Trying Times
It’s been tough surviving some personal life events on the home front this month but, fortunately, we’ve been helped by one of the mildest autumns I can recall since coming to live in Wellington.
Soft days with lazy sun and easy breezes, help a lot when you just need to stomp something out of your system. We’re doubly lucky in that Wellington is also one of the best walking cities in the world with a lot of beautiful and varied scenery within five to fifteen minutes of where we live.
This is Makara Beach, a small settlement just outside of Wellington’s Karori suburb. A rugged and relatively isolated spot, it has some beautiful walks above the cliffs and you can just sit on the beach and watch those waves rolling in for hours.
But enough of the melancholic landscapes …
Welcome to Vóg.
Production Notes
Work on Liath Luachra: The Great Wild continues slowly but I’m relieved to have finally reached a point where all the lines converge – the intended plot lines, the character development, the half-explained mysteries …
And then there’s all the unintended stuff.
It’s only become clear to me over the past month how much of this work stems from my own subconscious. When I first started talking about this work, I often referred to it as ‘arthouse’ for the narrative drew from a lot of ‘arthouse style’ visuals that had caught my eye (see earlier newsletters) and which were clearly driving me at a subconscious level. The term ‘experimental’ occasionally slipped out as well and, looking back on it now, I can see that this was quite accurate.
I started this book without a plot outline or any real influences beyond a general concept (a girl awakes alone in the Great Wild) and theme or ‘sense’ that I wanted to explore (hence, being hooked by the images that aligned with that).
Hence, the very simple blurb from day one.
Starting a work without parameters like is a complete self-indulgence but, even at the time, I thought, fuck it, why not? I’d taken time off to explore my writing and publishing so I figured I might as well do it the way I wanted.
For readers, of course, the absence of a plot isn’t generally appreciated (go, figure!) so I knew I’d have to insert one eventually. Fortunately, experience has taught me that you can meld a plot around anything if you really have to. Even if I wrote myself into a corner, I trust my subconscious enough to know it’ll come up with some narrative twist to get me out of it.
In any case, the theme now seeps through the whole story. It’s not immediately obvious of course, and I’m not going to tell you what it is, but you’ll work it out yourselves anyway. I suppose the nice thing is that it adds an additional layer of resonance to the story that runs deeper than the overlying adventure tale.
At this stage, The Great Wild is sitting at around 42,000 words but it’ll be closer to 50,000 by the time I’m done. It would be nice to have had the luxury of another two months to re-edit and ‘polish’ it further, but life don’t allow the scope to spend any more time on it. In any case, it’ll be very interesting to see what people make of the final product, come June.
In terms of the Liath Luachra character, this is probably the last major work based around her for a while. She will, of course, appear in the next project on the ‘production line’ (Fionn: The Betrayal) but in that series, she’s very much an individual character within a much larger cast, so the intensity she carries in the Liath Luachra Series is diluted. She’ll be back again in Liath Luachra: The Hungry People but I won’t start writing that until mid-2024 at the earliest.
Sometimes, you just need a break from your characters.
And then there’s …
Having just told you there’s no further works on Liath Luachra, it feels a bit rich to announce the release of ‘Liath Luachra: The Raiders’ which comes out on Amazon on 2 May (2-3 days away, depending on which part of this spinning globe you’re clinging onto).
The big difference here, of course, is that this isn’t a new work but a combination of the books Liath Luachra: The Seeking and Liath Luachra: The Metal Men. Given that these two books form a single story, I’d always intended to release them together but only managed to get around to that very recently.
If you’re interested and haven’t read either of the aforementioned books, you can find it here: The Raiders
Book Review: The Broken Empire Trilogy
Prince of Thrones (Mark Lawrence's debut novel and the first book in the Broken Empire Series) came out in 2011 to great acclaim and immediately helped expand the burgeoning ‘Grimdark’ fantasy genre to a far wider mainstream audience (i.e. beyond the works of George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie, Glen Cook and others). The fact that it was published just before the release of the first season of the Game of Thrones television series (April 2011) only helped to cement the genre.
What’s it about:
Set in a post-apocalyptic Europe (an area of radiated territories, mysterious ruins, mutants and conniving warlords), the Broken Empire trilogy tell the story of Jorg Ancrath, son of King Olidan of the kingdom of Anrcrath (modern day Belgium-ish).
In Prince of Throne (book 1), at the early age of nine, Jorg sees his mother and younger brother brutally murdered, while he himself is cast into a briar patch of lethal thorns (an event, he barely survives). Some years later, enraged by his father’s decision to accept recompense for the murders (and not seek vengeance), he turns his back on his birth right and leaves his family fortress.
