Blog guest - Michela O'Brien - a strong sense of place

Today, my guest is Michela O’Brien. She is the author of Playing on Cotton Clouds (2012) and A Summer of Love (2013), both published by Crooked Cat Publishing.

Michela was born in Milan, Italy, in... well, let's say some time in the last third of the 20th century. In Milan she grew up, studied, worked as a teacher, made friends and wrote, commending thoughts to page, imagining plots and characters, recording events in her life, noting observations about the world: stories, diaries, letters... In an era before personal computers, Internet, blogs and social networks, it was pen and paper and she still carries a notebook and a pencil with her to sketch ideas on the spot. She moved to England in 1994 and lives at the edge of the beautiful National Park of the New Forest with her husband and two sons.

Her greatest inspirations are ordinary people and real life stories, and her novels and short stories centre on themes of friendship, love, coming of age and self-discovery, human emotions and experiences everyone can relate to. Michela is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.

Playing on Cotton Clouds

When arty Livy falls for her sister's boyfriend, she knows her dreams are unlikely to come true... Sensitive Seth thinks he has hit the jackpot when the girl of his dreams finally looks his way... While laidback Aidan is every girl's hero.

Fast forward twenty-five years as carefree youth turns into adulthood responsibilities, relationships begin and end, music and fashion change, and life moves on with its successes, failures and heartaches. As the friends grow up, they discover life rarely turns out the way you imagined it at fifteen. The rites of passage through years are eerily familiar to every 1980s teenager in this moving, heartfelt novel.

 

A Summer of Love

Successful artist Jonah Briggs is a man who has made mistakes. Aged just eighteen, he was sent to prison for two years, leaving his family shattered and his first love, Sally, to wait for his return. But at eighteen, two years seem like a lifetime, and some promises are hard to keep. 

When Jonah reappears in her life, Sally finds herself torn between him and Ewan, the young Cornish farmer she has married, divided between loyalty and passion, duty and love. 

Over the course of almost two decades, through meetings and partings, secrets and revelations, and two momentous summers, Jonah will have to confront his past and heal old wounds, while Sally will face the consequences of her choices – whether to follow her conscience or her heart.

My review of Playing on Cotton Clouds

In this superb book about friendship and relationship, we travel with the main characters from 1983 through to 2008, with a poignant flashback to 1980. What's interesting is that the author was born and lived in Italy until 1994, when she moved to England; yet she captures the period prior to her arrival very well indeed.

There are three teenage friends, Aidan, Livy (Olivia) and Seth who meet up at the bridge that crossed the town's river. Even when they move away into the big wide world, the bridge has significance, sometimes in their memories, sometimes when they visit the town again. It links them, it seems. Added to the mix is Livy's sister, Tara. First fumbling with sex and alcohol are depicted, inevitably, with humour and a core of truth. Indeed, truth shines through this book - we believe these people lived, we live with them for the duration of the novel, getting anxious in moments of crisis, becoming pleased in moments of happiness. Life isn't tidy, there are false paths to take, wrong turns to make, and they drift apart, yet return after years, an invisible thread connecting them. `Can you fall in love at thirteen, one rainy afternoon, in an old faded café, and find yourself at twenty-nine, sitting in the fragrant summer sun, feeling as you did then?' The answer, of course, is `yes'. That's the human condition.

Aidan isn't too bright, but he's attractive to women, which is his downfall, yet as one conquest says, `People can't stop loving you, even when they think they have.'

Seth is a little self-centred, wrapped up in his writing, early on suffering from depression (`... in the small hours of the morning, when he felt himself slowly falling and darkness seemed to chase him with cold, invisible fingers'), but with the help of his friends he defeats the Black Dog, though he's always going to be a `half-empty pint' kind of man: `I wasn't interested in collecting stamps, so I went for rejection letters. Fascinating. Some can be perversely creative.' (I have to agree with his praise for Philip K. Dick).

Livy is in love with Seth, but (fool that he is) he's infatuated with her sister, Tara. `Carefully tucked away feelings were scattered around Livy's mind, leaving her with the painful task of picking them up and hiding them again... contemplating old memories as they lay on the floor of her recollection.'

The narrative is from the perspective of these three, and at every stage there's a depth of character and an emotional resonance that rings true. Emotion in a relationship novel has to be felt by the reader, not simply observed - show, not tell, and Michela O'Brien does that brilliantly: she could have written `Livy felt hurt by him' or something similar; instead, she gives us `Her heart had taken a dive into her stomach and she briefly held her breath to fish it out and put it back in its place.' There are several clever allusions, to springs in beds and Jack-in-the-box and feelings like thorns, imbedded in the body, making themselves felt after time, which `he could not tear out without maiming himself.'

