Skip to main content

Autumn


I’ve always loved autumn. When I was quite small I remember thinking these ‘Goldener Oktober’ wine adverts were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and spent ages trying to copy the lettering. (I wonder what the wine was like? My parents didn’t drink, so I probably didn’t even really know what wine was.) I never did get the lettering right, but autumn is still my favourite season.

Autumn sunlight is better than summer sunlight (more golden, less hot), leaves, ferns, and grasses start to turn more interesting colours after the drab greens of July and August, and the architecture of the trees starts to become visible again as their leaves are stripped away.  There are mists, mushrooms, blackberries (until Michaelmas when the Devil wees on them, the creature), and even in town there are sometimes great drifts of cornflake-crisp leaves to scuff through. If you’re lucky there is woodsmoke in the air, frost on the morning lawns, and a bracing chill when the sun goes down. If you’re not, there are storms and gales and wild howling winds, but that’s an excuse to snuggle indoors with the lights on and read. It’s a time for stories. It’s always been the time of year that best gets my imagination working. 

That’s why I called the archipelago where Utterly Dark is set The Autumn Isles: they have winter, spring, and summer there as well, but there’s always a hint of autumn in the air, which helped enormously in pinning down a slightly wistful, melancholy feeling I was trying to capture. It’s a book about the sea, but a lot of it is set on land, and that’s why I made sure Wildsea was equipped with plenty of woods and moors, because woods and moors are where autumn can be seen to best advantage. 

The story begins at midsummer, but really gets going as September turns into October and the dark hinge of the year approaches. It isn’t set at Hallowe’en, and I haven’t used any traditional Hallowe’en folklore (most of the folklore in Utterly Dark is invented) but I think it has a Hallowe’en feeling, because when you strip away all the trick-or-treating and the gruesome tat, Hallowe’en is about autumn, just as Christmas is about winter.

Happy Hallowe’en, and Happy Autumn!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin
5 comments
Read more

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after a painti
6 comments
Read more

Railhead A-Z

In order to save my website it became necessary to destroy it. Before I pulled the plug I rescued the longest post on my old blog. Here it is, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck: my A-Z guide to the ideas behind my novel Railhead. At the time it was written, Railhead had just been published. I'll be putting up some posts about the sequels, Black Light Express and Station Zero , in the coming days. Railhead cover art by Ian McQue A  is for Alternative Forms of Transport ‘What I need,’ I thought, when I’d been struggling on and off for a few years with my space epic (working title, ‘Space Epic’) ‘is an alternative to spaceships…’ I’ve always enjoyed space stories. I first started reading science fiction back in 1977, when the original Star Wars film made me realise that outer space could be just as good a backdrop for fantasy as Tolkien-esque worlds of myth and legend. (Actually, I didn’t see Star Wars until 1978, but its bow-wave of publicity hit these shores the p
1 comment
Read more