Latest / Mythmakers / The Twelve: Liz Hyder and Timeslip Fantasy

Transcript

The Twelve: Liz Hyder and Timeslip Fantasy · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  I'm here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor.
• 0:03
  Hey, good morning.
• 0:04
  Dale traded up to Geico commercial auto insurance for all his business vehicles.
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  I shouldn't have looked down.
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  It's all right.
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  We're with so far up here.
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  Look at me.
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  Take a deep breath.
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  Oh, I'm good.
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  So good.
• 0:25
  Get a commercial auto insurance quote today at Geico.com and see how much you could save.
• 0:28
  It feels good to Geico.
• 0:35
  Hello and welcome to Mythmakers.
• 0:37
  Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives
• 0:42
  brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy.
• 0:46
  My name is Julia Golding.
• 0:47
  I'm an author, but I also run the activities of our center.
• 0:52
  And one of my favorite things to do on this podcast
• 0:55
  is to interview other authors,
• 0:56
  particularly those who are at an earlier stage in their career.
• 0:59
  And a new voice is to me,
• 1:02
  because that's a great void of discovery.
• 1:05
  So I'd like to introduce you to Liz.
• 1:08
  Now, is it Heider or Heider?
• 1:10
  Just I guess.
• 1:11
  Ah, right.
• 1:12
  So Liz Heider.
• 1:15
  We have a lot in common we've discovered,
• 1:17
  because we were both born in the same part of the UK.
• 1:20
  But Liz has a forthcoming fantastic book called The Twelve,
• 1:26
  which it's due out shortly, isn't it, Liz?
• 1:31
  Enthoctober, yeah.
• 1:33
  And this is a follow-up to Bearmouth,
• 1:37
  which we'll also be talking about.
• 1:40
  So first of all, Liz,
• 1:42
  other than the most important point about you being at your fellow Essex girl,
• 1:47
  which to people in America is a bit like being a Jersey girl.
• 1:52
  Yeah, we've had to struggle against that, haven't we?
• 1:56
  But on your on your journey to being an author, Liz,
• 2:01
  what was your sort of gateway book?
• 2:03
  What fancy writers have led you to wanting to do this stuff yourself?
• 2:08
  I mean, all sorts of it.
• 2:09
  Narnia is key.
• 2:11
  Narnia is key.
• 2:12
  And Narnia is a land that I go back to regularly.
• 2:17
  I mean, I wish I could actually in real life.
• 2:19
  It's a world I immerse my girlfriend by rereading those books endlessly.
• 2:23
  They're probably the books I've reread the most out of everything.
• 2:28
  And I'm rereading them again for the moment.
• 2:30
  I always find when I'm exhausted,
• 2:32
  if I've gone through sort of slightly rough times or anything like that,
• 2:35
  they all might kind of comfortably do it.
• 2:38
  And it's always so interesting revisiting them.
• 2:41
  So definitely, definitely Narnia is key to me.
• 2:45
  But I mean, I read whatever I could get my hands on.
• 2:49
  And ironically, I never remember the word for this.
• 2:51
  But there's a word for being like addicted to reading.
• 2:54
  Well, why can I never remember what the word is?
• 2:57
  I was going to lick it up before I came before I sat down and I made myself a cup of tea
• 3:01
  and say it's foolish to laugh.
• 3:03
  But I would read the back of the cereal packet.
• 3:05
  Like, if there's words, my eyes are just drawn to them.
• 3:08
  And so I'd max out my livelihood every time we were allowed to ten books.
• 3:12
  Yeah, I remember.
• 3:12
  Yeah.
• 3:13
  I remember.
• 3:14
  Yeah.
• 3:14
  In fact, we still are actually.
• 3:16
  I think it's only like five now.
• 3:21
  But that worked hard every time.
• 3:23
  So yeah, I read Green Noire as well, the Lucy and Boston,
• 3:30
  which is for those who don't know.
• 3:31
  It's a fantastic series in which basically the ghosts of the past live in this house.
• 3:36
  And a boy who comes to sort of stay can sort of not just see them,
• 3:40
  but also interact with them.
• 3:41
  And it's sort of slightly time slip as well.
• 3:44
  Yeah, I've read a lot of that.
• 3:45
  The boy was, I laughed as well.
• 3:48
  And then some other kind of Welsh than Welsh stories as well,
• 3:51
  like Jenny and my snow spider.
• 3:54
  I always think that it's snow spider trilogy, but it's not called that.
• 3:56
  The snow spider is the first one.
• 3:57
  There's another two.
• 3:59
  Yeah, anything like that, really.
• 4:01
  The Lord of the Rings, I didn't come to.
• 4:02
  I didn't come to Tolkien until I was a bit older.
• 4:05
  And I really...
• 4:06
  I sort of regret that, really.
• 4:07
  I mean, I regret the hobbit when I was quite young,
• 4:09
  but not the Lord of the Rings.
• 4:10
  And I laughed the hobbit.
• 4:11
  I was obsessed with it.
• 4:12
  So there must have been a gap in communication somehow.
• 4:15
  But I read the hobbit kind of obsessively when I was about,
• 4:18
  I don't know, 10 or 11.
• 4:19
  And then didn't really get Lord of the Rings until I was, until I was older.
• 4:25
  Didn't know it was there.
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  Didn't know it existed.
• 4:28
  Wrong.
• 4:29
  That's quite an interesting blind spot, that one.
• 4:31
  And but Tolkien actually didn't think he was writing for
• 4:36
  a middle grade or YA when he was writing Lord of the Rings.
• 4:40
  So he would not be disappointed that you came to it as an adult.
• 4:44
  Yeah, so...
• 4:45
  He's not offended.
• 4:46
  Yeah.
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  I think it is.
• 4:47
  You know, good story is a good story whenever you come across it.
• 4:50
  And you know, it's the same with Alan Gorn,
• 4:51
  or I read a lot of Alan Gorn,
• 4:52
  and probably more as an adult than I have, as it...
• 4:55
  When I was young, I think Elador was maybe...
• 4:59
  I definitely read Elador when I was younger,
• 5:02
  but again, coming to him as an adult and rereading these things,
• 5:05
  it's a whole different level of pressure,
• 5:08
  sort of pleasure, really,
• 5:09
  because you're reading them at a different stage in your life,
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  so there's different elements of you that feed into that
• 5:14
  rereading you interpret it in a different way.
• 5:16
  And I love how that relationship with a book can change.
• 5:19
  It's the book is the same, the you have changed.
• 5:23
  And the thing about Alan Garner is I was absolutely delighted.
• 5:27
  It's it last year, or the year before,
• 5:29
  to find that he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize,
• 5:32
  because I'd assumed, because I read him as a child,
• 5:35
  that maybe he was no longer writing, maybe no longer with us,
• 5:38
  just in that way, that you assume people have gone.
• 5:41
  And there he is still producing really interesting books in his...
• 5:46
  He must be in his 90s now, well, very late 80s.
• 5:49
  He's not a spring chicken.
• 5:51
  Yeah, I've been listening to his late 80s now,
• 5:53
  but also, he just keeps getting better and better.
• 5:56
  I mean, Bound Labs and Triple Walker,
• 5:58
  which are his two sort of latest novels,
• 6:01
  are both extraordinary.
• 6:03
  I've never read anything like either of them,
• 6:05
  a bone land,
• 6:07
  played him out, I think, about six, six years ago, or something.
• 6:09
  And I thought, and that's one I've reread a lot of times.
• 6:12
  And I cannot quite pin it down.
• 6:15
  It's sort of like the literary equivalent of smoke,
• 6:17
  that every time I read it,
• 6:19
  and I think I've grasped it,
• 6:20
  I swear it changes every time I read it.
