Manda Scott's Blog
May 19, 2024
Manda talks to Chris Johnstone about her new book and Sustainable Happiness
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION
Thoughts from a writing life…Manda talks to Chris Johnstone about her new book and Sustainable Happiness RECENT Manda talks to Chris Johnstone about her new book and Sustainable Happiness The Future is Already Here Life Beyond Death Manda’s New Novel Why we need Thrutopias… FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address.
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Visions of Life beyond Death Writing a novel from the perspective of someone who dies at the end of the first chapter (truly, this isn’t a spoiler) was always going to be…interesting. But it was part of the vision from the hill and if I’ve learned anything in forty years of shamanic practice, it’s that not all visions come in clear text, and when they do, messing with them in any way is a seriously bad idea.
Manda's new novel: ways to a future we'd be proud to leave behind I genuinely believed I’d stopped writing novels. I’d become a podcaster instead, a smallholder, a holder-of-courses where people could learn in real time the things that might yet still turn us away from the multi-polar cliff edge to which our dysfunctional culture is hurtling us with such terrifying speed. But…
The post Manda talks to Chris Johnstone about her new book and Sustainable Happiness appeared first on Manda Scott.
April 12, 2024
The Future is Already Here
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION 
Thoughts from a writing life… The Future is Already Here
The Future is already here… …it’s just (very) unevenly distributed.
So said William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (well worth a read), and, while I haven’t found any sign that he was considering the Meta-Crisis back in 1983 when he first said this, he could have been. Certainly the entirety of Any Human Power (and the Accidental Gods podcast which fed into it) is based on this premise: that there are countless brilliant, highly motivated people coming up with brilliant, workable ideas that can bridge us at least to the emergent edge of what Indy Johar calls ‘Inter-becoming’ where we are putting into action all the things we know are the best of ourselves, and what happens then is unknowable, but watching it happen will be one of the most exciting things imaginable.
This, after all, was the challenge of the book. The visions on the hill gave me a frame— Lan dies having made a promise to her grandson and then has to work out how she can keep it when the dead have limited agency in the lands of the living —but beyond this, the instruction was to weave into being a fictional world that could happen, something totally plausible, grounded in things that are around today, but pulling them together into a thriller arc where the actions have clear guiding drives behind them.
Like the Boudica books where (at least for the first one) I had a rule that all the dreaming had to be something I’d either done or seen done, Any Human Power has a rule that any technology or social/cultural/political shift that I suggest has to be possible without any tweaks to the technology, and, ideally has to have been proposed by someone else a lot smarter than me. What I bring to the table is the capacity to weave it all together into one coherent narrative and give it the drive that carries us forward and opens the doors of possibility.
Possible Places, Futures that Work in the PresentGathering ideas for this kind of thing is not a one-time process. Unlike most historical research, where, absent a sudden archaeological find, or a new science, like DNA sequencing, everything has happened and it’s just a question of fitting it together, working out ways forward is an ever-evolving process. There are some obvious pointers, though, and people behind them. Audrey Tang, the world’s youngest digital minister, and a genius who combines leading edge technology with leading edge social and democratic thinking, has been a lodestar for the possible when it comes to creating a genuinely democratic structure. The ‘forking’ of the Taiwanese government and its subsequent capacity to fend off the predations of the Chinese by harnessing AI and intelligent social media to bring people together and to effectively crowd-source new democratic ideas is ground-breaking and inspiring in equal measure.
Similarly, the thinking behind Riversimple’s Future Guardian Governance model of business is completely transformative. In this model, shareholders hold one seat on a board of six, and the other five seats are held by: the workers, the customers, the supply chain, the environment and the local community. Already, this is changing the way Riversimple and its supplying companies do business. I genuinely believe that if every company in the world took this on tomorrow, we’d have the beginnings of genuine change (they’d have to be doing it for real, not green-washing, and some of them would voluntarily put themselves out of business at the first meeting, but this has to happen anyway, so the sooner it does, the better). In the book, the #Changemakers add in a seventh seat for Future Generations, but I don’t see this being an impediment to change, and it’s based on the Welsh Government’s ‘Future Generations Commissioner’ so it’s not wholly my idea and, again, it is already working within the current system.
Tech that unitesOne of the key ideas in the book is that our current technology doesn’t have to divide us in the way it does just now. If we harness our social media in service of driving profits ever higher, then the only way to do this is the ‘race to the bottom of the brainstem’ so neatly described by Tristan Harris. Jonathan Haidt years ago showed that triggering our limbic systems to outrage gives us dopamine hits of a magnitude on a par with snorting cocaine, so if our social media companies keep on stoking division, they keep us addicted, occupied and they can harvest our time and attention in service to selling us more stuff we don’t want to impress people who don’t care while desperately trying to heal the wounds of our separation which the social media are making worse.
It doesn’t take much thought to see that this is a self-perpetuating cycle that’s going to end up in social catastrophe and we have to get off the hamster wheel of limbic hijack asap.
But social media don’t have to be all bad – yet again, Audrey Tang is showing how changing the internal algorithms can create social media that are (imagine!) actually pro-social, where people are offered value for building bridges instead of piling onto the dog-fight and where the best-built bridges are distributed most widely, acting as incentives for other people to do better. This is also a self-reinforcing cycle, but it’s one that works to bring people together. With this on its doorstep, it’s perhaps not surprising that the People’s Republic of China wants to annexe Taiwan – but it’s equally clear that they’ll have to think a lot smarter than one of the smartest people on the planet if they’re going to succeed.
