FANTABULOUS FRIDAYS A-Z: F FOR FATES WITH NICOLA MORGAN

Scribble City Central's fifteenth Fantabulous Friday has a great many Fs in it, courtesy of the Crabbit Old Bat herself, the lovely and inimitable Nicola Morgan.  It must be Fate....  Talking of which, this is what I said about Wasted - Nicola's last novel:

"It's a book I wish I'd written myself. Jess and Jack's story is set firmly in the modern day world, but there are ancient echoes within it, echoes which have everything to do with Destiny and Fate and all those things we inhabitants of the 21st century are meant to dismiss as hokum and bunkum, fit only for the feeble-minded and charlatans." 

Since I wrote those words, Wasted has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal, won the Scottish Children’s Book Award, the Coventry “Read it or Else” award and the RED award, been runner-up and Highly Commended in the North East Book Award,  and been shortlisted for the Manchester, Grampian, Angus, Southern Schools, Stockport and Salford awards. Has that got anything to do with the Fates?  I'd say not - it's down to Nicola's writing talent and fabulous storytelling skills.  But the Fates are funny creatures - they turn up in all sorts of unexpected places, so who knows?  Anyway, it's clearly my destiny to hand you over to Nicola now to enlighten you on:

F for Fates

Mistresses of Possibility

NM: For me, the Fates epitomise the difference between rationalism and superstition. Believing in them is dangerous. I don’t like them but I find myself drawn to them and I am obsessed by the need to reassure everyone that they do not exist. 

They are (not) three women, generally robed in white, haggard and grumpy, and spinning. Spinning your life story in advance. 

Where are they from? They appear in many mythologies but the Greek ones are the ones I know. They are generally called the Moirai. They are Clotho, the spinner; Lachesis, the one who decides about lots - I mean lots as in portions or lottery, not as in lots of money; and Atropos, “without turning,” or “inevitable”. And she’s the really dangerous one to believe in, because the only thing inevitable is death and the only thing inevitable about death is that it will happen, but not when or where or how. 

They are sometimes confused with the much nastier Furies, whose job it is to punish you for doing all the things you couldn’t avoid doing because the Fates had decided that you would do them. 

My last novel, Wasted, never mentions the Fates but their absence is crucial to the book’s philosophy. Wasted is about whether lives have aspects of inevitability, parts that can be foretold. Whether they could be different. This is most explicit in the scene with Fantastic Farantella the Famous Fairgound Fortune-Teller – Your future foretold for a fiver – She can see it coming! Farantella is a charlatan, but even she begins to believe there might be something in her words. And what happens next seeks to pick holes in the claims of fortune-tellers and all those taken in by them. 

I first came across the Fates during my childhood when I devoured all stories Greek and Roman. Back then, I didn’t argue about their existence. I even quite liked the idea that my life was set out in advance, as long as it was a long and good and healthy life of course, and, being young, I assumed it would be. But when I got to university and started to study philosophy, including metaphysics, I became quite grumpy about how in thrall we are to Fate. “What will be will be,” etcetera. Well, no actually, not until it is. Of course, there are things we can’t avoid, but not because they are laid down in advance. Causal determinism works only in one direction: forwards. You only have to look at the Oedipus story to know that. (Something else at the heart of Wasted, and explicitly so.) So in Wasted Jess and Jack learn that “everything is possible until it isn’t.” 

Most frighteningly, the existence of fate negates free will and if we don’t believe in some free will there’s no point in anything. The trouble is, there’s newish neuroscientific evidence that we may have less free will than we think. The unconscious brain has been shown to act sometimes more than a second before the conscious brain gives the command. Which is freaky. 

But that’s still not fate. We are dominated by many forces, but everything is still possible until it isn’t. You’d better believe it….

SCC: I wouldn't dare do anything else, Nicola.  Thank you so much, especially for that neuroscientific evidence, which is indeed freaky! 

NEXT WEEK: Julia Golding talks about creating her own mythical creature, F for Frost Wolf.  See you then! 

Guest Post - The Weird and Wonderful World of Synaesthesia by Nicola Morgan

I'm delighted to have the inimitably Crabbit Nicola Morgan here today to talk about synaesthesia, which is the subject of her just-republished debut novel, Mondays are Red.  I first came across synaesthesia in the US paranormal TV series Heroes, in which one of the characters, Emma, is a form of synaesthete, and sees music as colour.  I wanted to know more, but somehow never got around to finding out. Luckily Nicola has enlightened my ignorance, both here, and in her book, which I finished a couple of weeks ago.  Nicola's rich imagery both made my imagination take off like a rocket and made me want to lick her words, which drip off the page like melted chocolate.  If I'd written a debut novel like this, I'd be bloody proud of myself - and so should she be! Do read it - it's marvellous. Anyway, enough of me.  Welcome to Scribble City Central, Nicola, and over to you! Make yourself comfortable... *pops a celebratory cork*

Hello, Lucy, and thank you for letting me visit your lovely blog today. Excuse me while I remove my shoes and wriggle my toes a bit. So, where’s the fizz? Ah, there. Cheers!

