Wednesday 2 October 2013

Paper book availability.

Well, I guess it was inevitable in the current book market that my little book should founder a little in the sea of literature, which is becoming a scene with almost as many contributors as there are consumers. I have been informed that last year I sold less than a hundred copies, and so it will only be available in print for a short time longer. If you have been putting off getting a copy, I strongly recommend that you do so now, and if nothing else, you will be getting your hands on a rarity!

What am I doing about this? Well, I am talking to you, for a start, and more importantly I am doing a quick second edition. Mostly this means having another look at the syntax, having read the book out loud for the first time recently, but I have also picked up a few errors such as referring to Eadmund as Eadwine on several occasions, which I noted has confused one reviewer!

The new edition will be out on Kindle in the near future, and I will of course keep everyone up to date with news here.

P.S.Ласкаво просимо всім моїм шанувальникам в Україні, мені шкода, що я можу використовувати тільки Google Translate би подякувати вам за ваше регулярних відвідувань. Я сподіваюся, що вам сподобалося дізнавшись про "Пригоди козлів Графф". Так благословить вас Бог!
Якщо це нічого не значить для вас, або що ми називаємо по-англійськи "Gobbledegook", будь ласка, коментувати, але майте на увазі, що якщо ви відповідаєте українською, мені доведеться використовувати Google Translate, щоб зрозуміти його, так що відповіді англійською мовою буде оцінили!

Friday 21 June 2013

Midsummer

Well, that's half of the summer gone, we are at the mid point, so now we can look forward to the nights closing in, the days getting shorter.

Remember the Words of House Stark ...


You have to admire George R Martin for coming up with such a catchy and easily parodied hook for his books. Every time someone Tweets or puts on Facebook, some comment about it soon being cardigan weather, they are advertising the Song of Ice and Fire series, even if they are thinking more of the Game of Thrones TV series. Either way, it's good money coming in to the author.

I'm sure he didn't imagine that these Words would have the impact they have, I would see it as being more of a reflection of the position of House Stark, that in a world where the seasons are unpredictable, it is the ones in the north who will need to remember winter the most through the long summers, for it will hit them hardest when it returns, with or without the White Walkers.

Living in Newcastle upon Tyne, I have often wondered on the use by the TV series of the Yorkshire dialect for the Starks and their allies. I approve, by the way, but it does then rather beg the question ... does that mean that Geordies are the Night's Watch? After all we are far to the north of the "Northerners" and we have a wall running through our fair city. By extension, north of the Wall there are the wildlings of Northumberland  and the Borders, and of course the White Walkers must have Scottish accents.

Thursday 13 June 2013

Sighs: an exhalation of breath or a sign of emotional turmoil?

[Sigh]

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing, why?" 

"Ah, well, you just gave a big sigh, that's all." 

 I don't know how many of you are familiar with that little scenario, but I get it all of the time from my wife, in some permutation or other. I really think it is a gender thing, possibly the root cause of so much misunderstanding between the sexes. Obviously I cannot speak for all Malekind, but to me a sigh is just a large exhalation of breath about 80% of the time. Possibly more. Only rarely will I sigh because I feel I am sad or exasperated or whatever other feeling could be expressed by a sigh. I am far more likely to be sighing because I have been breathing shallowly and feel the need for a good oxygenating breath. Or I might sit down suddenly and exhale sharply from the change in position. 

I think that to a woman, a sigh is one of a collection of non verbal modes of communication that they employ consciously to express dissatisfaction, a sense of hopelessness, or just as a way of eliciting an emotional response from their audience, e.g. the above "What's the matter?" If that audience is another woman, fair enough. The response will probably be uttered, and the woman can either make a dramatic denial of there being anything wrong (and thus confirming that there is) or she can pour her heart out to her confidante. If the audience is a man, there is a high chance that the sigh will be misinterpreted as a needful exhalation of breath. 