And the grand, beautiful thing about this, is that I don’t have to be this smart to be able to create characters who are – if they can code for connection the way Audrey Tang does, and solve for democracy the way Daniel Schmachtenberger does in the Consilience Project, and break out ideas like the person-hood of buildings like Indy Johar and his colleagues in the Dark Matter Labs… then we’re already a good way towards a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. What more could we ask for?
BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT The Future is Already Here Life Beyond Death Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind Why we need Thrutopias… Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point. FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address.Name
Visions of Life beyond Death Writing a novel from the perspective of someone who dies at the end of the first chapter (truly, this isn’t a spoiler) was always going to be…interesting. But it was part of the vision from the hill and if I’ve learned anything in forty years of shamanic practice, it’s that not all visions come in clear text, and when they do, messing with them in any way is a seriously bad idea.
Manda's new novel: ways to a future we'd be proud to leave behind I genuinely believed I’d stopped writing novels. I’d become a podcaster instead, a smallholder, a holder-of-courses where people could learn in real time the things that might yet still turn us away from the multi-polar cliff edge to which our dysfunctional culture is hurtling us with such terrifying speed. But…
The post The Future is Already Here appeared first on Manda Scott.
Life Beyond Death
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life… Life Beyond Death
Visions of Life Beyond Death Writing a novel from the perspective of someone who dies at the end of the first chapter (truly, this isn’t a spoiler) was always going to be…interesting. But it was part of the vision from the hill and if I’ve learned anything in forty years of shamanic practice, it’s that not all visions come in clear text, and when they do, messing with them in any way is a seriously bad idea.
So Lan had to die to be able to do the things I saw her doing. Specifically, she needed to find a guide who could help her navigate the liminal space between the lands of life and the lands of death and who, particularly, would take her into the Void—a place no sane individual would willingly go— and show her how to split the future, separating out all the many, many timeliness radiating from any given moment. Having done this, assuming some of the apparent futures were not heart-warming, generative or inspiring, the guide needed at least to open the door to Lan’s finding agency in the land of the living. This had to happen three times, and at each point, Lan’s capacity to see had to spread from her immediate family, to the whole movement they were leading and ultimately to the whole of humanity and the web of life. All of this needed to fit into a thriller framework that would make sense to people for whom the Void isn’t even on their radar (which is to say pretty much everyone else in the world) while not leaving gaps in their understanding for the few readers who are already students of this and who might pick up loose threads and run with them if it wasn’t made abundantly clear that this wouldn’t be a clever thing to do.
No pressure, then.
As anyone who writes will know, doing the research is one of the most fun parts of any book and in this case, it turns out there’s quite a body of secular literature concerning people’s experience of life after death. The emphasis is on secular because I’m not a great fan of monotheistic religions or their narratives – they’re too new, too hierarchical and arise too clearly from what Frances Weller calls the Trauma Culture – which is basically anything that arises from the agricultural mindset, though I think it’s likely the trauma came first – at the point when we believe it’s OK to take what we can, push power to the top and destroy everything else in pursuit of it, then we’re already traumatised. This is a conversation for another time. For now, let’s assume I’m averse to belief systems and to any deity that can’t trace its own origins back to before the agricultural revolution. The origins of deities is also a conversation for another time. We’re putting a lot on the back burner here, but this is what happens when we step outside the (terrifyingly narrow) boundaries of consensus reality. As the outstanding Peruvian shaman, Oscar Mira-Quesada says, ‘Consciousness creates Matter, Language creates Reality and Ritual creates Relationship.’ Our western languages, and particularly English, are gloriously flexible, but only within a tiny range of ideas. Exploring what happens to consciousness after death is fraught with difficulty.
Reading Routes throughSo let’s get back to Lan. I read the Tibetan and Egyptian books of the dead in my student years – way back in the last millennium. I’d also fallen into the void once, which was easily the most terrifying thing in my entire shamanic experience. I needed more detail, though, and found it in a number of relatively recent books.
Eben Alexander was my first discovery. He was a neurosurgeon, so his writing spoke to my (former) anaesthetist’s mind. In brief, he’d contracted meningitis and fallen into a coma. He was flatlining and eventually his colleagues and friends – who were also his doctors – said it was time to switch off the life support. His nine year old son climbed onto the bed, prised open his father’s eyes and said, ‘Daddy, it’s going to be OK’ over and over… and Alexander returned to life.
He was then faced with an interesting dilemma because western medicine states that when the EEGs are flatlining then there can be no brain activity. (The hubris of ‘we can’t measure it, so there’s nothing to measure is immense, but this is the way our world currently works). But Alexander had extremely details memories of his experience while ‘brain-dead’ and very little memory of anything else. He describes the risk to his career in some detail because talking about his experience seemed likely to be a career-destroying move, but it was so real, so vivid and so utterly challenging to the western worldview that he felt he had to speak. And in the end, he wrote Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife and then Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness.
Both are well worth a read and both opened doors to other writing: Life after Life by Raymond Moody and Memories of the Afterlife by Michael Newton were both well written and seemed credible, which didn’t always apply to some of the books I turned up. It’s not, after all, hard to write ideas that confirm what the people around you want to believe. It’s harder to do as Alexander did and go against the grain of your entire professional and social tribe.
