Censored??
Posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 in: Writing
3 Comments so far - click here to join in
So, some few of you may have noticed a certain silence descended over my blog for a while about what I’m actually doing with my life… besides, that is, writing…
And one or two may have noticed that for a period of roughly 12 hours, a blog entry did appear explaining what I was doing, before vanishing again.
And then silence.
Well! I am here to explain quickly that I can’t actually say what I’ve been doing with the last… oh… seven and a half weeks. It turns out that the places I’ve been working at – mmmnnn and mnnmnn – have policies prohibiting discussion of their work. (Although I can say that after 2 years studying technical theatre I am, in fact, not a spy. Although, obviously, if I was a spy, I’d still say that, thus leading, arguably, to nothing but confusion. Which would of course be part of the plan.) But as this is a universal policy to be applied to all, and as I’d really like to be employed again, I’m afraid I must honour it. Therefore! I’m afraid I am in no position to tell you what an absolutely excellent time of things the last seven weeks has been, or of the fantastic things I’ve seen and learnt… or even to heartily recommend that you see mmmnnn and mnnnn. I cannot sing the praises of mmmnnmnmn or suggest that you go to see mm mmnnn for that moment with the 3000W strobe at the end of Act 1. I can’t tell you how the mmmmn department have absolutely excelled themselves for the end of mmmn’s mnnmn or what a shame it was when the dragon got cut from mnnnmnn. In no way am I permitted to tell stories of adventures around the fly gallery of mnnmnnn or the secrets of programming in mmmnmnnn. I cannot tell you of men duelling for all sorts of things in mmmnnn or of high ideals being cut down in mmnnmnn. I can’t even tell you how many chocolate brownies I ate during the tech of mnnnmnn. Yeap – there’s no getting round it. I am gonna have to belt it. Entirely, utterly and, quite possibly, mistakenly. But very adverbially.
Although! It seems to me that, though I have this bubbling authorial indignation at being told to keep schtum and carry on, if nothing else, all of the above is a wonderful, brilliant exercise in that great principal of narrative suspense…
On which note…
Theatre rocks.
And that’s about all I have to say on that.
The Further Adventures of Horatio Lyle
Posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 in: Writing
18 Comments so far - click here to join in
Did I mention I have a pseudonym?
Oh yes, Kate Griffin is not my real name… however, since my real name is hardly a state secret, being fairly easily accessible on this website, I’ll keep this brief and say hello! As Catherine Webb I write books for kids and young adults and as this is my damn website and I’ll use it to say that my latest Catherine Webb book – the Dream Thief – was published a few days ago. And I’m not saying that if you like Kate Griffin you’ll like Catherine Webb (that’s probably one of the most schizophrenic sentences I’ve ever written, and let’s face it, writing characters like Matthew Swift that’s saying something) – but you might! And you’ll never know until you’ve gone out there, bought a copy, or maybe several, of the Horatio Lyle series, and a few for your friends just to make sure you’ve got a decent sample to do comparisons with, and found out.
In case you’re wondering, the Horatio Lyle series is about a Mr Horatio Lyle (go figure), a Victorian inventor/detective who spends an inordinate amount of time dabbling with mysteries, stepping on toes, only some of which are human, causing trouble and blowing things up. Admittedly he never plans on blowing things up, but there just comes a point in every chemical-toting scientific detective up against the odds and great evils in a city at the height of the industrial revolution when even a decent upstanding citizen has to say ‘ah, to hell with it’ and reach for the nitrates.
North-South Divide
Posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 in: London
3 Comments so far - click here to join in
Someone once defined ‘nationalism’ as a state of not-being. I am English because I am not French, I am Scottish because I am not, oh but so very much not English and so on and so forth. While as definitions go it leaves a certain something to be desired, it does seem that a lot of what the sociologists lovingly call identity (and remember sociology is a subject where, if you can get ‘identity’ into the first three lines, you’ve won) is based on a state of not being the other bugger. And so life gets filled up with these divides. They start big – I am English because I am not French. Then they refine – I am from Up North and therefore am rugged and strong, whereas he’s from Down South and is therefore wussy and smug. (Or conversely, I am from Down South and am therefore cultivated and clever and he’s from Up North and therefore drinks a lot and grunts.) In London this divide is just as strong as anywhere else, and the River Thames cuts the city up into a very strong North-South line.
