same mentality that voted to leave is the same mentality that may elect a ranting racist to the most powerful job in the world. Driven by the same kind of fear-mongering, this is a mindset that refuses to accept that we live in a globally-connected world. We can either enjoy and profit from that cross-culturality, or we can live in fear and conflict.</div>
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Had my father lived, (he would have been 100 this year, born during a Zeppelin raid in the first world war), he would be weeping to see the events of the last few weeks. When he died, my mother asked me to sketch a design for a sundial to be set in the grounds of the college he created. The block of slate was duly made in Wales, and dispatched to Kent, inscribed with words she chose; under his name and dates is the following: 'This centre of international friendship is his memorial'. His was work that I find it easy to see as important - not only did his schools teach people English, I saw how they fostered tolerance and understanding. </div>
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In my jet-lagged haze, I am trying to tell myself that books are important. That they do have a place in all this; that perhaps, in the long run, they really are the most potent force of all, because they contain ideas, ideas that can change the planet. We know this to be true, or freedom of speech wouldn't be banned in more than half the nations on Earth. As Percy Shelley said, 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'.</div>
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So who's right - Mishima or Shelley? Are writers insensitive voyeurs, or honourable philosophers? I guess my view on this can be summed up in this thought about writing by another poet, John Keats, who said a writer spends his or her life trying to work out whether they are the healer or the patient. </div>
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The answer, of course, is both.</div>
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Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-55586980039042949342016-06-06T15:38:00.001+02:002016-06-14T15:32:52.084+02:00Saint Death<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Saint Death plays out on the borderland of Mexico and the USA. It's the story of Arturo, who has one night to play a deadly card game to save his friend Faustino's life – Faustino having fallen into working for a street gang in Juarez, connected to the drug trade.</div>
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It's a story about power, lies, and friendship, and it's about what happens we be build fences between rich communities and poor ones, and then try to pass things of value (i.e. drugs, guns etc) across those borders.</div>
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Hovering in the background, never too far away, is the mysterious figure of Santa Muerte, (Holy or Saint Death), a 'folk saint' of growing popularity in Mexico and parts of the US. She's a figure of disputed origins and disputed significance, and is worshipped by many different people from all sectors of society: the poor, the powerful, drug lords, prisoners, prison officers, police, prostitutes... the list goes on and on. If you're interested to find out more, this video from youtube is as good a summary as any of the 'white lady' (who goes by many, many names).</div>
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There's some confusion over the various icons of death that Mexico employs. </div>
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<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=la+catrina&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-rr_jwpPNAhXFHD4KHWvKDXgQ_AUIBygB&biw=1218&bih=664#tbm=isch&q=santa+muerte" target="_blank">Santa Muerte</a> is a (female) skeleton in a shroud, often depicted holding a scythe in one hand and the world in the other (the scythe suggests the more European-in-origin figure of the Grim Reaper but the 'bony girl' is a distinct personality).</div>
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(Other figures, such as general '<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=la+catrina&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-rr_jwpPNAhXFHD4KHWvKDXgQ_AUIBygB&biw=1218&bih=664#tbm=isch&q=calavera" target="_blank">calavera</a>' (skull) icons like the one on the cover of my book, and the girl known as <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=la+catrina&client=safari&rls=en&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-rr_jwpPNAhXFHD4KHWvKDXgQ_AUIBygB&biw=1218&bih=664" target="_blank">La Catrina</a>, are also separate entities.)</div>
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You can read an extract from Saint Death on The Guardian's <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2016/jun/06/marcus-sedgwick-saint-death-cover-extract?CMP=share_btn_tw#img-1" target="_blank">website</a>. It will be published on October 6th 2016 in the UK and April 2017 in the USA.</div>
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<br />Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-89748985086642996152016-05-26T15:25:00.000+02:002016-05-26T15:25:03.191+02:00The Ghosts of Heaven - cipher solvedThis post is probably only of interest to anyone who got to the end of <a href="http://marcussedgwick.com/Ghosts.html" target="_blank">The Ghosts of Heaven</a> and wondered what the page of numbers and letters at the end of the book was all about; the page in question being this:<br />
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A lot of people wrote to me, asking if it was a cipher, and in response to that, I posted <a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-ghosts-of-heaven-numbers.html">this</a> in April of 2015, just over a year ago, and around eight months after the first publication of the book in the UK. In short; yes, I said, it is a cipher, and no, I'm not going to give any clues about how to solve it; other than stipulating that everything need to solve the thing could be found in the book itself.<br />
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I wasn't giving clues because I like being mean, in fact it was very hard sticking to what I had decided; namely that I wanted to see how long it would take for someone to solve the cipher with no help from me at all, and I could be certain that help could come from nowhere else because no one (not even my editors nor family) knew what it was all about. (Note, you can only get away with this kind of thing if your editors trust you).<br />
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It was, therefore, with great happiness a couple of days ago that I received an email from one Erik Kjellgren of Texas, because he's cracked it: he sent me the solution. So as to give him full credit for his work, I asked him for his own words on how he did it:<br />
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"<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">Whenever I read a book I have this habit of reading all of the additional information inside of it before beginning on the main content. In the case of The Ghosts of Heaven, this involved your spiral definition, the introduction, and turning to the back to see the cipher you had left. At the time I didn’t think much of it, maybe assuming it to be an unnecessary filler page, and so began reading. I didn’t think of the cipher again until I reached page 310, and a series of artists were mentioned. I took AP Art History this last year and we learned, of course, about Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and The Spiral Jetty. I was completely unaware of Final Words by Rijndael, and so I googled it, only to find the Rijndael Key Schedule. I read through the Wikipedia page and was reminded of the final page of the book. I then googled “The Ghosts of Heaven Code” and was led to your blog post, saw your warning, and saw your hint of it all being available in the book. This basically confirmed for me that I was on the right track. I then googled “Rijndael Decipher”, and found </span><a href="http://rijndael.online-domain-tools.com/" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">http://rijndael.online-domain-tools.com/</a><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;"> (honestly this felt like cheating, but I can’t imagine anybody deciphering that code by hand). Using that resource, I realized that I only needed the mode and the key. I decided to skim over the beginning of the third quarter to see if I had missed something, and saw that it was said on page 290 that a woman had a “CBC of at least 256”. CBC was clearly what I needed for the mode, and because of this I also needed the initial vector in addition to the key. The key was easy, however. From the Wikipedia page I knew I needed a 16-digit key, and on page 321 Bowman gives a code of the first 16-digits of Phi. I decided that must have been the key (quite fitting seeing as Phi is sort of the key to the entire novel). I assumed the initial vector to be zero just out of hope, ended up being correct, and was able to put in the characters from that page 256 digits at a time to reveal the message."</span><br />
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This makes me very happy, as I said, because this are exactly the steps I hoped someone might take to figure it out, and Erik explains it all so succinctly there is nothing left for me to add. Except, perhaps, the solution itself... which is no great earth-shattering secret, just something I was thinking as I wrote the book, but nevertheless something which I hope makes the bleaker parts of it, and life, seem much less so.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">"'The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed..' So said a writer whose work has always been important to me. I would only add one thing; there are those who are destroyed, those for whom life is simply too strong, but as long as they are remembered in the hearts of their loved ones, they shall not die, but shall live forever..."</span><br />
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Not that I'd offered one, but a small prize is being dispatched to Texas very soon. Thanks, Erik, for making my day.<br />
<br />Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-83636215882190111762015-12-18T10:05:00.001+01:002016-05-10T02:06:42.571+02:00New books<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I knew it was a while since I had posted; coming back here today I see it's six months. Oops. I have some lame excuses about moving house, settling in to a new country and so on, but who's buying it?</span><br>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The truth is usually that I didn't have anything to say, and in that case, it's better to keep silent. But I have been writing, and working on various stages of different books, and so here's a quick post of what's happening, and what books I hope will appear in 2016.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Have a very good and peaceful holiday.</span><br>
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<span style="color: orange; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Mister Memory</span><br>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My second novel for the excellent people at <a href="http://www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk/" target="_blank">Mulholland</a>, Mister Memory is scheduled for July 2016, and is the final realisation of an idea I've tried to work with for a very long time, over a decade in fact. Inspired by the real story of Solomon Shereshevsky, it's the story of a man with a perfect memory. Shereshevsky was a Russian living in the early 20th century, who lived a pretty sad life due to his inability to forget. Mister Memory recounts the tale of Marcel Despréz, working in the clubs of Pigalle, Paris at the end of the 19th. It's a tale of murder and of power, but above all of the fact that in order to function, we have to find the balance between memory and forgetting.</span><br>
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<span style="color: orange; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Saint Death</span><br>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">October will (I hope) see the arrival of my next book for Orion. I've just finished the first draft, and am trying not to tinker with it for a while. It's set (literally) on the border of Mexico and the United States. It's about death, love, money, power, guns, gambling and lies. It's about three friends who are part of the kind of community that suffers greatly from the narco wars.</span><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font><div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If you're reading this in the States, however, it's more likely that the next YA book released will be this true story about an English writer and his small but significant role in the Russian Revolution. You can read more about it <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Blood_Red_Snow_White.html">here</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally, I'm now working on a short book/long essay about one of my favourite subjects, for Little Toller. This is a beautiful series (<a href="http://littletoller.co.uk/our-books/monographs/" target="_blank">have a look here</a>) and I'm really happy to be adding to it. It's possible to write about anything, anywhere - but it's fun when what you're writing about is all around you. As I write these words from my new writing room in our new house in the French Alps, with snow lying thickly on the ground, my work as a writer is made that little bit easier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That's it for 2016, but looking further ahead, 2017 should hopefully see the following books.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After Dark Satanic Mills, <a href="http://www.juliansedgwick.co.uk/" target="_blank">my brother</a> and I wanted to work on something else. This book is the result. It takes the Orpheus legend and recasts it during the Christmas of 1944 in London. Harry Black, conscientious objector, artist, is working as a fire warden as the doodlebugs and V2s pound the city towards oblivion. It's part novel, part graphic novel. There is exciting news about the artist for this one, but I'm not allowed to say who that might be, as yet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Another collaboration, this time with my great friend <a href="http://www.thomastaylor-author.com/" target="_blank">Thomas Taylor</a>. We've both posted bits and pieces about this long-running project for <a href="http://www.firstsecondbooks.com/" target="_blank">First Second Books</a>, which has been beset by delays. We're both now happy to say it looks like it's back on track and I hope 2017 will see it emerge. Thomas is doing an amazing job with the art, he's a total natural for comics, and I can't wait to see the finished thing.</span></div>
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</div>Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-42965963357876905732015-06-12T18:36:00.000+02:002015-06-12T18:37:36.129+02:00A short tale of international harmonySome good people at <a href="http://www.lrhsd.org/site/Default.aspx?PageID=851" target="_blank">Lenape High School</a>, New Jersey, USA wrote to me asking if I knew whether Braille copies of <a href="http://marcussedgwick.com/Invisible.html" target="_blank">She Is Not Invisible</a> were available in America. They've chosen the book to be their <a href="http://www.lrhsd.org/Page/354" target="_blank">One Book/One School</a> title for 2015/2016 and wanted to make it accessible to a couple of blind/visually impaired students. The whole point of One Book/One School is to make a book available for <b>everyone</b> in the community to read, after all.<br />
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Sadly it seemed that there isn't a Braille edition in the US, so I thought it was worth asking the <a href="http://www.rnib.org.uk/" target="_blank">RNIB</a> over here in the UK if they could help. They'd produced a Braille edition for publication day of She Is Not Invisible back in 2013, but I thought there might be some obstacles. I wasn't sure if UK Braille and US Braille are the same, for one thing, and for another thing Braille books are VERY expensive to make. That's the main reason why so few Braille books are produced (less than 1% of published titles) and that's a shame because it is terrible that being blind should stop you from having access to as many books as a sighted person. Yes, there are other options, and yes, not every blind person reads Braille, but when I spoke to various people when I was writing She Is Not Invisible I couldn't help but feel that some more money to make more books accessible to blind readers through Braille would be very welcome.<br />
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Fortunately for me, and for Lenape High School, the RNIB are just a truly wonderful organisation, and though their school is all the way over the ocean in another country, they made the decision to gift a Braille edition of the book to the school. (It turns out that UK and US Braille are almost identical: I'm told the differences are only when you come to write it, not read it).<br />
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The impact of this act of generosity is not just of benefit for the blind students, and to explain why, here's what Jaime Fauver, Media Specialist at Lenape High had to say when she received the book:<br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">"It arrived yesterday and we are so excited about it! I spoke with our special education teachers and they are also excited - not only for students who are blind or near blind and read Braille but also for the other students in the MD classes (multiple disabled). These students in this class suffer from a range of disabilities and the teachers are going to use this as an opportunity to discuss differences and unique challenges. When we took the book to the classroom today, all of the students were fascinated and intrigued. Most of the school materials for our partially/fully blind students are audio; however they know how to read Braille (we just didn't have the resources). The teachers are going to spend the last week of school turning this into a lesson about diversity and acceptance and how interesting and exciting each of the students' unique traits are!"</span><br />
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Diversity and acceptance. What better goals could we aim for?<br />
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Finally, the Photography II students at the school made a range of posters to advertise the book around the school, and put together this short video to showcase their work. It's worth looking at: there are some great interpretations in there, and some cover designers in the making, I think.</div>
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Finally, I want to say a massive thank you to Cathy Wright, Librarian at New College, Worcester for her ongoing advice when I don't know something about the unsighted world, to Lenape High for doing such good work with the book, and to the RNIB for their wonderful act of kindness.</div>
Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-84193192655160269222015-04-29T14:15:00.002+02:002015-05-15T09:19:24.920+02:00The Ghosts of Heaven numbersI'm writing this post for those that have read The Ghosts of Heaven and have wondered about the page of numbers at the close of the book. I'm getting emails asking me to explain it, so it seemed a good idea to write this post so that I have somewhere I can direct people to. If you haven't read the book, I wouldn't bother reading on.<br />
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This is the page in question:<br />
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Most of the people writing to me by email have guessed that it is a code of some sort. To be precise, (and I use all my words very precisely), in cryptographic terms it's not a code, it's a cipher. I have been asked to explain what it means, but I don't want to do that for a number of reasons, the most important of which is, as Stanley Kubrick said, 'You tell people what things mean, they don't mean anything anymore.'<br />
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I am interested to find out if anyone can solve it, and how long it takes for that to happen if so, without any help from me. This blog post will be the only thing I have to say on the matter. I am the only person who knows what it means and how to decipher it - not even my editor or closest family know, so the answer will go with me to my grave. If this is irritating, I'm very sorry. One or two people have been rather rude and angry seeming in their emails to me, which I suppose I shouldn't be surprised about. Someone asked me what right I had to put something in a book they couldn't understand. Hmm. There's a worrying thought for you.<br />
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Anyway, I will say here what I have said to anyone who has written to me so far.<br />
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1 - Yes, it is a cipher.<br />
2 - And yes, it can be deciphered: everything needed to do so is contained in the book.<br />
3 - As I said above, I use my words precisely.<br />
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If you don't understand it, or if you can't be bothered to try to work out what it means (and let's be honest, why should you be?) then that's fine. Not everything in life can be, or has to be, understood. Perhaps that's one of the things I was trying to suggest with the book.<br />
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To quote the poem by James Sarafian that I used a part of in <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Ghosts.html" target="_blank">The Ghosts of Heaven</a>, and which appears in full in <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Killing.html" target="_blank">Killing the Dead</a>:<br />
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"It is enough to know that not to know is enough.</div>
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It is enough not to know."</div>
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<br />Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-5789072577868839722015-02-26T13:55:00.000+01:002015-02-26T14:00:29.212+01:00YA IS NOT, NOR SHOULD IT BE, A GENREIn the way that often happens, a seemingly chance series of
conversations and references suddenly coalesce in your awareness, and something
that’s been nagging at you as an indefinite feeling becomes realised in the broad
daylight of your consciousness.<br />
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Over the past few weeks I have heard several references to
the ‘YA genre’. I’ll come back to that nomenclature later. During the same
period I have been witnessing a stream of books sent to me to review, or quote
for, every single one of which was written in the first person present tense,
with a certain breathless intensity of oh-my-weird-little-life. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually there’s cancer, death, divorce etc.
thrown in to the mix. Let’s be clear, there’s nothing wrong with writing in the
first person present in itself. Many good books have been written this way.
