I haven't finished Tom Holland's Millenium yet, but already I'm going to have to recommend it to anybody reading or writing a medieval-style fantasy. In case you hadn't guessed, this is a history book about Western Europe leading up to the year 1000 AD. There's enough slaughter, backstabbing and prophesy here to please anybody, however, by far the most striking thing so far is the story of how medieval castles and knights came to be.

Basically, you have some peasants. They do a bit of reaping, a bit of hunting for game or mushrooms. They live in isolated farms and elect their own leaders. None of this helps the aristocracy to make money. So, Lord such-and-such -- not some particularly black-hearted villain, but your average, normal lord -- arms and hires some thugs (known in English as "cnichts", i.e. Knights). These thugs force the peasantry to live all in one village, which can then be controlled from a castle built for that very purpose. Like a herd of buffalo, they have been domesticated. They have become slaves. Literally.

And so, the aristocrats farmed the farmers. Brilliant! How quaint! It could never happen today!

Vacation

I'm just back from a few days of vacation in stunningly beautiful Co. Mayo. Wow. Clew Bay where the pirate queen Gráinne Mhaol raised her "taxes"; Croagh Patrick where the snakes were driven out of Ireland; beeches, sunshine, great food...

I was staying with the people who used to look after the dreaded Nork before the task fell to me. Needless to say, the creature became dangerously excited at times, but nobody suffered any permanent injuries and mere property should never be the cause of shed tears.

Photos soon.


Anybody for a Soylent Steak?

One of my writer heroes growing up, was the redoubtable, Harry Harrison. I loved his Deathworld books, his Stainless Steel Rat character; Wheelworld, Homeworld, Planet of the Damned...* I always wondered how they'd hold up to a reread, but feared the worst and stayed well away.

And then, quite recently, I started writing a dystopian detective story where the setting has developed out of our impending resource crash**. What a surprise then, to come across a Harry Harrison book, that I'd somehow missed out on as a kid, that deals with exactly these issues.  Make Room! Make Room! was a bit of a revelation for me, full of great world-building where every detail of people's lives has to fit the environment rather than some desired plot outcome.

His extrapolation has led him down some very different paths to the ones I chose, but there can be no doubt that a real professional was at work here and that the likes of me have a hell of a lot to learn from him.







*No, I will not provide links to all of these. Look 'em up yourselves!
**Speculation is speculation. Now, back off!

I'll be absent without leave from tomorrow morning until Monday. Please forward all death threats to your local political leaders. Weep if you must, but I shall return...

Eoin Purcell asked me to do a guest blog on the subject of ebooks. So, I did. It's not that I'm an expert, but as anybody who's been reading this blog knows, I've been doing a lot of thinking on the subject lately.

As commissioning editor of Mercier Press, a respected Irish publisher, I'm sure Eoin is doing the same.

Many of you have complained that after a year of lessons, you still can't put together a single, coherent sentence. I'll be honest here, and point out that it says more about your competence than about my superior teaching methods. However, I have bowed to pressure, working night and day to find some useful vocabulary.

So, enough of the complaints! Watch and learn. First, I will provide you with question words, and then, everything a teenager might need with which to answer them...

QUESTIONS

Irish..........................................................................................English
Cén fath?.................................................................................Why?
Cad chuige?............................................................................Why?
Can in a'thaobh?.....................................................................Why?

ANSWERS

Irish...........................................................................................English
De bhrí.......................................................................................because
De dheasca..............................................................................because
De bharr....................................................................................because
Toisc..........................................................................................because
Mar.............................................................................................because


More soon!

Once again, our team of reporter-poets bring you exclusive stories in the form of a Limerick. Ignore the imitators! TWWNaaL was the first Limerick news service anywhere in the world, and we are still the best.

Fire.

Water.

Air.

Explosions.

Overwhelming Numbers.

Ropes.

Tanks.

Speedboats.

Bigger Tanks.

Serendipity.

Helicopters.

Heights.


What else is there? Any ideas?