Common Paths to Uncommon PlacesIn all the reading, there seemed to be some common features: there’s a short time window after death when those who have crossed the line have some leeway to influence the living in ways they can’t do later on. I was particularly struck by the story told by a man who had received a phone call from the wife distraught wife of his best friend saying that said friend had just drowned while saving the life of their son. These two friends had regularly played one of the early online games where – rarely – the ‘winner’ had evoked a whoooopeeeee! sound that was particularly joyful for them both. That night, our man played the game alone—and was deluged by endless, almost back to back whooopeee! sounds in ways that were logistically improbable, if not impossible, under the code of the game. So when Lan needed desperately to connect with Finn, to let him know she was there, that she was keeping the promise she’d made as she was dying, to be there for him if he needed her…I had the ideal way for her to do it. She and Finn had played World of Warcraft together – it had been their way of bonding, when a sullen teenaged boy had turned up at the farm owned by his crazy grandmothers, taking refuge from an even crazier time in Glasgow, where being mixed race had suddenly stopped being cool and made of him a target. Warcraft though, they were both completely seeped in it and there’s nothing like the buzz of a battleground if you’re on a winning streak. Lan is a pattern-matcher, it’s what she does best (to be fair, it’s what most of humanity does best, but she knows it of herself) and she can match the patterns deep in the heart of the game-code to see to it that Finn and his team win way, way out of their league on the night she dies.
Which means I got to indulge two of my absolute obsessions: living, shamanic spirituality where the act of psychopomping the newly dead is one of the functions of the tribal shaman—and World of Warcraft. It may seem as if these two are incompatible, and from my current position where I’ve given up the game for the fifth successive time in 20 years, I might agree with you. But when I was writing, they were entirely congruent. And that’s one of the other truly grand things about writing: we get to build the worlds that feel real to us.
So I can bring gaming into a political thriller and show that our communities of passion and purpose can become as healing as our communities of place. And I can explore the Between and the Beyond and how we might all navigate the journey from one to the other. Because while not everyone is going to lead a worldwide movement while playing Warcraft at professional level as Finn does, we are all — every single one of us — going to die one day. And wouldn’t life go much better if we thought the experience might be interesting rather than a blank door of dread?
BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT The Future is Already Here Life Beyond Death Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind Why we need Thrutopias… Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point. FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address.Name
The Future is already here ‘Any Human Power’ is based on this premise: that there are countless brilliant, highly motivated people coming up with brilliant, workable ideas that can bridge us at least to the emergent edge where we are putting into action all the things we know are the best of ourselves. What happens then is unknowable, but watching it happen will be one of the most exciting things imaginable.
Manda's new novel: ways to a future we'd be proud to leave behind I genuinely believed I’d stopped writing novels. I’d become a podcaster instead, a smallholder, a holder-of-courses where people could learn in real time the things that might yet still turn us away from the multi-polar cliff edge to which our dysfunctional culture is hurtling us with such terrifying speed. But…
The post Life Beyond Death appeared first on Manda Scott.
April 7, 2023
Manda’s New Novel
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life… Manda’s New Novel
I genuinely believed I’d stopped writing novels. I’d become a podcaster instead, a smallholder, a holder-of-courses where people could learn in real time the things that might yet still turn us away from the multi-polar cliff edge to which our dysfunctional culture is hurtling us with such terrifying speed. Writing books takes a long time and the publishing process is too slow and why would I take years to get an idea into the world when I could put it out in an hour’s podcast on a Monday afternoon? So, because we’re going to need carbon-sparing modes of healing as our culture disintegrates, I started training to be a homeopath and that ate up all my spare bandwidth, which was fine.
And then at the summer solstice of 2021, as Covid was winding down, I taught one of the more advanced shamanic dreaming courses online: the one I said I’d never teach remotely because basic safety dictated that we had to all be in the room together.
But there were students in Germany, and Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland who really didn’t want to spend two weeks in quarantine either side of what amounts to a long weekend in Wales, and they brought their collective persuasion to bear and I caved. So there we were, gathered on Zoom for some fairly exacting journeys, and while it’s not usual for visions to arise while I’m drumming, it’s not entirely unusual either. What’s novel is for those visions to include instructions to arrive more or less in plain text when they’re usually couched more in metaphors and allusions and half-felt sensations that can take a long time to parse out.
But here it was: ‘Take the fossilized horse’s tooth that holds the southern side of the SE/Ancestor gate on the altar. Get some horse skin from someone who works with honour of what has died and bind the tooth to this particular horizontal bough of hawthorn in the ancient hedge on the hill above the farm. Then sit with your back to it every night for an hour as the sun goes down. ‘
I asked, ‘How long do I do this for?’
‘Until further notice.’
Wild pony weathering a rainstorm on a hill where we like to walk Right. Big deep breath. If I’ve learned one thing in the decades of working this way, it’s that ignoring the gods is not a sensible thing to do. It took me a while to source horse hide from someone with genuine integrity, but that was fine because I had the veterinary homeopathy exams coming up and it’s a while since I sat an exam; this took up a fair bit of bandwidth too, (Huge thanks here to Jenny Howard who made it possible).
