The Home of Shehaios

So, Leaving on the Tide is with the publisher (New Generation Publishing) and Hills of Gold will be following shortly once I’ve summoned up the courage to part with the manuscript.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my guinea-pig readers, Helen, Dan and Annette, and to my wonderful editor, fellow author Karen Tucker. Not to mention Andy for putting up with me throughout the process and keeping me well-fed and watered (or rather, tea-ed).

It’s ten years since I published my last book, Spirit of Shehaios in 2010. The world and I have changed quite a lot in that decade, and this time round I have had the experience to be able to stand back just a little and observe the writing process. I thought maybe it is worth sharing some of those observations.

The key thing I figured out is that I have to tell the story to myself first. That’s the reason I write. I do not want to re-hash someone else’s story, follow someone else’s formula. I am on a journey of discovery. I want to know what happens next – but when I turn the page it’s blank. So I’ve got to figure it out from the clues already laid in the pages with writing on.

I once saw the late, great Terry Pratchett give a talk at Winchester Writers Conference, in which he compared starting a new novel to standing on one side of a cloud-filled valley. Your travelling companions – your key characters – are standing beside you, but you don’t necessarily know them all that well. You have no shared experiences. They tell you their back-story as you travel on together through the plot. And you don’t really know where that plot is going to go. You can just about make out the end-point of the journey in the hills opposite you, but you have to go down into the clouds and bumble about a bit before you can emerge on the other side.

Quite often, I find I’m climbing up the valley on the opposite side heading for the final destination, only to find I’ve lost one of my characters in the mist. Or left them stranded at the start of the story. I have to go back and retrieve them.

When Grant and I used to do hill-walking with the Scouts, the rule was always that one of the more experienced members of the group should be the back-marker, staying with the slowest member of the party to make sure no stragglers got lost along the way. (Our collie, Megan, considered it her job to keep us rounded up, but she tended to just race backwards and forwards between the fit and determined heroes at the front and the strollers sub-group at the back.)

Karen has been my “back-marker”, pointing out the missing links, the bits that don’t quite work from the reader’s perspective, and the sections where I’d left behind the scaffolding I’d built to construct the narrative on. Usually because I was in love with the words and phrases I’d used. Sometimes I was able to salvage my favourite phrases and put them in the mouths of my characters. Sometimes, they just had to go.

That’s the point about recognising that my early drafts are always about telling the story to myself. Although they do contain quite a lot of dialogue, as my characters tell me what’s happening to them, they tend to be heavy on exposition. On telling the story, rather than showing it as it unfolds. Telling the story to myself is the bit I find most exciting and rewarding. This is the part of the process that feels as if it’s coming from somewhere beyond myself, as I reach down into all the memories and experience buried in my subconscious, absorb influences from the news and stories surrounding me and process my emotional responses into the thoughts and actions of my characters. But it’s the very opposite of what works best for the reader. For the reader to invest time and emotion in reading the story, they need to be able to engage with the characters and travel through the plot with them. The motivations buried in the back-stories of the character; the history that shapes their present; the root causes of their problems and dilemmas need to become apparent as the story unfolds – they can’t be pointed out in flashing neon letters.

I used to struggle with the idea that when the final work failed to connect with people, failed to make its mark on the world in any meaningful way, that negated it’s significance to me. The conception of the story taught me so much, meant so much to me, it hurt that it meant so little to anyone else. But if it meant as much to others as it meant to me, it would have been a work of genius. And my rational brain knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a work of genius. So I didn’t know how to value it. I vacillated between valuing it at nothing and defensively thinking of it as having the enormous value it had to me. Not the most helpful state of mind to conduct a sales campaign in.

Whenever I finish that early drafting process, I have always needed a friendly reader to validate the story and persuade me that it’s worth polishing for publication. Because all I am aware of is the extraordinary, emotional, exhilarating process of creating it. I have no idea if there is anything in it that makes sense to anyone else. Grant used to be that reader – I always knew if it didn’t make sense to him it wouldn’t make sense to anyone. This time round, my daughter Helen was able to fulfill that role. She was invaluable in helping me understand what I needed to retrieve from the mist and where the scaffolding was getting in the way. And in retrospect, I began to understand, with the help of a little mindfullness coaching, a little more about my writing process.