It goes something like this…
I am from North London, and therefore have experience of real London. I can actually find an underground station without having to ride a bus for an hour and a half, I am within easy throwing distance of Hampstead Heath, Ally Pally, Soho, Westminster, the Golden Mile, the Tower of London, the BT Tower, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Leicester Square, the British Museum and so on and so forth. My side of London is rich with history, eighteenth century mansions and nineteenth century terraces, in my part of town you can find pretty much anything anywhere and don’t have to shop at Argos to achieve it, in short, all things considered, North London, it’s where the action is at. Poor South Londoners – all that suburban landscape with nothing of any note in it, semi-detached houses looking exactly like the next street of semi-detached houses and my god but you have to wait for the train to get anywhere and you’ll be so lucky if it happens to be going that way to begin with. Urban poverty, transport failure and commercial decline – south London, who’d live there?
Whereas! As a South Londoner the thought goes something like this…
You ignorant North London smug bastards, you have no idea what you’re missing. We’ve got Richmond Park, Clapham Common, greenery everywhere, room to move in, low rents and big houses, some of the best curry that London has to offer. We’ve got rich and thriving local communities, we’ve got easy access to mainline trains to carry us swiftly to places like Brighton and other non-London destinations wherever they happen to be. We can get bags of exotic vegetables at half the price you lot can, actually find a place to park, and hell, the London Eye, London Aquarium, Tate Modern and Globe Theatre are all on our side of the river so you lot just take your inner city squalor and rising crime rates and piss off back to Barnet you ignorant Northern gits.
I’m very firmly a North Londoner. I did dally with the concept of South for a while, and can sorta see the other guy’s point of view, but no. Sorry. I remain up north and up north is where I intend to stay. However! Even once you’ve chosen your side of the river, there’s still more dividing up to do. I am from Hackney, therefore naturally dislike Tottenham – not because the borough has done anything personal to offend me, but merely because it’s good to have someone to look down on, whether for geographical or footballing reasons, who can say? Equally, my nearest borough growing up was Islington, where the sense of ‘oh god, not Hackney, what a dump’ was unmistakable. As someone from the vaguely eastern corner of the city, I naturally view the West with deep suspicion. Where is Acton anyway and were North, East, Central and West Acton stations really the best names that could be come up with for the local area? Is Knightsbridge a real place? Do people really shop at Harrods? Really? Wherever you go there’s always someone to look down on and feel pleased not to be… even if, as luck would have it, they’re looking back at you and thinking exactly the same thing…
Why History?
Posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 in: Misc.
1 Comment so far - click here to join in
So, I got asked a few days ago – and I get this now and then – how I ended up going from studying history, to doing technical theatre, via writing fantasy books. And I give a variation on the same basic answer – history rocks!
First up, the history-technical theatre link. Okay, simply put, I ended up running a lot of technical stuff for the student societies at LSE for two basic reasons. 1. I really liked lights. (And still do, who’d have guessed?) 2. I was the only person in the student union who knew the secret of accessing the dimmer room. A secret which can only be passed down from technical munchkin to technical munchkin, and which, for reasons of honour and legality, I will not herein repeat. Sorry. Anyway, at the end of three years of doing that, I kinda figured, ‘hey, I’ve spent three years doing lighting with a bit of history on the side… maybe I should look at doing this a little more seriously?’ and here I am now.
As for history-writing… let’s not beat about the bush, history is the greatest story ever told. I’ve said many times that I have a thing for the Shakespeare Dude – I particularly have a thing for his history plays. Give me kings killing queens and visa versa! Give me battles and the stake being the safety of the realm, give me adventure and sword fights and questions of politics and honour and betrayals! History is full of the most wonderful, amazing, implausible, incredible stories! And not just that… it’s full of the same story told a thousand different ways by a thousand different people, each one pushing an agenda. It’s full of little bits of human tragedy and great sweeping cataclysmic events, sometimes at the same time. Take Chernobyl – I was born the day after Chernobyl happened, so have a lot of time for the story. The firemen who were sent to put out the fires were given a shovel full of sand – and we’re talking nuclear fuel burning here – a shovel full of sand and told that they had 4 seconds to get their sand onto the flames. More than 4 seconds and they’d have received so much exposure to radiation that they’d die, and these firemen in the middle of a nuclear blaze in the middle of a collapsing empire that had ruled half the world for 45 years with its bonkers ideology – they went out and threw on their shovel fulls of sand.
