Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author, but I also run the activities of our centre. And one of my favourite things to do on this podcast is to interview other authors, particularly those who are at an earlier stage in their career and are new voices to me because that's a great voyage of discovery so I'd like to introduce you to Liz now is it Haida or Haida just like ah right so Liz Haida, um we have a lot in common we've discovered because we were both born in the same part of the uk but liz it has a forthcoming fantastic book called the 12 which it's due up shortly isn't it liz 10th of october yeah and this is a follow-up to bare mouth which we'll also be talking about so first of all liz other than most important about the point about you being a you're a fellow Essex girl, which to people in America is a bit like being a Jersey girl. Yeah, we've had to struggle against that, haven't we?
[1:22] But on your journey to being an author, Liz, what was your sort of gateway book? What fantasy writers led you to wanting to do this stuff yourself? I mean, all sorts, really. Narnia is key. Narnia is key. And Narnia is a land that I go back to regularly. Well, I mean, I wish I could actually in real life. But it's a world I immerse myself in by rereading those books endlessly. They're probably the books I've reread the most out of everything. And I'm rereading them again at the moment. I always find when I'm exhausted or if I've gone through sort of slightly rough times or anything like that, they are my kind of comfort read, really. And it's always so interesting revisiting them. So definitely, definitely Narnia is kind of key to me. But I mean, I read whatever I could get my hands on. And ironically, I never remember the word for this, but there's a word for being addicted to reading. Why can I never remember what the word is? I was going to look it up before I sat down and I made myself a cup of tea and said, foolish girl.
[2:29] But I would, I'd read the back of the cereal packet. Like if there's words, my eyes are just drawn to them. And so I'd max out my library card every time. We were allowed 10 books. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. I remember. Yeah. You probably still are, actually. I haven't been. I don't think it's 10. I think it's only like five now, but I max out my card every time. So, yeah, I read...
[2:50] Um green noah as well the lucy and boston uh which is for those who don't know it's a fantastic series in which basically the ghosts of the past live in this house and a boy who comes to sort of stay can can sort of not just see them but also interact with them and it's sort of a slightly time slip as well yeah i've read a lot of that before i was i laughed as well um and then some other kind of welsh and welsh stories as well like jenny nemo snow spider um i always think bit snow spider trilogy but it's not called that the snow spider's the first one there's another two and yeah anything like that really lord of the rings i didn't come to i didn't come to tolkien until i was a bit older and i really i still regret that really i mean i read the hobbit when i was quite young but not the lord of the rings and i loved the hobbit i was obsessed with it so there must have been a gap in communication somehow where i read the hobbit kind of obsessively when i was about i don't know 10 or 11 and then i didn't really get lord of the rings until i was until i was older didn't know it was there didn't know it existed wrong that's quite an interesting blind spot that one um but tolkien actually didn't think he was writing for uh middle grade or.
[4:03] Ya when he was writing lord of the rings so he would not be disappointed that you came to it as an adult he yeah so he's not offended yeah the thing is you know good story is a good story whenever you come across it and you know it's the same with alan garner i read a lot of alan garner probably more as an adult than I have as when I was younger I think Ellador was maybe I read I definitely read Ellador when I was younger but again coming to him as an adult and rereading those books it's a whole different level of pressure sort of pleasure really because you're reading them at a different stage in your life so there's different elements of you that feed into that writing you interpret it in a different way and I love how that relationship with a book can change it's the book is the same but you have changed the thing about alan garner is i was absolutely delighted is it last year or the year before to find that he was shortlisted for, the booker prize because i'd assumed because i read him as a child that maybe he was no longer writing maybe no longer with us just in that way that you assume people have gone and there he is He's still producing really interesting books in his, he must be in his 90s now, or very late 80s. He's not a spring chicken.
[5:17] Yeah, I think he's in his late 80s now. But also, he just keeps getting better and better. I mean, Bone Labs and Treacle Walker, which are his two sort of latest novels, are both great.
[5:28] Extraordinary i've never read anything like either of them a bone land came out i think about six six years ago or something and i've i i'm that's one i've reread a lot of times and i cannot quite pin it down it's sort of like the literary equivalent of smoke every time i read it and i think i've grasped it i swear it changes every time and and it's not that my memory is bad i just want to reassure everyone because i've.
