Moonstruck: Meeting Buzz Aldrin

I’m sitting in the gallery of the Sheldonian Theatre, one of the most beautiful if not one of the most comfortable venues in Oxford. Looking down across the packed floor, I see a tanned face and a white beard through the glass of a side door. Moments later, in he comes, wearing a beige blouson jacket with embroidered badges on it. He waves like a king and air-punches like a prize-fighter as he makes his way through the applauding crowd.

He’s Buzz Aldrin.

His sassy, witty ‘Mission Director’ Christina Korb conducts the interview, trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, but even she has trouble managing the blurted reminiscences and anecdotes. The man is bursting with things to tell us. He’s opinionated, forceful, waving be-ringed hands, boasting about the Omega watch he wore on the outside of his spacesuit because it’s kinda hard to see the time otherwise.

I read Andrew Smith’s fascinating book Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth several years ago, struck by the poignant reason for its composition. At that time, only nine men were alive who had walked on the surface of the moon, so he set about interviewing them while he could.

Well, there’s fewer than nine now. That is why several hundred people have queued in the chill rain outside and will later queue for the best part of an hour to get their books signed. I’m one of them. For a moment, we’re in contact with history, with what now seems a lost idealistic era. I grew up with the sense that space held all potential. I’d read Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian and Venusian series, and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury. The stars, the planets and the dear old moon itself held out dreams of human aspiration, adventure and fulfilment.

So we lap up the bombast and the showboating, enjoy the clearly oft-repeated wisecracks, the whole display of it, because although this man is 86 now he is more alive than most we’ll ever meet and this man walked on the moon! He wears a T-shirt saying ‘Get your ass to Mars’ and is passionate about sending humans there, saying that a human can do in a week what took Spirit and Rover five years. He describes his spacewalk, saying he ‘wanted to putt putt putt around like George Clooney in Gravity.’ He’s contemptuous of the Russians – yes, they put Sputnik up there but ‘if you put up a dumb satellite you don’t give it a parade and everybody loves a parade!’ What’s more, they put a dog in orbit and left it there – ‘at least we brought our monkey back.’ He expresses regret at the loss of Neil Armstrong and talks of his family and the kind of destiny he’d felt – his mother was called Marion Moon and his father knew the Wright brothers – yup, it was all meant.

The door of the Sheldonian open with a view
 of the Bodleian's Divinity Schools behind

When I eventually reach the head of the queue and he signs my copy of No Dream is Too High, I burble something about looking up at the moon from a Scottish garden when I was a little girl, amazed to think he was up there. ‘My mother came from Edinboro …’ he smiles and I pass on, past the selfie-taking crowd. Outside the Sheldonian I wish the clouds would part and I could see the old man’s stamping ground.

I remember another night, years ago, when I looked at the moon and it gave me an idea for a story of ‘something strange, spectacular and out of this world’ that grew into a children’s book, Hinterland, still not published though it made it to the shortlist of a significant prize in 2013. I remember the magic of writing that story, of describing grey dust and a terraced crater like an amphitheatre and ‘hanging like a jewel against the dense black void, with fat blue oceans and swirling white clouds’, our planet. And I think to myself, I need to rediscover what that story meant to me, and maybe, just maybe, roll it out onto the launchpad once more and send it into the ether myself.

So thank you, Buzz.

And thank you, Blackwell’s Oxford (best bookshop in the world), for hosting this event!

Further reading:

Buzz Aldrin: No Dream is too High – Life Lessons from a Man who Walked on the Moon

www.buzzaldrin.com

Andrew Smith: Moondust: In Search of the Men who Fell to Earth

Andrew Chaikin: A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

Raindrops really, but these white globes
lend a suitably otherworldly tone to this picture of the Sheldonian!

My novel Hinterland is shortlisted for Pan Macmillan's Write Now Prize!

I'm delighted to announce that my unpublished children's novel Hinterland has now reached the shortlist of four for Macmillan's Write Now Prize! I couldn't be more pleased, especially since the shortlisting has come from the votes of independent booksellers, who each chose their top two from the longlist of eight.  To have the validation of those who work in the trade and who know what children's reading tastes are makes the shortlisting all the more special. Now, of course, we shortlistees have to wait for the winner to be picked, chosen by Macmillan's publishing panel. So good luck to my fellow shortlisted writers Daniel Whelan, Martin Stewart and Clare Sandling!

Here's the opening of Hinterland, along with
another Cornish location-shot.

Chapter 1

The old man stands outside a house on a busy street. It's an ordinary terraced house on an ordinary street, where people are revving up for the business of the day. Shortly there will be the surge of traffic as the school-run reaches its peak.

The old man gazes at the house: one of the upstairs windows is slightly open and he can hear raised voices drifting out.

The boy.

The girl.

The time is nearly right.

He turns away, smiling.

Pan Macmillan's Write Now Prize: my novel Hinterland is longlisted

I'm immensely proud and delighted that my unpublished children's novel Hinterland has made it to the eight-strong longlist for Macmillan's Write Now Prize. This process began when I submitted the synopsis and first three chapters back in December. In January, the full novel was called in, and a few weeks later I was notified that I'd made the longlist. I couldn't make this public for quite a while (argh!) but now the competition is heading into its next stage. Independent bookshops and their customers will get the chance to view the longlisted books via extracts and summaries - and they're the ones who'll vote for shortlist of four, whereupon a panel will choose the winner. The winner's book will be published in hardback and available exclusively to independent bookshops initially. I think this is a brilliant idea and hope that as many indie bookshops as possible will sign up - and that you, the customers, will join in with the process!

