To London, On London, With Love...

There’s no way I can sort out my thoughts on what was a most incredible week, so I’m just going to offer a top ten list. I began last weekend at the Baltimore Book Festival and had a lovely time on panels and signing books, thanks to Laura Kaye and the whole Maryland RWA staff and volunteers for being amazing. Then it was off to London for research, alongside dear friend and fabulous talent Elizabeth Kerri Mahon of Scandalous Women fame.


10. The Spaniard’s Inn – A charming pub that has been featured in many a literary world and work, from Keats having “enjoyed many an ale here” as is immortalized on a bench outside, to being mentioned in Bram Stoker’s DRACULA, this Hampstead classic pub proved delightful and charming and full of literary as well as literal spirits.

9. Finding the streets upon which two of my main characters live. I just had a wonderful time wandering until I found the right spaces that my characters agreed with. They told me things about their lives that were important to know, as I’m still in the “getting to know you” phase of my first ETERNA FILES novel. I decided upon the Knightsbridge and Aldwych areas for Lord Black and Harold Spire, respectively. It’s such a privilege to walk the paths they’ll walk. That tactile connection provides an inexplicable bond that I can’t really explain or quantify, it just helps.

8. The Pre-Raphaelite exhibit at the Tate Britain. No artists move me as thoroughly as the Pre-Raphaelites, while their private lives were quite daunting for many of the women involved in them, their art none the less moves me spiritually and aesthetically. I appreciate the romanticism and spiritualism present in these works and this collection was exquisite. Seeing Millais’ Ophelia moves me every time, and getting a chance to see and appreciate more of Edward Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt was divine. It was nearly all of my favourite art in one set of rooms. What a treat.

7. Signing stock at Forbidden Planet! The folks at this store are some of the kindest, most knowledgeable and most wonderful people in the world of Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Danie Ware specifically took time out of her VERY busy schedule to make sure stock of DARKER STILL was in house for me to sign, brought me tea, made me feel utterly at home amidst her own whirlwind tour of her own fabulous novel. So, my UK friends, you can now get a SIGNED copy of DARKER STILL from Forbidden Planet, AS WELL as pre-order a signed copy of THE TWISTED TRAGEDY OF MISS NATALIE STEWART, as I signed book plates for the staff to insert into the books when they release next month! We’re only a month away! *happy dance*

6. Walking along The Thames. I feel that rivers tell you about the soul of a city. I am invigorated by water and so walking along this river that I’m sure I walked along in past lives, I am always charged, vibrant and inspired.

5. Kensington Palace. Birthplace of Queen Victoria, this charming palace has been renovated with fascinating exhibits and an amazing display featuring Queen Victoria’s charming courtship with Prince Albert. It truly is a love story for the ages, and they had her wedding dress and accessories, some of which were designed by Albert himself, letters, notes, quotes, it was wonderful. As I posed near one of Queen Victoria’s portraits, an elderly British woman passed by and patted me on the head, saying: “Very regal.” See? I belong with English Royalty, surely… I was charmed by the entire grounds and was so glad to be inside those walls that shaped the often troubled childhood of the monarch that so profoundly influenced the period most important to me.

4. Parliament: Gorgeous. Gothic. Overblown. Amazing. Built to celebrate Queen Victoria. Fascinating. Breathtaking. I love every inch of this quintessentially Victorian building. I dearly enjoyed this tour and look forward to following my character, Lord Black, and his best kept secret, his brilliant secretary, Rose Everhart, through the halls of the House of Lords.

3. An INCREDIBLE production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Beautifully done, in a fresh and exciting new translation gorgeously, simply and effectively staged, and so movingly acted I cried a lot in the front row, the actors beautifully close in the appealing space that is The Young Vic. I'm fascinated with Chekhov's "Masha" characters and I'm inspired to work on some thematic pieces involving them, some of my favourite characters in the 19th century canon.

2. Hugging a TARDIS. TWO OF THEM. Thanks to my dear friend Shalene’s husband Andrew, not only did I get to spend quality time with this delightful family but Andrew enabled a private tour of some of the iconic BBC studios, inside the Doctor Who room filled with treasures from the seasons and an old-school Doctor 5 TARDIS. I was a little hard to control.