But then all was in place, and it was summer and the evenings were grand, and I sat with my back to the Ancestor Horse and watched the crows go to bed in the ash trees that line the river beyond the farm and wondered what it would be like by February, when everything might not be so idyllic.
But really, I wasn’t there for long. Within a week, through a process I cannot begin to unpick, I had the basic premise for a new book: the idea of a woman on the edge of death who makes a binding promise and has to honour it.With a narrative arc following her after death, as she is shown how to split the timelines and, in the end, can see the one (or perhaps a one) where humanity reaches forward to a flourishing future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that follow us: that set of actions and ideas and ways of being that would leave our grandchildren’s grandchildren saying, Heck, they left it way, way too late, but when it really mattered, enough people pulled together in a direction that changed the whole trajectory of history. And here we are. And here is good.
And this is not something that I could do in an hour’s podcast on a Monday afternoon. Also, the equally clear instruction was, ‘Now go and write the book.’
‘What about the sitting on the hill thing?’
‘You can do that if you want, but writing the book has priority.’
So no need to sit out in the rain on a freezing February evening. I wasn’t entirely unhappy about that.
I am not going to pretend that the result is the only way forward. If nothing else, the political landscape became particularly fluid as the writing progressed. I’d originally set the whole narrative in 2024 and it became clear that this wasn’t viable, if only because the changes were too rapid and too great to predict and what mattered more than anything was that this book feel more like ‘this is happening’ than ‘this might have happened in a fantasy future.’
So it’s set at a particular fork in time that was the future when I began to write and is now the past. This exact fork hasn’t happened in any reality I inhabit, but the concepts, the mind-sets, the ways-of-being…these are all still possible. They’re necessary, too. The detail might be different if other people pick up this Thrutopian baton, but there’s a universal core to who and how humanity needs to work for us to flourish. We need to find connection, compassion, clarity and self-coherence. As Jon Alexander says in his outstanding nonfiction work, ‘Citizens’, we need to stop being consumers and start seeing ourselves as part of a different, more connected web. We need to find good faith again and a common truth. Above all, we need ways of arranging local, national and international governance and economics so that each of these is in service to the flourishing future our hearts know is possible.
There will be another book to follow this. I’ll start writing it in the new year and hope there is still a world in which it can be published by the time it’s ready to greet you.
In the meantime, as is the way with publishing cycles, the latest one is hovering over a desk or two, waiting for responses. It’ll grind through the terrifyingly slow process that is publishing, and yes, you’ll definitely get notice of when it’s going to hit the real and virtual shelves. The working title is ‘West of the Sunset, North of Tomorrow’. I’m already dreaming the cover art.
Planning the next book during a windswept break in Cornwall RECENT Manda talks to Chris Johnstone about her new book and Sustainable Happiness The Future is Already Here Life Beyond Death Manda’s New Novel Why we need Thrutopias… FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address. Name
The post Manda’s New Novel appeared first on Manda Scott.
Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life… Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind
I genuinely believed I’d stopped writing novels. I’d become a podcaster instead, a smallholder, a holder-of-courses where people could learn in real time the things that might yet still turn us away from the multi-polar cliff edge to which our dysfunctional culture is hurtling us with such terrifying speed. Writing books takes a long time and the publishing process is too slow and why would I take years to get an idea into the world when I could put it out in an hour’s podcast on a Monday afternoon? So, because we’re going to need carbon-sparing modes of healing as our culture disintegrates, I started training to be a homeopath and that ate up all my spare bandwidth, which was fine.
And then at the summer solstice of 2021, as Covid was winding down, I taught one of the more advanced shamanic dreaming courses online: the one I said I’d never teach remotely because basic safety dictated that we had to all be in the room together.
But there were students in Germany, and Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland who really didn’t want to spend two weeks in quarantine either side of what amounts to a long weekend in Wales, and they brought their collective persuasion to bear and I caved. So there we were, gathered on Zoom for some fairly exacting journeys, and while it’s not usual for visions to arise while I’m drumming, it’s not entirely unusual either. What’s novel is for those visions to include instructions to arrive more or less in plain text when they’re usually couched more in metaphors and allusions and half-felt sensations that can take a long time to parse out.
But here it was: ‘Take the fossilized horse’s tooth that holds the southern side of the SE/Ancestor gate on the altar. Get some horse skin from someone who works with honour of what has died and bind the tooth to this particular horizontal bough of hawthorn in the ancient hedge on the hill above the farm. Then sit with your back to it every night for an hour as the sun goes down. ‘
I asked, ‘How long do I do this for?’
‘Until further notice.’
Wild pony weathering a rainstorm on a hill where we like to walk Right. Big deep breath. If I’ve learned one thing in the decades of working this way, it’s that ignoring the gods is not a sensible thing to do. It took me a while to source horse hide from someone with genuine integrity, but that was fine because I had the veterinary homeopathy exams coming up and it’s a while since I sat an exam; this took up a fair bit of bandwidth too, (Huge thanks here to Jenny Howard who made it possible).
But then all was in place, and it was summer and the evenings were grand, and I sat with my back to the Ancestor Horse and watched the crows go to bed in the ash trees that line the river beyond the farm and wondered what it would be like by February, when everything might not be so idyllic.
