#evernighties Family, friends and pets that I wrote into my books.

The newest prompt in the #evernighties blog challenge is  "Family, friends and pets that I wrote into my books".
Oh, this could be a long post, so I'll skip family and friends altogether and just talk about pets, which are family and friends too, in any case!
I love animals, and my pets pop all over my writing!

My Haflinger mare, Kaylee, is a central character in my short story "Headshy", and her journey from mistreatment  to trust and confidence is both her true story and very much part of the story arc of the book. She also made another cameo appearance in "Spellbreakers"!
Kaylee is living proof of "little people" power. She's a small horse, not fast, and not inclined to play tricks. But she proved to be a wonderful work-horse, and almost bombproof on the road, keeping her wits about her in situations where flashier horses would have exploded like fireworks.
We walked 5000 km together from 2009 to 2011, on all sorts of paths and roads, from Germany to Brittany to Catalonia, and then back to France. This long foot trip was part of the inspiration for Spellbreakers.
She's happily retired in a pasture just outside my garden now, with a ridiculous Shetland pony called Boomer for company.

Then there is Jade, the hell-hound. So called because he's impressive, large and black. In fact he's the most embarrassingly gentle, friendly and sweet dog that you will ever meet. He's been known to turn absolute cat-people into piles of pooch-cuddling mush. Jade appeared as Amber in Spellbreakers. And he pops up also in the story I am currently writing, The Elder Man, as himself.
Although Jade is a basically a four-legged clown, there is from time to time a touch of the supernatural about him... and that always comes out in my stories, where he always has something magical about him.

Of course there is Muffin.
Muffin was my adored white cat, who died in 2016. She was my "Little Doctor", and many other things. I think she held my world together and everything came apart somewhat since she passed away.
In my whole life, only one other death affected me more than hers. 😭
Muffin appears as herself in Spice & Vanilla. I truly wanted to write her in a story where she still was alive, and doing her healing work.
Muffin always looked a bit grumpy... but she wasn't. 
There are also three more family cats in that book, Jonesy, Ebola (as Plague... yes, don't ask me about the name), and Tamburino as Tambourine.

And there is Luna, my "lemur cat"!
She is the newest addition to my menagerie, with her brother Lumos. Because of her face-markings and her propensity for tree-climbing, we decided that her father (identity unknown) might have been a ring-tailed lemur escaped from the reserve zoologique of Salviac, not far from us!
And that's how I had the idea of writing a ring-tailed lemur (two actually), in In the Eye of the Wind. Luna's pet name is Puny Loony, and the lemurs in the book are called Puna and Luna.

Even my ducks made it into my stories... in Spice & Vanilla (just as a small flash-back), and in The Elder Man, my current WIP. Here it is my Cayuga ducks, specifically. Cayugas are beautiful  ducks with the loveliest iridescent black feathers, and in this story they appear with the collective pet name they have here in real life, the Paphoonies. If you want to know how that name came about you will have to read the story...

Top five things on my bucket list - the #evernighties

Top five things on my bucket list.

First of all I would like to mention that it's a little weird to discuss my bucket list on my birthday, but anyway. Have a nice Valentine, my dear, long-suffering readers. 

Ok, this is a hard one for me. Not so much because I have too many things to choose from, but simply because I don’t have much of a bucket list at all. Perhaps that is a symptom of having had a fulfilling life? I don’t know. There many things that I desire (a better political situation in this crazy world, my hedges and fruit trees to grow, all hunters that prowl along my fence on Sundays to drop dead) but they are not things you can just put on the bucket list. 

But I’ll give it a try.

As a builder I’d love to finish my hobbit house. A little cob cottage with a grass roof that I am building on the footprint of an ancient ruin. A home that blends seamlessly in the forest around it, and is built from materials sourced in the forest itself.

As an artist, I’d love to have a chance to photograph my favorite model of all times, D. Kovalev. That would fit well with one of my two dream travel destinations, Moscow. It is full of fascinating ancient architecture... and some astonishing modern things... Does that count as two things on the bucket list then? 

