Mutineers, Rampant Nuns and a Grimdark Whoddunit
A busy month, hence this newsletter is a few days late. Cracking on with editing The Blocko Tower. I’m on the final content edit before the grammar etc. copyediting, and the following are proving to be really helpful:
Reading the MSS out loud. This was a tip from Lee Child’s BBC Maestro Course. If you rely on silent reading when editing your book there is a strong tendency to ‘read’ what’s in you head, as opposed to what’s on the page. Reading aloud not only forces you to slow down, but it makes it a lot easier to spot mistakes, repetitions etc. It works a treat for me.
For punctuation I’m using Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence, which is not only a very useful guide to correct punctuation (especially commas, which are a real pain), but is also full of laugh-out-loud funny examples - “Aghast at this revelation, the duke backed into the fire and seriously singed his nether parts.”
So I’m two thirds of the way through. Here’s an extract to whet your appetite:
Sally tried to get up, but an immense hand pressed her down into the seat. She was stuck in some kind of pilot's chair, almost on her back, with her knees up against her chest and her arms stretched out on either side, touching cold metal structures that felt like cobwebs knitted out of silver foil. All sense of direction had vanished the instant the hatch slammed shut, and now she couldn’t even figure out which way was up. She guessed where the opening might be - a few feet away, opposite her face. She lifted her arm - it was so heavy - and reached into the darkness. Her fingertips met nothing and the effort exhausted her. Sally slumped down, the back of her skull thumping into a wad of musty cloth. It was as if the universe had dialled gravity up several notches.
From behind her glass wall she waited for the panic, the desperate fear. She'd locked herself in a disused ride in an abandoned amusement arcade in the middle of nowhere. The air was running out, and she’d die screaming and gasping as she clawed her nails off against the hatch. Nothing. Her mind swam in an ocean of blank indifference, as if the sphere was full of frozen time in which every emotion foundered. Not even the slightest glimmer of urgency to make her lift her hand again. Sally felt only a fatal lassitude as she sensed the curved walls race away in all directions, leaving her alone in a void.
The blackness still pressed against her face, but Sally got the impression of other shapes within this new, vast nothing. An image formed in her mind - of a plain covered in spheres identical to the Mystery Planet. A hundred sat in a perfect ten by ten grid. The vision in her head became as clear as a photograph taken with an infra-red camera, and brought with it a precise geometry. Yet at the same time it had all the delirious grainy unreality of a picture slipping unbidden into her consciousness, through the thin gap between waking and a fever dream.
But she was not alone. Another moved among the rows - a warden tending the spheres, testing each one.
Reading this month
Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi, 1945
Richard E. Grant praised this book on his BBC literary journeys series. A very interesting and beautifully written account of the author’s exile in one of the poorest parts of rural Italy in the 1930s. Levi, who trained as a doctor, was banished by Mussolini’s government to the region now know as Basilicata. Despite abject poverty, the peasants welcomed him and he became part of the community, secretly practicing medicine to help them overcome the constant threat of disease (mainly malaria). The book was made into a movie in 1979 with Gian Maria Volonté (of A Fistful of Dollars fame) in the lead role.
Cloistered: My Years as a Nun, Catherine Coldstream, 2024
Fascinating and extremely well written. It’s both an exploration of a monastic community descending into cultish in-fighting, and a study of the author’s own search for meaning through religious faith. Highly articulate and analytical, Catherine Coldstream wanted to explore the philosophy of Christian asceticism. In response to her own unstructured childhood, parental separation and loss of her father, she entered a Carmelite nunnery in Northumberland. There, instead of finding the spiritual and intellectual nourishment she sought, she became the victim of petty in-fighting and a quasi-cult centered around one of the prioresses. That, and a deeply rooted and conservative anti-intellectualism, eventually led to her leaving. A very interesting book, both as a chronicle of a religious community gone wrong, and the author’s own self-discovery.
The Nun, Denis Diderot, 1780
There’s a lot of similarity between The Nun and Cloistered. Both catalogue how the febrile hothouse atmosphere of a secluded religious order provides fertile ground for cults, cliques and mental and physical abuse. Diderot was writing in the late 18th century, when Nuns and Monks were fair game for sentimental and gothic authors who wanted to combine psychological studies with scandalous exposés of Catholic villainy. He also initially wrote the novel as a fake begging letter to his friend, the Marquis de Roquemaure. Over the years it has gained an wholly undeserved reputation as a book about salacious goings-on in a nunnery, largely based on the second half, which describes the sexual exploitation of the innocent heroine by a prioress. Anyone looking for titillation is going to be disappointed, though. It is very entertaining as a typical early gothic study of psychological oppression, and variations of the plot would end up in later novels such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.