Well, one or two, at least. But it made me wonder why <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so many</i> books for young adults are being written in this way. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Many things determine the choice of narrative voice in a
book; but I believe it’s of utmost important that whatever narrative voice is
chosen, it is selected for what it can do for the book; how it will work
technically, as well as the emotional impact it provides. Here’s an example of
how the first person can go wrong; the most obvious limitation to it is that
since you as the writer only have your protagonist’s voice at your disposal you
can only convey to your reader things that the protagonist knows. That’s okay
if the plot of your book will work fine that way, but problems ensue as a
writer requires their reader to know things that the protagonist doesn’t. A <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">very</i> smart writer can find ways of
signalling thing to the reader of which the protagonist themselves is unaware.
Sadly the writer of the latest of such books sent to me did not seem to have coped with these limitations. The
result was a text in which the protagonist was constantly overhearing things
through walls, eavesdropping on phone calls, standing in doorways but remaining
somehow unseen, and in the very best case of all declared ‘if I was in a bad
movie I would jump into the closet now so I could hear their conversation. So,
I jump into the closet.’ I’m actually not kidding. <o:p></o:p></div>
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So what? Well, I’m fearing that the world of YA books is eating
itself. That its horizons are diminishing, its ambitions declining. Again, for
the sake of clarity, I am not saying there are no adventurous new books for
teenagers being published. There clearly are and you can of course tell me what
you think they are in the comments, if you wish. That’s not my point. My point
is that it feels as if the vast majority of new books for young adults fit into
one of two broad types; there is a) what we might call <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Twilight Games</i>, and there is b) the breathless first person
novel, or BFPN as I have started to call it, as described above.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And that’s why I think using the term YA as if it’s a genre
is not helping matters. As anyone who’s ever heard me speak will know I am very
wary of age ranging. Yes it’s inevitable, but overall I think it does more harm
than good. At most, that’s all ‘YA’ should mean – a way of placing books in
shops with a ROUGH idea that the titles may be appropriate for teenagers. What
YA most definitely should not be is a genre. Genres exist; Fantasy, Sci Fi,
Chick Lit, Dystopia etc etc etc. Fine. YA should not be on this list. Genres
are by definition limiting. <o:p></o:p></div>
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For me, the hallmarks of the teenage experience are these:
experimentation, rebellion, the thirst for originality. These things are what
attracted me to write in the way I have been in the first place, and when I
began, the term YA wasn’t really in use; they were just books for teenagers.
They went in a certain section in the bookshop, and their breadth and variety
was wonderful. Here, a book like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cider
with Rosie</i> could be shelved alongside <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Animal
Farm</i> alongside <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Outsiders</i>
alongside <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Chocolate War</i> alongside
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Shift</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I fear that we are now at risk of operating in a ‘YA world’,
in which we all; writers, teachers and students of creative writing, editors,
agents, publishers are self-defining what a YA book is, and it seems that that
definition is narrowing. It seems very hard to see beyond the two dominating
behemoths I’ve listed above. As the book industry continues to adjust to a
not-so-brave new world of online retailing, and so becomes ever tougher,
publishers are under enormous pressure, and thus increasingly are tempted to make ever more timid decisions. As
some will know, I worked in publishing for 18 years; I have seen such timidity occur,
and breed: ‘We can get this book through acquisitions because it’s a bit like
such and such’.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Perhaps I’m worrying about nothing. Perhaps all this just goes to
show the validity of that old adage ‘80% of anything is rubbish’. And that that was always so. And <i>if</i>
that’s so, then so be it. Let’s just try and ensure that the 80% doesn’t creep
up to 95%.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It takes a bold publisher, one who believes in what they are
doing, someone with the confidence of experience, or indeed of youth, to
champion a book that is utterly unlike everything else that’s flooding the
market. But it must be done, above all, in thinking about books that younger
minds will respond to, it must be done, because the desire for the original is
what the experience of being a teenager is all about. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
YA is not a genre. Referring to it as such will only
diminish us all.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-13996037455104091962015-01-11T13:41:00.002+01:002015-01-11T13:41:43.829+01:00In Defence of the YoungThis post first appeared at<a href="http://projectukya.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/ghost-of-heaven-by-marcus-sedgwick-in.html" target="_blank"> Project UKYA</a>.<br /><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One quarter of <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Ghosts.html">The Ghosts of Heaven</a> takes
place in pre-history, and features a young woman on the verge of making the
connection between the spoken word and making a mark. When she does, she will
effectively have invented writing, one of the cornerstones of human
civilisation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve written <a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-oldest-story-in-world.html">before</a>
on what I believe must be the oldest story in the world, or one of the oldest,
at the very least, and it’s this: our hero goes into the Dark Space, to face
the unknown, and returns triumphant, or fails, tragically. This is the story of
Theseus in the labyrinth, of Orpheus in the underworld, of Bilbo in Gollum’s
cave, and so on and so on. All these stories are, I believe, versions of what
must have been told around the fire-pit in the early days of Mankind (which is
hard to be exact about). Our primitive ancestors, (and I hate using the word
primitive, they must have been pretty sophisticated by the standards of the
time), often used caves, for safety and shelter, perhaps for sacred purposes,
certainly as places they practiced the earliest forms of art. Caves like
Lascaux and Chauvet in France are witness to human practices that are possibly
30,000 years old. Blombos in South Africa shows artistic activity on an
organised basis that is possibly 100,000 years old. For whatever reason, we
needed to go into those caves. But what might be waiting there? Perhaps
nothing, but perhaps a beast of some kind, a lion, bear or wolf? And what tales
would have been told of the brave hunter who first ventured into the darkness.
We have such a strong, limbic link to darkness, and I think this is why; are
inner, collective memories have not forgotten the fear of voyaging into the
dark unknown.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Once we had claimed a cave as safe, then we could begin to
use it; the art in the caves mentioned above and many others is breathtakingly
powerful. I’ve visited a few of these caves over the years, and there is still,
tens of thousands of years later, a strong magic about the things depicted on
the walls. What’s been revealed relatively recently is that at least some of
this art was made by <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2006/04/12/1614422.htm">teenagers</a><span class="MsoHyperlink">,</span> and even children. Some of the commentary on this discovery
is revealing in itself - it wants to place this Stone Age adolescent art in the
same vein as the graffiti of modern times; testosterone-induced markings by
young adults to express their clumsy urges. As so often with media representations
of the teenager, we are shown the negative and reprehensible. But there’s
another way of looking at our image of the teenager.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/">recent
research</a> has shown, the teenage brain operates differently from that of the
child and the adult. Some of the all-too-well rehearsed comments about teenager
behaviour; from their sleeping endlessly, to their desire to experiment, take
risks and so on, seem to be explained by this new neuroscience. The usual
conclusion to this is; well, there, you see – they may be annoying but it’s not
their fault they behave so badly, it’s their brain chemistry. But there’s
another way to look at this.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let’s go back to our Stone Age society again (not literally.
I like toothpaste and dishwashers). The Stone Age itself is an enormous period
of time. Forget the 100,000 years before the present mentioned above; that’s
recent history. The Stone Age began, when our earliest ancestors began using
stone tools, around <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">two and a half
million years</i> ago. This is the time not of our own species homo sapiens,
but of other human species from whom we are descended, such as homo habilis.
The Stone Age lasts a VERY long time, and there are different names for
different parts of it, but by and large things are more or less crawling
forward (a bit of antler use here, some flaking of flints there) until we get
to around a mere 80,000 years ago. From then until around 30,000 years ago,
there is a sudden acceleration in what Anthropologists call “cumulative
technological evolution”, resulting in what they like to call “behavioural
modernity” which basically means we’re painting pictures, building homes,
creating systems of belief and no longer dragging our knuckles in the dirt. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What was the life expectancy in the Stone Age? Contrary to
popular belief, while the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">average</i>
life span was perhaps only around 18-20 years, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">maximum</i> was much higher, <a href="http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/life-expectancy-myth-and-why-many-ancient-humans-lived-long-077889">perhaps
60 years old</a> – but nevertheless, this means that a large proportion of the
population would have been young. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think it’s very likely that the teenage brain is the way
it is for a very good reason. Evolution doesn’t tend to keep its experiments
for the sake of it; natural selection keeps those traits that prove useful to
the development of the species, the others tend to die out. So could it be that
the teenage brain, with all its experimentation and risk-taking, was just what
our species needed to accelerate out of the Middle Stone Age and into the Late,
when we began to behave in a much more recognisably modern way? Don’t forget
that at this point in evolution, we are living alongside other human species;
Neanderthals being the most celebrated. There is evidence that we interbred
with the Neanderthal to an extent, but however it happened, homo sapiens out-evolved
everyone else, became the dominant species, and the rest as they say, is
history. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s also now believed that everyone in the world from North
and South America, Asia, Australia and Europe is descended from a very small
founding group from Africa, of maybe just a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5299351/African-tribe-populated-rest-of-the-world.html">few
hundred individuals.</a> Times were hard; many populations must have entirely
perished, ending that branch of our species for all time. If homo sapiens was
to flourish, we needed as many families to survive as possible, and luckily for
us, 14 distinct populations survived in Africa, and one made it out of Africa
to found the rest of the world. So maybe there’s something good to say about those
risk-taking, experimenting teenagers. Maybe they were the ones who invented
things, such as the girl in <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Ghosts.html">The
Ghosts of Heaven</a> who’s on the cusp of inventing writing. Maybe they were
the ones responsible for the survival of our charming, respectful, spiritual
and caring species, homo sapiens. Whether that’s a good thing or not, is of
course, a topic for another day.<o:p></o:p></div>
Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-75644638667947940472014-11-17T16:45:00.001+01:002014-11-17T16:45:48.158+01:00I don't understand...This post first appeared at Wondrous Reads<br />
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Sometimes, when I’m speaking to someone about one of my
books; they’ll tell me they didn’t understand it. This happens a lot with the
end of <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/White_Crow.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">White Crow</i></a>, and then there’s the
whole thing with <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Midwinterblood.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Midwinterblood</i></a>. And when that
happens, I try and help them understand it, which is usually just a case of
asking them to re-read bits of it more slowly. I’m not a writer who tells you
something five times. I usually say it just once, and if I say it any more in a
first draft, my editor makes me take it out in a rewrite anyway. That’s one of
the reasons that my books are sometimes shorter than other people’s. And that’s
one of the reasons why I wish some people would read more slowly. Books are patient;
you can afford to take your time when you’re reading for pleasure. Anyway, I do
my best to explain, but to be honest, what I’m actually thinking on the inside,
when someone says they don’t understand something, is ‘good’.<o:p></o:p></div>
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If that sounds mean, I should try and explain. I don’t
believe you have to understand something in order to understand it. That sounds
like nonsense, so I had better explain some more. I don’t believe that you have
to consciously, clearly, easily understand something through and through in
order for you to connect with it, in order for you to take away something
valuable from it, in order for you to ‘get it’. In fact, I think that sometimes
the works of art that seem initially at least to confuse use and disorientate
us are the ones from which we gain the most in the long run.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I believe that the right words, the right music, the right
images can in some way connect with older and deeper parts of our minds than
the ones we use to pass A-Level Maths or learn to drive a car with.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFXERjxh6vuCBfuMnUb5WyjkkJC3ooRC5zG6kux_srByikZVTD1UP3ihU-263JbovJloUeS3wq12a6XAnYBzmmKao2x7xEPmZnSxA-QEHMmVtmz9lqXDmFQhK-GesLpwkxyWN8akNAV_ec/s1600/2001_A_SPACE_ODYSSEY_2254.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFXERjxh6vuCBfuMnUb5WyjkkJC3ooRC5zG6kux_srByikZVTD1UP3ihU-263JbovJloUeS3wq12a6XAnYBzmmKao2x7xEPmZnSxA-QEHMmVtmz9lqXDmFQhK-GesLpwkxyWN8akNAV_ec/s1600/2001_A_SPACE_ODYSSEY_2254.jpg" height="181" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keir Dullea as astronaut Dave Bowman, from 2001: A Space Odyssey</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And as evidence of this, I offer you <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4">2001: A Space
Odyssey</a>, by Stanley Kubrick. 2001 is many people’s candidate for the
greatest film of all time and in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFI_The_Top_50_Greatest_Films_of_All_Time">polls
by people who know</a>, it’s usually in the top ten (it’s in my top two). A
little history: The film was written by Kubrick and legendary science-fiction
writer Arthur C. Clarke, based on a short story of Clarke’s called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sentinel of Eternity</i>. Kubrick ran
through many possible titles before settling on ‘Odyssey’, hinting at the epic
nature of Man’s voyage through prehistory and into the future. Released in
1968, it’s an incredible film, ground-breaking in many, many ways, and far
ahead of its time in certain respects. To give an example; the film accurately
portrays life in zero-g, the view of the Earth from the moon and various other
aspects of space travel and all this was done over a year before we actually
set foot on the Moon. (Kubrick got this stuff so correct that certain sorts of
people have used it to create a laughably lovely conspiracy theory in which <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories#Stanley_Kubrick_involvement">Nasa
got him to fake the moon landings</a> so America could win the space race).<o:p></o:p></div>
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The main thing about 2001 however, is that it is weird. It
is a very mysterious film, there is very little dialogue (none at all for the
first 32 minutes) and when there is dialogue, it’s casual, almost throw away.
It’s been called a silent film in the sound era, despite the fact that music
plays a vast and vital role in the film. As if strange occurrences on
prehistoric Earth, and later, on the Moon have not been enough to unsettle us,
the final sequences (known as Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite) take us on a
trip in the most psychedelic sense of the word. A small snippet <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imbxqv_5TJU">here</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Now the point of all this is that I first saw this film when
I was about seven years old My dad ran a film club at the arts centre he ran,
and from time to time, my brother and I would go along and watch all sorts of
movies that we were ‘way too young to see’. I think my dad knew differently. I
cannot pretend for one minute that I understood anything about the film after
the first hour or so. Even today, people argue and debate and write dissertations
about what the end of the film means. But my point is that it doesn’t matter.
