OK, in no order of preference at all (apart from the Electric Boogaloo) here are the runners and riders for the new book’s title. By this time next week I will have received Ted Hughes’s Wolfwatching and Lupercal, so I may have some more titles to steal.
I like Shadow of the Wolf but it was a 1992 film, so that may rule it out.
I have included everything I’ve thought of in a sort of ‘brainstorming’ manner – not all are really contenders but it’s best to write them all down as they may point the way to the eventual title.
I’m not at all sure we’re quite there yet. I may have to try again tomorrow. I want something that says ‘fantasy’ but not the equivalent of a ‘hooded man’ title. That said, hooded men seem very popular and what I want is a title to get people to read the book. So maybe Wolfsbane or Shadow Wolf would be best – traditional fantasy, says fantasy, attracts the fantasy reader. At the moment I like The Fell Wolf Fenrir although I’d like something that gets the idea of a pursuit into the title. Most of the book someone is being chased so I might like to convey that.
Wolfsbane
Wolfshadow
Moontaker’s Song
The Moon Taker
Wolf Song
Stone Wolf
Shadow of the Wolf
In the Shadow of the Wolf
The Wolf and his shadow
My Shadow is a Wolf
Wolf Taken
Wolf Night
Night of the Wolf
Wolfsbane
Hunted
The Hunted
The Teeth of Midnight
Wolf Hunt
Hunting the Wolf
The Wolf at Midnight
The Midnight Wolf
A Night Caller
The Voice of the Night
Fenris Unbound
The Wolf Torn Men
The Wolf Torn
The Wolf in the Garden
Wolf Called
Call of the Wolf
Jaws of the Midnight
Eyes of the Wolf
Wolfseye
The Dread Wolf
A Wolf Called Fear
Dreamstalker
The Night Forest Stalker
Moonhunter
Axe Age, Wind Age, Wolf Age
Axe Age Storm Age, Wolf Age
Age of the Wolf
Wolf Dawn
Wolf Kill
The Killing of the Moon
The Moonkiller’s Lover
The Moontaker’s Song
Moon Song
Wolf Slayer
The Raven and the Wolf
The Dead God’s Servants
The God in the Stone
The Ever Wolf
Ever the Wolf
Always the Wolf
The Always Wolf
The Wolf Behind You
Teeth of the Wolf
God of the Hunt
They that must live
That they must live
The Ragged Forest
The Wolf of Always
The King of Carrion
Death’s Friend
Night Voices
Us He Devours
The Devourer’s Song
The Wolf in Dreams
The Dream Running Wolf
The Wolves Running
Running Wolf
The Fell Wolf
The Fell Wolf Fenrir
The Fell Wolf at Midnight
The Terror of the Gods
A Feast for Wolves
The Wolf’s Feast
The Fetters Shall Burst
The Wolf Runs Free
The Fetters Shall Burst and The Wolf Run Free
Tears of the Wolf
The Wolf’s Lament
The Fell Wolf’s Tear
A Falling Wolf
Wrath of Fenris
Wolfsmantle
Wolves of the East
Wolves of…. something
The Fell Wolf Fenrisulfr
Wolfsangel II Electric Boogaloo (thanks for that one Neverwhere)
The book is officially published tomorrow – 30 mins time, May 20.
Thanks to all who have helped with its publication and to everyone who has blogged it or reviewed it so far!
I have another review up, this time at the fabulous Un:bound blog.
http://hagelrat.blogspot.com/2010/05/wolfsangel-mdlachlan.html
Naturally, if it was a bad one I wouldn’t be drawing your attention to it!
Also see my Gollancz blog on the literary life in fantasy.
http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/genres/science-fiction-and-fantasy/gollancz-blog
Only days until book is released. Very excited!
M
I’ll be signing Wolfsangel at the Forbidden Planet megastore in London between 6 and 7 on May 13. We will be off for drinks afterwards! Details all here
All welcome to attend. This is the first time Wolfsangel will be available in the UK.
Back from Eastercon and just about recovered from psychoactive mixture of sugary food, hotel light and excitement at meeting so many interesting people.
Found everyone very friendly and welcoming – other authors and rival publishing houses to mine included.
Went on Saturday and Monday as could not get a pass from wife for whole event.
Sat began with me meeting up with Steve Kilbane – the sword expert – who had agreed to help me with my lecture on Victorian self-defence. We were going to run through some of the moves.
I used to do a lot of martial arts, from the age of around 15 up until about 5 years ago. Then I jacked it all in and decided to take up fencing as it’s less punishing on the body than Thai Boxing and Judo.
However, I thought I still knew enough to give a convincing display – particularly as I’d done a seminar with Bartitsu expert Tony Wolf a couple of years before.
