In keeping with the Russian theme, over on my food blog you can find a post about making a great ‘zakuski’ spread for dinner–the Russian version of tapas! It’s a fantastic and appetising way to eat.

Today my blog features Louise Cusack, author of the Time Trilogy and many other books, with a fascinating post that delves into her interest in ‘strangers in a strange land’–and the amazing Leonardo da Vinci!

Charming, talented and unfortunately dead

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated obsessed with the life and work of Leonardo Da Vinci – an Italian who died 500 years ago. Not only was he the painter of iconic works like the Mona Lisa, he made landmark medical discoveries in skeletal structure and the functioning of heart valves. He came up with the idea of tanks, submarines and winged flight devices, and was renowned for cartography, hydrodynamics and botany. But wait, there’s more: he was handsome, charming, intelligent, musically talented, and a vegetarian who abhorred cruelty to animals.
I mean, really, has there ever been a more perfect man?
So many accomplishments, such an eye for details, which he recorded meticulously in his notebooks, many of which are still around today as codices – one owned by Bill Gates in fact.
Yes, there were quirks. Leonardo used mirror-writing to ensure others would have difficulty copying his work. He often didn’t finish his commissions, and apparently left more than half his paintings incomplete. He wasn’t great with money and took on a talentless but handsome young thief as an apprentice which didn’t help stifle rumours of homosexuality. So Leonardo’s life was often fraught with difficulties, which doesn’t seem fair to me. If he was alive today, I like to imagine some wealthy patron – a latter-day Medici – would be cosseting him with whatever he needed so he could simply create, unimpeded.
To say that Leonardo Da Vinci was a once-in-a-millennium-talent isn’t hyperbole, but I have to admit, it wasn’t the breadth of his creativity that impressed me the most. It was his unbelievable visual acuity. He could see the individual movement of bird’s wings in flight, and he recorded those movements in his notebooks. I didn’t really “get” how impressive that feat was until I saw those wing movements for myself on a slow-motion film. And in fact, it was only when slow motion film was invented a hundred years ago that scientists could confirm the accuracy of Leonardo’s sketches.
No wonder people speculate that he was either an alien or a time traveller!
I rather think he was a very rare human who looked at his world through completely fresh eyes. It was almost as if he was a Stranger in a Strange Land, inspecting people, plants, animals, landscapes, stars and light as if he knew nothing about those subjects and had to understand it all without relying on previous assumptions (many of which turned out to be wrong). I’m constantly inspired by his example, and in my own craft of writing I’ve tried to look at the world around me with fresh eyes, and to create that experience of wonder and excitement for readers by having a character travel from one world to another.
In my first fantasy trilogy, Shadow Through Time, characters travel back and forth from our world to the brown kingdom of Ennae, and you can’t imagine how weird our world looks to them! The series begins, however, with an Australian girl, Catherine, leaving our world and travelling through a watery portal to Ennae to find her missing twin brother. In that opening novel Destiny of the Light, Catherine (who turns out to be Princess Khatrene) will be helped through the dangerous terrain by Talis, her appointed Guardian, who will sacrifice everything to ensure her safety in a land where magic prevails and nothing is as it seems. At each turn are real and imagined enemies who will do everything in their power to prevent her from fulfilling a prophecy, including the ethereal and erotic shadow woman, the enigmatic tattooed man, even her beloved brother Mihale.
The opening novel Destiny of the Light is currently free as an ebook and I encourage you to give it a try. As one book blogger said: “If you love your fantasy to be slightly gritty but with plenty of swoony romance, Destiny of the Light is for you!”

 Louise Cusack lives in Australia, in a tiny fishing village on the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. She’s a long-time vegetarian and caffeine addict who mentors other writers when she isn’t writing herself. A Trekkie from way back, she loves all thing science fiction and fantasy, especially if it has a good love story. Her website is at http://www.louisecusack.com

I had the pleasure of doing an interview just recently with Kristin Centorcelli of the fabulous blog My Bookish Ways. It’s here.