1. The Harry Potter Studio Tour. I had to go there alone, which was kind of difficult, because it’s hard being THE MOST PASSIONATE FAN THERE. No one was as excited as me. At least, no one brave enough to show it. Oh, I showed it. I wasn’t dressed in any sort of costume, though most people think my every day clothes are a costume, and yet my Malfoy tendencies were still in full effect, as evidenced by the girl behind me in line who said: I like your jacket. Very Narcissa. I smiled and replied: "I am." Once inside, I nearly knocked kids over to run into the Great Hall when they opened the doors. The full Great Hall set is so utterly breathtaking, even without the ceiling of sky and candles and only stage lights above. When the guide asked the crowd to state their house, I was shocked when no one matched my enthusiasm. There were a few mumbles drowned out by my shriek of: SLYTHERIN! The guide: “So I hear a few unenthusiastic Gryffindors and one VERY passionate Slytherin.” Guide turns to me and is sure to point out the specifically Slytherin things about the room. Once inside and spending a little too much time around the Malfoy costumes, I had several people say that I could “step right into the films”. I’d thank them and offer up a very Slytherin smirk. I held it together, mostly, until I got to the huge full room model of Hogwarts used for exterior shots. Some of the most beautiful music written for the films was playing, the theatrical lighting rendered the model into breathtaking beauty, and I just burst into tears for sheer love of this dear, beloved world.

You see, I’d been writing since I was a child, but I gave it up during college because I thought my ideas weren’t worthy. Harry Potter inspired me in a way nothing else had done since childhood, and I frankly owe my career to it, and so much of my favourite things and people and projects in life have been tied to the fandom. So yes, I cried, because it’s worthy of tears when something means that much and is that magical. I know my dear friends in the Harry Potter fandom will understand this transcendant experience.

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I ended the week in Oklahoma City as a Literary Guest of Honour at the OCTIPODICON Steampunk Convention, where the attendees and fellow "Professors" were some of the most delightful lot I've ever met. We had lovely and engaging panels on 19th century issues and trends in Steampunk and Gaslamp Fantasy. I delighted in some fellow Goth friends who charged the DJ during the ball to demand some VNV Nation and we danced our hearts out in corsets and flouncing black layers. I had a wonderful time talking about my books, old and upcoming, and as always my favourite part of conventions is doing dramatic readings of my work, I read a short story, "Too Fond" which will be coming out soon on Tor.Com as a part of their "Ghost Week" Halloween offerings, stay tuned. I also got to share insights and information about my upcoming novel, THE TWISTED TRAGEDY OF MISS NATALIE STEWART and I became even more excited for it's release, I cannot wait to share it with all of you.

So all in all, what a week. What an amazing set of journeys.
And London, Oh... I love you, London, always have, always will, and I can’t wait to return to you again soon. Eternally your magical changeling, Leanna.

Verdun

Verdun, France. From my diary, August, 2010:
Research trip for Miss Violet and the Great War

Where to begin? That’s what the history begs, as the history does not begin with one date in 1914 and ending in a date in 1918 – it does not bear one year, one single identiy, one particular flag (while it would choose the French flag if it had to choose) but it is a graveyard turned verdant – a word very near to its name.

I mustn’t neglect the journey on the rails to Verdun; a simple yet remarkable foray. En route to Verdun one sees field after golden field; the hills a particular yellow, a Van Gogh yellow. A crow on a hay-bale conjured up countless museum images and the impressionism of a master painter was translated into reality. I saw with Vincent’s eyes, his palette. We passed a whole vast plot of sunflowers, a transporting sight that connects me not only to Van Gogh but this sea of bright flowers also startlingly reminds me that I’d written about just such a field in my upcoming novel. In The Perilous Prophecy of Guard and Goddess the Goddess offers her Guard a glimpse of when she first met Phoenix; in a field of sunflowers arranging their seeds into iterate patterns. It was as if I knew that field before I’d ever seen it.

Arriving into the heart of Verdun, the first thing I see is a warrior-angel towering over the city, sword strong in her folded arms. She stands over la Rue de la Victoire and her declaration of victory is stern, not joyous. She is flanked by canons and she reminds you of death and war. She is a god not to be trifled with and you can see her from every city vantage point. She pierces above the 14th century turreted city gates, watching. Warning. "Seven hundred thousand..." she murmurs.

