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Diary of an Ice Age. Day 6.

December 2, 2010 in Edinburgh, Photos by Brian | 2 comments

It’s Thursday.  The first snow fell around midnight last Friday.  The car has been trapped, shackled by the white stuff, since Sunday.  Food stocks are running out.  The only shop within non-snowshoe walking distance has run out of bread.  It’s down to its last couple of boxes of corn flakes.  Life without corn flakes looms!  Morale is at a low ebb.  To keep warm, we are burning the complementary copies of my books that the publishers send me.  Saw a postman for the first time in days this morning, but he didn’t make it up our street; I fear he may have fallen victim to the ravenous wolves that now roam through our gardens and sidestreets, pressing their noses up against our windows after dark and drooling.  The snowmen we built in the first happy days of our wintry imprisonment are crushed and fallen, submerged beneath the prodigious further snowfalls. 

The birds – poor fluffy little birdikins – gather in disconsolate groups to bemoan the closure of the world.  There is an eerie silence, save the occasional crunch and rumble of a 4×4 patrolling roads that are more like skiing pistes.  It’s a fraught kind of peace.  Residents keep themselves busy bombarding the local council with demands for snowploughs, gritters, skis for those poor postmen and their waste collection colleagues.

And now and again the sun breaks through and the world is as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen: great undulating mounds of gleaming, powdery snow; icicles – proper, clear stalactites of pure ice – adorn every gutter.  It’s snowing again now, as I type, but without the conviction of recent days and nights.  Forecasters say it’s just about done with us for now.  But it’s going to get colder, not warmer, so what’s already fallen isn’t likely to be thawing any time soon.  The wintry fantasia is going to be with us for a while yet.

I fear for the postman, if he does arrive at the door of some particularly desperate, deprived house, its residents driven mad by their enforced seclusion.  Hunger and cold do terrible things to a person, and a plump-looking postman might be just the nourishment they need.

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Narnia’s Back

November 29, 2010 in Edinburgh, Photos by Brian | 3 comments

Last year it took until about mid-December, if I remember rightly, for unprecedented snowfall to convert my surroundings into a film set for The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.  Mother Nature is not messing about this year.  She has brought the unprecedented forward, and made it bigger.

Getting on for a foot and a half of the fluffy white stuff has descended upon us in the last 48 hours (that’s 40cm plus for those who think metric).  It’s entirely ridiculous for Edinburgh in November (I mean, it’s not even winter yet, for Heaven’s sake).  The local roads are impassable.  The silence is frosty, in the literal rather than metaphorical sense.  There’s not enough milk in the fridge to last past tomorrow morning.  Come to that, the car’s supposed to be going in for a service and MOT tomorrow am.  Not going to happen, I don’t think; particularly since, if I turn my head through ninety degrees and look out the window: it’s snowing heavily again.

All of this inconvenience and hassle is, I can report, absolutely fantastic.  Love it.  I started laughing when the first snow began to fall late Friday night; I’ve been smiling more or less ever since.  My life is being messed with, and I find it absolutely wonderful.  Although there is a limit.  Another day or so is probably mine.  Just saying, Mother Nature, if you happen to be listening.

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A Touch of Seasonal Colour

November 8, 2010 in Photos, Wildlife by Brian | 2 comments

Photos from a week spent out of town, savouring the season.  Autumn’s by far the most characterful time of year, by my reckoning (at least in this corner of the world): all bluster and colour and change.  Got a certain natural magic to it, which nothing embodies more powerfully for me than the movement of birds.  Yes, I’m the odd guy who, at this time of year, might suddenly stop in the middle of doing or saying something and stare up at the sky, just because he’s heard a skein of geese honking their way overhead; or who pulls over the car in mid-journey to stare fixedly at some long hedgeline because he’s seen a flock of Scandinavian thrushes enjoying a bit of British hospitality.

What can I say?  These things give me a frisson of pleasure every time I see them.  They speak of ancient, deep rhythyms and cycles that are unimpressed by mere human preoccupations.