There is a birth and a death, both handled with exquisite restraint and all the more powerful and moving for that. This debut novel is excellent, the writing controlled and a delight.

Q&A

Michela, your debut novel has picked up an enviable number of high-scoring reviews on Amazon. How does that feel?

It feels great! I’m still taken aback by the praises the book received. I’m especially moved when people say they loved the characters and that they felt like “real people” and “friends”.

What was the initial inspiration for the book?

The initial idea was to write about a male friendship. I started out with Seth and Aidan and their relationship. It was interesting to explore, as I was doing it from a female perspective, obviously. I then added another element with a male-female friendship between Seth and Livy, another theme that interests me.

Do you find that your characters – say, Livy, Aidan and Seth - have become real people, that you remember them as such? Or are they brief acquaintances who’ve drifted apart since you’ve moved on to meet new characters?

They are definitely very real to me. I feel like they are friends I have come to know well. Both my books span several years and I got to see the characters grow and change from youth into adulthood. I sometimes think it would be nice to revisit them and find out what they’ve been up to. I might very well do so, in the future.

Most debut novels take a long time to gestate. How long did you work on Playing on Cotton Clouds?

If we are talking about the actual writing, it didn’t take very long. About six months. If we are talking about “gestation” and how the story came together… well, I subliminally wrote this novel since I was 19 – and that’s a long time ago! I love choral stories, with different threads and subplots, and wanted to write about a group of friends, how they start together as a unit, and how then life splits their paths. Sometimes they run parallel, sometimes they meet and part and meet again. I actually started this novel many times and never finished it. Finally, I managed to get to the end.

In many ways, second novels are easier, because you’ve learned a lot from the first. (Some feel cursed by the expectations implicit in a second novel after a successful first one). At what stage did you begin A Summer of Love?

Funnily enough, I wrote A Summer of Love first. I sent it out to a few agents and publishers with no joy, so I shelved it and moved to another project, what became Playing on Cotton Clouds. After the latter had been published, I got back to the first novel and edited it, cutting a big bulk of the first draft and rewriting entire sections, until it was in the current form, which led to it being published too.

Excellent approach, to rewrite and rewrite, rather than just send out the MS! Now that you’ve got your second book published, are you writing another novel at present – and if so, can you tell us a little about it?

Yes, the third novel is almost finished and ready for editing. It has the working title of “Finding Paige” and it’s another story focusing on relationships, with an exploration of “timing”, meeting the right person at the wrong time and making what could be the wrong choice.

When you’ve finished your books, do you feel you’d like to see where the characters go next, or do you leave them alone to get on with their lives without your input?

Normally when I reach the end, I’m satisfied with the journey my characters have taken and happy to leave them where they have arrived. So, yes, I tend to let them “get on” on their own. Plus, I’m always thinking about a new project, a new idea. But you never know, one day I might like to revisit some of my characters and take them on a new journey.

How long have you been writing? 

Forever! I started writing stories as soon as I was able to, at about six. More seriously, though, with a look at being published, about 12 years.

What influenced you to start writing?

As I said, it was something I started doing very early on. I just love stories. Hearing stories, reading stories, watching stories… so I started to create my own.

You obviously know Italy well. Do you bring in other foreign places into your fiction?

Yes, I have done. In Playing On Cotton Clouds the actions move between the UK, Italy, Amsterdam and New York. A Summer of Love is based in the UK, switching between London and Cornwall, a county I know well and love. My new novel moves between London, Devon, the South of France and Northern Italy. Some settings like Cornwall, London and Italy, are very familiar to me, others I make up – for example the Midlands town the characters in Playing on Cotton Clouds come from, or the Cornish village to which Jonah belongs in A Summer of Love, are fictitious amalgams of similar towns and villages – and others I get to explore through research using the internet and even Street View! I did that when describing places in New York, a city I never visited.

New York is like you describe in Clouds, like being in a film, it's so familiar! I believe that a sense of place is important in fiction; how do you achieve that?

I share in your belief and as a reader I love books that have a strong sense of place. I treat the settings almost as another character, describing not just its appearance, but the feel it conveys and the influence it has on the characters. Roots and belonging versus a sense of adventure is a recurrent theme in my stories.

How do your family/friends feel about your writing?

They are very proud of what I have achieved, though writing takes a big chunk of my time and that is not always easy on family life.