You don’t need to understand in order to understand. The images, the music, the
words; they all connect directly to a deeper part of the brain, and our
experience is all the richer for it. I saw 2001 at the age of seven and my mind
was blown wide open, never, I suspect, to close again.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What has all this to do with The Ghosts of Heaven? Well,
here’s one thing; realising that I was writing a story in four parts, which
span human existence from prehistory to the far future, it would be
disingenuous of me not to acknowledge my love of Kubrick’s amazing film; hence
the name of the protagonist in the space section, Keir Bowman (fans will know
why), hence the strapline on the cover, and hence many other things. And as to
understanding the book, well, I’m not sure I understand it myself, and I wrote
the thing. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t got something to say.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-2139248054893515102014-10-30T09:42:00.001+01:002014-11-17T16:39:54.968+01:00You're on your own<br /><br />This post first appeared on the Huffington Post and at Delightful Book Reviews. <br /><br />I hate giving tips for writers. I really do. Not because I don’t want to help other people with their writing, but because there really are no rules for writing. But, as a writer, you frequently get asked to compile lists of tips, or even just a top three, and to be honest, I cringe every time I do it. <br /><br /><br />But here are three (non) tips. I’m not saying there aren’t some things that it might be helpful to think about. It’s just that they are probably different for everyone – one of the key joys about being a writer is that everyone seems to do it slightly differently. Not only that, but becoming a writer is to set out on a life-long journey of learning – anyone who thinks ‘that’s it, I’m a writer now and I know what I’m doing’ is a) probably fooling themselves, and b) probably a very bad writer. It’s much more common to feel out of your depth, unsure of yourself at times (if not all the time), and wonder why you ever started to try to write in the first place. <br /><br />But this is normal, so there’s my first (non) tip; get used to not knowing what you’re doing. Writing is hard enough without adding to your woes by worrying incessantly about it. And yes, of course you’re going to worry about it; that’s normal. Just don’t worry about worrying about it. That’s not going to help. <br /><br />Here’s my second (non) tip – be very suspicious of anyone writing lists of tips (including these ‘non’ tips). I teach on creative writing courses from time to time, so you might say, ‘well, what do you tell your students then?’ and what I tell them is that I’m going to mention lots of ideas and concepts and suggestions as to how to write, but that it’s up to each of them to take away the things that mean something to them, that resonate, that might work in their own writing practice. Writing is unusual in that it’s one of the very few jobs in the world that you teach yourself to do. <br /><br /><div>
Even if you do go on a creative writing course, I believe it’s up to you to navigate your way through the ocean of (frequently conflicting) ideas that you will come across. Should you plan your book, or not? Should you know how it ends before you start, or not? Should you write every day, or not? Should you set times to write, or word counts, or leave it all free? All of that is up to you. <br /><br />What I can say though, is to read as much as you can. If you (seriously) want to be a writer, you probably read a lot anyway. You can add to that reading everything I’m telling you to ignore – all the ‘how tos’ and ‘top tips’ and essays and books and blogs on writing. But remain suspicious. If you think (as I do) that writing a book by writing a part in the middle and then a bit near the start and then the end and then a bit three quarters of the way through sounds like a ridiculously complicated way of making a hard job harder (and you’d be right, of course ;-) ) then don’t do it. Just because your favourite author imports especially sticky post-it notes from Germany (yes, I do know someone who does that) in order to plan their novels, doesn’t mean you have to. <br /><br /><br />My final (non) tip is this: get used to paradoxes. Writing is full of things that don’t make sense. It is often a question of having to do contradictory things; I believe you need to ignore the question of who you’re writing ‘for’, and yet, at the same time, you cannot help but think about how ‘your reader’ is going to interpret something. You want to be original and new and yet you have to be familiar at the same time. You have to forget that every story has already been told a thousand times, and then show us how you can do something new with that story. <br /><br />Writing is full of contradictions. It is hard and it is challenging, and yet, when you succeed in achieving a small part of what you set out to achieve, the feeling of contentment is deep and powerful. That’s the drug that keeps us all going, and like anything in life that’s worthwhile, the journey to achieve can be a hard one. But that’s normal, so don’t be afraid. </div>
Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-23044806329075393562014-10-29T11:12:00.001+01:002014-11-27T11:05:38.922+01:00The Case of Howard Phillips Lovecraft<span style="color:#000000;">This post first appeared on </span><a href="http://readingawaythedays.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/guest-post-case-of-howard-phillips.html" rel="">Reading Away The Days</a><span style="color:#000000;"><br /><br />Very few writers can truly be called unique; American horror stylist H.P. Lovecraft is surely one who can. Lovecraft, never a success in his own lifetime, and barely more than a cult figure since, is nevertheless one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The same can be said of the writer whose work in turn most influenced Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s work was perhaps a little wider read than Lovecraft’s ever was during their respective lifetimes, but Poe’s nevertheless was derided and belittled while he was still around to hear such things. Only in France, for some reason, was Poe truly celebrated, and outside of that it’s been the sad fate of these men to only achieve their true worth after their deaths.<br /><br /></span><table border="0.000000" cellpadding="0.000000" cellspacing="0.000000"bordercolor="000000"><tr height="0"><td valign="middle" width="602"><p style="text-align:center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSqBJZ9HBH8zqW5V4BKS3WonhTK22TbmAEzBF2WXkfv3vHlDVWAgS10A3irof9rh6pxwnQRbxcy95nrgdPRIfnehSObqP3xZnLkPSGwAbhWlPflKrWzav_4VCHlyo_35ulU-FRmhMs0JIs/s1600/IMG_6445.JPG" rel=""><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/blog_files/thecaseofhowardphillipslov_1.jpg" width="1600" height="1600" /></a></td></tr><tr height="0"><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span></td></tr><tr height="0"><td valign="middle" width="602"><span style="color:#000000;">Lovecraft's grave marker in Providence, Rhode Island. Like many other fans, I left a quarter as a token of respect.<br /></span></td></tr></table></p><p style="text-align:left;"><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#0000E9;"><u><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></u></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br />If you don’t know Lovecraft’s work, a few titles will begin to give you the idea: The Shadow out of Time, The Dunwich Horror, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dreams in the Witch House. But these are no conventional horror tales; Lovecraft not only created a style all of his own, he also created an entire occult mythology for the world in which some of his tales are set. His pantheon of hideous ancient gods; the Old Ones, Cthulhu being the most notable, are painted as being horrible dark influences on humanity from times before our imagining and places beyond our understanding.<br /><br />Lovecraft created his own corner of New England; Arkham, Dunwich, Innsmouth, the Miskatonic river as the diabolic centre of unnameable terrors and lurking creatures, drawing upon (modern) America’s oldest places as his inspiration for twisted versions of reality. Here, we find decrepit houses touching eaves across foetid alleyways, we find unknown and unknowable things sliming their ways from murky harbours, and time and time again, we find madness. Madness was one of Lovevcraft’s recurring themes. His own father was confined to a mental hospital when Lovecraft was just three years old, possibly suffering with General Paralysis of the Insane (as it was known then) – the tertiary stages of a syphilitic infection. It’s hard not to see this as a direct influence on the writer, a writer whose own life was riddled by ill health and strange behavioural issues.<br /><br />In coming to write the section of The Ghosts of Heaven known as The Easiest Room in Hell, I decided I wanted to pay homage to a writer whose work I have always enjoyed. This part of the book is set in an insane asylum on Long Island, New York in the 1920s, and features a poet who has gone mad. His name (and Lovecraft fans will know why) is Charles Dexter. Dexter spends his days writing a novel in his head, much to the confusion of his doctors. He strikes up a friendship with a newly arrived Dr James, who hasn’t heard of the poet before. When he learns about his writing, he gets hold of a copy of Dexter’s poetry collection, On Drowning, and reads one of the mad poet’s poems. And here then, was a chance for me to let rip and write some Lovecraftiana of my own; the poem called...<br /><br /></span><span style="color:#0000E9;"><u><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></u></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align:center;"><span style="color:#000000;"><em>Poquatuck</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br /><br />Sea-found, wind-worn and wild; </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />the land will lose.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />Here are places so old as to defy memory;</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />The point, the creek, the inlet.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />The old tide mills, dilapidated,</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />were but a blink in the eye of time.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br /><br /><br /></em></span><em><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOg3fYRWHmbVZiyd79Sl7s4ZOCZukHmn9P_PQ1kQ5f4VnrkFO2kRVCScuE_YQUqXDRCpqgglhONY4rxo-5DTngQOEGaZlP4e1Bonkifggtoeiuwv0sQhNUTdoEiUyp_q4BmS5mcuBwsBSQ/s1600/Untitled.jpg" rel=""><br /></a></em><span style="color:#000000;"><em>And there are older things here, </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />things which the oyster boats dredge from the deep.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br /><br /><br />There on the headland; </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />the asylum, </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />and the asylum boneyard,</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />where the land-borne dead are corrupted,</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />harmless bodies are sucked of life; </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />in the cemetery.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br /><br /><br />Graves grow from the soil; </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />the black fingernails of the monstrosity beneath.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />It lies far down, under the ground, under the sea, </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />pushing an arm up,</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />up to the air </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />a hand with a thousand fingers; and every fingernail a grave.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br /><br /><br />Deep in the sea, at the other end of the arm</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />sits its heart-brain,</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />this being from beyond the stars, from the beginning of time:</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />its mashy form quivers inside the shell </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />which protects </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />and resonates its thought-waves across the world </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />in ancient reverberation.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br /><br /><br />Spiral-set shell mind, </em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />It blows a soundless horn to us all, a warning:</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br />I am coming.</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em><br /><br /><br /><br /></em></span></p>Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-8080958537661626562014-10-13T19:57:00.000+02:002014-11-27T11:05:34.408+01:00STANLEY KUBRICK: genius on tour<p style="text-align:center;"><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align:left;"><span style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><img class="imageStyle" alt="Untitled5" src="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/blog_files/untitled5.jpg" width="1193" height="1600" /><span style="color:#0000E9;"><u><br /></u></span><span style="color:#000000;">The sign for the Paris leg of the Kubrick exhibition, at Cinémathèque Française, uncannily brought to mind the famous ‘monolith’, the mystery at the heart of his best known and most revered film; </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em></span><span style="color:#000000;">. Intentional, no, but it signalled the right note of portent for this extraordinary show which, to date, British film fanatics have not had the chance to see.<br /><br />I was fortunate enough to stumble across the show in Paris in 2011, and though reviewers should always be sparing with hyperbole, it was a show remarkable enough to get me on a place to see it again, this summer, in Krakow.<br /><br />For the Kubrick aficionado, the show is a space in which to dream, but even for those less familiar with his work, it delivers something very special. The show was created by </span><a href="http://www.stanleykubrick.de/en/ausstellung-exhibition/" rel="">Deutsches Filmmuseum</a><span style="color:#000000;">, but in association with the Kubrick estate, which means that the curators were able to assemble an unrivalled collection; the sheer quantity and variety of exhibits on display combine to offer multiple pathways into Kubrick’s films. <br /><br /></span><table border="0.000000" cellpadding="0.000000" cellspacing="0.000000"bordercolor="000000"><tr height="0"><td valign="middle" width="772"></p><p style="text-align:center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglK-ifNz8BhhovlJKZSuvYsV0hLXI0UePgQmhYiTUNv-5m_dobeIAApZxafIfiDf0TLRIKkkbKmU3B5b0WCF-3PqpysSUDZsL01mwiyfhb7JGVpYkUTyhsbuCUAy4ksiMMgbBxcUL-1NaN/s1600/Untitled4.jpg" rel=""><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/blog_files/stanleykubrickgeniusontour_2.jpg" width="1439" height="1075" /></a></td></tr><tr height="0"><span 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mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:JA;} </style><![endif]--><tr height="0"><span style="color:#000000;"> </span></td></tr><!--StartFragment--><tr height="0"><span style="font:16px Times, Georgia, Courier, serif; color:#000000;">Extras on the set of </span></td></tr><tr height="0"><span style="font:16px Times, Georgia, Courier, serif; color:#000000;"><em>Spartacus</em></span></td></tr><tr height="0"><span style="font:16px Times, Georgia, Courier, serif; color:#000000;">, each with a number so Kubrick could make miniscule adjustments to every one from behind the camera.</span></td></tr><tr height="0"><span style="color:#000000;"> <br /></span></td></tr></table></p><p style="text-align:left;"><span style="color:#000000;">There will be something here to fascinate you; for the technician there’s the installation showing the front projection sequences on </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>2001</em></span><span style="color:#000000;">were put together, or the specially commissioned Zeiss lens which allowed Kubrick to shoot </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>Barry Lyndon</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"> by candlelight. For the screenwriting nerd there are complex diagrams of schedules and shooting scripts annotated in Kubrick’s own hand. <br /><br /><br />For the design junky, there are the mannequins from the Korova milkbar (</span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>A Clockwork Orange</em></span><span style="color:#000000;">), or a model of the war room from </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>Dr Strangelove</em></span><span style="color:#000000;">, the work of Ken Adams, the man responsible for the most stylish of early James Bond sets.