Spooktacular!

It’s Hallowe’en again!

MWAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!! Image: fanpop.com

The older I get, the more I enjoy this ‘holiday’, if it can be called that. I have had my little goodie bags wrapped up and ready to go for almost two weeks, awaiting our hordes of teeny tiny callers later tonight, and we have actually decorated the house this year. I know, I know, we’re falling for the hype – blahdiblah – but really. What does it matter if we’re helping a few local kids have a good time? Not to mention, of course, that it’s a whole lot of fun for us, too. Last year we had a tiny speck of a child, barely able to totter on her little feet, dressed up as a pumpkin. A pumpkin. I have yet to see anything cuter. (She got two goodie bags, but don’t tell anyone.)

Image: decorationforlife.com

Before all the fun begins later tonight, though, I have a lot to do. I am still trying to work out a story for the Walking on Thin Ice Short Story Contest, which I may have mentioned once or twice in passing (have you entered yet? Get on it!); writing my entry is proving a little more complex than I anticipated. I’m not sure why, because the theme is something about which I feel strongly. Perhaps, indeed, that’s the problem – I am too emotionally invested in the idea of mental health, and the oppression of those who suffer due to their mental health. I want to write a story which is authentic and which says something, not only about me but about the ethos of the competition, and it’s not as easy as it looks. I’ve written two stories now, and drafted them both at least ten times, but they’re still not right.

Sigh.

Anyway. Tomorrow is the start of NaNoWriMo – which is terrifying and brilliant in equal measure – and I’ve been thinking a lot about my project over the past few days. I’ve managed to plot out a little more of the story, but there’s still a huge Terra Incognita in the middle, between our heroine’s dramatic escape and the tension-filled dénouement; I’m hoping that the story will tell itself as I go. It’s a foolproof plan. It couldn’t possibly go wrong. Right?

One thing I do not have yet is a title for this new opus.

How about…

THE ICE KING

Nah. Or maybe…

THE CREATURE IN THE NORTH

Too general? How about…

THE WHITE FLOWER AND THE FROZEN GOD

Too long and complicated? Sheesh. Coming up with titles is thirsty work.

If you have any suggestions, let’s hear ’em. You might have guessed that the story will involve ice, north-ness, and frozen stuff. Oh, and a little girl called Emmeline Widget, just because.

Good luck with your entries for the Walking on Thin Ice Short Story Contest (I haven’t forgotten, you know), and with everything else you may be getting up to on this fine autumnal Thursday. I hope you have a scarily wonderful day!*

Image: goodhousekeeping.com

*Apologies. I couldn’t resist. Have a great day, if you prefer.

Wednesday Write-In #63

This week’s words for CAKE.shortandsweet’s Wednesday Write-In were:

hideout  ::  transitory  ::  share  ::  full bodied  ::  problem

Image: blog.kyletunneyphotography.com

Little Girl Lost

‘It’s almost full bodied, isn’t it?’ Becky settled her head on her folded arms as she stared out the reinforced window, her vision getting lost in the howling dark. Nelson cleared his throat, wondering where she was going with this one.

‘How d’you mean, full bodied? Like, curvaceous?’ He licked his lips.

‘Nah, you twit,’ she said, turning to smile at him. In the candlelight, her hair was translucent. ‘I mean, multi-layered. Sort of lovely, if you look at it the right way. Full of hidden depths.’

‘If you say so.’ Nelson settled back into his chair. ‘Just looks like a pile of snow, to me.’

‘Yes. Well. You never did have an eye for beauty.’ She waited for his snort of laughter, but the crackle of the radio interrupted them.

‘Hideout? We’ve got a problem.’ Becky moved smoothly, on silent feet, to Nelson’s side.

‘Control? Hideout here. What’s up?’ Nelson’s voice was steady, but his fingers weren’t.

‘It’s the signal. It’s fluctuating,’ came the reply. Becky wasn’t sure who was speaking – the voice was unfamiliar. Control changed radio operators pretty frequently; nobody lasted long, up here.

‘Fluctuating? How can it fluctuate?’ replied Nelson. The set started to squeal, like an animal in pain.

‘…can’t explain it. It’s strong as ever one second, and gone the next. Have you…’ The rest of the message was lost in a scramble of static. Nelson fiddled with the controls as Becky bit back her urge to tell him to hurry. She clenched her fists and turned back toward the window again, the darkness drawing her eyes like water to a plughole.

