Rio de Janeiro – Occult, Sci-fi & Military

From Green, Chapter 3
Tuma came to a decision:
“I will let you go Llanka. On one condition.”
“Yes, brother?”
“Each time you visit the City you will bring me some of your blood, either in a pot, or fresh, as it were.”
He smiled. Llanka knew exactly what he meant. She stripped and raised her thigh to him. Tuma drew a knife he kept for the purpose, a knife with a thin, crescent blade, and drew it across her thigh, sucking up the blood that dripped from the wound while she moaned in ecstasy. After taking what he wanted, Tuma handed her a jar of paste, made from the foliage of the Dragon fruit. Llanka rubbed the green paste into the wound and pressed the crushed leaves against it until the bleeding had stopped.
“Go,” Tuma told her. “And do not tell a soul about our agreement.”

Introduction – 1 February, 2019
I don’t know when I first conceived of The Hole Inside the Earth, but the idea to write something that spanned the whole of man’s existence from early times to the far future has been around for a long time. I think I first started writing Green and then the other colours in the Autumn of 2015, and I remember needing one more thread, as I only had 6, so I started Indigo on a very cold day in Jan or early Feb 2016. Until now, I often thought I would abandon it. In fact, in the early days, it was just an experiment, and I don’t think I or anybody else thought I would finish it. But now I am through the worst. There have been times over the last year when I just had to make a huge effort to keep going, and I think it affected me physically. I only started this diary in 2019, but then again, it’s the first time I felt that I could see light at the end of the tunnel.
nb: HITE is my acronym for The Hole Inside the Earth.

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if you don’t know the the origins of this week’s blog title, look it up! You won’t be disappointed.

Many times young writers ask me if it’s okay to write about something you have not experienced. I usually say yes, if you absolutely must, but there is no substitute for experience.

Landscape and Location
This is particularly true of places – landscape and location. In my first novel, The Ice Boat, a kind of odyssey of a young musician, I stuck to places I knew: London, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (update: this also helped for The Hole Inside The Earth – Ed), Den Haag (The Hague in Holland), Amsterdam and Stockholm. The second volume is yet to be published because the manuscript was lost for years and I only just found it again. In it the main character visits Siberia and and even the top of the world (I was influenced my Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein here!). Ironically I hadn’t even been to Russia while writing it but later I actually married in Kyrgyzstan, in the far east of the old USSR. There the ethnicity is largely that of Mongols from the far north. Perhaps this was a case of life imitating nature. My second book The Man Who Recreated Himself was largely set in England and in places I knew. By the time I wrote Infinite Blue Heaven I had married in Kyrgyzstan and so it made sense to write about the landscapes and people I had experienced. I hope this comes through in the book. Continue reading “Blog: Are You Experienced?” →