Plus, of course, there’s the colours.  No other season gets close to matching Autumn’s palette.

(I am glossing over the near-relentless rain of the last week or so.  It was, to put it mildly, a damp experience.  But hey, that’s part of Autumn’s personality too).

A Picture from Edinburgh’s Crazy Past

July 14, 2010 in Edinburgh, History, Photos, Scotland, The Edinburgh Dead by Brian | No comments

So, the manuscript for The Edinburgh Dead will be going to the publisher soon (i.e. weeks rather than months), hence relative quietness around here recently.  But I thought now might be the moment to check out a picture, taken by my own fair hand:

Yes, it’s a graveyard with a fortified watchtower in it.  Why, you may wonder, would the good citizens of Edinburgh have found it necessary to defend their cemetries with miniature castles?  Here’s a case where the past, when viewed from enough temporal or moral distance, starts to look every bit as unfamiliar as any invented fantasy world.  It’s a pretty well known, if sordid, tale of our past, so will come as no surprise to many of you, but in 18th and 19th century Edinburgh – and a good few other places in the UK, since this was by no means a purely Edinburgh phenomenom – the dead required heavy duty protection of this sort against the living.  Strange, but very much true.

Fresh corpses were so much in demand for dissection in anatomy classes at the then flourishing universities, and in private anatomy schools of which there were a great many, that a veritable industry sprang up: graverobbing.  As I said, a well known tale, so no great surprise.  But this watchtower thing is a particular flourish on the story that I love.  Several of Edinburgh’s graveyards still have them: fortifications from which armed men could keep watch for the dreaded graverobbers (or Resurrection Men, which is the rather more dramatic name for them I prefer).

When you stop and think about it, it’s just too strange for words.  One of the country’s greatest cities had castellated towers in its cemetries, because a certain number of its citizens, including eminently respectable and indeed famed teachers of the medical sciences, were engaged in a racket that involved exhuming the corpses of innocent fellow citizens and cutting them up for the edification of students.  Weird.  And an enormously tempting historical oddity to play around with in fantactical fiction, of course.  Which brings me back to: the manuscript for The Edinburgh Dead will be going to the publisher soon (i.e. weeks rather than months).

I Am Not Hard to Please

February 2, 2010 in Photos by Brian | 2 comments

Waking up to find an inch or two of unforecasted snow blanketing the world, and still falling … colour me happy.

Edinburgh Meanderings

August 12, 2009 in Edinburgh, Photos, The Edinburgh Dead by Brian | 2 comments

I did virtually no specific research for The Godless World, but things are a bit different now. The Edinburgh Dead requires me to drag myself away from the computer now and again, and do some proper work. There is, incredible as it might seem, some stuff that – as far as I can tell, anyway – the internet does not yet know, which suits me just fine because I seriously like a bit of research: digging around in old books (courtesy of the excellent National Library of Scotland) or, as I was doing yesterday morning, descending into the bowels of Edinburgh City Chambers in search of the City Archives. And once I got there I spent a very happy couple of hours perusing an unpublished phD thesis from 1996 on the subject of the 19th century beginnings of Edinburgh’s police force. Now and again this writing lark is very cool. (this depends, obviously on your definition of cool: and yes, mine does include discovering and reading vaguely obscure documents in slightly strange places. I’m funny like that.)

It’s a strange feeling, making fiction – and fantastical, dark fiction at that – out of bits of real history. It’s trespassing in the lives of real people, and putting words into their mouths and deeds – sometimes downright villainous ones – into their hands. It feels like taking a liberty with their memory, even the ones who were downright disreputable and murderous in reality. The city itself, though, is a much easier subject to work with. Edinburgh’s soaked to its rocky bones in history, much of it darker and stranger than anything a mere writer could come up with, and using it as the stage for a drama feels entirely natural and appropriate.