Dendrochronologists can tell you quite a lot about history. They chop up a helpless tree, look at the rings and use them to work out if it rained a lot in a given year, or if some volcano blew its top.

Exciting indeed! But, kids, don't even think of doing that kind of thing as a career. You can find out far more interesting stuff just from reading. Every major historical trauma reappears a few years down the line in a slew of books and movies as writers who had absolutely no influence on the events as they took place, work out their frustrations. They like to get in their pathetic  "i-told-you-sos", or to fight desperate, rearguard actions to shore up collapsing ideologies.

It's almost like you're watching the whole thing happen again, only in slow-motion.

Thus, I got to read about "stolen elections" in ancient Rome.
Then, there were a million revisits to 9/11 as terrorists flew spaceships into planets and the entire cast of The West Wing tried to drown themselves in cheese.
And now, as more and more conclusive proof rubs our noses in the true facts of the Iraq war, we get novels and stories competing to out-irony each other.

To my mind, the best of the bunch so far* has been Robert Reed's brilliant novella Truth, which plays an extraordinary game with its readers: what if the Neo-Cons did what they did because they knew something? I mean, really, really knew something frightening about the future that we don't... The answers RR comes up with, are super-cool IMO and if you haven't read that story yet, I urge you to check it out before you completely forget what it was like to lift a placard against Dick Cheney, or, on the other side, to believe in him.

A little more recently, there's been Paul McAuley's novel, The Quiet War. It's a good book, with great World-Building, decent characters and a fine dollop of ye olde sensawunda. But the author's handling of the Neo-Cons is a little more straight-forward and, in these latter days of absolute proof, his references to "weapons of mass-destruction in the Outer System" and so on, are starting to feel a little clumsy. Methinks, it's time we authors moved on to working on books about "new hopes" or skipping ahead altogether to "the age of disappointment".

What do you think?


*I probably haven't read more than 1% of what's out there, so be generous when applying the salt.

My latest novel project, “Eat the Drink”, is crawling along at about 1% a day and will probably reach the end of draft one sometime over the next two weeks. I am delighted. I'm thrilled. But I'm terrified too by all the work that remains to be done: draft 2; scary draft 3. Critiques from first readers and agent. Draft 4... And so on. Honestly, if I allowed myself to think about it all in advance, I would be sticking to short-stories for the rest of my life.

 

What keeps me going is a cocktail of unrealistic fantasies about how well the book will do when released, mixed with a string of targets and milestones that I use to fool myself that the goal is almost in sight.

 

This week's target is to reach 70,000 words, at which point I'll probably be on the home stretch... but only of draft 1. Then, an evening of pizza, a DVD and a week off from writing. Go team me!

I doubt I'm the first human being in all of history to notice that jokes are funnier when heard in a foreign language. Poems are more profound that way too, and emotions feel more... well, emotional.

A lot of humour works through flattering our egos. It's funny because you have worked it out, you have made the connections. It's telling you how clever you are and the more loops your brain jumps through to find the answer, the cooler that makes you. Well done!

 

But try telling some of those jokes in your native language when you get back from your holidays. Just try it! For then you must suffer the cold stares and the beatings of your friends. “I guess you had to be there!” you screech. “Please! No more! You had to be- OUCH!”

The language trick works with philosophy too. No wonder Shakespeare is so much more popular now than he was in his own day! Before we can understand what he has to say, our brains are forced to translate his vocabulary and word structure into modern English. Thus, almost every line seems extra special or particularly beautiful.

And what about the lyrics of pop songs? How many times have you enjoyed them in your car, straining to pick them out from behind a wall of sound, feeling the emotions as though they were your own, as though you were living them right now? And then you go home, look them up, and rereading them, discover how bland they are in the plain light of your screen? How childish, or worse, how empty they are?

 

So much of writing turns on this phenomenon: we need to give our readers the pleasure of working out who the killer is, of getting the joke, whatever. We provide just enough distraction to flatter them when they see through it, -- and the more they've worked out, the smarter they'll feel --, but there can't be so much noise that it becomes impossible to hear the lyrics underneath. I've never met a writer yet who didn't agonise over hitting that particular sweet spot. I agonise over it all the time, myself. But maybe I could get around it by writing my next book in Italian?