 Photo courtesy of Katerina Ross on Facebook

Unfortunately, I fear that I am not talented enough a photographer to deserve the privilege of working with D. Kovalev, so perhaps I will be content portraying him second-hand, so to say, through my drawings.

Empathy - Pencil drawing

© Katherine Wyvern 2018

Travel-wise, there is Moscow, mentioned above, and Grenada. I have had a lifelong fascination with the Alhambra palace. Like all places where East meets West it seems to incorporate elements of European art and culture, which I love, with the magic and spice of the exotic Orient. Best of both worlds.

 Creative Commons Image

And I would love to be a the Venice Carnival again, this time in full costume. 

A pretty humble bucket list, considering, but right now, all of these things seem pretty unreachable, except the building of my cottage perhaps. I just have to get my ass up, and go, and do it. Easy peasy.

A book that influenced m life - the #evernighties

A book that influence my life

It maybe unoriginal, but the book that influenced my life most is The Lord of the Rings.

I can’t even begin to tell how deeply ingrained Middle-Earth is in my life.

It’s not just that I love to draw pale blond elves with luminous eyes, and that I love swirly floral designs, and that I often say things like “Fool of a Took!”, or “What about second breakfast?”.

No, in fact I think that some of the most life-changing decisions I ever took had a distinctly Baggins-like cast to them.

At a crisis time of my life, I decided that much the best thing to do was to drop everything, including any pretence to respectability, and go on a grand walking adventure. In our case it was not so much a case of there and back again. We never meant to go back. We meant to tramp around Europe until we found a place where we could build a “hut in the woods”. Our own Shire, in other words.

We did find it. And there we decided to build a house with grass roof…

Much as I admire the tall Elves of Tolkien’s legends, I am very obviously a hobbit. Not only I am hobbit-sized, but I am also a gardener, and a tolerably rustic creature. I love good simple food, preferably grown in my own garden, or foraged in the nearby countryside. I don't have much use for kings and queens and complicated machinery (all of which can be described as orkeries, in my opinion). I love mushrooms, stout ponies, and "good tilled earth". I don't like upstairs, and I prefer to avoid being seen by the Tall People on my country walks.

 

But, like Bilbo, I have a reverence and need for higher tales and poetry in my life. So much of my art has to do with Middle-Earth, I would not even know where to start... embroideries, and paintings, and drawings, and maps, even woodwork and strange one-off projects... I have mixed Tolkien's world into my crafting since I was a child.

Gildor Inglorion - Pencil drawing

© Katherine Wvern 2018

Many find Tolkien’s stories antiquated, not so much for the (intentionally) high and archaic tone of them, but because of their “simple”, black and white moral tone, preferring a more cynical, more modern take on politics (a la George Martin, say).

I disagree on this assessment of Tolkien’s moral as simplistic. And in fact I always felt that his acknowledgment of some villains’ struggles (think of Gollum, Denethor, Boromir, and to a certain extent even Saruman or Wormtongue) and some heroes’ shortcomings (Frodo would never have destroyed the Ring, and even Treebeard was swayed by Saruman’s words, and let him loose, giving him a chance devastate the Shire, and not all hobbits shone for courage and loyalty, and Fëanor, the most gifted of all elves, made such a cock of things that we are still collecting the pieces to this day!) left a very strong impression on me as a child, and was perhaps the greatest ethical lesson I ever absorbed. It taught me to always try to see the other side of things (something that is sadly out of fashion lately) while still acknowledging that there are some absolutes of good and evil that it would be good to treat less cynically. 

Fëanor - Pencil drawing

© Katherine Wvern 2018

And Tolkien was, profoundly, an ecologist, perhaps before the word was even invented. That too he imprinted early on on me. 

While many accuse the Fantasy genre of “escapism” (an accusation that Tolkien himself refuted beautifully) there are lessons to be taken from good fantasy, especially at a time when our “real world” is becoming increasingly and dangerously unlivable.

