The Necessity of Bar Room Brawling

I spent most of yesterday trying, yet again, to make headway with a chapter that has been foxing me for a long while now. The main problem is that what I am planning to do is not really dramatic enough, as it begins with two characters discussing art, music and philosophy before moving onto alchemy. One of them is a sceptic, while the other is a practicing alchemist travelling incognito.

Finally, after going for a walk along the sea-front at 9.30 last night, and then popping into a hostelry on it for some much needed inspiration, I realised I had the solution. What was needed was to have something else going on at the same time as the discussions. What this turns out to be will be, of all things, a bar room brawl.

What happens is that the sceptic watches some women doing their laundry on the banks of the Rhine, and recalls something the alchemist said to him - 'Go to the woman who washes her sheets at the river and do as she does.' This is a fairly well-known alchemical adage, and the guy starts to wonder about his new friend. We then have a bit of back story about how the two met in Rome. After pondering recent events, the man realises he's been staring at the women for so long that they've gotten worried about his attentions, and leave.

That night, the sceptic meets the alchemist in a tavern. The husband of one of the women is also there, and he picks a fight with the sceptic, accusing him of lusting after his wife. Our hero protests, saying that he was thinking about alchemy, which makes the husband scoff. This is doubly embarrassing for our hero, as he doesn't want to tarnish his reputation (he is a university professor) with belief in alchemy. Needless to say, the husband takes a swing at him, flooring him in one go. It is then, I think, that our man spies the alchemist watching all this from a corner table. He is incensed, and, after the husband has left, asks the alchemist why he didn't intervene. The alchemist replies that the time is not yet right for him to blow his cover. By way of apology for the right hook that the sceptic has sustained, the alchemist offers to make him gold...

I'm pretty sure that by having the fight in the tavern, it will make the dramatic element of this particular episode much better, and will enable me to then get some alchemical chat going while the sceptic is applying ice to his bruised face. And of course, it will set up the later moment when the alchemist is forced to blow his cover, with tragic consequences. So I think that's the golden rule: always have two things going on in a scene.

How to write a novel Part 1: Look out of the window

Another post about Elias (the novel), although I have to admit to not having written anything since the last post here due to going to Cannes and attending two weddings and a funeral, and also that the post is not actually about writing, but something tangential to it.

But since I got back to the Manor at the weekend, I have been looking out of the window a lot. It's something I do anyway, as my desk where I write this is by my front window which looks out over the western edge of the Somerset Levels and, beyond them, the Quantocks and the cusp of Exmoor.

Due to the extreme weather we've had here over the last week, though, the landscape has changed on an hourly basis. I'm amazed at how different the same view can look under different atmospheric conditions: storms, mist, sudden bursts of sunlight that illumine parts of the landscape you've never seen before, gaps in the clouds, strange dusks.

It maybe sounds strange, but I have felt as though I have been able to see what C17th Dutch painters like Ruisdael saw... especially when the cloud breaks for five minutes or so, and an otherwise overcast landscape can have a shaft of gold cast down across it, maybe just highlighting one village, or a few fields, or a church spire.

Given that Elias happens in the C17th, this last few days' weather has seemed auspicious indeed, and I know that, given the right kind of silence, I will be back at work.

Finally... A Post about working on the Novel

I decided to take today off (currently working on another book for Pocket Essentials) to have a look at Elias and see where I stand. I have been setting myself ridiculous deadlines for the novel for ages, and had hoped to have completed the first draft by the end of last year. That, of course, was not to be, so today I felt like I really ought to just sit down and read through it, make notes, even just think about writing.

Make notes I did, but I also fairly painlessly managed to write 1,000 words, which is pretty good going, as on the days when I have been working on Elias (which have been too few and far between) I usually write about 500 words, which I would consider to be good going. So, after 1,000, I feel like I'm back in the saddle.

The section I wrote comes early on in the proceedings, when the new maid is shown around the house in Enkhuizen. Having visited there in January, I was able to slip in a few details about what she could see from her bedroom window (she's given a small attic room).

It's curious, though, how easy today's work on it was. I think if you get yourself settled, turn the music off, sit there in silence, then it will come. All being well, I should hope to top the 30,000 words mark this week, if I can have another 2 days like today. I still expect the whole thing to be around 80,000 words. I've started Part II, but Parts III and IV and the Epilogue are still only in note form at the moment.

So, if I can top the all-important psychological barrier of 30,000, it will be a case of, to quote Python, 'With this new novel well and truly under way, and the prospect of a good day's writing ahead, back to the studio.'

New Poems Published

In yet another non-novel related post, four of my poems are in the latest (#25 Spring 2005) issue of the poetry magzine FIRE. Copies can be obtained from their website, www.poetical.org.