On collapsing empires – only in history can you sit back and watch the slow crumpling of an empire, the sickly march of decline that at some point, and boy there will be arguments about when, becomes irreversible. I love collapsing empires (not a phrase I say every day) – the Byzantines, the Romans, the Ottomans, the British, the Soviets – I also have a big fondness for political and military history, for stories of battles that were won or lost because of the wrong kind of rain or because someone drunk too much ale the night before or because – as in the best dramatic traditions – the cavalry really did turn up at the last minute. Read about the second siege of Vienna – one of the most dramatic sieges ever. I mean, you’ve heard of an 11th hour intervention… this was more like a 5 minute job…
One of the best things about history is the bits we chose to tell ourselves. Take the Spanish Armada. As I was taught it in school, it was a tale of plucky English courage prevailing against lumbering Spanish arrogance. Our great naval heroes harried and pestered those ignorant Spanish tyrants and finally scattered their fleet with brilliant fire ships, stroke of genius, saving us all and Good Queen Bess hurrah! And oh yes, the weather may have helped. No one really mentions the part of the story where Francis Drake managed to misplace the entire Armada… or discusses the nature of piracy vs. privateering in Spanish waters or the thorny issue of shallow waters and the Dutch fleet… absolutely no one mentions the 1589 English Armada, Gloriana Regina’s particularly disastrous attempt to capitalise on the Spanish defeat by sending her own ships to burn what was left with theirs. (An episode best summarised up by the incident where the women of Coruna – the women, let’s just note – drove the English back to their ships with domestic tools.)
So yes.
I love history. I loved studying it, I loved reading about it and arguing about it. For the sake of posterity I should probably also add that I especially loved my dissertation supervisor, whose lectures in the first year of my study on piracy in the Mediterranean and the foreign policy of Suleyman the Magnificent single-handedly converted me to the wonders of early modern history. I wouldn’t have traded those three years for anything.
Travelcard Crazy
Posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 in: Glossary, London
2 Comments so far - click here to join in
I walk everywhere. But once in a very blue moon I find myself the proud owner of a day travelcard, zones 1-4, and I go just a little bit travelcard crazy…
In the world of urban magic, this is a genuine medical problem. Magic long since passed the point where a griffon’s feather was a source of power – true power lies in the Zones 1-6 London Travelcard, good for free transport on every bus, tube, tram, light railway and overground service within Greater London, and a hefty discount on the river bus too. I mean, if this isn’t urban power in ticket form then frankly, nothing is. And like all things with surplus power attached, it’s perfectly possible to go mad with a travelcard; thus, a traveller may find himself standing at Leicester Square wondering how to get to Piccadilly Circus and sure, the two are visible one to the other, but oh no! When in possession of a travelcard something as simple and easy as walking fifty yards is unforgivable! Trains must be caught, buses must be used – as many as possible, ideally – and even if they take you miles out of your way you’ve still gotta use them, because that is the magic of a travelcard.
When I was a kid I went to school in Hammersmith. Grew up on the other side of town, mind you – right on the other side of town in Hackney. (‘Is that anywhere near Kensington High Street?’ asked one perfectly affable 12 year old in a geography lesson once, when we were discussing our home boroughs. The answer, dear reader, would be a resounding no.) I had a travelcard, and prided myself on never quite taking the same route into and from school every day. I circled round my final destination like a hungry vulture in a butcher’s maze, sometimes striking from the north via Piccadilly Line and a bus, sometimes from the south via Northern Line and a different combination of buses, for Hackney is not renowned for its tube connections. I took the Hammersmith and City Line for a while, until I realised that the stations between Goldhawk Road and Royal Oak were full of bigger, scarier people than me in my baby-pink school uniform. (It wasn’t a uniform big on dignity.) Then I switched to the Piccadilly; then realised that the Piccadilly didn’t have anything on the Victoria Line, then discovered that actually, a Victoria-Northern Line combo was a deadly weapon. Violin lessons in the Barbican were an especial treat, as I had an option on at least five perfectly justifiable tube stops I could get off at each of which would lead, in roughly even times, through entirely labyrinthine passages, to the same destination from a completely different direction. Travelcard craziness was how I got to know most of central London, picking my way between tube stops with the reckless disregard of someone who knows that if I do get horribly lost, there’ll be a bus to somewhere where there’ll be a tube to somewhere else where I’ll probably be able to pick up a route I vaguely know in a reasonable direction.