• 6:23
  And it's not that my memory is bad,
• 6:25
  it's not a way to show it every time,
• 6:26
  because I've reread other books and that doesn't happen.
• 6:29
  But with his writing, there's something that is,
• 6:32
  is so minimalist,
• 6:34
  that it allows you to fill in all those gaps
• 6:37
  between the words and the gaps between the writings.
• 6:39
  And I think that's what it changes so much.
• 6:43
  But it's extraordinary.
• 6:45
  His writing is amazing,
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  and I'm not a minimalist writer,
• 6:48
  and so I always really wildly admire that in other people.
• 6:51
  Well, I'm also quite,
• 6:54
  yeah, I also am on the literary,
• 6:57
  as in using a lot of words into the spectrum.
• 7:02
  So I agree with you.
• 7:03
  So you've gone through your nine-year portal,
• 7:06
  and as a little girl and you're thinking,
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  I'd like to do that.
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  And scrolling forward a few years,
• 7:13
  not that many, but a few.
• 7:15
  You end up becoming a writer.
• 7:16
  So was Beermouth your debut,
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  or is there lots of novel sitting in a drawer at home
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  that haven't quite gone anywhere?
• 7:27
  Oh, there's loads.
• 7:28
  I mean, it's not just,
• 7:29
  I mean, if it was physically on paper,
• 7:31
  it wouldn't just be a drawer and it'd be one of those huge.
• 7:33
  It would be like a non-earth soil kind of wardrobe,
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  but you don't open,
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  and then it would kind of topple on you with dead ideas.
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  I've written all sorts, I've just always written.
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  I've just always written,
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  you know, on the youngest of three,
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  and we're very close in age.
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  And so it's a way of kind of keeping us entertained.
• 7:50
  It was like, why don't you go away and create my cuisine?
• 7:52
  Why don't you write a story?
• 7:53
  Why don't you do the illustrations?
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  You know, why don't you make up a newspaper?
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  And so we were always writing and drawing
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  and sort of making things up.
• 8:01
  And one mum is,
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  both my mum and my dad have got incredible memories.
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  And so incredible was imagination as well.
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  And so they would always be like,
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  oh, I wonder what would be around this corner?
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  Or like, you know, I kind of,
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  you know, you get those bricks up doorways,
• 8:16
  but most if you could walk through that,
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  and you know, what would be on the other side?
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  Or imagine if you walked through that,
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  that you could be transported somewhere up,
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  where would you go?
• 8:23
  It's just sort of constant.
• 8:24
  That was just sort of normal, really.
• 8:27
  They sound excellent parents.
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  So I'd just like to put that in there.
• 8:30
  I, you know, I really lucked out.
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  I've got to be honest.
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  I really lucked out of that.
• 8:36
  And books, it was, you know,
• 8:37
  we were always encouraged to read the word books
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  that we were taking to the library lot,
• 8:43
  you know, as kids, and taking to museums and sort of,
• 8:47
  you know, let loose in the forest.
• 8:49
  And I quite a sort of inner deployance
• 8:52
  of idealised childhoods, really.
• 8:55
  And sort of quite a kind of 1950s childhood,
• 8:58
  minus, minus sort of, you know,
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  decades of rationing.
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  Well, yeah, no, my boys are written,
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  and I went off to university,
• 9:07
  and I did the drawmage gritty.
• 9:09
  And I wrote then, I wrote some terrible plays
• 9:11
  that I hope anyone who's got a copy has destroyed.
• 9:14
  And I wrote short films.
• 9:17
  I got a grant to make a short film
• 9:18
  in my last year at university,
• 9:19
  and I thought that was it.
• 9:20
  I thought that was my big break, you know,
• 9:21
  I was like, oh, I'm going to be a filmmaker, right?
• 9:23
  Stephen Spielberg, look out.
• 9:25
  Yeah, here I come.
• 9:26
  And I sort of still started thinking
• 9:30
  why I was a failed filmmaker,
• 9:32
  because films take so long to make,
• 9:35
  and that development processes can be incredibly long,
• 9:40
  and then you've got to get the money for it.
• 9:41
  And it's crazy expensive.
• 9:43
  The people you might want to cast
• 9:45
  might not be available, or,
• 9:47
  but you know, the greatest thing about your imagination
• 9:48
  is you can cast who you want,
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  they can never say no.
• 9:51
  They can be dead, and you can revive them.
• 9:53
  I can have bust the cake and then one of my goats, you know,
• 9:55
  so you can do what you want.
• 9:57
  You can cast who you want.
• 9:59
  Your budget is endless.
• 10:02
  But yeah, I have got so many failed ideas.
• 10:05
  My mouth was my seventh novel that I'd written,
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  and the first to get published.
• 10:11
  And I don't see the others as being wasted
• 10:14
  or anything else like that,
• 10:15
  because it's an apprenticeship,
• 10:16
  and I think everything that you write,
• 10:18
  is useful, everything that you write is not wasted.
• 10:22
  And so I don't ever go back to them.
• 10:26
  You know, anything that was kind of genuinely good
• 10:29
  or you've got sort of a little spark
• 10:31
  of something that I might reuse somewhere else,
• 10:32
  it will resurface somewhere on the line.
• 10:35
  And if it doesn't, well,
• 10:36
  there's other ideas, wait good the wings.
• 10:39
  Yeah, I think writers have very,
• 10:41
  so some of us hold onto these things,
• 10:45
  thinking they're just waiting for their time,
• 10:48
  and others like me put them in something
• 10:50
  we call the graveyard document.
• 10:53
  But I kind of acknowledge that maybe
• 10:55
  their funeral has happened,
• 10:57
  and the moment has passed.
• 10:59
  But maybe there'll be a resurrection,
• 11:01
  we don't know, but I don't expect it.
• 11:04
  But it's very encouraging,
• 11:05
  because I think a lot of people listening to this
• 11:07
  are aspiring to write, wanting to write.
• 11:09
  And it may sound a bit harsh,
• 11:12
  but a really good piece of advice
• 11:14
  is when you finish your first novel,
• 11:16
  sit down and write your second.
• 11:18
  Keep going, keep going,
• 11:19
  because not only will you be improving book by book,
• 11:22
  mostly if you're listening to feedback
• 11:24
  and all the rest of it,
• 11:25
  you're also getting into your stride.
• 11:27
  Yeah, I'm always a book ahead.
• 11:31
  So by the time the 12 is comes out in October,
• 11:35
  I will have finished writing the next one.
• 11:38
  And hopefully it'll be in a fairly decent shape.
• 11:41
  It's already plotted out.
• 11:42
  I've written a bit of it already.
• 11:43
  I've got two waiting in the rings really,
• 11:45
  so they're having an argument in my head
• 11:47
  to which one gets written first.
• 11:50
  But I like to be a book ahead,
• 11:52
  because it also takes the pressure off.
• 11:54
  So that when it does get published,
• 11:56
  that kind of, hopefully you do get a bit of noise
• 11:59
  around publication and you hope people like it,
• 12:01
  but ultimately it's not really within your control.
• 12:04
  None of that's within your control.
• 12:05
  You have to accept that you've let go of it.
• 12:08
  It's no longer your story.
• 12:10
  You're imaginary friends,
• 12:11
  and I'm not afraid to be other people
• 12:13
  as imaginary friends, you know?
• 12:15
  You have to share them.
• 12:16
  And I do find that letting go of process
• 12:18
  absolutely horrendous, a lot of setting.
• 12:21
  But I've got much better at it now,
• 12:22
  but me staying a book ahead means
• 12:24
  that I've got new imaginary friends to play with.
• 12:26
  So it's okay.
• 12:28
  Those ones can go.
• 12:30
  So let's talk about the 12,
• 12:32
  so that people get an idea of the kind of thing it is.
