Poem -The Breaking of the Blood

The Breaking of the Blood

It is very clear to me,

as it is clear to all of us,

that memory

of the first trace of blood.

It was a surprise,

as it is always a surprise,

for each woman

who comes upon herself

with the breaking of the blood.

And I thought as I gazed

at my blood upon the water 

of the time

when reaching 

into fine white snow

my hand found glass.

I thought

of a child’s fairytale

of a queen at a window

wishing herself a child

snow-white

and lips of blood. 

This poem was first published in Grandchildren of Albion ed. Michael Horovitz

Ghost at the Feast - Meet the Family Bloghop

Our family has its very own ghost of Christmas past – her name is Betsy Hilda Morrison and she was my grandmother. She died thirty years ago, but she wouldn’t miss Christmas for the world (or otherworld in her case). She stands like a beaming Yoda at the end of The Jedi Returns benevolently looking on as the family continues the traditions she established.

Betsy, or Bessie as she was known, loved Christmas – she looked forward to it from one year to the next. If she had had her way the Christmas decorations would have stayed up until Easter, but my Aunt Zoe insisted on taking them down at Twelfth Night. Christmas Day was not enough for Bessie. On Christmas Day she and Aunty would arrive complete with presents at our house in time for Christmas lunch and leave in the evening. But on Boxing Day the process was reversed, we went to their house and what would you know – Father Christmas always seemed to get horribly confused because he had filled stockings for us there too! So we had Christmas twice, thanks to Betsy Hilda. When Boxing Day was over Betsy would look forward to the next big event – the trip to the January Sales at which she would buy Christmas presents.

Anyone meeting my charming grandmother could be easily be mistaken into thinking this little woman with white hair she referred to as “baby’s bum fluff” was a sweet old dear. But behind her considerable charm was a formidable mind and memory and a will of iron. Betsy was a matriarch of the first order and God help anyone who wronged her or hers. This killer instinct came in very useful in the run-up to Christmas as Granny did the rounds of the local whist drives. She never came away without winning something. Her memory and head for figures making her virtually unbeatable with a good partner. I remember regularly getting into my Aunt’s car to be told “Your Granny’s won another turkey!”

When Betsy died, my Aunt continued the tradition of the family Boxing Day although by now Father Christmas was mistakenly delivering presents for the next generation. No longer oversupplied with turkeys Aunt would bone and stuff ducks for Boxing Day, which were to my mind preferable to turkey. And when Aunt Zoe died, it was my turn to take on Betsy’s baton and celebrate our very special Boxing Day.

We live in Aunt Zoe’s house and when we started going through her things I found the Christmas Box. In it were the Christmas tree decorations with which we used to adorn the tree, taking orders from a seated Betsy. Also in the box were supplies of wrapping paper and labels, which dated back twenty five years to a time when Betsy had had a corner shop in the Forest of Dean, and which, when Betsy had retired, had come with her to her new home. I still have the labels, I don’t use them – they are far too old fashioned – but “waste not, want not,” as my Granny would say. 

Born at the end of the nineteenth century, Betsy was brought up by her grandparents and used to keep me enthralled with her memories of a very Victorian childhood, including memories of Christmases of that very different time. Memories of a stocking which might if you were lucky contain an orange no doubt inspired her in making her family’s Christmas so abundant.This blog post is part of the Meet The Family Blog Hop. 

My other blogs

It’s a while since I wrote about my other blogs. You might think one is enough and maybe I could have combined them in one large Zoe Brooks blog, but the content and approach is so diverse that it didn’t and still doesn’t make sense to me.

The first blog I ever created and which is still going is my blog Adventures in the Czech Republic.
It’s all about how I came to visit and fall in love with the Czech Republic, so much so that a few years ago I bought a house there/here. It is the place where I write all my books. The process of writing this blog in many ways brought me back to writing, I had virtually given up for about a decade. In fact I would recommend blogging as a quick, easy and not too demanding way of beginning to write. The secret is to create a blog on a subject you are passionate about. The blog allowed me to be lyrical and chatty, to write about my observations of this wonderful country and people and share those observations with others.

A more recent blog is my Magic Realism blog.
This I set up as a book blog in which I monitor my progress on my magic realism challenge. I am reading and reviewing one book a week for a year from a list of magic realism books which I have drawn together from various authoritative lists. The reviews all are on the blog as is the reading list. Part of the fun of this is trying to work out what is magic realism. So far I have decided that it isn’t actually a genre, but more of an approach to storytelling. This view will no doubt evolve as the challenge progresses. Why magic realism – well because I was told by several people that I wrote it and had no idea that I did so.

Photo Inspiration - the Severn Bore

My novel Mother of Wolves is set in an imaginary landscape along a great river. It will not be a surprise to those of you who know that I live in Gloucestershire that the river which had most influence on my imagination was the Severn.

A turning point in the book is when the heroine Lupa uses the river’s Autumn bore to her advantage. It was inspired by a trip to watch the Severn bore one very chilly morning. It proved impossible to photo properly, so this must suffice. The force of the tide is unimaginable. It is able to reverse a river’s natural flow and form so powerful a wave that it crashes into a bank like this. As you can guess I went away inspired.

Tuesday Photo Inspiration - TheWood Witch

I came across the witch in the woods above my Czech house. She is actually a stump of a tree which tumbled in a high wind. I was walking lost in thought when I turned a corner and saw her through the trees. She made me jump, I don’t mind telling you. She’s vanished now into the rich earth of the forest.

Poems for multiple voices

When Carolyn Howard Johnson reviewed my poetry book Fool’s Paradise as “Very experimental. Wholly original” I was surprised. Of course I don’t think of what I write as particularly original, what I write feels normal.  So Caroline’s review made me think, after all Caroline is a multi award-winning poet.

