The Rite of Winter

first posted at READING ZONE


Parts of many of my books have been inspired by music: the chapter titles in White Crow for example, are titles of songs with related meanings, much of the Book of Dead Days was inspired by Schubert's epic song cycle, Winterreise. 

And Midwinterblood is no exception: lines by Nick Drake and Led Zeppelin are tucked away in the text, but the most significant source for the book is Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, 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, many people know the story of how a riot broke out at its scandalous first performance in Paris in 1913. This story was actually somewhat exaggerated, largely by Stravinsky himself, but it's not hard to see what the fuss is all about. Even today, this piece, when performed well, is startling, brutal, raw and fundamentally unknowable.

The Rite concerns the pagan sacrifice of a girl in old Russia, and just the names of its fourteen short passages are enough to make my spine tingle: I stole some of them for the chapter titles in part seven of Midwinterblood: The Glorification of the Chosen One, The Kiss of the Earth... And one small part of Stravinsky's work was the inspiration for some lines in the book just before the climatic sacrifice. The passage known as The Sage is shortest of the whole work, often just around twenty seconds long, and is a very very quiet section with a weird, otherworldly discord to end it. Either side of this near silence, the music thunders and drums, pounds and shudders, and to me, it depicts the way in life that a moment of great drama or violence is preceded by a moment of calm and stillness first.
I'd long wanted to pay homage to one of my favourite pieces of music by incorporating some of it in a book: I'm glad Midwinterblood gave me that chance.

PS Here’s four pieces of music you can “find” in the book:
Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin
Evocation of the Ancestors, The Rite of Spring - Igor Stravinsky
The Unquiet Grave - many versions but my favourite is by Lau
Pink Moon - Nick Drake


And here’s a short extract from Part Seven of Midwinterblood

The Glorification of the Chosen One

The sled is nearly at its place.
King Eirikr rises from the gilded throne upon which he has been riding.
He is covered in a massive fur of fox, and yet, as he stands, he slips the knot at its neck, and lets it fall to the wooden floor of the sled.
He is naked, yet he feels neither the cold of night, nor the deep of winter. His blood is pounding through his body. He tips his chin to the heavens, defiantly.
He is naked but for the narrow gold band gripping his head, the gold bracer of triple design, another symbol of the flower cult, the magic of which even now hurtles round his veins with the rest of his hot blood.

As if in an orgy of orchestrated genius, there is always a moment of silence before the violence and noise of the act itself.
Before battle, as the whole army takes in a breath.
Before the diver leaps into the water, and the sea pounds his ear drums.
Before the storm, the stillness in which a single bird calls.
Before the pains of birth, the brief rest between the spasms.
Before the all the other instruments descend in a maelstrom, the faint and strangled chord from the bassoons.
Before the ice breaks, before the tree falls, before the sword lands.
It might only be a fraction of a moment, but that time can dilate, can swell and grow, can fill the world around it with its power, till it lasts for a lifetime.

© Marcus Sedgwick 2011

The Big Blog Story - Chapter 8

You can read the previous chapter of the Big Blog Story, by Lauren Kate, HERE

Chapter 8:

Back on dry land, Mr Catch turned and looked at Scribble.

"You know, Scribble," he said, "I feel like a pataphysical interlude just occurred..."
He looked puzzled as Scribble scribbled in his notepad furiously for several minutes. He held the pad up for Mr Catch to see.

OCTOPUS, it said.

"You are a strange boy, Scribble," muttered Mr Catch, darkly, "however, I feel that has been well established by now, but what is less clear is this business about the moon."

He waved his hand at the ocean.

"That sprightly young mermaid might just be able to help us, more considerate than Moby Doris, kinder of heart, and less prejudiced towards...ahem....fishermen, we need to speak to her urgently about the contents of this chest, for if I am not very much mistaken, the coral, the rope, the pearl and that fiendishly odd set of scribblings are the ingredients of some magical stuff, something powerful and dangerous, and yet also potentially adventure-solving... Just the sort of thing a mysterious and frankly mythological creature of the sea should be able to help us with."