Transferring to a bus that takes tourists to World War I sites, monuments and forts, it is very clear that within its life and charm, Verdun remains a city of memorial. And it has just cause for grief nearly a century old. The most costly battle of the entire War to End All Wars, Verdun saw 700,000 dead, directly in the middle of the war, 1916. Its land, while overgrown with grass, trees, wildflowers, in many places remains jagged and unnatural, the work of bombs, mines and innumerable shells. The earth still bears the scars.

But it is a pocked landscape transformed green. Life will out, I was reminded, as swallows had reclaimed Fort Douaumont as their own, chirping and diving, nesting and flocking, these birds found the cool, dank fort a haven, turning what to humans appeared a bastion of hell, into a place that sheltered fragile, avian life.

Sorting through my notes from the fields and furrows, words are more raw than I'm used to. I stood drinking in what was once a “lunar landscape” of mud, shells fell like rain and opened violent craters. Though the land is blanketed again with green, the disconnect remains between the verdant carpet and the stories of the heart of the battle, when trenches were dug and yards were gained and lost. A small village named Fleury changed hands a heartbreaking number of times before being wiped from memory, existent now only in plaques and in honour. You can walk the two main streets of what was once Fleury, now forested and green. You can still see some rubble in the uneven, cratered land. Markers tell you where the baker shop stood, the butcher, the shoe-maker, the well, the farms. It is a ghost town in the truest sense. On that ground families shot bullets from their basements- when there still were structures for shelter. It is nearly impossible to reconcile these disparate realities, but through imagination one can layer images upon one another like two separate photography slides; one slide reveals the loud destruction, exploding shells, rubble as far as the eye could see, dead bodies, the heart of a village ripped open and destroyed. This plate you struggle to place atop what is really staring you in the face; a quiet forest of pine, the sound of birds chirping – hardly a more peaceful place, the din of war seems impossibly far. Only those unnatural pockets and furrows of a ground landscaped by pummeling bombs remains to link these two disparate architectures together.

In Verdun I learned a new word. Ossuary. Visiting this repository, a tomb of the unknown soldier housing at least 130,000 unnamed bones, I would never be the same.

A field- a tunnel- a hall- a wall- a pit- a vast mansion of bone. Staring at the femurs stacked to my height for a countless number of square feet, carefully interlocked like log cabin timbers, I knew, staring into those square panels at the base of the monument that if I took a moment, even one moment to then process what I am writing now I would have broken down before countless other similarly stoic, awed, somber, stunned tourists. All of us putting our hands out – first to shield the sun and the light so that we might see into the pit of anonymous bone, and then the hand out became a distancing tool. Perhaps a primitive instinct to detach, to keep the disturbing vision at literal arm’s length. Trying not to imagine our own skeletons in such pieces, added to the mass, our hands remain out trying not to imagine that flesh once decked those bones. The pure essence of life that once animated those hundred-thousand bones would have taken a monument twice the size were the pit filled with bodies... It is hard to reconcile the flesh with the bone when we see them so separated. It is foreign, not of us, of an entirely separate time and place, it takes time to separate flesh from bone- through a horrifyingly organic, disturbing process. We see these bodies now pure, stripped of their flesh and in pieces they are dehumanized and yet we all can recognize them as the building blocks of ourselves.

Some bones are more of a trigger than others. For me, the interlocking femurs. For my father, the jaw bones, separated from the skull and tossed in a silent heap, baring their teeth to the stagnant air of their mass grave. The mind separates these images, compartmentalizeds them safely to assure that sanity and sense remain intact.

Was this the same France as golden fields and sunflowers? I read about France, I knew a deal of Paris and about art. I know what Victor Hugo wrote and Debussy composed. One feels one knows a country by its art, its books, its dance and music. But knowing its bones is another country entirely.

The 'undiscovered country' indeed. All of it France, and all French beauty may be found in Verdun, the banks of the Meuse no less beautiful for the monument of bones. More beautiful, perhaps, for the contrast. And as it appears to have been intended by the Ossuary's founders and builders; a reminder. A cautionary tale of war, whether world leaders hear it or not. Those who visit do.

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Update 11/2018 

After a long and winding trial and tribulation of publishing, this research finally led to Miss Violet and the Great War, releasing 2/2019 from Tor Books

Ah, homecoming. London 2010

Oh, London, how I love thee. Returning to London is the homecoming of my soul. The only thing missing was the love of my life, but he had to remain in NYC as our work schedules just couldn't make a joint trip possible. But my incredible family were more than wonderful to have as traveling companions, and made the trip possible in the first place. I'm so grateful.

