Foothills of a Dark Mountain

Mar 31, 2023

Mornings now, are filled with a reverberating choral promise of spring. The birds are in full song, not just at dawn but also each evening and often throughout the day, almost constantly. Living surrounded by woodland means we are in turn surrounded by calls and trills. The birds who make their homes among the trees cladding this once-glacial bowl are louder and more urgent than those in farmland or open spaces, their song needed to communicate through thick forest.

I have listened to birdsong all my life and I have never heard it as loudly, or as urgently, as I do here, each species seemingly simultaneously celebrating surviving another winter whilst reconnecting with others, partners, and worshipping the coming year.

There are species I know, others I have to seek out — I have an app, which is not always accurate, but it at least guides me to the species to double check. I heard a robin (the European kind, not the American) the other day, singing furiously, as is his way, then something different, something I did not know.

‘Hawfinch, uncertain,’ said the app. I checked other sources online and this switched to ‘Hawfinch, certain’.

There is often one precise day, usually in March, where I find everything suddenly seem to not only be possible, but also thoroughly exciting. A long to do list is a thrill, rather than a stress, and the cold air descending from the peaks brings a whisper of the hot days it will be welcome.

Sudden snow still falls higher up, although the peak to our south was almost naked until a few days ago, our little terrace basking and baking in burning sun, bees providing a deep droning counterpoint to the birds.

The sun, in the mornings, now rapidly descends the hillside across the river, the ridgeline beyond which lays the Belledonne and the north. That mountain to our south is illuminated earlier every day, the current snow cap getting a little less intense every day, but brilliant nevertheless. There has barely been any precipitation this year — France as a whole experienced its longest period without significant rainfall since records began and many lakes and rivers are already lower than they would be in summer.

The direct sunlight appears above the ridge to the east ever earlier too, hitting my study window and reminding me that I really need to give the glass a clean.

At this point of the calendar, the buds have yet to hinder the view of the individual tree, each trunk and branches clear from a distance, the wood still failing to obscure the trees. It is easier to see where to find a birch, or a sweet chestnut stand, to observe where the soil is thin and rocky, with smaller hazel and other shrubs. The beech, the occasional oak, some ivy-clad, others with crowns dead or dying, stag-headed, all still standing tall and proud and naked. The sunlight picks out branches longing to be climbed, highlighting the perches of the buzzards or ravens, or the places where I have seen the eagles alight, imperious. A peregrine falcon lives somewhere nearby. I have seen him mobbed by crows.

But the trees are beginning to leaf, fast. Overnight, one will go from grey-brown skeleton to acidic green Monet, thousands upon thousands of buds unfurling and reaching for the light, each dot creating a restless image. Zoom out, and the image grows, each dot now a whole tree, a wider view. Here and there, blossom and flowering trees decorate the picture, or the deep dark green of the spruce or pine provides a counterpoint.

These woodlands are enchanting and full of life. There are plants I do not know, there those I do, many useful, medicinal, edible, friends old and new. The badgers have been out and about but there is no sign of the wild boar, yet. The hunting season has only ended relatively recently and they will be hiding somewhere in the thicker forest where they farrow, to later descend with their tiny striped piglets.

As the forest awakes and breathes, as it shakes off the chill of winter and stretches limb, trunk and branch, so do I. Spring is the beginning of a year for me, with the equinox the turning point, the fulcrum upon which pivots the outgoing and incoming 365 days. I awake and I stretch and I breathe the air of the changing season. It is good to be alive.

Hello

There’s a thing that people say, that the older you get the less sleep you need. Perhaps this is the universe’s bizarre and mildly cruel way of telling me I have clearly not yet gained enough years, given that I absolutely NEED that sleep.

When I was younger, I would regularly skip entire nights of sleep, sometimes more than one night, and emerge little the worse for wear (apart from one memorable time, involving strange waking hallucinations, which seemed a sensible suggestion from my mind to head to bed). Now, however, this is firmly not the case.

