Post To Come - Interview With Gabrielle Wang!

Two of my students, Shane and Talapepa, have interviewed Gabrielle Wang, author of some fabulous books, as their creative response to their Literature Circles book, A Ghost In My Suitcase. Gabrielle's answers have just arrived in my cyber-letterbox and when I have been able to get it into a readable order, I will be sharing it with you. Gabrielle was impressed with the girls' questions and I must say, I've learned quite a lot from her answers that I didn't know before! :-)

So stand by. If you're not yet a Gabrielle Wang fan, what are you waiting for? Go check out some of her books right now!

Riffling through my bookmarks

Over the years I've been on-line, I've collected an awful lot of bookmarks on my Safari browser. The thing about web sites is that you can never tell whether they will still be there when you come back, but they form a history of my on-line research. There are a large number of crime-based web sites from when I was looking up stuff for Crime Time: Australians behaving badly. There are some on spy-related themes from when I was writing Your Cat Could Be A Spy. The CIA web site was especially terrific for that, with all sorts of stuff about spy gadgets, which they have in a museum - much more entertaining than the Australian version, which was just a dull public service thing back then. There are the teaching-based ones which I looked up whenever I was desperate because they'd just given me a class in an area in which I had very little experience, or none.

And then there are my favourites, the ones that helped me research my fantasy fiction.  Monstrous is an encyclopaedia of monsters and such creatures of the night as fairies (or even Faeries!) and where they came from. Gosh, I wish I'd had this one when I was researching my first book, Monsters And Creatures Of The Night! I did go on-line for that - once a week, for an hour, at an Internet cafe on Glenferrie Road, Malvern,back in the early days of Internet cafes, when you could actually buy food there. But mostly, I was researching in the State Library of Victoria, using books. Twice a week.

Omniglot is an encyclopaedia of languages, where I went to look up Breton, in case I needed some words. And speaking of languages, there is the one I have only discovered recently, the translator in Dictionary which lets you translate from one language into another. For example, "On Saturday I'm going to the football" translates into Irish as Ar an Satharn, tá mé ag dul go dtí an peile. The only disadvantage is that if the language doesn't have Roman letters, you'd better know how to read Arabic or Hebrew or whatever! But it comes in handy if you need a character to say something - briefly! - in another language. It's a great web site anyway, with a pile of other sections. There's the Reference section, which has stuff like the word of the day (frondescence is today's, meaning  "leafage/foliage" - what a cool word!) and a hot word (did you know in Old English the word "gift" referred to a dowry?) or you can look up something as you would in an encyclopaedia.


I stumbled on to Mysterious Britain and Ireland when I was trying to remember where I'd come across the story told by Armand, the hero's friend, in Chapter 3 of Wolfborn. For some reason I'd vaguely recalled it being French, but it was Irish and, in fact, comes from the Travels of Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis), who lived in the time of King John. The web site has a link to another one which tells the story. The stories on this web site are short, but useful, and range from water horses to werewolves.


An amazing web site I heard about from Juliet Marillier at her Swancon workshop on fairy tales is "Sur La Lune fairy tales" which gives a huge variety of fairy tales from all over the world, including variations on the same story from different countries. It has its own blog, which, right now, has a video of “The Lady of Shalott in art” with Loreena McKennitt’s song. It has a lot of annotated fairy tales, which have comments on the different themes in the story. I really love the variations. You think "Snow White" is just a Brothers Grimm story? There are versions from Italy, Turkey, Romania, even West Africa! I checked this out when I was doing my story "Brothers" for the Specusphere anthology on myths and legends. Mine, in the end, was fairly straight European, but if you want to try something that starts somewhere else, this is a fabulous web site.

If you're planning to write a Celtic fantasy or just want to have a browse among all the things available, why not  check out these web sites?

Personally, I just love the browse. You know how it is? You're looking for something and there's a link to something else, which is so fascinating you have to read it and that has yet another link and before you know it, you've gone a long way from where you started and you've learned a lot more than you expected.

Ah, I love the Internet!

Book Launch: Michael Pryor's New Book

If you live in Melbourne and can get to the Northcote public library at four p.m. this Wednesday December 7th,  Michael Pryor's new book, Extinction Gambit, Volume 1 of a series called The Extraordinaires, is being launched.

I won't be there, alas! I work in Sunshine and can't get away much before 3.30 p.m. I did buy a copy at the last CYL Booktalkers for the month and get the author to sign it for me, but there's nothing like a good book launch!