• 12:37
  It's a quest to find a lost person
• 12:40
  and put things right.
• 12:41
  Is this a general thrust of the plot?
• 12:44
  Do you want to tell us a little bit about where it's set
• 12:48
  and what it's about and who the audience is for this,
• 12:51
  what age group you had in mind primarily?
• 12:53
  Though, of course, I read it with huge enjoyment,
• 12:55
  though I may not be exactly of the age it's targeted at.
• 13:00
  I'd say it's sort of 12 upwards.
• 13:01
  So it's quite as young adult,
• 13:03
  whether they're kind of younger and younger at all.
• 13:05
  It's set in Pembrokeshire,
• 13:08
  and so a little bit of the Welsh coast in winter
• 13:11
  around the winter solstice,
• 13:13
  at the turn of the Millennium, say 1999.
• 13:16
  And two systems go to the coast for sort of,
• 13:22
  systemally supposed to be treated
• 13:23
  for kind of Christmas holidays,
• 13:25
  and they go within mom and kittens,
• 13:27
  the main character is 15 and her younger sister
• 13:30
  and her younger sister vanishes.
• 13:33
  And it is absolutely a quest for her,
• 13:36
  but it's a quest that incorporates
• 13:38
  staying circles and time slips
• 13:40
  and creepy bits of folklore and our relationship
• 13:45
  with the natural world and the importance of friendship
• 13:49
  and kindness and acceptance and learning
• 13:54
  to be comfortable in your own skin, I think, as well.
• 13:57
  Yeah, I'm not really going to talk about it yet
• 13:59
  because I've only literally just seen the proof of it yesterday.
• 14:03
  And I did a proof job in some book shops.
• 14:05
  So, you know, for those who don't know,
• 14:06
  basically you take early copies into your book shops
• 14:08
  and you chat about it.
• 14:09
  And I realized as I went into the first book shop,
• 14:11
  I thought, I think I'm going to ask me what it's about.
• 14:13
  And I kind of, I've been so busy sort of working
• 14:15
  on the next idea, it's not like I've forgotten or anything.
• 14:18
  You know, I don't know how to talk about it yet.
• 14:20
  What I need to do is get some more people to read it
• 14:22
  and then tell me what it's about.
• 14:24
  And then I cherry pick the best bits
• 14:26
  and then we go to take them and pretend
• 14:27
  that I thought about it.
• 14:28
  I think one thing you can do is ask a question,
• 14:30
  which is what if you were on a holiday
• 14:32
  in a really beautiful, ancient place
• 14:35
  with your annoying but beloved sister?
• 14:38
  She disappears and nobody else remembers her.
• 14:41
  What would you do?
• 14:43
  Oh yeah, I'll ask you something question a bit.
• 14:44
  That's a great idea.
• 14:46
  Oh yeah.
• 14:47
  Oh, thank you.
• 14:48
  I'll have a quick ditch for you.
• 14:49
  Yeah.
• 14:50
  It's, and I would say I read it, I just adored it.
• 14:53
  I read it with attention, but also it was very quick to read.
• 14:58
  If you know what I mean, I'm sort of raced through it,
• 15:01
  but also taking in all the details.
• 15:04
  It's wonderful.
• 15:05
  And you don't need to know the place in Wales
• 15:08
  where it's set to enjoy it because it's evoked so powerfully.
• 15:12
  And also it's not just the place as it is now,
• 15:15
  it's the place as it has been over the millennium.
• 15:18
  millennia.
• 15:20
  So you get a sense of how nature has changed
• 15:23
  a different periods of history.
• 15:25
  And in fact, humans in the landscape
• 15:28
  are a very minor part of the history of that place.
• 15:30
  And that's all very well described and sort of established.
• 15:34
  I was reading through the blurb,
• 15:36
  publishes and around these pitches with books
• 15:40
  when they are going out to critics.
• 15:44
  And they compare it to contemporary writers
• 15:47
  from the UK, one called Marcus Sedgwick
• 15:50
  and the other is David Arman.
• 15:51
  They may not be very well known to our listeners
• 15:54
  over in the US, but both of them write books which are,
• 16:01
  I would say, a powered by myths and legends,
• 16:03
  but well, some of their work is.
• 16:06
  And in the case of David Arman,
• 16:09
  has a strong sense of a region in his work.
• 16:13
  But for me, I found, I was actually much more reminded
• 16:16
  of Alan Garner, who we just mentioned.
• 16:19
  And Susan Cooper, who wrote the Darkest Rising series.
• 16:28
  Just to try and unpick your relationship with South Wales
• 16:31
  and Manorbeer.
• 16:32
  Is it Manorbeer? Manorbeer?
• 16:34
  Yeah, Manorbeer.
• 16:35
  I call it Manorbeer for ages.
• 16:37
  Yeah.
• 16:37
  I don't think there's so embarrassing about this.
• 16:39
  I live in Lodland in South Stropshire.
• 16:42
  And there's a train.
• 16:43
  It's very an occasional train that goes direct
• 16:45
  from my house to Manorbeer.
• 16:47
  And I'd never clearly not hate to touch the train.
• 16:50
  The train announcement.
• 16:51
  And I was getting on the train further north, actually,
• 16:54
  back home when it said, you know,
• 16:56
  this train I'll be calling at 10B, you know,
• 16:57
  Manorbeer and I thought, Manorbeer, I thought,
• 17:00
  it was Manorbeer.
• 17:01
  That's posh people, I want to do that all the time.
• 17:05
  It's Manorbeer, you know, and I thought, what was that?
• 17:08
  I mean, I love Wales.
• 17:10
  I think Wales is a really interesting country.
• 17:12
  And I've got kind of, you know,
• 17:15
  a long relationship with it in terms of,
• 17:18
  we used to go and holiday there every summer,
• 17:20
  so when I was a kid, we would be taking
• 17:21
  mainly to North Wales.
• 17:23
  And to me, it always felt like,
• 17:26
  it felt like a place of magic, you know,
• 17:28
  partly because, you know, I'd read this name spied
• 17:31
  and I'd read other Welsh writers
• 17:33
  when I was growing up.
• 17:34
  And Lloyd Alexander, who's an American writer,
• 17:37
  he lived in Wales for a bit and wrote The Chronicles of Prior Day,
• 17:40
  which he's inspired by elements of the mavenorgion.
• 17:43
  And he, those are, those to me are so rooted in Wales.
• 17:48
  And so there were all those bits that I read.
• 17:49
  And the father, they're flying, it's got a dragon.
• 17:52
  That good.
• 17:53
  Come on.
• 17:54
  And that feels like totally plausible.
• 17:56
  It feels like there is something about Wales
• 18:00
  that is, it's just full of storytelling.
• 18:03
  I think, you know, I mean,
• 18:04
  it's such a huge sleeping state, isn't it?
• 18:06
  Like the Welsh are really good storytellers,
• 18:08
  but I guarantee if you go into any shop in Wales
• 18:11
  and you say, I don't know about this.
• 18:13
  Can you tell me about this?
• 18:15
  The, you know, let's run lucky
• 18:16
  and you get someone who hasn't got much time
• 18:18
  and can't be bothered to talk to you,
• 18:19
  you will get a story.
• 18:21
  You'll get a story about it.
• 18:22
  It won't just be an explanation, it'll be a story.
• 18:24
  And I always find that really fascinating and entertaining.
• 18:27
  And I live where I live now,
• 18:28
  is kind of where I'm very near the border of Wales
• 18:30
  and I go to quite a lot.
• 18:32
  But there is, there's just something so powerful
• 18:35
  about such old stories.
• 18:38
  And about the fact that the world is such an old language
• 18:41
  and it's still being spoken and written.
• 18:45
  And it's never been a dead language.
• 18:48
  It's never been approaching a dead language.