[5:52] Reread other books and that doesn't happen but with with his writing there's something that is is so minimalist that it allows you to fill in all those gaps between the words and the gaps between the lines and i think it that's why it changes so much but it is it's extraordinary it's it's his writing is is amazing and i'm not a minimalist writer and so i always really wildly admire that in other people well i i'm i'm also are quite yeah i also am on the literary as in using a lot of words into the specter so i agree with you so you've gone through your nine-year portal and as a little girl and you're thinking i'd like to do that and scrolling forward a few years not that many but a few um you end up becoming a writer so was bare mouth your debut or is there lots of novels sitting in a drawer at home that haven't quite gone anywhere oh there's loads i mean i i it's not just i mean if it was physically on paper it wouldn't just be a drawer it'd be one of those like huge it would be like a narnia style kind of wardrobe that you'd open and then it would kind of topple on you with dead ideas uh i've written all sorts i've just always i've always written i've just always written you You know, I'm the youngest of three and we're very close in age. And so it was a way of kind of keeping us entertained. It was like, why don't you go away and create a magazine?
[7:18] Why don't you write a story? Why don't you do the illustrations? You know, why don't you make up a newspaper? And so we were always writing and drawing and sort of making things up.
[7:26] And my mum is, both my mum and my dad have got incredible memories. And so, and incredible sort of imagination as well. And so they would always be like, oh, I wonder what would be around this corner. there all right yeah you know like kind of you know you get those bricked up doorways but what if you could walk through that and you know what would be on the other side or imagine if you walk through that that you could be transported somewhere else where would you go so it's just sort of constant that was just sort of normal really um they sound excellent parents i'd just like to put that there i you know i i i really lucked out i've got to be honest i really liked that and and books it was you know we were always encouraged to read there were books that we were taking to the library a lot, you know, as kids and taking to museums and sort of.
[8:12] You know let loose in the forest and a quite a sort of enid blind sort of idealized childhood really and sort of quite a kind of 1950s childhood minus minus sort of you know echoes of rationing, yeah no i've so i've always written and i went off to university and i did a drama degree and i wrote then i wrote some terrible plays that i hope anyone who's got a copy has destroyed um and i wrote short films i got a grant to make a short film in my last year at university and i thought that was it i thought that was my big break you know it's just like oh i'm gonna be a filmmaker right steven spielberg look out yeah here i come um and i sort of still slightly thinking myself as failed filmmaker because films take so long to make and that development process is can be incredibly long and then you've got to get the money for it and it's it's crazy the expensive the people you might want to cast might not be available or but you know the great thing about your imagination is you can cast who you want they can never say no they can be dead and you can revive them I can have Buster Keaton in one of my boats you know it's like you can you can do what you want you can cast who you want your budget is endless um but yeah I have got.
[9:29] So many failed ideas bare mouth was my seventh not the seventh novel that I'd written and the the first to get published and I don't see the others as being wasted or anything else like that because it's an apprenticeship and I think everything that you write is is is useful everything that you write is it's it's not wasted um so I don't I won't ever go back to them you know anything anything that was kind of genuinely good or you've got a sort of a little spark of something that I might reuse somewhere else it will resurface somewhere along the line and if it doesn't well there's other ideas waiting in the wings yeah i think writers are very um so.
[10:07] Some of us hold on to these things thinking they're just waiting for their time and others like me put them in something we call the graveyard document where i kind of acknowledge that maybe their funeral has happened and the moment has passed um but maybe there'll be a resurrection we don't know but i i don't expect it but it's very encouraging because i think a lot of people listening to this are aspiring to write wanting to write and it may sound a bit harsh but a really good piece of advice is when you finished your first novel sit down and write your second yeah um keep going keep going because not only will you be improving book by book, mostly if you're listening to feedback and all the rest of it you're also getting into your stride, I completely agree I'm always a book ahead so by the time the 12th comes out in October I will have finished drafting.
[11:03] The next one, or hopefully it'll be in a fairly decent shape. It's already plotted out. I've written a bit of it already. I've got two waiting in the rings, really. So they're having an argument in my head as to which one gets written first.
[11:15] But I like to be a book ahead because it also takes the pressure off so that when it does get published.
[11:23] Hopefully you do get a bit of noise around publication and you hope people like it. But ultimately, it's not really within your control. None of that's within your control. you have to accept that you've let go of it it's no longer your story your imaginary friends are now free to be other people's imaginary friends you know you have to share them and I do find that letting go process absolutely horrendous and upsetting um but I've got much better at it now but me staying a book ahead means that I've got new imaginary friends to play with so yeah it's okay those ones can can go so let's talk about the 12 um so that people get an idea of, the kind of thing it is um it's a it's a quest to find a lost person and put things right it's a sort of general thrust of the plot do you want to tell us a little bit about, um where it's set and what it's about and who the audience is for this what age group you had in mind primarily though of course i read it with huge enjoyment though i may not be exactly of the age it's targeted at i'd say it's sort of 12 upwards so it's quite it's young adult but where they're kind of younger and younger adult.
