Finding New Ways - Ciaran Murtagh

How we all doing? It's tough isn't it. It's like that last bit of a long distance flight, we've watched all the good films, the food's been eaten, the novelty's worn off and now we just want to get off the plane. Unfortunately it turns out our Captain doesn't know where he's going, he can't fly a plane, and he's just told us we're going round again.

I've been lucky, I've had work to do and I've kept on doing it, squeezed around home schooling, supporting sick relatives and everything else. But now things have started to get a little tricky.

Working in animation you tend to work on contracts that last a year or two. The processes are set up and established, you have your teams and you know what is expected of you. For the past few months, I've been working on shows that have been in progress -  Ninja Express and Viking Skool. They've been a lot of fun, but now they're coming to an end. I'm at a point in the creative process where I'm gearing up for some new projects and figuring out how to move forward with new people and new relationships.

Ninja Express - coming to a screen near you soon. 

This is a tricky thing.  You may have worked with some of the people involved before, but not always. Some of them may be in different countries, some will speak different languages and you have to come together to find a process that works for everybody in order to get a project up and running. It's a very delicate thing, it breaks easily and it's all about relationships.

Viking Skool - also coming to a screen near you soon.

The usual way to do this is to get everyone into a big room and thrash it all out over sandwiches, biscuits and a bucket of coffee for a few days. It always works. The ice is broken, you find out you're all fairly decent, professional people who want the same thing and you commit to getting it done as painlessly as possible. Of course you are. But you have to go through that process to know that. However, right now, in these times, that's not possible and that makes all of this difficult.

An eight hour Zoom call is never fun, and when you're on a call you don't tend to chit chat - you're there to work. You can't form informal relationships over a juddering screen with twelve other people fighting the same barrier. I always knew how important the personal relationships formed at the start of these processes are, they're just as important as the professional ones when it comes to getting  you through the sticky mid series humps. It's nuanced and it's balanced and it starts right at the very beginning.

So far, I've been muddling through, getting stuff done that's been in play, stuff that's already trundling down a well established track. I can't do that any more. I'm about to embark on an 18 month project without doing any of the things I would usually do. We haven't even built the track.

In the scheme of what everyone else is going through it's small beer, but finding new ways to be creative in these difficult times is a challenge. I was hoping I could wait it out until things got back to normal and start things properly, but with the plane going round again and the Captain not having a clue, it looks like I'm going to have to try and generate some kind of spark, jet lagged and exhausted. It's not a good recipe for creativity, but right now it's all we've got.

Oh. And I need a haircut.

Charms, amulets and face masks - by Lu Hersey

We're now at a point where Covid-19 is unlikely to be going away anytime soon, so (if

you've managed to avoid it so far) you want to feel you have some kind of protection. Looking at the appalling death statistics is very sobering - but sooner or later, we all have to leave home to get food, visit the pharmacy or go to work. There is no vaccine yet - so what do you do?

Tamsin Rosewell (of Kenilworth Books) and I share an interest in folklore, and we were speculating on social media about how long it would be before people turn back to ancient forms of witchcraft, magic and folklore remedies to ward off impending doom. Because it's a subject I research a lot for my writing, I've come up with a few ideas used by our ancient (and not so ancient) ancestors to get you started. I'm only including a very small selection here. Pick whichever you feel most drawn to if you want to make an amulet or charm for yourself (or buy one online if it all looks too complicated).

First off, amulets. People throughout the ages have worn amulets for a variety of purposes, including to attract love, wealth or good fortune, or for protection. Here are a couple of examples of protection amulets, possibly more use than love or wealth if you're worried about catching an illness.

Protective amulet made to the design of Elizabethan magician Dr John Dee's table, filled with complex Enochian magick symbols. He believed the design was communicated to him by angelic forces and would ward off all evil. 

The ankh symbol basically means 'life' - even eternal life, which could be handy. This one in lapis lazuli with reed symbolism possibly represents the life giving Nile. Creating a protective amulet such as an Egyptian Ankh, or a scarab became ritual in itself and could only be made by someone with the power to make it.

Less complicated than amulets are the more folkloric protection charms such as hagstones, which can be found by anyone on the right type of beach. Also witch bottles, which contrary to popular belief, were made to protect a household from ill luck, not curses put on people by witches. Usually placed in the fabric of the building, under the entrance or built into a boundary wall, they were still commonly included in rural constructions until at least the 1960s.

Two witch bottles - the bottle on the left is a modern version (this one was made by Cornish witch, Levannah Morgan) filled with ends of wool from craft makings. (Historically they contained iron nails, urine and hair). It can be placed by the hearth, door or on a window sill. The other bottle is one I found in a crumbling old boundary wall in Cornwall (and cleaned very carefully!) In front of the bottles are hagstones, which are traditionally strung above doorways for protection.