The other stories in the longlist are briefly summarised on the competition website: they sound dauntingly witty, adventurous and intriguing! I think it'll be a challenge to make the shortlist, but it goes without saying that I'd be ecstatic if it happened!

Here's a brief synopsis of Hinterland, along with a photo of a very significant location far to the west ... Hope you enjoy it!

'I hope you die!' yells Kick Delaney at his sister Olivia. Minutes later she's knocked down by a car. From then on, she's his 'zombie sister'. When the family moves to Cornwall, he discovers Olivia's zombie state is a defence against the Soulbroker, who's seized part of her soul and wants the rest to sell to the Anhungert, voracious entities of the Hinterland, the realm behind our own.

Kick fights to save Olivia, with the help of Argentail, the moon-dragon avatar of a long-dead Cornish mage. Ultimately, Kick must pursue the Soulbroker into the Hinterland itself. And it's there that a shattering choice awaits him.

Finally,  a reminder that my next Fictionfire courses are on the 18th and 19th of May (less than two weeks to go!). If you want to learn how to plot and pace your story, or how to craft a submission, go to my website to find out more and make your booking. Bookings must be made by midnight on 16th May. Also, if you've tried to ring or text me, my phone hasn't been receiving messages for a couple of weeks. I've changed phone and network so contact me again from the 8th, when the new network should kick in.

James Attlee's Nocturne and some writing about the moon

Here's a picture my son took on Saturday night of the 'supermoon', when the moon was closer to us than it's been in eighteen years, apparently. He's doing GCSE Astronomy and has become far more adept than I am at using my new Lumix camera!

On that evening, under that moon, I went off to Waterstone's to listen to James Attlee talk about his book Nocturne, which is subtitled 'A Journey in Search of Moonlight'. He was a fascinating speaker, with a magpie mind where everything interests him and anecdotes and snippets of facts spill out of him - like W.G. Sebald, he meanders through art, history, astronomy, ancient cultures - everything fascinates him and he makes striking observations and connections. His book explores our attitude to the moon and also seeks to rediscover our lost connection with it. He talks of how we 'simmer in our own electronic bouillabaisse' of streetlighting, how the 'celestial light show' is 'rendered spectrally pale today by the intensity of our self-regard'. After seeing the moon in its full unspoilt glory on a trip to Cornwall, he resolved to get into tune with the lunar cycle and seize every opportunity of getting out there to look at it - really look at it. I'm dying to read the rest of the book - he talked of how he visited such diverse places as Japan and the Arizona desert in pursuit of its 'alchemical light.'

Later, at the bus stop on St Aldates, I gazed at the full moon glowing just beside Christ Church's Tom Tower. So often we're huddled beside the flicker of the TV screen and we miss what's going on out there - and even if we do go outside, the orange glow of city lights, which James memorably described as like being inside a Lucozade bottle, stops us seeing the stars and planets in their full glory. Only the moon survives that blotting out - but the moon too benefits from being seen above a dusty desert or as it rises from the sea.

It was a coincidence that James mentioned that he rediscovered the moon, as it were, while in Cornwall. I've written a children's story, Argentail,  set there - and in it a city boy wrestling with trauma is also part-awed, part-scared, part-comforted by the moon and what the moon brings him:

'The iron latch clattered loudly, like striking a tinder-box. The door seemed to swell towards him. He slipped through into the great echoing blackness of the tower, deep and dark as a well without water.
   And if he had thought it cold back in the cottage, that was nothing compared to the paralysing, brain-aching cold that seized him now. His breath was a vapour, his own personal fog-bank, accompanying him as he climbed the stairs to the first floor, to the second. Stony echoes left him, bounced back to him, like auditory boomerangs.
   At no time could he have said why he was doing this, why he had left the safety of the cottage for this spooky place, where wedges of unearthly blue light from the high windows were laid like stepping-stones before his feet. Up and round, up and round, up and into the great circular room, where the wedges of blue light fused into a flood. He walked across the bare floor and gazed out.
   He'd never looked at the sea except in terms of buckets and spades, rock-pools and jellyfish, lilos and waterwings and splashing your sister in the face until she howls with rage. The sea meant holidays. The sea was warm. The sea was a pet.
   Not this sea. Not this ocean.
   He grasped the windowsill and held his breath, not wanting to fog the glass, not wanting to spoil the view. The sea stretched out, charcoal-dark and glittering, to lands beyond imagination. This was a sea for explorers and invaders. It beckoned and tempted: it said anything was possible.
   It also said it didn't care. It didn't care for lost boys with confused feelings, standing at the edge of the land.
   A panel of bluish-white was laid in a long triangle across the water. Kick looked up.
   The clouds had all gone and the moon was there, huge and pure and nearly full. He felt that the window-glass was acting like a telescope - surely he'd never seen the moon so large?
   As a tiny child, like every tiny child, he'd heard songs and rhymes about the moon. A cow jumped over it. A man came down from it.
   He gazed now at its strange shadows and hollows.
   Then he leapt back, heart racing, a sudden heat breaking out all over his body.'