<br /></span></p><p style="text-align:center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAXOWNKSI3Q1b-Y13fc0Se_K4UJh_wrruqhvd8VgpQu-z1ft1pG_ChcO2Cb72dSHVebATkAHc22IHxERnRas2V1AUYIopbH-51CcKpC37cBl_M8MOMPGk_74Lnw7w5XR9kFCIYIRROj5At/s1600/Untitled3.jpg" rel=""><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/blog_files/stanleykubrickgeniusontour_3.jpg" width="1439" height="985" /></a><span style="color:#0000E9;"><u><br /></u></span></p><p style="text-align:left;"><span style="color:#000000;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></span></p><p style="text-align:center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLbx_2Xs6UprWlzV5Mm0_WL0yEoJa1T2v7o_usDLx0j0JkE3hoSZND6JHJKNrsYrSO8UHnc9OxO540wffWa7D5Xjpc1CIMLxenYNSEqHJgHS9NAE238Rc3ytLf1Ffj2z5yJaQk42h0dgkO/s1600/Untitled2.jpg" rel=""><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/blog_files/stanleykubrickgeniusontour_4.jpg" width="1439" height="1127" /></a><span style="color:#0000E9;"><u><br /></u></span></p><p style="text-align:left;"><span style="color:#000000;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Some of the most engaging items are letters; both from Stanley Kubrick to his many collaborators, and those received by him, often from detractors; a Mrs Dobbs from Florida wrote to express ‘protest, utter dismay and complete disgust after viewing the despicable movie made by you and shown at our local theatre last week’ (and that wasn’t even about </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>A Clockwork Orange </em></span><span style="color:#000000;">as you might expect, but </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>Dr Strangelove</em></span><span style="color:#000000;">).<br /><br />But it was the ephemera from </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>2001</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"> that stopped me in my tracks. We’re given the chance to get up close and personal with an ape suit from the Dawn of Man sequences. Completely terrifying: the aggression modelled into the ape’s face brings back memories of that ‘primogenital’ murder, as one of our distant ancestors discovers the first tool, and that tool is a weapon. Next to the ape, the helmet of Dave Bowman’s space suit. It takes an effort of will to look at this icon and remember that it is not real, and that it never went into space. Kubrick employed two ex-NASA scientists on the movie in order to get this, and countless other aspects of space travel, accurate. Such was Kubrick’s drive for perfection.<br /><br /><br />That perfectionism is legendary; stories about the dictatorial auteur abound. There is a similarity to Hitchcock in this regard; Hitchcock was the British director who went to work in America, Kubrick was the American who came to work in the UK, both shared an absolute belief in control and detail. Hitchcock, for example, claimed never to need to look at a script once shooting had started, he knew it by heart by the time that first day of principal shooting came by. What that allowed him to do was focus on how he was going to get the best from his actors, from his cameraman; he already knew what shots he was going to ask for.<br /><br /><br />Like all legends there is an element of truth to it, and an element of fiction. What’s clear from the items on display is that Kubrick possessed an intense desire to get it right; to get what he wanted on film. Making films is a complex business, in order to get exactly what he wanted he sometimes went to extreme lengths. He once said that the reason that so many bad films were made in Hollywood was not that people wanted to make bad films, that there were many well-intentioned people trying to make good films. The reason they make bad ones is that the problem, as he put it, ‘lies in their heads, not in their hearts’. By which he meant that it’s the entire structure of Hollywood that mitigate against good film-making. To break through this takes an enormous feat of will.<br /><br />But what’s also clear from the show is Kubrick’s gentler, human side; for example in utterly polite, considered responses to the Mrs Dobbs of the world. Here is a man, after all, who during the production of </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>2001</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"> was so concerned that IBM might be offended by what he was doing that he wrote to reassure them of his good intentions.<br /><br /></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOg3fYRWHmbVZiyd79Sl7s4ZOCZukHmn9P_PQ1kQ5f4VnrkFO2kRVCScuE_YQUqXDRCpqgglhONY4rxo-5DTngQOEGaZlP4e1Bonkifggtoeiuwv0sQhNUTdoEiUyp_q4BmS5mcuBwsBSQ/s1600/Untitled.jpg" rel=""><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/blog_files/stanleykubrickgeniusontour_5.jpg" width="1260" height="1100" /></a><span style="color:#0000E9;"><u><br /></u></span><span style="color:#000000;">Like Hitchcock, Kubrick was also intensely aware of the fact that form can create content. The restrictions of a structure, the limitations of budget, far from limiting the artist can paradoxically sometimes lead to greater creativity. To take just one example; the original intention for the sequences at the end of 2001 were for us to actually ‘meet’ the alien presences behind the monolith. As shooting wore on, and overran, there simply became a pressing financial need to finish the movie. Arthur C Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay, and Kubrick put their heads together, and instead of actually seeing these aliens, we are left with the mysterious ‘Star Child’ sequence, which I can’t help feeling is an utterly more successful end that the original might have been (if you felt the anti-climax when little grey men wander out of the awe-inspiring ship in </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>Close Encounters</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"> and you might agree).<br /><br />Kubrick, to the New York Times in 1968 on </span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em></span><span style="color:#000000;">;<br /><br /></span><span style="color:#000000;"><em>“Essentially the film is mythological statement. Its meaning has to be found on a sort of visceral, psychological level, rather than in a specific literal interpretation.”</em></span><span style="color:#000000;"><br /><br />I said above that reviewers should avoid unnecessary hyperbole, and yet I still have to say that this is not only the best exhibition about film that I have seen; it’s probably the finest exhibition of any kind I’ve had the chance to experience.<br /><br />If you’re interested in seeing the show, well, sadly for those on British shores it now moves further away; to Toronto, but even that might be worth the trip. After that, you’ll have to go to Seoul. 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Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-17947224073526964612014-10-07T11:51:00.000+02:002014-10-07T11:59:10.708+02:00'Where' I write...This post first appeared in The Guardian<br />
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As a writer, there’s a process that somewhere occurs in your head; a collision between the fantasy space of your imagination and the outside world, in the form of the things that have directly or indirectly inspired your book.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjivfxqUoQ1RM_4Ohs4gSYyK0LGLcXf9RyNaRxhKYlA2csmKioFXonJ8HPEB4F8rvedOn4J9bRoWfbpF8sraFY91ml9SwbrHznXnvyFssBMxCSR2IfNk1QLWODFIsW4Dk4mnVRlruKCKyj_1PlFdRWp8sbIbwqcKBd3c_sPpOR9A3Vciqrea5VhIzguM1ZKgXHeUNBzIQSXlYxweKuPu1qQzqHwyF-mALkGfzwEj5_e60N1HMcDRN00Iq8UY53Zliub6yYXMA=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Marcus Sedgwick, author in his shed (but is he?)</span></td></tr>
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Much of the time, this collision occurs while I’m actually in my writing shed, putting words on virtual paper. The space in my shed I see as an exterior manifestation of my imagination – at any given time the walls are heavy with clippings, doodles, photos and words all connected to whatever book I’m working on. And yet, I’m aware that while writing, I might be physically in my shed, but some part of my mind is travelling again, to those places that inspired the story. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhvV3Tb4UJ8wdT7Y4w5UIkorGJF-JGUfR-GVnlYl7EnXJD4djkqcOUC-zXhKbXZ7tKLc9oTU5-a-YqudppS9evLZceEkyibIFuvzyF0rVBtT_3o9mJzX_dHWoF3JFyrCkLdIrt8RVpZLmtJNOmGrEgvrSxv-PUgCfRedijN1H4WfvtD1qN0PeumHUs23OMsPlnEmLZLdNvHuTj_ZXpxHQmDkgrEmcMy8MDvFmzURN8nok805rRlfWWB4_t4uij96WqPmOOz4w=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">A room of one’s own</span></td></tr>
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The Ghosts of Heaven is a book of four quarters, each set in a different time, and a different place, and with a different mood. What connects them is the image of the spiral. This is a book that has taken me a long time to write; what follows are some photographs of the places that gave birth to various elements in the book.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjZZupB2gHdlZw65xSR1VAzfkgNqrbVvIBaInCNC6_3CfZi0qPzRgfQkZKwGOezyvrFpNBZRfo7uVNJCJu2h8DNHFGmbHL5L67yZwBFkiKsNCR668NMsHeasOy5waIAYJiYyznKQ2Wl7LUzj7a-53BC79P7bnV_ZDw22x7SRXx85HRs5mtsICOHYyxd1kGOCN0d51LzS9J8hy4IyvBunOh1wNlsoviCYBabjA8Dp3jnmlKJk4Em_fDOccwo_G2JvAjS0sbyJg=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">A cave on a hillside. </span></td></tr>
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This hillside cave happens to be in Snowdonia, but it doesn’t really matter – I liked the primal feel of the place. I took this photo with a long exposure, which accounts for the streaks, which I like; it gives it a sense of the mysterious. Whispers in the Dark is the section of the book set in the prehistory, and features a girl on the cusp of making the connection between a mark on a cave wall and the spoken word; when she does, she will effectively have invented writing.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjhJQV20LTSeqEuYxXCj8lULVhJtiOK7F8d6htMj5fuuZo8tjB22nMGd71YehHUdTi1ZGvWV8rrk5mtfrzbnK1273VoYcsrcnzj-Q9-YGh_BEGyL6VBBbzn7L2jSF7nAjH-WieHztXBHBspQY2KfRZ1BxCcFwBMM9ua9VXOx6OTIziNGgbwpelpqMf6H30PwFr_hoZF-Hb6zQGAYpOVvU74XU019MvZcufLY_0yf6Mi8uvkmtY5uTk2Yhv6LQna-qKoTqhCLQ=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: start;">
(Modern) spiral rock carvings, near Lausanne, Switzerland.</div>
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The spiral is one of the six groups of forms known to archaeolgists as entoptic shapes, perhaps derived from natural illusory shapes ‘seen’ by the eye in the absence of light. They can be found in the artistic creations of our most distant ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgTXcP0o8GvLcFaH_CwPQMi3qCEClKyQyEQ8lqlb88aFWh9NoU42mcY_O9ZXAB1d_0aPAyJGpWWUZbVOoOrgRsJgmBBgvMLWQYXT8gRR56kwoYG9eIZ5yJ2gaEtG_-BGOMMf4LG5Hco168f0WaUrUlTQvuQwJZyPQVqOv63rbrIoovCY2_GlH6k0eU8KByIFs1ITHsX8ouw-eQbgDp0A9uCy5ZySbqlIA8oFsoCuMh94aM9-AZ_P1NqUNIwbnS4gx48dOLFTQ=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">‘Fairy tree’, Lumb Bank, Heptonstall. </span></td></tr>
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The section of the book called The Witch in the Water takes place in a Yorkshire dale in the early 18th century. The witch-hunts were more or less over by this time but this story focuses about a very late episode in that dark history. A couple of years ago I was teaching a creative writing course at the wonderful Arvon Foundation, and feeling like a fraud because my own writing wasn’t going well at the time. On a walk in the valley one afternoon I came across this tree. I don’t know if it’s really called a fairy tree, but it ought to be. Folklore is full of the concept of things passing through gateways and boundaries, and if the local people didn’t see this tree with its ‘hole’ as a magical entity, I would be very surprised.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEggix3XGfWI9sKG7U1URWIXtb7waS-_g7v8bKvvKdAPfVjwpNiq6aqwjA7h9lKmwp4VRmRsdDy93sOajeMKEMG82aIruEkLdjiPZsGjjO-AWxt1Qj_KoKv30y-BCnTzYBmNvtH6uGiq2FZ-LYQJKGr9zTlVcExLM5SlHve_Qu_y_ClK24X8nNo2hSazI_3RtMoDyvikqs2ndRBCvozbobardMIwaiN_5gTosiNFcduRo3Cr9NgW7eTfWT4bAweVnLKmcRtLfg=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: start;">
The valley at Lumb Bank, home to one of the Arvon Foundation’s beautiful centres. </div>
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The part of the book called The Easiest Room in Hell is set on Long Island in the 1920s. This part of the book evolved from an interest I’d developed in the derelict insane asylums (as they used to be called) of North America.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgBL4p3dBHe3kRjzupH-RWdm-quw_3ONI0juLSqMaah_xNh2V2R3Nzw8jjclSbwpyObzWdeLyw81U8MD98mwmQmseItJo-C0uC833_B0s5W88C3YpTNn9_3g0TQrlV8AJXpRXINO8Sqr7RC-FfWbOB1bHwtiycVGM0aet5n4Hw3o73HkCAR5pHPvkw2JQc_rPDcdbfJLu70gyZBARhLqrzGvlkdFtEXznqXltgqFAOYoQcZFpzSyF2t6E3YoeKYjg20QtDIlQ=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption">This is one of those that have been saved, or part of it anyway. What was once the Danvers State Hospital (Massachusetts, US) is now a swanky apartment block. One wonders about the dreams to be had in such a place. </td></tr>
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With a nice touch of serendipity, I discovered that many of these old hospitals had spiral staircases in them, central to the theme of the book. Here’s one of them; the Octagon on Roosevelt Island, New York, which contains a beautiful staircase. I wasn’t allowed to take photos inside but there are some amazing ones on the net, both as the building is now, and in its derelict state before renovation. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhf_BbN5UT-asA-XLKan84cuKz7r94sSyxcxR6uZF_7fVZm0ksEb1UaPDuS1IGh1O3b8t9ANvw_AZtgaajA78P7TYEnArZ77rcgAhs4Y1DRXfiorerPpXIj2PxOGc_G7e92tr3wbBNdpKwQhDBin-0pa3o6zIMmqYEywp8IIpHeYxxoivHoRfksaP9Rj0b7lwjy8dYcn5DhN8extHJEP7kaoXFQj6ioQnv8aLvSl3Cn3bG0jq4RDMns9p-XgCDMr5foxg1NAw=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: start;">
Here’s one of these old hospitals; the Octagon on Roosevelt Island, New York, which contains a beautiful staircase. I wasn’t allowed to take photos inside but there are some amazing ones on the net, both as the building is now, and in its derelict state before renovation. </div>
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This part of the book is also heavily influenced by that most maligned of American writers; the creator of dark fictions and occult beings, H.P. Lovecraft. I made a trip to Providence, Rhode Island, to see both his family home, and his grave marker; which bears the kind of inscription we can but aspire to.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEidvPIKtoDgP0ekFZAbWOYuPeLu9By_-G-JjkqMYPYVfqQM1U3KpnzoKtJVOT4C7uk2k8oyO1I2vtFuAPyY0z-ph0Z6xxw6uzEoKFe7Nm5AbCoDWJXe_DNOpxtqhsZrvnsyNTktMTfoJ3jwsU6n34IeW54AKUlBlOy839Qyzr93Hs784DfxrCpTwwNC1MpMT2SoJcWxPpBF07Y2FUCIwuQqqB70iroF71zZMxCSzOeDzhBbV4-Fy-alfmVJibWL0Eovx46msA=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">H P Lovecraft’s childhood home, Providence, Rhode Island, US.</span></td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEix_Tx8rKN2kwkc4Xsayh3P-XUDMEdH7ktUDwOkB-6qDEwa56tdHH-DnJJAzm3hnY4v8N9_TQgvjzcZFOnihoFSkBKIAMowTl4RJj6iK2-1hntHAJH-aYH66sHM0f7YjQ5FVIMKe_IxZ_qrytNZS-MHh_MvMmuW78GmfQMsL4EdTa6XBVaNoKMB_G21TMJKjHifEIU46RXBQFrw8mWurlC2J29WngNdt4ePSCgIaAvXvgHBz9wua4c94FvQmwOm5xlym5BZlA=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Lovecraft’s grave marker reads simply with his name, dates and the legend “I AM PROVIDENCE”. Like many other fans, I left a quarter behind as a token. </span></td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEhjg2Utp-t_l2ViaRIyFSky9vC7I8ub4iM5EA2MHAuEXaJ1p0_ucHVED5LcaoOtfMoHYp5AICEIcP8qU2l8kZWThYYF45c3RDXqcYK1joUVVWXUVtTULR6P4cJdbFA25JksnfWwTBNys0CICBOeg_dntHPyYjFhkOCf9MDq4ypWXg-Kd7Tczt4qsIEUSh1y5IdutI5IA_pDPidQ4tIcASvTXdBWNeSdag9HSSWA0-Ocs7zcQa1MHpSNSqjrQx8ouUca-iIf9Q=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">The film </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Flew_Over_the_Cuckoo%27s_Nest_%28film%29" style="text-align: start;">One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</a><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;"> was filmed in this asylum in Salem, OR.</span></td></tr>
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The hospital at Danvers, like this one above in Salem, Oregon, on the other side of the States, are two examples of Kirkbride hospitals. The brainchild of Dr Thomas Kirkbride, he envisaged a whole new approach to the care of the mentally ill, a key part of which was the architecture of the hospitals themselves; light, airy and with room to remain human.<br />
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The hospital in Salem, famous as both the setting and later filming location of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is another hospital that has been saved – it’s now a social heritage museum.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEi4_Sg3V4p3JKGvy-wMXR1CfNA_wrCTjjsmHNflwUlIg0Zv7-3wOeN_FUd2foJoR25aGLgnG1CzrDQ9jBKddp-I827WTQBSLESb86QZYf6RzgrFF8I6tLBfx2D-RKC-xB9cZ9rXrGSiWEtE-XRQwcMuBeX7NrNMNI4IkBNlVzcvOAKCSZd5r6GRmPobmUfLzI8D7M_ete6JK63oSmG47BMNz3lfgSC829UM8bx3nWO-Mi3edJ8kx-Rl3yqMq6qNslDAU5Vf8A=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Inside a derelict psychiatric hospital, Long Island, New York. </span></td></tr>