The Nazar eye, a charm to ward off evil, has been made in one form or another for thousands of years. It remains a popular charm today.

Algiz - the Nordic rune most commonly interpreted as meaning 'protection', or 'sanctuary.'  A popular choice as a rune pendant. (This one is part of a rune set  )

Holding faith in ancient talismans and charms might seem quaint, but there are some new, far more dangerous and baffling beliefs already out there. Flat earthers are creationists who think only 'the truth' will save us (whatever 'the truth' is) from the virus. Along with the EDL and the 'there is no virus, it's a conspiracy and the problem is all about 5G' believers (mostly followers of David Icke, who also thinks the queen's a lizard), they've started arranging 'gatherings' of like-minded people across the country. protesting against the lockdown and avoiding any kind of social distancing.

Covering all bases, flat earthers like the owner of this car organise 'gatherings' of like minded people protesting against the lockdown, as they believe the virus is a conspiracy. These 'gatherings' are best avoided by anyone with half a brain.

To cap it all, in Glastonbury (where I live) there's at least one person who thinks playing the bongo drums on Glastonbury tor ALL NIGHT LONG, will do the job of keeping the virus at bay. If he keeps it up and the virus doesn't get him, I might forget social distancing and strangle him myself.

Whatever your opinion on ancient amulets or alternative ways to help ward off illness, it seems most of us can't resist the idea of charms against ill fortune. Even it's as simple as crossing your fingers, or wearing a pair of lucky pants.

However, despite my personal fascination with magical objects, this post isn't intended to stop you using your common sense. I'll be the first to admit that social distancing, plastic gloves, hand gel and a face mask are probably much more effective.

Me, ready to enter Tesco. Stylish face mask, hand gel in bag, sadly no amulet.

by Lu Hersey
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Keep Your Eye on the Road - Ciaran Murtagh

I don't have much to say this month, not because a lot hasn't happened - it has -  but because it feels like it's all been said by many people, in many ways, many times before. 

I feel like I'm in the midway through a trans Atlantic journey on some rickety old boat, no land in sight, just the knowledge that somewhere just beyond the horizon is the place I need to be. 

Days become weeks with precious little change and everybody seems to be in a holding pattern that started six weeks ago and is now getting harder to sustain. For a few weeks we could make do and scramble to regain a semblance of normality. We could work late, work early, home school, exercise with Joe Whoeverheis and keep the car on the road. Now we're six weeks in,  with no end in sight and starting to doubt the value of the car in the first place. 

It's at times like these that we have to remember why we set out in the first place. What it is we want to achieve - not in a 'I learned the lute in Covid' kind of way, in a much more profound, 'these are my values' and I hold them true regardless of the nonsense coming at me from all angles' kind of way. 

I'm taking comfort in music and - maybe because of the boat analogy, or the fact that we've just crossed some sort of Rubicon - it's The Waterboys who are really doing it for me.  This is the Sea sums up my feelings of where we are pretty well. 

You're trying to make sense

Of something that you just can't see

Trying to make sense now

And you know you once held the key

But that was the river

And this is the sea...

But as we drift out of our depth to who knows where, it's another Waterboys song that gives me hope. Keep keeping on and don't lose sight of what you hold dear. Know where you're going, be true to yourself and no matter what distractions, turbulence and nonsense lie ahead, trust that you'll get there eventually. Somehow. 

Keep the river on your right

And the highway at your shoulder

And the front line in your sights, pioneer

Senses and Sociability by Steve Way

Via the internet I teach students in Madrid and one student seems to have been infected by the Covid-19 virus. Fortunately, she only had mild symptoms but experienced the curious form of these that had been described in the media of temporarily losing her sense of taste and smell. Once her senses began to gradually return, I asked her how she would describe the experience. There were two things she particularly noticed. One was that whilst the symptoms persisted she ate far more vegetables than usual – we joked that that might have been a habit that speeded up her return to health! – and also, a possibly linked factor, that she became acutely aware and appreciative of the different textures of her food.

I was reflecting on this and about how when writing we might easily neglect aspects of our common experience that we normally more or less take for granted but which could add depth to our writing if we thought to describe them, when by serendipitous good fortune I attended a (virtual!) get together of writers here in south-west France hosted by writer Sarah Gungum. Sarah really encouraged us to focus on how describing the reactions of our many senses – of which she pointed out includes far more than the ‘Famous Five’ – can help illustrate and enhance our work in a multitude of ways.