The first stage is an outpouring of personal creativity that for me is expressed in story-telling, through the written word – others paint, dance, play music, talk, make things in wood, till the soil or nurture plants. Train dogs. Restore steam engines. Whatever. We do it for the pleasure and satisfaction we get from doing it.

The second stage is to tell the story to others. And that requires technical skills and knowledge that needs to be learned. It’s something that can always be done better. So if my stories don’t connect to readers, it’s not because my story is worthless. It’s because I need to improve my skill in communicating the story.

Of course, I also have to recognise that many people – perhaps even most people – will not be interested in my journeys of exploration. They want something that takes them on a more familiar journey – they want a formulaic tale, a re-hash of a story they’ve read a hundred times before. There are times when I want that kind of a read too – that’s when I turn to a Georgette Heyer, or an Inspector Morse tale. I don’t write that kind of story. I don’t want to write that kind of story. So I will never write a best-seller.

I am retired. I write mainly for my own pleasure – in purely monetary terms, my books cost more than they generate, just as my music always has. I’m going to spend my time writing the books I want to write, whether or not they’re the books people want to read. But I do derive a lot of pleasure from sharing my work, so I do want to improve my craftsmanship. I want the modest number of readers I do have to have the best reading experience I can give them.  What I’m aiming to do is delight and intrigue the kind of people who want a book that makes them work a bit. Think a bit. Dig a bit deeper.

I want to do it with enough wit and skill to keep my reader turning the pages. I want to create characters who behave like real people, that the reader does not necessarily like, but can relate to. I want you to feel glee when the villain gets his come uppance. I want you to feel frustrated with the obstinance of the anti-hero and the naiveté of the hero. I want their adventures to make you smile and their tragedies to make you sad. My characters teach me a lot about human nature and human folly as I swivel my writer’s lens to look at the action from their point of view. I want to share those insights.

Those of us engaged in the folly of trying to create the Fair Land in the real world have a really important story to tell. It’s about the survival and evolution of human beings on planet Earth. It’s about being part of the complex adaptive system of life on the blue-green world of dreams.

What I see happening right now is that there is a bunch of us who have told the story to ourselves quite lucidly. We are passionate about the outpouring of creative thinking that went into that process, and we have a tendency to yell at people who have just opened the book, because they’re making rookie mistakes based on the most rudimentary grasp of the problem. We’re like Olympic athletes condemning a toddler who has just mastered walking. He comes to us beaming with pride because he can walk upright on his own two legs just like us, and we scowl at him because he can’t get near the world record for the 100 metre sprint. He gets tired walking down the garden path, and we’re trying to coach him to run a marathon. How would you feel if that happened to you? Or worse, it happened to your child?

Those of us who have been active in the environmental movement or campaigning for social justice for decades need to learn how to tell the story to the reader. In a way that people who don’t want to do the deep dive into the fascinating complexity of the chaotic adaptive system of life on planet Earth can relate to. Negating the story of their own experience, telling them what they should and shouldn’t do (or even what they should or shouldn’t think) is as counter-productive as trying to get them to think like people who are fascinated by the complexity of the chaotic adaptive system. It just isn’t going to build the social consensus we need to transition to a sustainable lifestyle.

We need to start condemning less and celebrating more. We need to talk less about the problems and more about the destination, the joyous hope of life abundant, that contrasts so markedly with the dark fatalism of the old economic story. Then, and only then, can we trust each other to find a way of getting through the clouds to reach our destination.

Enjoy the journey.

Oh – and buy the book(s)!

I am a writer of fantasy. I do world building. I do big picture stuff. Not very good on the detailed practical work. I am a relative newcomer to the world of environmental politics, and I’m really not an activist. I have only ever been on one protest march in my life – the peace march opposing the Iraq war. I just write stuff. Talk to people, if they’re interested in talking. Listen, if they have a good story to tell. You never know the truth until you have heard all the stories, and as you never hear all the stories, you never know the whole truth.