As I have said in previous post I was blessed with being taught by an inspiring creative English teacher – Elizabeth Webster – who introduced me to the work of some wonderful and great poets. In particular she introduced me to the work of the British poets of the early to mid twentieth century – T S Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice. And surprise, surprise the works she first introduced me to were all verse plays: Murder in the Cathedral by T S Eliot, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas and The Dark Tower by Louis MacNeice. 

Those early readings were etched into my memory and, I suspect, my poetic DNA. Every year at this time on the cusp of winter I find myself repeating the lines from the opening chorus of Murder in the Cathedral:
Since golden October declined into sombre November
And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud

What is more under her direction I acted in a number of verse plays – including Under Milk Wood and plays by another British verse play writer Christopher Fry. Plays like Under Milk Woodand Louis MacNeice’s Dark Tower were written to be performed on radio, the BBC was a major sponsor of verse drama. But the roots of poetic dramas are deep in the beginnings of theatre. When I was twelve or thirteen I performed in a production of Alcestis by Euripides, first performed in the 5th century BC. I can still remember some of the lines:Daughter of Pelias fare thee well. May joy be thine in the sunless houses.

Just listen to the cadences in that one line. And of course there was Shakespeare. I was playing Caliban in The Tempest at the age of twelve, loving the poetry in the play (Caliban has the isle is full of voices speech) and realizing how verse can by woven into drama. Later I was to play Viola in Twelfth Night – another character with some great poetry. 

The poetry group at the Arts Centre, which Elizabeth ran and of which I was a member, gave regular readings and in one of these we performed MacNeice’s The Dark Tower and in another extracts of Blood Wedding by Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The poetry group with its emphasis on reading aloud taught me the importance of poetry as performance. Some of the best poems, even when not written to be read by different voices, are dramatic. And some, such as Eliot’s Four Quartets, although not written as plays nevertheless have different voices woven into them. My long poem called Poem for Voices, is the same.

You can see why writing poetry for different voices is so natural to me.  I don’t always write for voices, many of my poems are to be spoken by one voice. But writing for voices allows me to explore textures, emotions and forms in a unique way. This approach, which was once so prevalent, is now so unusual that Carolyn comments on it. Have I developed it further? I don’t know. It’s just how I write sometimes. But then it does seem to me that if people claim their work is original and experimental it almost certainly isn’t. 

Desert Island Books - Jane Eyre

Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane’s natural independence and spirit – which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving the man she loves?

Jane Eyre was the first “grown-up” book I read. I must have been about eleven, when I discovered I could read adult books. I loved the book and reread it regularly through my teens and still read it occasionally. I think Jane Eyre is an ideal book for teenage girls. I identified with the heroine, as did Charlotte Bronte. Like Jane I felt unattractive and awkward in society. I admired her resilience and spirit and I was delighted when Rochester expressed his love for her. My love of the book was reenforced by an excellent BBC TV series starring Sorcha Cusack in the title role and Michael Jayston as Rochester. It was shown in the early evening on Sundays, and I was always worried that I would not get back from rehearsals at the Arts Centre, but I didn’t miss any of it. It was only later that I discovered that Elizabeth Webster, the director, was also a fan and so stopped rehearsals with time to spare. Michael Jayston was the ideal Rochester, not particularly handsome but with the sexiest voice! He was my first crush.

Now that I am mature woman I find new depths in the book. The psychology of the book is spot-on. What is it that attracts a rich man of the world like Rochester to the plain inexperienced Jane? He has been surrounded by women who flatter him because he is rich, Jane is totally unlike them, she speaks the truth. He does not know what to make of her and wants to know more. But there is more than unfamiliarity – on the surface Jane is reserved, but underneath she is capable of passion. In the second scene between them Rochester examines Jane’s weird paintings in which her imagination takes her to the northern seas. How like the book’s writer: her imagination escaping the restrictions of her life?

The Jane Eyre plot is a classic Cinderella/ugly duckling story.  There are only so many plots and this is one of the most common. It is a plot that I have used in my trilogy The Healer’s Shadowtrilogy. Some people say that Jane Eyre is a Cinderella meets Bluebeard plot, but they are wrong.  Bluebeard is a psychopath that destroys the female, Rochester may have a first wife in a tower, but she is alive, as Jane discovers to her cost.

Photo Inspiration - Forest

I took this photo in the Forest of Dean last Sunday. I love the forest. When I was a little girl I stayed with my grandmother in Berryhill, not far from Symonds Yat. My house in the Czech Republic is only fifteen minutes walk from the forest. When I can’t write, I take a basket and wander through the trees looking for mushrooms.

Desert Island Books - Earthsea books

A superb four-part fantasy, comparable with the work of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the “Earthsea” books follow the fortunes of the wizard Ged from his childhood to an age where magic is giving way to evil. As a young dragonlord, Ged, whose use-name is Sparrowhawk, is sent to the island of Roke to learn the true way of magic. A natural magician, Ged becomes an Archmage and helps the High Priestess Tenar escape from the labyrinth of darkness. But as the years pass, true magic and ancient ways are forced to submit to the powers of evil and death.

Goodreads description

I managed to not read Ursula Le Guin’s books as a child and a teenager. It was not until my student son read The Wizard of Earthsea and told me that I would love it, that at last I settled down with the book.He was right, I loved it and all the other Earthsea books. Why, oh why did I wait so long? Maybe because I wrongly thought of them as children’s books. They can be read by children, but an adult reader will get so much more from Le Guin’s writings. What makes Le Guin so special?Le Guin has a genius for world creation  – Earthsea feels like somewhere I know and will know. Sometimes, as with my own fictional worlds, I come upon a place in this world which is Earthsea. Of course every reader will have a different Earthsea; Le Guin is brilliant at giving enough but not too much description so that we each can see our own vision. The same is true of the descriptions of her characters. I have an image of each, but what I remember tends not to be their physical appearance, but their thoughts, motives, loves and fears. For all Le Guin’s genius in world-making, she writes about humanity.