[12:31] It's set in Pembrokeshire, so a little bit of the Welsh coast, in winter, around the winter solstice, at the turn of the millennium, so 1999.
[12:43] And two sisters go to the coast for a sort of, it's ostensibly supposed to be a treat for kind of Christmas holidays, and they go with their mum. And Kit, who's the main character, is 15, and her younger sister vanishes. And it is absolutely a quest for her, but it's a quest that incorporates stone circles and time slips and creepy bits of folklore and our relationship with the natural world and the importance of friendship and kindness and acceptance and learning to be comfortable in your own skin, I think, as well. Yeah, I'm not very good at talking about it yet, because I've only literally just seen the proof of it yesterday. And I did a proof job in some bookshops. So, you know, for those who don't know, basically, you take early copies into your bookshops and you chat about it. And I realised as I went into the first bookshop, I thought, are they going to ask me what it's about? And I kind of, I've been so busy sort of working on the next idea.
[13:43] It's not that I've forgotten or anything. You don't think I don't know how to talk about it yet. What I need to do is get some more people to read it and then tell me what it's about and then I cherry pick the best bits and then regurgitate them and pretend that I thought of it I think one thing you can do is ask a question which is what if you were on a holiday in a really beautiful but ancient place um with your annoying but beloved sister she disappears and nobody else remembers her what would you do oh yeah ask yourself the question a bit that's a great idea it oh yeah brilliant for you yeah i is and i would say i read it i just adored it i read it, with attention but also it was very quick to read if you know what i mean i i sort of raced through it but also taking in all the details um it's wonderful and i you don't need to know the place in wales where it's set to enjoy it because it's evoked so powerfully and also it's It's not just the place as it is now, it's the place as it has been over the millennium, millennia.
[14:45] So you get a sense of how nature has changed at different periods of history.
[14:51] In fact, humans in the landscape are a very minor part of the history of that place. And that's all very well described and sort of established. I was reading through the blurb. Publishers send around these pitches with books when they are going out to critics. And they compare it to contemporary writers from the UK. One called Marcus Sedgwick and the other is David Allman. They may not be very well known to our listeners over in the US.
[15:23] But both of them write books which are, I would say, are powered by myths and legends, but some of their work is. And in the case of David Allman, he has a strong sense of a region in his work. But for me, I found I was actually much more reminded of Alan Garner, who we just mentioned, and Susan Cooper, who wrote the Darkest Rising series.
[15:52] Um you're just trying to unpick your relationship with south wales and manor beer is it manor beer manor beer yeah man i called it for ages yeah i think they're so embarrassing about this i can i live in ludlow in in south shropshire and there's a there's a train it's very an occasional train that goes direct from my house to manor beer and i'd never clearly not paid attention to the train the train announcements and i was getting on the train further north actually back home and it said you know this trend i'll be calling out tembe you know panathly at manabeer and i thought manabeer i thought it was manorbie ask posh people what to do the manorbie you know and i thought why um i mean i love why it was i think why else is a really interesting country and i've got kind of you know a long relationship with it in terms of we used to go on holiday there every
[16:45] summer when i was a kid we would be taken mainly to North Wales.
[16:48] But to me, it always felt like a place of magic, partly because I'd read The Snow Spire and I'd read other Welsh writers when I was growing up. Lloyd Alexander, who's an American writer who lived in Wales for a bit and wrote The Chronicles of Priory, which is inspired by elements of the Mabinogion, those to me are so rooted in Wales. And so all those books that I read, and the fact that their flags it's got a dragon come on and that feels like totally plausible it feels like.
[17:23] There is something about Wales that is, it's just full of storytelling I think you know I mean it's a huge sweeping statement isn't it like the Welsh are really good storytellers but I guarantee if you go into any shop in Wales and you say I don't know about this can you tell me about this, that you know unless you're unlucky and you get someone who hasn't got much time and can't be bothered to talk to you you will get a story story, you'll get a story about it. It won't just be an explanation, it'll be a story. And I always find that really fascinating and entertaining. And where I live now is kind of very near the border of Wales, and I go there quite a lot. But there is, there's just something so powerful about such old stories, and about.
[18:05] The fact that Welsh is such an old language and it's still being spoken and written and it's never been a dead language, it's never been approaching a dead language, despite the English's attempts to knock it out at various stages of history.