Working out all the moves with Steve, however, I was aware of quite a bit of creaking and rustiness and began to think ‘oh dear, I am going to make a twit of myself here.’
Come the talk at 4, however, the adrenaline kicked in. Rooms C and D were full and I began to really get into it. So much so that I went for it a bit too much on my first demonstration throw. After I’d thrown Steve I did think – in the moment before he hit the floor ‘oh no, I didn’t bother to check if he could breakfall’. Luckily he could, so was OK.
I’ll put up the full Bartitsu (that’s the Victorian martial art) stuff here soon. A fun bit was speculating which throw Conan Doyle was describing when Holmes threw Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.
The evening was spent yakking. I met Roz Kearney, among others. I often meet people I think are more clever than me. However, I rarely meet people who make me feel thick. Roz, who is very nice by the way, was one of those. She did seem to know everything about everything, particularly in the field of SF, Fantasy and myth. Let’s just say that, come the next Gollancz quiz night, I want her on my team.
All Gollancz crew were there and we went for a meal with them in the hotel next door. I tried to encourage Sam Sykes – he’s from Arizona – to try mushy peas but then remembered I don’t like mushy peas myself. Sam seemed to be bemused by his introduction to British drinking culture. ‘How come you’re all half my size but can drink twice as much?’
Went for round 2 of my debate with Gavin Smith. ‘This house believes The Smiths ruined popular music’. I am a major Mozzer fan, Gav is not – to say the least. Gav likes Faith No More, who he thinks are better than The Smiths and also, it transpired, The Velvet Underground. No further questions m’lud.
Still, I do like Gavin very much and our arguments remind me of ones I used to have with my brother. Who was wrong too. Simon Spanton, Steve and Michaela Deas were on hand to witness the slug fest. I think my goth purity got to Steve and Michaela when I described The Sisters of Mercy as ‘new stuff’.
Met up with Jonny Nexus there who has quite a fan club for his novel Game Night – published by a small press. I keep encouraging him to try with a major publisher because people really do seem to love this book.
Didn’t do any panels on the Saturday because I was too focussed on my Victorian Self Defence talk.
Monday I bowled up late and thought at first that the Con was basically over. Not so, as it turned out many people stayed right to the end. Attended panel on religious iconography in SF, which set the bar of debate rather high for my own panel on researching the imaginary later on. I was with three witches, it turned out – Raven Dane, Liz Williams and Jaine Fenn (wicca, lapsed). Did wonder if I was going to be told that I was king hereafter.
A good panel with a frighteningly well-informed audience and fellow panelists, very well attended too. I’d feared it would be us and the tumbleweed at that time on a Monday but we had a good turn out.
Then hit dead dog party, ate own weight in chocolate chip cookies and went home.
Bonus was that I discovered I had a good review for Wolfsangel in Waterstones Quarterly. Link here
Anyway, that was that. Now increasingly nervous as publication date of Wolfsangel approaches. Still bashing on sequel, which has required a bit of chopping recently.
Just a blog on the nature of the magic system in Wolfsangel as it’s something that has come up in a review.
The defining feature of fantasy tends to be the presence of some sort of magic – from the low magic of George RR Martin, through Tolkien to the fireball-throwing fun of Wheel of Time.
The magic system in Wolfsangel bears little resemblance to any of these and, as far as I know, has not been employed in fantasy before. That’s a bold claim and I stand to be corrected on it as, clearly, I haven’t read every fantasy title ever written!
The reason that Wolfsangel’s magic is a little different, I think, is that my interest in magic doesn’t really arise from fantasy literature at all. Ever since I was very young I was always fascinated by magic and, from about aged nine, was taking books out of the library such as ‘A History of Witchcraft in England’ and other stuff by Dion Fortune and such like.
I’d read these things under my blankets with a torch, and scare myself daft with tales of witch bottles, people vomiting pins and the tortures of the witch finders.
I say all this because what I’m about to write makes it sound like I sat down and thought ‘hmmm, let’s invent a new and terrifying system of magic for my next book. What would that look like?’
In fact, I just started writing and found that the magical system pretty much wrote itself. This idea of magic was inside me and it just popped out. Surprisingly, what did pop out is coherent and – once you’ve accepted its initial premise – logical. That’s part of the mystery of the creative process as I can honestly say I had no idea what the magic system would be until I came to describe the character of the main magician in the book.
It sounds a little pretentious but when I’m writing well I don’t really have much conscious input. It just seems to appear on the screen. So, like I say, ’system’ is perhaps too grand a title. I think I’d go for ‘the view of magic that seems to be present in the book I’ve written’ as a better description.