• 18:50
  Despite the English's attempts to knock it out
• 18:53
  at various stages of history,
• 18:55
  is very much a vibrant, alive language.
• 18:57
  And I think that all sort of fascinates me really.
• 19:01
  And Pembroke sure I only really discovered it as an adult
• 19:03
  because I didn't manage the West South Wales soil.
• 19:08
  And I just, yeah, I just found it sort of fascinating
• 19:12
  and man of ear, I mean, the idea for the book,
• 19:14
  because I thought man of ear sounded interesting
• 19:17
  and I went, we went through, me and my husband
• 19:19
  went through a weekend in Fembroke
• 19:20
  just sort of around the corner from there
• 19:22
  and we walked along the coast to man of ear
• 19:24
  and the minute we turned the corner and went into man of ear,
• 19:27
  I just had a feeling.
• 19:32
  And it's, I just, it's always quite difficult to explain
• 19:34
  but it's a bit like a tuning fault.
• 19:36
  Like if you put a tuning fault down on the ground
• 19:38
  and you hadn't knocked it and it was ringing anyway,
• 19:41
  that's the only way that I can describe it.
• 19:43
  It's like, is that your body turns into a tuning fault
• 19:45
  where you think there's this, I have to come back
• 19:47
  and just thought I had to come back.
• 19:49
  And there's a little church,
• 19:51
  there's sort of three kind of buildings there,
• 19:52
  all of which are sort of in the Berkter-Berry's degrees.
• 19:55
  There's a really old castle, there's an ancient castle
• 19:57
  that sort of semi-riverine, but it's got house in it.
• 20:00
  And then there's, and there's a big horseshoe bay
• 20:02
  and the castle sort of looms over the back of it.
• 20:04
  And then the other side of the valley opposite the castle
• 20:06
  is this sort of little stone church,
• 20:10
  very gray stone church with a white tower.
• 20:13
  No windows in the tower, but right at the top
• 20:15
  there's what look like windows
• 20:17
  and they've got like living around them.
• 20:19
  And where it rains a lot and they get all the sea air
• 20:22
  and everything, it looks, this is sort of streaked
• 20:26
  and smeared underneath, it genuinely looks
• 20:28
  like the tower has been crying.
• 20:30
  And I, I, they were the two main buildings
• 20:33
  and then out on the little headland,
• 20:36
  there's an ancient chronic that we would have been
• 20:37
  a burial 10,000 to be as old.
• 20:40
  And none of them quite make sense, you sort of stand
• 20:43
  and none of them, the relationship between them
• 20:45
  doesn't seem to, I just, every time I go,
• 20:47
  I just couldn't quite work out what the relationship
• 20:50
  between these three things were.
• 20:51
  It felt like there was something there
• 20:52
  and it's like on the tip of your tongue,
• 20:54
  like kind of that sort of sense.
• 20:58
  And so I just, I went back and I went back on my own
• 21:00
  in the depths of November to a place
• 21:03
  I found really creepy for a week.
• 21:06
  Which was obviously a stupid idea
• 21:08
  because I'm a massive worse
• 21:10
  about anything ghostly and so my friend came down
• 21:13
  and actually rescued me and stalled your hand, held my hand.
• 21:17
  Well, a day time's fine, it's just night time.
• 21:19
  My head is filled with imaginations of creepy things.
• 21:22
  Yeah.
• 21:23
  You know, I knew I wanted to write something
• 21:24
  that was atmospheric,
• 21:25
  but that had kind of real creepiness to it.
• 21:28
  And you know, and there's a sort of fan of,
• 21:30
  you know, M.R. James and ghost stories
• 21:33
  and all that sort of thing.
• 21:34
  It's not the sort of thing you want to be thinking about
• 21:35
  on your own in a really tiny, kind of very quiet village
• 21:39
  that's very, very dark,
• 21:41
  a lot of the time in a dark time of year.
• 21:44
  Yeah, no, no, definitely not.
• 21:47
  But I think what you're describing,
• 21:48
  the idea of going somewhere
• 21:49
  and finding or like this tuning fork image,
• 21:52
  which is lovely image,
• 21:53
  it does seem to me to be the,
• 21:57
  our storytelling gene switching on
• 22:01
  because those, those desires to explain
• 22:04
  to fit in the gaps to make sense of something
• 22:06
  which doesn't actually make sense to us yet.
• 22:09
  It seems to be the very basic urge that we have as humans
• 22:13
  and one of the chief pleasures
• 22:14
  of actually spending the time writing
• 22:16
  is to answer those questions for ourselves,
• 22:20
  pose and answer them for the readership as well.
• 22:23
  So you've set it as at the millennium,
• 22:28
  which now seems quite a long time,
• 22:31
  of course it is quite a long time ago,
• 22:32
  it's like a quarter century ago, though it is yesterday.
• 22:37
  I'm gonna ask you why this moment,
• 22:39
  there is some patterning reasons
• 22:42
  and sort of reasons of myths and legend
• 22:45
  why you might want to change to that moment.
• 22:48
  But I thought there was some other possible reasons
• 22:51
  for doing that.
• 22:52
  Why did you choose that date?
• 22:55
  I think solstice and sort of celebrations
• 22:58
  around solstice is always a time for reflections.
• 23:00
  People always look at new year resolutions
• 23:01
  or they look at Christmas and gatherings.
• 23:03
  And so it is a time of year
• 23:06
  when people tend to reflect
• 23:07
  on what they've done this year,
• 23:09
  what they might do next year.
• 23:10
  So partly it's a time of reflection solstice
• 23:13
  because that kind of turn of the sun
• 23:16
  and the light and the dark,
• 23:17
  I just think he's always such an interesting thing
• 23:20
  anywhere which obviously ties into those celebrations
• 23:22
  in my journey.
• 23:24
  But also partly because there is a theory
• 23:29
  that the great light in the star of Bethlehem
• 23:35
  was actually a conjunction.
• 23:38
  It was actually some kind of...
• 23:39
  Oh, okay.
• 23:40
  ...so this bright light in the sky that's very persistent
• 23:42
  and very unusual was a conjunction.
• 23:46
  But I think it is supposed to be to give me down
• 23:49
  because don't look it up people because I've forgotten.
• 23:52
  I think it was like being in us and Mars.
• 23:56
  So it's not the great conjunction that I have kind of.
• 23:58
  I do have a conjunction in the book.
• 24:00
  It's not the same one as mine.
• 24:01
  But that's what they think probably was the sort of star
• 24:05
  of Bethlehem.
• 24:06
  And so you speak really good because
• 24:08
  is it the great conjunction in my sort of story
• 24:11
  it does occur over 400 years
• 24:13
  and of course that does then add up to, you know.
• 24:16
  So it's doing a math for eight, 12.
• 24:19
  Yes, that is correct.
• 24:20
  It's possible.
• 24:20
  This is my story.
• 24:22
  That's not my strong point today.
• 24:25
  So partly that as well, yeah.
• 24:26
  There's lots of different reasons
• 24:27
  and then also their technology.
• 24:28
  I wanted them to feel slightly cut off.
• 24:31
  Yeah, that's the one I wasn't wanting to ask you about
• 24:33
  because the problem's about today
• 24:36
  writing in the most last 10 years
• 24:38
  is when you want to find and answer the obvious people.
• 24:43
  So Google it, you know, that kind of thing
• 24:44
  that so we are spending most of our,
• 24:46
  a lot of our existence in a online space
• 24:49
  that isn't very interesting really as a subject for story.
• 24:52
  So to get rid of it, you make the phone run flat
• 24:55
  or you're in a Wi-Fi black spot
• 24:58
  or you go back in time.