I love the way she is able to create fantastic worlds which allow her to explore big issues. In the Wizard of Earthsea, the first Earthsea book, the young hero makes an error of judgement and must face the consequences. In Jungian psychology all that we dislike and repress about ourselves is called our shadow. In order to be fully mature we must turn, face it and name it, something most of us fail to do. This happens quite literally in the Wizard of Earthsea. There are other similarly important themes in her other books.I had been a poet, playing with symbols and metaphors. Le Guin showed me that this was possible in a novel too and that it was possible to do this whilst telling a good story.

Ursula Le Guin inspired me to start writing novels. And she even provided the best book I know on writing – Steering the Craft.

This morning my new book Love of Shadows had its first review on Amazon and Goodreads. In it the reviewer says that she thought the series “similar to Ursula Le Guin’s books set in the fictional country of Orsinia”. I could not be more honoured by a comparison.

Photo Inspiration - Olsina

This is a photo of Lake Olsina in Southern Bohemia. I can walk here from my Czech house. It’s a very special place for me. It is set in a natural bowl formed by the surrounding hills. One of its attractions is that it is undisturbed. Much of the surrounding forests are in a military zone, which means that it is accessible only at weekends and that building is restricted in the locality.

The lake is man-made – a renaissance fishpond, which is still farmed today. Every other Autumn (in October or November) the sluices are opened and the lake drained. The carp are herded into the nets of the waiting fishermen. My friend Hannah had an old cottage next to the lake and I stayed with her one year, waking at 6 to watch the harvest. Crowds gathered to watch and buy fresh fish. When everyone had gone, it was the turn of the water birds to arrive – gulls of course, but also herons and white egrets.

At other times I have watched the mating dance of crested grebes rising and bowing on the still surface of the lake. In the summer Hannah and I would go swimming in the lake’s now warm waters, with the carp blowing bubbles around us or we would wander into the forest to collect wild mushrooms.

On the day of Hannah’s funeral I came to Olsina and launched a little paper boat on the waters in remembrance of her. In the boat’s prow I set a picture she had painted of a man waving. The boat bobbed in the current before disappearing round a small headland. My farewell said, I returned to my car and drove home. Later when I looked closer at the picture I saw that it was titled “Crossing Lethe.”

Desert Island Books - Weirdstone of Brisingamen

A tale of Alderley

When Colin and Susan are pursued by eerie creatures across Alderley Edge, they are saved by the Wizard. He takes them into the caves of Fundindelve, where he watches over the enchanted sleep of one hundred and forty knights.

But the heart of the magic that binds them – Firefrost, also known as the Weirdstone of Brisingamen – has been lost. The Wizard has been searching for the stone for more than 100 years, but the forces of evil are closing in, determined to possess and destroy its special power.

Colin and Susan realise at last that they are the key to the Weirdstone’s return. But how can two children defeat the Morrigan and her deadly brood?

Amazon description

This (and Moon of Gomrath, the second book in the Alderley trilogy) has to be my all-time  favourite book from my childhood.  I remember arguing with my teacher Elizabeth Webster that Alan Garner’s stories were better than Tolkien’s.

What makes this so great is the authenticity of the stories – they are based on real localities (Alderley Edge) and local myths. They are fantasy, but their roots are in the hills of Cheshire and British mythology. Garner arguably gave me my first introduction to magic realism, the genre in which I write. I could have chosen other books by this writer – The Owl Service, Elidor and of course the great Red Shift, but Weirdstone was how I first experienced Garner’s work and so it holds a special place in my heart.

Whether the book had such a strong hold on me (which it retains) because it chimed with my vision of the world – history and myth woven in to the present – or because it informed my view is impossible to say now. But I read this book over and over again throughout my childhood, delighting in Garner’s wonderful descriptions – the account of Colin and Susan’s journey through the disused mineworkings of the Edge beats the journey through the Mines of Moria into a cocked hat.

After many years Garner has just published the sequel – a book for adults called Bonelands. It’s on the list of what I want for Christmas. That’s if I can wait that long.

My fox - World Animal Day Blog Hop

The first thing I do when I arrive back at my house in the Czech Republic, even before I unlock the door, is rub the muzzle of the fox door knocker. It is an old farmhouse on a hill called Liski  Dira (Fox Hole in Czech) and the house is just like a fox with its haunches buried into the earth. As I lie in bed at night sometimes I can hear a vixen calling in the orchards above. The village dogs respond with frantic barking, but you can hear the fox laughing at them. “You have sold your freedom for a bowl of meat,” she says. “I have the moon and all the dark spaces in the forest.”

When I first bought the house I didn’t see any foxes, perhaps I was too busy restoring the house. I certainly wasn’t writing, although I had bought the house as a writing retreat. One evening as a taxi brought me from the station a fox crossed the road in the headlamp beam. “Liska,” said the driver with a smile. The following day I walked down from the woods with a basket of chanterelle mushrooms, called lisky (foxes) in Czech. It had started raining as I picked them and now it was sheeting down, so my head was bowed. Then I looked up and there standing in the middle of the lane a few yards away was a large fox looking straight at me. It contemplated me for a while and then trotted off across the fields. When we lived in London we were used to the brazen nature of town foxes, and  even had a family of them sharing the garden with our cat, but in the countryside foxes are shy of humans. I told my Czech friend about the meetings with the fox. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Foxes are lucky in this country, just like black cats in England. No wonder the taxi driver was pleased when a fox crossed your path. They are meant to be the familiars of witches, you know.”

After that sighting, the fox started to appear to me all the time and as it did so I began to write again. It seemed the fox was now my familiar and a bringer of words. Then during one stay in the house I didn’t see my fox at all and yet I still managed to write. My husband was visiting from the UK and as we stood in the back bedroom I commented on my fox’s absence. He grinned and said “Zoe turn round and look out of the window.” There, only a few feet away from us, my fox was strolling through the orchard. 

Toadstools - Photo Inspiration

How about these for classic fairytale toadstools? You can almost see one of the little people sitting on the top of them, can’t you? Fly agaric is the correct name. It’s not for eating, in fact a good rule is not to eat  red mushrooms. Fly agaric is a hallucinatory mushroom and eating it is said to give you the sensation of flying. It is a therefore part of many a shaman’s toolkit.

