leopard moon: the midnight hour, 24/7.

The Prayer Tree of Wiltshire

December 17, 2010, 4:44 pm

London was amaaaaazing.

The British SF writer Roz Clarke – my Clarion classmate and dear friend – decided to take me off the beaten path and show me the English countryside. Specifically, the ancient tomb of The West Kennett Long Barrow, and the stone circle at Avebury Henge. Both of which are AWESOME and searchable on the internet.

This, not so much:

A tree tied with prayer flags, which sits along the path to the barrow.

I don’t have much info on this, other than it’s a local thing and very much in tune with the pagan groove going on this part of the world.

Roz commented that my appearance in her London world was like I’d stepped through a mirror. It definitely had that magic-portal quality considering how much my image has been formed by brutally funny TV shows, and it felt like spending nine days on the other side of the screen.

So going here was pretty amazing, setting foot in a place of deep resonance – one that happens to be on the other side of the planet.

Unexpected and delightful, the surprise of finding yet another powerful dreamscape to run off to when life is being too much.

Seriously, Roz, thank you for the utter gift of sharing this little bit of real-world enchantment with me.

The raggedy, mistrustful, Bella-like sheep deserve a special mention. LOVE THEM.

Other fun moments:

Chatting with members of Annie Lennox’s band on the flight over.

Cornish pasties.

The utter Black Sabbath magnificence of Highgate Cemetery that had me running to a bench and immediately starting to outline my next novel.

The retail dance party of Camden Market.

The Hobgoblin drawing pentagrams in Guinness foam.

Grave/Misery Index/Arsis/The Last Felony/The Rotted at Underworld and how compliant British moshpits are when told to start a circle.

The National Gallery.

The absolutely breathtaking cast court collection at the V&A.

The Crobar.

Driving past Stonehenge with a contemplative, reverential scream of “OMG, THERE IT IS!!!!”

Sin City at the Electric Ballroom, copious amounts of air guitar (and three Metalocalypse lookalikes kneeling at my feet, banging their heads and lip-synching “For Those About To Rock, We Salute You.”)

Dreadfalls and elevator soles in full 90’s effect at the labyrinthine Slimelight, and stupid amounts of fun dancing along to an aggro-synthpop act whose entire lyrical output was profanity.

Vegan bangers.

(Yeah, my idea of a vacation is pretty much art museums and metal bars.)

Tags: green, london, witchcraft
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YA As Retroactive Programming

July 27, 2010, 12:57 am

A couple weekends ago, I was up til 5am reading The Hunger Games. According to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online reservation system, a LOT of people want to read it.

Normally I’m not into YA fiction at all. I prefer spending time within an adult consciousness – the logic, motives, and responses of seasoned minds, and the situations they get themselves into. Not so much parental struggles and high school. If I’m going back into a romanticized version of teenagerhood, give me The Lost Boys, not Twilight. (I *do* dig S.E. Hinton immensely. But of course I would, she wrote about greasers.)

I don’t understand the current fascination with YA, by so many adults. Is it escapism? Getting to go back to a more innocent time? Stray says a lot of people are into Harry Potter to recover their sense of wonder. I can understand the allure of wanting to return to one’s formative years – the vastness of not knowing your future yet, when anything really is possible. But a lot of this stuff, I wouldn’t have read when I was at the target age, either. At fourteen, I was already deep into Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and his revolting bizarro creatures of insatiable perversity. Vampire-werewolf love triangles? No, thank you.

What ended up persuading me into this book: the arena scenario that yanked me over the “blech, YA” barrier. I love love love survival horror and very jazzed to see someone else take a run at the last-player-standing setup (I’ve seen some kvetching about how it’s a ripoff of Battle Royale and I don’t think so – the idea is too big, and too good, for only one author to play with.) I’m into dystopian fiction probably because it’s so solution-oriented – the world is horrifying, how are you going to respond? And I liked the way that Katniss Everdeen went about solving it. A lot.

Donald Michael Kraig has an exercise in Appendix 1 of his book on ceremonial practice, Modern Magick, to increase magickal abilities and talents by making you more receptive to information. It involves flipping the pages of a calendar back to visualizing a younger version of yourself and burning a sigil onto your forehead, before flipping the pages forward again.

As I was reading through the way Katniss was handling her path through the arena, I started seeing myself at her age, in similar trying circumstances, and kind of backfilling: this is how I would have handled this situation, that problem, if I’d had this information. It was a way of sending the info back to my past self to salve a bad memory with knowledge, to believe and trust that I would have made a good decision if only I’d known how. Visualization-wise, it appears as a teacup sitting at the edge of the memory. Whenever something causes the memory to get barfed back up into present consciousness again, there’s a hot little mug of tea somewhere in the picture, disrupting all regret and cringing with its warm, calm presence.

You could pretty much do this with any good book at all – or a line from a movie, or a song – but YA gets you at the age when you’re figuring out who you are. Strong stuff, when written well.

And a question for the bookfiends: would Stephen King’s “Rage” and “The Long Walk” be considered YA by today’s standards?