Then, something hit the glass. Something small. Something pale.

‘Nelson!’ she said, in a half-hiss. ‘There’s something – ‘

‘Hideout? Hideout, are you there?’ The radio sputtered. ‘Be advised we’re getting readings… levels of radiation off the…’

‘Hello? Control?’ Nelson thumped the set. ‘Dammit! I can’t find the frequency. It’s like something’s bending the waves.’ Becky was only half-listening.

‘Nelson, there’s something out there,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Something alive.’ Nelson sucked his teeth in irritation and bent toward the radio again.

‘Your brain’s got frostbite, darlin’,’ he muttered. ‘Nothin’s able to live out there, Becks! You know that. Come and help me with this, willya?’

A small, pale shape slapped itself against the window pane, and then was gone again. It reminded Becky of a piece of paper caught in the jaws of the wind, a transitory message left unread. A downy feather, floating on a breath of breeze. A flash of sunlight through green leaves. A tiny face with dark eyes, lost.

She’d slipped into her jacket before Nelson even noticed she’d moved from his side.

‘Oi!’ he yelled, as a gust of frozen wind ripped through the hideout, upending equipment and dousing candles. Before he could move, Becky was out the door; by the time he’d suited up and made it to the threshold, she’d been swallowed by the emptiness.

‘Becky!’ he called, his breath fogging up his visor. ‘For God’s sake! Where are you?’ He took a couple of steps away from the hideout, trying to follow Becky’s tracks. He could only see a few feet, and he was terrified to move too far from the door. You could turn around in weather like this and get so lost you’d never be found, and Nelson knew it.

Already, he was getting tired. It had only been seconds, and his bones were starting to ache. He took two more steps, and then he fell to his knees.

Then, somewhere up ahead, something moved. Nelson’s heart skipped as he struggled to focus on it.

‘Becks?’ he shouted, realising as he did so that he was out of breath. ‘Becky!’

A child – a child? – appeared out of the whirling snow. Tiny, white, dark eyes, dressed in rags. Nelson didn’t know her, but that was the least weird thing about her being there. He struggled to understand as his blood turned to slush in his veins. Nelson blinked, and the child was beside him, her cruel teeth bared and her tiny ice-dagger fingers around his neck.

‘Next time you’ll share your warmness and your good stuff, won’t you?’ whispered the child as it stepped over Nelson, its bare feet blue. ‘Next time I won’t have to take what I need, will I?’

The only answer the child received as it closed and sealed the hideout door against the night was the hiss of the radio, still searching for a signal that would never come.

Laying Foundations

So – yes. Hello. Happy Tuesday to you.

I regret to inform you that my plans for yesterday, Bank Holiday Monday (i.e. to do loads of work), didn’t really materialise as I expected.

It ended up looking a bit more like this than it should’ve…
Image: gainesvillescene.com

We had a lovely and unexpected visit from my parents-in-law, which basically made me relax and enjoy my day off. As a result, lots of the planning I wanted to do for my NaNoWriMo project is still undone.

This morning, however, I’m wondering whether that’s a blessing in disguise.

You might remember me saying that when I signed up for NaNoWriMo, I had a project in mind. I had a title for it, but very little else. I spent a day or two last week drawing up characters and their profiles and their relationships and family dynamics and the details of a plot, and then last Friday my brain was invaded. An entirely new story, an entirely different voice, a full-blooded, spiky and determined little character sat down inside my mind and a story started to tell itself. I scrambled for a pen and tried to follow this voice as it spoke, and three pages later it faded out. I’ve been trying to plan – all in my mind, of course – a story arc for this wondrous character ever since.

However, can too much planning, in this case, be a bad thing? Well. I’m still not sure.

It’s rare and fantastic to ‘hear’ a strain of a story, and it’s a lucky person who happens to be in the right place at the right time and whose brain is tuned in just the right way to pick up on a tale as it passes. Last Friday, I was that lucky person. I literally sat down and wrote, without even thinking, the opening few pages of a new book; I loved everything about it. I’m not saying these words are set in stone, or that they won’t change between now and the time I write ‘The End’ on this particular project, but I know it was exciting to feel so enthused and positive about a writing project. It felt fresh and spontaneous and free and unbidden, and I wonder if setting up a scaffold for the rest of it and expecting the story to fit a certain mould or conform to a particular plan, is something that will kill it stone dead.

Then, having said that, I don’t want to reach 20,000 words and hit a wall.