So, synaesthesia. You’d like me to talk a bit about it. Since it’s one of my favourite topics, I’d be delighted!

What is it?

First, it’s NOT a medical condition or a negative thing. Second, almost everyone who has it has had it since birth, so they don’t know anything different. Often they don’t even know they have “something” that makes them different from the rest of us.

Yes, but what IS it, you annoying woman?

Well, it’s when two (usually, but occasionally more ) senses are oddly combined. The most common combination is hearing combined with seeing colours. So when you hear a particular sound you “see” a colour. Everyone with synaesthesia is different, but here are some examples of things that might happen:

• Certain sounds could make colours – for example when you hear particular musical notes or musical instruments, you see certain colours.
• Letters and numbers could have colours. If, for example, the letter ‘a’ was pink for you and ‘p’ was black, but ‘l’ was blue and ‘e’ butter yellow, the word ‘apple’ would produce all those colours.
• Similarly, days of the week (and months) could produce colours. That’s possibly the most common form of synaesthesia.
• Sounds could have shapes or tastes. One man talks of going to buy an ice-cream and finding that the voice of the ice-cream seller put such foul tastes in his mouth that he couldn’t face buying an ice-cream!
• Tastes could have shapes. In The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard Cytowic, he tells of eating at someone’s house and the host talking about the chicken needing more spikes. (I can relate to this hugely.)

There’s more info here.

How do I know if I’ve got it?

Well, if you see yourself in any of those descriptions, you probably have. But there are some “rules” to establish if it’s true synaesthesia.

• The sensations must be physical and automatic. You would not have to think about them. For example, I can relate to giving shapes to tastes (and colours to sounds) but I can only do this by thinking, “What shape would salt be?” And I know it would be slightly curved, rounded, and warm. BUT, I’m doing this by thinking and it’s not an automatic reaction, but a cerebral one, taking into account meanings and sounds and everything. I do not have true synaesthesia. (When I visit Mary Hoffman’s blog on Dec 9th, I’ll show how most of us can “do” synaesthesia and how we can use it as a powerful writing tool.)
• The sensations must be the same every time. If Mondays are red to you today, they won’t be blue next week.
• You will be able to describe the sensations in extreme detail. Mondays won’t just be “red”, they will be the most specific type of red, and you’ll be able to describe it easily because you can really “see” it, either inside your head or actually in front of your eyes, like a screen. (Which is how Luke in Mondays are Red sees it.)

Is it useful for writers and artists?

I argue that true synaesthesia isn’t necessarily particularly useful! This is mainly because the correspondences are too individual and “odd”, rather than “meaningful” in a traditional or accessible way. (I’ll explain more on Mary’s blog.) So, they will feel surreal to the rest of us – nothing wrong with surreal but it makes it hard to share meaning. But some famously interesting writers and artists have or had synaesthesia and it certainly did them no harm! The writer Vladimir Nabokov, artists Kandinsky and David Hockney and the composer Messiaen and are the best known.

What’s it got to do with Mondays are Red, my novel?

Luke wakes from a coma and finds he has a very overwhelming synaesthesia – highly exaggerated and confusing. But he discovers that it gives him huge power, the power of language, which I argue is the greatest power of all – the power to change minds. He even discovers he can fly. (NB: you can’t. Please don’t try. Also, his power corrupts him, so you wouldn’t want it. Really.)

An amazing test

This works for people who have a very vivid form of coloured numbers or letters and is an amazing objective proof of the condition. (It’s rare for people to have it this strongly.)

Create a sheet of paper with lots of rows of the number five, but interspersed with a very few examples of the number two. Get a load of people to find and count the number 2s. Most people would take some time to do this, needing to look at each figure. BUT…people with this particular form of synaesthesia would find them instantly because the 2s would appear as a different colour to them. Even though they are printed in black. Amazing! (This test appears here and there are more interesting facts.)

Do you have synaesthesia? Do any of these things seem familiar?

At the launch of Mondays are Red, several adults discovered they had it because they all got into an argument about whether Mondays were red, green or silver! Whether you have synaesthesia or not, I hope lots of readers will want to enter Luke’s world. You need to let your imagination go but I promise you an exciting ride, even if you don’t actually fly!

Do hop over to Mary’s blog on Friday to read more about synaesthesia! Thank you, Lucy!

Thank you, Nicola. As always, it was a pleasure - and now I know I am not a colour synaesthete, although I do seem to feel particular tastes in my mouth with certain people and places...

PS: There's a fab (and very revealing) post about Nicola's music choices for writing over on Ros Morris's blog, The Undercover Soundtrack today, which ties in perfectly with this one.  Do go and read it!