I love writing novels. And fantasy in particular, in its big breadth of genre, from heroic to urban, magical realism to paranormal romance,  fairytale thrillers to vampire and zombie sagas, to name just a few, lends itself to the big canvas. But I love to have a holiday sometimes with the slimmer fantastic, the short story. Not only can it be easier to sell—some types of fantastical narrative, like the ghost story, seem to work even better in short than long form—there are many more great short stories in that genre than there are novels(the possible reasons why would be a whole essay in itself!) But it’s not just the ghost story that can trip the short fantastic: all kinds of fantasy and supernatural genres can lend themselves very well to the short-story form, even epic fantasy, and here I’d like to pass on a few tips I’ve learned over the years of having had many short stories published–some of which are collected together in my e-book, The Great Deep and Other Tales of the Uncanny.

*Remember you don’t have time to build up a detailed setting, but must still plunge your reader directly into atmosphere. Use a setting you already know well, and can sketch in quickly.

*Direct use of a single source is very effective.
Focus straight not only on one story, but on one strand of one story: for instance, the reaction of a single sailor from Odysseus’ crew, turned into a beast on Circe’s island; the feelings of Andromeda, chained on her rock in the ocean.

*Think about focussing on minor characters, rather than major heroes.
This is especially so when you’re using big myths as your background. For my Arthurian short story, ‘The Common Dish’, I used the voice of a very humble character, the anonymous sister-in-law of Sir Agravain, to tell the story of those who are left behind in the great Grail Quest, but who nevertheless learn very important truths.

*If you’re going to write about major heroes, focus on revealing his/her character.
The short story is probably one of the most emotional forms of all. Revealing character, though, doesn’t mean being talky; it means allowing the character to come through effectively, in action as well as reflection.

*Choose one event as the pivot for your story.
This is not the form for lots of sub-plots, though it’s perfectly possible to have more than one narrative stream.

*A twist at the end is always nice—but not always absolutely necessary. You do need some kind of good ‘payoff’ however. And though you don’t need to ’round off’ everything—I always think a good disturbing shock at the end of a story works well, the ‘oh no’ kind of moment—you do need to give the reader a feeling of satisfaction, and not leave things dangling. It’s annoying in a novel—even more so in a short story!

An absolutely fabulous post by Achala Upendran over on the Momentum blog, about how Russian magic is so distinctively different.

Second of my ‘tasty Russia’ postings on the food blog!

One of the inspirations for some of the weird stuff in Trinity was the extraordinary story of the Russian psychic, Nina Kulagina, who became very famous in the Soviet Union and well beyond for the spooky demonstrations of her talents in telekinesis–or as it’s sometimes known, ‘mind over matter’ –the ability to move objects solely by concentrating on them. Feted by the Soviet secret services, paraded as an example of Soviet superiority in ‘out-there’ research, Nina was a real character—a Red Army tank driver who became a soldier at the age of 14, she said she first realised her mind-power came originally from great anger, but its full potential could only be achieved through restraint and meditation. Back in civilian life, she was quickly spotted by the secret services, and more than 40 scientists, including two Nobel prizewinners, studied her, while weird black and white films of her demonstrations popped up all over the world. It was one of those films that I saw many years ago at school, as part of a documentary on Cold War rivalry(for the Americans, spooked by the apparent success of Soviet psychic research, quickly instituted their own research project, dubbed the Stargate project–later immortalised in the film, ‘Men who Stare at Goats’!)

I’ve long forgotten most of what the documentary said; but those few jerky scenes of Nina staring at a frog, and apparently stopping its heart then restarting it, simply, apparently, by the power of her mind, always stayed with me, and has now resurfaced in my book. You can see films of her abilities now on You Tube–check it out!

Over at my food blog, A la mode frangourou, to celebrate the launch of Trinity: The Koldun Code, I’m reposting some articles about the culinary aspects of Russia, which I wrote while I was there in 2010 and 2012. Also there will be recipes! Here’s the first in the series of posts about the tasty side of Russia.

A fun interview with me on Urban Fantasy Investigations blog, complete with a contribution from Helen!