How do you write a novel?

It’s the question that many people ask me at a book-signing, at newspaper interviews or upon hearing that I’ve published a novel. I’ve been writing since my teens. finished ten novels of which two have been published. I can answer the question --- How I write a novel but other authors will have very different responses.

The old cliché that writing a book is like having a baby is not far off the mark. It gestates for a while, grows inside you, then there’s pain, labour and the child appears. I can’t do outlines, synopses and the like. After the book is finished I’ll struggle to produce a synopsis for a publisher, but I hate them.

Each novel begins with a strong feeling, about something in particular; sometimes for a while not identifyable. A student wakes up to find four eyes in his head. How does he feel about them? God on Texas Death Row. Could it happen? With Gaia’s Children, gestation began with the vision of a country torn apart by climate change, climate refugees hunted down by skinheads, and of a woman who stood up for the refugees. The human race was close to finished. The planet was ridding itself of a deadly virus --- us. The evolutionary torch would be passed on to a new race.

In presenting the new race it seemed to me that the role of human language is critical. It shapes our thoughts, attitudes to the environment. In greater part it affects our psyche. Language cause us to divide subject from object, you from I, outside from the inside. It gets been me and what I observe. Our attitude to the Earth as a dead thing to be exploited follows from language and our thought structure. We can try to change things by creating peace movements or doing environmentally friendly things. All window dressing. Our behaviour will not fundamentally change as long a the old psyche remains. Could a radical change happen if we were shown the way? If we lived alongside a people with a different, non-verbal psyche?

While those thoughts and feelings bounced about, I didn’t put anything down. The character of Linella (inspired by Amber) took shape. Some of the others too but no more than charcoal sketches. The unborn book was growing even when I didn’t give it much attention. I wrote the opening chapters. I had to work out how to present events from the point of view of people who don’t verbalize. Several versions of those chapter went into the rubbish bin. Finally the plot skeleton emerged as a series of chapter headings. I still didn’t know details of what each chapter would contain.

The rest tended to flow. Chapters appeared without my knowing of where or how they came from. But they made sense. Whenever I was stuck, I returned to the original vision and to the characters. After the first draft came the hard part, checking the plot and characters for consistency, voice and motivation. You have to be draconian about throwing out stuff that doesn’t work. No matter how much you like it. Then there came endless editing. Sometimes Polish dialog that makes no sense in English sneaked in. Amber’s ear for dialog caught those. She’d tell me: “Nobody speaks like that.”

Other books followed a similar course. In each case the initial vision was key, the place from which the story flowed. I’ve found that as long as I adhere to it, the rest of the writing process takes care of itself.

Aristotle in Love

In Episode 3 of Sophia Through Time, Sophia gives the venerable philosopher a lesson in love. Not only his syllogisms fail to rescue him when he most needs them. He discovers aspects of himself that he cannot readily categorize.












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They’re Taking Away our Jobs!

Refugee Camp - Calais







There are few more divisive issues than immigration. It’s not a subject for a dinner party unless you like people shouting at each other. Xenophobes claim that immigrants come here for our generous public benefits. Pro-immigrants try to prove that immigrants work hard, taking jobs that the locals don’t like to do anyway. The British tabloids know that an immigration “scare story” will sell copies.

Here are recent headlines from the Daily Express:
MIGRANT FAMILY WHO ‘BROKE EVERY RULE IN BOOK’ TO SWINDLE BENEFITS

HOW ILLEGALS USE HUMAN RIGHTS LAW TO STAY IN UK DEPORTING ILLEGALS

HOW MUCH ARE YOU PAYING IN WELFARE TO IMMIGRANTS?

The injustice of it all!

And so to our Tory Government was elected with a pledge to reduce UK immigration from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands. They’re facing an impossible task, as most immigrants come from EU countries and have a right to work in the UK.