It's a pity it was timed this way; if they'd done it a bit later, plenty of people could have made it - and on another day, the Nova Mob SF group which meets there every month, could have come as a group. As it happens, that's been planned as the annual end-of-year dinner, somewhere else. But a later time on that day and some of us, at least, could have scrambled into each other's cars and gone to the launch first.

Ah, well. Go if you can, though - it will be well worth the effort!

Hour Of Need: The Laws of Magic #6 By Michael Pryor

Sob! The Laws of Magic series is over. No more will we read of the adventures of Aubrey Fitzwilliam and his friends George, Caroline and Sophie. The only thing that comforts me is that the author has begun a new series, The Extraordinaires, which I’ve just started reading. It has taken me a while to finish this one because I was trying to relish it, but finally, after my month’s stint on Insideadog, I am working my way through all those review copies that have been languishing in the pile by my bed. And I do have a new Michael Pryor book to read, after all… ;-) By the way, Michael is doing this month's stint on the Dog - go have a look.

The war is in full rage and is looking quite a lot like our World War I. Aubrey and his friends, a special unit, are right on the battlefields. And it looks like Dr Mordecai Tremaine, who is supporting Holmland (Germany) may just get his shot at immortality. How do the friends stop him from murdering half of Europe to get his way?

I can’t tell too many more details, because of spoilers, but this one is non-stop action, following on directly from Moment Of Truth, the fifth volume in the series. It builds to a tremendous climax in which Aubrey is going to need all his magical abilities to cope, and even those won’t necessarily work out as he needs them to.

Like all the other novels in this wonderful series, Hour of Need has plenty of humour – and at the end, while I can’t reveal it, I thought, “Oh! How clever! This is where Aubrey’s universe will split from ours and go down another path.” Actually, I would have liked to know how the world got this way in the first place; perhaps Mr Pryor will return to this universe one day to write about it, even if it’s only as a novella – perhaps for another volume of Ford Street’s Trust Me! short fiction?

The women in this universe are strong, intelligent and ass-kicking – but not unbelievably ass-kicking. Aubrey, son of a strong woman, a scientist, and a strong grandmother, has been brought up to respect strength in women and find it attractive, so Caroline is a believable partner for him.

You really can’t read this without having read the others, but that’s no problem. Just read them if you haven’t.

The series is doing well in my school library and there’s a student currently waiting for this last volume, so I’ll have to buy another copy, next year if necessary; he isn’t getting mine.

A Different Kind Of Book - Cookbooks!

I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to cookbooks.

"Who isn't?" you may ask. They're so colouiful and mouthwatering to look at.  But you're never going to make all those recipes, unless you're that lady who cooked her way through Julia Child's book and blogged about it...

Well, yes, all that's true. My sister has gotten rid of all her cookbooks and now finds any recipes she wants on-line. Actually, she admits to an addiction to recipe blogs.

I see her point. It saves space in the cupboard and it's true you're never going to cook all those things. I mean - red braised duck with plums? Quail stuffed with this or that? (I won't even EAT quail - a schoolfriend of mine used to keep them as pets).

But when I find a recipe I like, I make it and type it up on my computer, so I have them all in one file and can look up favourites without having to hunt it up.

And meanwhile, while going on-line is fine for a specific recipe you want, how you you get ideas from it?

Right now, I'm drooling over a Women's Weekly Christmas cookbook and a Good Taste magazine with Christmas recipes in it. Christmas isn't actually my holiday, but there is plenty in there you can use any time.

Last year I made chocolates for gifts, using moulds I bought in a convenient el cheapo homewares shop. I experimented and didn't use either cookbooks or on-line help. This time, I'm playing with truffles. I admit I got some recipes for those on-line - good heavens, just type "chocolate truffle recipe" into Google and you get 1,350,000 hits and it's everything from the elegant ganache-based ones you have after your dinner party to the condensed milk ones suitable for kids to make (and very nice indeed - just so you know, my students made and sold enough truffles to make $65 in profit as their donation to Greenpeace).

But can you really wade your way through that many recipes?

It took a hard-copy book to suggest something that hadn't occurred to me: why not make a chocolate coating for your truffles? I'm going to try that this weekend. It warned not to make the coating too hot or risk melting the truffles. I'll let you know how it works out.

