R. F. Long

The Wolf’s Destiny is featured at Kindle Romance Authors today. And there’s an interview with me there too.

Happy reading.

So I promised to post about Loughcrew, or the stop off on our journey home from Ashford Castle where we did this.

A rather important scene in my WIP is set in the Hag’s Cairn on Slieve na Cailleach (Loughcrew), and so I kindly suggested, as it was a lovely day and we were travelling along a completely different road, wouldn’t it be nice to take a detour and visit it. For fun. Because I’m like that. All about fun. And not about research at all. OH NO. NO RESEARCH INVOLVED HERE. *ahem*

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The May Tree, or Hawthorn, or the Fairy Tree features in my novel THE TREACHERY OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS. The tradition is to tie a rag or ribbon to the tree and make a wish. It’s a gnarled, thorny little tree, with the most beautiful white flowers in springtime and bright red berries in autumn. It is the Thorn in the saying Oak, Ash and Thorn, and grows in the most exposed areas, clinging to the sides of hills and the rocky earth.

We’ve been away for a couple of days, back to Ashford Castle in Mayo. I’ll have more photos and a post about it soon.

On the way back, we stopped off at Loughcrew, or Slieve na Cailleach (your spelling may vary). Slieve na Cailleach means Mountain of the Witch and is topped by a stone cairn called The Hag’s Cairn, which is about 6000 years old. It’s a fantastic place, really atmospheric and not a little creepy. I’ll have more on that too, including some compass related weirdness. But for this morning, here’s a photo I took on the way up there.

It’s a May Tree in November, with it’s rags and ribbons clearly displayed to the world as offerings to the fairies and the wishes of mankind. We added our own. I sort of felt I had to.

So this weekend just gone I was at the Camden Court Hotel in Dublin for the annual wonder that is Octocon, the Irish National Science Fiction Convention. It’s a fun and friendly convention, always trying new things, always something different and this year was no exception.

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Yes, it’s Octocon next week. Programming runs throughout the 15th & 16th October 2011 at the Camden Court Hotel, Dublin. That said, we usually meet up the evening of the 14th as well to catch up. The full schedule is available here. And Octocon is 21 this year, so I’m expecting a party.

As for the work side of it, this is what I have on:

Saturday
13:00   The Curse of Paranormal Pop culture
15:00   “Women in Scifi/fantasy/comics panels” – do they marginalize women.
16:00   Reading (!)

Sunday
11:00   The Ideas Book – Pitches that failed
12:00   Well Written Characters
16:00   Writing for Kids is Easy– why writing YA is hard.

Yes, that’s right, I’ve a reading on Saturday afternoon. So when I’ve been lured out from under a table by offerings of crisps and fizzy pop, as well as reading from one of my currently available books, I’m planning on reading something from THE TREACHERY OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS. Who knows, maybe 2 things. We’ll have to see how time goes.

Ok, so I’ve delayed posting this evening as I should have but I completely blame the brand new shiny shiny phone that arrived today. Did I mention it’s shiny???

Part 2 of the holiday theme was Megalithic. Brittany is of course awesome for all things megalithic. It has Carnac, to begin with. Actually Carnac pretty much trumps a lot of things, leaving aside the likes of Newgrange and Stonehenge. But anyway… it doesn’t just have Carnac.

I’m starting to form the opinion that the Bretons and their ancestors have something of an unspoken obsession with stones. With stones and the sea. The two seem to go hand in hand. All along the shore line at Point de la Torche, and on the rocky outcrops of Pointe de Raz in previous years, we found little towers of stones.  Everyone builds one. No one could offer us a reason why. Just because, I suppose. I wonder if there’s something in the air, something that makes one want to leave their own mark. I’m also starting to wonder if it’s something to do with Ankou, the Breton personification of Death, who leaves stones behind when he takes the dead away. (Ah yes, hello plotbunnies, there you are again).

I did mention there’s a Brittany book, didn’t I?