But really, I wasn’t there for long. Within a week, through a process I cannot begin to unpick, I had the basic premise for a new book: the idea of a woman on the edge of death who makes a binding promise and has to honour it.With a narrative arc following her after death, as she is shown how to split the timelines and, in the end, can see the one (or perhaps a one) where humanity reaches forward to a flourishing future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that follow us: that set of actions and ideas and ways of being that would leave our grandchildren’s grandchildren saying, Heck, they left it way, way too late, but when it really mattered, enough people pulled together in a direction that changed the whole trajectory of history. And here we are. And here is good.
And this is not something that I could do in an hour’s podcast on a Monday afternoon. Also, the equally clear instruction was, ‘Now go and write the book.’
‘What about the sitting on the hill thing?’
‘You can do that if you want, but writing the book has priority.’
So no need to sit out in the rain on a freezing February evening. I wasn’t entirely unhappy about that.
I am not going to pretend that the result is the only way forward. If nothing else, the political landscape became particularly fluid as the writing progressed. I’d originally set the whole narrative in 2024 and it became clear that this wasn’t viable, if only because the changes were too rapid and too great to predict and what mattered more than anything was that this book feel more like ‘this is happening’ than ‘this might have happened in a fantasy future.’
So it’s set at a particular fork in time that was the future when I began to write and is now the past. This exact fork hasn’t happened in any reality I inhabit, but the concepts, the mind-sets, the ways-of-being…these are all still possible. They’re necessary, too. The detail might be different if other people pick up this Thrutopian baton, but there’s a universal core to who and how humanity needs to work for us to flourish. We need to find connection, compassion, clarity and self-coherence. As Jon Alexander says in his outstanding nonfiction work, ‘Citizens’, we need to stop being consumers and start seeing ourselves as part of a different, more connected web. We need to find good faith again and a common truth. Above all, we need ways of arranging local, national and international governance and economics so that each of these is in service to the flourishing future our hearts know is possible.
There will be another book to follow this. I’ll start writing it in the new year and hope there is still a world in which it can be published by the time it’s ready to greet you.
In the meantime, as is the way with publishing cycles, the latest one is hovering over a desk or two, waiting for responses. It’ll grind through the terrifyingly slow process that is publishing, and yes, you’ll definitely get notice of when it’s going to hit the real and virtual shelves. The working title is ‘West of the Sunset, North of Tomorrow’. I’m already dreaming the cover art.
Planning the next book during a windswept break in Cornwall BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT The Future is Already Here Life Beyond Death Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind Why we need Thrutopias… Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point. FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address. Name
The post Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind appeared first on Manda Scott.
March 28, 2023
Why we need Thrutopias…
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life…Why we need Thrutopias…
Imagine waking up in the morning to that fuzzy ‘not-quite-awake’ sense, where you know the day is going to be completely inspiring. You have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, you’ll hit the mattress in 14 hours or so feeling that life is amazing and you’re utterly, heart-explodingly grateful to be alive. Is that hard? For many of us, it’s not only hard, it feels impossible. We live in a system where scarcity, separation and powerlessness are baked into everything to the point where they feel like the only way life could be. And because we think this, we’re right on the edge of existential chaos.I spend my life immersed in what we might call the regenerative movement and there are some immensely bright people reckon we have 8 years to turn things around.Eight. Count them. Eight.And that was before the old white men decided it was fun to start a war so they could burn mega-tonnes of carbon over and above all that already burning.Which leads anyone sane to stick their head right back in the sand because what can we possibly do in eight years? And anyway, what is it we’d want to do if we could? Because even if it’s twenty eight, we’re stuck in a political and economic system that’s designed to strip-mine our ingenuity, crush our creativity and make sure we’re suitably frightened wage slaves, working our fingers to the bone to keep feeding the endless ‘growth’ that keeps the people at the top happy.Because from a certain perspective, unlike the beautiful forest-meme that floats round on Facebook once in a while, in this system, we are born to just to pay bills and then die.Except, obviously, we’re not. The last mass extinction was sixty four million years ago and it’s taken us till the last couple of thousand years to create a system that annihilates our spirits. And even then, the really radical thought is that… for thousands of years, thousands of people in other communities managed to structure their ways of living so that they *didn’t* end up with psychopathic kleptomaniacs at the top of a linear hierarchy, siphoning out everything that is good and right and beautiful from the ninety nine percent beneath them: that’s pretty much our creation, it’s just we’ve told ourselves stories for millennia about how clever we are, and until recently, we didn’t look at the ways other people did things with any kind of lucid assessment.The recent book by Davids Graeber and Wengrow has changed all that. If you want your world view overturned, I heartily recommend The Dawn of Everything as a fascinating, inspiring, life-changing read. The realisation that other cultures have gone out of their way to avoid exactly the idiocy that we’ve embraced is like a breath of fresh air. It’s not that – say – the Wendot of north America, didn’t have the occasional despot arise and try to take over, it’s that they saw the danger and structured things to make sure said despots didn’t gain any traction.All of which leads me full circle back to the power of story. I’m a novelist and stories are the air I breathe and the sea within which I swim. And I am realising that we need a whole load of new stories if we’re going to make it through whatever window we still have left. We need stories that tell us about the thousands of people within our system who are striving to change it for something that works much, much better. We need stories of ways we could shift our political and economic structures to ones that are regenerative by design: where the economy is based on values that ensure people and planet thrive whether or not the baseline numbers grow – as opposed to the current one, where the number has to grow even though people and planet are manifestly not thriving. We need loads of these. We need them