 Lothlorien Brooch - stumpwork embroidery 2012

What would I do if I couldn’t be a writer? the #evernighties

What would I do if I couldn’t be a writer?

I suppose I would go one pretty much the same way, seeing how after all I don’t make a living (not even close) with my writing.

But let’s suppose hypothetically that I did make a living, that I *was* technically a writer (as opposed to someone who just writes, and publishes and goes stark raving mad about her stories etc), and supposing I could not be a writer any longer ... I suppose I would go and be a cobber. 

Of course I *am* cobber, or a least a person who cobs (cobbing being the activity of building cob buildings, try to keep up, won’t you?).

I mean, I am not likely to make a living with my art, so that’s a no-go.

I probably won’t make a living with cob either. But at least after you worked you ass off all summer you get a house out of it, albeit a small one. That’s gotta count for something. Cobbing is the most satisfactory job I ever did. First of all after a cobbing day you are intensely aware in all parts of your body that you worked hard. There’s none of that “where did the day go?” nonsense. You know exactly where the day went, and your back knows it, and your feet know it, heck even your fingernails know where the damn day is gone, because they are gone with it. Cobbing occupies all your muscles. If you have no muscles you are going to get some in a real bloody hurry.

And it’s fun. It might be one of the dirtiest things you can do with your clothes on, but it’s as fun as fuck (all puns fully intended). When you are sculpting an arched niche, in wet mud to your armpits, you know in your whole body that you are creating something beautiful. Beauty, thick, gritty, wholesome beauty, gets smeared thickly all over you, from your toes to the inside of your ears, and even in your hair and places inside your tightest sports bra where you would never have thought possible.

Artists and writers tend to live in their head, way, way too much. Cobbing is art too, it's the most creative thing you'll ever do, but it brings you in full body contact with the ground. Literally. It is literally grounding. As in you end up with subsoil sticking all over you.

 

It’s brilliant. When I grow up, I will definitely make mud pies, I mean, houses.

How much of me is in what I write? - the #evernighties

 Today's #evernighties blog prompt is "How much of me is in what I write".

All. Blood heart and soul. That’s the short answer.

The long answer is that I always pour a lot of my personal feeling and experience into my characters and stories. It would be hard to know where to start. My novel Spellbreakers (which is on sale at 0.99$ at the moment, just saying) is a long slow foot and horse trip across Europe, and large bits of that were inspired by my own 5000 km trek from Germany to Catalonia via Brittany in 2009/10.

Two of my characters (Ivory in Black Carnival and Gillian in The Nymph in the Stolen Garden) are apparently tame, shy plants-women with a wild side. I did work as a gardener, and like Ivory I did spend a preposterous amount of time making botanical illustrations and drawing up garden plans, when I would have much preferred to hire a model and draw nudes.

In Head Shy there is a traumatized mare that is slowly brought back to working condition and a more trusting frame of mind. Much of that comes from my experience with my own Haflinger mare, Kaylee.

But I certainly poured most of me in my more recent books especially in my loosely interconnected Transgender Trilogy. Nina from Woman as a Foreign Language is a strongly autobiographical character. Her traumatic past, her metal-work, her let us say, almost accidental gender-queerness, even her passion for myths and fairy tales, are all me.

In Spice & Vanilla there is a bit of me in Di, and a bit in Hugh. 

My passion for ancient sailing ships definitely shines through in In the Eye of the Wind (coming tomorrow!!)

And Nathaniel in A Muse to Live For (coming soon!), is definitely very much my alter ego in the way he feels about his art, his muse and inspiration. 

Perhaps it makes me a pathologically self-centered kind of person, but I find it very difficult to write characters that are entirely “other” from me. For example writing truly assertive, confident heroes is not something that comes at all natural to me, and I wonder how convincing they are when I actually do write them, although it is always fun to try.

There is a strong elemental streak in all my writings, earth and air and fire, light and darkness. In almost all my stories there tend to be an earthy, subfusc, usually short lover, and a taller, more luminous, airy-fiery one. 

Almost all the earth people in my books are me.