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I decided to make up a Kirkbride of my own, setting one out on the distant shores of Long Island – part of Kirkbride’s plan was to move away from dark and grim places in the city to sites in the countryside where the open air and healthy aspect would have a beneficial effect on the patients.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEjn9jpdym5jvppq5hJyD9jy1KN_zdQe0Y0AW_xJ-5Tc_GRNMfa8QYXy6A4ARdlQb_yekohWG1aBmWTZt9UhAUL0iaFHBT77VvxcVahdPtEmPRxq3mcmaBR7sQB9kgKYj3rEQ7IGkHK-gKqo0KZpcpByFJFvi6FQDKvHNNZUNgErrkcLSHLd8-w3xQ2Fa14I_nyOOFgZn0KGMDmcWL8CAIUmA24jYUmJz8WqPIOWveZVCpzsqv5ioWFtsLRmvKvUVmKJ-bgXGw=" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: start;">
The shores of Long Island. </div>
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I can’t show you pictures of the inspiration for the remaining quarter of the book, called The Song of Destiny, since it takes place aboard a ship venturing into deep space. The ship is the first voyage travelling to colonise a new planet. <br />
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Instead, to finish here’s a spiral staircase, this one from the Pantheon in Paris. Spiral staircases are some of the most beautiful architectural creations, be they simple, or ornate, and for me, they are the ultimate metaphor.<br />
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<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEj5tadnDQ2H0ZC6WYzAAWmZf_Scm0b4kAbzENolycaVRwR6oWSPfmE-wrSbg9JgjniaF9vL7mUxOtyOvgKLWU94hh5objatXsXwA0RdCZbqh7oSaqAtlBgUkN8C52GpCBEWrFlMfBzAV9k3owSkIhM9fjHDcp-Iw-iCdAXRJSijsrkn6XIH39vBG9bd5l6i43bBsiGmcUEd0HGcBoIICV_UaVxgWpgTiCZ4cViDE3k8JHhR0jm5X0TFJmY1WZVXEwtQeJ9gGQ=" /><br />
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All photographs: © Marcus Sedgwick<br />
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My new book <a href="http://bookshop.theguardian.com/ghosts-of-heaven.html">The Ghosts of Heaven is available at the Guardian bookshop</a>
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"https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/proxy/AVvXsEgBL4p3dBHe3kRjzupH-RWdm-quw_3ONI0juLSqMaah_xNh2V2R3Nzw8jjclSbwpyObzWdeLyw81U8MD98mwmQmseItJo-C0uC833_B0s5W88C3YpTNn9_3g0TQrlV8AJXpRXINO8Sqr7RC-FfWbOB1bHwtiycVGM0aet5n4Hw3o73HkCAR5pHPvkw2JQc_rPDcdbfJLu70gyZBARhLqrzGvlkdFtEXznqXltgqFAOYoQcZFpzSyF2t6E3YoeKYjg20QtDIlQ=" -->Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-7012057856058138682014-09-15T14:05:00.000+02:002014-09-15T14:10:51.698+02:00The oldest story in the worldWhat is the oldest story in the world? How can we possibly know what the first story was? What would it have looked like? Would we recognise it as a story, and would anything in it mean anything to us today?<br />
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These are questions that in all probability cannot be answered definitively, but I'm going to try to make a case here for what the original story was, and then (eventually) talk a little about my new book, <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Ghosts.html">The Ghosts of Heaven</a>.<br />
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It might seem like an impossible task to go so far back in time - it's even hard to find the original version of stories that we know, or think we know, well. This is something I found out when writing <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/swordhandnotes.html"><i>My Swordhand is Singing</i></a>. I was trying to find the oldest vampire story, the very first one. In terms of printed, published books, it's relatively easy to drift back before Stoker, Le Fanu, and even Polidori and Byron to Ossenfelder's poem <i>The Vampire </i>of 1748, but once we realise that since all these tales were inspired by existing folk stories, it becomes much harder to pin down their origins. I followed vampire stories back to <a href="http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/id5.html" target="_blank">their origins in Eastern Europe</a>, but the truth is that vampire-like stories have been told in most cultures, all around the world, since time immemorial (what a great phrase - "unremembered time").<br />
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Looking at really old stories, like Bible stories, we might think we know roughly when and who wrote them - for example, Noah and the flood, until we learn that that story was based on an even older flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, of Mesopotamian legend. This story is based on sources that are over four thousand years old according to some.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpHEzqmdW9hqDFEMlPhu0K4-9WwN1qimwEW5Wm2rYhZlCAPm4Zeq5yilwmyr5k6wWXcyC4ZEmQ6OsGgX4FHfoXqB5RWwOC1UFLccJ8PZul9R8IeykKiIs_AwXc7c8nwve4C7Vy3oPt7P1v/s1600/British_Museum_Flood_Tablet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpHEzqmdW9hqDFEMlPhu0K4-9WwN1qimwEW5Wm2rYhZlCAPm4Zeq5yilwmyr5k6wWXcyC4ZEmQ6OsGgX4FHfoXqB5RWwOC1UFLccJ8PZul9R8IeykKiIs_AwXc7c8nwve4C7Vy3oPt7P1v/s1600/British_Museum_Flood_Tablet.jpg" height="200" width="176" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The tablet in the British Museum recounting the story of Gilgamesh and the flood.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And once we start to discover that many cultures around the world have some version of a flood story, we might begin to wonder whether that's just coincidence or whether there was a indeed a great flood event, or events, that inspired people to tell these kinds of tales. We might also start to realise that we have probably been telling the same stories over and over again, throughout our history, recast in different ways, depending on the times in which we're living.<br />
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There's nothing wrong with that, and nothing so amazing about that, in itself, but I do love the implication of this idea; that stories we know well today have unbelievably ancient origins. Let's look, for example, at stories from Greek mythology, such as Theseus and the Minotaur, or Orpheus in the underworld. We know that the Greeks began to write their stories as long as 2,700 years ago, but once again, that many elements were based on even older stories from earlier cultures. What the stories of Theseus and Orpheus have in common is the notion of a journey into a dark space, in order to confront death. As they say, the Greeks had a word for it, and that word is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabasis" target="_blank">katabasis</a>. But once again, we find that the Sumerians had beaten them to it; Gilgamesh himself made a voyage to the underworld on his quest for immortality.<br />
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What's striking here is that these are not just old stories that we get told in primary school and then, unless we become an archaeologist, anthropologist or Assyriologist, forget all about. The proof of that is to be found in the number of modern retellings of a story like Orpheus in the underworld; from the 13th century Breton 'lay' <a href="http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk/mer/61" target="_blank">Sir Orfeo</a>, to what is regarded to be the very first opera, Monteverdi's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JQ-tdULkGE" target="_blank">L'Orfeo</a>, through to modern times; Offenbach's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0WRJES4cyw" target="_blank">Orpheus in the Underworld</a> (which gave us the tune now known commonly known as the can-can), to Jean Cocteau's <a href="http://www.criterion.com/films/610-orpheus" target="_blank">film trilogy</a>, even to Baz Luhrmann's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203009/?ref_=nv_sr_1" target="_blank">Moulin Rouge</a> which (with a nod back to Offenbach) the director saw as a being a parallel to the ancient Greek story - the hero has to enter the 'underworld' (in this case, Montmartre during the Belle Epoque) in order to rescue his doomed love.<br />
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Why do such stories last? Why are they so powerful? For me, it's all to do with Darwin. Just as species thrive or fail under the pressures of natural selection, so must stories; the good ones survive, the weak ones are told no more. What makes a good story is of course an question for another day, but one essential element must be that they tell us about ourselves in some way. They tell us what it is to be human, to experience human emotion, and so on. It's a fair assumption then that the old stories that stood the test of time are ones which directly related to our experience of being human, to our earliest and most primal emotions and fears.<br />
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So what is the oldest story? What does it look like? I'm guessing that it looked something like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg75VueZVHTh45epshyphenhyphenE-IXdxWbS06LoHXlMdDNydQ45alsXm70xHJPcN4soniQFp3bYQVNrJ_dFWF_cR_m-xg6yaBdt5XW9lC5Dm7w5XRkdSOYwUehZLidheZbn92JKPkFmz5MgXizZoHW/s1600/cave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg75VueZVHTh45epshyphenhyphenE-IXdxWbS06LoHXlMdDNydQ45alsXm70xHJPcN4soniQFp3bYQVNrJ_dFWF_cR_m-xg6yaBdt5XW9lC5Dm7w5XRkdSOYwUehZLidheZbn92JKPkFmz5MgXizZoHW/s1600/cave.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></div>
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As we sat around a fire-pit, there must have been some powerful primal experiences that we were driven to encounter, and one of them will have been to venture into a cave. We know that many early hominids lived in and around caves. Our earliest examples of art are the extraordinary paintings of places such as <a href="http://www.culture.gouv.fr/fr/arcnat/chauvet/en/" target="_blank">Chauvet</a>, <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/310" target="_blank">Altamira</a>, or <a href="http://www.wits.ac.za/academic/research/ihe/archaeology/blombos/7106/blomboscave.html" target="_blank">Blombos</a>, where engraved ochre dated to as old as 100,000 years before the present day has been found.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Chauvet, France</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Altamira, Spain</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Blombos, South Africa</td></tr>
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We needed the cave, as a place of safety and of shelter, and yet, venturing in for the first time must have been always been a tense moment of fear; what would be found inside? A cave lion? A bear? Or perhaps, nothing, and a new safe place to camp would have been welcomed.</div>
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Think of Theseus venturing into the dark labyrinth to fight the beast inside. Think of the connotations of the cave as being the entrance to the underworld, and Orpheus venturing to confront Death itself. Think of a stone age homo sapiens entering the dark cave, to return triumphant, or to meet a terrible death. That story must have been told and retold, round the fire-pit, since the very earliest days of Mankind.</div>
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If you're still with me, here's a video that captures the flavour of <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Ghosts.html" target="_blank">The Ghosts of Heaven</a>, one quarter of which is set in the world I have just been describing; a stone age community. Since it's now known that a lot of the cave art was made by juveniles' children and teenagers, the section of the book called <i>Whispers in the Dark</i> takes a young woman as the hero, a young woman who is on the verge of doing something vital to the development of our species. She's about to make the connection between the spoken word and a mark, be it a mark on a cave wall with a piece of charcoal, or in the sand by the fireside. When she does that, she will have made the first steps on the road to the development of writing, and without writing, there can be no civilisation. Writing enables us to do several things; it allows us to pass meaning on to people either distant in space, or in time. It enables us to remember. It enables us to instruct, to educate and to copy: and copying is essential to civilisation too, because without copying we could not build on what our ancestors had achieved before us, something that is the utmost foundation of civilisation.</div>
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So here's The Ghosts of Heaven:</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/WaS2CuFv4Zo?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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<br />Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-81655556209205710312014-09-13T09:12:00.000+02:002014-09-13T09:12:45.460+02:00Don’t call it glory<br />
Some thoughts on writing a story for Walker Books' anthology <a href="http://www.walker.co.uk/The-Great-War-Stories-Inspired-by-Objects-from-the-First-World-War-9781406353778.aspx" target="_blank">The Great War</a>. This piece first appeared in Carousel magazine.<br />
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In 2005 I
published a novel set during the First World War; <i>The Foreshadowing</i>. Set in 1916, the denouement of the novel takes
places during an engagement of the Battle of the Somme. This, and the novel in
general, required me to do a lot of research, but about halfway through this
period of reading and travelling and learning about the war, I had a sudden
crisis: I don’t know exactly what brought it on, but I know when and where it
happened. I was staying the night in a converted monastery in a small town in
Picardy, having gone to scout the locations in the novel, when I had a nightmare.
In the dream, the souls of the dead from the war rose up and were angry with
me: how dare you turn our suffering into your pale fictions?! We were those who
died; you will now profit from it! They railed at me and shouted curses; it was
a truly disturbing dream. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Awake, the next
day, I realised what it meant – I’d been feeling uneasy for some time about
what is, after all, the essential act of a writer: to take truths, and make
lies of them. Paradoxically, we do that to use those lies to tell truths,
truths about life, but in the case of writing about the war, I felt anxious
over the way as a writer of war fiction I had immersed myself in an ocean of awful
things. As you read about war, it’s so easy to get swept along in the
pornography of horror: as you learn about this horrendous battle, or some
specific death, as you shudder from the comfort of your armchair about gas
attacks, and lice, and amputations, and drowning in mud, it’s easy to become
addicted to finding out just one more awful, awful thing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I finished that
book, however. It was too late to do otherwise, and I just tried my best not to
glorify any aspect of war, at all, in any way. I also swore that I would not
write on the war ever again. I was also immediately distrustful of novels that ‘use’
the Holocaust as a way of engendering absolute bad into the story. What worse
horror can there be than the Holocaust? How easy then to give your book the
power it might otherwise lack? This is a big subject and I have limited space
here; let me just acknowledge that this is a complicated issue, but one that I
feel strongly and very uneasy about.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I turned down
three other requests to write a story about the First World War for publication
in 2014. I finally agreed to Walker’s invitation, thinking it sounded a bit
different from other more obvious projects, but even then, I was on the verge
of picking up the phone two or three times to pull out.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The essence of
the problem, in addition to the easy pornography of horror that I describe
above, is this: war is senseless. Episodes of conflict do not have neat
beginnings, trajectories, and endings. In short, <i>they are not stories</i>. But to make them work as a story you have to give
them all those things. Francois Truffaut, the great French director, famously
said, ‘you can’t make an anti-war film.’ What he meant is that any attempt to
‘storify’ a war turns it into something that it isn’t: neat, satisfying,
conclusive, even if it’s saturated in horror and anti-war rhetoric. There are
perhaps a couple of exceptions; Stanley Kubrick’s <i>Full Metal Jacket</i> is almost without plot. It doesn’t follow a
narrative arc; it does as close as job as possible to catching the
senselessness of war. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Deciding I had
left it too late to let Walker down, the challenge remained of how to write a
war story when war is not a story. My solution was to find a way to talk about
all these things but still, I hope, have a story that captured the reader. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s very
important, when discussing such potent subjects, that we don’t get dragged into
simplistic and divisive arguments – these are complex issues and complex
arguments must be given space. It’s my fear that certain quarters of the media
and of government are already using the centenary with relish to foist
jingoistic emotions onto us. Feelings that should have died a hundred years ago
as the war that was supposed to be over by Christmas got stuck in the mud of
France and Belgium. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we shouldn’t remember.