What do you think? I could call it, “La Pizza Catatonica.” Or something. All suggestions welcome.

On a nearby forum dedicated to ebooks, I saw a link to all the archived short stories of the late, great scifiction website. The quality of the fiction that appeared there, from writers such as Michael Swanwick, Vonda McIntyre and Lucius Shepard was second to none. A lot of that was down to the amazing Ellen Datlow, an editor who's become a bit of a living legend among SFF writers everywhere. Her prestige is such that when she used to put together her list of honourable mentions at the end of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology, people like myself were always thrilled to get a mention. Seriously. Most readers didn't know what we were on about, but we authors always found a way to boast about it to each other.

So yes, her award-winning, classy taste made the site a great success, but there was another element too that was far from insignificant: Scifiction paid really, really well. It paid better than any of the other genre magazines out there. Well known writers at the top of their game could afford to take a little time from the hectic work schedule needed to scrape a living from novels, in order to write that novella idea they'd been kicking around in their heads all these years.

Pay for it and they will come.

Many of these people -- especially in the States -- have huge medical bills. They have responsibilities that would force them to do something other than writing, that would cut their output in half or worse, leaving the vacuum to be filled by amateurs.

What! I'm against amateurs now? Of course not! Absolutely and positively not. But in the brave new internet world where everything is expected to be free, real and consistent quality will still need to be paid for. Oh, it's not that there wouldn't still be amazing and wonderful stuff hidden out there otherwise, it's just that the effort of digging for it, of sifting though mountains of vomit inducing sewage would become too much for most readers and they might just turn to other pursuits instead. Maybe then, they'll long for the days of Ellen Datlow's glittering salon of brilliant men and women.

Sometimes, I am amazed at my own stupidity. Even worse, I like to share the fruits of my idiocy with others. Hence today's post.

I am so cool now, so with it and up to the max! That I actually own a mobile phone. I cannot stress how trendy that makes me. Really.

But this post is supposed to be about my stupidity and not my coolitude. So, allow me to continue...

One day, I received a call on my communications device. A friendly, elderly lady from the phone company, had contacted me up to help me with my pricing plan. Apparently, I wasn't getting good value for money. Somebody like me, making X number of calls a week and texting Y times to his invisible friends, would save a whole bucket of money by switching to price plan Z. The phone company would have to be insane to allow me to switch to such a plan. But, they had made the exception for me. Just this once, but only if I signed up for a minimum six months.

Sounds like I'd be a fool not to, really. So I did and thought nothing more of it.

Now, looking back over my bills for the last three months, guess what? Oh, you already know the answer, don't you?

That's right. My average bill is now higher than it was before I was permitted to change my plan and I am in a plan that can never sink to the lowest level I was paying before. Methinks I need to complain to the regulator. Except I'm afraid she'll just laugh in my face.

:-(

Many thanks to eldritchhobbit  who sent me a virtual gift for my birthday and to marshallpayne1  who baked me a cake, but for crying out loud, when is somebody going to get me what I really want?

Who among you will step up? Who?

Apparently, according to these losers at The Global Language Monitor, you can get a new word into the English Language just by using it a few thousand times somewhere on the internet. Well, what I want what I need, is a verb to explain why I give up on books after only a hundred pages. Why I am even prepared to fling them at my long-suffering wall.

Therefore, if you love me, if you really, really love me, you will immediately log onto every forum of which you are a member, and start using my latest creation: the verb to disjoy.

I'll go first.

I disjoyed my birthday because nobody used my new word.
I disjoyed the disloyalty they displayed in displeasing me so disfaithfully.

Your turn. Hurry up -- I want my present.

Many of you only ever hit this page to mock me, but you're missing out on some really great stuff. A few weeks ago I had a "stunning"* post on the subject of what makes a book "dark". And my shocking conclusion, or one of them, was that "subject matter" and "darkness", may look very alike, but they're so distantly related that it's perfectly safe for them to get married.

