I’m Nina Milton, and this blog is all about getting out the laptop or the pen and pad to get writing. My blogposts are focused on advice and suggestions and news for writers, but also on a love reading with plenty of reviews, and a look at my pagan life, plus arts and culture. Get all my posts as they appear by becoming a subscriber. Click below right...

Tuesday 28 November 2017

Finding a Writing Soul-Mate

I’ve been writing professionally now since the 90’s, and I know just how solitary a job it can be. Like a lot of people who are drawn to the writing life, I enjoy my own company…and the company of my characters!

But being alone with my work can sometimes feel too huge a deal. The challenge of maintaining confidence, plus keeping the motivation high enough to actually get on with it, grinds me down, especially at the bad times, when things aren’t going so well.

To help me, I use a winning resource which I
Nope, not in there....
recommend to all students. This resource is stimulating, user-friendly and without financial cost. It needs no technical know-how, power supply or insurance policies.

You can learn more about the efficacy of this method by clicking on this link

Saturday 25 November 2017

Living With the Gods


The Lion Man


I'm in the middle of an arts course, because I don't know much about fine art, and would love to understand it better, and I'm unsurprisingly finding that one of the easiest ways I can penetrate and decipher art is through the delight of story. 

Not all art tells a story, but at the moment, with my little knowledge, this seems to me to be the overarching theme of most art, from its very beginnings, and often the story that the artist wants to tell, is that of the gods. This led me to recall the programme I’ve been listening to on Radio 4, Living With The Gods, a 30-part series of fifteen minute talks, written and presented by Neil MacGregor, a former director of the British Museum. To run alongside, the British Museum have an exhibition of some of the artefacts MacGregor is using to illustrate his talks.



Taranis
 Throughout the radio series MacGregor draws upon objects and curatorial insights from the British Museum to talk about daily and weekly religious practices, festivals, pilgrimages and sacrifices, power struggles and political battles between beliefs across millennia. He uses the artifacts, some thousands of years old, to illustrate and explore how the human race has lived with gods. This week, he took an earthenware cooking pot, about 1,750 years old, discovered to contain many little bronze statuettes…a household Roman god, two tiny birds, perhaps a raven and a dove which are often found in pre-roman societies in Northern Europe to symbolise deities,  plus some gods of more import – the Greecian god Minerva, the Roman God Jupiter, god of sky and thunder, and a spoked wheel, a symbol of Taranis, a Celtic god worshiped in Gaul and Britain. As Taranis was also a god of thunder, the Romans and accepted him alongside their own Jupiter.


The Roman Baths, Bath
MacGregor explained how the Romans exported their gods to the newly conquered lands, but were also able to ‘go global’ and assimilate the gods they found there, building temples to new and old, such as the Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath in the UK. The Romans seemed to understand that if you honour other peoples gods, they become less strange. As McGregor says…The Romans will change, and so will they. It was an approach which allowed the Roman Empire to become a long-lasting multi-racial, multi-faith state. As the Roman Senate is recorded to have written; “The Immortal Gods are the same everywhere.” This allowed them to live on good terms with very many very different peoples, absorbing many cultures into what became a world view.


MacGregor explained that polytheism –  the worship of many gods – has had a bad press which has left us almost blind to the fact that across the span of human history, multi-theist one god systems have been the exception rather than the rule. And in the very distant past, the acceptance of what other people believe, or what previous people believed, was possibly stronger than it is today.
It’s not just in Bath, at the Roman baths, that I’ve understood this fact for myself.  There is a wonderful landscape on The Gower, in South Wales, called Parc le Breos. This is a Norman Deer park with a hunting lodge you can stay at if you have sufficient readies. It is also a walkers, climbers and campers paradise, and it contains not only a  many-chambered passage grave, but also a cave, called Cathole, high up on a cliffside, which hides an exciting secret.