So what is this view? Well it stems from the central idea that magic costs. This is an idea you see in most real world magical traditions (I know that’s a weird concept but you know what I mean) – but it’s one that’s absent from much – though not all – fantasy writing.
Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizards of Earthsea (an early favourite of mine) contains this idea but a great deal of fantasy just involves someone having a power, using it and suffering little personal cost – the Dungeons and Dragons mode of magic, so to speak.
Ascetics of real world cultures, though, undergo privation and even torture to access their magical insights and powers. Shamans take to sweat lodges, hermits undergo wilderness ordeals, Native American magicians stake themselves down in the desert – at least in my A Man Called Horse inspired memory they do - yogis starve, pierce themselves or are buried alive.
This tradition is very present in Norse magic. In the Edda – the collection of 13th century Icelandic poems and myths from which we get our knowldedge of Norse myth , Odin goes to the well of Mimir – whose waters impart knowledge – and gives his eye to drink from them. The Poetic Edda also says:
‘I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin
myself to myself
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run
No bread did they give me nor drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.’
This is a very evocative passage. Many of its ideas seeped into Wolfsangel, though I can’t claim to have consciously put them in. I love the idea of the god sacrificing himself to himself. I wonder if this was in the original myth. The Edda were written by Christians and this is clearly a very Christian idea.
No matter, it’s a good one and I absorbed it. So Odin mutilates himself, hangs and is pierced by a spear to take up the magical symbols – the runes.
This then, is the idea of magic that is in Wolfsangel – a magic of transgression. The sorcerer does something so painful, abhorent or gruelling that her (in Wolfsangel, as in Norse myth, magic is overwhelmingly the province of women, Odin apart) normal mind recoils, enabling the magical self to appear through the veil of daily reality. My sorcerers are drained by this whole process, physically ravaged.
I have a conception of the runes of Norse mythology too – the magical symbols used for spell casting. I won’t say too much about them because I don’t want to spoil the book. However, they are not inert ingredients and those who use them pay a high price to do so.
The other thing I took from my early reading is that magic is disturbing. I really tried to get that in to Wolfsangel, the idea that the forces involved are alien and terrifying. The images that came to me while I was writing the book were the bog bodies, the woodcuts of the witch trial period (I know they’re an anachronism but they set a certain mental tone), half remembered stuff about Native American pain rituals, and illustrations like this. I wanted to get something that recreated the feeling I had when I read those books on witchcraft, a mixture of fascination and horror.
So I hope that explains a little of the foundation of the magic as it operates in my new book.
Many of the rituals and magical practices my witches and magicians subject themselves to are so extreme that they are gateways to madness. Again, this ties in neatly with the Norse conception of Odin – God of magic, madness, poetry, the hanged and the slain. He suffered to gain his magic powers at the well of Mimir. My magicians must do the same if they want to share in his magical abilities.
The advantage of writing historical fantasy is, of course, that you don’t have to make any of the details of your world up. It’s all there for you in history.
The problem is that history is slippery, amorphous and sometimes unrecorded. The dark ages (sound of historians screaming as I use that name, sorry, early medieval period) where I’m setting the first three books of my Wolfsangel series, are a case in point.
There can be a great deal of dispute about what a particular historical figure said or did and the details of day to day life can be very hard to come by. You can’t extrapolate back from the high medieval period because the difference in world view and even technology between the 8th century and the 13th is immense.
OK, with effort you can find those things but it’s the little details that kill you. I’m currently having a bash at discovering what the walls of Paris would have looked like in the 9th century. My guess is that they’d be the old Roman ones – perhaps with a bit of patching here and there.
However, it’s equally likely that they could have been a wooden pallisade or a rampart.
Then there’s clothing, attitudes, geography. If you’re making up your own world you just say ‘I know, let’s have some deep ravines along this river to the sea.’ Historical fantasy writers, however, are left with trying to find out exactly how, say, the Somme looked in the early medieval period. Fens, apparently. Well, I’ve never been in a proper fen so now I have to find out about them.
And this is the dark ages. There are relatively few things to get right – horses, houses, dress, customs but it’s not such a complex time as, say, the Victorian period. Also, luckily, sources are few. Why luckily? Well it means you can take educated guesses at things that you don’t know without getting a call from Eric Pode of Croydon saying ‘do you know your description of the mechanism of a gentleman’s fob watch in 1876 is anachronistic. The mechanism you’re talking about didn’t exist until 1877 at the earliest’.
Still, I do like to get things right because the richer you make the reality the more convincing will be your world. Exactly what was the disposition of houses outside the walls of Paris? Was the river faster or slower flowing back then? How did the armies that invaded the Frankish realm – Vikings, Saracens, Frisian and others camp – under tents? Probably but I can’t find any definite evidence that says they did..