The Holy Blood, the Holy Grail, and all That

On Sunday I gave a talk for the Sauniere Society at their Spring Symposium at Carberry Tower, near Edinburgh. My chosen subject, if I can coin a phrase from Mastermind, was the Cathars. I shuffled on at the ungodly hour of 0930 and proceeded to speak until 1115, far longer than I expected, but I lost track of time! Anyway, I had a number of people thank me afterwards, which was nice, as I was totally unsure of what I had let myself in for when I agreed to give the talk while I was in Los Angeles.

And that leads me on to something else... Alchemy, Elias, the great work of what I am still slaving over, thinking about much of the time, and generally procrastinating over whenever I have the opportunity (which is frequently). Alchemy had been on my mind anyway, as Carberry is not so far from Port Seton, the home of Alexander Seton and the location of his rescue of Jacob Haussen and his crew in the Firth of Forth on that fateful day in 1601.

I arrived in Edinburgh at 0830 or so on Friday morning. It was my first visit since the EIFF 2002. I usually go to the Film Festival every year - an act of religious observance, almost, since 1997 and all that - but had been unable to go in 2003 (due to shooting Crow) and in 2004 (due to editing it). But here I was, back in the Holy City, and facing not just a chilling wind, but also nerves about how to talk about something which I have difficulty in talking about. The difficulty is not in ineptitude in terms of speaking, but in terms of emotion. How do you talk about atrocity? How can you talk about the death of people you feel close to? And not just the death, but the murder? The mass murder?

And, moreover, who the hell was I going to give this talk to? I'd heard all about Berenger Sauniere from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - a required text if you ask me, not only for what it says, but also for the extraordinary backlash that it continues to provoke - but not the Society named after him. I feared a colloquy of conspiracy theorists who would rebuke me for not labouring the more esoteric points of the Cathar story (that they possessed the Holy Grail etc).

It was with these trepidations that I got a taxi out to Carberry on Friday afternoon. In the lobby, I met Joy, the co-chair of the society, and also Lynne Picknett and Clive Prince, whose book on the Turin Shroud helped me with my research when I was doing my first book, the one on alchemy. I also credit Lynne with re-igniting my interest in the Royal Art when I went to see a talk she gave at BUFORA in September 1996. She claimed that she was 3 at the time. She doesn't look a day over 7 now.

And banter like that - frequently over red wine - proved to be the gel that brought the weekend and its disparate participants together. I felt very much on my own that first evening when Henry Lincoln - peace be upon him - spoke, but this feeling of isolation diminished with each breakfast, lunch and coffee break. To say nothing of the afterhours wine...

So, by the end of the weekend, I had not only spoken for nearly two hours about The Good Christians, but had also heard a former Sinn Fein activist turned Celtic Bard sing Walter Scott and had chewed the cud with punk legend and all round decent bloke Rat Scabies.

The mysteries of the transmutatations of every day life will never cease to amaze me.

Western Daily Press Article

There's an article about me in today's edition of the Western Daily Press, on page 11 in Geoff Ward's Mysterious West section, complete with author mugshot (taken in Heidelberg Castle) and a shot of the cover of the Cathar book. It's funny, I go away to LA for two weeks, and while I'm gone, everything starts happening. Still, things happen for a reason...

Here's the article, minus the photos:

FILM-MAKER SEAN EXAMINES CULT OF THE CATHARS
10:07 - 25 March 2005 A Somerset film-maker's fascination with medieval mystery and mayhem has led to his fourth book on those turbulent times. After the Black Death, alchemists and the Knights Templar for the Pocket Essentials series, Sean Martin has now brought out a study of the Cathars, the heretical religious cult brutally liquidated by the Catholic Church in France and Italy in the 13th century. Sean, 38, of Brent Knoll, who took a history degree at university, said it was the "extreme world" of the Middle Ages that drew him to the period.
"Life was much more fragile and short then," he told me. "But there was a greater spiritual life, people were more certain in matters of faith and seemed to be in closer touch with God and the unseen things, myths, and so on.
"It has struck me also how much our modern world is a product of the Middle Ages.
The Middle East was no different then, at the time of the Crusades and the persecution of Muslims, than now. Western society directly resulted from changes around the time of the Cathars."
Sean has just been to Los Angeles for a preview of his second full-length film, The Notebooks Of Cornelius Crow, about a man who uncovers the secret meaning of the geometry of London's layout and architecture.
Crow leaves his findings in a series of cryptic notebooks which his protege, Jack Cade, must decipher before a mysterious organisation finds Cade and exacts an awful vengeance.
A DVD release and film festival screenings are expected in the UK this year, as well as a showing at the Cannes Film Festival. Sean's next Pocket project will be the Gnostics, another sect suppressed by the early Church, and he is also developing a novel, as well as writing poetry.

The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy Of The Middle Ages is published by Pocket Essentials at £9.99.

Radio Interview 31 March

I'm on the Morning Programme with Jo Phillips on BBC Somerset Sound on Thursday 31 March at 0900, talking about the Cathars, the Templars and filmmaking. To tune in, set your radio to 1566m, or go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/somersetsound/