So how is progress with The Ancestor's Tale, the fourth book in The Sefuty Chronicles.

Actually, not so good.

I first realized the trouble I was in last summer, when I found, with careful contemplation,that what I was struggling with was in fact two books. They had inadvertently merged together. Now how has that happened?

I believe the problem was caused by the prolonged interruption in the writing of it, caused by illness. Some of the more minor characters had had time to think of themselves, time to enlarge and run away with their own tales.

Those characters were a handful of children.

And they weren't even dead!

So they didn't belong in the book titled The Ancestor's Tale!

Eventually I had to face facts and work out a plan to save this fourth Chronicle.

Drastic plans.

I dismantled the many thousands of words I had already written, 90,000 of them.

Painstakingly untangle the two separate stories.

Sat down to decide what could be salvaged from the wreck.

After a couple of weeks of pondering and pottering around the garden, I decided the children needed the limelight and in fact they should do so in The Children's Tale. I had approximately 30,000 words for this new tale. What to do with the rest, I didn’t want to lose the ancestors, their story was important too. They have been moved over to a new book Companion Tales, I had begun planning this book in 2012, they would provide most of the backbone to this follow up book.

Companion Tales will be a series of short stories chronicling not just the ancestors, but also a few of the minor characters already mentioned in the previous books of the series, who in fact had had a fair amount to do with the story. So the Companion Tales would include Kennett Marshall and Gran in their early lives as well as the geneticist who medals with the DNA. Along with a few characters from The Children’s Tale.

Sorted.

The new Children's Tale, which is to be the fourth in the series, deals with the first-generation of mongrels. The children of Bixs and Jack, and their siblings and friends. Born outside of the City in a time of violence and war, trying to make sense of where they belong, where their loyalties lie. I have decided that in fact this does actually make a better fourth book. The story continues the end of Jack's Tale more smoothly than the Ancestors would have done. This leads me to wonder whether our brains are cleverer than we are. Well of course they are, we know this, Somewhere in the deep recesses of my tired, ill, mind my brain knew as I was straying along the wrong path. In those hours that I spent on my bed, not being able to do anything except let my brain go along its own sweet way The Children's Tale took off.

It sounds simple written like this,

Dismantle, untangle, resurrect.

However, another problem with the writing of this book, caused by my long illness, is the fact that what I am working with words which have been written over a long period of time, some typed, some dictated, depending on how much energy I had. Some indeed hand written. They have been written when I have been feeling optimistic and well, they have also been written when the opposite has been true. Editing these words is proving to be a new challenge. I can manage the different character’s voices, but which of mine am I producing?

Now at the beginning of 2014 real deep editing has begun. This has been the longest period of time spent writing a book, it began at the beginning of 2012. I think it will in fact be a better book due to this length of time,the amount of daydreaming and thought that has gone into it. We will see what editing will do with it, whether or no I can in fact edit the separate versions to become one whole.

World Building: Drawing board? what drawing board

When I started the Sefuty Chronicles I had no very clear idea of the world I was writing about.  However, before I was half way through Ellen’s Tale I realised I would have to find out and fairly quickly.  I had an impression, of my own making, of the downsides of climate change; I needed to find out how realistic these were.

Apart from checking climate change scenarios the most important idea was how my survivors outside the city walls would fare.  I grew up here in the UK after the 2^nd world war with a romantic mental picture of farming.  Story book farms with cows, milked by hand! sheep, an odd pig complete with little pink piglets  eating scraps from the table. Dozens of chickens in the yard, ducks on the pond, and jolly fat farmers and their families.  It was a place of endless sunny days and the whole family would bring in the hay on the back of a hay wagon pulled by a shire horse, settle down to cream teas and merrymaking.  It never seemed to rain, harvests never flattened by the wind, never frozen into the ground by ice and snow.

Of course I became aware through my growing that life is different from the books.  However when I started writing I still had the mixed farm in mind.  All I had to do post climate change was eliminate the tractors and land rovers and bring back that Shire horse wasn’t it? Simple? Well no.  There may not have been fossil fuel any more, but neither would there have been many Shire horses, they are almost gone now.  I went back to medieval times to see if there were clues on survival for my country folk to be found there.  It seemed easy.  Take away the feudal lord of the manner and the tithes due to him and the church.  Calculate how much of everything they grew and survived on. 

As I researched it was with growing dismay I remembered I had put rings of landmines around every settlement.  In the ‘olden’ days they shared the heavy draught animals, as today expensive tractors may be shared, between villages and farms.  They exchanged foodstuffs they had with that they didn’t at markets.  They would share the bull, the ram. Between communities.  I had taken that mobility a way with never a second thought.

I searched self sufficiency books of the now, the articles and books about the past.  I travelled back as far as the Stone Age.  But everywhere the greatest difference was the mobility the other ages had.  I had myself, that year, in my garden, a plague of snails which demolished an entire harvest of cabbages before even the Cabbage White could get to them, and I realised that, all through the ages, harvests fail for so many reasons. While I continued buying cabbages from the village shop my survivors would not be able. 

While you can live without cabbage until the next season my research had been throwing up disasters a plenty with universal starvation from a ‘poor’ season.  It is of course always going on, we do though in this country think of famine and plagues of insects as happening somewhere else.  I had to try and think the impossible.  How would they survive without the ability to seek further afield, how would they survive if the weather wasn’t kind for a whole growing season.  What would then change in the ordering of societies as they faced this constant challenge to live? 

In my anthropology studies I had been fascinated at how environment and climate dictated so much of the social differences we find puzzling in our dealings with ‘others’  now I would have to work out if our social conventions could remain intact within the maelstrom of such a catastrophe.  It seemed the more I thought of one thing, i.e. how to farm, I saw the dominoes of consequence tipping, falling and sometimes landing lying askew.

It always came back to food.  Everything about the survivor’s way of life would begin with the security of their food.  As with the City I had placed Ellen in, food security was to be all.  However the world Ellen inhabited had the science and the wherewithal to secure the feeding of the survivors, had a certain mobility to travel further afield.  Not depending only on themselves they had an army to defend them.  My wilderness survivors had no science, and land mines not an army.  It was not a case of back to the drawing board as it was evident in writing my ‘short story’ of Ellen I had not visited a drawing board at all!


Read a review on Ellen's Tale on Goodreads at
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