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