Not unsurprisingly the topic of the interplay between our senses and our experience of eating came up and I was reminded of the description of the feast the dwarves prepare in Bilbo’s house at the beginning of The Hobbit. Published just before the deprivations of the Second World War and the rationing that followed it, to his readership at the time the description of the sumptuous meal must have been mouth-watering and may have contributed to his audience’s enthusiastic engagement with his wonderful story. The detailed and careful preparation or description of food seems to have been a significant component of many classic children’s books, written in times of less abundance, such as the contents of Ratty’s hamper in The Wind in the Willows and Edmund’s temptation with Turkish Delight in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Nowadays, even if only sub-consciously, I think many of us would worry about the cardiovascular consequences of the feast on the health of Bilbo and his comrades and feel less inclined to focus on the sensory experience of food and eating in our stories. Maybe because nowadays, if we were so inclined, the majority of us could almost daily consume the calorific equivalent of the dwarves’ banquet.

Thinking about this led the other members of the group to speculate about what effect our current dearth of social contact might have, consciously or otherwise, on future writing. Will stories be more likely to include large social gatherings? Will characters more frequently be able to hug and kiss each other… or just (gasp!) shake hands? Instead of endless ‘man walks into a bar’ jokes will there instead be endless ‘man walks into a bar’ novels?

I don’t know what your opinion is – but it’s ‘food for thought’ perhaps? He he.

~~~~

On a more serious note, which could be worth consideration regarding post-pandemic writing, might be the long-term psychological effect of ‘lockdown’, particularly on children. One of my other students in Madrid told me about an experience of a friend of hers. As you may be aware in some regards the ‘lockdown’ in Spain has been more restrictive than in the UK and children under the age of fourteen were only allowed outside for the first time in seven weeks last Sunday. Perhaps alarmed by seeing his parents only going outside occasionally for the last month and a half and wearing a mask when they did so, their six-year-old son was terrified by the prospect of going outside. Maybe there’s a place for some stories that make the outside world a relatively safe and exciting place to be most of the time?
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Recent publications; Bongo the Armadillo Volumes 1 -3. 'Surprising things happened to Bongo the Armadillo, usually when he was sitting in his garden having his cup of tea. Short stories with a regular format but quite different 'surprises'. Appealing (though not exclusively) to reluctant readers and useful as a resource to inspire creative writing.

One plague or another... Anne Rooney

As Dawn said a few days ago, we all went into this lockdown with fine plans of writing new things. In my case, revamping an outline for a non-fiction book I'm keen to sell and doing some work on adult book that I'm not yet trying to sell as I don't have a clear vision of its shape. And improving my very poor German. Plus working on the few commissioned books that have not been put on hold. But aside from meeting deadlines, that's not what has happened. A good deal of gardening has happened. And a sudden desire to revive a novel I wrote some time ago and my then-agent couldn't sell because 'we don't want historical right now.' Historical in this case is the plague in Venice in 1576.

I found myself drawn back to the book with some enthusiasm for the first time in years. I know I can't be bothered with trawling it around publishers or agents again (I've parted company with my last agent) so it will rot in a drawer. I thought I might self-publish it as something to do. But then I got into an argument with a whole bunch of people on a publisher's website and now I'm not sure. They were denouncing the publication of a book set during a fictional pandemic as 'opportunistic' and 'profiteering' and 'making money out of people's misery'. Are they right? I don't think so. No one is being forced to buy this book set in a pandemic. Profiteering, surely, is making money by price-gouging essentials, such as soap or masks? If you don't want to read a story set in a pandemic, just don't. Personally, I am enjoying revisiting plague narratives now and recognising aspects of the lives described that were previously alien to my experience. Even revisiting a book I wrote myself, I am quite pleased to see that I correctly captured the feelings of self-isolation. (It's not really a book about plague, but plague is the backdrop and isolation and restricted movement are key aspects of it.)

If we believe that people want characters they can identify with rather than a homogenous white, straight, middle-class cast, don't we believe they also want situations they can identify with? And that might include living through a pandemic?

When I was first writing this novel I did worry that I was exploiting the misery of people long dead, and I lit a candle for the plague dead every time I visited Venice for research. But the thought that to publish it would be exploiting victims of the current pandemic had never occurred to me. What do you think? If someone publishes a book set in a plague/pandemic, is that reprehensible? And does it make a difference whether, as in the case of the dispute, the book is about a covid-like disease or something else? (The author of the disputed book wrote the book 15 years ago, so the disease is not a direct reference to covid-19.) Are you reading pandemic literature? I've been revisiting some and ordering some new dystopian fiction. I'm finding it helpful seeing this new aspect of life reflected in fiction. What about you?

Anne Rooney
Out now: How to be an Eco-Hero
Hachette, 2020