Image: thepunch.com.au

So, I’m trying to compromise. I’m laying foundations for this story, but they’re not solid like poured concrete, and there are no inflexible metal bits. My foundations are in my head, still – I’ll start putting them down on paper after November 1st, and we’ll see if I can keep the process as organic as possible – and they are, as yet, pretty vague. I have a main character, and I have a name for her. I have another character, and a name and basic outline for him. I have an Antagonist who has a Dastardly Plan (insert your own ‘mwahahahaha’ here), and I have a sense of the world they inhabit. Importantly, I have a handle on the voice of the story, which is different to anything I’ve done before – and, crucially, is in the third person – and I really want to keep that little voice alive, because it’s thrilling.

What I don’t have in any real sense is any idea how my protagonist is going to get from point A to point Z – as in, from the first site of conflict with her enemies to her final showdown. However, perhaps I’d do well to discover it along with her. I’m imagining a tense chase through the icy streets of Paris, a scuffle at the Gare du Nord, and a pair of stowaways bundling themselves onto a northbound train…

Anyway, stick with me through November and hopefully I’ll have plenty more updates to share with you. If you’re taking part in NaNoWriMo and you’d like to be my writing buddy (or if you just want to have a peek at my page), you can find it here.

Whatever you’re laying the foundation for today, I hope it goes well.

Image: ohs.com.au

 

 

 

 

Another Publication!

My week is getting off to a good start already. My story ‘One’ was published this morning on Daily Science Fiction, and I have to say it’s a handsome thing. It’s great to see a story in its finished state, formatted and laid out to a publisher’s specification; it almost makes the content of the story seem better, too. It’s a long way from the day I first started tapping it out on my battered old laptop, months and months ago.

If you’d like to read the story, you can go here. Thrillingly, this time around, there’s an option for you to rate the story from 1 to 7, depending on how terrible you think it is. Currently, I’m holding steady at 5.4 average, so have fun skewing those stats!

I imagine the city Unubert lives in to look a little like this…
Image: blog.zeemp.com

Today is a Bank Holiday in my fair isle. Most people, I would wager, are still abed. This is a shame, because they’re missing a beautiful morning. We had awful weather yesterday – not as bad as parts of the UK, which suffered the fury of ‘St Jude’, the winter storm they decided to nickname after the saint of lost causes – but today, the sky is blue again.

I hope good weekends were had by all? I met up with some of my old university friends on Saturday, which was wonderful. It was so much fun to slip straight back into our early twenties, as happens when we’re all together, and forget for a while that we’re not that young any more and our lives have all changed beyond recognition. It did me good to remember what it felt like to have nothing more than getting to your next lecture to worry about, and I don’t think I’ve laughed so hard in quite a while.

So, all in all, it was the perfect cure for a fraught week.

I’m feeling a lot better now, too. You might remember me saying I felt unwell a few days back, and that I wasn’t able to focus on the computer screen, and all that. Well, thankfully it turned out to be nothing serious – the optician diagnosed me with eyestrain. Part of the reason I know the day is bright and blue outside is because I’m making a point of looking out the window every few minutes, just for a few seconds at a time, in order to flex my lenses. That wasn’t the term the optician used, but I just like to imagine it that way.

LIFT and stretch and LIFT and stretch and LIFT…
Image: generalcomics.com

So, today will be spent ‘dividing my time’ (I’ve always wanted to use that phrase…) between my NaNoWriMo prep (my brain has been invaded by an entirely new idea, which is clamouring to be written), my efforts to write a story for the Walking on Thin Ice Short Story Contest, and spending a bit of time with that man who lives in my house, whathisname… oh yeah, my husband. So, you know. It’s going to be a busy one.

Happy Monday! Remember to keep those eyeballs supple and those typin’ fingers flying…

Book Review Saturday – ‘After the Snow’

I’ll say this about S.D. Crockett’s ‘After the Snow’: the cover image lets you know what you’re in for.

Image: panmacmillan.com

The book’s title, and the author’s name, are written in such small font that it’s easy to overlook them completely. What overwhelms, on the other hand, is the image of the dog skull and the hastily scribbled words all over the background – words which, we learn as we read, belong to Willo, our fifteen-year-old narrator. This is fitting, because ‘After the Snow’ is a book which does its best to absorb the reader into a world of its own making, a future world where the damage done to the environment in our present day has resulted in almost neverending winter. It uses Willo’s dialect and idiosyncratic language, and his relationship with the dog-spirit he carries with him, as well as the detailed and palpable descriptions of the crushingly cold landscape, to achieve this.