Mondays are Red was Nicola Morgan’s debut YA novel, published in 2002. Nicola is now delighted to be producing the ebook, with a new cover and brand new extra material, including creative writing by school pupils inspired by the book. For details about how to buy see here.  You don't need a Kindle to download it, and the price is approx £2.23 on Amazon and will be similar on other outlets (coming soon). There's also a wonderful trailer, made by Nicola's daughter, which you can see below:

About the bookWhen Luke wakes from a coma, his world has altered. Synaesthesia confuses his senses and a sinister creature called Dreeg inhabits his mind. Dreeg offers him limitless power – even the power to fly – and the temptations are huge, but the price is high. Who will pay? His mysteriously perfect girlfriend, with hair as long as the sound of honey? His detested sister, Laura, with the wasps in her hair? When Laura goes missing, Luke realizes the terrible truth about himself and his power. His decision is a matter of life and death, and he will have to run faster than fire.
Nicola's next stop will be at Mary Hoffman's Book Maven blog on Friday 9th December.
Nicola's website is here
You can also find Nicola on Twitter (where she Crabbits regularly as @nicolamorgan).

Undiscovered Voices 2012 - How Published Writers Can Help You

I'm delighted to be kicking off the blog tour to celebrate yesterday's launch of the submissions process for Undiscovered Voices 2012, which will be published next year.  In case you don't know about it yet, Undiscovered Voices is the very successful joint publishing project between SCBWI British Isles and Working Partners which has now launched several writing careers. In fact, from SCBWI's first two Undiscovered Voices anthologies, 13 of the 24 selected authors have had publication contracts for their novels and most have signed with agents.  Well worth submitting then, I hope you'll agree!

So, as an undiscovered voice--an unpublished writer--how do you tap into the wisdom of those who have already overcome all those daunting hurdles that stand in the way of getting a publishing contract?  The good news is that it's a whole lot easier than it used to be.  Those of you who are regular readers of Scribble City Central will know that this is mostly due to that wonderful thing, The Author Platform.  Those of you who are new here--well, welcome, and hold onto your hats for the whirlwind tour!

Very briefly, The Author Platform means that published writers in all genres are out there in the virtual world of blogging, social networking and even on YouTube.  No longer are we stuck in a tiny garret, blowing on our frozen fingers, wrapped in shawls and never communicating with anyone except the characters in our heads (and occasionally our editors or agents).  No.  We are now get-attable.  Well, some of us are, anyway.  There are still those who think that all this internet stuff is the Work of the Devil, and prefer to stick to the old methods of pencil and paper and smoke signals.  I'm not one of them. I've embraced my author platform with great gusto (possibly rather too much gusto in fact--but that's another story entirely).  So.  How can published writers help you?  How does all this authory wisdom benefit you, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undiscovered voice?

• Author blogs often have great advice, both on writing itself, and on the business of being published.  If you look to the right of this post, you'll see a page titled All the Writing 101 Productions.  That's my own rather odd and eccentric writing advice.  A couple of the very best 'getting published' author bloggers to check out are Nicola Morgan at Help! I Need a Publisher and Jane Smith at How Publishing Really Works, and of course there are all the other blogs on this tour to explore too. If you comment on author blogs, and ask short, intelligent and relevant questions about the post or something related to it, most authors will reply 9 times out of 10, and it can be an interesting and helpful dialogue to get into.  However, when I say relevant, I mean relevant!  Please don't go off on some long-winded spiel about your own manuscript here, as it won't be appreciated.
• Twitter is a great place for chatting to authors.  Lots of us hang out in the enormous bookie community there (I'm at @lucycoats if you want to chat to me!), and there are publishers, agents, illustrators, booksellers and loads of other booktweeps as well.  Don't be afraid to jump in and comment on a conversation if it interests you.  That's what Twitter is, a big public conversation--and I have huge fun 'talking' to loads of people both about writing and other stuff--I find my Twitter friends a great source of support and comfort. For you as an undiscovered voice it can be equally nice to have some positive encouragement from the wider writing community, and also to see that us published people moan on about really crap writing days too (fairly often in my case) as well as talking about the happier (and considerably rarer) stuff like getting a new contract or a foreign rights deal! By the way, if you want to see this year's Undiscovered Voices story as it unfolds, why not follow @UndiscVoice2012 too?
•  Author websites are always worth checking out.  Who do you admire as a writer?  Type their name into Google and see if they have their own site. Quite often there'll be a FAQ section which can have some interesting insights into the writing process.  You may also be able to email your favourite authors from here. However--another piece of 'don't advice' here, I'm afraid--if you send an email about your own work, don't expect a busy author to spend time critiquing your manuscript for free. There are other routes for that, so please don't ask or expect any author to do this for you gratis!
• Facebook is where lots of authors have 'fan pages' as well as personal pages.  I'm not sure it's particularly useful in the context of this piece--though perhaps you might like to keep up with where various authors may be speaking or bookshop visiting if you want to go along and meet them.
• YouTube may seem an odd place to hang out for an author, but it's where more and more of us are putting book trailers, or readings of our work, or, in my case, short video clips of school visits.  It's one to watch (excuse the horrid pun), because I think a lot of writers will be using it more and more to promote themselves.  There's no reason why an undiscovered writer shouldn't do this too.  If you're good at the techy film stuff, why not make a short video piece about your book or story?  At the very least, it is an exercise in how it sounds read out loud!  If you make it quirky or witty or viewable enough, you never know who might be watching! Stranger things have happened.