He stood up, feeling heroic, and tried striking a variety of noble poses, then realised something.

"There's just one problem...," he said, looking suddenly glum. "How are we, land-based organisms, going to venture beneath the salty waves?"

Now Scribble applied pencil to paper in a frantic and free manner, and after some little time had passed, handed the pad to Mr Catch.

"Well call me Ishmael and wipe my face with a flounder! A submersible!"

For what Scribble had drawn, nay designed, was exactly that. A fully equipped, deep sea diving, sub-marinal machine.

"Give me till tea time!" cried Catch, picking up a hammer and a sheet of metal that he found immediately at hand, "and I'll be putting on the final lick of paint."

And he was as good as his word...



Read the next instalment of the Big Blog Story at Alan Gibbons' blog on September 24th: HERE

The right hand giveth, the left hand taketh away

Reposting my guest blog from The Periscope Post
According to CILIP, the professional body of our country’s librarians, one in six adults in the UK are functionally illiterate. This means they have literacy below that expected of the average 11 year old. We are not talking here about using reading as a leisure activity, as a source of pleasure, we’re talking about reading levels insufficient to be able to live, to work to full potential. To communicate.
Thinking long term, the sensible approach is to correct the problem early, by improving the literacy of primary school children. So, good news, at the end of 2011 the government awarded a grant of £110 million to be used to boost the attainment of the poorest children in the country.
Launched last week, one of the first announcements of the Education Endowment Foundation, who will administer this fund, is a piece of research that shows that, unsurprisingly, it’s our poorest children who are most likely to suffer such disadvantages: A staggering three out of five (60 percent) of children from the poorest sections of society lack basic literacy. Looking in more detail, the 165,000 pupils that the EEF will target are half as likely as their better-off peers to reach national standards at primary level (40 percent v. 81 percent), and one third as likely to reach national standards at secondary level (18 percent v. 61 percent). And, far from improving, the picture is getting worse. Three years ago, 45 percent of primary school children met these standards; the figure now stands at 40 percent. So it would seem like there’s no better time to be throwing some cash at the problem.
However, CILIP, many teachers, publishing professionals and various children’s authors argue convincingly that at the core of any child’s progress towards literacy should come a good relationship to books, at best, a love of reading. And where is any child from one of the poorest households described above going to find books? Free books, thousands of them? In their public or school library, that is where.
On the same day as the launch of the EEF, the government released its white paper on Open Public Services. Rather lost amidst the spectacle of the revelations concerning New International, the white paper, while according to many pundits a watered down version of Cameron’s initial plans, contains nevertheless the imperative for the control of public services, including libraries, to be outsourced to private companies, charities, community groups, you name it. And explicit in this process is the belief that struggling services should be allowed to fail: “The inevitability of small levels of failure is not an excuse for dismantling the system of open public services and returning to the old ways of top-down prescription.
Speak to any librarian and they will be more than happy to regale you with accounts of the reduction in funding and services to libraries not just since the coalition came to power, but over the past several years. How galling is it therefore, to find yourself in a service that can now be deemed as failing when funding has been repeatedly cut? For libraries, cuts means reduction in opening hours, reduction in book budget, and reduction in qualified staffing. According to the Voices for the Library campaign, it seems that over 10 percent of UK libraries are currently under threat, on top of those that have already seen closure.
Around the same time that the announcement of the EEF was made, we also learned that the Museums, Libraries and Archives (MLA) Council was to be abolished, and responsibility for library services to be handed to the Arts Council instead. And with a 25 percent reduction in their budget. As for libraries, the Arts Council announced last week that it intends to “speak up for libraries” in the Review of the Arts Council’s Strategic Framework. What the review doesn’t mention is that it will be doing this with an allocation for libraries slashed from £13 million to just £3 million.
Well, we have to save money somewhere, right? Just a shame it has to come at the cost of our children’s literacy. Does £3 million sound like a lot to you? In governmental terms, it sounds pretty tiny, especially if you compare it with something like Defence spending, the 2010 figure for which was over £43 billion. Then it sounds very tiny indeed.