Some men are naturally more attuned to sighs than others and some men learn to invest time and effort into listening for these verbal clues - especially early in a relationship, when failure to interpret a sigh at a critical juncture can result in withdrawal of privileges, possibly on a permanent basis. Failure to pick up on a well placed sigh has its own set of feedbacks in the female mind, not least of which is a feeling that there is a deliberate refusal to pick up on such an obvious message, such as the "We have been at this party far too long, they are all your friends, the music is rubbish and the food is worse, so make our excuses and let's get out of here." You have to admit that is a lot of message to fit into a simple exhalation of breath.

I think we are back full circle to the female misinterpretation of the sudden exhalation of breath. Here is where the really fertile ground for misunderstanding lies. As the female mind is more sigh conscious, the response at the top is wide open to misinterpretation. Firstly, the denial is in fact an admission that something is wrong and therefore the cue for further investigation, which leads to increasingly vehement denials from the male, who has in fact just made the mistake of breathing out a little too forcefully. The terrain gets worse if the sigh occurs during, or immediately after a conversation. This can mean that the male disapproves of whatever the female said or subsequently did and this is therefore a followed by a more intense cross examination of the hapless and increasingly bewildered male. 

 At this point the male may sigh again. This time it probably does represent an expression of emotion or exasperation.

Thursday 30 May 2013

A little bit of self-promotion

I've just joined The Independent Author Network. You can see my page at http://t.co/a6S3T87xC3 It would seem that in order to succeed as an author, you have to spend more time trawling the internet for new ways to flag the interest of new readers than you do writing. There are any number of platforms out there that I have yet to get to grips with; Tumblr,  Pinterest, Stumbleupon, etc. I see that Reddit has survived from quite a way back, but I'm sure that there used to be a load of other services like it that have gone the way of the dodo. Ah well, it is a fast changing world online. Anyone been on Friends Reunited recently?

Wednesday 1 May 2013

Hal-an-Tol!

Hal an tol, jolly rumble-oh!
We've been up long before the day-oh!
To welcome in the summer
To welcome in the May-oh!
For summer is icumen in
And winter's gone away-oh!

Here we stand, as the sun rises on the month of May. The BBC is probably poised to launch its Springwatch programme on us yet again. Yet there we have one of our oldest folk songs telling us that we are welcoming in the summer, for it is but six and a half weeks to midsummer. I know that I have technically jumped the gun on the actual date of the ancient festival of May Day (also known as Beltane (Irish) or Calen Haf (Welsh)) by a few days, but the words of the song clearly speak of welcoming in the May, so I have timed this post to go out at sunrise in Newcastle upon Tyne on the 1st of May.

Will I have been up long before the day? Probably, probably not! Let's just hope that it feels like the beginning of summer.

Why am I so fascinated by all of this? It is a reaction to something that always annoys me in desk diaries, which tell me that summer begins on the 21st June, which is patently nonsense. More importantly, when I am writing of times which did not have this sort false view of the seasons, if I talk about "the beginning of summer" I need it to be clear that I am talking about early May, not late June.

Wednesday 20 March 2013

Tweet! Tweet!

Well, my publisher keeps pestering advising me to have a higher profile, so I have joined Twitter. This is actually the second time I have done this, but although I can now see my old account, it won't let me update it or send me a password reminder, so @Gruffling is in limbo and @KevinFuters is live.

Friday 1 March 2013

Trolls

I really felt that my trolls had to be something both like and unlike humans. They have an earthy, stony quality, but they are not made of stone. They look quite human in their body proportions and many of them are either much taller or much smaller the human average. I use the name Orcneas for them, using a word used once to describe Grendel in Beowulf. English did not have a word cognate with troll, it seems to have come into mainstream English usage in the 19th century, although it is recorded in the 17th century in a witch trial from the Shetlands.