And the Saga Continues...

I've been reading again. The latest, was Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, a hugely popular SF adventure for young people. The plot is an American take on Takami's cult classic, Battle Royale: shove a gang of kids into an isolated location and make them kill each other until only one survives. Hurray! It sounds like fun, and it is -- I flew through it in two days and could have been quicker if it wasn't for those darned kids.

But while the book passed a bit of time for me, it has failed entirely to give me nightmares. Yes, there's killing and hardship and one mention of cannibalism and so on. There is loss, as good friends get torn apart, impaled, crushed and sliced. But the hard choices have all gone missing and it robs the tale of any possible emotional trauma.

What do I mean by that? Well, SPOILERS are under the cut.

( SPOILERS )

( MORE SPOILERS )

In other words, the book side-steps all hard decisions and all the consequences too. The Hunger Games is about a dystopia, it's about murderous children and plenty of other nasty stuff besides. But "dark", it is not. So, once again, I have heroically proven beyond any doubt that subject matter and darkness are unrelated.

I rule.


*anonymous quote and not necessarily in reference to the above-mentioned post. Something about tasers, I think.

I was admiring my manly physique in the mirror last night, when I got a scare. There was a bizarre, thick white line running across my arm. I panicked a bit.

Although I was supposed to be writing, I wasted a few hours googling until I discovered I had nothing to be worried about and that this was in fact a well-known phenomenon related to the strange weather we've been having in Ireland lately. The stripe was just the place where I'd been wearing a watch-strap and it was the rest of my skin that had changed colour around it! Believe it or not, I even found a word for this in wikipedia: it's called a "tan", or "sun-tan", since it is primarily associated with that burning moon thing we've been seeing a lot of lately.

Who knew?

HCF stands for High Concept Fantasy. Earlier parts in this series can be found here. Read them or I will send something unpleasant to rend your flesh and torment your spirit. Run along now! Flee!

More Magic, More Delicious Toppings
Bring it on! I mean, it's what fantasy's all about, right? In previous articles I've moaned more than a lovestruck zombie teenager about the fact that SF has the whole of High Concept sewn up. I've complained about how Big Innovations in fantasy are as rare as talking dolphins.* But that's because the fantasy writers are concentrating their considerable creativity into the one thing that sets their genre apart from all other forms of literature: magic. Holy, or unholy, effable or ineffable... That's right, isn't it? Hello?

Oh. It's like that, is it?

Well, the good news, is that I have combed my memory in search of groovy bits of enchantment, and as always, I have cleverly left room in the comments for you to add your own samplings of wonder. My examples come in no particular order and there's never any guarantee that I actually liked the books I mention below**, --  I'm looking for HCF here and nothing else.

The List.

1) The Great Game series. Deity: Dave Duncan.
Nobody has the power to perform magic in their own world, but, if you can find a gate into another world, and if you can convince people to put faith in you, you gradually accumulate magical power (mana). Gather enough of the stuff, and you can set yourself up as a god with an army of believers who keep giving you more and more mana that you can use to battle your rivals. A great idea, that's really well developed and woven heavily into the plot of the story.

You might say there's nothing new about this, that lots of writers have used ye olde faith = stronger gods formula (cf. Terry Pratchett's excellent Small Gods). But Duncan takes it to another plain with the whole idea that only "strangers" can do this. Most of the gods in his fantasy land originally came from Earth, and most of the powers on Earth originally came from elsewhere...

2) Lord of the Rings. Ruler of them all: J. R. R. Tolkien.
JRRT has been such a staple of the genre that we can forget sometimes how so very HCF a lot of his stuff was and not just for its time. For me, he is still the master of the "it just is" school of enchantment. He lends his magic a genuine sense of mystery, of majesty even, and the concept of the One Ring and its incredible morally and spiritually corrosive properties, is far more than just a clever allegory or a plot device.