Do you intend to stick with the personal relationship genre or switch to other genres?

Writing about relationships and emotions is what I like best and I will probably continue in this genre. But I have a few ideas for more “topical” stories and I’d love to dab into historical fiction as well.

A tall order, I know, but what is your favourite book? And why?

That is a hard question to answer! The first novel that made a huge impression on me was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, which I read when I was about 13. It encapsulates everything my writing is about: relationships, families, everyday life against big political and social changes, ordinary people dealing with small and big issues. Jo March was more than a heroine, she became a role model. An independent woman, aspiring to be a writer, who also happened to become a teacher – which I am too. I don’t know if it’s my “favourite” book, but it certainly occupies a special place in my affections.

Other books that made a big impact on me were Joy in the Morning by Betty Smith and Rosso di Sera by Brunella Gasperini, an Italian writer, journalist and feminist that shaped a great deal of the way I write and view the world.

Where do you hope to be in 5 years?

Mainly alive and in good health! I’d like to take my writing career forward and hopefully have my books in more homes!

You’re generous with giving space and time to other authors on your blog. Can you tell us how this came about?

To be honest, they do me a favour writing for my blog as I’m always stuck for ideas! And I’ve had some truly interesting and fascinating entries. How it came about? I just asked “would you like to write a piece for my blog?”

Where can readers find you?

I’m on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Michela-Sacchi-OBrien/16450121895

Twitter https://twitter.com/michela_obrien

Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5822651.Michela_O_Brien

and, as you mentioned, on my blog  http://words-in-a-jar.blogspot.co.uk

My books can be found on Amazon

Playing on Cotton Clouds http://www.amazon.co.uk/Playing-on-Cotton-Clouds-ebook/dp/B007WFK3B2

A Summer of Love http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Summer-of-Love-ebook/dp/B00B3MKEQ4

Book of the film - Where Angels Fear to Tread

Published in 1905, when Forster was 26, this debut novel is regarded as a modern classic. He only published six novels.  He was inspired by journeys to Italy with his mother (in 1901). For a young man’s debut, it is accomplished. It’s written from an omniscient point of view, so that we hear the author as much as any character’s thoughts, which was – and perhaps still is – the fashion in literary fiction. It begins as an Edwardian comic piece but towards the end turns into a tragedy.

As it’s omniscient, the book’s an ideal vehicle for filming, with some great dialogue. Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Judy Davis, Helen Mirren and Rupert Graves, this 1991 film is faithful to the book. Doubtless due to the running time, some of the humorous pieces from the beginning were omitted or cut short. The music by Rachel Portman enhances the narrative.

 

The young widow Lilia Herriton (Mirren) tours Italy, leaving her daughter with her mother-in-law. She’s chaperoned by neighbour Caroline (Bonham Carter). When Lilia announces her marriage to Gino (Giovanni Guidelli), an Italian a dozen years younger than her, there are ructions at home and Philip (Graves) is despatched to put matters right. Philip is accompanied by his sister, Harriet (Davis). However, Philip is ineffectual and fails in his mission. To say more would spoil the story.

Edward Morgan Forster

Forster intended that the book should be about the improvement of Philip, according to one of his letters. Yet much of the first portion of the book is as much about Lilia and her rocky relationship with Gino and Philip’s implacable mother, Mrs Herriton.

Mirren and Guidelli

The editor for this book states that he finds the book ‘flawless – in the perfection of its structure, its subtle use of leitmotifs, etc.’ Much of the ‘etc’ I can agree with, but not the structure, which I found uneven, and some of the head-hopping quite annoying.

However, what won me over were Forster’s acute observation and his humour. There are many brief examples of the latter, and I’ll provide a few here: ‘Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy.’

When learning of Lilia’s outrageous behaviour, Mrs Herriton fumes, ending with, ‘I am going to the kitchen , to speak about the range.’ She spoke just too much, and the cook said that if she could not give satisfaction she had better leave.

For three years (Philip) had sung the praises of the Italians, but he had never contemplated having one as a relative.

Philip’s sister Harriet accompanies him on another mercy mission to Italy and when asked about her ticket, she replied, ‘A single for me, I shall never get back alive.’ Perhaps because she held the view ‘foreigners are a filthy nation.’

Towards the end, Philip deduced that ‘For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.’ And that’s the case, though there is a neat little twist ending, which is retained in the film.

Let’s get political – Winter Fuel Payments

Winter Fuel Payment is a contentious issue in the UK – and in Europe, if it comes to that.