On the first day of our holiday we went to La Roche aux Fées (or the Fairy Rock) at Essé, a passage grave, uncovered for centuries, which looks like a giant table. Like Newgrange, the chamber is aligned with the rising sun of the winter solstice. I love the picture of the beech tree growing around the massive stones at the base. Nature always finds a way. And as we meandered through many tourists, took photos and gadded about in general, we found more piles of stones, balanced daintily on the gnarly trunk of the old beach tree by the entrance.

Carnac is a strangely peaceful place, especially considering the number of people it attracts. During the summer the alignments themselves are closed off, though you can see them clearly enough from behind the low, drystone walls (perfectly balanced and built by hand). The area becomes a wildflower and wildlife preserve. In winter one can book tours which allow you inside. There’s a reason to go back. The site is spread out over several areas, so we didn’t get to see it all. But there is an atmosphere to the place I really wasn’t expecting. It was lovely.

It also helped that near the Ménec alignments we found the most wonderful crêperie, Au Pressior, surrounded by a stone enclosure, where we had the best crêpes ever. No really. Mine had goat’s cheese, honey and nuts. They were perfect. It made our day.

The other thing about Carnac that the photos can’t capture are the colours — the stones themselves, the plants and flowers (purple, white and yellow like gold in the sunlight). The difference in the textures, the constant movement of butterflies and long grasses. And all so peaceful (except for my children playing Harry Potter and giving me story ideas, loudly!) We also found a stone at Carnac that appears to have a face of it’s own. (More plotbunnies – the kids helped with that one!)

Out to the far west, La Torche itself, the huge rock outcrop on the point in the shape of (you guessed it) a torch, is dramatic enough to feature in any number of stories. Believe me, I have ideas.

So anyway, here’s my slideshow of our visits to Megalithic Brittany, old and new!

The reason for the parts? Ah yes, well, there are many photos. So many in fact they fall into different categories. As did our holiday, in a sense. Medieval, Megalithic, Geographic, Folklorish, with the overriding theme of research. Strangely enough I didn’t get a lot of reading done. We did watch the series Pillars of Heaven which tied in with the first section – Medieval. Read more…

One of the most wonderful things about holidays is that I get time to work my way through my TBR pile. Some of these are books I’ve had for AGES, others are new (books tend to shuffle up and down the pile, in a bizare sort of queue jumping, elbowing others aside sort of way) but they are all books I want to read.

The Demon’s Surrender by Sarah Rees Brennan

The Poison Throne by Celine Keirnan (and the next 2 in the Moorhawk series)

Evermore by Alyson Noel

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Cathars by Sean Martin

and hopefully Revelation by C. J. Sansom (if I manage to borrow it before I go)

Plus a book on the Megaliths of Brittany. And a trip to the library before we go.

Hey, last year I took 16 books for a 14 day holiday… and read them too!

It all started as a bit of a whim to be honest. But then these things often do.

As some of you know when I was in Rome for a library conference in January, we were lucky enough to visit the Vatican library. It’s an incredible place. Of course, photos and videos were right out for us, lowly librarians that we were. So too was seeing the treasures!

But one of the group sent me a link this morning to a video report done for 60 minutes on the Vatican Library so I thought I’d share. It really captures something of the place, its history, its (often bizare) accessions – Henry VIII’s love letters to Anne Boelyn for example, and the breathtakingly beautiful Salon Sistino (pic above). It also shows us the behind the scenes work of the conservators, and the amazing things they do to preserve the most fragile of documents for the future. I can never praise this sort of work highly enough.

There’s an additional video where Morley Safer gets the same tour of the Salon Sistino as we did, but I will never forget seeing an elderly librarian of my group standing there, with his mouth wide open and head tilted right back as he stared in wonder at the ceiling like a small boy.

The extras are well worth looking at as well - the treasures oh, the shiny treasures… – and an explanation of why the library is closed to the public. And of course, if the library was burning down, what would the experts save???