[18:20] It's very much a vibrant, alive language and I think that all fascinates me really. And Pembrokeshire I only really discovered as an adult because i didn't really know the west south white or soil and i just yeah i just found it sort of fascinating and manabir i mean the idea for the book thing because i i thought manabir sounded interesting and i went we went through me and my husband went through a weekend in pemby just around the corner from it and we walked along the coast to manabir and the minute i we turned the corner and went into manabe i just had a feeling and it's i just it's always quite difficult to explain but it's a bit like a tuning fork like if you put a tuning fork down on the ground and you hadn't knocked it and it was ringing anyway that's the only way that i can describe it it's like it's like your body turns into a tuning fork where you think there's this this i have i have to come back and she thought i had to come back and there's a little church there's sort of three kind of buildings there all of which are sort of in the book to various degrees there's a really old castle there's an ancient castle that's sort of semi-ruined but it's got a house in it and then there's and there's a big sort of horseshoe bay and the castle sort of looms over the back of it and then the other side of the valley opposite the castle is is this sort of little stone church very grey stone church with a white tower.
[19:38] No windows in the tower but right at the top there's what look like windows and they've got black leading around them and where it rains a lot and they get all the sea air and everything thing it looks this is sort of streaked and smeared underneath it genuinely looks like the tower is has been crying and i i there are the two main buildings and then out on the little headland.
[20:01] There's an ancient cromlech that would have been a burial tomb, thousands of years old. And none of them quite make sense. You sort of stand there and none of them, the relationship between them doesn't seem to, I just, every time I go, I couldn't quite work out what the relationship between these three things were. It felt like there was something there and it's on the tip of your tongue, like kind of that sort of sense. And so I just, I went back and I went back on my own in the depths of November to a place I found really creepy for a week.
[20:31] Which was obviously a stupid idea because I'm a massive wuss about anything ghostly. And so my friend came down and actually rescued me. Spelled your hand. Spelled my hand. Well, daytime's fine. It's just nighttime. My head is filled with imaginations of creepy things. Yeah. You know, I knew I wanted to write something that was atmospheric, but that had kind of real creepiness to it. You know, and as a sort of fan of, you know, M.R. James and ghost stories and all that sort of thing. It's not the sort of thing you want to be thinking about on your own in a really tiny kind of very quiet village that's very very dark a lot of the time in the in a dark time of year yeah no no definitely not um but i think what you're describing the idea of going somewhere and finding your like this tuning fork image which is lovely image it does seem to me to be the our storytelling gene switching on. Because those desires to explain, to fill in the gaps, to make sense of something which doesn't actually make sense to us yet seems to be the very basic urge that we have as humans. And one of the chief pleasures of actually spending the time writing is to answer those questions for ourselves.
[21:45] Pose and answer them for the readership as well. Well, so you've set it as at the millennium, which now seems quite a long time. Of course, it is quite a long time ago. It's like a quarter century ago, though it is yesterday.
[22:02] I'm going to ask you why this moment. There is some patterning reasons and sort of reasons of myths and legend why you might want to choose that moment. But I thought there were some other possible reasons for doing that. Why did you choose that date? I think solstice and celebrations around solstice is always a time for reflections. People always look at New Year resolutions or they look at Christmas and gatherings. And so it is a time of year when people tend to reflect on what they've done this year, what they might do next year. So partly it's a time of reflection. Solstice, because that kind of turn of the sun and the light and the dark, I just think he's always such an interesting thing anyway, which obviously ties into those celebrations and reactionaries. Yeah. But also partly because there is a theory that the, um, The great light in the sky, the star of Bethlehem, was actually a conjunction. It was actually some platypus. So this bright light in the sky that's very persistent and very unusual was a conjunction. I think it is supposed to be. Forgive me now, because don't look it up, people, because I've forgotten. I think it was like Venus and Mars.
[23:21] So it's not the great conjunction that I have coined. I do have a conjunction in the book. It's not the same one as mine but um that's what they think probably was the sort of star of bethlehem and so it's because is it the great conjunction in my in my sort of story it does occur every 400 years and of course that does then add up to you know 15 months 48 12 yes that is correct it's plausible sorry math's not my strong point today so partly that as well yeah lots of different reasons and then also the technology I wanted them to feel slightly cut off yeah that's the one I was wanting to ask you about because the problems about today writing in the last 10 years is when you want to find an answer the obvious people say google it you know that kind of thing that so we are spending most of our a lot of our existence in a online space that isn't very interesting really as a subject for story so to get rid of it you make the phone run flat or you're in a wi-fi black spot or you go back in time and by choosing pre-smartphone.