Now that I no longer need to commute across half a city to get to school, I have travelcards less frequently, and thus go a little bit more bonkers when I use them. This weekend, for example, I needed to get from my home to the Old Kent Road for a job interview, and then to a wedding in Putney, and then back home. I can proudly report that I managed to achieve this, with my travelcard, through use of four tube lines, three buses, two mainline trains and if only the service had been running on a weekend, I damn well would have taken the riverbus too. Sensible, level-headed geographical planning goes out of the window. I see a bus heading vaguely west, and I am heading vaguely west, and I will jump on it with a cry of ‘ah hell, it’ll probably work out for the best!’ So all things considered, my advice to you would be… beware travelcard madness! And perhaps every now and then, give into it too.
In Praise of Neil Gaiman
Posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 in: Writing
4 Comments so far - click here to join in
This was going to be a very long blog entry about Neil Gaiman. It was going to go off on a great sweep, covering Sandman (greatest graphic novel I’ve ever read and, in fact, the graphic novel that convinced me that it wasn’t that shameful to be caught in that particular section anyway, despite being a girl) and Neverwhere (greatest London novel I’ve ever read – although in answer to the questions that will come, no, I read it after I wrote a Madness of Angels). It was going to wave you in the direction of Stardust, Coraline, Mirrormask, and suggest a detour via his short stories – who knew that you could experience a drop in body temperature in so few lines? It might have paused for a second to mention the works of Dave McKean, illustrator, collaborator and all-round visual genius. It was probably going to linger on the Graveyard Book, which I only managed to nab a copy of this week and haven’t put down. It was, all things considered, going to be an epic entry full of wonder and praise and general admiration for the complete works of Mr Gaiman, possibly running to several thousand words and a touch of verse.
But you know what, let’s save time.
Neil Gaiman.
Read him.
Now.
Blackout
Posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 in: Glossary
5 Comments so far - click here to join in
There’s a thing at the end of the alley.
It’s watching you.
Grafitti, Soho – source unknown.
My Local Library
Posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 in: Writing
2 Comments so far - click here to join in
Okay, so this is probably my most tragic blog entry ever, but I gotta say, since I’m passing through… I love my local library. Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. I love a wide range of local libraries, and currently hold membership cards for at least three boroughs in London, not including the University of London libraries where you will still sometimes find me with my alumni card trying to work out exactly what went on in the French Revolution. (Russian Revolution – walk in the park. French Revolution – not a clue.) So I’ll admit – I’m a member of many different local libraries on the basic principal that you can’t always get what you want, but if you’re willing to walk an extra ten minutes and look at the bottom of the trolley, you might just get what you need.
I guess the Barbican Library was where I first started turning into a fantasy writer. I had violin lessons in the Barbican every week (in answer to the inevitable violin question – many years, and badly) and so every week was to be found waiting for the lesson in the fantasy section. By grade 2 I’d done A-G, by grade 5 I’d made it from A-S, and by the time my violin teacher realised I might actually be more suited to the viola, I’d gone all the way down to the bottom of the shelf and met Roger Zelazny, on who much praise has already been heaped.
At university I got into the habit of borrowing as many books as I could carry, dragging them back to halls and renewing them on a daily basis before the other buggers could get their hands on my essay material. Everything I know about the Algerian War of Independence I learnt in the bath. (My hall of residence had wonderfully high water pressure combined with a fantastic boiler, and I was learning karate at the time and thus baths seemed the logical learning environment. On an entirely irrelevant note, I freely admit that for the first six weeks of learning karate, if someone had tried to mug me I probably would have been too physically shattered to even try and put up a fight…) Simultaneously, when being forced to take a subject that wasn’t history as an external option, I would go to my local library for ‘dummies guides to…’ Thus, my room ended up full of books on the Korean Civil War, Piracy in the 1500s and graphic novels. (All praise Neil Gaiman!)