• 25:00
  And by choosing free smartphone,
• 25:04
  I was amused that one of the chapter vignettes,
• 25:06
  one of the sketches at the top of the chapter
• 25:08
  was a phone from then
• 25:10
  because a lot of your readers will have been,
• 25:13
  well, most of them will have only ever known
• 25:16
  a smartphone world that it was just a little bit more basic.
• 25:21
  There was the internet,
• 25:22
  but it wasn't available everywhere all the time.
• 25:25
  Yeah, and so you can't find those easy answers to questions.
• 25:28
  That you can't ask the question,
• 25:29
  just go look it up, if, you know,
• 25:31
  you have to make more effort to look it up.
• 25:34
  And it's not that the internet wasn't there,
• 25:35
  it's just that you could only get access to it
• 25:38
  in certain places.
• 25:39
  And I thought that also makes them,
• 25:42
  makes my characters more, more helpless
• 25:46
  that they have to find out the answers to those questions themselves.
• 25:50
  And so it's empowering in a way,
• 25:51
  but it is also frustrating
• 25:54
  because they can't,
• 25:55
  they can't just click their fingers
• 25:56
  and find out the answer to a question.
• 25:57
  They have to go and seek it out.
• 25:59
  And so there's something about the quest of that
• 26:02
  that is an interesting thing to play with.
• 26:05
  So it's sort of, yeah, all of those reasons are really why
• 26:07
  I said set it around then.
• 26:08
  All of those things kind of came kind of together.
• 26:12
  And there is some bullying in the book
• 26:14
  and I wanted that connection with the phone
• 26:16
  so that the bullying is still a threat.
• 26:20
  It's still a presence,
• 26:21
  even though the person doing it is many miles away
• 26:25
  that that element is a threat
• 26:27
  because I think that is something that is much more easy.
• 26:31
  It's much more, it's much easier to do that now
• 26:33
  because you've got small faiths.
• 26:34
  You get it's much, much more.
• 26:35
  It's much more, you can do messages.
• 26:37
  And as you send it saying, you know,
• 26:39
  you were horrible person,
• 26:40
  I hate where you look or, you know,
• 26:42
  sorry nasty things, whatever.
• 26:43
  Like it's, and that message disappears
• 26:45
  as soon as the person is really at the other end.
• 26:47
  So there's no trace.
• 26:48
  So things like that are so much more horrible
• 26:52
  and frightening and nasty.
• 26:55
  But actually that sort of, that basic,
• 26:58
  well, when you sort of think of now
• 26:59
  sort of more basic technology
• 27:01
  that you can still use those tools
• 27:03
  for sort of niceiness as well.
• 27:05
  So yeah, I wanted to kind of,
• 27:08
  I didn't want them to not have a phone.
• 27:10
  Yeah, so not that, not, not my own childhood,
• 27:13
  but the, yeah, not mine either, you know,
• 27:15
  very much not mine.
• 27:16
  And so that's sort of in between stage.
• 27:21
  Yeah.
• 27:22
  I noticed that all your characters are quite lonely.
• 27:25
  Everybody is lonely, in fact,
• 27:27
  even the ones in families.
• 27:31
  Either because their parents are absent
• 27:33
  or absent in through busyness
• 27:38
  at this stage in the story
• 27:39
  because obviously there's a movement in the story
• 27:41
  to community and love and friendship.
• 27:45
  Where you're thinking of those,
• 27:47
  what I would call square pegging round-hole kids
• 27:49
  that scored the ones who,
• 27:52
  there's nothing particularly,
• 27:54
  I mean, Kit actually is very gifted,
• 27:56
  but she does appear as though she fits, does she?
• 27:58
  No, and I think Kit's got a sister, you know,
• 28:03
  Libby who disappears, you know,
• 28:06
  who she's on the quest to find.
• 28:08
  Libby's not lonely, but Kit,
• 28:11
  there is a loneliness about Kit
• 28:12
  because she's been increasingly sort of isolated
• 28:15
  and there's a loneliness story,
• 28:18
  the boy who she sort of becomes friends with,
• 28:20
  and there is a reason why he's called story,
• 28:22
  which I won't go into.
• 28:24
  But he's definitely lonely,
• 28:26
  but the two of them by kind of getting to know each other
• 28:31
  are less lonely, and I think it is that thing
• 28:34
  that, you know, I was a very geeky child,
• 28:36
  like most bookish children.
• 28:40
  I think there is that thing
• 28:41
  of not feeling quite like you fit, really.
• 28:46
  And so I never really had like a best friend,
• 28:49
  I had friends who I was very close with,
• 28:51
  I had sort of best friends as a plural,
• 28:54
  I never had a best friend because for me,
• 28:57
  it always felt like quite a risky strategy
• 28:58
  to sort of throw all the eggs in one basket.
• 29:01
  So I was friends with sort of friends with everyone,
• 29:04
  but also not.
• 29:07
  And I think, I think you'd become aware,
• 29:10
  if you're sort of a geeky child,
• 29:15
  that you have to sort of be able to read the room,
• 29:20
  and you have to work out how to sort of slightly
• 29:24
  keep your head down in a way.
• 29:27
  It's quite interesting in sort of exploring that of it as well.
• 29:31
  But it's also, I mean, because it's from her point of view
• 29:34
  that she's accepting other peoples,
• 29:37
  what she interprets as their view of her,
• 29:39
  and what lovely things the blossoming in the book is
• 29:42
  to actually shift friends, say,
• 29:43
  some people start to say,
• 29:44
  well, what I see in you is this.
• 29:47
  And she did have some encouraging figures
• 29:49
  earlier in her school career,
• 29:51
  but they started go off of peace,
• 29:53
  or off the rails when the bully turned up in the school.
• 29:58
  And one of her sort of growth journeys
• 30:01
  is to actually remember,
• 30:03
  she's the kid who basically will be fine
• 30:05
  once she gets to university.
• 30:06
  Yeah, she'll probably find that a level,
• 30:09
  because it's absolutely hard and it's really tough,
• 30:12
  but you're academic and you'll do well.
• 30:14
  But there's sort of not really enough people
• 30:18
  like her in that soul at that particular time.
• 30:22
  And so there is that sort of isolation.
• 30:24
  And I mean, I have to say, you know,
• 30:27
  sorry, I'm really sorry for me.
• 30:29
  Oh, listen, I had really happy childhood.
• 30:32
  I was generally fine.
• 30:33
  I did have someone who was in my brother's year
• 30:35
  to like two school years above me,
• 30:37
  who for some reason hated me, he just hated me.
• 30:40
  And I don't know why I never did anything to him.
• 30:42
  He would, I've got very curly hair.
• 30:44
  He'd call him a juicer, which got tired very quickly.
• 30:47
  And I've worn glasses since I was four.
• 30:50
  So, you know, I'd get the four wires and specie two wires
• 30:53
  and all that sort of stuff.
• 30:55
  He would occasionally try and pick up
• 30:58
  like a physical flight with me.
• 31:00
  He would punch me in corridors.
• 31:03
  I don't consider that I was building it
• 31:04
  because I'd totally punched it back on five foot ten,
• 31:07
  and I have never...
• 31:08
  Oh, good see you, yeah.
• 31:10
  Sort of like spelt ways.
• 31:12
  So, I gave as good as I got,
• 31:14
  but so I don't feel like I was building it,
• 31:17
  but I also feel like that there is an uncertainty in that
• 31:22
  that you never, you never quite knew
• 31:24
  when you might bump into him,
• 31:25
  or if you might be okay that day,
• 31:26
  or if you might not be that, or if you might not be.
• 31:29
  And that interest me.
• 31:31
  And seeing a complex sort of,
• 31:33
  sort of in a fictional way as well.
• 31:36
  Yeah.
