Lari’s Writing blog

Silliest writer injury I’ve had yet… I was in Port Seton Library this morning talking to the P5/6s from Cockenzie Primary about First Aid for Fairies and Wolf Notes. I was telling them a Viking myth, and explaining why I mostly like telling this particular story on Thursday. Because it’s Thor’s Day! (I also tell it on Wednesdays and Tuesdays – does anyone know why?) And I decided to demonstrate Thor’s hammer creating thunder by thumping a desk with my fist. I do this a lot – pretty much every time I tell this story, and as it’s my favourite story, I probably thump desks at least three or four times a month. Usually I thump school desks, which aren’t very sturdy – they wobble and they rattle and they don’t hurt at all. But today, while momentarily pretending to be the Norse god of Thunder, I thumped a library desk. And it turns out that library desks (in East Lothian anyway) are a lot sturdier than school desks! My fist on the desk made an excellent thunder noise, and hurt a great deal. It was like punching a wall (or a superhero’s chin.) The edge of my hand is still (8 hours later) completely numb all the way from my wrist to my pinkie, and I am typing this very very slowly! So – a Viking hammer injury! (And proof that pretending to be a god is a dangerous hobby.) But I really enjoyed meeting the pupils from Cockenzie – they had great ideas for fabled beast adventures and they asked me lots of great questions. But if I visit them again, I’ll tell them a story with no hammers at all.

I’ve just about finished the very very final draft of Storm Singing, and in my final round of research, I had to find a boat expert willing to talk to me about the practicalities of getting a centaur across to an island.

My experience in boats consists of being in charge of a yacht twice at school – my physics teacher thought that as I was a whizz at vectors on paper, I’d be able to steer a yacht in Findhorn Bay.  In fact I need a diagram to work out my left and right, and as a teenager could crash a bike into a wall even if there wasn’t a wall there.  So the first time I was in charge of the wee boat it crashed into someone else’s boat (not even someone I knew), and the second time I sank it. So I’ve never been put in charge of a boat since.  Until now.  When I had to get Helen and the other fabled beasts round the north coast of Scotland. 

Left to myself I’d probably have drowned them all long before they even got to meet the rest of the characters, because until I spoke to Alec Jordan, a boat builder and boat expert in Fife, I was putting Yann right at the front of the tiny wee boat because I thought he would look good as a figurehead.  But I did, at the last minute, think, “oh, I wonder if that will make the boat unstable, seeing as he weighs the same as a HORSE.” So I did what I usually do, and I found an expert, and asked them lots of daft questions.  But this time, unlike calling people about selkies’ breathing patterns, and mermaids’ tails, and giving the impression that I was writing about seals and fish, I couldn’t really get away with saying, “so I’m planning to put this horse in a rowing boat…”  Because NOONE puts horses in rowing boats.  So I had to say, “this might be the daftest question you’ve ever been asked, but how can I get a centaur – yes a centaur, half man, half horse – how can I get a centaur in a rowing boat safely?”  And to his credit, Alec made himself a cup of tea, and chatted me through it.  We didn’t need ballast (which was a shame, cos I was quite proud of knowing the word ballast) all we needed was to put Yann in the middle of the boat, so that he didn’t tip it forward or back, and have Helen row from the front.  And, Alec suggested, the horse would need to be quite sensible and not rock the boat too much.  Do you think we can ask Yann to be sensible…?

Anyway, thanks very much to Alec Jordan, who I can thoroughly recommend for any queries about Greek mythological beasts in small vessels, or indeed the Scottish Coastal Rowing project, which looks great fun: jordanboats.co.uk

I’m doing the final research double-checking for Storm Singing (the third Fabled Beast book) this month, and I spent today calling serious proper academics at St Andrews University and Edinburgh University about selkies and mermaids! To be honest, that’s not what I said to them, not at the start. I began with perfectly sensible questions about how long grey seals can stay underwater, and about fish scales and tails. And only once they had told me what I needed to know, or confirmed what I already thought, did I admit that I was writing about magical creatures, so I thanked the seal researcher for helping me create the perfect selkie and the fish expert for helping me create the ideal mermaid! I do like to make sure that my fantasy is firmly fact-based and believable…