Ailsa still sleeps in her cot next to our bed, which means that when she wakes I do too. Sometimes, she’ll go a few nights with barely a murmur, others, it will be every hour or so (especially when she’s teething, or sick).

My days, at times like these, start to revolve around the question of how many legal, caffeinated stimuli can I pour into my body, and how quick. Coffee (I only ever have one, to be honest, in the morning after breakfast), whilst always enjoyed and appreciated, suddenly gains a new level of admiration. Tea is brewed that bit longer, the bags or leaves steeped and squeezed and stirred harder, further, longer.

And I still regularly feel oddly floaty, lightheaded and disassociated from the rest of me.

How did I manage to go without sleep, back in my younger years? Now, I prefer to get at least eight hours a night — before Ailsa, we would average somewhere between eight and nine hours, and that left me refreshed and my aches and pains mostly healed.

I keep putting off sessions in our little gym, simply because I know I need sleep to recover from them (and the matter of actually fitting them in). This is a double edged sword — they would certainly help my stiff joints, help with mental health, help with my sleep BUT, if I can’t recover from the workouts, that would also have a negative effect. Tricky.

I do know I need much less sleep in the summer half of the year, however, so perhaps this might help.

At the time of writing, I have now gone for over two weeks without looking at the news. Not just limiting myself to headlines, but a complete block. The only thing I saw happened to be a short on Youtube about the ongoing strike action here in France, but that played automatically and by accident, so I don’t think it counts. I’m barely on Twitter any more, either, or any social media, for that matter.

Two weeks is a long time for me not to head to the news channels and scroll through what is happening in the world. I had noticed that I was doing this more and more, which is not a good sign, so I made the conscious effort to knock it on its head. And it is working. I feel less stressed about the world, less concerned about things I will read and click on.

It is not always easy, given that I always like to feel connected to the news, but I think it might be a solution I have been seeking.

This is what psychologists call the elimination stage, whereby I cut out a bad habit completely for a time, then potentially reintroduce it in a structured, monitored fashion. At this point, I am unsure if I will introduce reading the news again — if something happens I should perhaps know about, I’m sure someone will let me know (something my sister, Lydia, also says, as she has been sans news for a lot longer than me*).

Removing that extra layer of anxiety and uncertainty seems to be having a positive effect.

*I really need to do a section on the rest of my family’s creative endeavours — they are many and varied and wonderful. Soon, I promise.

Books

No promotion this month either. However, don’t forget that if you head to my linktree you can always find where to get my books, whether those which are free or those you have to buy (for a small amount).

Most of these can be found in different places and different platforms. If you click on the Amazon link, that’s an affiliate link too so, if you buy my book from there I get a little extra on top of the money I already earn, at no extra cost to you.

In fact, if you click on the Amazon link and then buy something else whilst there (for a short time), I might even get a wee bit of cash from that too (again, at no extra cost to you). I’ve heard legendary tales of people clicking such links to buy a book for the price of a coffee, then going on to buy a 78” TV at the same time, earning the affiliate much more than the book alone would — that would be great, thanks! If you are planning on using Amazon to make a big purchase, head there through one of my links! Thanks.

(Incidentally, my full, boring, affiliate scheme and other legal stuff website disclosure is here, if you want to be put to sleep. It does have pretty photos though, just to make it marginally tolerable.)

Contact Hours

For the past few weeks, I have been recording the precise hours and minutes I am at my desk working, removing any point in which I am not there, such as going to the toilet, making cups of tea, doing my daily Duolingo, making lunch or eating, for example. I added all these times up and took an average for a week’s worth of work.

Turns out, I am working for 19 hours a week.

This figure isn’t entirely accurate, as any writer will tell you — work does not stop when you leave your desk, you never stop thinking about the words, about the characters, the plot, what happens next, what just happened, and whether it could be polished into something better, more engaging and powerful.