I’ve got the perfect excuse, now, to wander around Edinburgh’s Old Town, tracking down ancient alleyways that have been the scenes of murder, debauchery and mystery for hundreds of years. Even now, in the midst of the Festival(s), when the main streets are so full of tourists you can hardly move, the canyon-like closes are still and quiet and full of atmosphere. They feel old, and patient. Perfect venues for fictions.

And while I’m wandering around with my head in the 19th century, searching out the bits of the past that have survived, pondering the dastardly deeds – real and invented – that I’ll populate these byways with, everyone else is milling about in a crazy, Festival-fuelled present in which mermaids pose beside statues of great philosophers (David Hume, famous son of Edinburgh, in this case)

Funny old world.

Posting While the Rain Falls

August 6, 2008 in Comics, Fall of Thanes, History, Magazines, Photos, Podcasts by Brian | No comments

To be honest, there are already enough short fiction podcasts to make it tough to keep up with them, but the latest addition is far too cool to ignore: TTA Press, the publishers of the UK’s major sf/fantasy and horror fiction magazines, as well as a rather good (if excessively infrequent) crime one, have launched Transmissions from Beyond, podcasting selected stories from their huge, multi-genre back catalogue. I’ll be listening.

Another new podcast: Reality Break is putting out interviews with authors, most of them originally done for radio in the 1990s. Some notably big guns have already been deployed: Will Eisner, Cory Doctorow and the late Robert Jordan.

Free Fantasy Reading: you can download a free pdf of Black Gate magazine no. 12. Got to admit I haven’t actually read it, but the magazine’s got a pretty good reputation, and there’s certainly a lot of content: 224 pages of it.

Since Watchmen featured in the last post here, thought I’d mention an interesting transcript of a 1988 round table discussion about the series. But first: BEWARE! This is as SPOILERIFIC a discussion as could possibly be contrived by the wit of Man. If you have not yet read Watchmen, or if you want to see the upcoming movie without actually knowing every last detail of the plot in advance (and, believe me, you really do), FLEE! The imminent link will utterly and completely ruin the whole thing, including all of the many surprises the story has up its sleeves. Seriously. For those who have already read Watchmen, it’s a fascinating discussion, because Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are involved, and it unpicks in great detail a lot of the story’s many layers, influences and concerns. It can be found here.

An interesting historical side note: The Picts appear to have had a whole lot more going on in their part of the world (Scotland) than was previously thought.

Thanks to everyone who’s e-mailed asking about a release date for Fall of Thanes. It’s nice that people care enough to be interested! I wish I had a more definitive answer to offer, but at the moment I don’t. It’s taken longer than I hoped and intended to finish the thing off, for a mixture of writing and non-writing related reasons, but it is almost done. Should be going to the publisher for consideration in the next few weeks. In the past, it’s taken about a year to get from that point to publication. Sorry I can’t be any more specific than that yet. More news as and when it’s available.

It has been raining all day. Raining hard, for a lot of it. Frankly, it’s all a bit disappointing, as the weather has been for weeks and weeks. So I thought I’d post a photo, grabbed in one of the few sunny interludes I remember from the last couple of months. It commemorates the chance discovery of a wonderful country lane, thick with wildflowers, bees and butterflies. As I sit here listening to the rain gurgling along the gutters and down the drainpipes, perhaps it will provide a little remembered warmth, and remind me that we do still notionally have things called summers, even if these last couple of years the only possible description of that season has been ‘damp squib’.

Return to The Isle of May

June 16, 2008 in Clips, Photos, Scotland, Wildlife by Brian | No comments

A ritual of sorts has been enacted: the all but annual trip to the Isle of May (2007 version was recorded here). Good news for me, since it’s one of my favourite places. Less predictable in its consequences for readers of this blog, as it leads inexorably and inevitably to … my photos! Hooray.

