One’s for posing, two’s for the parents…

Come on!  You have to do it, don’t you…

The publisher usually sends five free copies.  I kept one, sent one to my Aunty in Trinidad and gave one to my husband’s parents, my parents and my best friend’s mum. Which leaves… Damn!  Where’s that gone, then?  I’ve always wondered what other writers do with their freebies.

 

No funny sex, but a hit of myth

I was intrigued by Authorprofile’s assertion at the London Book Fair that Rick Riordan has, to resurrect the spirit of  the X-Factor judging panel, made myth his own.  The presenter pondered  how any other YA writer could encroach on this rich territory.

Myth and legend is a constant influence on the popular arts.  It threads through pop-culture, from glam-funk 1980s groups like ‘Imagination’ to the Coen Brother appropriation of the Ulysses myth in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ through to Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’ and the Marvel magazine’s Thor stories – though my daughter greatly resents the films’ erroneous pairing of Thor and Loki as brothers!

My particular interest is Caribbean myth and legend.  Although I grew up in England, my world was filled with the tales of female devils, poltergeists, wolfmen and the souls of unbaptised babies.  At primary school, in the pre-video age of BBC school TV programmes, I remember trooping off to our little television room with my English friends and seeing a programme about Anancy.  I took the news back home and my mum proudly claimed him as our own.  But I preferred our own family tales – the time when the obeah man was called to stop ghosts throwing stones on to the corrugated metal roof, or when my aunty saw a la diablesse by the mango tree in Victoria St.

In the Authorprofile branding exercise, I thought hard about what powers my writing.  Caribbean stories rates highly, central to both ‘Granny Ting Ting’ and ‘Wild Papa Woods’.  Now I just have to hope that Rick Riordan’s eyes haven’t turned to Trinidad.