Some of my best sentences come when I’m doing the dishes. Sometimes a thorny plot problem resolves itself as I take a shower or, with frustrating regularity, just as I am about to fall asleep or in the middle of the night.

19 hours is the average weekly time I have to actually write, however. Not long, is it?

I am still considering how this is broken up, what needs more time, what might do with less. I also record 30 minute, distraction-free working blocks throughout my day, using the app, Forest. I have a current target of 180 minutes, six blocks, and I’m trying to stick to this.

This also gives me a little leeway each day to do all those other things which are hard to quantify, such as Pinterest image creation or Quora answering/marketing, for example.

This note leads neatly into the next section…

Writing

Sometimes, when I am stuck with a piece of work — fiction work — the easiest thing to do is to jump ahead to the next thing.

This has been the case with the final novel/novella of The Tales of The Lesser Evil. For some months now, I’ve redrafted, edited, redrafted some more — and nothing seemed to fit.

Every version seemed drab and dull, lacking in punch, too much exposition and scene setting and not enough action, dialogue or, well, just not fun.

Despite this, I have definitely made progress, the latest version is significantly better than the earlier efforts, but it was still not as good as I’d like.

So I left it.

Instead, I decided to begin a first draft of something else. Move ahead, jump and skip to the next thing.

I have a lot of editing at the moment. Editing/redrafting that story I am stuck on and editing The Care Industry, the first novel of The Greater Good. Add to this editing all the thousands of words of travel writing, hints and tips I’m currently working on, and it makes my brain… stick…

What I need is to draft something new at the same time. It seems to use different parts of my brain, ensuring the editing also flows in a way which has been lacking of late. A first draft is arguably the easy bit, after all. It is what comes later that makes all the difference.

So I started the first novel of The Lesser Evil, the trilogy for which all the novellas and novels of The Tales of The Lesser Evil are simply prequels, a multi-thousand word bonus (with a cunning extra goal of earning me that wee bit more money). Each Tale also sets up characters and themes, locations and ideas which will appear in this much longer work.

I had not intended to start this until later this year, simply because I did not want to add another thing to the already full schedule.

However, I began to wonder if I was sabotaging myself by not spending any time drafting brand new fiction and, sure enough, beginning this draft seems to have loosened something. In the past, doing similar has worked well too, so you would have thought I’d have remembered this sooner. Sometimes, adding a different thing to the schedule is a certain magic of its own.

I have talked of drafting, explaining my process before (which hasn’t really changed in a long time now, it works, why alter it?). I only realistically need to draft for 30 minutes a day to make a big difference, not only to a new work, which gathers an average of 750(ish) words in those 30 minutes — sometimes many more, sometimes fewer — but also to my other edits and redrafts. If I have more time, I will add on another block of 30 minutes, something I have done once or twice already since making this change.

I had wondered if drafting fiction would have a knock-on effect with the non-fiction travel blogging, for example, and it did. I am pleased about this.

It has to be said, I think the changing season helps — with more hours of daylight I come out of a hibernation of sorts, where wordcraft can be like pulling teeth. The birdsong and fresh green leaves and plant shoots are like a drug to me, something which enables focus and flow in a way in which winter does not.

Writing this first novel, even if I am only a few thousand words in, is fun and quick. After all, I already have a solid outline for the story, a map to guide me (and, quite literally, a MAP too). It also feels good to return to some characters I have not worked with for a while (Hi Strings, Hello Dhinal!). There will no doubt be surprises along the way, hitherto unforeseen obstacles and forks in the path, but I know I can navigate my way through these.

As I say with relative repetition, watch this space, just know that things are moving forward…

Reading

The other week, shortly after sending my last letter to you, I finally felt in the mood to begin my read through of The Wheel of Time, the epic fantasy mentioned here.