World Book Day is (and should be) a busy day for authors. I was in Bonnyrigg Library in the morning yesterday, and met a couple of very enthusiastic P6 classes from Bonnyrigg Primary, who asked some really excellent questions, and had a wonderfully gory collective imagination for inventing monsters. Then I hurtled into Edinburgh to meet more than 200 pupils at the lovely Flora Stevenson Primary School, and lots of them were dressed as their favourite book characters. Which gave me the wonderful opportunity to say things like “What do you think, Mr Gum?” and “Do you have an idea for defeating the monster, Fili and Kili?” (they’re experts at that sort of thing, being from the Hobbit) and “What’s your question, Pippi Longstocking?” There’s only one day a year you get to say things like that and not get very funny looks! There was also someone dressed as a faun from First Aid, with splendid furry shorts, which was the highlight of my day…

Hope you all had a great World Book Day, and if you want to tell me who you dressed up as, just get in touch!

Do I write rather odd books?  I hope so!  I got an email recently from a reader saying she’d really enjoyed Rocking Horse War (she wrote, “I felt like I was actually one of the characters, I was in my bed reading and I imagined that there would be a movie of Rocking Horse War, it was a great feeling,”) but she also said “I found bits of it rather odd.”  And I thought – is that a good thing?  Do I write rather odd books?  Then I thought –  if rather odd means: unpredictable, unusual, surprising, unlikely … then I hope that I do write rather odd books, characters, scenes, stories and endings.  So thanks for the review, and I’ll get back to the keyboard, and find some more rather odd things to write!  Long live odd!

 Just back from a short family holiday in London, where I dragged my kids round lots of museums I needed to visit for research.    

My favourite was the Ancient Mesopotamia room in the British Museum, which had lots of amazing artefacts from Ancient Sumer, because Ancient Sumer is a time and place I’ve spent a lot of time inside my head recently while researching The Mountain’s Blood, my retelling of the Sumerian myth about Inanna.  When I was writing the book, I did all my research from books, in libraries or online, but in the British Museum, I saw the remains of this fascinating civilisation for real. 

Actual carvings of this goddess whose character I tried to understand, whose story I tried to tell.  Real examples of the very first writing.  A bloke who led a wee tour round the room, who claimed that the Sumerians didn’t just invent writing, but also the wheel!  And a couple of squashed skulls, from the wonderfully named Death Pits – though looking at them made me feel a bit intrusive, because even though these two people died thousands of years ago, I’m not sure if it’s fair to dig them up and put them in cases for us to point at and say, “gross!” and “yuck!”  (Because they were gross!) 

However I also discovered that the British Museum has 130,000 pieces of Sumerian cuneiform writing in its back rooms, and that they are still translating them.  So there might be lots more ‘new’ anicent myths about Inanna and Enki and Utu waiting to be told.   Who knows, I might even retell a few more of them myself!

I realise that the previous two posts will have given the impression that I only do events in Perthshire.   I do love Perthshire but you can see me elsewhere too!

I was in the wonderful Blackwells bookshop in Edinburgh last weekend, in the kids’ department in the basement, telling Sumerian myths and talking about the kickass goddess in the Mountain’s Blood.  And at the end, I was signing books and chatting to the really impressive number of customers who had sat down to listen to me (and it wasn’t even raining outside!) when a boy (whose name I won’t use unless he says it’s ok!) very quietly handed me a homemade blue dragon.  With wings, and bright eyes.  And a tiny intricate bracelet on one of her blue legs.  It was Sapphire.  He had made a real live (well, real felt) version of the dragon from First Aid for Fairies and Other Fabled Beasts.   And he gave her to me, to keep, to inspire me to write more books!  I was so touched.  She’s quite delicate, unlike the muckle beast in the books, so I only cuddled her very gently.  And she’s now sitting splendidly on my printer, telling me to hurry up with the next book.

But she’s so impressive, I wanted to share her picture with you – so here it is, below.

 (And the background, that cheerful blue and red tartan, is the official Fetterangus Primary School tartan, designed by the pupils of a very small school in Aberdeenshire.  I had to travel through snow to visit them last week, so they very kindly gave me this warm scarf as a present.  And doesn’t Sapphire look good on it!

So thanks to the very talented dragon-making boy for Sapphire, and to Fetterangus School for the beautiful scarf!