Winter Fuel Payment – about £100 (about 116 euros) per year per individual - is a universal benefit paid to overs 60s each year to offset the high cost of heating during the winter months. Higher rates apply for older ages. The biggest bill for winter fuel payments in Europe – outside the UK – is for expats in Spain, followed by France, according to the Department for Work and Pensions figures. In the winter of 2011-12, fuel payments to expat pensioners in Spain was £5.78 million (about 6.7 euros).

Costa Blanca, February

 

Back in 2008, a Home Office Minister wanted government lawyers to find ways around European law so he could stop winter fuel payments to thousands of pensioners living in the EU. Yet another instance where government mandarins don’t do their homework but think they can get a few votes, particularly by appealing to the politics of envy. That didn’t work. In fact, the EU told the Home Office in no uncertain terms that the allowance should be paid without pre-existing conditions, otherwise they were being discriminatory. I have a vested interest, as I’ve lived in Spain since 2003 and first claimed the allowance last winter (2012-13).

Now, the subject is rearing its head again. Chancellor George Osborne advocates that a ‘temperature test’ should be applied to restrict elderly UK pensioners living in warmer countries from receiving the ‘benefit’ after August 2015.

On the face of it, he’s trying to save the country money, resources are limited, after all. He's probably also hoping it will win votes at the next election. Yet he is applying questionable logic in doing so.

 

 

Resources are limited

We’ve already detected a trend as the world’s population gets older and lives longer. Governments are becoming alarmed at the subsequent pension costs. They start to move the goal posts, shifting the qualifying age, changing the rules. The winter fuel payment issue is another example of this. I can’t argue against them changing the rules, per se. I do take issue with them when they attempt to apply dubious science, in the form of ‘temperature tests’.

Costa Blanca, February

Granted, Spain is much warmer than the UK in the winter months, but that’s during the daytime. Evenings in Spain are cold, as any student of geography would confirm. It’s a little disingenuous to apply a ‘temperature test’ at midday, for example. (The photos here were taken after a hailstorm in February, 2005; pretty, aren't they?).

Hailstones, Costa Blanca

 

Fact. The houses in Spain are not built to retain heat so they still require heating. This heating is in the main supplied by bottled gas and electric heating systems, whose prices have increased considerably over the last six years, thanks to those green taxes. Indeed, expat residents acclimatise and their blood thins so, like the elderly in the UK, they feel the cold more than visiting tourists; walk around in the daytime and you’ll see locals fully clothed, not wearing shorts, while tourists are in T-shirts and shorts. My bottled gas bill for the winter 2011-12 amounted to 1,160 euros (about £981) Shame, they shouldn’t have moved here then, comes Nasty’s response.

Fact. Most pensioners living in Spain are here not only because of the climate, which is considered healthier. They live here because they can’t afford to live in the UK since Gordon Brown raided their pensions. Nasty says, They’re lucky to have a pension, some of us have to work till we’re 70 now!

Fact. Most, if not all, of in excess of 25,600 pensioners living in Spain and claiming the fuel payments actually pay the Chancellor’s and all civil servants’ wages through their taxes. Nasty keeps quiet, perhaps he’s never paid any taxes?

Fact. These same pensioners paid into the system and since the rules entitle them to a monetary benefit, why should he see fit to curtail it simply by virtue of where they live? Since the balmy climate argument doesn’t hold water, perhaps it’s simple envy? Nasty stamps his foot.

The Chancellor sees the continuation of these payments as a problem. The problem is in fact the Home Office and the Treasury and their constant attempts at chipping away at the inalienable rights of expat British who pay their salaries, a fact they’re uncomfortable to acknowledge.

I wonder how much the Government pays its lawyers to ‘get around’ or ‘subvert’ laws. And I wonder too how comfortable their eventual pensions will be, compared to the pensions of those expats living in Spain.

Why do you use a pen name?

I’ve been asked that over the years, as, doubtless, have many other authors who fall into that category. There are reasons.

Let me start by pointing out that my real name is Robert William Nicholson-Morton (no secret, it's on my website). Yes, quite a mouthful. When cheques were the normal form of payment, I hated signing them with that name – more like a squiggle. In truth, I hated signing cheques anyway!

When I joined the Royal Navy, my name-tally ended up as R.W.N-Morton. Having a double-barrelled name had its amusing side. When I appeared for duty one evening, the Leading Hand called out ‘Morton’ and I answered, ‘Here!’ Then he called out ‘Nicholson!’ So I said, ‘Here!’ I quickly added, ‘But I don’t want two jobs.’ Inevitably, in true forces spirit, I had to have a nickname. I became ‘Nik’ – I insisted on dropping the ‘c’ so I could sign my cartoons that way. (I thought there couldn’t be another Nik Morton around – and there wasn’t for some years, but now there is, and he’s a distinguished doctor in UK! But I got there first.)

