Danced to Death....

'Went the day well?'  I hear you ask...

The launch for the paperback edition of The Last Changeling was excellent - not least because I was presented with a rather nice bottle of champagne! Yummy!

I was surprised to find that when it came to it, I was quite stressed at being interviewed in front of an audience.  Thankfully only my nearest and dearest detected this, but I found the process distinctly 'counter-British'.  We are raised to be discreet and 'showing off' is discouraged.  I can only think that early conditioning was kicking in!

Interestingly, one of the questions I was asked was all about early influences...

 A June baby, I started almost a year earlier than some of my classmates, so I first read Laurel and Gold Readers II when I was about 4 or 5, in my much loved village primary school.  When they had a book sale I was thrilled to have my very own copy to keep.
Despite being quite old by the time they came into our little hands, Laurel and Gold readers were like a Readers Digest for very small children.  Bound in green cloth with gold lettering, they featured traditional tales,mythology, short essays about natural history and some actual history, plus a poem or two.  All beautifully illustrated, I adored them.

 It just so happens that the image from a book I read as a child has stayed with me.  I dug the book out the other day, and here is the intriguing image

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The unseen hands stealing the baby must have sown an early seed that grew to flower in The Last Changeling.  Imagine how shocked I was when I turned to the story of The Wood Maiden...  here she is with Betushka, a girl she entices to dance...

But it's these lines that really astonished me... imagine having them in a children's book today...

Danced to death!  Extraordinary!  All these years these ideas have been running around in my head! 

So the influences started pretty early I guess... 

As I love the nonsense that we insist on calling 'co-incidence', here's something else.  Today on BBC Radio 4, the afternoon play 'A Time To Dance' was all about the idea of people dancing themselves to death.  Have a listen on the BBC iplayer, it's an excellent play: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015mzl8

Fantasy Becomes Reality

I am officially 'following my dream.' I have taken the leap of faith, given up the pesky 'part time' job that was taking up too much time and I am now a full time writer.  As a direct consequence, I been surrounded by nothing but love and support ever since.  Thank you Universe.

Today I was paid for a poem I had quite forgotten I'd written, well over a year ago - and asked for more.  That felt very good indeed.  Tonight I will be onstage in Liverpool, (actually a little way under Liverpool  - at the entrance to the fascinating Williamson Tunnels), reading from The last Changeling and addressing an audience of fantasy thriller fans... it's been something of a journey so far I can tell you!

What I can't tell you, much as I'd like to, is how to follow your dream.  All I am doing is following my nose and occasionally taking inspiration from others who have taken the same course of action in deciding to shape their lives rather than let others do it for them.

As Marianne Williamson famously wrote: 

When we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

All we are ever meant to be is happy, nothing more.  If someone looks at something I have written and feels some kind of a connection, then that is wonderful.  If they read my book and for a short time become so engrossed they are entertained and forget their cares for a while, then that's 'mission accomplished.'  It is a beautifully balanced exchange of energies as we co-create the story - I write the words and you provide the pictures in your mind.  Wow... this is the BEST JOB EVER!!!

So, if you want to, try tuning in and turning on your own heart-light... you never know where its light will guide you.

A series of fortunate events...

"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at baker Street, "life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent."

I am living in 'interesting times,' both a curse and a blessing I suppose.  It started with someone being quite mean on Facebook.  I have been hacked, and for a while, a background picture quite refused to appear.

  I

It was chosen because of the perfectly balanced look of the picture - draw a horizontal line two thirds down the picture, and in that top segment you have a charming watercolour of a woodland scene.  The interest is focussed in the foot of the painting, where the fairies glide beneath the leaves.

I looked for it again and found an extraordinary coincidence.  Having put the picture up a little over a year ago, I was unaware that it had been painted by Richard Doyle.
Who?
Richard 'Dickie' Doyle.

He was an illustrator who designed the banner for Punch magazine - which was used for 100 years.
All rather ironic when you see how Punch lambasted Dickie's nephew about his belief in fairies, for Dickie Doyle was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's uncle.

Anyone reading this, who has read The Last Changeling, will by now be beginning to sit up!  This is where the 'coincidences' begin to rack up and I begin to wonder if I am being led deeper down this rabbit hole of otherworldly stuff.

The first picture 'Under the Dock leaves,' really put Dickie Doyle on the map as a fairy painter.  After that, Dickie illustrated the beautiful edition of In Fairyland, a series of Pictures from the Elf World which is still held to be one of the most breathtaking examples of high Victorian story books for children.  It features the William Allingham poem, 'Up the Airy Mountain,' the first poem I ever learnt by heart, taught to me as a child by my father, an Irishman from Kilkenny - and which I have referenced in 'The Last Changeling.'

Dickie's same illustrations were also used in 'The Princess Nobody' by Andrew Lang.  I am currently studying an interesting book called 'The Secret Commonwealth of Elves Fauns and Fairies' by Robert Kirk, a seventeenth century mystic and priest who allegedly was taken away by the fairies.
The foreword was written by the same Andrew Lang.

So, back to the Doyle's... we have a nephew and an uncle, both highly educated men, both with a strange fascination for fairies.  I followed a link to another page about Conan Doyle's father, Charles Altamont Doyle, (who co-incidentally married a woman from a Kilkenny family).  Charles was also fixated with fairies and ended his days in a Scottish lunatic asylum.  In 1977 a book of his illustrations came to light and was printed in the UK.  The strange thing is that I have that book, but I had quite forgotten about it.  It sits beside me as I type this.
I know there are such things as families who believe that they have all been 'taken' at some time.  Some can quote abduction stories that go back for generations.  It's interesting that here are three members of the same family with the same, strange otherworldly interest...

Apart from using 'Altamont' as Sherlock Holmes alias in 'His last Bow,' Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was understandably reticent about his problematic father.  Dickie didn't mention him either.  Yet both brother and son promoted and celebrated fairies.  Almost as if they were colluding to make Charles' interests seem normal and unremarkable.

So if a family can draw down these influences, what about specific locations?
I am wondering about this because of William Allingham, writer of the poem, 'Up the Airy Mountain,' husband of the famous 'chocolate-box' cottages painter, Helen Allingham, of all the places to live, this Irishman settled, for a while, in Witley, Sussex in 1881.
This is all within 9 miles of other intriguing locations in The last Changeling, in what I am beginning to think of as 'The Fairy Line,' as the three points line up quite nicely...

Allingham's home is point A on the map, it  borders Lea Park, later Witley Park, home of the man airbrushed from history, Whittaker Wright - see my previous post about 'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Infamous Neighbour,' (point B) and is less than six miles from Hindhead where Arthur Conan-Doyle wrote the Hound of the Baskervilles exactly twenty years later, (point C).

This has all left me reeling.  There is more... I will post again when I can, but for now I have to get on with Book II ...