I am what one of my delightful Facebook friends calls the chattering liberal middle class. I don’t just write about a fantasy world, half the time I live there. It’s nicer than the fantasy world the mass media try and tell us is reality – all that doom and gloom and death. As if doom and gloom and death were not an intrinsic and indivisible part of life. Just as much as love, hope and laughter are. 

Our living, breathing presence on planet Earth is the only reality. The gift of life that is given to us at birth and taken from us at death, and the interdependencies of the complex adaptive system we are born into. Economy, society, politics, religion, nationality – these are all stories told by human beings about how human beings live on planet Earth. They only have credibility because a significant mass of human beings believe the same story. We can change those stories. We can believe in something better. We can’t change the interdependencies of the complex adaptive system, nor the impact our stories have on it. But belief – faith – can move mountains.

To change our whole global economic system is a huge ask, and I think it will take more than one generation. I also think if you take the long view, we’re making huge progress in the right direction, it just doesn’t look like it from the front line. Partly that is because the media constantly batter us with news of our defeats. Stories about the triumph of gloom, doom and death. But a lot of the reason is that we do think of it as a battle. We think in terms of winning it or losing it. We have been conditioned by the story of “good and evil” to think that all life is a battle between the two. You can see it that way. Or you can see it more like the Tai Chi philosophy, as a constant flow of energy from negative to positive, the tension between the two being what creates energy. AKA life. Evolution. Everything. The complex adaptive system reacts to the pull and push of that energy flow – so there is no ultimate victory. Every life, every day, every moment, contributes to the positive, or to the negative. And often to both. Like COVID-19. It’s a human tragedy. But a chance for Earth to take a breath after the hammering humanity has been giving it. Maybe teach us to use our adaptation for survival – our large brains – a bit more than we have been doing.

If you want a battle, then seek out humanity’s main competitor for the accolade of most successful life form on earth. Viruses. Once we start realising that all humanity is on one side and the “aliens” (the viruses) are on the other, we might start thinking differently about where we invest our energy, resources and capital, including financial capital. We combat viruses with healthy human societies where no one is left without the basic essentials of life – food, water, shelter, warmth. Dignity and self-respect. We combat it with investment in healthcare, and scientific research. We combat it by looking after and looking out for each other, around the world. We combat it with a joint sense of purpose that celebrates life over money. Those are the foundation stones for sustainable human life on Earth.

Most people won’t want to understand any of that. They just want to do things the way they’ve always done them and bullishly defend their “right” to do so. But once a new normal is established, those people forget that they ever did it a different way. They’ll defend their new “tradition” just as bullishly as they defended the old one. So it is down to those of us who are privileged to have the time, security and inclination to try and understand more – those chattering liberal middle class people – to guide, shape, steer and above all, to dream. That’s where the magic of creativity comes from.

And in the meantime, we can start building a Wellbeing Economy one community at a time.

News on the next two-volume story in the Shaihen Heritage series, ‘Leaving on the Tide’ and ‘The Hills of Gold’ is that I’ve done two or three passes through both books now, and I think I’m nearly ready to commit them to print. I would welcome some other critical eyes on the manuscript before that stage, so if you would like to read an advance copy, email me sa.rule@btinternet.com and I’ll send you a pdf manuscript. The quid pro quo is that if I do, I need your comments in the next few weeks – let’s say, by the end of April.

Writing these two novels has been an emotionally-charged journey. It’s taken a hell of a long time, and there has been a hell of a lot of Life in between, personally, politically, spiritually. The world we now live in is all but unrecognisable to the world of the mid-1980s when I first amused myself with the adventures of Therro the Pirate under the title ‘Leaving on the Tide’. Incidentally, I am sure that there will be those who think Therro is modelled on Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean. He isn’t. I invented my pirate years before Disney dreamed up their franchise – they stole my idea, I didn’t steal theirs!

I’ve said before that for me, writing is an intellectual exercise, an exploration of ideas. Shehaios itself started off as a joke – a feudal anarchy. It has morphed into an attempt to reflect the reality of a chaotic adaptive system – which when you think about it could kind of be described as a feudal anarchy – through a rose-tinted lens.