3) The Wheel of Time. Tainted: Robert Jordan.
What's this? Somebody else has been reading LotR as well? Sure. RJ took Tolkien's whole ring corruption thing and brought it so many steps forward that it became a wonder in its own right.

Both men and women may be born with the ability to cast magic. However, men are a) more powerful magic users and b) destined to be driven so crazy and dangerous that every one of them has to be hunted down. It's like you had hundreds of copies of the one ring floating about the world like nuclear bombs that anybody could just pick up.

4) The Dying Earth. Magic User: Jack Vance.
Only a hundred spells still exist in the world. They are long and difficult, but will only work when learned by heart. Even worse, the moment you use it, the magic will wipe itself from your memory and you have to start all over again. "Not very original," you might say. "It's sounds suspiciously like Dungeons and Dragons." Exactly. Where do you think they got it from?

5) Monster Blood Tattoo. Wit: D. M. Cornish.
Many writers like to systemise their magic, making a semi-science out of it. None, and I mean none***, go further in this than D.M. Cornish. It would take an encyclopedia to detail the various types of magical powers, potions, objects and practitioners in the world of the Half-Continent, not to mention all of the specialised vocabulary he has created in order to be able to describe it all. It's incredible stuff, detailed and beautiful. But I don't have a week to go into here in detail...

6) The Long Price. Poet: Daniel Abraham.
Magic is performed by creatures known as andat -- the creations of poets who both imprison and control them and from whom they are constantly trying escape. Very clever, insightful stuff.

7) Anything by Brandon Sanderson.
This guy seems to specialise in creative magic systems and has a new and different on in every series he writes. Everything from ingesting metals to magic swords...

There are bound to be lots of other examples out there of mad creative genius, but I may be too busy to dig it out for you. So, my advice? Stop being so lazy and contribute a few ideas to the comments!

Damn you. Damn your eyes.

*I've only ever met six.
**Most, however, are great.
***Rather than, say, "nun".

Politics don't belong on this blog -- clear off, damn you! Go home!

-- but my home is burning. My sweet, sweet penguins are crisping in the sun...

It's a dilemma, for sure. So let's swoop back for an objective view. Ah! That's better. Now they're just little black dots and I don't have to look them in their beady, pleading eyes. Finally, I get to concentrate on the issues that really matter for the upcoming Euro and local elections: the nearby football pitch without enough parking; that tiny rise in taxes; that corrupt idiot who failed to resign over the thing that time.

But I can't get the stench of penguin meat out of my nostrils, because there is a fundamental question of logic, of rationality that I need to face up to:

Do I think man-made Global Warming is real? Peak Oil? Peak Soil? Peak Water? Mass species extinction?

Ask me and I'll say 'yes'. Ask most people on this side of the Atlantic and they'll say the same. They know it's real in the same way that young people know they're going to die. They know. But they don't believe. Because if they did, they would be INSANE not to vote Green. Now, I don't call them that to their faces. Their politics are absolutely none of my business.

Except lately, I keep hearing: "how can you vote for them, Peadar? Their leader made a stupid statement last week." Or, "They're in coalition with party X and I hate party X -- in fact, Peadar, so do you!" Or, "They'll raise taxes for stupid green issues. They'll sneak into my garden at night and try to hug my trees -- stinking perverts! Perverts!"

I can't understand why they ask me these questions. Man-Made Global Warming is either true, or it is not. A very simple proposition. If it is true, and we do nothing to stop it, urgently, then it is the end of civilisation. The end of us and our culture. A return for all of us to savagery and the death of billions of us. Billions.

So, shove your tiny rise, or even, your massive rise in taxes. Stuff your pointless, pointless empty party politics and the supposed virtue of your molested trees. I'm sorry, none of it matters.

CLARIFICATION: This is not intended as an attack on anybody who votes differently from me. It is merely an attempt to point out, in the face of the sorts of discussions that are going on here in Ireland at the moment, that there *might* be rational reasons for the decisions I've made and that no, it's not about wanting to go back to living in those very attractive trees.

So, you've boiled a few bunnies in your time and maybe, followed me around the supermarket for secret photos of my non-beer related beer belly. And all of this when you should have been at home studying your Irish.

