Inspirations: Cats In Art

As you can imagine, I looked at a lot of cat pictures for inspiration while I was writing Varjak Paw!  So I wanted to share some of them with you this week.

This first one is by Rudyard Kipling.  He drew it to illustrate his story 'The Cat That Walked By Himself', which is one of the Just So Stories.  Kipling's one of my favourite writers, and this is definitely one of my all-time favourite cat pictures!

Cats have a very long history in human art; we've been making images of them for thousands of years.  Here's an ancient Egyptian cat - a statue of Bastet, the cat goddess.

This one's a mosaic from 2nd century Rome; it shows a cat hunting a bird.

And here's a 19th century Japanese woodblock print, by the great Ando Hiroshige.  I love how he captures the way cats watch the world.

Of course, there's been lots of cat photography too.  My favourite cat photographer is Ylla, who made this fantastic image.  I must have looked at it more than any other single image when I was writing Varjak and Outlaw - somehow, I feel it goes right to the essence.

But for me, Dave McKean's pictures are right up there with the very best.  This page is from his brilliant comic Cages.  I read it long before I wrote Varjak Paw; and when my publisher asked me who I thought drew good cats, my first and only thought was "Dave McKean!"

It's still amazing to me that he illustrates my books; I never get tired of looking at his art.  I can't wait to show you what he's been doing for Phoenix - it is absolutely incredible!!!

Writing Music: The Outlaw Varjak Paw

A while back, one of my readers asked if music ever inspired me while writing.  It certainly does, so I made this post about the music I listened to while writing Varjak Paw.  This time, I'm going to share some of the music I listened to while writing The Outlaw Varjak Paw.

I started writing Outlaw in 2002, and finished it in 2005.  During that time, I discovered the band British Sea Power, and particularly their first album, the brilliantly titled The Decline Of British Sea Power.  

I played that album hundreds of times while writing Outlaw.  It had the epic sweep I wanted the book to have; the same combination of darkness and hope.  I would always feel electrified by the surge and crackle of their songs, which often seemed to be on the edge of spiralling out of control - as you can see in this amazing video of them playing live on Jools Holland.

But old habits die hard, and I have to admit, I also listened to a huge amount of The Cure while writing Outlaw. This time, it was mainly their Disintegration album, which remains my favourite of theirs.  To answer an interesting question on my earlier post, I would pick the spine-tingling 'Plainsong' as the music I imagine when Varjak and Sally Bones are on the tower at the end - perhaps not the battle itself, but the moments just before it.

The live version in this video is great, but if you want to hear the original version I heard while writing, you can listen to it on Spotify, where I've made a playlist with a few other tracks that I put on a CD for Dave McKean, when he was doing the illustrations...

School Visit: Saxon Primary

A big thank you to Bonnie Saunders & everyone at Saxon Primary School in Shepperton, who were kind enough to invite me to visit them this week!

Thanks especially to all the amazing Varjak Paw fans I met in Years 4, 5 and 6 - it was a great pleasure to meet you, and to talk with you about writing & books!  I really enjoyed the day, and I hope you all did too.

It was especially exciting for me as this was the first author visit arranged through this site - so if anyone else out there would like to know more about my visits, have a look here.

Book Review: Hostage Three

Here's another book review - I've been doing quite a few recently, as I have a bit more time on my hands now Phoenix is finished.  (Though I'm already beginning to plan my next book, and will hopefully start a draft of that one soon...)

Anyway - this time, the Guardian asked me to review Hostage Three by Nick Lake.  It was published in the Saturday 19th January Review, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be up on their website yet, so here's the text of my review:

Hostage Three

by Nick Lake

370pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99

Hostage Three starts by plunging us into the middle of an adrenaline-drenched dramatic situation.  The narrator, a teenage girl called Amy, is being held hostage by Somali pirates on her family's luxury yacht.  Her father is Hostage One; her stepmother Hostage Two; Amy is Hostage Three.  There's a gun to her head, and she is about to be executed.

It's hard to imagine a more arresting opening.  This is very much what creative writing textbooks mean when they talk about starting a story in medias res.  It's impossible not to be hooked.  But there's a risk.  Frontloading a narrative means that nothing else is likely to match the beginning for sheer intensity.  And so it proves with Hostage Three – yet as it rewinds to show us the events leading up to that opening, Nick Lake's story develops not into the white-knuckle thriller ride you might predict, but into something more complex, with unexpected political intelligence and emotional power.

He lays out the backstory quickly and neatly.  Amy's mother has recently died; her wealthy banker father has remarried, and she's lost in a teenage rebellion that distances her from everything around her, numbing her pain.  Her father's response is to buy a yacht and take his dysfunctional family on a round-the-world cruise – only to get hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia.