[24:30] I was amused that one of the chapter vignettes, one of the sketches at the top of the chapter was a phone from then, because a lot of your readers will have been, well, most of them will have only ever known a smartphone world. That it was just that little bit more basic. There was the internet, but it wasn't available everywhere all the time. Yeah. And so you can't find those easy answers to questions that you can't ask a question and just go look it up. You know, you have to make more effort to look it up. And it's not that the internet wasn't there, it's just that you could only get access to it in certain places. And I thought that also makes my characters more helpless.
[25:11] They have to find out the answer to those questions themselves. And so it's empowering in a way, but it is also frustrating because they can't just click their fingers and find out the answer to a question. They have to go and seek it out. and so there's something about the quest of that that that is an interesting thing to play with so it's all yeah all of those reasons are really why i said set it around then all of those things kind of came came kind of together and there is some bullying in the book and i wanted that connection with the phone so that the bullying is is um is still a threat it's still a presence even though the person doing it is many miles away but that element is a threat because i think that is something that is much more easier it's much more it's much easier to do that now because you've got smart phones yeah it's worse much much worse it's much much worse you can do messages and as you send it saying you know you horrible person i hate what you look or you know swearing nasty things whatever like it's and that message disappears as soon as the person's ready at the other end so there's no trace so things like that are so much more horrible um and frightening and nasty, but that actually that's sort of the, that basic, or what you would sort of think of now as sort of more basic technology that you can still use those tools for, for sort of nastiness as well. So yeah, I wanted to kind of, I didn't want them to not have a phone.
[26:35] Yeah. So not that, not, not my own childhood, but the. Yeah. Well, not mine either, you know, very much not mine. Um, so that's sort of in between stage. Yeah. Mm.
[26:48] I noticed that all your characters are quite lonely. Everybody is lonely, in fact, even the ones in families.
[26:56] Either because their parents are absent or absent through busyness. At this stage in the story, because obviously there's a movement in the story to community and love and friendship.
[27:10] Were you thinking of those, what I would call square peg in round hole kids at school, the ones who, there's nothing particularly, I mean, Kit actually is very gifted, but she doesn't feel as though she fits, does she? No, and I think Kit's got her sister, Libby, who disappears.
[27:31] Who she's on the quest to find. Libby's not lonely, but Kit, there is a loneliness about Kit because she's been increasingly isolated and there's a loneliness, story, the boy who she sort of becomes friends with and there is a reason why he's called story which I won't go into but, he's definitely lonely but the two of them by kind of getting to know each other, are less lonely and I think it is that thing that you know I was a very geeky child like most bookish children, and I think there is that thing of not feeling quite like you fit, really um and so I never really had like a best friend I had friends who I was very close with I had sort of best friends as a plural I never had a best friend because for me it always felt like quite a risky strategy to sort of throw all the eggs in one basket so I was friends with, sort of friends with everyone um but also not and I think I think you become aware if you're sort of of a geeky child, that.
[28:41] You have to you have to sort of be able to read the room and you have to work out how to sort of slightly keep your head down in a way um yes but it's quite interested in sort of exploring that a bit as well but it's also i mean because it's from her point of view that she is accepting other people's what she interprets as their view of her and one of the lovely things the blossoming in the the book is to actually shift around and say some people start to say well what I see in you is this and she did have some encouraging figures earlier in her school career but they started to go off off piste or you know off the rails when the bully turned up in the school and one of her sort of growth journeys is to actually remember she's the kid who basically will be fine once she gets to university yeah she'll probably be fine at a level you know because it's absolutely hard and And it's really tough, but you're academic and you'll do well.
[29:40] But there's sort of not really enough people like her in that school at that particular time. And so there is that sort of isolation. I mean, I have to say, you know, before everyone starts feeling sorry for me, I'm listening. I had a really happy childhood. I was generally fine. I did have someone who was in my brother's year, like two school years above me, who for some reason hated me. He just hated me. and I don't know why I never did anything to him. I've got very curly hair. He'd call me Medusa, which got tired very quickly. And I've worn glasses since I was four. So, you know, I'd get those four eyes and specky two eyes and all that sort of stuff. He would occasionally try and pick like a physical fight with me. He punched me in corridors. I don't consider that I was bullied because I totally punched him back. I'm five foot ten and I have never... Oh, good for you. Yeah. ...thoughts of sort of like spelt ways.
[30:37] So I gave as good as I got. So I don't feel like I was bullied, but I also feel like, that there is an uncertainty in that that you never quite knew when you might bump into him or if he might be okay that day or if he might not be that or he might not be and that interesting.