We absolutely <i>must</i> remember. But <i>how we remember</i> is vital, and that’s why
I chose the title of my story for this anthology: <i>Don’t Call It Glory</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-78216706917284560042014-08-31T12:07:00.001+02:002014-09-13T09:02:38.016+02:00The Ghosts of HeavenI have nothing to say about this.<br />
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<br />Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-55410116931852176642014-07-08T20:58:00.000+02:002014-07-08T20:58:12.226+02:00Viva Las Vegas!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Okay, here's the money shot: the South Las Vegas Boulevard, aka the strip, with 'Paris' centre left.<div>
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That's where Lady Sedgwick and I were headed, for ALA 2014 and the evening when I would pick up the Printz Award, but we took the chance to have a little American road trip before that.</div>
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First up was Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A small and very pretty town in The Berkshires, and the reason for going - to pay homage to the American branch of the Sedgwick family, to whom I am VERY distantly related. The Stockbridge Sedgwicks were notable for some 'characters', including Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol's muse back in the day, and Kyra these days. Even further back in the day, 'Judge' Theodore Sedgwick was quite a gentleman - he defended 'Mum Bet', then a slave, in her attempts to be freed in one of the first test cases for the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence's 'All men are created equal'. They won, she became Elizabeth Freeman, and came to work for Theodore. He must have thought pretty highly of her, because when he came to design the very unusual cemetery plot in Stockbridge, she found a place reserved for her.</div>
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It was this cemetery that we'd come to Stockbridge to see: it's unique; a circular cemetery; with a series of concentric rings radiating out from the Theodore's monument in the centre. </div>
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There are generations of Sedgwicks here; the idea of the circularity being (rather amusingly) that on Judgement Day, as they arise from their tombs, Sedgwicks will only have other Sedgwicks to look at. Superb snobbery :-)</div>
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Also in the cemetery, another notable Sedgwick, and the one I am most proud of; Ellery Sedgwick, who was a magazine publisher, and just happened to be the first person to publish Ernest Hemingway, in Atlantic Monthly. I'm not claiming this took amazing insight; I suspect Papa would have made it as a writer anyway, but nonetheless, I'm very happy that he did, because I have always loved Hemingway's writing. Ellery's grave, like so many, is rather beautiful. </div>
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Time to move on.</div>
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And our next destination was here, once upon a time a <a href="http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/" target="_blank">Kirkbride</a> hospital, an extraordinary type of Lunatic Asylum built at the end of the 19th century across the States. This one, in Danvers, MA, is now an apartment block, many others have been razed to the ground or are derelict. A Kirkbride hospital is the basis for the 3rd quarter of my next book; <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Ghosts.html" target="_blank">The Ghosts of Heaven</a>.</div>
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If it was hot in Massachusetts, it was nothing for where we were heading; the gentle 110F of Nevada.</div>
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Never mind the clouds, they soon disappeared, and left no rain behind, as a short trip out in the desert proved. We passed a couple on Vespas, which looked very incongruous indeed. </div>
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And then it was time for the Printz Award evening itself, a small and cosy affair with 5 or 600 hundred of my closest friends ;-)</div>
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Here's half of the room, the row at the front being the INCREDIBLY INTELLIGENT members of the Printz Committee, i.e. the wise and kind people who decided that <a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/Midwinterblood.html" target="_blank">Midwinterblood</a> should win this year.<br />
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There really wasn't time to be nervous; the way the Award works now is that Jennifer Lawson, chair of the judges, presented prizes to the Honor recipients (Sally Gardner, Rainbow Rowell, Clare Vanderpool and Susann Cokal) and within five minutes I was up to make my speech. And even then I couldn't really be nervous, when faced with a room full of very, very friendly and welcoming librarians, who I now love very deeply indeed.<br />
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Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-51233165492339984582014-06-15T12:37:00.000+02:002014-10-28T17:18:02.142+01:00One Thing Leads to Another<span style="color:#000000;">This interview with Julie Bartel at The Hub, YALSA was first published over </span><a href="http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2014/06/12/one-thing-leads-to-another-an-interview-with-marcus-sedgwick/" rel="">here</a><span style="color:#000000;">.<br /><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>One of the things I love most about doing this interview series is getting a little sideways glimpse of the incredible people behind the books I love. In order to figure out what questions I want to ask I read a lot of background material–blog posts, interviews, speeches, reviews and such–and I try and read a lot of their work, if I haven’t already. The whole process is very indulgent, and often quite fun in and of itself. And then I send off the interview and am further rewarded with lovely answers to my questions and often the additional treat of trading a handful of emails or whatnot in the process. This is not a terrible gig, that’s for sure.</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>As usual, I’ve just inhaled half a dozen books, along with years of blog posts and interviews and all sort of other bits and pieces found online, and it’s truly been a strange and wonderful couple of weeks. I’d read a handful of these books before, and sort of knew what I was getting into, but immersing myself in the language, the ideas, the characters and stories turned out to be a bit of a revelatory experience and one I’d highly recommend. </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">White Crow</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>. </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Midwinterblood</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>. </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Revolver</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>. These books are not easy to shake, and I don’t really want to. But honestly, the sideways glimpse I’ve been given of the man behind the words, patched together from correspondence and interviews and blog posts, is going to stick with me just as long; being familiar with his books didn’t really prepare me for just how generous and gracious and engaging he is, and I certainly wasn’t aware of his amazing ability to bend time, his excellent taste in music, or his passion for comics.</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>It’s been one year since the first </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">One Thing Leads to Another</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em> post appeared on The Hub, and I feel remarkably honored to start year two, interview 13, with 2014 </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><em><a href="http://www.ala.org/yalsa/printz" rel="">Michael L. Printz Award</a></em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em> Winner Marcus Sedgwick. Thank you so much, Marcus, for your willingness to share the painful details, for showing us what determination can accomplish, and for indulging my ’80s music obsession.</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:16px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Always Something There to Remind Me<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_1.jpg" width="300" height="199" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#757575;"><em>©Kate Christer</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#757575;"><em><br /></em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Please describe your teenage self.</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Oh God, do I have to? Shy, quiet, introspective, shy, gawky, spotty, shy, timid, scared, shy, nervous and did I mention that I was shy..?<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">What did you want to be when you grew up? Why?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">I had no idea what I wanted to be when I was a teenager. That worried me I think – I had no idea what life was about, what it could be about, what I wanted, what there even was to think about doing. I found the thought of the adult world very frightening, and still do, in many ways. I had no idea about how things work; things like jobs, money, insurance, mortgages, etc. etc. The adult world seemed so complicated but to be honest, I was just struggling with being a teenager to worry too much about the years to come. <br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">What were your high school years like? </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">High school was pretty traumatic. I went to a type of English school called a Grammar School. These are typically old establishments – mine was founded in 1563 (and that’s by no means the oldest), and very often in the ’80s, when I was there, they were still stuck in the past. Violence came from not just the other boys (it was a single sex school) but from the masters too. And though being beaten up or hit with a hockey stick was bad, it was the psychological torture that was worse. The school seemed to almost condone such matters. We were told it was ‘character building,’ but it certainly didn’t work for a timid, shy (did I mention that already?), weak young boy. Sorry, this is turning into a therapy session! The whole thing was pretty rough with the exception of two teachers who made life tolerable, so my mental energies were pointed in the direction of home, where I was much, much happier. I am lucky to have come from a truly loving family.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">What were some of your passions during that time?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">As an older teenager, music began to be really important to me. I was a first generation Goth – I think because it felt more real to me than the commercial pap of the mainstream. Plus the music was great. And the look. My first ever gig wasn’t goth though, but The Smiths, and that probably was a major boost to me – it set me on a course of going to loads of concerts. I was also, and still am, very much into classical music – it was Mozart and Wagner back then. Wagner became Mahler as I grew older, and nowadays, it’s Richard Strauss, who I believe has composed the most sublime music of all time, with the possible exception of Chopin. I did little sport as a teenager, but I read a lot. I was one of those teens who didn’t cause their parents any problems – I sat in my room, listening to music and reading – the most important book of my life then was the</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em> Gormenghast</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> trilogy by Mervyn Peake. That certainly changed my life, and I have my Dad to thank for introducing them to me.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Would you be willing to share a difficult teen experience or challenge that you feel shaped the adult you became?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Oh, whoops, it looks like I did that already! See above… Which is not one specific incident, but rather the accumulated painful experiences of High School. It left me as a very worried individual, but there was the seed of something positive about me, and that thing was…<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">What about a positive experience or accomplishment that had an impact on your adult self?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">… determination. It’s almost the only quality of myself that I am proud of. I am </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>very</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> determined, so on the very day that I arrived at University, I decided that I couldn’t go on being so shy (did I talk about that? Maybe I haven’t spelled out exactly how painful, how disabling, my shyness was – it stopped me from doing almost anything, from answering the phone to making friends to speaking to girls etc. etc). On that day, as I arrived at University, I decided that I would pretend I wasn’t shy. No one knew me. I could reinvent myself. So I did. And after about three months went by, I realized I was no longer shy. I was normal – which is to say, shy sometimes, confident others, sad then happy then calm then excited. But no longer was I permanently disabled by shyness.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">What advice, if any, would you give your teen self? Would your teen self have listened?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">I would like to be able to give myself lots of advice. Like: stop worrying so much; it will be okay. You won’t be spotty forever. You’re not as ugly as you think you are. You will one day not only be able to talk to girls but will actually go out with them too. I would have listened, but I’m not sure I would have believed any of it. And if I had told myself that one day I would be able to give a presentation to several hundred people for an hour or so without feeling nervous, I would have been </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>sure</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> I was lying.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Do you have any regrets about your teen years? Anything left undone or anything that might have been better left undone? </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">It’s a shame that I was so timid. But it was me, and it was the way things were. I could have had more fun perhaps, but I think it does mean I won’t ever become too arrogant towards other people, because I know what it is to feel scared.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">What, if anything, do you miss most about that time?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">My Dad. He died when I was just 20, and apart from him, you can keep my teenage years. But I do miss not having to worry about money/jobs/cars/houses/insurance/mortgages, and all that other deeply dull stuff that adults have invented for themselves.<br /></span><span style="font:16px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Every Day I Write the Book<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_2.jpg" width="98" height="150" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Your new book, </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>She Is Not Invisible</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">, is about coincidences and </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; font-weight:bold; "><a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.com/2013/10/co-inky-dinks.html" rel="">you’ve noted</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "> that you’ve had some “pretty weird ones happen” to you over the years. Would you be willing to share some of the weird ones? How did the idea of “coincidence”– rather than any particular coincidence in itself—come to fascinate you and what drew you to the idea of writing a whole book about it?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">The weirdest thing that ever happened to me, by far, is the coincidence that happens to the writer, Jack Peak, in the book. The thing with the book on the train, the German lady etc. etc. This coincidence is so weird that most people don’t believe me when I tell them, and I have told very few people as a result. So I stopped telling people and decided to put it in the book instead, but actually my interest in coincidences goes back years before that – I didn’t want to write about one single coincidence because, for various reasons, coincidences are very hard to write about. On the one hand, they are what bad writers use to make their plots work. On the other, people aren’t interested in minor coincidences, and, as I found, they don’t believe the major ones. So I thought it would be better to tackle the subject sideways, through the eyes of a writer who is himself obsessed by the subject.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_3.jpg" width="105" height="150" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_4.jpg" width="101" height="150" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Critics have highlighted various themes in your work—love, loss, and sacrifice, among them—but I’m particularly interested in the things you yourself have had to say about the power of “belief.” You’ve</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; font-weight:bold; "><a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.net/blog.php?categories=Julian%20Sedgwick" rel="">written</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "> that </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>Dark Satanic Mills</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">, the graphic novel you wrote with your brother, was heavily influenced by William Blake and that “our message, if we have one, is Blake’s: create your own system of belief, or be enslaved by another man’s.” In other words, “believe what you want to believe, not what you are told to believe.” Your YA novel </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>White Crow</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "> also deals explicitly with the ideas of belief and conscience, especially the consequences of questioning beliefs. Could you talk about the power and consequences of belief and how you explore those ideas in your work and in your</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; font-weight:bold; "><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/16/marcus-sedgwick-teenage-novel" rel=""> interaction with readers</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">We live in interesting times, and they are times of change in terms of what belief means. The impression I get of the UK and the US is that to a greater or lesser extent, much of the nation is becoming less ‘religious’, while certain sections of it are finding more extreme versions of religion to believe in. The US may well be a little different from the UK, so I shouldn’t speak about what I don’t know about, but in the UK although we are still a nominally Christian country, report after report shows that most people are at most agnostic now, and go to church once a year for Christmas, out of habit, if at all.<br />But this does not mean that people have stopped needing to believe in things, and so I see many people turning to alternative forms of belief and worship. And all of those are fine by me as long as no one tries to force their beliefs on anyone else. That’s when the problems start. If you take a look at a book like</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>White Crow</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">, its antihero, Ferelith, is obsessed with the matter of life after death, and yet she herself is not religious per se. I wanted to portray a young adult, who I see very often; someone who wants to believe in something, and yet is being offered nothing by the modern pop culture around them. We worship celebrities now, sports stars and film stars, and people with no talent but for making people gossip about them. I think there are lots of people, and among them many teenagers, who feel shortchanged by the vapidity of all of that, and would like something that speaks to them. That was what was at the heart of </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>White Crow</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_5.jpg" width="96" height="150" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_6.jpg" width="99" height="150" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">In a recent </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; font-weight:bold; "><a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.com/2011/10/symbols-and-folklore.html" rel="">interview</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "> you explained that folk and fairy tales “are almost my favourite kind of story, and so, ever since I became a writer, I have always tried to find ways of working elements of folklore into my books. How? By using iconic images, words with deep resonance, patterns of storytelling and certain motifs which remind us, subconsciously at least, of those dark stories we all heard at a tender age.” Could you talk a bit more about this? What tales were you drawn to growing up and have they changed over the years? Do you have any favorites? Do you consciously look for ways to work elements into your stories or is it a more subtle process? And finally, in the same interview you say, “if I can’t get away with writing new fairy tales, at least I can enjoy plundering our literary heritage to populate my books,” which leaves me wondering why you don’t think you can get away with writing a new fairy tale, and whether you might change your mind someday?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Yes, I love fairy tales, and folk tales of all kinds, from all cultures and all times. I think they have deep resonance for us, and I have always worked, both explicitly and more subconsciously, to incorporate their rhythms and tropes into my work. There are rich veins of story to be mined, and adapted and plundered! I loved Russian fairy tales as a kid, and Greek and Norse myth. I have read many more varieties of story now, from Sweden to England to North America, and they all have their own special quality and power.<br />The only reason I said I can’t get away with writing new ones is because I wouldn’t be able to find a publisher for them – publishers will tell you such things don’t sell, and they may be right, but I’d love to find out some time. The closest some people have come is to adapt old stories and recast them in modern clothes, as I did with Cassandra in </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>The Foreshadowing</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> in fact. And yet, in certain countries, eg Slovenia where I was recently, their most famous modern author wrote dozens of new fairy tales that are loved and revered.