I hint that trolls eventually leave Britain in order to find lands less densely inhabited by men; that they now live in Iceland and Scandinavia.During the 7th century they live in areas which are sparsely populated, but the human population is already on the increase and new lands are being cleared for human settlement and agriculture. In Northumberland, the spine of hills that we now call the Pennines meets the Cheviot Hills and the Southern Uplands of Scotland. This area is perfect for the trolls, and this is the area referred to as Trolldom in the book. There are other trolls living outside of Trolldom; one lived near Yeavering under a bridge over the River Glen. Communications with trolls living south of Hadrian's Wall have been lost, so there is no news of any who may have been alive further south.

Trolls and humans can have children together, although it is clear from what Alfreda says that trolls consider humans to be ugly - and most humans similarly consider the trolls to be ugly. Fortunately this is not always the case! Half-trolls may exist, and over time their descendants merge fully into the human population.

Tuesday 26 February 2013

The other project


I have referred to it elsewhere on this blog as "the other project." Well, if you are interested in finding more about it, I have uploaded it onto Authonomy where it is free to view in its unedited form. To view it you will need to be a member of Authonomy; a website run by Harper Collins which allows authors to showcase their work in the hope of receiving constructive criticism and (hopefully) attracting the attention of the editors at Harper Collins or even another publisher.

So, what is the other project? The title it is currently lurking under is "Cædmon: The Lord's Poet."


"Here, my friend, take the harp. I am sure you can entertain us with a fine lay!"

When his lord makes him swear an oath never to sing his greatest composition again, and carrying a burden of additional lies and slanders, Cædda seeks refuge in anonymity and exile as a slave near remote Streneshalh.

His past returns to haunt him when a menacing stranger appears at the Winterfilling Feast, calling upon him to sing.

Eluding his pursuer, he finds refuge in an isolated cow byre. As he contemplates his life story and his immediate situation, he must make a final decision.

Can the Lord’s Poet avoid retribution again, or is it time to rise to the challenge and embrace his destiny?

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Candlemas (again)

Steve Ashley sings a "Candlemas Carol" which begins:

"Oh, Candlemas beware old man
The wind gale and the storm,
For if you think that winter's dead
It's barely been born,
And if you think that the spring has come,
With the bright sun in the sky
An icy wind blows icy tears
From the corner of your eye"

I posted last year about Candlemas, and here I am again. This year it is much colder and I am more inclined to appreciate Steve Ashley's point. So, how to reconcile the conflict between a logical division of the year by length of the day and our observation that there continues to be cold weather after winter (and for that matter warm weather after summer).

I see two factors at work here, the first being that it should be possible to divide the year up into two "great seasons" of warmth and coldness and that the boundary would therefore be the equinoxes, the dates when the day and the night are both twelve hours long (give or take a few minutes). With this pattern, half of spring would fall within the greater winter and the other half would fall in the greater summer. The same apply to autumn.

The other factor is the physical laws relating to the conservation of heat. It feels like summer through August and into September because the energy provided by the sun is still present as warm atmospheric conditions and warm land surfaces. February and early March feel like winter because a lot of the sun's heat is taken up  just with heating that mass of air and the upper layers of the surface.


Blog tidy-up

I have created a new page on this blog which brings together the posts that relate to the book. You can find all of this information here. I have deleted the older posts that this information is derived from.

Friday 18 January 2013

The Historical Setting: 7th century Northumbria

I'm still not exactly sure why I wanted to set The Adventures of the Billy Goats Gruff in the Early Middle Ages, but I know that I was drawn to stories of the period. I started writing the story in about 1994, before I  started my MA, so the interest was sparked by history books for the general market and I had not at that stage picked up a copy of Bede's Ecclesiatical History to begin to read the primary sources - indeed at that time I knew more about the later Historia Britonnum and Annales Cambriae than I did about the Anglo-Saxon sources.

What I was aware of was the prominent position of Northumbria at that time. I have since learned to develop a layer of scholarly cynicism, to see Bede and other contemporary writers as people with agendas and bias, not as pure, disinterested chroniclers of events. Nonetheless, there was definitely something dynamic and vital about the kingdom in the 7th century, a fact that is attested in the monumental sculpture, the incredible illuminated manuscripts and the fact that no other kingdom at the time produced so many writers who could present their stories of saints and kings and be preserved after Northumbria had ceased to be independent and became a relatively minor earldom and ultimately remembered only through the county name of Northumberland.

