Words by the Water - Free Tickets for Students

Words by the Water, the literary festival that runs from March 2nd to 11th, 2012, in Keswick, is offering bursaries of free tickets to 17 to 25 year olds. 

This is a quote from their flyer:

"Words by the Water - Festival of Words and Ideas is pleased to offer young people the chance to listen to and engage with a host of prominent writers, politicians, broadcasters and commentators through our Bursary Scheme. If you are passionate about writing and new ideas; excited about art, travel, philosophy, politics and current affairs, or simply seeking inspiration there are lots of reasons to apply.” 

The festival takes place at the Theatre by the Lake, in a lovely setting just beside Derwent Water. There are lots of walks, some only a few minutes, others a few hours long. There are also flocks of water birds and a regular ferry up and down the lake.

Some very well-known people will be there. The whole programme can be downloaded as a pdf from the website. The person to contact for an application form is alice.ling@wayswithwords.co.uk.

Youth Olympic Games

Innsbruck by Fernand Metzger

I see that the Youth Olympics Winter Games in Innsbruck finished last week. They ran from January 13^th to January 22 and involved athletes from 14 to 18 years old. The first summer Youth Olympic Games (YOG) were held in Singapore in 2010 and the next will be in Nanjing in China in 2014. They are overseen by the International Olympic Committee, like the adult Games, and are part financed by the committee and part by the host city. There’s a long article about them on Wikipedia, pointing out that there is a strong cultural element to them as well as the sporting events. They give my female protagonist, Suzanne, a target to work towards, together with the Commonwealth Games in 2014 in Glasgow. I'm sure, if Themis were alive today, he would be gearing up for Nanjing too ...

Our search for a photo of the statue that we now think of as what Themis looked like goes on. No answer as yet from the owner of our favourite on the internet. I'm in London for five days, so I'll see what I can do here.

No biting, no gouging ... and flowers

The more I research the arts and writings we still have from Ancient Greece, the more connections I find with aspects of modern life.

I saw the movie ‘Warrior’ the other day. It’s about a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) tournament in which the two finalists are estranged brothers. I was interested because MMA is similar to the Ancient Olympic sport of pankration. This was a combination of boxing and wrestling which famously had no rules except ‘no biting and no gouging’. It seems to have started at the 33^rd Olympic Games in 648 BC but has never been included in the Modern Olympic Games, even in 1896 when they began.

They say that even the no biting, no gouging rule was ignored by the Spartans, who were trained to use any method possible to win in a battle. So Spartans were barred from competing in the pankration of the Ancient Olympic Games. They were too dangerous!

According to the Wikipedia page, ‘In Greek mythology, it was said that the heroes Heracles and Theseus invented pankration as a result of using both wrestling and boxing in their confrontations with opponents. Theseus was said to have utilized his extraordinary pankration skills to defeat the dreaded Minotaur in the Labyrinth. Heracles was said to have subdued the Nemean lion using pankration, and was often depicted in ancient artwork doing that.’

Taken by Yair Haklai in 2008, St Petersburg

The fighting in ‘Warrior’ includes a bewildering series of techniques of striking and grappling and submission holds. There is a statue that shows a submission hold in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It is a Roman marble copy of a third century BC Greek bronze and is known as the Uffizi Wrestlers. This photo is of a copy of it (a copy of a copy!) in the Yusupov Palace in Saint Petersburg.

There’s a story in Pausanias (translated by Peter Levi) about a pankratiast or all-in-fighter called Arrachion of Phigalia. He had won twice in previous Olympic Games and in the final bout of the 54^th Olympiad (564 BC), he was caught by his opponent in a strangle-hold. As he tried to get out of the hold, he broke his opponent’s toe. The opponent submitted because of the pain, but just at that moment Arrachion died in the strangle-hold. Arrachion’s dead body was proclaimed the winner. As I watched the story of ‘Warrior’ unfold, I wondered whether something similar would be the climax. If you haven't seen it, I won’t spoil the ending for you …

I’ve been away for ten days visiting relatives and came back to Cumbria to find snowdrops, crocuses and cyclamen out in the garden. This is earlier than usual by two weeks or so. 

I particularly love the cyclamen at this time of year. In Greece they flower from now until the heat begins in April and the autumn ones flower from September through to December. So as long as there’s rain there are wild cyclamen among the rocks and scrub on the mountains. In The Boy with Two Heads I had them garlanding a statue of Pan, god of wild places.

Talking of The Boy with Two Heads, Connie is now working on the text layout. We met on Saturday and decided on various design features and spacings. Because the story is told partly in extracts from blogs and diaries, we have had to use two different fonts and various heading styles. Our own two heads were better than one again, especially as one of the decisions was to do with running heads! The cover is still causing problems, but the whole is progressing, though more slowly than anticipated - as always in my long experience of publishing. 

The Boy is nearly there.

We were in Carlisle shopping a couple of days ago and came across this sculpture of chairs. It’s beside one of the paths towards the stadium where Suzanne used to train in The Boy with Two Heads, but the story is set two years ago, and this is quite new. It seems unlikely for this part of the world, more reminiscent of Barcelona or Lisbon. The weather was so cold and windy that I didn’t manage to find out if it has a name and who made it. I’ll have another look on a better day. 