Coming from the US, I’m familiar with the never ending debate on what to do about our borders in the face of migration pressures that never seem to ease. Build a fence and shoot immigrants on sight? Unsurprisingly the issue is hot in the current US presidential race. The debate is much the same across European countries.

For an excellent article on immigration, see the recent article “Europe at Bay” by Jeremy Harding published in the London Review of Books.

While I have no energy for the political discussions, I’m deeply concerned about the issue. People migrate for economic, political, religious reasons. For thousands of years they’ve braved every danger to secure a better life in another land. During the coming decades, global warming will be major cause for mass migration --- northward to cooler climates. Countries close to the equator and low lying lands, will first bear the brunt of rising temperatures. What would you do when faced by hunger, in a land that no longer supports you? You'd move. Today there are refugee camps near Calais with thousands of immigrants trying to cross the Channel to the UK. Tomorrow we’ll be faced with boat people. How will we respond to the challenge?

Our attitudes in the face of social stresses will determine the sort of world we will create. A dystopia from a science fiction book, where immigrants are incarcerated or shot? A lifeboat swamped by too many people? A multicultural multi-ethnic society?

In my novel Gaia’s Children, and in the short story, The Lottery, my protagonists take in illegal migrants in the face of social opposition much in the way that many during WWII took in Jewish families. I wasn’t trying to make a political point for or against migration, except to say that, when the s***t hits the fan, many indigenous people will host migrant families, whatever the cost. My intuition found partial confirmation in Harding’s article, where he writes:

Plenty of people are disturbed by the consequences of European immigration policy, whatever they think of the principles. In France, when the Interior Ministry began detaining illegal immigrant children at the school gate in 2006, there was a surge in political fostering by indigenous families. Dozens of French children acquired temporary siblings, as their parents took in threatened minors. This radical solidarity prefers the moral case over any argument about national borders. In France, the deportation of Jews in the 1940s is still a vivid precedent.

In Scotland attitudes to immigration are softer than in the rest of the UK. Scotland is still largely mono-cultural, with low diversity, owing to its lower levels of immigration. In a recent survey, Scots support higher immigration targets compared to the English. Though the issue is still divisive, there’s an increased perception here that immigrants, rather than subsisting on benefits, are here to create a better life by working for it. Polish migrants are viewed as hardworking, educated and entrepreneurial. So far Scotland has fewer migrants from warmer climes compared to the rest of the UK, maybe because the place is so bloody cold. Something that may change with global warming.

While I don’t advocate open borders, or an electric fence around the country, I’d like the debate to shift from where it's been stuck for decades. We must first acknowledge the fact that people migrate from country to country. It's a pattern that will never change. Migration will continue, especially in the face of global warming. Building fences and destroying migrant camps won’t stop migration. In facing this fact, we can shift our thinking away from our fears to discover more creative solutions.

Twitter Adventures (or how not to network)

So, everyone has been telling me to get on Twitter. My daughters, friends, well wishers --- those who would like “Gaia’s Children” to be as successful as Harry Potter. After a lot of procrastination, I decided to swallow the bullet. So, Twitter fans, I’m there with the pompous sounding ID of @paulauthor. (I refuse to use Kieniewicz as only Poles know how to spell it.)

A week on Twitter has sobered me to the realities of social networking. It’s not as if I haven’t read and taken to heart good advice on how to attract followers. There’s a ton of it out there but like reading about driving a car and actually doing it --- well things don’t quite go as expected.

What’s my purpose --- it’s to connect with people who read science fiction, who may appreciate a book review, recommendations on interesting books, who may even want to sample “Gaia’s Children”. Plus I want to get closer to the zeitgeist and find out what people are reading and what they’re thinking about.

After choosing an ID, and building a profile that I though might not be too offensive, I started following people. Twitter is a time commitment. You can spend an hour on it and find you’ve barely moved from home base. Using various search engines I quickly found science fiction fans. Most are science fiction writers, publishers and editors. Where are normal people who don't write, but love to read?