Therro started out as a joke, too – or at least a rather 2-dimensional character from an adventure novel. Leaving on the Tide circa 1980 rambled across hundreds of thousands of words, a series of adventures written for my own amusement, and not really shaped into any kind of narrative. But at some point in the saga, the idea of Shehaios, the Fair Land, emerged. And it was clear that Therro’s life was at odds with it. So as a storyteller, there’s my conflict. There’s my drama. That’s the story I started to tell. And it took me to places I didn’t expect. Out of it came the concept for the Cloak of Magic trilogy, taking the history of Shehaios back in time to where the natural magic ran up against a powerful human civilisation.

I always had the idea that I would return to Therro’s story for the next books in the series. Some of the adventures were worth telling – at least I thought so, and I hope you’ll agree that the thrills and spills, the humour and the energy of these pirate tales is entertaining and you’ll warm to Therro’s indomitable spirit and stubborn independence. But when I reached the point where the story got serious last time round, I hit a problem. I couldn’t re-tell Cloak of Magic. I had to go somewhere else.

‘Somewhere else’ is recorded in the books in the counter-point to Therro’s story, Myo’s quest for the Fair Land. Myo’s quest is my quest. How do you reconcile the fantasy dream of the Fair Land with the reality of how humans behave? This extract from Leaving on the Tide sums up Myo’s dilemma, and mine:

“The first time Myo received a request to address a group of students about his work he was both astonished and slightly terrified. He knew he had such an obligation under the terms of his project funding, but he had never imagined he would actually be called upon to deliver it. He spent several weeks in a sweat of apprehension, seeking advice from anyone willing to give it, and most especially his father, whose lessons he still looked back on with pleasure. When the day of reckoning came around, he took [his father’s] approach, sharing the insights he had found on his journey and inviting comments and opinions from the students rather than standing in front of them pontificating. The enthusiasm and feedback he got in response slightly overwhelmed him. They asked questions that hadn’t occurred to him, set him off on new trains of thought and rekindled his faith in the Fair Land all over again.

… It was only when he returned to his solitary apartment and shut the door on reality that he began to feel like a fraud again. Because, as the newspapers reminded him on a daily basis, the glorious idea that inspired all that creative energy was only that. An idea. As rare and fragile and beautiful as a snowflake. Exposure to the briefest dose of reality was enough for it to melt away into nothing.”

And that’s kind of how we all feel at the moment. The future has never looked more uncertain. Everything we thought we could rely on is disintegrating beneath our feet – the economy is lurching from crisis to crisis, democracy as a force for social justice is proving to be a joke, the glorious dream of a free internet is turning into a tool for hate, deceit and predatory behaviour. The Lie is rampaging around the world while Truth is still desperately looking for her knickers. And we’re destroying our own environmental niche, along with that of a large percentage of life on planet Earth. Nice one, humanity. Tell me again why you call yourself “Wise Man”?

How the hell do I write a positive tale about the quest for the Fair Land against that background? It wasn’t easy. I’m not entirely sure I’ve achieved it. But the young magician who features in Hills of Gold is a practical joker. He’s the kind of guy who, given a large red shiny button marked “do not press this button!” will press it just to see what happens. And he likes making people laugh. But he’s also intelligent, compassionate, gregarious and ultimately humble. He loves indiscriminately and appreciates people for who they are, without judgement. He knows his own limitations. He recognises how much he doesn’t know. Both he and the magical powers he wields are grounded in the Fair Land.

The term “sense of humour” originates with pre-scientific medical thinking which held a theory that health was governed by the various ‘humours’ of the body, which had to be maintained in balance. You got sick as a result of them being out of balance, and someone who had a ‘sense of humour’ was therefore someone with a healthy, balanced outlook on life. Which is why the leaders of Shaihen communities are called Holders. They hold the balance that keeps us on the tightrope of life in the chaotic adaptive system. Somehow, we have to persuade our leaders that’s what they need to be doing, too. Or we’re all going to fall off into oblivion.