I’m not entirely sure it’s successful.

There were parts of this book which I really admired – the descriptions of the snowdrifted landscape, for one, and the sometimes beautiful language employed, as well as the fire at the heart of Willo’s character – but there were a lot of things about this book that I didn’t like so much. I found Willo’s dialect hard to process, at first, but it did get easier after a few pages; however, there were times when I found his voice frustrating. I did love the character, though, and his determination and bravery, so Willo kept me reading. I also found the book’s pacing difficult to understand – not a lot happens for at least the first half of the book, or at least that’s how it felt to me; it seemed that too much was then crammed into the second half, leading to a strangely offbeat ending.

As for the plot: Willo lives with his family, deep in the wilds of the Welsh countryside, far from the prying eyes of the totalitarian-seeming government. They eke out a living, and seem very happy – cold, deprivation and near-starvation notwithstanding. Lacking a formal education, or much exposure to the world outside his immediate family, Willo has a unique way of dealing with the world; he has a dog spirit, which he hears inside his head at moments of crisis. He wears a dog skull on his hat, and has made a cloak out of the dog’s tanned hide. I thought this was a marvellous touch, and really made Willo come alive for me. I only wish that S.D. Crockett had allowed more time to the voice of the dog, and made more use of it – I was hoping for a relationship like that between Todd and his dog Manchee in ‘The Chaos Walking’ trilogy, but it wasn’t to be. Nevertheless I thought it was a very realistic and touching detail, this relationship between Willo and his ‘dog’, and it more than anything else really described the world in which Willo and his family live.

Willo’s family have been taken away as the novel opens. We learn about his father Robin and his stepmother Magda, his sisters and brothers (particularly Alice, ‘who got a baby with [Geraint, their elderly neighbour]. And she only been fourteen’ (p. 25). We realise that Willo and his dog-spirit are alone now, without any idea where the family have been taken or why they are gone. Willo suspects Geraint is behind it, and goes on a mission to find his family and bring Geraint to justice. In the course of this he meets Mary, a young girl whose father has left her and her young brother Tommy in an abandoned house while he searches for food. Willo knows the children are doomed if he doesn’t help them, but the dog-spirit – in the interests of keeping Willo alive – counsels him to keep going and forget them. Eventually, he manages to rescue Mary, and she travels with him on his somewhat aimless journey toward retribution.

When the story moves to ‘the City’, it begins to pick up pace. We read about living conditions so dire that I could barely believe it, and a government with an iron grip on its people. Crime and cruelty are the orders of the day. Willo (in one of these annoying coincidences that can crop up in books, sometimes) becomes apprenticed to a man who can lead him right to a powerful woman who holds a life-shattering secret about Willo, and what has happened to his family; before he can escape to join them, however, he is apprehended by enemies he didn’t even realise he had.

This book is a strange juxtaposition of quiet and loud. For the first 130 pages or so, we have Willo in the wilderness, dealing with wild animals and hunger and cold; there are some gruesome scenes, particularly when he is trying to rescue Mary and her brother, but nothing too stomach-turning. Then, we come to the second half of the book, and it’s like someone switched the colour contrast up. There are scenes and descriptions of such horror that I wondered whether I was reading a book aimed at children – I think, despite the differences between it and a ‘typical’ YA book, this story is more suited to older teenagers – and there were times when I felt it was a little too graphic for me. I understand we’re dealing with a world in which people have to do anything they can to survive, and that doesn’t lead to civilised behaviour, but there were some scenes which will stay with me for a long time. It was powerful and effective storytelling, but rather bleak. The book’s ending seems to come out of nowhere, then, and – being honest – it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. The darkness that led up to it suddenly explodes into light, and it was a strange contrast. There were also so many brilliant details that we didn’t hear enough about, including why China is the new superpower in this strange world, and what ANPEC (the government entity keeping the City in lockdown) actually is. We meet several characters that seem pointless, serving only to get Willo out of a bind, and there isn’t enough detail about this world and how it operates to really get a handle on understanding it. I thought that was a shame, because there are some really excellent ideas in this book, and I would have liked to explore its story world a bit more deeply.