on Netflix, on TV Soaps, in theatres and in poems, in songs and blogs and articles in the local Parish magazine. They need to give everyone, whatever their current political shade, a sense of a future we could reach if we all worked together. And then we need to get on and head for it.Imagine a future where our great grandchildren look back and say, ‘Yes, it was hard. Yes, they made mistakes. Yes, they left it way, way too late, but that was because they didn’t know what to do. And my goodness, when they had the visions, they threw themselves into making them happen. And we’re here now, living lives we love, because they took the risk to change the way things worked.’That’s the world we’re aiming for. If you’re a writer, actual or aspiring – in fact any kind of creative person – then figuring out clear road maps that inspire people to a new future has to be, I think, the single most important thing we can be doing. However long we have between now and the tipping points, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will thank us for starting on the road to thriving sooner rather than later.That’s why we’ve set up Thrutopia Masterclass – to create the space where the broadest possible range of writers can come together over six months to listen to some of the people who are at the leading edge of change: people who are living in worlds that are already regenerative, and planning ways forward. If we’re going to write futures that will inspire everyone across the globe to strive for something better, then we have to understand how we get from here to there. We have to walk the maps in our heads, plan out the routes, finds the moments of challenge and uncertainty that are at the heart of every good story whether it’s a novel, or a film script, a Netflix binge-watched 10 season set, or a haiku; a stage play or a blog, or a TikTok video; a song or an Instagram post… whatever our format, we need to get to grips with the potential, road-test our ideas in a safe space with other writers and then support each other in getting the resulting work out into the world.This is what we plan – so that we can create the stories that will be the bedrock of a future we’d be proud to leave to our children, and our children’s children down all the generations. Come and join us – we still have places left! VISIT MY NEW THRUTOPIA WEBSITE BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT The Future is Already Here Life Beyond Death Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind Why we need Thrutopias… Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point. FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address. Name
The post Why we need Thrutopias… appeared first on Manda Scott.
January 9, 2023
Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point.
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life… Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point. 
Everyone is writing about Fay Weldon just now and I didn’t want to leap on the bandwagon. But truly, when I look back on the tortuous path from full time veterinary medicine (actually, full time veterinary anaesthesia and critical care, but that’s a distinction that matters only to a tiny minority of people), Fay is one of three individuals who helped me shift.
The first was the incomparable Reina James, a psychic astrologer who I went to see on a whim the day after my 30th birthday. I was a full time veterinary anaesthetist at this point, working in the clinical department of the vet school at Cambridge and while I was never what you’d call mainstream/reductionist in my thinking—I’d started training in shamanic practice by this time, and was already exploring homeopathy—nonetheless, I was still a lot more embedded in consensus reality than I am now.
Reina took a look at my chart, and, apart from telling me things about my childhood that I hadn’t at that point got around to mentioning to any of the therapists I’d seen in the previous decade, she listened to my nascent attempts to shift from vet med to writing as a career, nodded sagely and said, ‘Remember you’re a writer who happens to be making a living as a vet, not a vet who has writing as a part time hobby.’ I wept all the way back up the road to Newmarket. Barring one or two really close friends, nobody in my world took my writing seriously at that point: certainly not my veterinary colleagues who were pretty much my entire social circle. Even when Hen’s Teeth was published and shortlisted for the Orange Prize, nobody took much notice. If I’d been published in Nature, they’d have been impressed, but most of them had never heard of the Prize and those that had thought it was something to do with Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Oranges are not the only fruit’ – a ghetto for lesbian memoirs.
So, Reina’s taking me seriously was the first step in realising that I needed to surround myself by other people who didn’t see writing as a companion weirdness to stamp collecting or live action role play. (with apologies to philatelists and LARPers – and actually, I did dark age battle re-enactment when I wasn’t climbing rocks, so I was really quite weird).
Anyway, this led me to explore the writing courses available nearby and I found one that was modelled on the Arvon system but held much closer to home. I picked a week when the students weren’t around and I was allowed to take time off and the first year, that turned out to be the week when Fay Weldon was the tutor. The following year, it was Terry Pratchett took that slot. Which is how I came to be the only person in the world who has played Dungeons and Dragons with both of these outstanding writers (it’s a long story, but the TL;DR is that Friday night was a down time which involved a great deal of red wine and I always carried my set of D&D dice with me. It didn’t take much to entice two quite creative people into what is essentially an act of live creativity). Fay’s verdict: ‘With short breaks for eating, drinking and a little sleep, one could become quite addicted to this.’ I count this as a win.
But what I remember best, were the three key nuggets of writing advice she gave.First, was ‘Find your voice.’ For someone with a science background, I had no idea what she meant, but I took it to mean, ‘write as you speak’, which freed my up hugely and I continue to pass this on.
Second was, ‘Write the bits you can see.’ As so many people do, she likened writing to driving across a foggy landscape at night: you can only see as far as your headlights allow, so write that bit and when you’re done, your headlights will illuminate the next bit of the road. But she added the concept of the mountains on the landscape: if you can only see their peaks, write those and the fog will begin to disperse. Then you can see the landscape of the valleys. Wise words and again, it freed me up from having to know where any novel is going when I start it. In fact, it let me see that often, where I think I’m going is not, in the end, where we need to get to, but driving that road, so to speak, took me far enough out into the wilderness to see the real route. Enough of the geographical metaphors, the key is to write what you know, but not in the sense of rehashing the tedium of your life (please don’t do this), but write what you understand of your characters and what motivates them and you’ll get to know them well enough to fill in the rest.