In short, the virtual landscape means that as a fledgling writer you no longer have to feel that you're alone in a scary world where you have no idea how to take the next step.  With all the wealth of author platform wisdom now at your disposal, you can find out anything and everything you need to know about the long hard process of turning your undiscovered gem into a publishable work (or even a bestseller!).  Good luck!

The blog tour continues tomorrow when Keren David will be giving more helpful advice to aspiring writers at Almost True

You can find out about the submission rules for Undiscovered Voices HERE

My Complementary World Book Night Giveaway-on-a-Train (& a Brief Encounter)

So what's a complementary World Book Night?  Well, it all started with the ineffably Crabbit Nicola Morgan, who made the very fair point that giving away a million free books wasn't necessarily the best thing for struggling independent booksellers, and that perhaps there was Another Way which might address that.  You may have caught her saying so at the end of Newsnight on Thursday.  As an alternative, she suggested a simple but brilliant idea, namely that people could sign up to the idea of buying just one book, write in it "Given in the spirit of World Book Night and bought from ___ .  Please enjoy and tell people about it." And give it away. You can read her original post HERE.

Well, I wasn't going to be able to take part in the 'real' World Book Night, and I liked Nicola's idea very much. So I signed up. 

On Thursday I went to my local independent bookshop, the wonderful Old Hall Bookshop in Brackley, Northamptonshire.  You can see from the picture what a pleasure it is to shop in this lovely building with its well-stocked shelves and its airy friendly book-smelling atmosphere.  I scurried around, sniffing out favourite books that I'd read and loved.  I wanted to give mainly to teenagers, so I chose those sorts of books. Here are the two I picked....

The third book I decided to give away (for a slightly younger age) was one of my own.  It was a strange experience, buying my own book in a bookshop, but I was so grateful that they stocked it!

So what next?  Go and chat to lovely booksellers Christine and Carey, of course.  They were very happy to hear what I was doing.  Here they are behind the desk with my purchases.



Carey Percival and Christine Bridger of The Old Hall Bookshop

 Now, cut to King's Cross Station on Saturday morning.  I got lost.  Here's where I ended up.  I felt it was a Good Omen...



I scanned the passengers boarding the Edinburgh-bound train minutely.  Who would it be? How would I know? How would they respond to a complete stranger shoving a free book at them?  I decided to have a sit down and a cuppa and let everyone settle in their seats.  Then, as the train reached Yorkshire, I picked up my brown paper bag and made my way up through the whole swaying, rattling train from one end to the other.  I was nervous, I'll admit.  It was such a strange thing to be doing--but I was excited too.  There were lots of teenagers.  Most of them were asleep.  This was not promising.  Wake a sleeping teen at your peril is my experience. I worked my way down again.  Ah, here was an awake one.  I made my offer.

"Er, no thanks.  I've already got a book."  Not a promising start. I was downcast.  Perhaps this wouldn't work.  Then I spotted a blonde boy chatting to his mum and dad.  Did he like books, I asked him. 

"Ooh, yes,|" he said in a fab Geordie accent.  So Hootcat Hill was duly handed over, to big smiles and round-eyed wonder that an author should be giving him one of her own books, 'signed and all!"  Then there were three more refusals.  Quite polite, but they obviously thought I was mad.  Then a solitary girl, immersed in a magazine.  Was that her preferred reading matter?  No.  She liked books very much and took Troubadour by Mary Hoffman with alacrity.  One to go.  Two giggly young ladies.  Were they interested?  Definitely!  So they tossed a coin (shades of Nicola Morgan's book, Wasted) for Sigrun's Secret by Marie-Louise Jensen.  The dark-haired one won, but she's going to lend it to her friend when she's finished.  What a result!

And then, lovely readers, my World Book Night adventure took a surreal turn.  I'd been tweeting back and forth with @EffieMerryl since we were both doing WBN giveaways on trains. Now this is where it gets weird.... We were both going in the same direction.  Could it be that she had a seat booked on my train?  In the same carriage?  We both thought so for a few glorious minutes.  But it was not to be.  However, Nil Desperandum!  We arranged to meet on Platform 2 of Newcastle Station (where my train was stopping for a second and hers was leaving from), so that she could hand over one of her WBN books and we could meet.  It was a bookish Brief Encounter. We hugged, we snapped each other on phone cameras, and we waved farewell in in a cloud of steam (oh alright, I made the cloud of steam up).  It took all of three minutes. 