In my final year at university, I found myself back in the Corporation of London, where my initial love of the Barbican Library developed, and discovered that box sets of shows like West Wing for £1 a week were really the only way to try and muddle through a dissertation and stay sane.
Now that I’m Domestic Woman, complete with my own (terminally ill) basil plant and council tax bill, my local library has become if anything even more important. How to books, computer and printer access, leaflets on recycling in the borough (tragic but useful) films, comics, hardbacks I can’t afford to buy, music galore, ads for free haircuts, cheap swims, local parties and classes in taekwondo, books in Farsi, kids learning how to sing ‘the wheels on the bus’ – popular history! Say what you will for studying history at LSE, there does come a point in the middle of every essay on the economic policy of Charles V that you dream of a book about sieges and adultery, and imagine the face of your historiography tutor crinkling up distressed at the two words… ‘popular history’…
So yes…
… I love my local library. And if we are indeed about to have, well, pretty much everything slashed in half during the economic recession, I really hope that my library isn’t one of them.
In Praise of… Dr Who
Posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 in: Misc.
3 Comments so far - click here to join in
So, as anyone who’s been muddling along with this blog for a while will know, I love Dr Who. And it’s taken me an age to admit it, because, let’s face it, there was a very long while when loving Dr Who was sorta like saying that you kept a comic book about farting hidden inside your copy of War and Peace. I mean, it was tragic, it was sad, it was, all things considered, really nerdy without any hint of redemption to love Dr Who, particularly if you happened to be a woman born after 1980 (which I am). And then came along Russell T. Davis and suddenly I found myself in the same room as my Dad watching plastic monsters rampaging through London and, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I wasn’t totally ashamed! And the more I watched, the more the sneaky suspicion dawned on me that actually, maybe Dr Who isn’t total rubbish and you know what, there are other people watching too…
By the time David Tennant took over as the Doctor, I’d discovered a whole corps of people at LSE who were quietly addicted. We were, admittedly, a group of people at the technical theatre crew/Dr Who lovers/Cluedo playing end of student society, but, and this is the bizarre thing, we weren’t ashamed of it… I mean, if nothing else, let the new series of Dr Who go down in history as making it practically acceptable, maybe, and this is a big maybe, but maybe even kinda cool to be a nerdy science fiction/techno-geek… which is a blessed relief to me, because, really, I was never really going to shape up to be anything else.
I have no quiver of cultural shame when people say ‘it’s a kid’s program’. Sure, it is, but it’s a kids program with jokes for adults, and huge ideas, and witty scripts, and great big rollicking story lines and, frankly, a lot more craft in its big toe than the average 9 p.m. weekday fare has in a whole fist of themes. I mean, at its most basic level, the setup of Dr Who allows you to do pretty much anything. Any place, any time, any situation, any species, any state of mind – anything. I’ve been meaning to write this blog entry for a while, but it was the fact that last weekend the plot of Dr Who included – and please avert your eyes if you haven’t seen this already – the entire universe going phut and then some – that really kinda nudged me into thinking that the time had come to mentioned how much I enjoyed this series. You gotta love the combination of tragically geeky and utterly cool, of ridiculously domestic and world-shatteringly big. Your average episode of Dr Who jumps in with forty something minutes of space to play with and an idea to dabble in and just charges. It’s funny, hugely entertaining, (huge in general) and I love it. More, please!
(And if anyone finds themselves reading this the day after I wake up to discover that any of my works, as either Kate Griffin or Catherine Webb have soared to huge international success… then yes please, do hire me as a writer. I mean, there’s being cool… and then sometimes there’s just plain, unashamed, unabashed being a nerd…)
Cross Country via Westfields
Posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 in: Cities and Adventures
3 Comments so far - click here to join in
As I mentioned in a previous blog, I’ve been off to Derby this weekend for the Alt. Literature Festival, and very fun it was too. But this was the first time I’ve ever attempted to get to one of these events from a base that wasn’t London – in this case, my journey went from Stratford Upon Avon to Birmingham to Derby and back again.