The home economics teacher at my first school swore by the Women's Weekly cookbooks. They have recipes even kids can make, under supervision, among the adult ones. They're well laid out. They have a good glossary at the back, explaining some of the more unusual ingredients.

This one that I'm drooling over (I really must try some of the ice cream recipes) actually tells you not to worry if you don't have the exact amount of, say, cream - one carton this size will do - saving you buying two cartons and wondering what to do with the rest, a real problem for me; I still have a packet of cardamom I bought a while back for one recipe with "two teaspoons of cardamom". I don't have an ice cream maker, so it was nice to find a cookbook that says, "If you don't have an ice cream maker, here's what to do instead."

And then there are the more exotic cookbooks. Some years ago, I bought the Death By Chocolate cookbook, which has in it a recipe for chocolate peanut choc chip cookies, utterly decadent, easy to make and not as expensive as you might think, given how many biscuits you get out of it.

That said, I also collect recipes from the sides of packets - my nicest banana cake recipe came from a packet of house brand flour.

Yet there are even cookbooks based on recipes from the sides of food packets!

In the library I found a cookbook with recipes from the ancient world. I have since tried out some of them. One of them, involving a kind of pancake from ancient Greece, my Greek library technician told me was still made. She herself makes it. Wow!

Another one a Queensland friend sent me was about mediaeval holidays and festivals, which, apart from the fun of cooking mediaeval (my friend and I agreed that perhaps it was a bit much, nowadays, to waste a bunch of roses on rose petal bread), is useful for me as a writer, as reference material. I could possibly have found some of this on-line, but not curled up and absorbed it, knowing the person who wrote the book is an expert in this area.

The Ritz Guides (discovered in one of those discount book shops I mentioned on the Dog) are fun and I have made some wonderful family holiday breakfasts using the Ritz guide to breakfast, able to assure everyone that this is how they make Irish soda bread and decadent hot chocolate at the London Ritz.

Mmm, I'm going off to have a special breakfast right now...

On Writing And Finishing Things

This is a large chunk of my very last post on the Dog, with a bit extra. It's aimed at younger writers because it was written for a youth web site, but no reason why it can't pretty much apply to anyone interested.

I have had an email from a young writer who asked me how to go about being a writer, because, even though she is  already running what I think is a wonderful blog on things that matter in this world, what she really wants is to do a novel.  She does write fiction, including some pretty good poetry, if the samples she sent me were any example, but says she can’t seem to finish anything. She hoped I might have some tips. I hope she will forgive me for putting it all up here instead of answering personally, because it just seems like something that can apply in general.

Perhaps I’m the last person who should be offering tips on finishing stuff. I have two unfinished novels sitting on my computer. One of them, only a few chapters long, is a mainstream YA novel. The other is a companion volume to Wolfborn and is already longer than the finished book! I’ve put them both away for a while, till I can get a fresh look at them and meanwhile, I’m writing short fiction. I've sold three stories that will be out over the next few months and am working on another one right now. It's not like doing a book, but it makes me feel good not to be doing nothing writing-wise.

In the end, the only way to be a writer is to write. I never go anywhere without a notebook and pen. (People don’t ask me if I have a pen, they say, “Sue, can I borrow your pen?”). Just write. I once read a book on writing that advised you to overcome writer’s block by starting with, “I remember…” It makes sense – you can’t get writer’s block about your own life, can you? And it worked for me; I once wrote fifteen pages after a severe case of writer’s block, using that exercise. One of these days I will use what I wrote that time to do a historical novel.

Why not try short fiction while that unfinished novel is waiting for you to get back to it? Perhaps write a story set in the universe of the novel? This, in its turn, might help you to get a new perspective on the book-length project. And you've got all those handy characters and settings lying around already and if you can sell it, that will raise interest in the novel when it comes out. 

There are, by the way, plenty of youth markets out there. Why not try Voiceworks, a Melbourne magazine produced and written by people under 25? It takes poetry as well as fiction and it pays! For more, you can Google. I just looked under “Young writer markets Australia” and a whole pile of web sites popped up. This one – 40 of the Best Websites for Young Writers - seems pretty good. It features links to a lot of other web sites, including Inkpop, the one which my students swear by, an on-line writing community which is run by HarperCollins and where your work may be seen by a real publisher. Writing can be a lonely job, but on-line you can share with people who have the same interests as you do and the same problems.