The London part of my trip 'across the pond' was all about recharging. A trip to London means indulging the invigorating surge that overtakes my mind and heart while walking the streets; returning to the inciting inspirations that first birthed the Strangely Beautiful saga. This trip wasn't about packing in moments of tourism, this was simply about happily wandering and paying homage. First of these blissful days had me returning to the Bloomsbury district and strolling along the paths Alexi and Rebecca would have done in a promenade route to my fictional Athens Academy. Here's a specific shot down Grape Street in the heart of Bloomsbury, which looks quite similar to what the alleys around Athens, and indeed Athens itself would appear to be.

A further course of meaningful wandering included Hampstead Heath and Highgate Cemetery, two places of particular importance and magic. Its no surprise that graveyards are particularly fascinating to me, they hold a distinct energy not replicated in any other context. Eternal crossroads, these locales are both sacred and alluring- particularly to a paranormal author. A garden-style graveyard like Highgate is the epitome of aching beauty, a paradox of life and death; eternal monuments, temporal humanity, cold stone and soft flower. You know Hampstead and Highgate well from my books. The Rychman estate is just off Hampstead Heath and Highgate Cemetery, built in the first half of the 19th century and seen pictured here, is a focal point of ghostly unrest in the Strangely Beautiful saga. In my Highgate pilgrimage, from the moment I slipped inside the gate, I again saw my Guard darting among the monuments. I paid my respects to beloved authors Douglas Adams and George Eliot among others, ever marveling at the beauty of sculpture, stone, verdant ivy and flora. Wandering nearby Hampstead Heath and looking down over London in the distance, I was transported by walking the childhood haunts of Miss Violet Rychman, who will be the star of Strangely Beautiful #4; Miss Violet and the Great War, and for whose book the bulk of the research on this trip was dedicated. I ate wild blackberries and my mind's eye watched her and the hero, William Page, doing the same as children.

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The Imperial War Museum was a day in and of itself. I spent countless hours learning about the details of World War I. It is not something I can begin to summarize in a blog post. It is sobering, terrible, incredible tales, millions of tales, millions of lives affected and lost. I will but scratch the surface in my book as I continue to learn about this behemoth struggle that was supposedly The War to End All Wars. You will hear much more about my complex response to the research when I post my Verdun, France entry later this week.

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Ghost and Jack the Ripper expert Richard Jones was kind enough to reserve a place for my family and I on his Jack the Ripper walking tour, led by Ripperologist Philip -, an expert and author on the matter. His tour was entertaining and informative and while I had gone on this tour once before, and doing so inspired me to use The Ripper in The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, it was meaningful to do so again as certain forthcoming changes to the London streets will block certain murder sites from visitation. So paying one last homage to Mitre Square, the site of Catharine Eddowes' murder before it is irrevocably changed was important.

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An exciting signing at Forbidden Planet brought my London adventures to a close. I will have more pictures forthcoming. There couldn't have been a nicer staff and attending managers, the store is one of my favourite places on earth, a haven for all things I love, and after a rousing Doctor Who discussion, one of the managers there, Jon, gifted me with a Tom Baker (Doctor #4) action figure that now holds a sacred place on my awards shelf. I was attended there by blogger extraordinaire Hasna from The Bookpushers, ever grateful for her presence and support. It was such a delight to meet her in person. And Richard Jones himself dropped by! I was so honoured that my foremost resource on the Ghosts of England and on Jack the Ripper came by in support of my work. As you know, all the ghosts I use in the Strangely Beautiful saga, other than spirits I've created inside Athens, are real London haunts that I plucked from Richard's accounts in his many books on the subject. Please look for his next work; Haunted Britain, releasing in October. It was so thrilling to meet this kind and generous inspiration of mine in person. Having dinner with him and Hasna was such a treat, there couldn't have been a better way to say goodbye to London. If you'd like a signed copy of The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker and / or The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker, Forbidden Planet has them ready to ship to you!

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While it was goodbye to London, it won't be for long. A girl gets too homesick for her soul's native land otherwise. Then on to Paris! And that's another entry entirely. Stay tuned. Blessings!