As I said, Shehaios started out as a joke. Hope lies with the joker. And maybe with the pirate, too. 

So here’s my prediction.

In time – not quite sure how long, maybe twenty years, maybe fifty – human civilisation will transition to more localised, less monetary, economies, with a minimal, high-level international connection. How much international connection we retain, at what level of society, will depend on how much pain and damage we inflict on ourselves in making the transition.

By transitioning methodically in an enlightened and co-operative manner, we could create flourishing local economies of much happier, more connected, prosperous people who are still able to trade  goods, services and – most important of all – knowledge around the world. Knowledge, compassion and generosity – in other words, the best that humans are capable of – take us to this scenario.

Unfortunately, the political culture of the dominant global powers is driving us to create instead  isolated, impoverished local economies, fearful and suspicious of each other, all clinging to life on a much, much more hostile planet. And most of the people who hold the privilege, fought for by our ancestors, of electing their leaders haven’t even got a clue that we’re on a journey, let alone where we’re going. By the time their cosy bubble of complacent self-justification bursts, it will be way too late. The clueless eco-cidal criminals who currently pass for political leaders in the dominant global powers of the world will have torn everything of beauty and value apart and left only a degraded form of human, displaying all the worst characteristics of humanity, to eke out a miserable existence on a dying planet.

So it is up to those of us who strive in our lives to embrace the best human beings are capable of to build the future in spite of the politicians. To build local communities of happier, more connected and  contented people who truly understand what is valuable in life, take care of themselves and each other and do not measure everything in terms of money. We may not succeed. But if everything beautiful about humankind is doomed to extinction anyway, we can at least celebrate that we were part of what was good, and creative and amazing about humanity.  

Hence my greeting to all those of goodwill as we progress through the first month of 2020 is not “Happy New Year” but  “Keep the faith”.

So the view from Rosehaugh today is beautiful. The sun is shining, and the loch reflects a patchwork of white clouds and blue sky. There was a flock of gulls wheeling about high over the water, screeching and bickering, as I walked up the road to my Tai Chi class this morning.

Every time I walk up the road to the village hall, it reminds me how beautiful this place is. There is still a cap of snow on the mountains above the Rest and Be Thankful, visible in the distance. In the foreground, the Saltire on the end of the pier flutters bravely in a brisk breeze.

I used to feel the same about the fields of Gabriel’s Farm in Edenbridge that I could see from the window of my old house in Kent – more intensely so because that was my own country, my own land. My own history lay beneath my feet as I tramped across the fields to Marsh Green with the dog, or the kids, or both. I rode across those fields. We picked blackberries in autumn and sledged down the hill in winter. Scotland is beautiful, but it isn’t mine in the same way. I miss not belonging to England.

Last night was the first time I slept since the grim results of the election were announced. I expected the Tories to win, but not to win by 80 seats. It’s a very difficult thing to come to terms with. In five years time, much more of what we treasure about Britain will have been consigned to history.

I really haven’t been able to stop crying. I tried to rally and look for the positive, but honestly, there isn’t any. There’s no getting away from the fact that we lost the battle. We’ve been defeated. The enemy is in the ascendant. We must all be kind to ourselves, and each other, and accept that it’s going to take time to get over this defeat. I realised this morning that what I was suffering from was grief. It feels very much like how I felt when Grant died. Then, I lost one dream of who I was and what life was all about. Now, I’ve lost another.

The history of Scotland is littered with noble defeats. Listen to the songs. Listen to the heartbreak of Flodden in the Flowers of the Forest. The passionate hope pinned to Bonnie Prince Charlie –

“If I had fifty thousand sons I’d give them all for Charlie” – trad. Over The Water To Charlie

But in spite of the heartbreak and betrayal that litters Scottish history, Scotland is still proudly, defiantly, Scotland and the West of Scotland where I live is the home of the Gael. If you want a miserable song, look for a Gaelic one, but I find inspiration in a more modern Scottish folksong from a great band called Skipinnish:

“Don’t tell me I’m dead when my heart is beating strong
Though I’m down upon my knees I will rise in song…”

The song is called Anchors of the Soul, and the second verse says,

“In our day we stand now to lose or to live
We have one last chance before the lifelines give
Use the history and the pull of our people and our plight
To wake up now and see the morning light.”