I suspect that much of my blog will be taken up with brilliant questions from kids, because for me they are always the highlight of any event.  My favourite EVER questions are the questions Inverkip Primary sent me from the characters in my first book.  I actually got into an argument with the centaur while answering them.  You can find them in the Q&A bit of my website.

But I was asked another EXCELLENT question last week, which made me stand still and speechless in front of a hundred kids in a theatre.  I was at the Winter Words Festival in Pitlochry – the bravest book festival in Scotland, where they confidently and optimistically invite writers from all over the world to make it to Perthshire in the depths of winter.  And it works!  Though I do usually wear climbing boots and carry a rucksack to get there…

So, in keeping with the climbing boots and rucksack look, last week I spoke to a lot of P7, S1 and S2 pupils from Pitlochry High School, about my new book Mountain’s Blood.  And a girl in the second back row asked me, “Would you rather live in the real world, or in the world of your books?”  I have never been asked that before.   And I really didn’t have a pat, soundbite, easy answer.  So I probably looked a bit gobsmacked and dottled and even gormless for a wee while.

But then I gave as honest an answer as I could – I pointed out that I have two kids, and they are in the real world, so there is nowhere else I’d rather be.  BUT that the adventure books I write (the fabled beast books, with Helen and Yann) are probably set in the world I’d like to have lived in when I was about 11.  So I’m happy in the real world now, but that I’d have happily swapped it for a magical fantasy world when I was younger.

I do love being challenged by completely new questions.  It makes me think hard about how I write, and sometimes even think hard about who I am.   So if you think of any questions which can mess with my head, go for it!

This is my first attempt to write a blog, and as a writer who normally rereads and edits my novels at least 100 times before letting anyone read them, writing something so immediate, something which I can’t look at again next week and rethink next month, is a bit scary!

But I’ve decided to put a blog up on my website because I realised that my website itself wasn’t changing that much, except when I publish a new book and put the cover on the homepage.  Also I do a lot of events in brilliant places, and meet fascinating readers who ask really interesting questions about writing, and I thought a blog would be a way of sharing that with you.

In fact the visit that finally made me decide that I really would get round to a blog was at the very end of January, when I spent a day in Aberfeldy in Perthshire, at a very new library in the Breadalbane community campus.  It was such a beautiful library, in such a fabulous place, with such an enthusiastic librarian, that I thought I should shout a bit about it.

The library isn’t in some dusty old building in a corner of the town which no-one visits.  It’s in a huge new building which also has a café, a swimming pool, squash courts and both the local schools – primary and secondary.  The library is right at the front of the building so you have to walk past the library door to get anywhere else.  And the library has a massive wall of windows, so as you walk out of the car park all you can see are these lovely shelves of books, just beckoning you to come in and browse and borrow!  It’s a lovely library, and I wish more libraries were like that.

There is a great central library in Dundee, which is attached to a shopping centre (how clever is that – go and buy your messages, and borrow some books, at the same time).   But most libraries are in very old buildings, often with no parking anywhere near, and often not near anything else useful.

And given how little money is spent on libraries, it doesn’t look like many other towns will be as lucky as Aberfeldy, and get a shiny new modern library any time soon.

And that’s the other reason I decided to start a blog …

I spent most of last week, having got back from the lovely library in Perthshire, writing emails, letters and press releases, trying to firstly stop Edinburgh Council cutting secondary school librarians’ hours (a battle which I think we may have won!  So get out there, and campaign – sometimes it actually WORKS!) and also supporting a brilliant Scotland-wide protest at the Scottish parliament last Saturday about all cuts to libraries.

And the more people blog, and twitter (I don’t twitter – a website is enough for me just now!), and campaign, and contact their local MSPs and councillors, the more chance we have of saving our libraries.  Libraries, whatever kind of building they are in, are vital to our education, to our culture, to our authors and our readers, and if we don’t fight for them then they will fade away.  And making a bit of noise online is one way to do that.

So – if you want to comment at all, or link to this blog, then please follow the instructions which I hope appear below.  Let me know what you’d like me to blog about (let me know if this reads like a blog at all!) and let me know which is YOUR favourite library.

(And if you have any problems either linking to or commenting on this blog – because I freely admit I have NO IDEA what I’m doing when I’m putting this up, then just email me!  (info@laridon.co.uk)  Because even a techno-idiot like me can open an email…)

I’m currently working on starting a blog – please come back soon