Effie Merryl

And I am now the proud owner of Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, a book I've been wanting to read for AGES and was intending to take on holiday with me anyway.  Thank you, Effie (I wish I'd still had a WBN book to give YOU!). And thank you Nicola Morgan for putting this brilliant, amazing, book-giving, reading-enhancing, fantabulous idea into all our heads!

A Writing 101 Production - Part 12: Twitter Wisdom

Here's the thing.  I've been promising you Lovely Blog Readers a useful 101 post about Twitter since sometime before the fish crawled out of the sea and grew little stumpy legs.  Only now I find that all the nice technical authory bits I was going to say have already been said much better than I ever could.  I have, in fact, been gazumped and beaten to the wire by none other than the Crabbit Old Bat herself (that's @nicolamorgan for those of you who haven't yet had the pleasure...). So it is with much gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair that I point you in her direction.  Her Help! I Need A Publisher blog is pretty much the best advice a writer can get, and her Twitter for Authors Parts 1-6 (look in the posts for August and September 2010) is a model of excellence which is impossible to better.  Damn but she's good!
Nevertheless...
No two authory experiences of anything are ever exactly the same, so I'm going to give you my own slightly more eccentric brand of Twitter wisdom anyway. Variety is the spice of life and all that, Lovely Readers.
So here's me answering 8 of your Really Important Random Questions about Twitter
(Yes. I know I'm interviewing myself.  It's fun.  You should try it sometime. No.  I am not delusional. Whatever made you think that?)

• Why did you start tweeting? I'll be honest.  It was an idle moment.  I was bored.  This Twitter thing was starting to be talked about a lot (though far less than it is now--I joined up 18 months ago), so I thought I'd give it a go. I shut my eyes, held my breath and plunged in with both left feet. There was no Grand Authory Plan to Take Over the World via Tweets then. I'd like to make that clear at the start. (There is now, of course. And no. I'm still not delusional. Mwahahaha!) 
• How did that work out, then?  Confusing at first, but I soon got the hang of it by just doing it. Thing is, loads of writers are not very techy and are quite scared of the big bad internet infecting them with Something Nasty, or crashing their computers and eating the manuscript which has taken them 10 years to write. I'm not very techy either, but I am quite willing to experiment and give things a go. I've talked about the importance of firewalls and backing up in Writing 101 Production Part 4 and I know that if things do go pear-shaped, I have done all I can to cover my (fairly ample) behind. I have to say I found things a lot easier once I'd discovered TweetDeck, and could organise TwitStuff how I wanted it.
•  Hunh? TwitStuff? What are you on about?  Well, I found it hard to keep up with all the tweets for a start, once I'd started following people, not to mention the @ mentions and my own new followers.  Don't be under any illusions.  Twitter is a continuous cascade of information.  Something every second.  So getting organised was pretty important, otherwise I would have drowned.  TweetDeck allows you to make nifty little columns which you can name as public (everyone can see) or private (only you know they exist) lists and 'drag' people into (kicking and screaming if necessary).  I have, forinstance, a private 'bookies' column where I can skim through all the book tweets, another for 'friends'--and others for 'vampires' and 'mad tweeters'.  The latter are a source of much amusement to me, and include a lewd nun and several very eccentric wordsmiths. I can also keep track of hashtags in their own columns too (#SpeakLoudly let me watch all the tweets around this fantastic campaign without having to follow everyone who joined in).  
• Talking of #hashtags and all that...explain--and what about those double asterisky things?  Now look, I told you.  Nicola Morgan explains all this techy Twitstuff in a fine and brisk manner.  There's a whole post from her on hashtags and other fascinating Twittery bits, so go and look. All I will add on the hashtag subject is that I like making up silly ones to enhance my tweets.  Such as #notwritingbecauseampissingaboutontwitter. As for the asterisky things, well, I might tweet something like "I don't understand this whole Twitter business *confused*"  It's a way of indicating mood or state of mind--like an emoticon (please tell me you know what an emoticon is?  PLEEEASE?).
• So--what have you got out of it?  It's a strange creature, Twitter. I like it more and more.  I have fast and frantic conversations on it with actual-friends-I've-met and also with tweeters who I've never met, but who are soon bona-fide Twitter friends.  I jump into other people's conversations without a qualm (even quite famous people's conversations)--something I would never do in real life because I would consider it rude (and anyway, it would be hard for me to butt into a conversation that was taking place in America.  I'm versatile--but not that versatile!). I learn crucial bookish news via links and tweets from others.  I share my own book and blog news (but never as a hard sell--that's fatal, see below) and stuff I find interesting (might be a blog, or a book I've loved, or a fascinating piece of useless information, or a review). I've done some successful #bookgiveaways and competitions. I chat to booksellers, librarians, parents, industry pros, agents, publishers and lots more, including a load of delightfully bloodthirsty vampires and one extremely baaad faery boy, @sethmacgregor if you're interested--but hands off, he's MINE! I find it's a fantastically rich community which gives me more important information, quicker, than any of the other social media.
• Does it sell books, though? Well, do blogging or Facebook fan pages or author websites sell books?   It's all a bit unquantifiable.  I have indubitably (one of my favourite words btw) sold some of my books via Twitter, because people have told me they've bought them--all the way from Australia in one case.  But Twitter is NOT about hard sell--if there's one thing you take away from this piece it should be that.  If you are trumpet-blowingly shouty and me me me, wonderful me buy my fabulous book all the time, it will put people off in droves.  I'm even doubtful about the value of tweeting your own blogpost links more than a couple of times, to be honest. I think that if you can get people to like you by being interesting/funny/interested in others, then by definition if you mention that you have a new book out, then some are likely to be more prone to buying it.  But for me the value of Twitter is more about building up relationships with nice people who like children's books than in hard selling. 
• Do you follow everyone who follows you? And if not, then why? I don't follow absolutely everyone who follows me, no.  But if someone bothers to have a conversation with me, or RT's one of my posts, or engages with me, then I am much more likely to follow them back.  I also thank people for RTing and mentioning me in #FF (Follow Friday) or #WW (Writer Wednesday).  I'm all about the good Twitter manners, me.  I do delete and block obvious spammers and pornofollowers and 'bots.  Except the Custard Cream bot, obviously.   
• Finally and most importantly, do you spend too much time on Twitter?  That's debatable.  If you believe that author platforms are important, as I do, then no (I tweet in short 2-15 minute bursts through the day, if I have time or during a coffee break).  According to my family, yes.  I leave you therefore with the graffiti Lovely Daughter affixed to my computer yesterday.  Chip off the old block, eh? (So proud!)  Now back to the 'super keyboard of might' for some more attack tweeting. Bye for now, Lovely Blog Readers--and if you pluck up the courage to join Twitter, do come and say hello to @lucycoats!