So – write. And read. You love reading, right? Why else would you be writing? :-) Check your markets by reading, to see what publishers are buying. Join a book-based web site like Goodreads and “friend” as many people as you can. See what they’re reading and share.

If you write, you may never sell anything, but if you don’t write, if you spend your life boring your friends with that “great idea for a book” you mean to write one of these days, you definitely won’t.

The Night After Leaving The Doghouse

So, what do you do when your writing commitment is over?

I'm going to read and read and read tonight. I've just started a new iMovie project, putting together my students' book trailers. I really can't put them all up, even if I had their permission, because there is too much need to check out how much material is copyright, although it was all credited. Too much hassle! But I will be burning it all on to DVD for the staff's professional interest, so they can see what Year 8 English students can do when they try, and catalogue it for my library, and I will be showing it to my class before we all go off for holidays.

If any of the authors want to see what 8B has done, I'll be happy to pop a copy in the mail for them. They're not perfect, but they did what I needed - showed they understood the book and that they had got something out of it. Also, they hopefully persuaded the viewer it might be a good book to read.

Here are the books: Pool, by Justin D'Ath,  Dragonkeeper by Carole Wilkinson, Burn Bright by Marianne De Pierres and Once by Morris Gleitzman. A Ghost In My Suitcase was saved as a plain Powerpoint because I couldn't open the original file (pity - they could have changed it to .wmv - if  only I'd known! )However, two other students prepared interview questions for Gabrielle Wang, who has kindly agreed to answer them and offered to publish it on her own web site as well as this one.  Anyway, if any of you guys who wrote these books are reading and are interested in a copy, let me know.

I'm also about to prepare some interview questions for Miffy Farquarson, who has agreed to answer questions about being a CBCA judge.

So, while I won't be blogging every day now, I will be keeping busy.

Today I got such a nice email from Bill Condon, who had been a WIR on Insideadog too, and said how much he had enjoyed my posts. It does feel a little lonely when you blog away and nobody - or, in my case, almost nobody - commented. But it's nice to know.

Late dinner time - I'm off to eat and read.

Insideadog - The Last Post!

Well, my month's gig on the Dog is over. I am very, very tired. I spent lunchtime today supervising students who were selling frog-in-the-pond for their Pathways community assignment. I think i may have given myself ten minutes to eat an unsatisfactory sandwich and a little fruit after lunch was over. After work I went to the year's last Booktalkers at the State Library. We got goody bags! With books in them! Michael Pryor was there to talk about his new book, and Paul Collins had finally been invited to talk about the new Ford Street publications, including the new anthology with my story in it ... and an Obernewtyn prequel by Isobelle Carmody, which you'll have to buy the anthology to read.

Tomorrow, more supervising of Pathways projects and no lunch break at all, and another long day.

But I was determined, tonight, to get that last post done, so go over and hopefully enjoy. Good night!

January 24 2013

And since this post has had so many hits since I wrote it, I am finally attaching the link to the Insideadog post itself - go check it out! That was a great month and the one and only time I have ever had this sort of gig!

http://www.insideadog.com.au/blog/so-long-farewell-adieu-and-other-stuff

On Being a Library Teacher - second-last post for the Dog

I suddenly realised that I'd left out my post on YA book blogs, so I popped that up this evening. Then I put in tomorrow's post, which will be about my other hat, that of library teacher, and some of the things we've had happening in the library in the last year or so.

I am very tired, alas, and hot and ready to go take a shower and fall into bed. Tomorrow night I will be at the State Library for the last Booktalkers for 2011.

It would have been nice to be invited to speak at Booktalkers myself,  some time, but being on Insideadog for the last month, and meeting the challenge of a post a day has been good.

I'm already throwing myself into review books so that I'll have those to blog about in a few days. And I suppose I'll need to go back into slushing for ASIM.

Meanwhile, thanks to those of you who have been following. You might be interested to know that in the last month or so, my hit rate seems to have tripled!

Keep visiting! :-)

What's On TV Right Now - Pride And Prejudice

I've just finished my post for the Dog, on YA book blogs. After sitting through one book-based TV show, Brideshead Revisited (Revisited - it's a remake) while working on my post, I'm having trouble tearing myself away from that wonderful version of Pride And Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and the gorgeous Colin Firth, even though I have my own copy of the DVD, autographed by Andrew Davies, the scriptwriter. I remember when it was first on and all the female teachers at my school gathered every Monday morning to drool over Colin Firth. And the producers knew what effect he'd have. That wet shirt scene and the one where he's in the bath were never in the novel... :-)

This episode is the one where Elizabeth and Darcy are finally realising that they just might be right for each other (just before she gets the bad news about Lydia and has to go home).