On a completely different note, it seems there’s to be an award ceremony at the IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) conference in Glasgow in March at which I will be given a certificate for winning first place with Dragons' Eggs in its category. When Nelson’s Dream won, it was a very small affair at the CUP stand, but this time it will be a bit more public and involve people having drinks and making speeches. I’ve known about winning the category since August, but had no idea there would be this celebration. Brilliant!

Eastern Highlands, Zimbabwe

Yesterday there was an email from the friend in Zimbabwe who checked over the text of Dragons’ Eggs for me to make sure there were no cultural mistakes. He jokingly mentions Juliasdale, a small town in the Eastern Highlands, where Brian and I climbed a granite hill and looked out across miles of mountains. It's not where the action of Dragons' Eggs happens but it is such a wonderful place, I want to include a picture here. I'm really looking forward to the better weather when we can do some more walking in the hills here in Cumbria.

My work on The Boy with Two Heads is almost done now, except for letting people know about it. There will be checks of text and so on till the last minute, but that looks like being within three weeks or so. I have made a proposal to CUP for another Reader for them. Their Readers are not timeslip novels, of course, but they can be just as complex to write because they are for young adults learning English, so the language and structure are carefully controlled, as well as the content.

We've been trying to get some more tickets to the Olympics in London, but the website seems to be having trouble dealing with the traffic. We wanted to see some of the athletics but haven't managed as yet, in spite of Brian spending hours on line. 

I shall be busy with other parts of my life for the next couple of weeks, so won't be posting anything here until later in the month. Thank you for your interest so far!

Today three heads ...

... were even better than two! 

I met Connie’s daughter and the rest of the family when I went over for a working lunch. It stretched into the dark of evening as I watched the cover materialise on the screen, based on the thoughts we had two weeks ago. Photoshop is magic in the right hands! But getting it right is slow and involves lots of minute detail. And there's a back cover and a front cover and a spine to be carefully built up from various components. It will be a long job.

We non-designer people ate mince pies and cakes and kept the two puppies busy, while planning various publicity projects from the beginning of February. We discussed how library and school visits by authors can be arranged and what happens. The Boy with Two Heads involves ancient history, sculpture, sport, fitting in (or not) with the rest of society, and some modern medicine, so we’ll probably need to direct our efforts to more than one department in each school. 

Talking of schools, everyone was amused by this painting of an Ancient Greek school boy (from a vase now in the J Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California). I found it in the book called ‘Panorama of the Classical World’. 
As the boys said ‘They even had laptops!’

The choir concert was fun to be in and the party afterwards was memorable. As the adrenalin of performing worked on us we all managed to come in correctly, but somehow we’re not quite in the Military Wives’ league.

Meanwhile, all those programmes on TV that remind us what happened in 2011 are on. They cover things like the revolutions in Muslim countries, the disastrous earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, economic crises in Europe (especially Greece where my grown up children live), the riots in UK cities and the phone hacking scandal. Except for the wedding of Wills and Kate, it’s all very gloomy, so it has been nice to see programmes previewing the Olympics in 2012. 

Two heads are better than one.

We had our last full rehearsal a few days ago for our choir concert next week. It went quite well, but getting 80 people to come in on exactly the right note seems almost impossible. (Why is that?) When we get it right, though, each song brings back its own memories and changes the mood. Music can wash your mind clean of the present and fill it full of another place and time. 

I've been going through the text of The Boy with Two Heads yet again and that same thought colours what happens to one of the protagonists, Suzanne. It's funny how so much in real life cross-references with the project I'm working on at the time. I was talking to someone about making bread the other day and he was telling me about using rye and barley. Both of these were used to make bread in Ancient Greece and are mentioned in the story. 

I was preparing for meeting up with Connie again to decide on the layout and styles of the text. That meeting was today and we had another couple of ideas for the cover, which her daughter/designer will work on over the New Year. As she said, “Two heads are definitely better than one” when brainstorming! 

And this was our last meeting before Christmas. 

Carlisle centre Christmas lights

So Happy Christmas, everyone!

I never can tell ...

What they said was very reassuring. So now on the back cover we can put “A wonderful story which brings the ancient Olympics to vibrant life. You can almost smell Greece from its pages…” and “It seems that young people's issues have hardly changed in 2,400 years!” The complete quotes will go inside the book.

I’ve written quite a lot of stories and even some that have won awards, but I never can tell whether they are going to be of interest to anyone else. It’s good to know that at least three people like this one – my publisher and the two reviewers.

Cover notes

Today we worked on what the back cover will look like. We went through lots of my photos. This was one of them, but probably we won't use it. There's a copyright issue nowadays with the Olympic rings. And they were taken down from the Panathenaic Stadium soon after the time when my story begins there. 

Perhaps we’ll have one of those ‘Accident Here. Please telephone such and such if you have any information’ notices, with a photo of the pedestrian crossing where the accident happens in the story. Connie has some great ideas.

I handed over the maps I’ve drawn to go at the end. We had decided there should be a map of the journey from Athens to Olympia, as well as of each of the cities. It does make the stages of the journey clearer.

And I’m working on the list of characters and the other bits and pieces they call end-matter and pre-lims. That list, and checking some final facts, will be my ‘homework’ before our next meeting. 

I’m sitting working on it now, and the wind is howling round the house. The slates on the roof shift on their nails every now and again with a great rattle, like the scales on a fish lifting. What must it be like out there for the birds in our garden? It reminds me that life is so safe now, compared to what it must have been like for most people in most of the past. My Themistokles lived at a dangerous time... 

I snuggle down into my slanket and thank my lucky stars.