There are tales of reindeer eating the mushroom and staggering around trying to fly. Maybe Rudolf had eaten one too many!

Magic Realism Blog

Just after I had published Girl in the Glass I went to an alternative literature festival in Leicester. I was still incredibly green about publishing and was unclear what sort of story I was writing. I knew it didn’t fit neatly into the usual genre headings that one gets on Amazon. I had got as far as knowing that it was a) women’s fiction and b) not quite fantasy. I was having a soup for lunch when I got chatting to another writer, who asked me what I wrote. I gave a short description and he repled “Oh you write magic realism.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Well Terry Pratchett described it as fantasy for people whose friends went to Oxbridge.”

“Oh,” I said thinking that indeed many of my friends were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge.

I wrote the genre down on a piece of paper, stuffed it in to my handbag and continued eating. When I got home, I could not find the paper nor could I remember what genre he had said I wrote.

A month or so later I found a review of the book on Amazon. The reviewer Iain M. Grant said:
“Zoe Brook’s novel is a true magic realist story. Its setting is a world that is not ours but is nonetheless recognisable. It is a novel in which the almost magical and vaguely supernatural are an accepted reality. Reading it, I couldn’t help but be reminded favourably of other authors. The setting and Anya’s sprawling and occasionally grotesque family put me in mind of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Having said that the harsh, epic landscape of the story and the fable-like quality of a narrative held shades of Paulo Coelho.”

Lawks a mercy me! Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my all-time favourite books. Now armed with the name of the genre I did a Google search and discovered not only that I wrote magic realism, but that I had been reading it for years and not knowing it. There still seemed to be a lot ambiguity in my mind about what constituted magic realism, but I think this was because the term gets used wrongly. I decided that I would get to know my genre better. But how would this be achieved?

I knew that in order to do it properly I should set myself a task, one which is public and which I would feel obliged to complete. So I decided I would read one magic realist book a week for a year and that I would record my progress and what I found out about magic realism publicly on a dedicated blog. For the purposes of selecting books for the blog I chose the simplest definition I could find.

It’s now a month since I started and I’m loving it. I have drawn up a to-read list, following suggestions taken mostly from Goodreads, where there are at least two Magic Realism groups and several booklists. The books are very diverse – some literary, some for the popular market – which adds to my enjoyment. The requirement that I review what I read has proved extremely useful in solidifying my thoughts on the book and the genre.

So after all that work what is magic realism? I’m glad to say that the definition I chose is still remaining true: “Magical Realism is a literary genre that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.”

Please do visit the Magic Realism blog and check it out, better still join me in my challenge or at least part of it. It’s on https://magic-realism-books.blogspot.co.uk

Celebrating Women - A Special Lady

Today I am taking part in a blog hop celebrating women. I have chosen to write about a very special woman in my life – a teacher who was more than a teacher.

I have been blessed with having a series of inspirational women educators in my life, but the first and probably therefore the most important was Elizabeth Webster. Without her I doubt I would be writing, without her I would not have got in to Oxford University and without her I would not have met my husband.

Elizabeth or EMW as she was better known was a little red-head with a liking for brightly coloured scarves, who commanded any room she was in. She stepped into my life when I was eight and newly arrived at my junior school. She was the creative English and music teacher and although I did not shine at music, Elizabeth recognised the writer in me. On that first lesson she asked us to write a poem. I wrote about Queen Boudica dying of poison after her defeat by the Romans. Elizabeth loved the poem. She praised and encouraged me, recognising the need to feed my love of poetry and confidence in my abilities. She was no regarder of age: she believed that children should be encouraged to read the best, so I was soon sitting cross-legged under her grand piano reading Under Milk Wood and Murder in the Cathedral. The first Shakespeare play I saw was performed by ten and eleven year olds directed by her at the end of the school year.

When ill-health forced her to retire from school, she set up an arts centre for children and I followed her. First in a church hall and then in an old bakery she continued to encourage writing, acting and the visual arts for a further twenty-five years. The Children’s Arts Centre Cheltenham became the Young Arts Centre as we turned teenagers, but the motto remained the same: “Everyone is Someone.” Saturday morning was for the younger children, and Sunday afternoon for the older members to rehearse the next play we would perform. I was soon to act in Under Milk Wood as well as read it. But best of all was Tuesday evening, when the EOS group met. In a side room, seated on second-hand sofas and armchairs, we would shuffle the papers in our hands mumbling “I’ve got a poem, but it’s not very good.” before reading it to the rest of the group. Encouragement followed (Everyone is Someone) and discussion. I was for some time the youngest in the group, but there was no compromise for my age. I learned to hold my own with the others on subjects such as Milton’s interpretation of the devil. Not that I had read Paradise Lost at that point, but that didn’t stop me. Every year we would give at least one public reading of our poems together with those of published poets and in so doing learned not only how to read poetry but also how to speak in public.

Encouraged by Elizabeth, I entered national poetry competitions and won. I was published by the age of thirteen. At the same age I wrote a full-length verse play, which of course was performed at the Arts Centre. I had found what I was good at. How lucky is that? And that luck had a name: Elizabeth Webster. But I was not the only one – a number of my fellow Arts Centre members have gone on to enjoy successful careers in the arts. Others found their lives enriched in different ways by the experience: principles were established for life, friendships were forged and relationships begun. What a wonderful place to meet your first boyfriend (or in my case my last as I met my husband there).

And what reward did Elizabeth receive for this work? Nothing but the reward of knowing that every child in the Arts Centre realised they were someone. It is only now with writing this post, that I realise how the central character of Girl in the Glass is a girl who, unlike me, was told she was nothing. When at last she had to retire Elizabeth started a new career: that of a novelist. She used her books to give her predominantly female readers an insight into the lives of young people. Even in that I seem to be following her.

