3 January 2005
Publication year
Writing is hard work. It takes, above all other things - the concentration, the imagination, the inspiration - time ...
This new year, unlike last new year, means publication for me. In the UK, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Russia - perhaps others.
I've been looking back on the long process of creating Labyrinth. It went something like this:
The first time I climbed the Cathars' Safe Mountain in the snow, it was like visiting a memory. I had an eerie feeling I had been to Montségur before. The cold blue sky, the rocks, the trees, the tiny winter flowers.
The place was like an old scar, distant tragedy, half-healed by passing time.
When I was a little girl, I spent hours imagining myself a medieval warrior with bow and arrow. I roamed the woods and marshes, hunting, tracking, saving the world. I sought the Grail and found it – again and again!
As I climbed to the lonely citadel, the last refuge of a doomed people, I began to wonder what it would be like to become consumed by déjà vu, to find myself drawn backwards through time and to touch with my fingers the fraying threads of the past. I saw a face on the ruined battlements – narrow, dark-eyed, perhaps a man, perhaps a woman.
Later that day I was in Carcassonne. The sun was shining. I sat on the terrace of a 300 year old, biscuit-coloured house, nestling beneath the medieval ramparts. I took a sip of the chilled rosé, dry, fruity, almost coarse. And in my mind a procession formed: a stone, the Holy Family, a knife, a book.
And that face again. Someone riding out of the past to meet … well, the future.
Well, that's to come.
In the meantime, the answers to the Christmas quiz are below. It was all to do with connections between three apparently disparate things ...
1. retriever, St John's, Clinton's buddy
Labrador
2. Van Gogh, Rijksmuseum, trams
Amsterdam
3. Charlie, Irving, Adolf
Berlin
4. Mayans, Cancún, meteor
Yucatán
5. Duke, Virginia, park
Richmond
6. ISB, Shah Faisal mosque, capital
Islamabad
7. Confucius temple, Jiangsu province, 1937 massacre
Nanjing
8. Holy Cross, Afortunadas, one of seven
Tenerife
9. Hudson, Higgins, Eighth
Henry
There are answers in the Labyrinth!