[30:56] And sort of in a fictional way as well yeah so um so it's very encouraging book to read and to give to a child who if you know them and you think that's a really interesting child who doesn't quite fit and isn't quite flourishing a perfect book to give them um i would say there's some lovely patterns woven throughout your your your story um you mentioned one of the characters is called story who he explains is after i mean it's got a bigger meaning but it's also after one of the lesser known astronauts who was called story um but you've got birds stones time travel travel, stars, lots of these crunchy nouns. I love these nouns, like very specific birds, not just because Kit loves birds, so she knows what she's looking at, which is always great as an author. If you can think, can I plausibly say it's a chuff rather than just a plain old bird? You know, that's really nice when your character knows. Are these patterns, which also give you lovely signs.
[32:03] Poetic language to describe things in are these emergent properties as you write i.e you don't really plan it like that way but they sort of arrive when they're ready or do you then actually start off your story almost with a word cloud where you've made a list of the kind of world that we're in and then bring it in because i know that some writers do that they kind of approach it with oh here is my atmosphere and it's going to have um stones and stars and waves and beats, or is it yeah tell us about your writing process yeah that's really organized i never thought writing that bit down it's just all in my head it's all in my head and in my heart really i walk a lot and i figure out a lot of my plot i'm definitely a plotter i'm not a panther and i plot i have to know i have to know where it ends because otherwise i don't understand how you can sort of the idea that you would arrive you arrive at your destination without knowing that that's what your destination was you know that doesn't make sense to me i've got plenty of writer friends who literally kind of go oh you know stretch out and then tap tap tap tap and off they go and they discover the stories it goes along obviously I think that's just nuts and they think the way that I work is nuts as well so I tend to have a grid.
[33:16] Um I tend to have a bit of a grid and it's got my main characters on and it's got what's sort of happening when so it's more of a timeline really but it will have themes woven into that and I didn't really do that so much with the 12 actually because it's first person so it makes it much easier. I tend to just have sort of bits of paper, like things that I know will happen in the book.
[33:40] And then I'll walk and try and work it through my head, order they should be in. And then I tokenistically shuffle the bits of paper around on the floor, but I don't, I've sort of done with them really.
[33:48] I just, I know the sort of shape of it. Kit, I always knew was going to be a bird nerd. I'm a bit of a bird nerd. And I was a bird nerd when I was quite young as well. There's a scene in the book where she gets taken by her teacher at the weekend to go to a bird fight. That is real. That did happen to me. It's funny now, because you sort of think, a teacher would never be allowed to do that now. Imagine all the consent forms you'll have to sign. But a teacher did do that, and I still do remember that day. It was a really lovely thing to be taken out, me and another boy from the class. And so the bird nerd thing is quite easy for me to write about because ultimately I'm quite lazy and it means I don't have to do any research and making a bird nerd is great and you know but because of the wider kind of theme in the book about our relationship with nature and our relationship with the natural world I wanted her to be a wildlife nerd of some kind and birds is always, A good one because there's, you know, the fact that they can fly and we can't.
[34:52] Sort of the feather motif, they're just wondrous. I love, you know, so with Kit, that was quite easy. With Story, I knew it was going to be about stars. I knew he would be a kind of stargazer and that he would have in his little caravan that there would be sort of those luminous stars used to get his kids on the ceiling. So there were certain patterns and things that I knew I wanted to be in. And the same with the stone circle, I knew that I wanted the stone circle in it. So it just sort of they kind of just turn up organically and then they're woven in they're just woven in through the draft really um and the first draft is always, i have that moment where you sort of just finish writing i think well that's not too bad i think that's all right and then within about half an hour you think yeah that bit it's not going to work is it you need to move that bit around there and you need to you know so i just i kind of enjoy the moments where i feel like i've done an okay job knowing that five minutes later to i'll come up with something that's not quite right and then i like i really like that i you know for me even though i have plotted it out and i do normally plot my book my books generally pretty thoroughly but um i like to leave enough space that organic things can happen in it like a character can say or do something that you think oh god i didn't know you're going to do that that's annoying what are you going to do now then i've got to fix all this in it so i quite like it when they kind of take on a life of their own because then i know that that character has become real you know really that i can't predict what they're going to do in the same way um and then i love the editing process because it's effectively a jigsaw puzzle that it's like yeah.