I’ve always loved trains. As a kid we used to go on holiday as a family of about nine by train, taking the sleeper from Calais to places like Toulouse, Rome and Bologna. Toulouse was famous for the number of times my Mum was sick there – it seemed to be a habit – Rome was immortalised for the time my parents went second class and I went third – and of course Calais International was notorious for the institution known only as the Terminal Cafe, home of the worst food you have ever eaten in western Europe. It made the greasy spoons of Glasgow seem like lobster and garlic in comparison. In more recent years I’ve dabbled with the TGV from Paris to Montpellier, and the overnight train to Vienna and Berlin, changing at Cologne. No one does mad castles clinging to sheer cliff faces like the German princes did in the Rhine valley. It’s an ambition of mine to take the train to Istanbul one day, and perhaps one day even try taking the train across parts of the United States, where there is a train to take. Planes are cool; but oddly enough you don’t feel the speed like you do on a high speed express, nor is the view as much to write home about after the first eight thousand feet.
Back to the trip to Derby… as a Londoner I am naturally pre-disposed to assume that a) all roads lead to London and b) only a fool would take a road in the opposite direction. It’s therefore something of a treat for me to discover that it was surprisingly easy to get from Stratford to Derby and back; and what strange options it turns out are available for doing so! The departures board at Birmingham New Street is rich with routes to Edinburgh, London, Cardiff, Bristol, Plymouth, Sheffield, Nottingham and Coventry calling at Manchester, Leicester, Leeds, Durham, Luton, Exeter, Weymouth… once you’re through the ticket barrier it is more than possible to get pretty much anywhere anyhow, changing in bizarre and unexpected places to get there. I always bring a book to read on a train and invariably spend the journey looking out of the window instead for a glimpse of isolated farms and villages, power stations sat at the end of perfectly straight roads in the middle of empty fields, church towers peeking up through trees, motorways where the traffic seems to go backwards as we overtake it, city suburbs and cathedrals, rivers and estuaries. I love changing trains; during the volcanic ash business that shut down Europe’s airspace a few months back, I heard one story in particular that caught my imagination. It was told on the radio about a charity that deals in organ transplants – particularly, organising the transportation of donor organs to patients from Europe to the UK. When European airspace was shut down, there were obviously still patients in need of life-saving and urgent organ transplants, and one in particular who was just a few days from death and who needed an organ urgently. The charity had secured a matching organ, but needed to get it from Poland to the UK without flying in less than 48 hours otherwise the organ (and thus patient) would die. Needless to say, all the ports and stations of Europe were packed with people trying to get back on the already over-taxed services, so the charity put out a message on twitter and within an hour had all the offers of seats on trains that they needed. As a writer, put yourself inside the mind of whoever the poor sap was who had to make this journey – a non-stop rush from Poland to the UK by train – Eurostar and trans-continental express – not quite knowing where your next ticket was coming from, with the whole of Europe trying to nab your seat, and a box under your arm containing a slowly dying human organ upon which someone else’s life depends. Hopefully you’ll never look at the people changing trains quite the same way again…
On the subject of changing trains… my only beef with the Birmingham-Derby route was the fact that my changes seemed to perpetually involve going via a Westfield’s Shopping Centre. Between Birmingham Moor Street and Birmingham New Street you are cordially invited to walk through one of these anonymous white monoliths to shopping on your way to your connection, and knock me down with a feather if between Derby Station and the Lit Festival there wasn’t another one, looming up on the horizon like a monument to commercialism! As a kid I used to play in Dover Castle, where my uncle was a warden for a while, running up and down the corridors of King Henry II and all his probably rather chilly but very well exercised descendents. I got very good at knowing which identical stairwell of identical dark damp stone led to which precise room of white-washed arches and arrow-slit windows, and myself and my two playmates could run circles round our weary parents with no trouble at all. I wonder if in five hundred years time, future generations of kids will wander through the anonymous dark halls of historically preserved Westfields playing hide-and-seek among the remains of plastic mannequins and padded couches while sonorous tour guides pronounce on their themes of kings and castles long gone?