You can find all my other eccentric and useful Writing 101 Productions right HERE

Mythic Friday Interview: Number 12 - Nicola Morgan

To lure the inimitably crabbit Nicola Morgan to Scribble City Central once may be deemed a triumph.  To do it twice is definitely a coup.  When Nicola agreed to talk about the Oedipus myth and her utterly fabulous new novel Wasted (which I still can't stop thinking about), a few weeks ago, I was delighted, and I wondered if I might lure her in (with the promise of future champagne and biscuits) to do a regular MFI.  To my surprise she agreed (so we'll be drinking the fizzy stuff at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where she and I are both appearing. Phew! I can finally say that without fear now the 'official' programme is out!). Once again, welcome, Nicola, and thank you for your great answers.  I too am fascinated by Achilles--I don't like him very much, but you are quite right, his story encompasses so many interestingly contradictory themes of the human psyche. As for your answer to question 7--I can just see you in some Greek myth version of 'Chariots of Fire'--filmed in Edinburgh, as of course the original was!  
PS: I've said this before, but if you lot ignored me last time and haven't read Wasted yet, please go and do so at once.  No really. It's that good.  And possibly even better.  Definitely one of my 'Top Books of 2010'--but you'll have to wait till the end of the year to see what else I've chosen! Now, over to The Crabbit One herself....

1. Do you think that the retelling of Greek and other myths is important or relevant for the children of today? Why should they care about some “dry old stories” which come from ancient cultures they might never even have heard of?
I could say (and it would be true) that they’d find amazing connections between the myths of all cultures and our own more modern literature. I could say (and it would be true) that they’d be fascinated to discover how people from all cultures around the world have told many of the same stories, even before we’d crossed oceans and met each other. But I’ll just say that ancient myths are exciting, gruesome, violent, passionate, dramatic, romantic and exciting. What more can you want from a story?

2. What age were you when you came across your first myth or myths? Tell us how you felt then about the myths you first discovered. Did you love them or hate them? Did they scare you, excite you—or were you indifferent? What kind of myths were they? Greek? Norse? Native American? Celtic? Or from another culture entirely? Were they in a book you read? Or did you hear them as oral storytelling from someone else?
Greek and Roman myths were the first stories I remember enjoying. The Greek and Roman ones are basically the same, but I prefer the Greek names – they feel more exotic. I think it was all from books rather than orally. They were part of my education, so they were shown to me by my parents and teachers, but I don’t remember feeling I was supposed to read them – I just loved them from an early age. I collected books of myths. I remember they had a different smell, and always thick paper, as though they were special.