That’s one reason to opt for a pen name; you’ve either got a common or familiar name or your name is already on the covers of published books. And although it doesn’t deter some authors, a long name is harder to fit onto a cover than a shorter snappier one.

I digress.

Way back in 1971, when I first started submitting short stories and articles, I wrote as Platen Syder. Being in the RN, I felt it prudent in case I ended up having some possibly controversial piece published. (I’d slightly adapted the name of someone I’d signed-up to join the Navy in Gosport, Platten Syder, who now lives in Truro, UK). Despite the name being in front of them, some magazine sub editors managed to give me the byline Playten Syder!

 

By the time I was publishing the magazine Auguries (http://auguries-magazine.blogspot.com.es/), I was using Nik Morton. (When courting my wife-to-be Jennifer, she knew me only as ‘Nik’ for a short while, and to this day I am still Nik to virtually everyone. Schizophrenic, who me?)

When I ran book reviews in my magazine, I had a small stable of reviewers; but the volume of books meant there were still too many for them to cope with. So I reviewed some books under the names Maggie Weaver, Nicola Williams as well as Nik Morton, to avoid the name monotony!

Eventually, after many years, my first novel acceptance was Pain Wears No Mask by Nik Morton, in 2007. Within a month or so afterwards, I wrote my first western and felt it should be under a different brand, so Ross Morton was invented. Ross was my late mother’s maiden name. Bear in mind that this was in the traditional publishing arena, where genre branding is considered important. The reasons for this are manifold: readers’ expectations possibly top the publishers’ list. If a reader buys a Nik Morton book, they expect it to be a crime novel. This is a little nonsensical if the cover and blurb of the book stated the story was a western, or a science fiction dystopian novel, surely? Nik Morton is considered a ‘brand’, in effect.

So quite a number of authors over the years have adopted pen names to get out of the ‘brand’ straitjacket – Ruth Rendell became Barbara Vine, for example, and recently J.K. Rowling hid behind Robert Galbraith for The Cuckoo’s Calling, perhaps because she felt she’d never get a dispassionate review as herself. Years ago, Doris Lessing did something similar with the pen name Jane Somers for two books. And yet there are exceptions, of course; she also successfully switched genre from ‘mainstream’ to science fiction with her Canopus in Argos sequence, eschewing a pen name; perhaps the success of her remarkable dystopian novel Memoirs of a Survivor helped.  

 

Nowadays, as any reader or writer knows, publishing is changing. There’s a recognition that maybe readers are happy to read an author no matter the genre she or he writes. Of course there will be those who won’t touch a western or a science fiction novel ever – or not again, not after reading a bad one. (You mean, there are no bad detective, mystery, romance novels? Fancy that!)

Things have become a little blurred for me and my pen name usage. I was commissioned to write a western, chose the title, Bullets for a Ballot, but then baulked at the byline – Nik Morton or Ross Morton. The publisher had published my short stories as Nik Morton, and that was the name most familiar to a US readership, so I clouded the issue and settled on Nik Morton!

I have a horror-crime-romance cross-over novel written as Robert Morton – Death is Another Life. My science fiction and horror short stories were published as both Platen Syder (or Playten Syder!) and Nik Morton, so the confusion persists.

Should a writer use a pen name, then? It’s his or her decision. There’s a great deal of excellent advice and background material on pen names to be found in the blog of Kristine Kathryn Rusch (former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and an incredibly prolific writer in several genres); just one instance: she wrote the popular novelization of The Tenth Kingdom as Kathryn Wesley. Her blog is: http://kriswrites.com/2013/10/02/the-business-rusch-pen-names/

 

 

 

 

FFB – ALIENS by Alan Dean Foster

Foster is the undisputed king of film novelizations. It has been stated that Foster claims to add an additional third to each script he novelises, such as providing the characters with thoughts and past history. Having written a screenplay of my book Death is Another Life, I know how much has to be left out for a script to work. Virtually all the description goes, as do the thought processes – though some can be verbalised if essential to the forward motion of the story.

I reviewed this way back when it was first published, but I think my comments still stand up.