Joining a band of bloodthirsty bandits (who he refers to as his ‘Brothers’), Jorg eventually becomes their leader and decides to seek his own revenge on his uncle, King Renar – the ruler of a neighbouring, and rival, kingdom – the man behind the attack on his mother and sibling. But everything is not as it seems and revenge proves a slippery dish to dine from.
In King of Thrones (book 2), Jorg is now ruler of Renar, but remains haunted by his past. Although he’s obtained his vengeance on his mother’s killer, he remains hungry for a reckoning with his father. Plagued by nightmares of the murders and other atrocities he’s committed, these plans are derailed by the arrival of an overwhelming enemy force (led by an honourable champion that everyone adores), a reconnection with his mother’s side of the family, a new child-wife and, of course, the mages who control and manipulate the various rulers for their own designs. Fortunately, with the help of Fexler Brews, a data echo from the past, and a cache of ancient artefacts, Jorg has a number of aces up his sleeve.
In Emperor of Thorns, (book 3), King Jorg Ancrath is now twenty years old and rules over seven of the one hundred nations. His goal—revenge against his father—has not yet been realized, and the enemies that threaten him have grown even stronger. This, however, hasn’t tempered his longstanding ambition to rule as emperor. Fortunately, he finds that there’s no better way to unite a fractured empire than to face a common threat – in this case, the Dead King and his army of undead soldiers.
Style:
In terms of style, the Broken Empire Series is very ‘Grimdarky’ (i.e. set in a dystopian civilisation with an amoral and violent tone). As a result, its gritty, violent, and definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. In the first book, Jorg is only thirteen but he’s already the leader of a cutthroat gang of marauders and a multiple murderer (including innocent civilians and a number of his own men). Traumatised by his past, he’s equal parts antihero, villain, sociopath, and amoral jerk.
How much you enjoy this series will completely depend on how much you commit to the conceit of the central character. Jorg is quite a terrifying figure to follow but he also evokes great sympathy The downside, of course, is that he’s thirteen years old in the first book but, carrying out deeds and spouting narrative more suited to someone far older. His godlike abilities and skills (compared to his elders) are also a bit over the top and, if you let it, can detract from the read.
On the positive side, Jorg is an incredibly unique protagonist, and his narration style sets the tone and the pace for the entire series, one in which his intensity of thought (and Lawrence’s witty, but beautiful, prose) can drag you in to the point you overlook the age and ability issues.
In terms of plot, the first book is by far the tightest but Lawrence’s excellent world building in that work allows some intriguing trails to be investigated further over the next two books (the political intrigue from rival kings, political intrigue from entities outside the Empire, the interaction with figures from pre-apocalyptic times, the threat of the Dead King, the background to Jorg’s days on the Road and the various events that shaped him etc. etc.). The problem, however, is that it’s actually quite hard to complete such a complex weaving of threads in a satisfying manner with just three books (George R.R. Martin for example has six enormous books just to cover the various plot threads in his Fire and Ice Series and he’s still going!) and the story would have been better served by taking time to complete the story with a fourth volume (something that’s not always feasible in the commercial publishing industry). That said, Lawrence does a competent tying up of the various threads and even adds a twist.
For me, the trilogy’s main weakness was the non-linear narrative style which involves switching between different timelines within the actual story. That’s a useful narrative device that allows you to hold back a key twist until the end of a work but, in this case, the process was overused and ended up making the overall story quite disjointed by breaking the flow and, occasionally, the link with the protagonist.
Overall, however, these are structural weaknesses against the scope of a story that is exciting, and which presents a fascinating protagonist. Lawrence’s trilogy has its flaws but it’s a story and a protagonist you won’t easily forget.
The Irish Mythology Seekers
Ireland has got to be one of the only countries in the world where people who aren’t native to the country, feel completely entitled to rummage through our cultural heritage, for something they can use.
I wrote a wee story about that. Oddly enough, people weren’t amused.
We had a bunch of foreign visitors arrive at our home in Cork last night.
Being hospitable, we fed them at the kitchen table.
As soon as they’d eaten what we offered, they got up and started rummaging through the cupboards, combing through our personal correspondence, pulling our belongings out and throwing them one side as they continued their search.
‘Where do you keep the Irish mythology?’ they demanded.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete the planned in-depth article on “How we picture Irish mythology” so I’ve replaced that with “Sexuality in an Irish Graveyard” - part of another project that I’m working on at the moment.
The programmed article will be in the next edition.
Sexuality in an Irish Graveyard
You can actually learn quite a lot about ancient Irish communities if you wander through an Irish cemetery with your eyes open. Some of our cemeteries are incredibly old and have been utilised as final resting places by native communities for a remarkably long time (sometimes over a thousand years).
If you do get it right, the names, the topography, the archaeology and even the direction in which the graves are laid out, can all be used to offer patterns that are strong enough to identify higher-level aspects of ancient communities with a relatively good degree of accuracy.
But they don’t all have to be that ancient, of course.
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