3. Looking back, what is your favourite myth of all time, from any culture? And why would you choose it?
The story of Achilles is fascinating. You’ve got a mother, the sea-nymph, Thetis, who tries to protect her baby from death, so she dips him in the river Styx to make him immortal; but she can’t fully protect him because she has to hold him by his heel, which misses contact with the magic water. Besides, she should know that even the gods can’t prevent a human from dying eventually. So, Achilles grows up strong and heroic, but his invincibility also makes him arrogant – because every hero (and every human) has a flaw, and in the Greek myths a flaw will always be punished. In the Trojan War, Achilles refuses to fight because he feels insulted by his commander. His refusal causes many deaths of his own side – so we should perhaps condemn him for this. He eventually decides to fight because the Trojan prince, Hector, kills his lover, Patroclus, so Achilles goes after Hector and viciously kills him, dragging him round the walls of the city in ugly triumph, after threatening to eat him. The story shows everything: a mother’s hopeless and misguided desperation to protect her child; heroism, determination and bravery; cruelty and nastiness, friendship, loyalty and love; the human failing of arrogance when we think we’re better or stronger than everyone else. And the inevitability of death: for, of course, Achilles does die in the end, wounded in the heel. This gives us the well-known phrase, “the Achilles heel” – meaning our weak spot, the flaw in our character that we need to watch out for. Oh, and the fact that Achilles was meant to be the best looking hero in the whole world, ever, helps the story’s romance! Mind you, he was by most accounts a really arrogant hero – which perhaps allows us not to mourn his death when it comes. Achilles is a terribly human mixture of bad and good. He’s certainly very far from being a saint, but I like the story because it’s full of contradictions. There’s lots to argue about.

4. Who is your most hated mythical hero or heroine, and what made you feel that way about them?: Hera, Zeus’s wife. She’s such a jealous, grumpy, vindictive, negative Nora!

5. Is there a mythical beast you are particularly fond of? If so, which one?
No, they’re all way too scary to be fond of!

6. How have myths had an influence on your writing life, if at all?
I find this really difficult – no, impossible – to answer. They’re just deep inside my consciousness and I don’t really notice their influence but I know it must be there.

7. If you could choose to be the demigod child of any one mythical god or goddess, which one would it be? Which power would you like to inherit from them—and what would you do with it?
Artemis, the goddess of hunting. Not because I want to hunt (!), but because she was also the goddess of speed and athleticism. I used to be a fast runner and I’d love to be able to run like the wind now, so if I could inherit her speed and fitness, that would be lovely. What would I do with it? I’d find a really long sandy beach on the south coast of England, or the west coast of Scotland, with no one on it (I might have to hunt and kill them first), and then I’d run, and run, and run, with my feet hardly touching the sand, the wind in my long hair (which I don’t have, but I would if I were Artemis’s daughter) and the sun on my skin.

More about Nicola:
Nicola Morgan is an award-winning author, mostly for teenagers – though she has also written some Thomas the Tank Engine books. She’s best known for her gruesome novel, Fleshmarket, her thriller, Deathwatch, and her internationally-acclaimed book on the teenage brain, Blame My Brain. She also blogs energetically on behalf of writers aiming for publication, and her book on the subject, Write To Be Published, will be published by Snowbooks in 2011. Her brand new YA novel is Wasted, which was published May 2010. Nicola lives in Edinburgh and London.
Nicola's brilliant Wasted blog is HERE
Her extremely useful writing blog is HERE
Nicola tweets as nicolamorgan
and her website is HERE

The Most Dangerous Story in the World - Guest Post by Nicola Morgan

If you haven't read Nicola Morgan's newly-published YA novel Wasted yet, then go out and buy a copy. At once.  I say this, not because Nicola is the first Google result for "Crabbit Old Bat" and therefore I'm terrified of her awesomeosity and crabbitness (though obviously I am), but because it's a book I wish I'd written myself. Jess and Jack's story is set firmly in the modern day world, but there are ancient echoes within it, echoes which have everything to do with Destiny and Fate and all those things we inhabitants of the 21st century are meant to dismiss as hokum and bunkum, fit only for the feeble-minded and charlatans.  But I say to you: just try playing 'Jack's Game' for a day (or choose not to--it's up to you, of course).  But if you do so choose, toss a coin (beautifully, of course) to decide your every move.  It's scary and powerful stuff.  I know. I did it.  Now I've spent too much money I couldn't afford and eaten something which disagreed with me.  But I've also rung an old friend I hadn't talked to for years and caught an early train where, by chance, I had an unexpected conversation and found out something I needed to know.  There are many more such stories of chance (including one of mine) over at Nicola's Wasted Blog, which I urge you to visit at the earliest opportunity.  Now, that's quite enough from me.  You'll be wanting to hear from Nicola, who I welcome to Scribble City Central for her first (but I trust certainly not last) visit.  Thanks for sharing your wisdom, O Crabbit One, and over to you for a bit of musing on the Oedipus myth.

Stories are dangerously powerful. The Oedipus story is the most dangerous, devious, destructive story in the world. But it’s also very easy to protect yourself: refuse to believe. Then you retain your power of choice. The story is a very important part of the philosophy behind Wasted – can we escape our Fate? Is there such a thing as Fate? Do we have freewill or are we mere victims?