That’s the Isle in question, and very pretty it is too, but here’s the real reason I actually take the hour long boat trip required to reach it:




The birds, obviously. But there’s no denying the place itself is so extremely pleasant it might be worth even if there was nothing with wings within ten miles of it:


The last of the bird pictures, by the way, is an Arctic tern. These are heroes of the bird world, going from the Antarctic to the Arctic and back again every year (and no, Scotland is not quite in the Arctic – for all that it feels like it occasionally. I guess our Arctic terns are ever so slightly less motivated than most of their brethren). Watching them, if you take a moment to reflect that not so very long ago these very birds were surfing the breezes of the Antarctic Ocean, perhaps even dodging Antipodean icebergs, it blows your mind just a little. I think they’re fantastic.

That sentiment is not, it has to be said, mutual. This year, the tern colony has taken a collective decision to locate itself right next to the landing stage. To reach the boat, therefore, you have to run the gauntlet of righteously agitated and protective parents. I am thus able to leave you with this world exclusive video. A brief (and I do mean brief, like 2 seconds brief, so pay attention) clip revealing, for the first time anywhere, the sound a fantasy author makes when the immensely well-travelled beak of an Arctic tern connects with his skull at high velocity:

Bloodheir Bits and Pieces

April 21, 2008 in Bloodheir, Photos, Reviews, Signing by Brian | No comments

My trusty test reader enjoys a quiet moment with the finished Bloodheir. He’s smiling, so presumably happy, even though the only reference to bears occurs on page 161 and involves poking a sleeping one with a stick. Not much to engage the ursine reader, you’d think. Still, it’s probably an improvement on Winterbirth, in which the main bear involvement was getting wheeled around in a cage and shot full of crossbow bolts. Contrary to appearances, I have nothing against bears.

Big box of hardbacks and the UK trade paperback turned up on my doorstep last week. One of those moments that I suspect never quite loses its appeal, no matter how well-established and megastarish an author becomes. Orbit have done a lovely job with the book, methinks. It’s a very fine package. Seeing the cover art up close and in situ it’s striking what a fine piece of work it is. Given that my artistic skills are on the wrong side of non-existent, this kind of thing leaves me not a little impressed. And jealous. The illustration is by Gene Mollica, much more of whose diverse work can be admired here.

There’s a Bloodheir review up at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist. It contains the succint and pretty accurate line: ‘Aeglyss is a complete basket case.’ Yep. Can’t really disagree with that. The guy’s got issues, you know.

And I’ll just insert the customary reminder here that anyone who wants to buy a signed copy of Bloodheir can do so via Transreal Fiction. It’ll cost you the cover price plus post and packing. Dedications, inscriptions and so on can also be included, but not, sadly, any cute little drawings, as my artistic skills … well, see above.

Another Country Ticked Off

April 7, 2008 in Photos, Winterbirth by Brian | No comments

A first, very brief, visit to Ireland for me over the weekend. Gorgeous place. Was in the Burren, on the west coast, which is a place so fantastically landscaped it looks like it belongs in fiction.


Huge expanses of exposed limestone, all corrugated and cracked. Basically looks like a moonscape, only with less dust and a bit more grass (though in some places not much more – the photo above is really a positive oasis of grassiness compared to the really cool bits, but of course I didn’t get a photo of them). And for extra cool points, the whole place is dotted with relics of Stone Age humanity. Like this tomb, which looked precariously balanced to me, but presumably will last a bit longer since it’s made it through from BC times this far:


Away from the limestone, it’s all rolling countryside, verdant fields and wide open shores.


Very nice. Well done, Ireland. Good effort.

Despite the fact I wasn’t paying attention, the world saw fit to continue to happen over the weekend, and indeed happen in ways that manage to be very modern but would also be entirely familiar to our ancestors from a few hundred years ago: the hyper-modern (and rather fine looking) sailing ship Ponant got seized by pirates and last I heard is holed up in a Somali port hiding from the French navy who are in pursuit … Terrible business, I’m sure, but since nobody seems to have got hurt so far, I feel able to admit that my first reaction was something along the lines of: ‘Ha. Cool. Them’s some pirates with taste.’

And in other, marginally less noteworthy news, the US mass market paperback of Winterbirth turned up in the post. It’s published next month, and is a lovely little thing that I am entirely charmed by. Small, but perfectly formed.

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