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_7.jpg" width="97" height="150" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><img class="imageStyle" alt="" src="unique_8.jpg" width="99" height="150" /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Not only do you write and draw, you also play the drums and are clearly an avid music lover. </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; font-weight:bold; "><a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.com/2011/10/rite-of-winter.html" rel="">You’ve said</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">that music has inspired many parts of your books, including the chapter titles in </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>White Crow</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">, and “much of the </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>Book of Dead Days</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "> [which] was inspired by Schubert’s epic song cycle, </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>Winterreise</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">.” The 2014 Printz Award-winning </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>Midwinterblood</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "> includes “lines by Nick Drake and Led Zeppelin…tucked away in the text, but the most significant source for the book is Stravinsky’s </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "><em>The Rite of Spring</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">, which is probably the piece that made me fall in love with classical music, as well as modern music. I first heard it at the age of around 14 and as the saying goes, it blew my tiny mind. More energy than the Sex Pistols, freakier than Hendrix…” Could you describe your relationship with music over the years and how it colors or inspires your writing? Do you have a sense of why </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; font-weight:bold; "><a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.com/FAQ.html" rel="">particular songs or bands or musicians or composers</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; "> resonate for you? And since it sounds like our late teen musical tastes overlap, I have to ask you about your goth days and those early concerts—any memorable moments you’d be willing to share?</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Music is something I love almost more than I love words. It’s a close fight between the two. But rather than let it be a fight, I have tried to let music into my head to colour my imagination and to stir my thoughts. I love (almost) all forms of music. It is my belief that the very best of any genre is worth listening to, and as to what it is that resonates for me – it has to be something that is </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>authentic</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">. So I can’t listen to mass-produced chart pap, although I can listen very happily to great pop music if it has something in its heart that is true. I tend to like slightly more obscure pieces of music than the mainstream as a result, but that’s not deliberate – as I say, if a piece of pop music is great, I will happily listen to it as well as the weirdest thing on my iPhone.<br />I don’t understand why people delineate between the genres they listen to and the ones they don’t. Maybe it’s fear or ignorance that does that, but actually I think we live in much more enlightened and all-embracing times than when I was young. Because what makes two pieces of music similar is not if they are from the same country or genre or year and so on. It’s not even so much about the key signature or the notes or the melody. It’s about emotion, and feeling. So this is how a piece of music like</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>Winterreise</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> by Schubert (some of the bleakest and most beautiful music ever written) can share something of the feel of a mournful ballad by Nick Cave. And it’s those emotions that music creates that are what we listen to it for, and that’s why it has a direct correlation to writing – we read to experience emotion too. So when I’m writing, I play the music that feels like what I am trying to put down on paper, whether that’s happiness or melancholy.<br />Yes, I was a first generation Goth, and I loved it – the music was intense and the lyrics were dark, and it actually (for all its pretentiousness ) </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>meant something</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">. I have great memories of gigs by Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Sisters of Mercy and so on. The first band I ever saw however, and still one of the best gigs of all time for me, was The Smiths, in their first year of success. It was a mind-changing evening.<br /></span><span style="font:16px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">Just Can’t Get Enough<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">This question comes from </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; font-weight:bold; "><a href="http://www.lainitaylor.com/" rel="">Laini Taylor</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; font-weight:bold; color:#262626;font-weight:bold; ">: “Hi Marcus! Reading about your process, I was struck by two things in particular: your notebooks and your maps. I keep notebooks too, and refer to them often for the same reason you do. I like the way you put it, about making connections between things lurking in your unconscious. That’s it exactly! Are your notebooks a catch-all for stray thoughts, or organized by project? Is there a method to it? And can you explain your maps, and at what point in the writing process you make them, and how you use them? This is fascinating to me, since I feel the need to visualize my structure, but have never tried anything like this. Thank you Marcus, and belated congratulations on the Printz Medal!</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Thanks Laini, lovely question. (And thanks for the congratulations – very kind of you!)<br />Yes, I have some method to the madness in my notebooks, and that is this: I work in them from the front and the back simultaneously – in the front I put ideas/thoughts/notes for the book or project that I am currently working on, and in the back I put ideas for future books. However, these two things are sometimes not clear, and therefore page by page there may be an utter mess of what idea belongs to what project. This is deliberate, however, because I like my ideas to cross pollinate in the notebooks, because sometimes when they do, you come up with things you’d never ever though of. So the notebook fills up as I do my research.<br />I agree with you entirely that a book has a shape! I love that idea and sometimes it’s not even something you can put into words but it does seem to help make the whole business of writing a book a little bit easier. The maps may have started as small doodles in the notebook, but at some point towards the end of the thinking/research stage, I will start to experiment on large sheets of paper with a map for the book itself. They are in pencil. They change. I may reject two or three until I find the right form. Some are almost purely geographical maps, some are more esoteric. (I blogged about the maps </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/maps.html" rel="">here</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">.) I have to find the right structure for each book, so each map is different, but when I have (most) of it as I want it, I will finally sit down, chapter one, line one, and begin to write…<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>Marcus has contributed a question for the next author in the series, </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><em><a href="http://www.emilylockhart.com/" rel="">E. Lockhart</a></em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>. Watch for an interview with her coming soon!</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>Marcus Sedgwick was born and raised in East Kent in the South-east of England. He now divides his time between a small village near Cambridge, England, and a remote house in the French Alps. Alongside a 16 year career in publishing he established himself as a widely-admired writer of YA fiction; he is the winner of many prizes, most notably the </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><em><a href="http://www.ala.org/yalsa/printz-award" rel="">Michael L. Printz Award for 2014</a></em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>, for his novel </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Midwinterblood</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>. His books have been shortlisted for over thirty other awards, including the Carnegie Medal (five times), the Edgar Allan Poe Award (twice) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize (four times). In 2011 </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">Revolver</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em> was awarded a </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><em><a href="http://www.ala.org/yalsa/printz/previous/2011" rel="">Printz Honor</a></em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>.</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>Marcus was Writer in Residence at Bath Spa University for three years, and teaches creative writing at the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd. He is currently working on film and other graphic novels with his brother, Julian, as well as a graphic novel with Thomas Taylor. He has judged numerous books awards, including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Costa Book Awards. His first title for adults, </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">A Love Like Blood</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>, was published in March 2014 in the UK; US publication will follow in early 2014. His most recent YA novel, </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">She Is Not Invisible</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>, was published in April 2014.</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br />You can find Marcus at his </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><a href="http://www.marcussedgwick.net/index.html" rel="">website</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> and </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><a href="http://marcussedgwick.blogspot.co.uk/" rel="">blog</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">, on </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Marcus-Sedgwick/112416905475026?ref=hl" rel="">Facebook</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">, or follow him on </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><a href="https://twitter.com/marcussedgwick" rel="">Twitter</a></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">.<br />–Julie Bartel, currently reading </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>iZombie</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> Vol. 4 by Chris Roberson & Michael Allred and </span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>Saga</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"> Vol. 3 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples.<br /></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>Check out previous interviews in the </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;">One Thing Leads to Another</span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em> series </em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; "><em><a href="http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/tag/one-thing-leads-to-another/" rel="">here</a></em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><em>.</em></span><span style="font:13px Georgia, serif; color:#262626;"><br /></span>Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-83393684192679608632014-06-11T12:32:00.001+02:002014-06-11T12:32:26.099+02:00 HOSTILE QUESTIONS<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background-color: white; width: 100%px;"><tbody>
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This interview first appeared on the fantastically disrespectful Hostile Questions site, over <a href="http://blog.booklistonline.com/2014/06/10/hostile-questions-marcus-sedgwick/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br /><span class="sig" style="font-family: verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.8em; line-height: 1.1;">Posted by: Daniel Kraus</span></div>
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It’s just a couple weeks before Marcus Sedgwick accepts the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. It’s a pretty sweet deal: your books get <a href="http://www.ala.org/yalsa/printz-award" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="Printz Awad">these neat foil dealies</a> and you get to take home a glass — well, I don’t know what to call it. It’s a thing. <a href="http://sonderbooks.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Corey-Whaley.jpg" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="John Corey Whaley & his Printz Award">A glass thing</a>. Perhaps they should rename the award to The Glass Thing?<br />
Anyhoo, what did Mr. Sedgwick do to deserve such unusual glassware? He wrote a historical-novel-in-reverse called <a href="http://booklistonline.com/Midwinterblood-Marcus-Sedgwick/pid=5790676" style="font-weight: bold;" title="Midwinterblood"><em>Midwinterblood</em></a>. I know, it <em>sounds</em> brilliant, but I have a theory. The <a href="http://www.ala.org/news/mediapresscenter/presskits/youthmediaawards/alayouthmediaawards" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="Youth Media Awards">Youth Media Awards</a> are always announced at the ALA <em>Midwinter</em> Meeting, so isn’t it possible that Mr. Sedgwick wrote this book for t<em>he sole purpose</em> that the title would worm its way into the minds of <em>Midwinter-</em>ing Printz Committee members so that they rubber-stamped it like glassy-eyed Manchurian Candidates? Isn’t it possible we are <em>all</em> victims to a <em>massive conspiracy</em> by a <em>foreign interloper</em>? That’s right, Sedgwick <em>isn’t even American</em>.<br />
And to think, he almost got away with it. The clever little bastard.<br />
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<a href="http://blog.booklistonline.com/2014/06/10/hostile-questions-marcus-sedgwick/marcus-sedgwick-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-14575" style="font-weight: bold;"><img alt="The best picture we had on file." class="size-medium wp-image-14575" height="300" src="http://blog.booklistonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Marcus-Sedgwick-2-254x300.jpg" width="254" /></a><div class="wp-caption-text">
<em> The best picture we had on file.</em></div>
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<strong>Just who do you think you are?</strong><br />
I think I’m a 46-year-old British writer with a liking for red wine and the films of Stanley Kubrick amongst other things, but somehow I also think I’m a 17-year-old dude who plays bass in a <a href="http://www.blog.chromatik.com/blog/videos-band-practice-in-garages" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="band">garage punk band</a>. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, any more than there is that I have always felt like I’m about 72, even when I was 12. I hope I’m not getting any weird looks now – I believe we all have this feeling; who else might I have been? Who else <em>could</em> I be? Isn’t that one of the reasons we like to read? So we can become a thousand-year-old <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2084017/A-Cambridge-scientist-believes-seen-beginning-animals-telepathic-powers.html" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="telepathic cat">telepathic</a> go-go dancing cat living in another galaxy? If no one has written this book yet, please could they?<br />
In summary, I have no idea who I am; I’m certainly not the person I often find myself describing when invited to speak about being a writer. It’s odd that other people always seem to know <em>exactly</em> who you are. Or think they do.<br />
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<strong>Where do you get off?</strong><br />
Well now, that would be telling. I seriously don’t think I should talk about that here, on the Booklist blog. I mean, this is a classy place, right? But I could perhaps mention other forms of mind-altering behavior, such as writing. Because this is an interview about writing, isn’t it? It isn’t? Oh. Well, anyway, I don’t do drugs because that whole thing is incredibly boring. And people talking about it is even more boring.<br />
If you take even a few minutes to look around, it rapidly becomes obvious that the <a href="http://travel.usnews.com/images/articles/145/Peculiar_City_Limit_Sign.jpg" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="weird sign">whole world</a> is a spectacularly <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCLtyED0KaS2raj81FtkFq2hwK0bQyPk6y4Ghyt_qweUn4oeF3tFpb1McNv-D0DOPTT2SbjqdhhIETZHrMbfxl4YCD_MbRaCOy644Rfdqg8TgIbRq_vNHGTDdbuG0UOCK7C_ofoJtckmI/s400/Strange_Toilets_30.jpg" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="strange sign 2">strange</a> mind-bump anyway. And as a writer you get to pick and choose the freakiest drugs in the candy store. And then, rather than ending up as a burned-out, bankrupt bore with ruined health, you get to turn these things into stories, for which there’s even the slim possibility you might get paid. So that’s how I get off. But I’m not letting on where.<br />
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<strong><a href="http://blog.booklistonline.com/2014/06/10/hostile-questions-marcus-sedgwick/midwinterblood/" rel="attachment wp-att-14571"><img alt="midwinterblood" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-14571" height="300" src="http://blog.booklistonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/midwinterblood-199x300.jpg" style="display: inline; float: right; margin: 0px 2px 7px 0px; padding: 4px;" width="199" /></a>What’s the big idea?</strong><br />
The big idea is linked to the above. It seems that the world falls into two kinds of people; those who think the world falls into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. And of those that do, the world falls into two kinds of people; those who seemed interested in the universe into which they have been deposited, and those who don’t look further than their toenails. As a writer, you are always being asked what’s the most important trait to have, and <a href="http://cdn.imore.com/sites/imore.com/files/field/image/2012/10/curious_george_dictionary_screenshot_4.jpg" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="Curious George">BEING INTERESTED</a> in the world is right up there with <a href="https://twitter.com/chimptypist" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="twitter">good typing skills</a> and a <a href="http://sassytalent.com/portfolio/boutique-agency/gallery/the-importance-of-reading-out-loud/" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="Sassy Talent">sassy agent</a>. It’s probably the most depressing thing in the world when you meet someone who simply has no desire to look around, to understand himself or herself, or anyone else for that matter, or, in the loosest sense of the word, to <em>explore</em>. Note, these kinds of people tend not to be readers. That’s a generalization of course, but the world falls into two kind of people; those that… Oh yeah. Sorry.<br />
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<strong>What is your problem, man?</strong><br />
How long have we got? Do you want a list? I could draw you a picture if that makes things clearer, or maybe I could do a matrix diagram, like those that the incredibly-intelligent and not-at-all-patronizing people who work in advertising use to work out how to sell us stupid people rubbish stuff we don’t need. <a href="http://collegechurchplanter.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/mike-breen-discipleship-matrix.png" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="matrix diagrams">Matrix diagrams</a> (potential for unlimited harm..!?) are dumb because they try to make the world simple. The world isn’t simple, it’s very complicated, but that’s not my big problem. My problem is that many people seem to think the world can be simplified; black/white, good/bad, Coke/new Coke, when the truth is way more complex than that. It would be like trying to classify everyone in the world as falling into two types of people; those that… Oh, yeah. Right. Sorry.<br />
My other big problem seems to be using the phrases ‘seem to’ or ‘seems to’ because I haven’t got the nerve to say what I actually think.<br />
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<strong>Haven’t you done enough?</strong><br />
Yes and no. I’ve probably done too much of some things. I guess you know what I’m talking about. But I haven’t done enough of the things that really matter to me, and writing is one of those. The very best part about being a writer is the time when you are putting words next to each other, trying to find an interesting and original and good way of doing that. When it’s going well, it feels very, very nice. I don’t get to have that experience anywhere near often enough – and actually I don’t think it would be possible to. So in the meantime I will go on, trying to ‘fail better’ as Samuel Beckett put it. But I’ll stop doing <a href="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2013/9/26/1380206271944/Ernst-Stavro-Blofeld-in-t-010.jpg" style="font-weight: bold;" target="_blank" title="Enrst Stavro Blofeld">the other stuff</a>. Thanks for pointing it out.<br />
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<br />Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-67934626286479192542014-04-22T12:38:00.001+02:002014-04-22T12:40:47.542+02:00Nabokov on coincidence<div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="text-indent: -30px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Since it's the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov, here's a little quote from this great writer. </span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="text-indent: -30px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br></span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="text-indent: -30px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">"A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence."</span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-indent: -30px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-indent: -30px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-indent: -30px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue Light', HelveticaNeue-Light, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;">I didn't know this quote by Nabokov when I wrote She Is Not Invisible. I wish I had because it sums up perfectly the way some people have tied themselves in knots trying to explain and find meaning in the phenomenon. And it makes me smile. </span></div><br><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyK6zgpz7LYwoe3ez5zEnzCLhbZM_SHVdSOUrppQJfcw5xJDPRA0GGY3itFG1XjdmHG36wS2r502x6tgNEm-R2yCMKPUXcrM7cTZbkvTl28JEmZsuLmZUlgL0zSMOAz7xkOIPBCJgwPmvR/s640/blogger-image--1920063087.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyK6zgpz7LYwoe3ez5zEnzCLhbZM_SHVdSOUrppQJfcw5xJDPRA0GGY3itFG1XjdmHG36wS2r502x6tgNEm-R2yCMKPUXcrM7cTZbkvTl28JEmZsuLmZUlgL0zSMOAz7xkOIPBCJgwPmvR/s640/blogger-image--1920063087.jpg"></a></div>Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-86280333292074936632014-04-13T15:34:00.000+02:002014-04-13T15:34:56.473+02:00Who is it 'for'?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5f2OGSk1lZpWdzoEwIGhbJlnqzBfL6NImDFhzpcIj9qz5PTS2lO1IfL417sk7UQAU7zSv0ZWVA2aRxbC799J1S60BUuEF_0-fL6TXRzHG2gN05IkHhMDPxo_fpF1yrVMjzjWfH0lF0979/s1600/A+Love+Like+Blood+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5f2OGSk1lZpWdzoEwIGhbJlnqzBfL6NImDFhzpcIj9qz5PTS2lO1IfL417sk7UQAU7zSv0ZWVA2aRxbC799J1S60BUuEF_0-fL6TXRzHG2gN05IkHhMDPxo_fpF1yrVMjzjWfH0lF0979/s1600/A+Love+Like+Blood+cover.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">This post first appeared on <a href="http://www.waterstones.com/blog/2014/03/but-who-is-it-for-marcus-sedgwick/" target="_blank">Waterstones.com </a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’ve written
about thirty books, of which all but one, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Love Like Blood</i>, is ‘for children’. Or so I’m told, and so I am led to
believe by the fact that it’s the imprint of a children’s publisher that
appears on the spine of all of them, apart from this new title. But is it all
that straightforward? What makes a book for children, and another for adults?