Manipulation of the viewer or reader can annoy; the scene in Alien where Ripley stripped to her underwear, besides seeming unnecessary for the story, was to my mind deliberately manipulative, offering her up visibly defenceless, without even the dubious protection of clothes, and of course the scene was there for titillation, perhaps. Aliens does it, too, manipulating, that is: not only is Ripley destined to face the aliens, but she is to be accompanied by a child – a sure-fire heart-stopper. Despite these misgivings, the manipulation is effective, as it was in the forerunner, Alien.

This sequel picks up Ripley in suspension floating in her drifter, Narcissus, some 57 years after she rid herself of the alien. The character of Ripley is enlarged upon, and her susceptibility to nightmares is both understandable and well conveyed – in the event she undertakes to return to the alien planet of her nightmares in order to exorcise them. The planet now has a name, Acheron, and a colony, which inevitably succumbs to the aliens! So the space marines are sent in, with state-of-the-art weaponry which is convincingly featured.

Drawings that accompanied my original review.

 

You won’t get a great deal of style or literary writing, but the story and characters are convincing and occasionally Foster illuminates with a telling phrase or two, viz:

‘Both wore the expression of men for whom sleep is a teasing mistress rarely visited.’

There are minor irritations, such as ‘politicoporate manoeuvering’, repeated use of ‘heretofore’ outside of legalise contexts, ‘she was slipping on her equipment’ for ‘she was putting on her equipment’, a different image entirely, death is an ‘irritating finality’ – irritating seems an inappropriate description. But these are trifling quibbles concerning a good edge-of-seat read which kept me awake into the early hours. Reviewers of the film say they felt drained and limp after the movie, due to unremitting tension, and the book does read like that too. Yes, it is very well done.

 

Moor about Spain

Today, I’m discussing in brief a 2004 non-fiction book entitled Andalus by Jason Webster. The sub-heading of this book is Unlocking the secrets of Moorish Spain and it’s a follow-up of his first book Duende: a journey in search of flamenco which became an acclaimed big seller. Having studied Arabic in Oxford, Webster lived for several years in Italy and Egypt then went to Spain to learn to play the flamenco guitar; he now lives in Valencia with his Spanish wife.

Like many Hispanophiles, he’s had a long-lasting fascination with the Moorish past of this country, whether triggered by the sublime Alhambra in Granada, the dramatic and beautiful Great Mosque in Cordoba or the surprising number of Arabic root words in the Spanish language. Gibraltar which the Spanish vociferously and with inept politicians insist is theirs could realistically be claimed by Morocco or other North African countries – after all, it’s named after a Moor – jabal Tariq – the mountain of Tariq, the first Arab to conquer Spain.

For eight centuries Christians, Muslims and Jews lived and worked side by side. It was a period of great cultural and artistic blossoming. The Moors in Spain had the first universities, the first paper factories and the first street lighting in the whole of Europe. The Arabs learned paper-making from the Chinese artisans on capturing Samarkand. Indeed, the Moors first crossed the Strait to Spain in the Dark Ages, at about the same time as Bede was writing his History. At the time Spain was under Visigothic rule, the German tribes having moved in and taken over as the Roman Empire collapsed.

‘Moor’ was the term used to describe Muslims in Spain – Arabs, Berbers, Syrians, Persians and eventually Spaniards; it originated from the Latin maurus, which had been used to refer to North Africans.

Eventually the Christian Reconquest started to bite and in 1492 the Moors were expelled from what had become their country. What followed was religious intolerance, epitomised by the Inquisition. In modern Spain now annual ‘Moors and Christians’ fiestas occur in many towns and cities; these are noisy, colourful and quite spectacular events.

Two hundred years before the Reconquest, Arabic scholars translated great medical and mathematical works from the original Greek. By way of the Reconquest many of these works were translated into Latin, notably in Toledo. It could even be argued that the Arabic learning laid the foundations of the later Renaissance.

Webster was curious to see how the Moorish influence persisted even to this day, beyond these fiestas – ironically at a time when the Spanish government is having difficulty stemming the tide of illegal immigrants from Morocco and North African ports.

He read an old legend about Musa the Moor, the richest, strongest and most powerful caliph in ancient Spain. As the Christian armies were advancing, Musa asked his friendly jinn to safeguard his riches – which he did by turning them into stone in a special cave; but Musa’s daughter Zoraida didn’t want to flee, so she was turned into a tree outside the cave. But for one day in every year, as spring arrives, Princess Zoraida comes back to life and all the Caliph’s riches gleam and shine again. Only for one day the spell is broken. Webster was enchanted by this tale and wondered if, like the Caliph’s riches, much of the Moorish heritage was hidden from view, only waiting to be discovered.