Having said all that, I enjoyed the book. I loved Willo and his strange, unique voice, and I loved Mary, the brave little girl who fights like a tiger for survival. The picture this novel paints of the future is horrifying, but that’s the point, I guess. It’s a future we’re heading for, with our eyes open. One aspect of the novel which I found strange was the vituperative way in which things like recycling and wind power were spoken about – they were decried as being worse than useless in a world which could have harnessed nuclear and large-scale solar power (huge banks of solar panels in Africa, which are owned and operated by China, are mentioned in passing); part of the blame for the state of the world is laid at the feet of those who were too busy sorting their rubbish and spending millions on ‘winfarms’, as Willo calls them, to bother about proper ways of dealing with the environment. I’m not sure I agree with that, entirely, but I do take the point. Unless something drastic is done, the world we will bequeath to our descendants is one not too far removed from that in which Willo lives – and I hope I won’t be alive to see it.

Give this one a go if you’re looking for a dystopian novel with a difference – just make sure you’ve a strong stomach for the second half.

Happy reading!

A replica of Willo’s ‘dog hat’, which was offered as a prize by the publishers of ‘After the Snow.’
Image: goodreads.com

Picking up the Pen

So, today I’m facing a disappointment. I’ve had another rejection, and this time it’s a big one. I’m dealing with it the only way I know how, which is by picking up the (metaphorical) pen and continuing with what I love best.

In that spirit, here’s a wee piece of flash fiction, which also happens to be my entry for Flash! Friday for this week. It’s a tiny bit risqué, but I hope I’ll be forgiven.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off. I have a bit of picking myself up, dusting myself off and getting back on the horse to do… Happy Friday, and happy weekend.

Image: silentfilmlivemusic.blogspot.com

A Moment on the Lips…

‘All right, Mr. Fairchild. Nearly finished.’

‘Doctor, may I ask – is it serious?’

‘Not sure, old chap. Let me just take another look at your skull. Hold still, now.’

‘My skull? But I thought -’

‘Hold still, Mr. Fairchild, please.’

‘I say! Are you quite sure you know what you’re doing?’

‘Mr. Fairchild, be reasonable. I am the preeminent authority on STDs in the country, after all.’

‘S… STDs? What on earth?’

‘Supernaturally Transmitted Diseases, sir.’

‘Of – of course. Yes. Supernatural, you say?’

‘Mmm. Just turn your head, there’s a good chap. Ah, yes – just as I thought. Definite lengthening of the earlobe, and if I’m not mistaken… Yes. A nascent protuberance.’

‘A what?’

‘You’re growing horns, Mr. Fairchild. Tell me, was it a faun? It normally is.’

‘It – what? It was just a kiss!’

‘Yes, yes. That’s what they all say. Why don’t you have a seat, old bean. You look done in.’

‘Good God. What shall I tell my wife?’

‘Oh, I should think it doesn’t matter. I give it about a week before you’re gambolling and eating grass.’

‘You can’t mean…’

‘I certainly do.’

‘Isn’t there –’

‘Anything I can do? Afraid not, old bean. Now. Will that be cash, or cheque?’

 

 

Unscheduled Interruption

Phew.

So, apologies for the lack of a blog post yesterday. In my defence, I was quite unwell. It had been building up for a few days, but it came to a head yesterday morning, when I tried to write my entry for the Wednesday Write-In. I found that I couldn’t focus on the words I was trying to type – it was like my eyes were sliding all around the screen, and they were burning, and sore, and my head ached. I am much better today but I’m going to see the optician later, just in case there’s a problem with my vision. I guess spending hours on end peering at a computer screen might not be the best thing you could do for your eyesight.

Image: catster.com

I am working on cooking up a story using the Wednesday Write-In prompts, and I hope to post it just as soon as I am able. Sadly, however, today is not that day. I’m off to have a nice lady examine my retinas and test me for glaucoma and shine bright lights into my peepers, and if I don’t hurry up I’m going to be late!

I will be back, just as soon as possible. Do not adjust your sets.

Image: freethoughtblogs.com

NaNoooOOOoooWriMo…

I may have done something foolish yesterday.

No. Scratch the ‘may have done.’ I did do something foolish. It could, however, turn out to be the best thing I’ve done in quite a while.

So, what did I do? Well, I signed myself up for NaNoWriMo, didn’t I.

Image: thesnapper.com

‘NaNoWhat?‘ I’m sure some of you are saying – well, fear no more. I shall explain.

(At this point I cannot resist a picture of Inigo Montoya. Please stand by:

Image: quickmeme.com

Okay. Normal service can resume.)