• 31:37
  So, it's very encouraging book to read
• 31:41
  and to give to a child who, if you know them,
• 31:44
  and you think that's a really interesting child
• 31:46
  who doesn't quite fit and isn't quite flourishing,
• 31:49
  a perfect book to give them, I would say.
• 31:53
  There's some lovely patterns woven throughout your story.
• 31:57
  You mentioned one of the characters is called Story
• 32:00
  who he explains this after.
• 32:02
  I mean, it's got a bigger meaning,
• 32:03
  but it's also after one of the lesser known astronauts
• 32:06
  who has called Story.
• 32:08
  But you've got birds, stones, time travel, stars,
• 32:12
  lots of these crunchy nouns.
• 32:14
  I love these nouns, like, very specific birds,
• 32:17
  not just because Kit loves birds,
• 32:20
  so she knows what she's looking at,
• 32:22
  which is always great as an author.
• 32:23
  If you could think, can I plausibly say it's a,
• 32:26
  a chaff rather than just a plain old bird, you know?
• 32:29
  Yeah, that's really nice when your character knows.
• 32:32
  Are these patterns, which also give you
• 32:35
  lovely poetic language to describe things in?
• 32:40
  Are these emergent properties, as you write,
• 32:43
  you don't really plan it like that way,
• 32:45
  but they sort of arrive when they're ready?
• 32:48
  Or do you then actually start off your story
• 32:50
  almost with a word cloud
• 32:52
  where you've made a list of the kind of world
• 32:55
  that we're in and then bring it in?
• 32:57
  Because I know that some writers do that.
• 32:59
  They kind of approach it with,
• 33:00
  or here is my atmosphere.
• 33:02
  And it's going to have stones and stars
• 33:05
  and waves and be.
• 33:08
  Or is it, yeah, tell us about your writing process.
• 33:11
  Yeah, that's really organised.
• 33:12
  I never thought writing that bit down.
• 33:13
  It's just all in my head.
• 33:15
  It's all in my head and in my heart, really.
• 33:17
  I walk a lot and I figure out a lot of my plot.
• 33:20
  I'm definitely a plotter.
• 33:21
  I'm not a pancer.
• 33:23
  And I plot.
• 33:25
  I have to know what I have to know where it ends
• 33:27
  because otherwise, I don't understand how you can...
• 33:29
  The idea that you'd write your destination without knowing
• 33:33
  that that's what your destination was.
• 33:35
  That doesn't make sense to me.
• 33:36
  I've got plenty of writer friends.
• 33:37
  You'll literally be like, oh, you know, stretch out
• 33:39
  and they tap, tap, tap, tap, and off they go.
• 33:41
  And they just cover the stories again.
• 33:43
  It's a lot of, obviously, I think that's just nuts.
• 33:46
  Perfect.
• 33:47
  And they think the way that I work is nuts as well.
• 33:49
  So I tend to have a grid.
• 33:51
  I tend to have a bit of a grid
• 33:53
  and it's got my main character's on
• 33:54
  and it's got what's sort of happening when.
• 33:56
  So it's more of the timeline, really,
• 33:58
  but it will have themes, waves and incidents.
• 34:02
  I don't really do that so much with the toil, actually,
• 34:04
  because it's first person.
• 34:05
  It makes it much easier.
• 34:06
  I tend to have just have sort of bits of paper,
• 34:09
  like things that I know will happen in the book.
• 34:15
  And I'll walk and try and work it through my head
• 34:17
  all day, they should be in.
• 34:18
  And then I'd tokenistically shuffle the bits of paper
• 34:20
  around on the floor, but I've sort of done with them,
• 34:22
  really, like, I just, I know this sort of shape of it.
• 34:27
  Kit, I always knew it was going to be a bird node.
• 34:30
  I'm a bit of a bird node, and I was a bird node
• 34:33
  when I was quite young as well.
• 34:36
  So there's a sort of thing in the book
• 34:38
  where she gets taken by her teacher
• 34:40
  to work the weekend to go to a bird node.
• 34:43
  And I just thought, that is real.
• 34:45
  Well, that did happen to me, and it's funny now,
• 34:48
  because you sort of figured,
• 34:49
  a teacher would never be allowed to do that now.
• 34:51
  I imagine it won't be consent forms, you'll have to say.
• 34:53
  But a teacher did do that, and I still do remember that day,
• 34:55
  and it was a really lovely thing
• 34:57
  to be taking out me and a mother boy from the class.
• 35:00
  And so the bird node thing is quite easy for me
• 35:02
  to write about, because I'm ultimately
• 35:04
  quite lazy, and it means I don't have to do any research.
• 35:07
  Yeah, and making a bird node is great.
• 35:09
  And you know, because the wider kind of theme
• 35:13
  in the book about our relationship
• 35:14
  with nature and our relationship in that world,
• 35:16
  I wanted her to be a wildlife nerd of some kind,
• 35:19
  and birds is always a good one,
• 35:22
  because there's, you know, the fact that I can fly
• 35:24
  and we can't sort of the feather motif,
• 35:28
  they're just wondrous.
• 35:30
  I love what you know.
• 35:31
  So I would kick, that was quite easy.
• 35:32
  With story, I knew I was going to be that star.
• 35:35
  I knew he would be a kind of stargainster,
• 35:37
  and that he would have in his little caravan
• 35:40
  that there would be all those luminous stars
• 35:42
  used to get his kids on the ceiling.
• 35:43
  So there were certain patterns and things
• 35:45
  that I knew I wanted to be in it.
• 35:46
  And the same circle I knew,
• 35:48
  I wanted the same circle in it.
• 35:50
  So they kind of just turn up organically,
• 35:52
  and then they're waving in,
• 35:54
  they just waving in through the draft really.
• 35:56
  And the first draft is always,
• 35:58
  I have that moment when you sort of just really shining,
• 36:01
  I think, well, that's not too bad.
• 36:03
  It's all right.
• 36:05
  And then within about half an hour,
• 36:07
  you think, yeah, it's not going to work,
• 36:08
  is it?
• 36:09
  You need to meet that big around there and you need to, you know,
• 36:11
  so I just, I kind of enjoy the moments
• 36:13
  where I feel like I've done an okay job,
• 36:14
  knowing that five minutes later,
• 36:17
  I'll come up with something that's not quite right.
• 36:19
  And then I like, I really like that.
• 36:20
  You know, for me, even though I have plotted it out,
• 36:24
  and I do normally plot my,
• 36:25
  but it's generally pretty early,
• 36:27
  but I like to leave enough space
• 36:30
  that organic things can happen in it.
• 36:32
  Like a character can say or do something,
• 36:33
  but you think, oh my god,
• 36:34
  are you going to do that?
• 36:35
  That's annoying.
• 36:36
  What are you going to do now, then?
• 36:37
  I'm going to fix all this, then.
• 36:38
  So I quite like it when they kind of take on a light
• 36:40
  of their own,
• 36:41
  because then I know that that character has become real.
• 36:44
  Really, really, that I can't predict
• 36:46
  what they're going to do in the same way.
• 36:49
  And then I love the editing process
• 36:51
  because it's effectively jigsaw puzzle,
• 36:52
  but it's like, yeah.
• 36:54
  Here are the things that aren't quite working.
• 36:56
  Ta-da.
• 36:57
  You know, I do.
• 36:58
  But to you, that it's like, okay,
• 37:01
  so why isn't it working?
• 37:02
  And what can I do about that?
• 37:05
  And sort of evaluating that,
• 37:07
  and then working out solutions to it,
• 37:09
  the kind of puzzle bit of my,
• 37:11
  the puzzle solving bit of my brain loss, though.