We need time to grieve. Time to rage against the machinery of power that inflicted this defeat on us. I will probably cry more tears for the people who were so desperately deceived when the truth was staring them right in the face – you can’t say Boris pretended to be anything other than the lying, bullying, elitist bastard that he is. And people still believed it was decent, honest, caring Jeremy Corbyn who was the threat. That decency and honesty and compassion are weak and a dishonest, callous disregard for humanity is a sign of strength. All the time people believe that, we will be spiralling down to oblivion – and I think we’ll probably deserve it. That’s not the kind of human being I want to be.

I don’t think it’s the kind of human being most people want to be, but everybody is just trying to survive, and sometimes the work of survival simply doesn’t leave time to think – not about politics, anyway. This is why the machine makes it so hard to survive. In the words of one of my characters, “People don’t want deep they’re too busy trying to stay afloat.” There are all sorts of ways of stealing voices – death is only the most final. But even after the death of an individual, the songs remain. The expressions of how we felt, and what we dreamed about. And in those songs you can reach back and connect with people long dead; reach across boundaries and barriers and connect with people in other places, other desperate situations. Even if we can’t rescue them, we can say, I feel your pain. I share your anger. I grieve for you.

And we still have a voice. We have the power to keep fighting. We just need to fight smarter.

This morning, our Tai Chi tutor gave us a demonstration using a sword. (It’s not every day you get handed a sword and asked to sweep it down towards your tutor…)  Tai Chi is like a ballet to watch, a sequence of graceful movements as the energy flows back and forth, but it is a martial art. That energy is being gathered in, sucked from your opponent and then unleashed in targetted blows. That’s how we have to fight. We need to understand the power we have, gather it in and focus it where it will have the most impact.

We are living through the collapse of the old system, and it is throwing up grotesque distortions of all its best features as it dies – twisting democracy into the travesty that is Trump and Johnson, twisting enterprise into the malevolent greed of a Nestle or a Monsanto, twisting commercial competitiveness into the control freakery of Google and Amazon and Uber and all the others. Appropriating the freedom of the internet to spread the old messages of hate and bile and contempt. Brow-beating us with information technology until we start behaving like programmable algorithms ourselves. Feed a big lie in one end and get the power of popular support out of the other.

“There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare, Hamlet

The rich and powerful won’t save us, they’re only interested in themselves – they think they can live without us, besieged inside their castles, numbing their souls with drink, drugs and excess and telling people this is what success looks like. The things won’t save us – the money, the politics, business, science, theories. They’re just things, tools.  Only the people can save the people.

“Hold, hold and live for the goal
We still can save our soul
Hold, hold and live for the goal
And the anchors of our soul”
                Skipinnish, Anchors of the Soul

Hate and anger cannot create anything but hate and anger, and they will tear us apart. Love and understanding can hone the rage into a sword, and learn to wield it effectively. Look back at why we lost this battle not in recrimination and blame, but to learn how we can avoid making the same mistakes next time. For there will be a next time. We are fighting to make sure there’s a future for our species, and there will be a next time right up until Earth’s patience runs out and she destroys us all.

The next battle for me will be for Scottish independence. The chance to forge the future without the dead weight of Westminster on our backs. We might lose that one, too, but my point is that my English friends should not see the Scottish fight as a betrayal, as Scotland bailing out, but as Scotland leading the way for a better way of organising ourselves.

People are people and politicians are people too. Even the best of them will probably get more wrong than they get right, but if Jeremy Corbyn has taught us anything it’s that winning or losing means nothing if you don’t stand up for the values you believe in. The SNP believes in Scotland. The Tories believe in the British Empire and the God-given right of the rich and powerful to rule over us. I know which history I prefer. So I’m going to give the last word to Skipinnish:

“We will look to the future with the power of our past
And the wounds long held will be healed at last
And the rise of the Gael in our time will come
From the old through the passion of the young.”