You will find a website commemorating the Young Arts Centre here.

How To Find A Good Book – Ask A Blogger

Over the past few weeks the press and internet have been full of stories of dodgy goings-on in the frantic world of “buy-my-book”. There was the scandal of 5 star reviews being bought on Amazon and that of well-known authors setting up bogus Amazon accounts in order to give themselves glowing 5-star reviews and (worse to my mind) vicious 1-star reviews to their rivals.

Too many people have as a result thrown the baby out with the bathwater, saying that you cannot trust the free-for-all of the internet and you should stick to traditional print reviews by professional reviewers. But how many books would you discover that way? I have a women’s fiction newspaper in which I pick up the best articles and reviews from across the web and I therefore monitor the major newspaper sites. What I have found is that they all review the same books.

How is this? Is it because the publishers only promote a very limited number? Is it that the reviewers act as a cabal? Is it that newspapers only review books by “established” authors? And dare I say it – does money exchange hands, just as it does to ensure that a book ends up on major booksellers’ three for the price of two tables or even just prominently displayed on the shelves? I’ve no idea, but what is certain is that the majority of books (and I am talking about traditionally published books as well as indies) never get reviewed by these professional reviewers.

What is worse is that the newspapers tend to review only literary fiction and not genre fiction. This of course has an implication for women’s books, which can be dismissed as chick-lit, romance or just women’s fiction. No matter that romance outstrips literary fiction and all the other genres in terms of sales.

Where then can you turn for reviews you can trust? Where can an author go for reviews? The answer is I believe the burgeoning phenomenon of the book blogs. Until I published my first book only six months ago I had only been slightly aware of the wonderful, selfless world of the book blogger. The proponents of the traditional professional reviewers would pooh-pooh the amateur book bloggers (and have done so in various comments I have seen). But they are wrong to do so. Yes, many, but not all, book bloggers have no qualifications (such as English literature degrees), nor do some professional reviewers for that matter. But what book bloggers do have is a love of books. They write reviews in order to share what they have read with you. And some of them clearly do nothing else than read and review. I have a magic realism review site and I just about manage a book a week.

How do you know which book bloggers to trust? Simple – look at their reviews. Have they liked the same books as you and better still for the same reason? Do they provide you with the sort of review you need to make a decision? If the answer to these questions is yes, then start following the blog.

But how do you find the right blogs in the first place? You have a number of options:

• Try a search with two book titles you like and the word “blog” to find a suitable blog.
• Use one of the book blog directories, such as http://directory.kaysbookshelf.com, and http://www.bookblogs.org/blog-list. If you are interested in indie writers try http://www.theindieview.com/indie-reviewers/
• Or you might like to join the book blogs forum on http://bookblogs.ning.com

This post is part of the Celebrating Bloggers Blog Hop organised by Terri Guiliano Long.

Notes from a Story Editor - Structure

This article was first published on the Indie Exchange website

What is a story?
Every story we tell is an adaptation. There is a great deal of discussion and several books on the subject of how many basic plots there. Suffice it to say there are a limited number to choose from. For my novel the Mother of Wolves I chose the revenge story form. But every story will be unique because we make choices in telling it – which characters to use, which events to come out of the underlying story world. But even these are adaptations.

The underlying story world
The underlying story world contains the context of your story – its past, present, and future. It also contains the seed(s) of that world’s potential destruction. The main character reflects this world and indeed has within her the seed(s) of her own potential destruction.

This seed, (which is often a lack), upsets the equilibrium of the world and the central character and in so doing initiates and drives the story. As an author I need knowledge both of my character and her world and of the why – why this story, why told by me, why now,  i.e. I must plant a seed of potential self-destruction in the story world. I need to know the best way of testing the main character(s) so that I can develop the why.

For example for my novel Mother of Wolves although it is a story about revenge, I was interested in the choices one makes and their consequences.

We need to examine the physical and emotional world of the story – the home of the story.
For this we need to choose the main character(s), and their goal(s), the place, the period, the society, the main source of conflict and opposition. To this we add secondary characters and their goals, secondary sources of conflict and so on, until we have people the world.
For example in Mother of Wolves I chose:
1)      to make Lupa, the wife of the King of the Roads, the central character and tell her story
2)      to make the story Lupa’s search for revenge and safety for her and her sons
3)      to place it in a fantasy landscape along a great river bordered by a forest
4)      to set it at in a historical time
5)      to create two societies – the tribal world of the People of the Roads and the settled world of the Others
6)      to make both societies patriarchal and prone to politicking and betrayal, additionally Lupa’s People are subject to persecution by the Others
7)      Lupa’s enemies are her husband’s uncle, who plotted his murder, the Newharbour Guards who carried it out and lastly the Rebel general and his army.

N.B. There is a whole blog post to come about the issue of the flaw/lack in the home world and the central character when I write about the protagonist/antagonist relationship, but for the time being we’ll stick with story structure.

The Timeline
We unfold what we have developed on to a time-line. This is what Hannah referred to as the “Ur Story”. This normally breaks down naturally in to a three-part structure (more of that in another post).
So for Mother of Wolves I decided to start the story with the murder of Lupa’s husband and end it with the defeat of the rebel army. The three parts are:

1. Lupa’s pursuit of revenge against the guards and Uncle and their attempts to kill her
2. Lupa’s pursuit of Jo and the decision whether to kill him
3. The consequences of that decision with the fight against the rebel army.

There are two important things to note. Firstly as writers we do not need to follow the Ur story timeline when we structure our book or film, we can jump around, move backwards and forwards, whatever is best for the narrative, but the underneath it is the Ur story. And secondly the Ur story, whilst being limited by the timeframe, also can contain relevant history and even future.

I find these concepts of establishing the underlying story world and the Ur story extremely useful when approaching a novel. As a result of working with Hannah, I find that I have a novel’s structure in my head before I ever set pen to paper or rather finger to keyboard. As a general rule I don’t find I need to do major structural reworking at second draft.