And indeed, what does that innocent preposition ‘for’ even mean?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">The world of
children’s books has changed over the years. It used to be pretty obvious what
was a children’s book and what was an adult novel. That was the case when I was
a teenager at least, and I should probably specify that in this train of
thought I am speaking about the reading that teenagers choose. Perhaps we can
all agree that not many adults are picking up Horrid Henry’s latest outing. Perhaps.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, even
back in those dim distant days of teenagehood, there were strange books that
threatened to make things more confusing; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catcher
in the Rye</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord of the Flies </i>are
the ones that are most often touted as hovering somewhere in a liminal space
between the worlds of the teenager and the adult, but there were always other
books that appealed to the young adult as much as the more mature version of
the human being: Camus’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outsider</i>, the
science-fiction of Heinlein, the horror of Poe, the epics of Tolkein.
Publishers, being canny people, have over the last few decades been
instrumental in defining a new area of the bookshop – the notion of the YA novel
was born, with those at the forefront being writers like S.E. Hinton, like Alan
Garner (I defy many adults to fully appreciate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Shift </i>on first reading), or Robert Cormier, who pushed the
boundaries of what was acceptable to find in a book ‘for’ children. There were
many others. So now we live in a complex grey area of what’s-for-who, and I can
say that at least four of my books have been widely perceived to be as
appropriate for adults as young adults. When John Ajvide Lindqvist (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let The Right One In</i>) read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Revolver</i> for example, he told me he
couldn’t see why it wasn’t published as an adult novel. To confuse things even
further, some of the foreign editions of my books have been published as adult
books.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">And yet, despite
this, I can see that A Love Like Blood is the first of my books that is ‘for’
adults. Why?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">To unpick this,
it’s necessary to understand what motivates a writer. I’ve spoken to many
writers about this, and with a totally unscientific guess, I would say 99% of
them don’t write a book for anyone other than themselves. This can sound a bit
arrogant at first, but if you think about it, it’s quite the reverse. What
would be arrogant would be to assume that you, the writer, knows best. That you
know what a 40 year old male commuter in Berlin would like to read on their
Kindle, or a 16 year old girl in Rio, or a 65 year old pensioner in Penzance.
No. That’s not how you write. You write the book that you yourself would like
to discover. Nothing else is going to make you sit at your laptop for 8 hours a
day for months on end until the thing is finished. That’s the only honest and
true way to do it – to write something that excites and moves you, and then,
when it’s published, you can hope that someone else might be excited by it too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Looking at it
from the other side, the reader doesn’t by and large choose a book because they
think it’s ‘for’ them. Of course, things might put a certain reader off reading
a certain book, but all the reader is looking for is a book that grips them.
That’s why, as a teenager, I was reading Arthur C. Clarke alongside Hemingway,
and why any adult now is as free to choose <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Hunger Games</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twilight</i> as
Martin Amis’s latest, an author I mention for his contention that he would only
ever write a book for children if he had a serious brain injury (Faulks on
Fiction, BBC 2011). And we know adults are reading these apparently teenage books
because the sales figures could not possibly be as high if they were only being
sold to teens. Although, Amis went on to reinforce the very point I make above
when he added that ‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the
story to is anathema to me’. Quite.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Like the White
Queen, I also believe in the possibility of thinking six impossible things
before breakfast, and here’s just one: at the same time that I am writing the
book purely for me, I am also aware that it has a publisher waiting for it, and
beyond that, a logo that will be printed on the spine and an area in which it
will be placed in the bookshop. So, once I had the concept of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Love Like Blood</i>, I knew no children’s
publisher would publish it. For one thing it’s just too unpleasant, for
another, I wanted to delve more fully into psychological depths which would be
deemed uninteresting to the young adult reader. Who knows? Has everyone
forgotten what the landscape of their teenage mind was like? These questions
are not mine to ponder, however. It’s only up to me to write the best book I
can. And do I care who it’s ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for’</i>?
Ultimately, no, I don’t. All I hope for is that someone will like it, that
people will buy it, and I for one am glad to be selling books to adults as well
as their younger selves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">MS 15/3/14<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5521732925966360865.post-10177800521930579512014-03-04T12:51:00.000+01:002014-03-04T12:51:43.917+01:00Where I Work<div class="MsoNormal">
(This post first appeared on Mulholland's <a href="http://mulhollanduncovered.tumblr.com/post/78443757738/where-i-work-by-marcus-sedgwick" target="_blank">tumblr</a>)</div>
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<span lang="EN-US">A few years ago I moved back to Cambridge: when I saw this shed in the
garden of one of the houses I was viewing, I put an offer in on the spot. Like
most writers, I’ve had to work in all sorts of inappropriate spaces, and, like
most writers, always craved the perfect place to work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">My shed is near perfect. It’s a little on the small side, but that just
means I have to tidy up from time to time, which is no bad thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Here’s what it looks like on the inside (just after a tidy
up)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtaSXJdhOhe_50HZE6nAtu-6n39u4kDNyH_-LBgXXNBdOmMrEPZM6UcwotoqHuNuDCJEnvt61PwQSdu5JXLkejJlfmmuh9JnDEh0eCM_xBgKGA7TlcShtEzcKPLVJWxTF0130OG6sRiTr/s1600/photo+1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrtaSXJdhOhe_50HZE6nAtu-6n39u4kDNyH_-LBgXXNBdOmMrEPZM6UcwotoqHuNuDCJEnvt61PwQSdu5JXLkejJlfmmuh9JnDEh0eCM_xBgKGA7TlcShtEzcKPLVJWxTF0130OG6sRiTr/s1600/photo+1.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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The stuff on the walls is never just random – they’re all
things to do with books, most usually, they’re inspiration for books I’m
writing or have just finished writing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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High up on the wall are a couple of guardians – ‘V’ from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta,
one of my favourite films, and Edgar the raven, both of whom make me smile
every time I walk into my shed. That’s more important than in sounds, and links
to the word that Edgar’s standing on. That one word – PLAY – is the single most
important thing I’ve learned in the 15 years I’ve been a published author. I’ve
thought a lot about writing in that time, I’ve had moments of block, I’ve had
many fears and worries and concerns about how to best do the art. The
importance of play, and I mean play in a focussed yet relaxed, serious and yet
fun way, cannot be denied: it underlies the best work I do, I think.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPTG-LcG75tIja0lZIuUaRZrCViO4h9bBDj9YwmIlL6GCphij-9x_X6gZrSys9wL4TcQ0Xeg8VyzvnrnJ39cyZxDC7ciWR2JDBrBhaI4ypN4Qz7qcy8r7VH_j0PJf1WDuHTLT3PG2ze5Io/s1600/photo+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPTG-LcG75tIja0lZIuUaRZrCViO4h9bBDj9YwmIlL6GCphij-9x_X6gZrSys9wL4TcQ0Xeg8VyzvnrnJ39cyZxDC7ciWR2JDBrBhaI4ypN4Qz7qcy8r7VH_j0PJf1WDuHTLT3PG2ze5Io/s1600/photo+2.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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Underneath that are a few spirals; I’ve just finished the
second draft of a new YA novel called The Ghosts of Heaven – it’s a slightly
complex quartet of novellas, each of which has the motif of the spiral
underlying the text.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> </o:p> </div>
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Beneath the spirals we come to a series of rough art by my
friend Thomas Taylor. I’ve started to write graphic novels in the last year or
so – and these are images from a forthcoming project: Scarlett Hart. It won’t
be out for a while though. I finished a first draft in the autumn; a second
draft is due and then Thomas has the gargantuan task of producing almost 200
pages of full colour art. That will take him a year or so to do. And then
publication will be a year after that – comics take MUCH more work than many
people give them credit for. Personally, I’ve found it a wonderful challenge to
learn how to write for comics – to set up plot, character, backstory,
atmosphere etc etc and yet to have so few words to do work with (95% of what
you ‘write’ as the author of a graphic novel disappears into the images) is a
huge task. Then, add to that, that you have to hit a page count more or less
exactly (due to the cost of production of comics) and you have a major set of
hills to climb. But I like a challenge.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq9n3wSi4a-2yNxeDGJGrY8qalmrozu5-9sOEQqyZ4dk_2wFJY8_Iup7Xbguiu-5uEqdIvOZsP0f37ANFWvGCvnWDHjfheBcaK5FvXkAgUsqZ2pgND9ypqU3OzbH0PugSRSB0RaFtf-zt1/s1600/photo+3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq9n3wSi4a-2yNxeDGJGrY8qalmrozu5-9sOEQqyZ4dk_2wFJY8_Iup7Xbguiu-5uEqdIvOZsP0f37ANFWvGCvnWDHjfheBcaK5FvXkAgUsqZ2pgND9ypqU3OzbH0PugSRSB0RaFtf-zt1/s1600/photo+3.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><o:p> </o:p></div>
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On the left of the desk here are a few books I’ve been using
to research my next novel for Mulholland – I’m deep in that process of hunting
out things that I know will be useful, or hope will be, and connected to that,
I guess, are the red notebooks at the back of the desk. I’m on book 10 at the
moment, since 2000, and the previous 9 I keep close at hand as you never know
when browsing through old ideas might finally make a connection to something
that’s been lurking in your unconscious for a while. Connections are as much
the stuff of a writer’s art as the imagination.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Next to the books are the edits for a short story I was
recently asked to write – that will be what I work on later this week. I love
writing short stories – they’re a chance to let your hair down, try something
new, and experiment with style. Something which can feed back into longer work
in the future, perhaps.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I tend to change the view on my screen saver, and find
something central to what I am writing about at the time – this is a building
that will appear in this second Mulholland title. I won’t say where it is but
it’s more sinister than it might first appear. Me view is pretty limited - a hint of my neighbours’ garden – but
that’s a good thing – it’s interesting enough to stimulate day dreaming (a
friend in my opinion, not an enemy), but not so interesting that you end up not
doing what you should be doing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Over to the right, although I’ve finished work on it long
ago (the book is about to be published) is the cover of my first novel for
Mulholland – A Love Like Blood. Covers are so important. I know that’s obvious
but what might be less obvious is the nerves with which you open an email with
the subject line “cover of your book”. Whenever we get to the moment of
designing the book cover, I live in fear, and the hope that your publisher will
come up with something you love. Fortunately, this time, I loved the cover from
the first design. A little tweaking and it was done. If you get sent a dodgy
first attempt, you know you might be in for months of wrangling. But if you
have to, you have to, because covers are the first and primary thing that sells
your book once it’s out in the world. Something that some authors might not
like to admit, but which, having worked in sales, in publishing for many years,
I know to be true. Above the book jacket is a photo of the Italian village
where the book opens – a weird and wonderful hilltop place called Sextantio by the
Romans.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And
finally, here’s another important tool for me. Along with notebooks themselves,
maps of one form or another have always been key to how I organise a book. So I
use large sheets of paper, on which I write in pencil (because it changes all
the time) and on these maps I sketch out a novel’s structure, themes character
notes, and so on. Every book has a different kind of map, because every book
needs to be written in a different way. Understanding that and not being scared
of it is very important, and is again something I am still learning about. This
map is the first go at one for the second book I’ll write for Mulholland. At
the moment it doesn’t even have a working title, the characters don’t have
names, the plot is still forming. It’s simultaneously one of the scariest and
most exciting periods in a writer’s work cycle.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3sRdRl23O0a762mUhd7YoRcFkEtzFQ33hHWT_SpELV1NtkbQ9skP2OeIOJQGvTakcvDY32HgpRapHTeLLrHiXSpaIBFEyBrwyykQln2mxx9isICV7k7dmtztzmtwQpNDekDV_z5qkPIpX/s1600/photo+2-1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3sRdRl23O0a762mUhd7YoRcFkEtzFQ33hHWT_SpELV1NtkbQ9skP2OeIOJQGvTakcvDY32HgpRapHTeLLrHiXSpaIBFEyBrwyykQln2mxx9isICV7k7dmtztzmtwQpNDekDV_z5qkPIpX/s1600/photo+2-1.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<o:p><br /></o:p></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-no-proof: yes;"></span></div>
Marcus Sedgwickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08284626115720979363noreply@blogger.com1