Rather than the rising tension one might expect at this point, a dreamy, dislocated tone takes over, as Amy falls for one of the pirates: their translator Farouz, who is young and considerate and shares her love of music.  When it becomes clear that he has feelings for her too, a Romeo and Juliet situation develops.  The electricity between them is heightened by the impossibility of the situation, and nicely counter-pointed by self-aware humour.  Musing on the wisdom of loving a pirate, Amy tells herself that "this is taking the whole bad boy thing to another level," and that "some people would probably say it was Stockhausen syndrome, or whatever it's called."

Farouz also serves as Amy's introduction to the lives that lie behind the headline-making tales of piracy upon which this novel is based.  While she comes into the story with little knowledge of Somali history, politics, economics and culture, she ends it, as we do, having learned a great deal very lightly.  "It hadn't even occurred to me that these men had a story of their own, that they were anything but thieves, pure and simple," she tells us.  Lake blows that idea out of the water, showing a well-researched and nuanced grasp of the situation, carefully drawing distinctions between Somalis and Somalis, Muslims and Muslims, even pirates and pirates.  He doesn't glamorise them, but takes us deep into their perspective, fleshing out their reality to such an extent that by the end, we can see the Western characters through their eyes, and do not necessarily like what we see.

All of which leaves him with a formidable problem: how do you end a story like this?  It would be a hard-hearted reader who wouldn't want a happy ending for Amy and Farouz, but perhaps only a naïve one would believe it possible.  Lake's solution – a succession of different endings – doesn't quite work for me.  But the appeal of this book lies not with its narrative mechanics.  It's with the characters and their voices, each possessing their own unique perspective and subjectivity.  By extending this imaginative generosity even to people who would usually be villains, Hostage Three goes beyond the tropes of genre fiction, and does something rather more humane and interesting.

New Year, new book, new blog...

Happy New Year to all my readers!  It's exciting because this is the year that my new book PHOENIX will finally be published - so please make a note of the date, and spread the word - it'll be out in August!  I'll be posting lots more about it as we get closer to publication...

In the meantime, you may be interested to know that as well as blogging here, I also post sometimes on the DFB Storyblog, where my publishers suggest a topic, and lots of authors and illustrators then post about it.  This time, we were asked to write about the business of being an author, and how we balance it with actually writing books.  We were also asked about our new years' resolutions...

If you want to know more, my post is here - and here's one of the images from it - my new notebook!

Book Review: The Great Unexpected

As well as writing my own books, I also write about other people's books occasionally.

Here's a review I wrote of The Great Unexpected by Sharon Creech, which is published in today's edition of The Guardian.

SF Said's Photography

Photography is my favourite hobby.  I love it because it doesn't involve words.  When you spend every day writing words, it's nice to get away from them sometimes!  And pictures can still tell a story.  Photography has helped me see so many strange and interesting things; things I would never have noticed otherwise.

I enjoy prowling around city streets at night with my camera, trying to see things from different points of view.  Sometimes I imagine them from a street cat's point of view, as if I was Varjak Paw, or one of his friends.  What would the city really look like to them?

This has led me into some strange places.  I can find myself staring for ages at puddles, or reflections of neon lights on a rainy pavement.  I spend whole evenings standing on precarious bridges over motorways, watching the light trails from traffic sparkling in the night.

I've even been down sewers to see what it really looks like there.  (And smells like.)  If you've read The Outlaw Varjak Paw, you might recognise this view:

I like to justify my photography by claiming that it's part of my research; it influences the way I imagine and describe scenes.  My new book, PHOENIX (coming in summer 2013), would definitely not be the same without it.  This book is not about Varjak Paw, or even cats; it's about people this time, and also aliens, because it's a science fiction epic set in outer space.  It begins with the stars singing to the main character.  I think that might look something like this:

By the way, if you like these photographs, some of them are published in a beautiful little book called London's Lost Rivers.  It's a guide to the hidden, secret rivers that flow underneath the city; rivers most people have never seen.  I didn't write any of the words... but there are 18 of my pictures in the book.

Writing Music: Varjak Paw

One of my readers recently asked if music ever inspired me while writing (thanks for the question, Jade!)  The answer is that music is absolutely crucial to me while writing, though different books have had  different soundtracks.  So I thought it might be fun to share some of my favourite writing music with you here.  (Of course, everyone sees and hears things differently, so I wouldn't expect anyone else to share my tastes in music!  This is just a bit of background, if you're interested...)

When I was writing Varjak Paw, I was almost always listening to The Cure.  Somehow their music seemed to be the perfect soundtrack for Varjak's adventures in the city.  Strangely enough, I didn't listen to Lovecats while writing, but it does seem  perfect for Varjak Paw, so I put it on a compilation tape for Dave McKean when he was doing the illustrations!