Cathole has recently been discovered to hold a prehistoric carving. It’s a reindeer, scratched in with a sharp flint too, to expose the redness of the rock below. It may be 14,000 years old – the oldest rock art yet found in Britain. I’ve been to Cathole many times, climbing up a steep, wooded path through the gorge to reach it. There are inner and outer chambers, and although it’s not that deeply cavernous, there are parts that are very dark indeed. So, despite my exploration of the cave, I’d never spotted the carving, and neither had any of the parties I’d been with. Since it’s official discovery, the cave has been gated, to prevent the public entering, so I’ll probably never see it now. 

http://www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone/parclebreos.htm
Thirty metres scrabble down into the valley of Parc le Breos Parc is an even older monument to ancient peoples; a  Neolithic chambered burial tomb over 5,500 years old. Locally known as the Giant’s Grave, it was partly restored in the 1960s, which is sad in a way as it no longer looks as it did when discovered, but it does mean we can have a reasonable idea of how it might have been (minus its capstones, which were plundered, probably for a 19 century building project). The layout is perfect for the games we liked to play in such places. The Giant’s Grave, or Parc Cwm, as it’s properly called, was where we fought off Tolkein’s Wargs as members the Fellowship of the Ring, and became a brilliant crossing place over the River Styx, on our way to Cathole, an even more brilliant Hades.

Inside the tomb, the human bones of at least 40 people were found. Examination showed that the women were all petit, the men all big and burly. Like many Neolithic sacred sites, it was used for almost 1,000 years – generation after generation – each passing down the stories of what this tomb meant to the people. There is a link to Cathole, too; it’s possible the cave was used to dry out and expose the bones of the dead before they were placed in the tomb.

Those people lived long before Cathole was used again. Then, during the last Ice Age, the people who came after the hunter-gatherers buried their own dea there. In the Bronze Age, it was used again for ritual burials. People came back to Parc Le Breos time and again, for over 3,000 years, to use the landscape, and especially the cave, time and again. 

McGregor gives a very ancient example of ‘more gods work better than less’ – he explains how the story of Noah, in the Bible, is echoed by a cuniform tablet from Mesopotamia, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’,  which tells the exact same story of a flood and an arc. The difference, apart from the names of the characters involved, is that in the Bible, only one God, Jehovah, orders the flood and drowns his disobedient people. In Gilgamesh, there is a council of the gods in which the main god, in a dictatorial move, orders the flood. However, mankind is saved when one whistleblower god secretly tells a local family to build an arc. After the flood is over, the gods understood that the flood was a wrong decision, and too much power can be bad, even for gods. 

It would be nice if we could all listen to that Roman advice that The Immortal Gods are the same everywhere, and try to accept other peoples' belief systems, while never trying to impose our own upon anyone.

You can learn more about Living with the Gods, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09fj9mt
and listen to the programme, if you’re in the UK. You can also buy the book (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neil-MacGregor/e/B0034PYKSQ/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1


And if you’re in London between now and next April, you can see the exhibits MacGregor talks about in his work at the British Museum. 

Monday 13 November 2017

Odd Child Out by Gilly Macmillan

Which d'you fancy? 


Gruesome detail?
or

Cosy Crime?

Recently, Rebus creator Ian Rankin forecast that extreme bad news in the real word is killing it off the violent thriller. In the Scottish paper, the Daily Record, Rankin claims that the rise of Donald Trump, terrorist attacks and mass shootings have left people yearning for 'kind and gentle' books…The world seems so crazy and irrational that many novelists have difficulty trying to shape it into a coherent narrative…Fiction must be credible, the real world right now feels to me like the opposite of that. People crave normality and stories of kind people helping each other… He added…I think this may happen – a move away from serial killers and bleak dystopian crime fiction towards something with a more comforting message...

source; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Rankin
Is he right? In turbulent times do we turn away from turbulent fiction? Are we ready for more cosy crime and less violence and gore?