The Oedipus story goes like this. King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes were expecting a baby. The prophet Teiresias predicted that their son would kill his father and marry his mother. As you can imagine, this wasn’t the best news they’d had all year, but they had a solution: they gave the baby to a shepherd, with instructions to leave him on a distant hillside, making sure he couldn’t escape by driving a wooden stake through his foot. (As if the baby was going anywhere…) Inevitably, the shepherd couldn’t bring himself to leave the baby, and took him to another city, Corinth. Somehow – by a series of coincidences that a modern story-teller couldn’t get away with – the baby was brought up by the king and queen of Corinth. Lucky baby. Or not so lucky, because they called him Oedipus, meaning “swollen foot”. (Be glad your parents didn’t give you such a silly name.)

When Oedipus grew up, he heard rumours that he wasn’t the true son of the king and queen, so he foolishly went to ask the oracle at Delphi. (This was foolish because the oracle was famous for giving unhelpful answers.) Sure enough, the oracle didn’t tell him what he wanted to know but did tell him something he didn’t want to know: that he would kill his father and marry his mother. As you can imagine, this wasn’t the best news he’d heard all year, but he had a solution: a very long journey.

On this journey he got into an argument and killed a man. And carried on, arriving at the city of Thebes, where they were having some trouble with the Sphinx, who kept eating travellers who couldn’t solve a riddle. Oedipus solved the riddle and the Sphinx committed suicide. So far, so good. The queen of Thebes (Jocasta, you remember, and Oedipus’s mum) forgot about being terribly upset about her husband’s recent unsolved murder, and married the hero. Everything would have been fine, but the truth about Oedipus’s identity came out, including that he’d killed his father and married his mother. Jocasta was so appalled that she killed herself. Oedipus was so appalled that he poked his eyes out with a burning stick and wandered around the country for some years while other innocent members of his family also came to unpleasant ends.

So, what’s the problem with this story? The problem is that it’s supposed to tell you that you can’t escape your destiny and that you have no real choices, no free will. It gives us no hope at all.

But it doesn’t tell us this at all – it just pretends to. It’s a fairy story, not a story of something that happened or might happen but a “what if” story, a “thought experiment”. All it really does is ask us to think, “What if you were told your future? Here’s an example of a made-up story of how someone tried to avoid their foretold future and ended up fulfilling it.” So??? It couldn’t happen because it is impossible on any level to know your future. It’s impossible because there are so many permutations of tiny combinations of events that there are an immeasurable number of possible futures, because each result depends on what comes before, and what comes before depends on what comes before. Etc. Etc. Etc.

When one of my daughters was small she used to ask questions like, “What if you woke up in the morning and you had two heads? What if you woke up and the sea was made of cucumbers? What if chickens spoke French?” I was frustrated by the questions and she was very frustrated by my answer, “But it couldn’t happen.” I wasn’t being obstructive – I genuinely couldn’t answer the question because it was literally impossible in this world, therefore it was philosophically impossible in this world to say what “I” would do because “I” am in this world.

When I studied philosophy at university, one essay question in my final exam was something like, “Can you know what it would be like if you were a scorpion?” Basically, my answer would be, “No, because if I was a scorpion I wouldn’t be me and it wouldn’t be this world.” I think I probably made the essay a bit longer than that….

So, ignore the “what ifs” of the Oedipus question: if you believe the story and think it has any meaning, it will wreck your self-belief. It loses all its power if you refuse to acknowledge it.

You do not have to worry about whether you can avoid your “Fate”, because there simply is no such thing. Like a sea made of cucumbers. Or chickens speaking French. It’s not in this world.

This is what Jack needed to discover in Wasted. I can’t tell you whether he does. Because it depends how the coin spins and you’re the one who has to spin it in the end. Also, the first chapter seems to foretell the end – but it doesn’t. Because the message of Wasted is that nothing is until it is; everything is possible until it isn’t. Oedipus came to a terrible end because a) he was foretold a future and b) he believed it. But a) is the false bit.

If Oedipus had known that, he could have ignored that silly oracle. Just as Jack and Jess ignore Farantella the Famous Fortune-teller. Even though she got it right….

Thanks so much for having me on your blog, Lucy! I know you love the old stories as much as I do. Keep up the good work!

Copyright © Nicola Morgan 2010

More about Nicola:
Nicola Morgan is an award-winning author for teenagers, with successful titles such as Fleshmarket, Deathwatch, Blame My Brain and Sleepwalking. She prefers to forget that she also used to write Thomas the Tank Engine Books.... When she's not writing, she loves speaking in schools, and at festivals and conferences in the UK and Europe, She also enjoys messing around on Twitter or her blogs. Nicola blogs for writers HERE and has set up a special blog about her brand new book, Wasted - you can join the activities and contribute in lots of ways HERE