I am a mood reader. I cannot force myself to read something, unless I feel like it. Sometimes, friends and family members recommend a book or author (please do this, it’s a wonderful thing, to share something you love), but I can’t read it/them immediately — that’s just not how I operate. Even books I have been waiting for, in some cases waiting for years, I usually find it impossible to jump straight in.

I used to stress about this — and I think it was why I struggled with directed reading at school, where the class is set a text, for example. I don’t like to be forced into something when I do not feel ready for it. Nothing if not stubborn. Perhaps it’s the Taurean in me?

Now, I see it as a good thing. It allows me to read widely and well, depending on how I feel, what the season is, whether I want to escape or be challenged.

The Wheel of Time, for those of you who have somehow escaped this, is a series of novels by the writer Robert Jordan and, later, Brandon Sanderson (who finished the series after Jordan died in 2007). I read the first book back in the early 90s, not long after it was published then, for a decade, I devoured each subsequent volume as it came out, right up to the point where, after reading book nine, Winter’s Heart, I just…stopped.

Around that time, I had been disparaged by certain people, including two in positions of educational authority, for still enjoying reading fantasy. I was told it was not proper fiction, and would never be seen as literary or worthwhile. Fast forward a couple of decades and the world (mostly) views fantasy very differently. Or perhaps the voices in favour are no longer hushed or pushed to oneside?

I think I also stopped reading The Wheel of Time because I mostly stopped reading fiction, full stop. This was a difficult time in my life and, for a variety of reasons, I retreated from a number of things that brought me joy — reading being one of them.

I have wanted to finish the series for some years now and, the other evening, as I finished reading something else I just felt like starting the process.

So I started.

Share Not A Travel Writer

(I actually had a DNF — Did Not Finish — recently, trying to read a novel by an author I have heard many good things about from people whose opinions I trust. It was the second novel of theirs I have tried and I just could not get into their voice, one or two things irritating me, including how the author wrote male characters looking at female. Sometimes, this happens. Put the book down and move on. Life’s too short for not enjoying what you read — there’s a lot else out there, after all, and more being crafted all the time.)

I began with the prequel novel, New Spring, having only ever read it as a novella, before it was expanded and released as a full novel in 2004. It made sense to start with this, but if you are new to the series I would recommend waiting until much later, maybe after book eight or nine (there are different schools of thought as to precisely when to read it).

After reading New Spring, I read A Rose for Winter, Laurie Lee’s travelogue of his visit to Spain some fifteen years after the time he spent there during the civil war. It is not strictly a part of his famous autobiographical trilogy (Cider With Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer’s Morning, A Moment of War), but it could easily be added as a fourth book. In places, it is certainly a product of its time, with some things which could make some readers uncomfortable, but it is also delicious to read as a piece of historical travel writing. And Lee’s eye is always oh-so-sharp, his way of translating everything he notices into imagery so intense and vivid you hear, taste and smell it is second-to-none.

My initial idea had been to split reading The Wheel of Time with other books but, after I began book one, The Eye of the World, I immediately moved to book two, then three and now four. I decided that, since I’m unlikely to ever read this series again or, if I do, perhaps once or twice at most, I might as well work through all four and a half MILLION words at once. So far, I’m enjoying it — there are segments I can speed read, as I remember them very well, but other parts still feel fresh and new.

No doubt I’ll keep you updated with this as I go on — at this rate, around a quarter of the way through all those words, I suspect I will finish reading the series around the end of July or beginning of August. That’s quite a chunk of reading time. Wish me luck.

Listening

I have been mostly listening to various techno playlists, or my favourite 145bpm dark forest psytrance, lately. Not really the sort of thing I could share, unless you are on Tidal, then perhaps I could, somehow, if I take the time to work out how (if you are, let me know!).

However, I have also listened to a few new albums, something which is harder for me to fit in, as I like to concentrate on these, whereas the other BPM-driven music is designed to keep me going with drafting and editing.

Fever Ray’s new work, Radical Romantics, is superb. I really enjoyed their last work, Plunge, but it is their first album which holds a special place in my heart. I’ve played that one many, many times.