The Devils of Loudon, Aldous Huxley, 1952
Final nun-related book. Once of the sources for Ken Russell’s best, and most notorious, movie The Devils (1971). It’s clear from reading this that the concept of dispassionate historicism hadn’t yet arrived in Huxley’s study. This is a stylistically odd, highly judgemental and often tongue in cheek account of the outbreak of mass hysteria around accusations of witchcraft in the French town of Loudon in 1634. A third of the way through, Huxley heads off into a long discussion of religion and spiritual contemplation with loads of references to a very Orientalist concept of Zen Buddhism. In the end it’s a rather bizarre book, typical of its era with its casual racism and snobbery, and its odd digressions into Eastern mysticism.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, David Grann, 2023
A fascinating account of the shipwreck and mutinies surrounding the ship The Wager which was part of the 1740 Anston expedition against the Spanish during the War of Jenkins Ear. The descriptions of the truly horrific voyage around Cape Horn, and the internecine rebellions between the crew, would make a cracking film. This was before the British Navy discovered that lime juice prevented scurvy, so most of the crew succumbed to a truly awful disease. The book fizzles out at the end, when the story shifts to England and the survivors start publishing their own accounts, which Grann has clearly used as his main source material. Still highly entertaining, though.
The Executioner’s Blade, Andrew Knighton, 2024
In a genre currently dominated by teenage/young adult Romantasy, Knighton’s debut novel is a real breath of fresh air. It’s best described as a hard-boiled detective novel set in a grimdark gothic city dominated by three all-equally-crazed religions. The town executioner, Lena, becomes convinced that the woman she beheaded for killing her husband was innocent, and sets out to discover the truth. Refreshingly, she is a middle-aged woman and a war veteran, forced to hide her own background and burying her regrets and loneliness in the bottle. She also happens to possess the ability to mind-link with the mythical creatures (dragons, manticores and wyverns) who come to the city caves to die. The labyrinthine politics and double-dealing of the city need patience and concentration to follow (think James Ellroy), but the payoff is well worth it and the book moves at a cracking pace.
Games
The main highlight this month was spending far too much money at the UK Games Expo at the NEC in Birmingham (well actually, I went on Sunday 1st June but I’m going to write about it here rather than in a month from now). It was billed as the largest games convention in the UK, and I can well believe it. Three immense halls full of stalls selling just about everything you could want in the hobby. There were also game tables everywhere, with people playing all manner of games, and playtesting yet-to-be-published prototypes. The three-day event also included loads of talks on gaming, though I was there mainly to source some accessories for my own games. I didn’t want to get any new systems, but that vow went right out of the window and I ended up with:
Pirate Borg - think magic and monsters set in a fever-dream Grimdark Caribbean. This one looks like a really good, spooky and ultra-violent way to scratch the pirate itch.
Into the Odd - psychedelic industrial horror steampunk in a beautifully designed world.
Mutant Crawl Classics - Goodman Games’ gloriously bonkers science fiction answer to their Dungeon Crawl Classics. Basically designed to help you recreate pulp-style Sci-Fi from the Golden Age and before, this is old school gaming at its most over the top. If nothing else, it’s worth it for the hilariously retro artwork alone.
Dungeon Crawl Classics - Dying Earth - DCC’s take on Jack Vance’s legendary series of science fantasy novels set at the very end of the Earth, just before the sun finally goes out. (side note - the original Dungeons and Dragons magic system drew heavily on Vance’s books, and Gary Gygax paid tribute by scrambing the author’s name into that of the evil sorceror Vecna).
Loke Battlemats - This is what I was actually after. We use these in my Thursday night live games. They’re basically huge books of wipeable gridded maps of terrain for playing out encounters and combat. We use home-made tokens which are a very cheap and easy substitute for miniatures, or eye-wateringly expensive stand-up pawns. This is how to create them.
Get a set of 1 inch wooden tokens and a 1 inch hole punch.
Source old Magic the Gathering cards (weeding out any valuable ones) and punch out the images (or you can run off a page of character and monster images as a pdf and take them to your local printer)
Use wood glue to glue the images to the tokens. Leave them to dry for 30 mins or so.
You now have a set of tokens for your game - dead easy and very cheap. If you source the images yourself you can print out exactly the number you need. The image above shows some of my homemade tokens on the Loke Big Book of Battlemats Revised which I bought at the Expo.
That’s all for this month - enjoy the better weather and have fun writing, reading and gaming.