• 37:14
  I think sometimes, sometimes for sort of,
• 37:15
  you know, if writers who are listening, editing,
• 37:17
  sometimes it always seems,
• 37:18
  but it is a well-meaning,
• 37:19
  and it seems like it can be, you know,
• 37:22
  a ring sort of whole thing to face,
• 37:23
  but I just think, actually,
• 37:24
  see it as empowering,
• 37:25
  but it's only you who can do it.
• 37:27
  It's just you.
• 37:28
  It's just words on a page,
• 37:30
  and you can fix it,
• 37:31
  and you can make it better
• 37:32
  when they're great about writing,
• 37:33
  is that it never has to be sort of finished
• 37:36
  unless it's taken until it's sort of prized
• 37:38
  out of your hands and taken off the printers.
• 37:41
  So there's a real sense of,
• 37:45
  even though it's a fantasy,
• 37:46
  it has definitely sort of feet in realism, I think.
• 37:50
  And one of the ways that I felt that was the balance,
• 37:54
  I'm going to be careful how I talk about the ending,
• 37:56
  but there is a bit of sweetness
• 37:57
  to your sort of take on the world,
• 38:01
  which you get at the end of Lord of the Rings.
• 38:04
  You know, Frodo is damaged
• 38:05
  and has to sort of go on to for healing,
• 38:09
  but you also get it in things like the Avengers
• 38:12
  when Tony Stark sacrifices himself,
• 38:15
  everybody else,
• 38:16
  oh, sorry, plots for all of their guys.
• 38:19
  And Harry Potter, of course,
• 38:20
  that Harry does step out on his own
• 38:25
  at the end to sacrifice himself,
• 38:27
  but other characters are also sacrificed
• 38:30
  in that cycle of books.
• 38:33
  So did you sort of know,
• 38:35
  you said you plotted in advance,
• 38:36
  but were you aware of that?
• 38:39
  Well, I've put it as a greater love of no man
• 38:41
  than you lay down his life for his friend's theme.
• 38:45
  Was that something you felt had to be there
• 38:48
  in the story to make it feel earned?
• 38:51
  That's what I kind of felt when I got to the end.
• 38:53
  I wasn't sad,
• 38:55
  but I felt the bitterness of some of the things
• 39:00
  that were happening.
• 39:02
  Yeah, and I think I wanted it to,
• 39:05
  I wanted it to feel like a dilemma.
• 39:09
  You don't want it to happen,
• 39:10
  but it sort of has to happen.
• 39:12
  And also, you know,
• 39:16
  change and loss and what ifs.
• 39:19
  And they are part of life,
• 39:22
  they're part of storytelling.
• 39:24
  I wanted to kind of,
• 39:25
  I wanted to use that and to play with it,
• 39:29
  and that burden that you have to carry.
• 39:33
  You've done a great, you know,
• 39:35
  that kid and story do great things,
• 39:38
  but then...
• 39:40
  No more.
• 39:41
  Yeah, we don't want to go too far.
• 39:42
  We don't want to give away the end.
• 39:43
  But it's not a depressing end.
• 39:47
  It's got a sort of,
• 39:48
  there's something bit cleansing
• 39:50
  about a bit of sweet ending, actually.
• 39:53
  It's empowering in some way, yeah.
• 39:56
  Because an overly happy ending
• 39:58
  feels a bit, can be a bit clawing.
• 40:00
  Yeah, yeah.
• 40:01
  So the balance I think is lovely.
• 40:03
  It's very well done.
• 40:04
  I also particularly like your watcher character,
• 40:06
  it's sort of the villain character,
• 40:10
  particularly because what you seem to be wrestling with
• 40:12
  in him is something I wrestle with
• 40:15
  right at the beginning of my writing career,
• 40:16
  my first fantasy quartet,
• 40:18
  which was called The Companion's Quartet,
• 40:20
  which in an environmental story,
• 40:23
  my one of my...
• 40:25
  I don't want to call them villains even,
• 40:27
  but one of my antagonists,
• 40:29
  his view was the answer to the environment
• 40:33
  is to get rid of all these pesky humans who are messing it up.
• 40:37
  So you, and my main character,
• 40:39
  does sympathise with that character to a degree.
• 40:42
  I was interested to see you in your book,
• 40:45
  20, well, not how many years it,
• 40:47
  18 years later from when I was thinking that
• 40:49
  in an earlier stage of our environmental thoughts,
• 40:53
  we're having the very similar thoughts to that.
• 40:56
  So it wasn't important to you that your villain
• 40:59
  wasn't like the Dark Lord, who so obviously evil,
• 41:02
  but a character who has his own agenda
• 41:05
  which you can sympathise with.
• 41:07
  Yeah, very much so.
• 41:08
  And someone who has really thought about it a lot
• 41:12
  and weighed it up and come to a different conclusion
• 41:15
  than I would,
• 41:17
  but at the same time you can see why he would think that
• 41:20
  and where he's coming from.
• 41:22
  And that makes sense.
• 41:22
  So it feels a bit kind of...
• 41:24
  Somewhere like slightly mentally ill
• 41:26
  because he's isolated himself.
• 41:29
  Yeah.
• 41:29
  Is that element to him on a sort of mythic level?
• 41:32
  It's what happens when a powerful being cuts himself off
• 41:37
  from the social contract in a way.
• 41:39
  Yeah, there is that.
• 41:40
  I mean, that's really interesting.
• 41:42
  Yeah, that's a really lovely way of looking at it, actually.
• 41:44
  I think that is something that was probably there.
• 41:48
  I have had various friends and family
• 41:51
  who have quite serious mental health issues
• 41:54
  and particularly recently, actually.
• 41:58
  And so I suppose that was probably bubbling away
• 42:00
  in the back of my head without me realising it.
• 42:03
  Which is why it's always so interesting to talk to
• 42:05
  other people about books,
• 42:07
  because they see things in there that you think,
• 42:09
  I can't get out.
• 42:11
  It's always enlightening.
• 42:12
  It's a world I feel.
• 42:13
  Oh, I was very clever doing that, wasn't I?
• 42:15
  Totally.
• 42:17
  But yeah, there is that.
• 42:19
  And I think I did want to make him complex and layos
• 42:25
  and also quite, quite sad thing going away.
• 42:29
  Yeah, exactly.
• 42:29
  I think that's what I was getting at.
• 42:31
  And I said everybody is lonely.
• 42:33
  I felt that he was also with probably the lonely life.
• 42:35
  Yeah, yeah, I think he is.
• 42:38
  And because he has separated himself from the 12
• 42:42
  and that's not a lot of spoiler,
• 42:45
  because that is an emergent thing from the story.
• 42:49
  I haven't given you his name,
• 42:50
  so you won't know which one I'm talking about.
• 42:53
  And just finally, we should mention the wonderful artwork
• 42:56
  that comes along with this book.
• 42:57
  For those of you who are watching this on YouTube,
• 42:59
  you can see the lovely cover here.
• 43:02
  But it also has what they call in the trade,
• 43:05
  chapter vignettes, sort of pencil drawings at the beginning.
• 43:09
  No chapter numbers, I noticed.
• 43:11
  Yeah, I think these sort of scenes, really.
• 43:13
  That's my failed film maker in May.
• 43:14
  Oh, interesting.
• 43:16
  I've never seen that before.
• 43:18
  I'm looking to see if I can find the mobile phone.
• 43:20
  So if you don't, there we go.
• 43:22
  So if you're young and you don't know what a phone look like
• 43:24
  in 2000, there's a picture for you.
• 43:27
  And it's not up yet, whatever it was.
• 43:29
  Yeah, if you've forgotten, there it is.
• 43:32
  And the artist is called Tom DeFreston.
• 43:34
  Did you have any communication with him
• 43:37
  or any, how did the artwork come about?
• 43:40
  I'm a huge fan of Tom's work.
• 43:42
  He's an extraordinary artist.