The series was clearly made by people who loved the book. There's the beauty of the countryside, the costumes and the music. The actors are just right for the roles. And if you know about it, there's the delicious fact that Anna Chancellor, who plays the role of the snooty and jealous Miss Bingley, is actually related to Jane Austen.

It's my favourite of Jane Austen's books and this one does it full justice, in my opinion.

Has anyone seen Lost In Austen? Loved it! Especially that scene where the heroine, who has somehow swapped places with Elizabeth Bennet, asks Darcy to please walk into the water so she can see him in a wet shirt. (wide grin)

Welcome, Emma! A new link

Welcome to the new member of this site, Emma McGregor, who was kind enough to attend my writing workshop at the Bendigo Catholic College Lit Fest (see my post about this visit on the Dog).

Emma has her own blogs, one of which I've added to the links on the right hand side of the page. I really need to work out how to make it a proper blog roll. That wasn't an option when I started this site, but I'll get there.

Emma's site, Be The Change, has lots of terrific social justice and environmental stuff on it and useful links to things like Fair Trade sites - no more having to go Googling it all (which I have been doing) just check out on Emma's site. Emma is also a writer and I hope she sells lots of books, a lot earlier than I did. Meanwhile, why not do yourselves a favour, guys, and join  Be The Change?

Procrastination - a post from early in the month

Puttingitoff-TheJoysof

This was up on Insideadog earlier this month. I put in a link and so many people have checked out the one on this site which just said, "This is my new post" and put a link to it that I thought maybe I should put up the actual post here in case anyone else wants to read it.  It's the only one for which I got any comments at all, AFAIK, both from Goodreads friends. The comments thingie on IAD is confusing. To add a comment or even to see if there ARE  any comments, you have to click the heading. And I don't think there are instructions, or anyway, not where I can see them.

Procrastina

Which is a lot of waffle, but for those of you who didn't follow the link or who have just discovered this blog - enjoy!

When thinking about this post, I went on-line to look up the word “procrastination”, which means, “putting it off”.

 Here’s what I found on Dictionary.com:

 procrastination

1540s, from L. procrastinationem "a putting off," noun of action from procrastinare "put off till tomorrow," from pro- "forward" + crastinus "belonging to tomorrow," from cras "tomorrow," of unknown origin.

Notice the date? 1540s? So even back then, it seems, people were putting off doing things. I’m sure they were doing it before, but in the 1540s, someone must have said, “I’ll just go watch the execution of the King’s wife before I finish making dinner, cleaning the house, writing my poem… hey, there should be a word to describe that.”

 This is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the idea being that you write 50,000 words in a month and if you break it up nicely you can get it done, even if you have a day job. I believe people have met the challenge and some have actually sold their writing month books.

   I don’t think I could do it, but I can totally relate to the idea that if you have a deadline you’ll somehow meet it. That’s one reason why I love writing non-fiction. It’s commissioned, you have a deadline and you can break up the work. If you can’t actually write something just now, you can do some research.

 Right now, I’m putting off washing last night’s dishes (I made chocolate truffles for my students and the sink is a mess) because, knowing how I do put off things, I’ve set myself the challenge of writing a post for Insideadog every day this month.

 Having a deadline helps.  Even if you only get a draft done, you have the pleasure of seeing the whole thing in front of you. Who cares if it’s a mess? You can fix it later.

 There are other ways. I have to take public transport to work each day.  I take along a notepad and scribble away. While I had time off work to write Crime Time, I took my laptop to the local café, where I could have another pot of tea without having to get up. That way I had no excuse for not writing.

 Mind you, I was putting off cleaning the house and doing the wash…

E-readers and me - from The Doghouse

This was yesterday's post. I have suddenly realised that putting "Residence" into the link meant you had to be logged in to find the page that way. And of course, you can't log in unless you're a member. But you can just go to Insideadog and find the page. However, to save hassles for everyone, here it is. I'm working on this morning's post, whoch is about my visit to Bendigo Catholic College.