I've done my best for you. I've given you vocabulary and proverbs and even a few curses to fling at your enemies. But, I'll admit it now, I have yet to soothe you with song. A love song written by somebody just... just like you and the way you get when the meds have run out and the Pharmacies are all closed. You know what I mean.

So, out with the dictionaries and I'll translate a few verses for you. The only thing I ask is please, please don't try any of this at my home.

Chorus:

'S é'n trua nach mise, nach mise
'S é'n trua nach mise bean Pháidín
'S é'n trua nach mise, nach mise
'S an bhean atá aige bheith caillte

[Translation]

It's a pity that I'm not, that I'm not, that I'm not
It's a pity that I'm not Paddy's wife
It's a pity that I'm not, that I'm not, that I'm not
And the wife he has now be lost (dead)

The next verse is a rather saccharine one in which Paddy's self-proclaimed future wife will accompany him all the way to Galway before returning with him in the boat. Sweet and harmless.

And then, we get this rather creepy bit:

Verse 2

Rachainn go haonach an Chlocháin
Is siar go Béal Á' na Báighe
Bhreathnóinn isteach tríd an bhfuinneog
A' súil is go bhfeicfinn bean Pháidín

[Translation]

I'd go to the fair in Town X
And over to Town Y
I'd look through the windows
and on Paddy's wife I'd spy

It's a pity that I'm not, that I'm not, that I'm not
It's a pity that I'm not Paddy's wife
It's a pity that I'm not, that I'm not, that I'm not
And the wife he has now be lost (dead)

And finally, the icing on the cake, the proof of the psycho pudding:

Verse 3:

Go mbristear do chosa, do chosa
Go mbristear do chosa 'bean Pháidín
Go mbristear do chosa, do chosa
Go mbristear do chosa 's do chnámha

[Translation]

May your legs break, your legs, your  legs
May your legs break, Paddy's wife,
May your legs break, your legs, your legs
May your legs break and your bones too.

Are you charmed yet? Well, go on then, learn the vocabulary! Hurry up! And here's the actual tune from youtube. I'd prefer to have a woman singing it, but at least Planxty were great musicians in their day.



Next time, if there is a next time... who knows? We might do "Cailleach an Airgid" (the money hag), which explains why you shouldn't marry somebody four times your age.

Awfulness
In 1985 the life of an Irish boy was forever destroyed. You see, that was the year Boris Becker claimed his first Wimbledon title and thus, on 7 July, I had the shocking realisation that I, Peadar Máirtín Ó Guilín,  would never be the youngest tennis champion in the world. It was too late.

Not that I played much tennis or even liked it. The point is that the window of time in which all possibilities were still open to me had been shut in my face so hard, that I still have glass splinters in my eye. :-( Oh, cruel German! That despair has dogged my footsteps ever since.

Even More Sadness
The sight of soccer on TV last night almost broke my heart. I play every Friday night, but no scouts ever come to watch me and, with my birthday just around the corner, my ability to keep playing at the very highest levels may soon be at an end. It all goes unapplauded: the goals I have scored; the great passes; that time I headed the ball in roughly the right direction. Wasted. Pointless.

With all this in mind (and a heavy heart -- don't forget the heaviness!), I have decided to compile a list of some of the prizes I have yet to win, along with a professional assessment of my chances.


Prizes as yet Unwon

Title:	Assessment:
1997 World Darts Championship	Too late :-(
Winona Ryder's First Kiss	Too late :-(
Nobel Prize	All to play for!!! Admittedly, I have yet to receive any contact from the committee, but there have been a few missed calls on my phone with excited, congratulatory-type breathing on the other end. So, you never know!!!!
Olympic Gold for Nork Wrangling	Pretty damn good, actually. I've been training for nearly six years and so far only one broken rib and assorted scratch marks.
Oldest man to win Wimbledon	All to play for!!! I can't wait to pick up my trophy -- only then will I be able to put 1985 behind me.

More prizes soon.