NaNoWriMo stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month.’ Every November, people all over the world pledge to write 50,000 words during the calendar month, and at the end of that time they submit their work (for counting purposes only) to the NaNoWriMo website. If they have reached the grand total of 50,000 words, or more, they are declared ‘winners’; if not, well, there’s always next year.

The idea behind it is to encourage people to write enough words to form a first draft – you’re only supposed to write for the month, not edit or any of that fancy stuff – so, in theory, there should be just enough time to get it done. The website offers encouragement, tips and tricks, all the help you could want and lots of support from your fellow NaNoWriMo-ers, and I think it’s a great idea. I’ve been wondering about taking part for a while now, and so yesterday I did what I normally do when I’m making a big decision, i.e. I agonised about it forever and then just threw caution to the wind and signed myself up before I could talk myself out of it.

I spent some time yesterday, once the deed was done, putting a little bit of flesh on the bones of an idea I’ve had stewing for a while. It’s an idea I haven’t thought about too deeply, so the story was a total sketch – all I had was a title, and a vague notion of the central characters. (NaNo is supposed to be about writing a story from scratch, not about putting the finishing touches to a project you’ve had on the go for a while, but I don’t think anyone really minds as long as you’re writing.) As you might expect for me, it’s going to be a children’s book, and it’s going to involve family ties and friendship, and noble self-sacrifice for others, and deep, life-changing love (but not the yucky kind. This will most definitely not be a ‘kissing book.’)

I promise, I promise it won’t be a kissing book. Okay?
Image: smallreview.blogspot.com

One character who I am quite clear on is the Antagonist – and he deserves that capital A, for he is a nasty creature – and I’m letting him settle in my head. The whole book will take shape around him. An ancient evil force, whose prison is made weak and who is finally released in error by a child, he will wreak all kinds of dreadful havoc. In preparation for getting started, I’m thinking deeply about a few things, including: ‘When I was eleven, what were the things I was most scared of?’ and ‘When I was eleven, who were the people I loved the deepest?’

Of course, I haven’t written a word. I can’t even write the title into my Word document before November 1st, because I would consider that cheating. However, I think a bit of mental preparation can’t hurt.

I’m also going to write this book in the third person. I’ve made that very clear to my brain just in case it starts to write in first-person, which seems to be its default setting. I haven’t tackled a full-length project like this in the third person for a long, long time, and I’m looking forward to that. Third-person gives the writer a bit more freedom than first-person, but it also means the reader isn’t as involved in the action. As a reader, I don’t really have a preference for one over the other, but as a writer I want to make sure I can handle both types of narrative voice with equal ease. So, this is my chance.

Of course, my NaNoWriMo project may well turn out to be nothing. The story may work, or it may not. I might reach my 50,000 word target, or I might burn out at the 20,000 word mark. I’m hopeful something great will come out of it, something I can work on and perfect well into the new year, but even if it fizzles out I know that nothing related to writing is a waste of time.

I still feel like I’m being a reckless so-and-so, though. Will you wish me luck? I’d really appreciate it.

And hey! If you want to take part yourself, here’s the link you need: NaNoWriMo. Have you always wanted to write a novel? Well, here’s your chance!

Happy Tuesday, folks. While I’m here, thanks for all the feedback I got – not all of it via WordPress – on yesterday’s blog post. It seems to have struck a chord with some of you, and I’m glad.

The Difficult Things

**Content warning: This blog post touches on material which some may find offensive or upsetting, and carries a link to a newspaper article about online pornography and its effect on young people. It may not be suitable for younger readers.** 

I recently read an article somewhere which asked the question: ‘Why are books for young people full of stories about the Difficult Things in life, such as abuse and bullying and death and loss and pain? Why can’t we just write stories about nice things, so that young people can read them and be inspired to be nice?‘ (Or, words to that effect. I may be paraphrasing, here.)

Then, at the weekend, I read a newspaper feature which took as its subject the ubiquity of pornography and how easy it is for young people to access it, whether it be on their computers or on their smartphones or at school, among their friends. Leaving aside my own feelings about pornography – because it’s unimportant to what I’m trying to say here – I found the article to be terrifying. I wasn’t unaware of the phenomenon, because I try to follow the trends of teenage life in order to inform my work, but I was still appalled by some of what I read.