Radical Romantics also features collaborations with some other favourites of mine, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. There are tracks on this album which sound not dissimilar to The Knife (not surprising, given that they are collaborations with Dreijer’s brother, Olof, the other half of The Knife), then there are also tracks which would be at home on Fever Ray’s first album.

Heavy Heavy is the latest album, after a gap of five years, by Young Fathers. I find it joyful and joyous, intriguing, catchy, emotional and generally well worth a listen. It is brief, each of the ten tracks hovering around the magical poptastic 3 minute mark and, before you know it, it is finished.

Young Fathers are one of those bands who the music press love to say are unable to be placed in a pigeonhole. They combine so many different styles and influences that, in my view, they are doing something unique. Too often, artists, whether musicians or writers, are pushed into boxes they do not wish to inhabit and forced to stay there, staring at the sides, unable to grow. Young Fathers communicate in their own way, and that has my respect.

Finally, for this section, I’ve also been working my way through old Dead Can Dance albums, many of which I’ve never heard before. I’m really enjoying that — still really fresh, despite some of the albums being decades old.

Watching

There are just so many great TV shows out there at the moment. It is a shame when we accidentally watch something which is not so good…

However, I won’t dwell on the negatives, so here are some things we’ve enjoyed recently (some more than others, but all worth a watch). Capitals indicate a movie, otherwise it is a TV show, in order of viewing:

Andor
His Dark Materials, Season 3
GLASS ONION
Witcher: Blood Origin
Slow Horses, Season 2
The Peripheral
Russian Doll, Season 2
The Old Man
EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE
Wednesday
Bad Sisters
Picard, Season 2
ALL THE OLD KNIVES
Babylon Berlin
The Last of Us
EMPIRE OF LIGHT

There are a couple of omissions for the aforementioned negative reason, which is not bad really, for all those hours of watching (usually we manage an episode a night, occasionally two. Rarely do we get to watch a whole movie, but we try not to split it if we do, having made that mistake last year, which broke up the flow of several films).

Anything to recommend? Do let me know, just hit reply!

Growing

We have seeds. Lots of seeds and lots of plans. Our home doesn’t have much in the way of garden, but it has an outside space: terrace, decking, and an area along and down the side of the house. I’ve calculated it should still be enough to grow a lot of things, as long as I get the construction of self-watering containers, trellising, and various other things complete in time. Then there will be finding enough soil to fill said containers and working out a watering system to contend with. Lots to do, but lots of potential.

My first goal is to turn the terrace area outside the front door into an outdoor room. Last year, when we were renovating and decorating, we ate outside nearly everyday and have already begun to do so this year, even as early as February; the space is a suntrap and we are glad of the retractable shade. This year, I want to add green walls to that space, three types of tomatoes, Armenian cucumbers, round courgette, and kabocha/Japanese pumpkin, for example, things going up and some things going down. There will be both edible and medicinal flowers too, along with some which deter some kinds of insect whilst encouraging pollinators. Add to this a lot of herbs and we will have a wide variety of plant life.

The plan is to grow things that are either expensive to buy, difficult to get, or which just taste vastly better when freshly picked. We’re not going to grow things that store well, take up a lot of room, are cheap to buy frozen or fresh and don’t really add that extra punch to flavour when grown oneself (examples include potatoes or green beans).

I have also designed, but not yet built, a set of shelving on a wheeled platform, for plants which will appreciate being wheeled into the garage every evening when the sun goes down (chillis, three types!).

Not only will it be nice to have the cooling effect a green-fringed buffer zone will have on the indoors in summer, but it will also be lovely to be able to pick fresh fruit and vegetables and eat them straight away, or perhaps pickle or preserve others (chillis, again, I’m definitely looking at you!). Given that I’ve also chosen some varieties of flower based on their scent, I also hope they will perfume this green room.

