introducing…

ANAMAR, which is a novel, and I see even looking over the little chunk I was going to put in as a taster there were three corrections to be made, so God knows what the rest is like (and I thinking I was the world’s best text-editor), but I want to move on to my next project so what the hell. Here’s the taster anyway, which is when Sara first meets the misshapen six-legged “unicorn” who will carry her across war-torn Europe and all the way to India:

….she thought of a clown. Whatever Kryak was, he seemed to be inside a body that he was not quite used to, or that didn’t quite fit him.

“Unicorns are just like small horses, with horns,” Sara told him. “They’re very delicate, like a deer, and they only come to young girls.”

“To young girls,” Kryak said. It seemed he always repeated the last words she said. “See then, I have come to you. But a unicorn like a horse – why, that would be four legs and no neck! He made a noise something between a soft whinny and a hoarse bleat, then turned his head slightly and started scratching his ear with one of his front feet. “Some have horns,” he added after a while. “Horns, stars, domes, clubs – some with nodding plumes like rainbow-coloured windflowers: ah, beautiful. And the thunder of the unicorns in the winds of sunset, or in the violet light of the thaw-cloud… You should see it, little wanderer; it is worth a few tears.”

Sara said nothing. Whatever Kryak was, she had no reason to doubt him. She was a little shocked to learn that unicorns were not the creatures she had thought they were. “Can all unicorns talk?” she stammered….

Anyway, I got this done, with some help from Anna, and of course Rachel who oversaw all the transcribing from the original manuscript; and though I’m not happy with the format I did want somewhere else to store the thing rather than just as typescript in my pile of boxes. At some stage, if I can catch Ben in between serious print-jobs, I shall get him to print out alluring extracts and distribute them in all the re-opened cafes of the World.

I wrote Anamar between ’92 and ’94 – I guess, as it has some points in common with Ruth and the Blue Horse, though curiously I associate working on it more with when I was supposed to be Michael Player’s gardener at Boharm, and that was a couple of years earlier. On submission It was immediately turned down by my publisher, on the grounds that it was too like The Shining Bridge. Eh? I thought – but the Editor’s Word is pretty final. It turned out the be the first of an avalanche of rejections, with the exception of Timeghost (which got a fairly hard-won acceptance but whose sales were such that it finally convinced Walker Books that I was altogether a bad investment), but the light at the end of said avalanche was when I realised that I would soon be able to live like a king on my state pension – and write like one too, without having to bend to someone else’s idea of what I should be producing; and guess what? since “retiring” I’ve had practically nil time for any proper writing! (well, I guess I hadn’t expected calamitous house-fires, etc). Anyway, I won’t be too hard on my dear ex-editor, Sally Christie, because after she got out of publishing (Timeghost must have been one of her last projects, I think) and had a family, she went back to her first love, writing, and subsequently discovered that the world of “young adult” publishing had drastically changed. Pre-Harry Potter it had was still a relatively gentlemanly place to be, and there was still a vague commitment to challenging young readers’ minds rather than just giving them more of what they were wanting… I don’t know what Sally will be doing next – possibly nothing literary – but I can recommend the two books she did manage to get published with David Fickling, The Icarus Show and Spirit, quietly dark stories that still manage to be quite down-to-earth.

And now I’m going to see if I can make a link to the actual text of my little masterpiece….Anamar. – ha, who needs masterpieces when you can work a computer?…..