Finally, of the many, many wise things she said, ‘Your realities can have any rules you like as long as the reader understands them and you don’t break them.’ This came only slightly ahead of ,‘Magical realism is fantasy written by your friends.’
In the context of that particular late-night conversation, she was suggesting that even way back then in the dying days of the old millennium, the restrictions of genre and literary category would suffocate us if we let them. Conversely, if we could write something strong and compelling, the genres would bend around us. So write what you want and then it’s up to your publisher to work out where it goes in the bookshops. These days, with so many people taking control over their own work and self-publishing, this is doubly true. The sub-genres to the sub-genres are huge and people who like reading may be fewer and further between than, say, the people who want to spend their time surfing Netflix or getting into flame wars on Twitter. But books have never been so accessible, or so capable of shifting the ways we think.
All of which is to say, if you want to write, please, please give it the time. As the equally great Terry Pratchett said, ‘Writing is the most fun anyone can have on their own.’ And he’s right. So get on and do it. And have fun.
BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point. Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind Why we need Thrutopias… A New Project for a New World On Prizes and what they Mean FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address.Name
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January 8, 2023
Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point.
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life…Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point.
Everyone is writing about Fay Weldon just now and I didn’t want to leap on the bandwagon. But truly, when I look back on the tortuous path from full time veterinary medicine (actually, full time veterinary anaesthesia and critical care, but that’s a distinction that matters only to a tiny minority of people), Fay is one of three individuals who helped me shift.
The first was the incomparable Reina James, a psychic astrologer who I went to see on a whim the day after my 30th birthday. I was a full time veterinary anaesthetist at this point, working in the clinical department of the vet school at Cambridge and while I was never what you’d call mainstream/reductionist in my thinking—I’d started training in shamanic practice by this time, and was already exploring homeopathy—nonetheless, I was still a lot more embedded in consensus reality than I am now.
Reina took a look at my chart, and, apart from telling me things about my childhood that I hadn’t at that point got around to mentioning to any of the therapists I’d seen in the previous decade, she listened to my nascent attempts to shift from vet med to writing as a career, nodded sagely and said, ‘Remember you’re a writer who happens to be making a living as a vet, not a vet who has writing as a part time hobby.’ I wept all the way back up the road to Newmarket. Barring one or two really close friends, nobody in my world took my writing seriously at that point: certainly not my veterinary colleagues who were pretty much my entire social circle. Even when Hen’s Teeth was published and shortlisted for the Orange Prize, nobody took much notice. If I’d been published in Nature, they’d have been impressed, but most of them had never heard of the Prize and those that had thought it was something to do with Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Oranges are not the only fruit’ – a ghetto for lesbian memoirs.
So, Reina’s taking me seriously was the first step in realising that I needed to surround myself by other people who didn’t see writing as a companion weirdness to stamp collecting or live action role play. (with apologies to philatelists and LARPers – and actually, I did dark age battle re-enactment when I wasn’t climbing rocks, so I was really quite weird).
Anyway, this led me to explore the writing courses available nearby and I found one that was modelled on the Arvon system but held much closer to home. I picked a week when the students weren’t around and I was allowed to take time off and the first year, that turned out to be the week when Fay Weldon was the tutor. The following year, it was Terry Pratchett took that slot. Which is how I came to be the only person in the world who has played Dungeons and Dragons with both of these outstanding writers (it’s a long story, but the TL;DR is that Friday night was a down time which involved a great deal of red wine and I always carried my set of D&D dice with me. It didn’t take much to entice two quite creative people into what is essentially an act of live creativity). Fay’s verdict: ‘With short breaks for eating, drinking and a little sleep, one could become quite addicted to this.’ I count this as a win.
But what I remember best, were the three key nuggets of writing advice she gave.First, was ‘Find your voice.’ For someone with a science background, I had no idea what she meant, but I took it to mean, ‘write as you speak’, which freed my up hugely and I continue to pass this on.
Second was, ‘Write the bits you can see.’ As so many people do, she likened writing to driving across a foggy landscape at night: you can only see as far as your headlights allow, so write that bit and when you’re done, your headlights will illuminate the next bit of the road. But she added the concept of the mountains on the landscape: if you can only see their peaks, write those and the fog will begin to disperse. Then you can see the landscape of the valleys. Wise words and again, it freed me up from having to know where any novel is going when I start it. In fact, it let me see that often, where I think I’m going is not, in the end, where we need to get to, but driving that road, so to speak, took me far enough out into the wilderness to see the real route. Enough of the geographical metaphors, the key is to write what you know, but not in the sense of rehashing the tedium of your life (please don’t do this), but write what you understand of your characters and what motivates them and you’ll get to know them well enough to fill in the rest.
Finally, of the many, many wise things she said, ‘Your realities can have any rules you like as long as the reader understands them and you don’t break them.’ This came only slightly ahead of ,‘Magical realism is fantasy written by your friends.’