Lupa – the woman leader, lessons from history

Lupa, the central character of Mother of Wolves, was originally a minor character in a children’s book I wrote (and abandonned). However she had made such an impression on one of my beta-readers that he suggested I write a book about her. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it a good idea, but the book was definitely not a book for children.

In a previous post I wrote about how I was inspired by three Czech 18th century folk paintings of the persecution of the Roma to write Mother of Wolves. As those of you who have read Girl in the Glass will know, I am interested in women overcoming prejudice and discrimination. As a historian I am also fascinated by great women leaders: women who, despite living and ruling in a male-dominated society, commanded the love and/or respect of their people. I first came to the attention of my mentor and junior school poetry teacher with a poem about Boudicea at the age of 8. My first major piece of writing (at 13) was a verse-play about Joan of Arc. Of all my historical heroines Elizabeth I is perhaps the most influential on the character of Lupa.

The book allowed me to explore what makes a successful female leader and what might trigger such a leader to step forward. In Lupa’s case the trigger is the betrayal and murder of her husband and the need to protect her children, but once on the road Lupa becomes the leader her people need in the face of the threat of genocide.

So what are the traits that Lupa shares with historic women leaders? Like Boudica Lupa is spurred into action by a desire for revenge, like Elizabeth I she has a genuine love of her people, like Joan of Arc she has self belief. Like Boudica she pulls together disparate tribes, like Joan of Arc she leads her troops into battle, and like Elizabeth I she surrounds herself with good counsellors. She is both charming and ruthless.

When I was younger some people suggested that as an up-and-coming poet I should study English Literature at university, instead I studied history. I have never regretted it.

Lessons of history - suppression of the women healers Part 2

The main character of my trilogy (Girl in the Glass, Love of Shadows, Fear of Falling) is a woman healer. My books are fantasy/magic realism, nevertheless I am by training a historian and the lessons of history inform my writing and themes, so I began to research the story of the women healers.

Having destroyed the educated women healers (see previous post) by the end of the 14th century the authorities turned their attentions to the lower class women healers. As with the educated women healers the wise-women were faced with an alliance between the church and the new university educated (and therefore male) medical profession. The alliance’s motives were financial self-interest, misogyny and social control.

The majority of the population had no access to any form of medicine other than that provided by the local wise-woman. Even if they had, the medicine taught in universities was closer to magic than the empirical approach of the wise-woman. But whether the wise-women were healing their patients was not a consideration, the very act of healing was a crime and that crime was witchcraft. As one English witch-hunter said:

For this must always be remembered, as a conclusion, that by witches we understand not only those which kill and torment, but all Diviners Charmers, Jugglers, all Wizards, commonly called wise men and wise women…and in the same number we reckon all good Witches, which do no hurt but good, which do not spoil and destroy, but save and deliver…It were a thousand times better for the land if all Witches, but especially the blessing Witch, might suffer death.

The witch-hunts were not a case of mass hysteria, but organised state persecution. At the heart of it was the book Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), which guided the witch-hunters. At the beginning of the hunt a notice was posted in the village commanding that if anyone knew or suspected a witch they should report her to the authorities, failure to do so was itself a punishable. If this resulted in the identification of a witch, she would be tortured to reveal more witches in the community. That torture is detailed in Malleus Maleficarum . The “witch” was stripped and shaved of all her body hair, and inspected for signs of the devil such as moles and marks, although not having such signs was simply seen as an indication that the witch had hidden them. Beatings, thumb screws and the rack, bone-crushing boots, and starvation followed. Soon other “witches” would be identified and so on. On continental Europe these witch-hunts resulted in many thousand executions usually by burning. At Toulouse 400 were killed in one day, 1000 died in one year in the Como area, whilst in 1585 two villages in the Bishopric of Trier were left with only on female inhabitant each. 

Women healers were not alone (there were also some male healers although they make up approximately on 15% of the numbers killed), it is hard to credit now but midwives were also under attack:  
Midwives cause the greatest damage. Either killing children or sacrilegiously offering them to devils. . . . The greatest injury to the Faith are done by midwives, and this is made clearer than daylight itself in the confessions of some of those who are afterwards burned.

The witch-hunts lasted from the 14th to the 17th century. By the time they finished possibly over a million women had died, much of the knowledge that had been acquired by generations of women healers had been lost and women’s roles in healing had been so denigrated that women had to fight even to be nurses.  

Notes From A Storyeditor - Where to start

This is the first in my series of notes about what I learned from my friend and professional story editor Hannah Kodicek. This was first published on the Indie Exchange website. 

The starting point for any story-making is the relationship with the audience. Although we writers may be sitting alone in front of our computer in a garret somewhere, the story exists only in that relationship, otherwise you’re not telling anything.

We start by understanding what we all have in common (audience and writer):

• Curiosity – this is inherent to human nature, it’s the reason we do so many things, one being picking up a book.
• The need to find context – what is it like, how does it fit with what I know/feel, how does it feel like to be someone else
• Need for pattern – again part of our nature, we will look for patterns and order even if they are not there, and there are a load of patterns which we will expect in stories
• Need for balance (equilibrium) – we feel disturbed if things aren’t fair, we want to put it right.
• And conversely the need to upset equilibrium – the need for the unknown, the thrill of risk.
• The need to think ahead causally – this is an extension of our need for pattern,
• But there is also the thrill of the unknown.
• Common cultural context – myths, history, fairytales, belief-systems etc.
• Archetypes – which Hannah described as “deep subconscious forces shared by all” and which are the subjects of numerous books
• The need to relate to others, which for me is the most important.

These commonalities are what we as writers build our stories on, for example every story starts with an imbalance which propels the story forward. We may play with them e.g. encouraging the reader to detect a pattern that isn’t there and so think ahead incorrectly. But the single most important thing is to access people’s emotions. Everything we write will stir some sort of emotional response in the reader. They will be gratified if their curiosity is satisfied or they feel they see a pattern or context. They will be thrilled and scared when we take them to somewhere unknown. But they will be dissatisfied if we promise and do not deliver.