The album I listened to the most while writing Varjak was definitely The Head On The Door.  The track I would pick as the single most inspiring is A Night Like This.  Whenever it came on, I would always feel an extra surge of energy.  For me, it has exactly the feeling that I wanted to the book to have.

I still love that song; I listened to it a lot while writing Outlaw too, and even Phoenix.  But lots of other music came into the writing of those books, and I'll do some more posts in the future about them, if anyone would like to know more!

Research: Catwatching

Another thing I'll be doing in this blog is sharing some of my research with you.  So here's a book that helped me write Varjak Paw: Catwatching, by Desmond Morris.

It was very important to me that the cats in Varjak should be as much like real cats as possible.  So I did a lot of research into cat behaviour and body language, and of all the books I read (there were many!), this one was the most helpful:

Morris really gives you a sense of what it must be like to be a cat, and to experience the world through a cat's senses - most of them much sharper than human senses.  For example, he tells us:

"Humans in the prime of life can hear noises up to about 20,000 cycles per second.  Dogs can manage up to about 35,000 to 40,000 cycles per second, so that they are able to detect sounds that we cannot.  Cats, on the other hand, can hear sounds up to an astonishing 100,000 cycles per second...  This acoustic ability explains why cats sometimes appear to have supernatural powers.  They hear and understand the ultrasonic sounds that precede a noisy activity and respond appropriately before we have even realized that something unusual is going to happen."

The book is packed with this kind of information; Morris answers almost every question you could have about cats, sometimes very surprisingly.  If you enjoyed Varjak Paw, I can highly recommend it!

Inspirations: Watership Down

One thing I'll be doing in this blog is writing about my inspirations. 

So here's one of my first: Watership Down.

It was 1975.  I was 8 years old, and I lived in the middle of London.  I'd never seen a rabbit in real life.  So when my mum gave me an enormous 500 page book with a rabbit on the cover, I didn't know what to make of it.  "Trust me," she said.  "I've read it myself, and it's brilliant.  Read the first page.  If you don't like it, you can stop, but try one page and see for yourself…"

So I did.  And from that first page, I was plunged into the world of those rabbits.  And their world was so much darker and scarier than I'd imagined.  Because everything in it was bigger than them, and it was all out to get them.  Just to survive, those rabbits had to be so much braver and stronger than they ever thought they could be…

Sometimes it was terrifying, sometimes it was sad, sometimes it was funny – but at all times, it was completely compelling.  I could not stop reading that book, and as I read it, I remember thinking, "I will never forget this, as long as I live…"  And I haven't.  This is the very same copy of the book I read all those years ago (click on the picture to see it bigger, and you'll notice the price: 50p!)  It remains one of my most treasured possessions, with me through all the changes of my life.

Watership Down meant a lot to many other people too, because it became an instant classic, a bestseller across the world.  A few years later, there was an animated film.  It was different to the book, but I loved it anyway, for what it was. Then there was a picture book based on the film, full of stills, with little bits of text (and here it is, the very same copy.)  Again, it was different: not the book, not the film, but a whole new thing.  Richard Adams's story was so strong, it could work in all these different forms.

I got to interview Richard Adams many years later.  It was 2002.  I'd just finished writing Varjak Paw, but was still working as a journalist, and I was doing an article on Watership Down.  So I re-read it, for the first time since I was 8, and was even more amazed.  It seemed an even greater achievement, now I had some idea of what it must've taken.  And it was stunning to see how deeply that story had shaped my own imagination; how much of Varjak's origins I could see in it.

The interview was fascinating; I got to ask him all the questions I'd ever wanted to ask.  (You can read the article I wrote here.)  At the end of the interview, I told him how important his work had been to me, and how I'd now written a book of my own.  He said he wanted to read it, so I gave him a proof copy of Varjak Paw, thinking he was just being polite.  But then, incredibly, he wrote me the loveliest letter, telling me how much he enjoyed it; he actually used the word 'brilliant' about my book!  That was one of the nicest things that has ever happened to me.  It was like the end of a long, long journey.

 

SF Said's new blog

People sometimes ask me what I've been doing since I wrote The Outlaw Varjak Paw, all those years ago.

The short answer is that I've been writing a new book called PHOENIX.  This one's not about Varjak Paw; it's not even about cats.  It's about people this time, and also aliens, because it's an epic space adventure set across a whole Galaxy.  It took me nearly 7 years to finish it, but it was worth every minute, because I think it's the best thing I've written yet.  Dave McKean is working on the illustrations right now, and it'll be published next year.

I'm going to be telling you all about it in this blog, as well as giving you news on various Varjak Paw events, and sharing some of my interests and inspirations with you.  I'm looking forward to it!

In the meantime, here's one of the images I just showed to Dave. It's one I looked at a lot while writing PHOENIX. Click on the picture to see it large!