  
I don’t have an e-reader yet. When I was growing up, you never saw one outside of science fiction. You’d read novels set hundreds or thousands of years in the future and everybody in them would have shelves of book spools or tablets. Come to think of it, in the TV series of Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, made in the 1980s, the alien Ford Prefect handed earthling Arthur Dent what looked like something we’d recognise now as an e-reader.

Now that they’re all over the place, not that far into the twenty-first century, what are they going to do in three or four hundred years? Have a chip installed in their heads, perhaps, to deliver books directly to your brain? Urk!

There’s something magical about choosing a book on-line and downloading it straight to your e-reader or even your phone. A friend who had bought his Kindle at the supermarket  demonstrated by buying my novel Wolfborn from Amazon and downloading it straight to his e-reader. “Ooh!’ I breathed in wonder.
Another nice thing about it is the lightness instead of carrying a load of books with you, you can carry a whole lot on your little reader that goes in your bag or pocket. You can change the font  size– terrific for people with poor eyesight.
The fact that a lot of these readers have pre-loaded books means that you might read something you wouldn’t choose in a bookshop of a library; one of my students is reading Frankenstein because it came free with the reader. That has to be a good thing.
And yet – for me, there’s nothing like the feel and smell of paper, the curling up in bed with your book, the overcrowded book cases in my study. You could put an entire encyclopaedia on e-reader, I suppose, but why not just go on-line where it would be up to date?
Because I don’t read non-fiction just for research, I like to browse the bookshops and libraries for books I might enjoy; you’d have to have some idea of what you want to get it from a web site. It’s just not the same as discovering that book about astronomy of the Middle Ages or the Faeries of Brittany.
Tell me you can do that on-line, ordering from a catalogue!

Guys, this post is shorter than most I’ve done so far because it’s getting late and tomorrow I’m heading up to Bendigo with a bunch of other writers from Ford Street Publishing to do some workshops at a school there. Wish me luck and if you’re going to be there, do come up and say hi!

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For the Dog: On E-readers

I don't have one. I say so. Go take a look on the Dog and I hope you enjoy. Me, I'm going to bed - I have a long trip to Bendigo to do my first writer visit and I really, really hope it works out. I'll be one of about sixteen guests and we all have to do workshops with students who have paid to be there.

Fingers crossed for me!

Books and Covers

Today's Dog post is about the importance of book covers. Go check it out. Sorry i can't be witty right now, but I've returned from the Year 12 Formal, I'm still sitting here in my fancy clothes and longing for a shower and bed. I have a very short time to sleep. But I'm determined to get a post a day on to Insideadog till the end of the month - it's my very own NaNoWriMo.

Today's Insideadog post - Books and Travel

Once every few years I travel overseas. When I do, I’ll try to go somewhere connected with a book or a writer. It’s just a nice thing to do, to know that where you are is where a writer lived or a favourite story happened in the book world.



I’ve been to England twice. While I was there, I visited some places connected with writers I loved. A friend took me to Stratford-on-Avon, where I visited Anne Hathaway’s cottage. Anne was the wife William Shakespeare left behind when he went off to London to be an actor. The house was where she lived with her parents and Will would have visited her there before they got married.



Passing the Stratford Tourist Information Office, I spotted a small plaque on it that told you how old the place was; Shakespeare’s daughter Judith lived there with her husband.


I also visited the mediaeval town Shrewsbury, which is on the border of Wales. It’s a very beautiful place. At the time I was reading Brother Cadfael, a series of mediaeval crime novels by Ellis Peters. Ellis Peters was actually Edith Pargeter, a woman who wrote both historical fiction and crime fiction. She put them together to create Brother Cadfael, a mediaeval monk and amateur detective, living at the abbey in Shrewsbury during the mid-twelfth century, when there were two people fighting over the British throne.

In Shrewsbury, there were Brother Cadfael walks, Brother Cadfael souvenirs, bookshop windows with Brother Cadfael displays. The church which was a part of the abbey mentioned in the books was still there. I snapped photos outside it. A gentleman walking past called, “Dare I ask if you’re a Brother Cadfael fan?”

I smiled: “Need you ask?”

After that, he told my mother and me about the church and pointed out some places mentioned in the novels. What was really wonderful was that you could walk along the streets and recognise the layout from the novels.
In Oxford, a friend took me to the Eagle and Child, a pub where J.R.R. Tolkien and his friends used to go regularly for a drink. It was known locally as the “Bird and Baby”.