Image: joobworld.com

The article outlined the sort of thing that young people – both girls and boys – are looking at on a daily basis, and it outlined the kind of behaviour they display after a diet of such material. One parent described how her son went into a fit of shrieking and shaking, followed by deep, visceral and destructive anger when she tried to remove his access to his computer; he was acting ‘like an addict’, as she described it. Another contributor described how her friend’s nine-year-old came home from school and told his mother that he and his friends had been talking about ‘boy things’ that day at lunchtime. When pressed, the child revealed they’d been discussing rape. When asked to define his understanding of the word, the little boy said that it meant ‘forcing a girl to do sex and then killing her.’

This child was nine, just in case you missed it.

The landscape that children and teenagers are growing up in is a vastly different one, in some ways, from the landscape in which people of my generation found their way into adulthood. We had pornography, sure. We had dangers, and we had concerns about our bodies, and we had bullying, and we had curiosity about adulthood and sexuality – the same as young people do nowadays. What we didn’t have was immediate and free access to the most depraved and violent material the internet can offer in order to feed this desire to learn about what it meant to be grown up; we didn’t have that, and I am thankful for it.

The ways in which modern pornography teaches young people to think about themselves and other people borders on the sociopathic, in my view. I am not an expert, of course, but it seems clear to me that young people are digesting image after image and movie after movie encouraging them to think of other people as objects, existing merely to provide them – the viewer – with a service. The idea of consent is non-existent; the idea of mutual enjoyment, let alone love, is non-existent. Women are brutalised and discarded, men are creatures of appetite and exist merely to destroy, and both are depicted as being impossibly ‘perfect’ in terms of their bodily appearance – in itself, a dreadful thing to be allowed take root in teenagers’ psyches.

Image: thedailyedge.com

I don’t know what the answer to this is. As I see it, not enough adults and parents are even aware of – or, wish to face up to – the fact that this is a real problem. Kids looking at pornography is not new; ‘we all did it when we were their age’ is the common reply when you try to sound a warning. That is true – but the type of material young people are watching is very different to the sort of thing that was around when their parents were growing up. Whatever the relative harmlessness of the pornography available in their parents’ generation, the type of thing young people are encountering today is less about sex than it is about violence, and less about titillation than it is about destruction and inflicting pain. It is new, and thrilling, and absorbing; ‘everyone’ is watching it, and so a child who is uninitiated may be pressured to watch, or forced to. It is very difficult to avoid something if the majority of your peers are doing it, and this has always been true. Kids egg each other on to watch ever more and more brutal material; smartphones and tablets with super-fast WiFi connections get passed around at lunchtime behind the bike-shed. It’s a long way from a copy of ‘Playboy’ magazine stolen from your older brother.

Children are watching things they do not understand, and for which they are not ready. Children are watching things that are warping their expectations of sex and relationships, and which are forming their opinions of themselves and one another. Boys are watching women being degraded and tormented, and trying to square that with their lived experience of having female teachers, female friends, sisters, mothers and grandmothers. Girls are watching men dominate and brutalise women, and are struggling to figure out how their brothers, fathers, and friends fit into that model of manhood. Both boys and girls are learning that other people do not matter – it is all about your appetite, your needs, and whatever the other person wants or does not want is immaterial. Is that the sort of world we want to give to the next generation? What sort of world will they create?

Books for children and young people should not be afraid to tackle important and painful subjects. There should be no beating around the bush. Children are living in a world which is as frightening as it is wonderful, and as full of inexplicable things as it is happiness and laughter. A child may have nowhere else to turn but books to try to make sense of his or her world; the life they are living may bear no resemblance to stories about missing puppies or stolen rainbows. Children are living in a strange new world and they deserve literature which is equal to it. They need a place to deal with what they’re seeing, and they need to know they’re not alone if they’re struggling to cope. Adults need to realise and be sensitive to what young people are going through, and they definitely need to stop belittling the lived experience of young people. Writing stories worthy of their young readers is one way to help with that.

Facing up to what they’re going through is another.

 

 

 

 

One of the newspaper articles I read which inspired this blog post is here; adults looking for advice on how to help their children can check out http://www.ispcc.ie, and young people looking for help with any aspect of growing up can check out http://www.childline.ie.

Book Review Saturday – ‘Interworld’

I’m in two minds regarding this week’s book review post. I want to love the book – and, on some levels, I do – but on so many other levels, it left me shrugging my shoulders in a serious case of the ‘So Whats?’