The book begins with Webster incognito under the plastic sheeting of a fruit farm, doing some journalistic research on the illegal immigrants working in appalling conditions. Because they’re illegal, the immigrants are locked up at night and monitored by guards; they get no pay, only food and cramped sleeping quarters. Slavery was alive and well, it seemed. Then he was discovered and had to flee, aided by a young Moroccan called Zine. They got away but Webster now felt beholden to Zine and attempted to find work for him – a difficult task when he had no papers. [This short episode inspired me for a sequence in my Blood of the Dragon Trees].

Amazon.co.uk - http://goo.gl/fsLk3X

Amazon.com - http://goo.gl/wHQpQp

 

Accompanied by his own modern-day Moor for most of his journey of discovery, Webster meets a number of fascinating characters in Cordoba, Murcia, Almeria and Seville, among other southern Spain and Portugeuse towns. There’s an amusing visit to a clinica de enfermedades sexuales in Seville; however, I could have done without the over-long surreal Christmas party in a Valencia disco. On the way he reminds us of the Moorish legacy in the language – many words beginning with ‘a’ or ‘al’ have Arabic roots, whether English or Spanish: ‘Cotton’ – algodon in Spanish – comes from the Arabic al-qutun, for example.

Webster has an observant eye and a deceptively easy writing style which enliven a fascinating quick tour round the Moorish history via modern-day towns and cities of Spain.

Since writing Andalus, Webster has produced three detective novels featuring Chief Inspector Max Camara in Valencia: Or the Bulls Kill You, A Death in Valencia, and The Anarchist Detective.

 

Editing tips - About the sighs of it

No, that isn’t a spelling mistake. I thought we’d go on an emotional odyssey today. Sigh is one of those overused words to illustrate a character’s feelings. Others that spring to mind are smiling, shrugging, nodding and frowning. While there’s nothing wrong with any of these, in moderation, there’s a strong tendency to settle for them all the time instead of working that little bit more to evoke greater emotional response from the reader. (Memo to writers – find ‘smiled’ in your manuscript; you’ll be surprised how often it’s used. The self-edit should have highlighted the repetition, too, of course, but often doesn’t).

I’m sure we’ve all seen examples such as these:

‘What a joke that was,’ he smiled.

‘I’m not too sure about that,’ he shrugged.

‘All right,’ he nodded.

Yes, these appear even in the prose of best-selling authors; no names, but you’ve come across them. It doesn’t mean they’re right. In fact, they’re using lazy short-hand. What they mean, invariably, is ‘he said and smiled.’ And other variants. I point out that you’ll find it difficult to smile and speak at the same time, anyway, in Write a western in 30 Days (p124).

Employing the above standby words too often is both lazy and unhelpful to the reader. The attributions ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ are virtually invisible to the reader so don’t derail the narrative flow; those shrugs, nods and smiles are virtually invisible also, when they’re being used as attribution.

‘What a joke that was.’ He smiled.

This is better. It puts emphasis on his action – smiling.

However, there have to be other ways of conveying his feelings. Smiling implies happiness. It so happens that a book published in 2012 can offer guidance. The Emotion Thesaurus, a writer’s guide to character expression (by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi) provides 75 emotion entries that list body language, thoughts and visceral responses for each type of emotion, from Adoration to Worry.

So our example could read,

‘What a joke that was.’ His eyes sparkled.

Or:

‘What a joke that was.’ He bounced on his toes.

It just depends on the depth of the emotion at that time. And that’s just a physical response. There are internal sensations (when you’re in that POV) – say, a feeling of breathlessness. The section also offers the cues of suppressed happiness.

 

A writer writes to affect the reader, even if only to entertain, but usually you’re also creating tension, anger, fear and perhaps tears – an emotional response which can only be evoked through experiencing the emotions of the characters.

I’ll quote from the Emotion Thesaurus: ‘All successful novels, no matter what genre, have one thing in common: emotion. It lies at the core of every character’s decision, action and word, all of which drive the story. Without emotion, a character’s personal journey is pointless. Stakes cease to exist… readers pick up a book to have an emotional experience. They read to connect with characters who provide entertainment and whose trials may add meaning to their own life journeys.’

At the risk of getting over-emotional, I believe that authors Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi have provided a great service to writers by writing the Emotion Thesaurus, which is for all writers, not simply budding scribes.

Music to my ears!

I’ve been a fan of film music since the 1960s. So I was very interested and pleased to view three programmes on TV (BBC4) recently. Presented by composer Neil Brand, the series celebrates the art of cinema music and demonstrates how great soundtracks work.