And speaking of Tolkien, I couldn’t go to Hobbiton or Gondor, but, after the release of the Lord of the Rings movies, I could go to New Zealand, where the movie was filmed. New Zealand is a gorgeous country, whatever your reason for going.

In 2003, I booked a tour on something called Magic Bus, travelling New Zealand and went.

One place I visited was Queenstown, in the south. Queenstown is a place well-known for its sports facilities. You can do everything from skiing to bungee-jumping. Only one member of the tour group wanted to bungee-jump, though, and while we all cheered her on, we stood on the bridge across the river and gazed at the water that had played the role of the River Anduin in Fellowship of The Ring. Of course, they’d had to remove the traffic from the background and add in giant statues of Aragorn’s ancestors, but it was pretty impressive anyway.

During the three days we were there, my mother and I went on a half-day Lord Of The Rings tour. The tour guide was a pleasant American-Kiwi gentleman who had been cast as an Uruk-Hai orc. He took us to the Remarkables, where the Misty Mountains scenes were filmed.

We also got to see a bit of stream where the Nazghul had turned up to threaten Frodo.

Once we’d seen all these places, it was easier to notice them next time we saw the films.

Book – and movie – travel is a special thing to do.

Tomorrow's Dog post: My own world-building (and chocolate)

It's Sunday night and I need desperately to get to bed, so I'll just urge you all to go along to Insideadog and check out my post for Monday. I give a lot of detail about what I did in my world-building for Wolfborn and add a recipe for chocolate truffles, just because I can.

Good night!

The Eagle movie

A part of the Ninth Legion went to Scotland and never came back. Some years later, Marcus Flavius Aquila, the son of the cohort commander, comes to Britain and, when he's invalided out of the army, goes north to find out what happened and retrieve the legion's lost Eagle, without which the legion is shamed and can't re-form. He finds out, perhaps a lot more than he wanted to, but comes to accept what he can't change and get on with his life...

I finally got the chance to see the movie of The Eagle of the Ninth (called The Eagle as a movie), on DVD. While watching it I wrote my post for Insideadog and it was about Rosemary Sutcliff, not the movie. Watching it made me think again of her books.

I'm glad I saw it on DVD, because I got to see the alternative ending, which I think better than the one they used, if not like the novel either. I also got to see two deleted scenes which showed bits that were in the book - the one where Marcus is trying out a chariot and horses belonging to a local and the one where Esca goes into detail about his family's death. Those were right out of Rosemary Sutcliff - why did they scrap them? I have some ideas about that and about why the ending was changed, but won't go into them here. I also watched the doco, in which the director says he read and loved the book as a child ... so why did he do things to it?

If you haven't read the book, you may not know the point was that the legion had become corrupt before they ever went north to Scotland and, while the hero's father was not a part of that corruption, the legion really is better off not re-formed. This point was missed in the movie, even in the alternative ending. A LOT of the original points were missed, in the producers' eagerness to shout, "Look! American imperialism! Aren't we clever?"

Whatever your politics - and I'm not going into mine here - why shove it into a story where it wasn't written or intended? The book was written in 1954 and it was about Marcus and his coming to terms with his life - and the adventures he has while it's happening. In the end, he stays in Britain and marries Cottia, a British girl who was left out of the movie, probably because it would have been less of a buddy movie if she'd been there.

Here are some of my thoughts about the film: It was better than I expected, though I have a number of issues with it.

 Unlike a lot of people who complain about Tatum Channing as Marcus, I don't mind him. He looks like a Marcus to me, if a little older than the original; he had to deal with the script he got and he did it well, in my opinion. And let's face it, Anthony Higgins, who played the role for the BBC, is WAY  too old to do it now! :-)

 I did prefer Jamie Bell's Esca, the British slave who goes with him. What I didn't like was that in the movie he's still a slave when they go north, because the producers are planning to change the storyline and if he's not a slave at the time they can't make you wonder what he's up to. In the novel, Marcus frees him before they leave on their journey because he can't ask a slave to go into danger with him. And he does ask, not demand.

In the book, Marcus goes as an eye-doctor, as they're welcome everywhere, and actually does some healing - not in the film. Would he be dumb enough to take no thought for what might happen if the two of them just turn up in Scotland and are caught? It seems so.