Interviewed on the BBC Radio Four Today Programme, Simon Kernick, with 15 novels under his belt, including The Hanged Man, 2017 and The Bone Field, 2016, suggested that…books where there’s a good level of tension but there isn’t the nastiness, such as Big Lttle Lies [by Liane Moriarty] are more comforting to the reader… Asked if he was tempted to tone it down himself, he admitted…I now prefer to write books where I rely heavily on the tension rather than the nastiness.

Denise Mina, who writes the Alex Morrow Books, suggests that one of the reasons why crime fiction is compelling is because that a belief in a just world is fundamental to human beings, and that is what most crime fiction affirms…In all the evidence that life is not fair, we have this fundamental belief…and she suspects that…In these very grizzly ones there isn’t a restoration of order. It's often leaving things open at the end in order to continue a series…

I must admit I like the books I read – and the books I write – to have a just and fair ending, with a denouement that’s believable as well as gripping. And although I can 'take' a certain level of blood and gore, I don't need it. The beauty of the language and the profoundness of the characterisation is far more important.

I’ve just finished Odd Child Out by Gilly Macmillan (HarperCollins), and it’s a perfect example of this. Set vividly in my home town of Bristol, it’s about fifteen year old Noah, found floating unconscious in the Feeder Canal, and his best friend Abdi Mahab, whose parents arrived in Britain after terrifying experiences in a Somali refugee camp. I don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to tell you the book ends by affirming there is justice in the world, and that those who deserve a better chance in life should be offered it. The parents of both the teenaged friends have to face personal suffering, and their own demons, before the case is resolved by Jim Clemo, returning for his second case in Macmillan’s series. This is a police procedural at its heart, with Clemo and his team arduously sorting through lost iPhone records, searching out CCTV images and interviewing recalcitrant witnesses, as they determine if foul play, or even a racially motivated crime, has been committed. But to balance this, Macmillan includes a host of different points of view – first and third – to allow the various characters to have their say. This is a precarious device for a crime novelist, but it worked perfectly for me, allowing me to hear Noah’s story as he drifts in his deep coma, as well as see into the personal life of the detective, Clemo. Each of the Mahab family…the high achieving Abdi, his sister Sofia, now a midwifery student, his taxi-driving father Nur and his mother, Maryam, who speaks little English…all offer important perspectives to the story.
Gilly Macmillan

This is not a book that has high octane gun fights or car chases. Instead it steadily delves into the lives of ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, just as I have tried to do in my Shaman Mystery trilogy. It is a study of human nature and human dilemmas, deeply absorbing and full of tension and suspense.

This is certainly not ‘cosy crime’, but neither is it filled with gruesome gore. It’s not even clear, at first, if anyone is going to die at all, and then, suddenly, a lot of people are in danger. By the end, I was gripping my Kindle as if that would help the good guys survive. 

Gilly Macmillan lived in Northern California in her late teens, but now she’s in Bristol (West of England) and writing full time. You can hear her talk about her previous book, The Perfect Girl, at https://soundcloud.com/harperaudiopresents/gilly-macmillan - in a very revealing interview. It's already downloaded onto my Kindle and I can't wait to start the read.

Friday 3 November 2017

Torturing a Poem – Philip Pullman

I've been guesting on the OPEN COLLEGE OF THE ARTS blog this week, talking about Philip Pullman's new book on writing. 


Pullman has been busy writing – in October he released two new books. The first is the beginning of a new series which will be a sort of prequel to His Dark Materials. The second, released on 26 October, is his first non-fiction work, Daemon voices. This is a must-read for all writers, as well as readers who love his work. It's also a must-listen at the moment, on iPlayer. Go to the OCA blogsite to read the whole post and find the link.



Why 'Torturing a Poem'?  Pullman suggests, in Daemon Voices, that if you ‘interrogate a poem’ the results will be worthless, ‘as the results of torture always are’. …Poetry is in fact, enchantment, that it has the form it does because that very form casts a spell…