• 43:44
  He's one of my absolute favorite artists, genuinely,
• 43:48
  like living all day, so that's how much I've enjoyed.
• 43:50
  I wrote him, I think he's a really exceptional artist.
• 43:52
  And he's noidingly a really good writer as well.
• 43:55
  I know, he's double threat.
• 43:56
  I know, he's like, and he's a really nice guy.
• 43:59
  It's triple threat.
• 44:00
  He's a great boy.
• 44:02
  But I know, and I've admired Tom's artwork
• 44:05
  and his writing for quite a while.
• 44:08
  And it really was an absolute kind of dream come true
• 44:12
  to push him to sort of pair him with the bird.
• 44:16
  And because I know Tom a little bit,
• 44:18
  I did message him and say, is it because I did sort of have
• 44:21
  that thing.
• 44:22
  You know, something so lovely happens
• 44:23
  that you used to do slightly wake up in the night
• 44:25
  and think, if I dreamt it, you know, it'd be happening.
• 44:29
  So I messaged him and said, is it true?
• 44:30
  Are you doing it?
• 44:31
  And he said, yes, I am.
• 44:33
  And he said, you know, how do you sort of
• 44:35
  envisage the cover or anything else that is?
• 44:38
  That's not my job, Tom.
• 44:40
  But I just entirely trust him.
• 44:42
  I was so excited to see what he came up with.
• 44:44
  And he's so, he's such a deep, deep thinker.
• 44:48
  And he's so generous in his, in sort of sharing,
• 44:51
  he's sort of thought and his ideas as he goes along.
• 44:54
  And so it has felt like such a beautiful collaboration
• 44:59
  and such an honour to be paired with someone
• 45:01
  who's got such an incredibly original brain.
• 45:05
  And he's, he really understood the book
• 45:09
  on a really sort of sound to him, I think.
• 45:13
  And that was such a beautiful thing
• 45:15
  to kind of have that working relationship.
• 45:17
  I just feel so honored, really.
• 45:19
  Because I do absolutely love his work.
• 45:22
  And it brings that little flavour of something else
• 45:26
  on the page as well, those, those interior illustrations.
• 45:29
  Yeah, he's, he's incredible.
• 45:31
  Go and look him up and look up on his website
• 45:33
  and see his beautiful paintings.
• 45:34
  And he's in awe.
• 45:37
  I will do.
• 45:38
  So thank you so much for telling us about the 12,
• 45:41
  which is out in October.
• 45:43
  So we always end up to around the fancy worlds
• 45:47
  by picking the best place for something.
• 45:50
  I thought in honour of a caravan holiday in Wales
• 45:54
  that we should pick where we should go
• 45:58
  on a caravan holiday.
• 46:00
  And it's got to be like a proper caravan,
• 46:05
  not like a glamorous gypsy caravan.
• 46:08
  It has to be like a little thing
• 46:10
  you'd put on the back of a car.
• 46:12
  So imagine you climbing in your,
• 46:16
  it can be a space-traveling car that's
• 46:18
  towing this caravan.
• 46:19
  Where would you like to pitch up in your caravan?
• 46:23
  Oh, isn't it?
• 46:24
  I mean, I would have said Noonia,
• 46:26
  but I do think, I should say something
• 46:28
  that is mind-blowingly stupid as well,
• 46:30
  is that I only realised the sort of whole
• 46:32
  religious connection to Suthania
• 46:35
  when I was older than I should have been
• 46:37
  and the friend pointed it out to me
• 46:38
  and I think my first year at university.
• 46:40
  And I said, what do you mean?
• 46:41
  No, Wales Lens, not hang on.
• 46:45
  He can be both.
• 46:46
  Because both Lens, not around the smudge,
• 46:51
  maybe kind of, yeah, I don't know.
• 46:55
  But Tolkien and CS Lewis talked about
• 46:57
  not allegory but applicability.
• 46:59
  So for somebody coming to Noonia
• 47:03
  from a faith perspective or coming to it later
• 47:05
  and seeing that, can do that.
• 47:09
  But you can also read it without applying it
• 47:12
  in a faith way, because it's a dash-good story.
• 47:15
  It is, yeah.
• 47:17
  I think maybe sort of early on,
• 47:19
  like when it's, you know, early Noonia
• 47:21
  and sort of Magician's nephew, you know, kind of.
• 47:24
  You're going to have your little caravan
• 47:25
  watching the creation of Noonia
• 47:27
  with your hot chocolate as the star of the storm.
• 47:30
  Maybe it's already been.
• 47:32
  Yeah, it's kind of, it's already been created
• 47:34
  and the cabbie is already king and, you know,
• 47:36
  because I like them
• 47:37
  and I think they'd be really nice King Queen.
• 47:39
  So I think, okay.
• 47:40
  You'll be their first courtier.
• 47:42
  Yeah, and then to kind of be able
• 47:44
  to sort of hang out with the talking animals
• 47:45
  and, you know, and maybe hitch a ride on Fledges
• 47:50
  if it could let me.
• 47:52
  I think that would be really lovely.
• 47:54
  Or if not, no, I'm going to give it that.
• 47:56
  I'm just going to give Noonia
• 47:58
  because I'm re-reading horse and his boy at the moment.
• 48:00
  And it's interesting to read
• 48:04
  as if those worlds again and again and sort of see.
• 48:07
  I think you might be a bit hot in a caravan
• 48:09
  down in where they from Kalomino,
• 48:13
  wherever it is.
• 48:14
  I think you better off in the northern climb of Noonia.
• 48:17
  Definitely would be in the northern bit.
• 48:19
  Yeah.
• 48:19
  So I think you've got to bear this in mind
• 48:21
  when you're taking a caravan somewhere with you.
• 48:24
  Yeah, I want to be careful which bit I was in.
• 48:26
  I wouldn't want to be in the sort of marshlands
• 48:29
  and, you know, I think they're sort of.
• 48:32
  Too many mosquitoes.
• 48:33
  Yeah, I'm, you know.
• 48:36
  And I wouldn't want to be on the don't travel there
• 48:38
  because I'd be seasick, I just know it.
• 48:40
  And that would be real important.
• 48:42
  So the journey being seasick.
• 48:44
  Although I would love to make reaper-cheat,
• 48:46
  I really would love to make reaper-cheat.
• 48:48
  Well, I would quite like to join you
• 48:49
  parking up my caravan somewhere near the beach
• 48:52
  below Care Paravelle.
• 48:53
  Oh, lovely. Yeah.
• 48:55
  That's very similar.
• 48:56
  Basically it's your book.
• 48:58
  Yeah, that's also on a hill with a lovely beach.
• 49:02
  So I'll bring my caravan and park it alongside.
• 49:05
  And yeah, we can take in the sunsets.
• 49:08
  I'm actually, I hadn't thought about that with Care Paravelle,
• 49:10
  but you're right, actually.
• 49:11
  I mean, it's one of these things, isn't it, where books
• 49:13
  have seaked so deep into your sort of very beating.
• 49:16
  The bits of them are kind of echoes of them come out
• 49:20
  in your own writing in ways that you don't even realize
• 49:25
  that subconscious level.
• 49:26
  Yeah.
• 49:27
  So thank you so much, Liz, for taking us through the 12.
• 49:31
  And thank you very much for bringing it to me
• 49:34
  because I totally enjoyed this story.
• 49:35
  And I will highly recommend it to everyone.
• 49:38
  And at the moment, you don't have to wait to October.
• 49:40
  You can read already Bearmouth, which is available already.
• 49:44
  So thank you very much, Liz.
• 49:45
  Thank you for growing me.
• 49:52
  Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast.
• 49:55
  Brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy.
• 49:59
  Visit OxfordCenterForFatasy.org to join in the fun.
• 50:03
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• 50:08
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• 50:11
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• 50:14
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