The scenery is amazing. The second part of the movie was actually filmed in Scotland and who's to say that the blue-painted Seal People with the mohawk hairdos, or their historical equivalents, weren't ancestors of the extras who charged across the landscape? I liked that they took the trouble to have the Seal People speak in Gaelic, because we don't know what the Picts spoke. I believe that they searched for a Gaelic-speaking boy for the Seal child.

The costumes are believable and look lived-in. The music is beautiful, lots of Celtic-sounding pipe skirls in it, and I will get the soundtrack when I can.

Marcus's uncle lives in Calleva, which was a Roman town - so why is his house surrounded by acres of open land? I wouldn't mind so much, but he actually says that this is Calleva.

In the novel and the film, Marcus meets Guern the hunter, actually a Roman, one of his father's legionaries, who tells him what happened, but in the novel he isn't interested in coming back. He's settled into this life, has a wife, family and friends. In the film they seem to decide, after all this talk about imperialism, to let a bunch of elderly ex-legionaries redeem themselves. And, just to make sure it's okay for them to fight the pursuing British victims of imperialism, the Seal Prince does something very nasty in front of them.

I'd give this film a B rather than an A, if I was scoring it, perhaps 3 1/2 stars. It has a lot going for it and at least the makers loved what they were doing. It just doesn't respect the spirit of the novel as much I would like.

Finally Found A Copy!

My previous post, written for IAD, talked about the joys of stuff you find in discount and second-hand bookshops. Well, I've unearthed Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber collection - finally! I thought it was out of print, or, at least, you'd need to order it on-line, but there it was at the Bookgrocer in town, and I got it for $10 in the spring sale.

I'm halfway through already and I can see why it's a classic. More on this when I've finished. I also have a Ranger's Apprentice volume to finish and some review books. I don't often put up "reading" on Goodreads because the computer message comes and nags you if you haven't updated it for a while. So this will go up when I've finished it.

Latest on the Dog - bookshops!

 Posted on Insideadog this morning - enjoy!

I woke up this morning listening to the rain on the roof, one of my favourite sounds. That’s the time when I make up stories in my head for later. Right now, I’m trying to think up a story for a science fiction and fantasy anthology about how things started. I don’t know much about it yet except it’s going to be something about the Trojan War and begin with, “It started with that stupid wedding invitation. The one I didn’t get…” and be seen from the viewpoint of Eris, goddess of trouble.

At some point I’m going to hit the discount and second hand bookshops to see what I can find to help. I already have plenty, but you never know and any excuse will do. I just love the kind of shop where you can find books on everything from chocolate to gladiators and what they ate in London in Shakespeare’s time, along with recipes. I found most of my folklore collection in a second-hand bookshop in the middle of Melbourne. It came in handy for my research for Wolfborn and I was interested to find out that Melissa Marr, author of the Wicked Lovely series, found her fairy information in a lot of the same books I used.

 (Not my shelves - I'm not at home to take the pic. But these shelves also belong to a writer...)

Between book commissions, I just like to read non-fiction, any non-fiction that looks good. You never know when information will come in handy. Like that history of the Roman games I found in a discount bookshop last summer. Did you know that executions happened at lunchtime, between the real entertainments? While Christians faced the lions, in the stands above people were digging in their picnic baskets for the last of the olives, wondering if they should go to the lavatory or the hot food stands and risk losing their seats. And if you think fast food began with Macca’s and the Colonel, forget it! Most Romans lived in flats. The cooking facilities were pretty much non-existent and dangerous anyway, because the buildings were wooden, so they’d go to their favourite cook shop and buy dinner there.

Will I be writing a book set in ancient Rome? Who knows? Who cares?

I’ve just found a biography of Nicholas Culpeper, a seventeenth century guy who wrote a book about herbs (I have it somewhere on my crowded shelves). Herbs are important to someone like me, writing mediaeval fantasy. So I keep it on my shelves for when I need to know the properties of a particular herb or what they might have used to treat a wound before modern medicine. Meanwhile, it’s nice to know about the author.
There’s lots of great stuff out there, but buying it on-line or ordering it for your e-reader means you have to have some idea what you want. Bookshops mean you can browse and discount and second-hand bookshops have a wider variety than regular ones.

 Libraries are great too. I found some wonderful craft books in my school library that no one had read in years and got to take them home. I now have a book or two on weaving, something I may need to know one day.
Now excuse me, I’m going back to bed to read about food in Shakespeare’s London.