Much of the planned produce are early varieties, which fruit early summer or even late spring. These are deliberately chosen to make it easier when we are not here later in summer, and also to manage heat issues.

Of course, another reason to do this is because, at the moment, we can; growing things when on the road is difficult but when based in one place, it makes sense. It is also good to show Ailsa and involve her in the process.

Circling the Dark Mountain

If you’ve been reading this letter for some time, you’ll no doubt have seen me use the term ‘active hope’, to describe how I feel about climate change and what is often perceived as inaction on the behalf of our species.

I like to hedge my bets. I like to be prepared, no matter what the world may throw at me — plan for things, consider pathways and routes through the near future and then, whatever happens, you are (I am) ready to face it.

Sometimes, it can become difficult to see the hope. Sometimes, those clutching fingers reach from the mire, grasping and tugging you down into the depths. Or try to. I try not to let them but, at times, it can be hard.

A part of the problem lies in the fact I like to be aware of the science behind, for example, the climate emergency. I can be pulled into this and, when you read pieces and interviews by the scientists involved, people who deal with raw data and fact and are increasingly alarmed by what they are recording, that can be difficult to deal with.

I am confident we as a species can actually not only solve the issues we have created, but can also reverse them. We are an incredible bunch of hominids, after all. What makes me worry the most, however, and sometimes tugs hardest, is that, even with these remarkable minds, they can only do so much before the big corporations shut them down. Big oil, for example and, by extension, energy providers, are making record profits — what is in it for them, if they were to suddenly declare they were switching to a free, clean energy source, such as that massive ball of plasma we orbit, diverging entirely from oil?

The problem is always money.

Even some writers I admire, whose work is often fact-based, seem to miss this. It is all very well, listing how other times in our collective history were also fraught, how bad things always seem to happen, but the simple fact of the matter (even disregarding all the other issues those of us currently alive have to deal with) is that we are at the top of a spiral, circling and gaining speed ever-downwards.

At what point does that spin become unstoppable?

Governments and, for example, the United Nations, can only do so much — and that is at the behest and say-so of those same corporations lobbying and pulling strings.

Some of you may have read of the Dark Mountain, a project initiated over a decade ago now, a project which is divisive and many find hard to accept. In essence, this is a creative endeavour, in which the contributors accept that ecological, social and cultural decay and, indeed, destruction, is inevitable and already happening. That’s not entirely it — if you want to know more, do follow the link — but it is the very basics.

In a word, the Dark Mountain represents ‘uncivilisation’, an unravelling of society.

Over the winter, I began to think more and more about the Dark Mountain, wondering whether my thoughts were increasingly moving that way — that uncivilisation is inevitable, and who are we to try and pretend otherwise?

Perhaps I have yet to climb the mountain itself, but I have definitely found myself exploring its foothills, questioning whether active hope was the right way forward, after all.

Recently, I have decided, for now at least, it still is. Blind hope doesn’t really cut it for me, never has, but active hope is another matter.

It can be good to stare into the darkness, to assess it and my own reaction to what I see and come back refreshed, reinvigorated.

I will still read Dark Mountain works, I will still keep my options for a darker future open, keeping that axe sharp and those skills sharper — but I will not give up on the world, on humankind, just yet. Hopefully, neither will the right people, those who can actually solve something as dire as this. Doomerism (something I recently discovered is A Thing) is not for me.

Finally

Given that I missed the last scheduled newsletter date and that this is already over 5k words, I think that’s enough for now, right?! I’m leaving some bits back for the next newsletter.

I hope all is well with you? If you have it where you are, I hope spring is warming you well and that the land is blossoming. Take care of yourselves and keep fighting the good fight.

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Photos

The pictures are all mine, all taken recently. I really do like taking macros shots of weird things whether mould, bees, leather journal covers or pages… These photos usually make the email length too long for some email clients, but I do hope people still click the ‘read entire email’ link. If you are reading this, I suspect you did. Thank you.