All of this is fine and, actually, quite fun. Does it matter if I get the length of a Frankish cloak wrong (half length, known as a Saie, I think) or the language of ancient Paris? Not terribly materially to the story – I’ve got werewolves and sorcerers in it after all. It would matter to me, though.
The reason is that the past is a very strange place. One of the reasons people come to fantasy is to get a sense of wonder. To me – and I’m really not knocking imaginary world fantasy at all because I love that stuff – there’s as much wonder in a recreation of the world view of a 9th century prince, monk or peasant as there is in hearing of the invented moon-worshipping customs of the Ngler of Nglee.
In fact, I think it’s easier to create wonder using real history than it is fantasy. We’ve come a long way since Tolkien and there have been many, many books with invented worlds – some brilliant, some not quite so.
It’s actually quite hard to do something new in fantasy world building. Yes, you can have original ideas but the bar is set very high before you get the ‘wow!’ factor, for the simple reason that there have been so many ‘wows’ before. I have to confess I find it quite hard to get excited about a new race of creatures, a new floating forest (random example, if someone has a floating forest, I’m not talking about that book!), a new magic item.
Of course, all those things can be exciting if done well. It’s just that it’s getting harder and harder to do them well, or at least originally.
I was going to continue this blog entry for a while yet but, since I’ve been composing it since before Christmas, I’ll stick it out now or it will never get done!
Wolfsangel still attracting good reviews and early indications are that bloggers really like it too, which is gratifying. There’s always a nervousness that a good reception by critics won’t be matched by the reception by fans. It can work the other way around, of course. Something that gets a critical mauling – Da Vinci Code, for instance, is loved by millions around the world. Hopefully a novel can score with both sets of readers. My fingers, toes and other extremity is crossed.
Just had a very pleasing review of the advanced review copy of Wolfsangel from the wonderful multiple British and World fantasy award-winning novelist Graham Joyce.
He said the following:
“Superior thunderous and full-blooded historical fantasy, broiling and smoking with mystery, beautifully written”
That makes this werewolf howl with gratitude, if you can howl with gratitude.
Here’s all the ARC reviews of Wolfsangel in one place. Please don’t think I’m going on an ego trip, it’s just that it’s convenient for me to have a link that I can direct bloggers to. I hope this will encourage them to review the book.
I’ve sent this direct to several bloggers but thought it might be convenient just to have the link here.
Advanced review copies of Wolfsangel were sent out to leading authors just before Christmas and I’m really pleased to say the response has been excellent so far.
Adam Roberts, author of Yellow Blue Tibia and also a Guardian book critic said of the book:
‘A classic. Brilliant stuff. This is not a run of the mill Fantasy text; nor, really, is it even a riff upon those worn-smooth tropes. It is something genuinely strange, eerie, evocative.’
http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2009/12/m-d-lachlan-wolfsangel-2010.html
Joe Abercrombie, bestselling fantasy author, writing on his blog, said Wolfsangel
‘manages to evoke the weirdness of the viking mindset to the point where even the normal people feel a lot more alien than most denizens of epic fantasy. It’s savage, dark, strange and unpredictable, which are all good things in my book.’
http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2009/12/wolfsangel.html
Mike Carey – author of the bestselling Lucifer graphic novels and much good stuff besides has provided a quote for the cover, saying
‘A unique take on the werewolf mythos, on the Norse pantheon and on magic itself. An enthralling, mesmerising book.’
Stephen Deas, author of The Adamantine Palace has said
‘Sent chills down my spine. Dark, bloody and dangerous, you can almost smell the sweat and iron coming off the pages. There are a lot of werewolves coming our way this year, but Wolfsangel could well be the standard by which they will be judged for some years to come’
Detective fiction bestseller RJ Ellory said:
‘A spellbinding and unputdownable fusion of historical and fantasy fiction that is sure to enchant devotees of both genres.’
So that’s the news so far. I’m available for interview to answer questions on the book/me/writing in general. It’s due for publication on May 20, I’m appearing on panels at Eastercon and, I hope, putting in an appearance at Horrorcon (to be finalised).
Just had another good review for Wolfsangel, this time from Stephen Deas – author of The Adamantine Palace.
Stephen is a braver man than me because, while werewolves have been fairly well covered in literature – he successfully took on the myth of the Dragon – a much more difficult beast to bring originality to, owing to their complete centrality to fantasy lit.
Stephen says Wolfsangel. ‘Sent chills down my spine. Dark, bloody and dangerous, you can almost smell the sweat and iron coming off the pages. There are a lot of werewolves coming our way this year, but Wolfsangel could well be the standard by which they will be judged for some years to come’‘
Hoorah!