Neil Brand

 

Neil Brand has been accompanying silent films for nearly 30 years, regularly throughout the UK and at film festivals and special events around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, America, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, and, in Italy, the Bologna, Aosta, Bergamo and Pordenone festivals where he has inaugurated the School of Music and Image.  

Training originally as an actor, he has made his name as a writer/performer/composer, scoring BFI video releases of such films as South (Shackleton's Journey to the South Pole), The Ring by Alfred Hitchcock, the great lost film The Life and Times of David Lloyd George and Early Cinema, avant-garde cinema and Russian pre-Soviet cinema. New DVD releases for the Danish Film Institute and Lobster Films, Paris as well as a highly acclaimed jazz score for the 1927 Anna Mae Wong movie Piccadilly which premiered live in September 2003 at the Lincoln Centre, New York and the Barbican concert hall in March 2004. His most recent DVD scores are for Silent Dickens, Silent Britain, The Cat and the Canary (1927) and the Laurel and Hardy short ‘You’re Darn Tootin’.

Brand has toured to Finland’s ‘Midnight Sun’ Festival, Padua Opera House, Kilkenny comedy festival, the Middle Eastern International Film Festival and throughout the UK and abroad with his ‘hilarious and touching’ one-man-show ‘The Silent Pianist Speaks’. He has written the title music and many scores for TV documentaries including Silent Clowns, Silent Britain, Great Britons, The Real Stephen Hawking, The Crimean War, In The Wild: Pandas with Debra Winger, Great Railway Journeys as well as scores for over 70 Radio 4 dramas including War and Peace, the Box of Delights, Brideshead Revisited, Showboat, and Sony award winner A Town Like Alice.

In his overview of cinema music, Brand tells us that the movie score is intended to make the audience hear what you need to – altering the emotional effect the movie makes by the sound attached. Brand moved through the silent era, where films were accompanied by a piano, orchestra or an organ, through the invention of the ‘click track’ to the point in 1933 where Max Steiner made film history by underscoring King Kong.

King Kong (1933)

There were many interesting insights – the simple sequence of notes that signifies a particular character (latterly, the character’s theme), the way Erich Wolfgang Korngold utilised three different themes in a single scene to illustrate the shifting mood of a conversation in Nottingham Forest. Then there is the score of Bernard Hermann for Psycho, with the violin line for the shower scene slashing sharply down the page, in time with the knife cuts – ironically, Hitchcock hadn’t wanted any music for this scene, but Hermann overrode him!

Thanks to composers like Korngold, Steiner and Hermann, classical style of music dominated the movies for many years. Brand then looked at how jazz and pop music became acceptable for soundtracks. John Barry was shown, emerging from his pop incarnation, The John Barry Seven, to Oscar-winning composer.

And finally, Brand showed how synthesisers took over. Not least, the Theremin, invented by a Russian of that name in 1928. This instrument was used by Miklós Rózsa in Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Bernard Hermann in The Day the Earth Stood Still, which led to the sound being adopted for almost all science fiction movies thereafter!

We were treated to interviews with some of the movie soundtrack greats – though never enough are included, inevitably. Richard Sherman, talking about his Mary Poppins music, Vangelis talking about Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, and Hans Zimmer discussing how his music affected the opening scene of Gladiator (I think he was robbed at the Oscars!). It was an audio-visual treat for any film buff.

Gladiator

 

Sadly, I feel that the music in many films (for TV or the theatre) now compromises the film, instead of complementing it. Recent films such as The Dark Knight Rises, A Good Day to Die Hard, TV’s Dr Who, and many US TV imports (though so far not Game of Thrones); the list is becoming longer. Usually, the pace of a film means that information has to be imparted ‘on the run’ so to speak, as there are few quiet moments, so drowned out exposition can ruin a viewer’s understanding of the plot and character motivation.

I get really irritated where a character is saying something in a dramatic moment but I can’t hear what was said. The music is dominant, drowning out the words, time and again. The blame must lie squarely with the director, who has the final say. The director knows what has been said by the character, so he doesn’t actually ‘not hear’ the words, they’re lodged in his head anyway. If I was the actor or scriptwriter for those drowned out scenes, I’d be mightily miffed.

 

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Footnote: If you enjoyed this short overview, maybe you would like my book of 16 short stories, When the Flowers Are in Bloom by Nik Morton (Solstice Publishing). Many of the tales are prize winners and several are based on true events. One of the stories, 'The Busker of Torrevieja', won an international prize and concerns musicians and the love of music.

http://goo.gl/HRHNjO

 

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