[36:19] Here are the things that aren't quite working. Ta-da! You know, I'll hand it over to you. And it's like, okay, so why isn't it working? And what can I do about that? And sort of evaluating that and then working out solutions to it. The kind of puzzle bit of my, the puzzle-solving bit of my brain loves that. I think sometimes for sort of, you know, for writers who are listening, editing sometimes it always seems a bit overwhelming and it seems like it can
[36:45] be, you know, a really sort of hard thing to face. But I just think actually see it as empowering that it's only you who can do it it's just you it's just words on a page and you can fix it and you can make it better and the great thing about writing is that um it never has to be sort of finished unless it's taken until it's sort of prized out of your hands and taken off the printers so there's a real sense of even though it's a fantasy it has definitely its sort of feet in realism I think and one of the ways.
[37:17] That i felt that was the balance i'm going to be careful how i talk about the ending but there is a bit of sweetness to your sort of take on the world which you get at the end of lord of the rings you know frodo is is damaged and has to sort of go on to for healing um but you also get it in things like um the avengers when tony stark sacrifices himself everybody else oh sorry plot spoiler there guys um and harry potter of course harry harry does step out on his own at the end to sacrifice himself but other characters are also sacrificed in in that that cycle of books so did you sort of know you said you plotted in advance but were you aware of that well i put it as a greater love of no man than you lay down his life for his friends theme um was that something that you felt had to be there in the story to make it feel earned that's what I kind of felt when I got to the end I wasn't sad but I I felt the I felt the bitterness of some of the things that were happening yeah and I think I wanted it to I wanted it to feel like a dilemma, that you don't want it to happen but it sort of has to happen um and also you know um.
[38:42] Change and loss and what ifs and they are part of life they're part of storytelling I wanted to kind of I wanted to use that and to play with it and that that burden that, you have to carry you've done a great you know that, kit and story do great things but then no we don't want to go too far we don't want to give away the end but yeah it's it's not it's not a depressing end it's got a sort of there's something bit cleansing about a bittersweet ending actually it's empowering in some way yeah, because a overly happy ending feels a bit can be a bit cloying yeah yeah so this the balance i think is lovely. It's very well done. I also particularly like your Watcher character. It's sort of the villain character, particularly because what you seem to be wrestling with in him is something I wrestled with right at the beginning of my writing career, my first fantasy quartet, which was called The Companions Quartet, which in an environmental story, one of my – I don't want to call them villains even, but one of my antagonists, his view was the the answer to the environment is to get rid of all these pesky humans who are messing it up. So you and my main character just sympathize with that character to a degree.
[40:07] I was interested to see you in your book 20, well, not how many years, 18 years later from when I was thinking that in an earlier stage of our environmental thoughts.
[40:18] We're having very similar thoughts to that. So was it important to you that your villain wasn't like the Dark Lord who's so obviously evil but a character who has his own agenda which you can sympathize with yeah very much so and someone who has really thought about it a lot and weighed it up and come to a different conclusion than than than i would but at the same time you can see why he would think that and where he's coming from and that feels a bit kind of somewhere like slightly mentally ill because he's isolated himself yeah it's that element to him on a sort of mythic level it's what happens when a a powerful being cuts himself off from the social contract in a way yeah there is that i mean that's really interesting and yeah that's a really lovely way of looking at it actually i think that is that is something that was probably there i have um I have had various friends and family who have quite serious mental health issues.
[41:21] Particularly recently, actually. And so I suppose that was probably bubbling away in the back of my head without me realising it, which is why it's always so interesting to talk to other people about books, because they see things in it that you think, oh, God, yeah, it's always enlightening. Oh, I was very clever doing that, wasn't I? Totally. yeah but but yeah there is that and I think I think I did want to make him complex and.
[41:50] And layers and also quite quite quite a sad figure in a way yeah exactly i think that's what i was getting at the eye when i said everybody is lonely i felt that he was also probably the yeah yeah i think he is um because he's separated himself from the 12 and that's that's not a not spoiler because that that you that is an emergent thing from the story i haven't given you his name so you won't know which one i'm talking about um and just finally we should mention the wonderful artwork that comes along with this book for those of you who are watching this on youtube you can see the lovely cover here um but it also has what they call in the trade chapter vignettes sort of pencil drawings at the beginning no chapter numbers i noticed.
[42:36] Yeah i don't really do sort of scenes really that's my failed filmmaker in me oh interesting i've never had i'm looking to see if i can find the mobile phone so if you don't there we go so if you're young and you don't know what a phone looked like in 2000 there's a picture for you and whatever it was yeah if you've forgotten um there it is and the uh the artist is called tom de fresten did you have any uh communication with him or any how did the artwork work come about i i'm a huge fan of tom's work he's um he's an extraordinary artist he's one of my absolute favorite artists you know genuinely like living or dead that's how much i i wrote him i think he's a really exceptional artist and he's annoyingly a really good writer as well he's i know he's double threat i know he's like he's and he's a really nice bloke it's triple for it.