Pigs with Wings

A day or two ago I shared a post from an organisation called Compassion in World Farming, which I’ve started to support because of course my conscience is jogged by anyone who takes action over issues that I feel strongly about but generally just sit at home and fulminate over: in this case the way we treat farm animals while all the while waving the “humane“  banner over what we do. Basically our humaneness is so great that we can’t even get it together to retain local abattoires but instead load animals onto trucks and transport them whatever huge distance the economics of the situation demands. And no, I’m no lover of abattoires, I think we should be employing a regular corps of peripatetic slaughtermen, if farmers can’t be allowed to do the job of slaughtering themselves; and yes, that would make meat very expensive and guess what? That would mean cooks would have to use a lot of ingenuity, like peasant farmers in the past used to have to do – and which incidentally I do believe is what engendered the “great cuisines of the world”. I can imagine that in the drover days a herd of cattle being driven somewhere on foot would have found the whole escapade mildly entertaining – ditto for the pigs which, forensic archaeology assures us, used to accompany their human families immense distances to some centre like Stonehenge, when people would come from as far afield as our own locality in Aberdeenshire: I daresay the pigs wouldn’t have thought much about the slaughter and feasting at the end of the journey, but well, at least they weren’t being put under undue stress whilst en route. One of the things the Covid crisis has highlighted is the recklessness of modern farming methods worldwide, where animals, wild or domesticated, are crowded together in an intensely unnatural fashion, or where they’re transported long distances out of their local biosphere of bacteria and viruses. Will the ardently longed-for “getting back to normal” mean a return to this same old recklessness (no doubt combined with parliamentary tussles over who “leads the world in animal welfare”)? Well, maybe pigs will fly.

However, that’s all by the by. What I meant to say – and this is, of course, NOT a blog, more just a progress report on one of the revision jobs I’m engaged in – is that the link posted by the Compassion people included a picture, on this occasion, of three little piggies, looking very cute and don’t-eat-me-ish, and it so happened that the night before it appeared on my newsfeed I had been working on a re-jig of the start of a book I’d written somewhile back and called Pigs and Wings. I doubt if my word-processing programme really is accessible to scrutiny by The Algorithm, though I do wonder sometimes; but I guess in this case it was actually just one of Those Coincidences…. Anyway I can’t remember if this is the actual start of the book – the file’s buried away somewhere and I was just working from memory for my re-jig:

I am pig. I have been with you for a long time. You say, I feed you, and that’s why you love me. I might as well say, you keep me prisoner, feed me what you can’t eat, and then prey on me; that is, eat me. Thousands of years ago when you travelled great distances to your festivals, I would trot along beside you, because you were my friends, my family; but when you arrived at your festival you would kill and eat me just the same. I have been a good pig. My fat and my flesh has been the most nourishing food you have ever had. What do I get in return? “Lazy pig”, you say; and ”greedy pig”…. Yes, like every other animal I spend most of my waking time finding food to eat. When I’ve eaten enough I lie down to rest. When I’ve rested I might want to mate, or play with the little ones. But “lazy pig” and “greedy pig” follow me around, sometimes with an accompaniment of stones. I am cleanly in my habits, besides rooting in the earth or lying in mud to cool my skin. “Filthy pig”, you say.  How can something as disgusting as me be so desired by you? There’s a teasing, or bullying, game which your children played: the children would stand in a ring and a younger, weaker, child would be put into the middle while the older ones would throw an object to each other, generally some item precious to the younger child, and the younger child would have to try and catch it as it was thrown to and fro over the ring. The name of this game? Why, “piggy-in-the-middle”, and I wonder why? And when you stuck your knives into my throat, being a vocal sort of creature, I would scream out my outrage at being so betrayed by those I loved. So that noise I made would be remembered by you and if one of your own was deemed to be making an undue fuss over some minor injury, you would laugh at him and say he was “squealing like a stuck pig” – and I, of course, would be adjudged “pig ignorant” for even having such thoughts. Not so long ago, among the Germans, the worst insult that could be hurled at a human was “pig-dog”. I don’t even know what a pig-dog is. I am not dog, I am pig. But I understand that the worst insult among the humans then was to combine the names of the two creatures they loved the best, and that was very curious. There is an expression “if pigs could fly”, which means an impossible thing. So if an impossible thing were ever to happen, it would be in the time when pigs fly.

I say, pigs will fly before ever you humans do.