It is difficult to define when the concept of Northumbria came into being and whether it was meant to represent a unified political force or to be descriptive of a group of peoples who came to be united. The inverse term of South Humbrians was certainly used (by Bede, of course) to refer to all the other English kingdoms, but that label did not stick, largely because the South Humbrians included Mercia and the West Saxons, who were to be the main rivals in later centuries for the dominance of England.

There were two principal dynasties involved in the formation of Northumbria, the Idings in the north and the Soemilings in the south. The Idings ruled a land given the Latin name of Bernicia, which I have called Bernice (not pronounced Ber-nees like the girls' name, but Ber-nee-che). The Soemilings ruled ina land in modern Yorkshire called Deira, which I have given the alternative name of Dere in the book after the name of the Roman road which runs from York to Edinburgh.

Ida was a king of Bernicia and is said to have joined Bernicia and Dinguaire (Dinware in the book). As the older name given in Welsh sources for Bamburgh is Dingauiraroy (or something similar), this seems to represent a more southerly kingdom, probably centred on the River Tyne, absorbing a more northerly one. Ida seems to have had a lot of sons, the greatest of whom was Æthelric. They were under repeated attack particularly by Urien of Rheged and Morcant, but they survived it all in part because the Welsh were divided and Urien was killed by an assassin. Æthelric's son, Æthelfrith, was the first king of both Bernicia and Deira. He also seems to have expanded his territories westwards at the cost of kingdoms like Rheged and its forgotten southern neighbours.

Soemil is named in the ancestry of the kings of Deira, but may not have been an actual person. For the purposes of the book, I have assumed that he was, and that the Grufflings are descended from him, thus giving them royal blood. The first king of Deira named in history was Ælle, for his name is said to have been known to slave traders in Rome, as recounted in the Life of St Gregory. It was Ælle that was defeated by Æthelfrith when he became ruler of both kingdoms. Ælle's son Eadwine (Edwin) was forced into exile until the time was ripe for his return. Eadwine defeated Æthelfrith and in turn ruled over both Deira and Bernicia, the only Soemiling to do so. The importance of the line continued after his death, however, as we shall see in time.

Into this situation I have placed our family of Grufflings. The two older boys were born in Deira and stayed there as fosterlings when their mother died. Their father was sent north into Bernicia, to the place that Bede tells us was called Ad Gefrin and is know called Yeavering, in Northumberland. Here he remarried, a political match to a princess from the fallen royal family of Rheged. They had two sons and a daughter, born in the north and of mixed ancestry - they differ from their elder brothers in being biligual, learning Welsh from their mother even though English was their main language. When Edgar and his elder brother Athelred join the family, they are almost full grown men, and Athelred is taken by his father as his assistant. The younger boys learn to get along with their older brothers, but the differences between them can cause arguments to flare up - as with brothers anywhere.

In AD 633 two significant events seem to have occurred. The first was that Cearl of Mercia (or Mierce) was deposed by a kinsman called Penda. The second was that Cadwallon (or Cadwalla), who was the king of Gwynedd, rebelled against Eadwine. Together with this same Penda, he marched out against Eadwine, who fell at Hatfield Chase. Cadwallon stormed northwards, harrying the land and seeking out any English settlers, putting them to the sword. Bede states that his intention was to destroy the English race. This is the situation facing the family at the beginning of the book. The events at Yeavering are not part of history, although the excavation there by Brian Hope-Taylor identified two attempts to burn the place to the ground, neither of which was particularly successful. I have taken the first attempt as being in AD 633 and have based my account around that fact.

In a future post I will discuss the aftermath of Eadwine's death further, as it has an impact on one minor character and will affect the world to which the Grufflings return.