Which brings me to us the writers. There are a number of questions we need to ask ourselves as we approach a story:

• Why am I telling this story? – Why me? Why now? Why do I care? (If you don’t the reader certainly won’t).
• How does the story fit with or challenge the context familiar to my reader?
• What is the emotional key to the story? What touches me most deeply? How will it resonate with the reader?
• What will I and the reader take from the story?
• What tools do I have to do the job?

These then are the fundamentals from which all storytelling flows and I always go back to them when I am working on a story. I find them particularly useful when I am working on the second draft. 

Lessons Of History - The Suppression Of Women Healers 1

I am a historian by training and I use history to give a reality to my books. I deliberately don’t fix the books in a specific time or place, but the subject matter and the details are influenced by my knowledge of and research into events in history. In this blog I intend sharing with you some of those “lessons of history.”

In Girl in the Glass my heroine Judith is warned about the dangers of becoming a healer. In the second book in the trilogy Love of Shadows (which I am writing now) she pursues her calling and puts her life at risk. The subject of the suppression of women healers over the centuries is a fascinating one.

Up to the 13thcentury women traditional healers (wisewomen) were practising their arts throughout Europe relatively without hindrance. Their medicines were born of traditions handed down through the generations and tested by use. In addition they were midwives and bonesetters. They were the only medical help available to most people and they had status in their communities as a result.

Then in the 14thcentury things changed. A new medical practitioner was being created – the university-trained physicians – one whose services were more expensive and elitist. Not better. The university medical training at that time was based on Galen’s concepts of the humours and governed by Christian doctrine. It did not have the empirical approach of the women healers and was mostly mumbo jumbo. Nevertheless the new male (nearly all universities were closed to women) physicians, supported by the Church, pushed for and got laws forbidding the practice of medicine by non-university trained healers. Suddenly women could not legally practice medicine. Of course given the low numbers of university medical students, these laws were unenforceable across the board, but they could be applied selectively.

The first targets were not the peasant women healers, but literate urban women healers who were in direct competition for the male physicians. In 1322 Jacoba Felice was put on trial in Paris – her crime practising medicine illegally. No matter that she produced witnesses verifying that she had cured them where the university physicians had failed, her competence was evidence of guilt.

The court found that: “Her plea that she cured many sick persons whom the aforesaid masters could not cure, ought not to stand and is frivolous, since it is certain that a man approved in the aforesaid art could cure the sick better than any woman

1. Perhaps the true reason for her prosecution and other women like her can be found in
2. Her accuser was a university-trained male physician.

One witness Jean St Omer stated that Jacoba had visited him repeatedly throughout a grave illness, never asking for payment prior to a cure. He affirmed that she had done more for him, and with far less demand on his purse, than any licensed physician. As her punishment Jacoba was excommunicated and fined. Nothing more is known of her. In some ways she was lucky, from then on the suppression of women healers started to a more deadly turn. More of that in a future post.

Notes From A Story Editor - Background

When I started to write novels I was encouraged to do so by a close friend. And not just any friend: Hannah Kodicek was one of the best story editors in the business. Hannah had had a varied and successful career as an actress, director, writer and latterly story editor in the film industry. She was story editor on the Oscar-winning Counterfeiters and occasionally advised friends with their novels – including Danny Scheinmann (Random Acts of Heroic Love) and of course me. 

Hannah was considered such an expert that she lectured on story structure and other aspects of story-making to people in the business on the EU funded ARISTA and MAIA programmes. Many writers will know of The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler – a book which is film industry required reading – which sets out in easily accessible form the mythic form of stories. Fewer will have read the works of Carl Jung and his followers, specifically The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell on which Vogler based his book. Hannah had gone direct to the source, studying myths and fairytales and Jung, Campbell, Von Franz and other Jungian writers. Her lectures therefore had an authority that few others in the business could muster. They also had a practicality and realism, that were important features of my friend.

She was moreover a wonderful educator, which made her work as a story editor all the more powerful. I never sat in one of her lectures, but I had my own private tutorials. We had wonderful sessions talking about story structure and what is more I asked her to read and feedback about my novels. I could tell that at first she was nervous, worrying that I might be sensitive about my babies and that it might impact on our friendship. She needn’t have worried, I loved out sessions. She had a way of not telling me what to do, but rather, like all great teachers, asking questions that made me think. She would send me off spinning unforeseen possibilities. She in turn enjoyed seeing what I then came up with. I was, she told me, the best of all her clients. 

Sadly Hannah died of cancer last year. I was writing Girl In The Shadows at the time and although we discussed it, Hannah never got to read the novel. “Don’t worry,” she said, “You don’t need me anymore, you’ve learned everything.” I’m not sure about that, but I have her notes and my memories of our conversations. Once it became apparent that she was dying, we talked about whether her notes could be made into the book she had always wanted to produce or maybe a website, so that future writers could learn as I did from what she had to say. Again she ran out of time. So I have decided to share with you some of what I learned as a tribute to a great story editor in this series of posts Notes From A Story Editor.  

A few weeks ago I agreed to do a guest post on The Indie Exchange – advice to other indie writers was the brief – the content was obvious, Hannah’s advice on the basics of storytelling.

Fool's Paradise

The illustrations for my poetry book Fool’s Paradise are prints by my friend and mentor Hannah Kodicek. Hannah produced a whole series of prints in response to my writing and it was always our plan to publish a special edition of the poem and the prints. We did not have in mind an ebook, but rather a beautifully produced limited edition paper book. But one thing stopped us: when Hannah moved back to Prague she mislaid the first quality prints (the ones I have used in the ebook being her second or third choices) and never found them again. Her death last year almost certainly means that they will never be found.

Nevertheless the ones I have chosen for the ebook do her justice. They were created by painting on a sheet of glass, often I think with her fingers, and then placing the paper on top.