[43:27] But i saw i i know and have admired tom's tom's artwork and his writing for for quite a while, and it was you know it really was you know an absolute kind of dream come true to push him to sort of pair him with the book and because I know Tom a little bit I did message him and say is it because I did sort of have that thing you know something so lovely happens that you do slightly wake up in the night and think if I dreamt it you know so I messaged him and said is it true are you doing it and he said yes I am and he said you know how do you sort of envisage the cover or anything I was like that's not my job Tom but also I just entirely trust him and I was so excited to see what he came up with and he's so he's such a deep deep thinker and he's so generous in his in sort of sharing his sort of thoughts and his ideas as he goes along and so it has felt like such a beautiful collaboration and such an such an honor to be paired with someone who's got such a incredibly original brain and is.
[44:33] He really understood the book. It really sort of sang to him, I think.
[44:39] And that was such a beautiful thing to kind of have that working relationship. I just feel so honoured, really, because I do absolutely love his work. And it brings that little flavour of something else on the page as well, those interior illustrations. Yeah, he's incredible. Go and look him up and look up his website and see his beautiful paintings. Yeah. Be in awe. I will do. So thank you so much for telling us about the 12th, which is out in October. So we always end our tour around the fantasy worlds by picking the best place for something. And I thought in honor of a caravan holiday in Wales that we should pick where we should go on a caravan holiday. And it's got to be like a proper caravan, not like a glamorous gypsy caravan. It has to be like a little thing you'd put on the back of a car. So imagine you're climbing in your, it can be a space travelling car that's towing this caravan. Where would you like to pitch up in your caravan?
[45:48] Hard, isn't it? Because I mean, I would have said Narnia, but I do think, I should say something that is mind-bogglingly stupid as well, is that I only realised the sort of whole religious connections with Narnia when I was older than I should have been. And a friend pointed it out to me and I think my first year at university and I said what do you mean no Aslan's not hang on he can be both because um both Aslan's you know not around so much you know maybe kind of um
[46:18] yeah I don't know but Tolkien and C.S. Lewis talked about not allegory but applicability yeah so for somebody uh coming to Narnia from a faith perspective or coming to it later and seeing that um can do that but you can also read it without applying it in a faith way because it's a dash good story it is yeah um i think maybe sort of early on like when it's you know early narnia sort of magician's nephew you know kind of you're going to have your little caravan watching the creation of narnia with your hot chocolate as the start, maybe it's already been yeah it's kind of it's already been created and the cabbie is already king and you know because i like them and i think they'd be really nice king queen so okay.
[47:05] You'll be their first courtier yeah and then yeah and then to kind of be able to sort of hang out with the talking animals and um you know and maybe hitch a ride or fledge if if if you'd let me i think that would be really lovely or if not.
[47:21] No, I'm going to go with that. I'm just going to go with Narnia because I'm rereading A Horse and His Boy at the moment. And, you know, is that thing interesting to revisit those worlds again and again and sort of see? I think he might be a bit hot in a caravan down in, where are they from? Kalomene or wherever it is. Yeah. I think you're better off in the northern clime of Narnia. Definitely would want to be in the northern bit. Yeah. So I think you've got to bear this in mind when you're taking a caravan somewhere with you. Yeah. I don't want to be careful which bit I was in. I wouldn't want to be in the sort of marshlands and the, you know, I think they're sort of... Too many mosquitoes.
[47:59] Yeah, you know, and I wouldn't want to be like Dawn Trowder because I'd be seasick, I just know it, and that would be real awesome to have the journey being seasick. Although I would love to meet Reaper Cheat. I really would love to meet Reaper Cheat. Well, I would quite like to join you parking up my caravan somewhere near the beach below Caer Paravell. Oh lovely yeah that's very similar basically it's your book it's a castle on a hill with a lovely beach so i'll bring my caravan and park it alongside and uh yeah we can take in the sunsets, actually i hadn't thought about that with character but you're right absolutely i mean it's one of these things isn't it where sort of books have seeped so deep into your sort of very being that bits of them are kind of echoes of them come out in your own writing in ways that you don't even don't even realize it's that subconscious level yeah so thank you so much liz for taking us through the 12th and uh thank you very much for bringing it to me because i totally enjoyed this story and i will highly recommend it to everyone and at the moment you don't have to wait to october you can read already Bearmouth which is available already so thank you very much liz thank you thank you for having me.
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