Perhaps the readers don’t always list “science fiction” in their profiles. To find them I searched through tweets that contained the name of one of my favourite authors (Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Philip K Dick etc.) I did find a few SF readers that way, though I was never sure if the tweet I latched onto was a one-off. After hours of searching I found 65 people I wanted to follow.

I started tweeting --- about interesting books, book reviews,science fiction small news and so on. Also retweeted some tweets and replied to a few. I never mentioned "Gaia's Children" as I didn't want to appear to be selling a product. My followers began to grow. I now have 6. Of those, four are women who are promoting porn sites. Maybe the tagword "fantasy" threw them off? The two others are people I'm glad to connect with. I'll find out soon whether my future followers will maintain the same ratio of 2 porn-site followers to 1 SF reader.

I have a lot to learn about how Twitter works.

Gaia's Children --- Kindle Edition

The Kindle Edition of Gaia's Children is now available for download. Please pass the word on to your friends, facebook friends and tweet-ees, those who'd like science fiction, wolves, a uniquely Scottish story, or just a good read. You'll meet some unforgettable characters that you'll want to spend some time with. Try out some sample chapters.

Sophia Through Time

Sophia Through Time tells the story of a woman who has fallen from heaven to find herself trapped in our world with no memory of how she got there. Alone, but immortal, she searches for the way out of the world. Her path crosses the lives of many eminent philosophers: Lao Tse, Socrates, Aristotle, Rumi and others but none of them can tell her why she is in the world. In a series of vignettes (taken from my unpublished novel Aristotle’s Beard) we follow her journey through time, confused and perplexed by our world, to finally discover liberation.

Individual installments will be posted monthly. Click on Sophia Through Time

Scottish Rain Dance

Over here you don'r expect to see a rain dance. In Scotland there are only three certainties: death, high rail fares and constant rain. Last year, while England had record-breaking droughts, Scotland had record-breaking rain. The met-office pundits wagged their heads and claimed that they’d expected it all along. A consequence of global warming. However prolonged dry spells do happen. For several weeks we haven’t had a decent downpour. Plenty of gale force winds to tear slate tiles from the roofs; a few snow flurries, but no rain. Last April we had a month-long dry spell that made me start watering --- something I almost never have to do.













Perhaps because of those dry spells the locals, for hundreds of years, conducted weather spells to open up the heavens and dump some extra rain on the land. According to “Description of the Parish”, 1726, every May 3, there was a fair held in Botriphne (today’s Drummuir). Among the festivities, a woman ritually washed a wooden statue of Saint Fumac in a nearby natural spring. We don’t know who she was, other than her function, as the keeper of the statue. Presumably that statue was passed down to a designated family member upon her death. The purpose appears to have been to secure plentiful rains for the fields. If the ritual smacked of witchcraft, that didn’t seem to bother the locals much as there’s no record of any censure by the Kirk.

As far as we know, Saint Fumac, an associate of Saint Columba, established a mission at Botriphne in 570, close to the natural spring. Because springs were venerated as healing centres, and sacred places, Christian churches tended to be built nearby, to give a Christian meaning to the old practices. Pilgrimages to the wells were banned following the Reformation but despite the bans, such pilgrimages were common until recent times. People still sought out the help of the Well Guardian for healing, rain, wealth or protection from damaging winds and rain.






Botriphne Kirk, built 1820 on the ruins of an older Kirk







According to MacKinley's, "Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs", the statue-washing at Botriphne ended in the late-nineteenth century on a memorable May 3 when the skies opened with a vengeance, and the nearby river Isla broke its banks. The statue was caught up in the flood and washed downstream. It came to rest at Banff where the local minister, a bit less tolerant than the folk of Botriphne, declared the statue as idolatrous and ceremoniously burned it.

Today the spring still flows strong. Recently, the Rev. J. S. Stephen conducted several baptisms there. A curious irony. Despite all our attempts to construct our human temples over the spring and officially suppress it, the spring’s ancient power still makes itself felt.