Problems or opportunties in plotting

One of the things I love about writing is the way solving logistical problems in a novel can open up creative opportunities.

The underlying story of the Girl in the Glass, Love of Shadows and the, as yet unnamed, last book in the trilogy is how Anya/Judith follows in her dead mother’s footsteps to become a healer and a wisewoman. But from the word go I had a problem. Of necessity Anya’s mother is dead when the first book opens, so how does she learn the healer’s art?

a) how does she learn about gardening and propagating plants?
b) who gives her the first book on healing?
c) how does she learn to tend wounds and set bones?
d) how does she learn to distill medicines and make creams?
e) how does she learn to read and have access to medicine and herbal books?
f) what triggers her to become a healer?

The answers to each of these crucial questions are:
a) she works with the gardener in her Aunt’s garden
b) the housekeeper Marta gives her the book
c) there’s an earthquake and she works in a dressing station with the wounded
d) she works for a perfumer Elma and so learns to distil and make creams and other beauty products
e) Elma sponsors her use of the library, ostensibly to learn about perfumes,
f) Elma develops cancer and they cannot afford the medicine.

Each solution moves the story forward, often in ways I hadn’t foreseen, opening the plot and characters to more twists and depth. In my next post I will talk more about the decision to make Judith a perfumer  and its consequences.

The Gypsy Hunts

For the last two days I have been working on the third draft of my novel Mother of Wolves It’s an alternative history novel. The alternative history being that of the Romanies.

The idea for the novel first came to me when I visited a castle in the Czech Republic. As is often the case in the Czech Republic the only way to visit the castle was on a guided tour. I was the only English speaker and stood at the back of the group of listening Czechs, reading a couple of sheets of A4 that was meant to be a translation of the tour. As the tour took an hour and I read the sheets in five minutes I spent a lot of time looking in cabinets and at prints.

In one room as the guide droned on in Czech and some annoying person kept asking questions I found myself examining three folk art pictures on the wall. They were not listed in the translation nor did they have any label. The guide did not refer to them and the rest of the party ignored them. They had no significance. But as I looked I was increasingly shocked by the subject matter. They were primitive but graphic pictures of the persecution of gypsies from, I guess, the 18th century.

It is two years since I saw the pictures, but I still remember them in detail. In one a man is hanging from a branch, while in the foreground a gypsy woman (perhaps his wife) is holding a babe while blood pours from her head where her ear has been cut off. As a historian I had known that the gypsies had been the victims of persecution through the centuries and that they too had been the subject of Hitler’s extermination programme. In the Great Devouring as they called the holocaust the numbers of Romany victims varies but it seems that it was at least half a million. But as I investigated further I was shocked by the untold history of persecution over centuries. Gypsy hunts occurred in many European countries. Very simply gypsies were hunted as vermin, no different than foxes. In Jutland in 1835 a hunt “brought in a bag of over 260 men, women and children.” A Rheinland hunter recorded in his list of game for the day “Item: A Gypsy woman with her sucking babe.”

It is a sad fact that no matter how horrific a story one can devise, that reality can always exceed its horror. The tragedy of the Romany people has in some ways always been overshadowed by that of the Jews. They were/are rural, often illiterate, and poor. They also do not have and never had a state or a leadership to speak for them. But what if there had been such a leader…

A name of my own

It’s taken me several years to bite the bullet and seriously consider putting my writing back in to the public arena. When I was younger I didn’t have that problem. I happily sent my work out to publishers. I was of course disappointed when I got rejected, but enough said yes to make up for this. Even when I had a run of rejections I brushed them off and sent out the next batch of letters. I defined myself by my writing.  Had you asked what I was, I would have answered “I’m a poet.” It was that simple: Zoe Brooks was a poet. She was other things of course – a daughter, a student, an Oxford graduate, an arts manager, but above all she was a poet.

That stopped as my other roles took over – mother, wife, heritage professional and then, for the last twenty years, inner city regeneration professional. The only person who still introduced me as Zoe Brooks the poet was my friend Hannah Kodicek. I thought it quaint of her and even a little perverse. I felt sometimes she wasn’t valuing me properly. Then about three years ago I started writing once more.

“Will you publish it?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t know. I was thinking maybe I’d use a pseudonym.”

 “Mmm,” she said. “Are you sure?”

“Oh yes, I don’t think I could do it any other way. I thought maybe Elizabeth Rivers – Elizabeth is my second name and as for Rivers – Brooks/Rivers.”

She laughed. “That sounds like a cop out, it’s not a real pen-name.”

I’ve thought about it a lot since that conversation. She was right, she usually was. What was I ashamed of? Why was I trying to hide? I decided I would not be ready to publish until I was prepared to use my real name. It’s taken me months to start this blog, but I’ve done it. In a few days I plan to publish my first novel as Zoe Brooks

A room of one's own

When I was younger (in my teens and 20’s) I used to write, a lot. I didn’t just write: I was published in poetry anthologies and magazines, but then I stopped. I was too busy with working and being a mum. Maybe the writing abandoned me rather than the other way round. Maybe as Virginia Woolf put it “Every woman needs a room of her own.”, not just physically but psychologically – a creative space.And I didn’t have one.

I’d always made up stories and composed poetry, even before I was taught how to write them down. And not having a room of my own didn’t stop that process, I just didn’t write anything down. Somehow it wasn’t important enough. I needed to get away. About seven years ago I bought a farmhouse in the Czech Republic. I had intended to buy a little hut, somewhere that didn’t need lots doing to it, where I could live in nature for a while and write. Instead I bought a ruined farmhouse, one which would need lots of TLC and work. Talk about sabotaging one’s best intentions!

But the Czech house brought one great benefit – I started to blog about my experiences in “Adventures in the Czech Republic.” And I loved blogging, the feedback was great and I got to know some really lovely, interesting people in cyberspace.

A few years ago the house, although not finished (I had run out of money), was ready to be used for my original purpose. I took a deep breath and sat down with my hands resting on a computer keyboard and a blank screen in front of me.