Radio silence

Like many bloggers I am guilty of occasional long silences, a result of having too much to do and yet not much to say about it either.

I've been travelling a lot, doing talks and school events, and got back last week from the States, where I'd been in New Orleans at the ALA conference, which was excellent: I discovered that American school and public librarians are every bit as wonderful, enthusiastic and knowledgable as their British counterparts. Why, on both sides of the Atlantic, we are cutting library services, is beyond me. Or rather, I know full well why, but it's a crime.

I also had time to indulge my obsession with Bond: this is the location of the Jazz funeral at the start of Live and Let Die :-)

Today is my last school event of the season, and then I have two weeks to write half a book, and co write half a screenplay with my brother. Oh, and get ideas for a new YA book together, finally. So that should all be a doddle, and I'm wondering what to do with my spare time :-/

Twitter event for Edbookfest

I've just written a short story called 'Archipelago' for Edinburgh Book Festival for a project called 'Elsewhere'. They invited me to do a twitter q and a session today, and there's a transcript of the whole event online here:

http://edbookfest.blogspot.com/2011/04/transcript-of-todays-twitter-q-with.html

It was great fun, some deep questions, some silly ones, some that really stumped me, but the most interesting thing is that I find these events more nerve-wracking than 'real' ones, for some odd reason. Part of it is that you don't know who, or how many people, you're talking to, unlike a real event.

But it was fun and it's good to think you can communicate with people around the world all at once.

Cover design

I've got time for one more pass through my new book, Midwinterblood, to be published this autumn, and that means it's time for the design team at Orion to kick into overdrive with the cover. I like this bit for lots of reasons, not least because my work is nearly done and I can 'advise' on someone else trying to get the best out of the thing.

Midwinterblood was always going to be a challengin cover design, because the book has so many different elements. Which to go for? What to focus on? In the end, as I've probably said on numerous occasions, it comes down to one thing. It took me years to realise what a cover should do, and actually it's pretty simple. A good cover should obviously be a smart and striking piece of design, if it tells you something about the plot, characters, setting etc then so much the better, but THE ONE THING a cover should do is tell you how you will feel when you read the book. We read, after all, to experience an emotion, or emotions, and a cover should give you a sample of that before you even open the pages. 

That being understood, as we tweak what will be the finished thing for Midwinterblood, I realise again that that is what it has come down to. A big fat slice of what I hope people will feel as they read the book. And also, after a few alternative designs, we went back to something based on the painting that inspired the book in the first place, Carl Larsson's Midvinterblot. That seems fitting.

Rewriting

Normally I hate it. Now it seems I love it. Rewriting, that is.

The last two longer books I've written, White Crow and Midwinterblood (which won't be published till October) have seen a change in my attitude to rewriting. With White Crow, I thought this was because I really didn't like getting the first draft down as much as usual, so I wondered if the fun came in tinkering with afterwards. But then, I really enjoyed doing the first draft of Midwinterblood, so that's that theory out of the window. My alternative theory is that because I wrote the first draft pretty quickly, I didn't 'live' for a long time in its world, and therefore was not yet bored/fed up/angry with it.

I've just finished the second draft, and hope I've done enough of the major stuff that needed doing, there will undoubtedly by lots of little bits still to get right, but for a few more days at least, it's off my desk and in my editor's inbox :-)

In the meantime, I realise that we are all wasting our time worrying about writing the perfect children's book, when it was done in that episode of Black Books, with the elephant and his balloon. (The relevant section comes in at 17:24, but really the whole thing is painfully apt.)

Mind you, the stages they went through to get there seem awfully familiar...