Image: booktopia.com.au

Yes, astute reader – that is the name Neil Gaiman adorning the cover. Can you imagine the horror of a Neil Gaiman book which I am in two minds about loving? It’s almost like being ripped in half by wild horses.

By ‘almost’, of course I mean ‘not at all.’ It’s not at all like being ripped in half by wild horses. But it’s painful enough, let me tell you.

My pain is assuaged a little, however, by the fact that this book isn’t really a Neil Gaiman book. The story came from an idea that he helped to cook up, but the book itself was mostly written by Michael Reaves, a man with an extraordinary list of writing achievements to his name. Perhaps this book suffered a little from weight of expectation, then; from two people as insanely talented as this, perhaps I expected more.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing to enjoy about the book. For a start, I loved the premise of the story. We’re introduced to a teenage boy named Joseph Harker who is a little like me in terms of his sense of direction; in other words, he doesn’t have one. He begins his story by telling us that once, he managed to get lost inside his own house. I warmed to him straight away, and in fact the voice throughout this book (that of Joey himself) is a lovely, easygoing, fun and engaging one. On a class activity with two of his fellow students – one a bullish boy who has a grudge against Joey, and the other a beautiful girl named Rowena on whom Joey has a crush – he manages to get lost again, but this time it has serious consequences. He walks into a cloud of mist and becomes disoriented, and when he manages to find his way back he realises he is in a world which looks, on the surface, a lot like his own Earth – but it’s not. He has the jarring and horrible experience of returning to his ‘home’, which looks similar to his own house from the outside, but instead of his own family he meets a woman who resembles his mother but who doesn’t know who he is, and a girl who looks a lot like him.

He realises, eventually, that he is in an alternate reality; this is a world like his own, but not exactly.

Desperate to escape the frightening creatures which are now pursuing him, Joey runs from world to world, trying to find out how to get home. He encounters another world in which everything is the same as his own, except in it he is supposed to be dead, and in the course of recovering from this shock he is intercepted by a strangely bewitching woman and her two grotesque sidekicks. They bring him on board a ship, beautifully named the Lacrimae Mundi (Tears of the World), and whisk him off to realms unknown. However, Joey is being followed – but is it by friend or foe?

The single greatest strength in this book is its use of multiple worlds, each of which have a version of Joey living in them. The story is essentially the adventures of all the Joeys. We meet Jay, Jai, J/O, Jakon, Jerzy, Josef, and Jo, of all genders and races, all of whom are their own world’s incarnation of ‘Joseph Harker.’ All of them are Walkers, or people with the ability to travel between worlds, and all of them are highly prized by Interworld, the organisation dedicated to protecting the Altiverse (all possible versions of Earth) from being taken over by either the Binary or HEX. The Binary is a completely technological version of earth, and HEX is a completely magical one, but both of them are totalitarian in their outlook. They would overthrow the harmony of the Altiverse if allowed to take control of all the worlds, most of which function using a mix of technology and magic. With the help of the ‘other’ Joeys, all of whom have their own individual talents and strengths, and a wonderful character named Hue about which I’ll say no more, the Walkers attempt to save the universe. All of this is great, and I loved it.

Where the book is weaker is in terms of plot. There are several teeth-grindingly irritating coincidences in the book, especially at the end when Joey faces down Lady Indigo, the great villain, and the whole book is a little quick and simplistic. Some other reviewers have said they really admired a scene in the middle of the book when Joey and his mother have a heart-to-heart about him going away and straight into danger, but it annoyed me. It’s wonderfully written, and very heartfelt, but I just didn’t think it was believable. We have a mother whose fifteen year old son is telling her he will never see her again, giving away his possessions to his sister, and preparing to leave forever – but she says she can’t stand in his way because she trusts him to do what’s right?

Well. Maybe. I just know what my mother would’ve done if I’d tried pulling that at fifteen, and it wouldn’t be to wave me off in the middle of the night (without even waking my father up to say goodbye to me, incidentally), shedding a few tears and giving me a going-away present. Something about the scene just didn’t seem real to me, and I have to admit it did affect my enjoyment of the rest of the book.

The book is a quick read, and it is enjoyable. However, I did not love it. I will probably check out the sequel, ‘Silver Dreams’, which has just been published, though, so, I guess that’s an endorsement of sorts. That said, I feel that ‘Interworld’ could have been more. It seemed underdeveloped and sketchy – but then I guess that’s what sequels are for. Right?

Uh-huh. Whatever you say, hombre.
Image: angelfire.com

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.