The Cover as Writing Aid

I find that working on the cover image of my book helps me work on the text itself. Right now I  need clarify my feelings about the book.

The book’s working name is Mud and it is set in modern Prague. At first I was playing with classic images of Prague – Charles Bridge and moody spires, but they didn’t feel right. For starters the story isn’t set in tourist Prague, but in the lovely but less well-known area of Holesovice. But I didn’t want to identify that area particularly.

One of the reasons for playing with the cover is that it helps me identify my audience and genre. For many writers that is easy, but I write magic realism which isn’t easy to slot into genres and can appeal to a range of audiences. The book is partly a psychological mystery (a main character is a Czech detective) and partly paranormal (the book touches on the Golem legend). I searched for books of these genres with a reference to Prague and got a load of books with moody spires or darkened streets. Maybe I should copy them – if it works… But I don’t want to.

I wanted a moody picture but not a conventional one. So I wrote down the key elements of the book. They were

• the extreme storms and floods of 2013
• the Golem
• Prague
• missing female
• male detective

Then I searched for photos on 123rf.com which had combinations of the above phrases. It didn’t work until I used the word “rain” and “Prague”. That generated a photo by Czech photographer, Jaromír Chalabala. I clicked on his name and there was this photo:

It was just what I was looking for.  There’s even a hint of a Golem in those reflections, don’t you think?

Now all I’ve got to do is finish writing the book!

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.

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.

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…