In the context of that particular late-night conversation, she was suggesting that even way back then in the dying days of the old millennium, the restrictions of genre and literary category would suffocate us if we let them. Conversely, if we could write something strong and compelling, the genres would bend around us. So write what you want and then it’s up to your publisher to work out where it goes in the bookshops. These days, with so many people taking control over their own work and self-publishing, this is doubly true. The sub-genres to the sub-genres are huge and people who like reading may be fewer and further between than, say, the people who want to spend their time surfing Netflix or getting into flame wars on Twitter. But books have never been so accessible, or so capable of shifting the ways we think.
All of which is to say, if you want to write, please, please give it the time. As the equally great Terry Pratchett said, ‘Writing is the most fun anyone can have on their own.’ And he’s right. So get on and do it. And have fun.
BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT The Future is Already Here Life Beyond Death Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind Why we need Thrutopias… Fay Weldon: a visionary teacher who lifted my writing to a publishable point. FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address.Name
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December 7, 2022
Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life…Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind
A wild hilly place near where we live I genuinely believed I’d stopped writing novels. I’d become a podcaster instead, a smallholder, a holder-of-courses where people could learn in real time the things that might yet still turn us away from the multi-polar cliff edge to which our dysfunctional culture is hurtling us with such terrifying speed.Writing books takes a long time and the publishing process is too slow and why would I take years to get an idea into the world when I could put it out in an hour’s podcast on a Monday afternoon? So, because we’re going to need carbon-sparing modes of healing as our culture disintegrates, I started training to be a homeopath and that ate up all my spare bandwidth, which was fine. And then at the summer solstice of 2021, as Covid was winding down, I taught one of the more advanced shamanic dreaming courses online: the one I said I’d never teach remotely because basic safety dictated that we had to all be in the room together.
But there were students in Germany, and Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland who really didn’t want to spend two weeks in quarantine either side of what amounts to a long weekend in Wales, and they brought their collective persuasion to bear and I caved. So there we were, gathered on Zoom for some fairly exacting journeys, and while it’s not usual for visions to arise while I’m drumming, it’s not entirely unusual either. What’s novel is for those visions to include instructions to arrive more or less in plain text when they’re usually couched more in metaphors and allusions and half-felt sensations that can take a long time to parse out.
But here it was: ‘Take the fossilized horse’s tooth that holds the southern side of the SE/Ancestor gate on the altar. Get some horse skin from someone who works with honour of what has died and bind the tooth to this particular horizontal bough of hawthorn in the ancient hedge on the hill above the farm. Then sit with your back to it every night for an hour as the sun goes down. ‘
I asked, ‘How long do I do this for?’
‘Until further notice.’
Wild pony weathering a rainstorm on a hill where we like to walk Right. Big deep breath. If I’ve learned one thing in the decades of working this way, it’s that ignoring the gods is not a sensible thing to do. It took me a while to source horse hide from someone with genuine integrity, but that was fine because I had the veterinary homeopathy exams coming up and it’s a while since I sat an exam; this took up a fair bit of bandwidth too, (Huge thanks here to Jenny Howard who made it possible).
But then all was in place, and it was summer and the evenings were grand, and I sat with my back to the Ancestor Horse and watched the crows go to bed in the ash trees that line the river beyond the farm and wondered what it would be like by February, when everything might not be so idyllic.
But really, I wasn’t there for long. Within a week, through a process I cannot begin to unpick, I had the basic premise for a new book: the idea of a woman on the edge of death who makes a binding promise and has to honour it.With a narrative arc following her after death, as she is shown how to split the timelines and, in the end, can see the one (or perhaps a one) where humanity reaches forward to a flourishing future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that follow us: that set of actions and ideas and ways of being that would leave our grandchildren’s grandchildren saying, Heck, they left it way, way too late, but when it really mattered, enough people pulled together in a direction that changed the whole trajectory of history. And here we are. And here is good.
And this is not something that I could do in an hour’s podcast on a Monday afternoon. Also, the equally clear instruction was, ‘Now go and write the book.’
‘What about the sitting on the hill thing?’
‘You can do that if you want, but writing the book has priority.’
So no need to sit out in the rain on a freezing February evening. I wasn’t entirely unhappy about that.
I am not going to pretend that the result is the only way forward. If nothing else, the political landscape became particularly fluid as the writing progressed. I’d originally set the whole narrative in 2024 and it became clear that this wasn’t viable, if only because the changes were too rapid and too great to predict and what mattered more than anything was that this book feel more like ‘this is happening’ than ‘this might have happened in a fantasy future.’
So it’s set at a particular fork in time that was the future when I began to write and is now the past. This exact fork hasn’t happened in any reality I inhabit, but the concepts, the mind-sets, the ways-of-being…these are all still possible. They’re necessary, too. The detail might be different if other people pick up this Thrutopian baton, but there’s a universal core to who and how humanity needs to work for us to flourish. We need to find connection, compassion, clarity and self-coherence. As Jon Alexander says in his outstanding nonfiction work, ‘Citizens’, we need to stop being consumers and start seeing ourselves as part of a different, more connected web. We need to find good faith again and a common truth. Above all, we need ways of arranging local, national and international governance and economics so that each of these is in service to the flourishing future our hearts know is possible.
There will be another book to follow this. I’ll start writing it in the new year and hope there is still a world in which it can be published by the time it’s ready to greet you.
In the meantime, as is the way with publishing cycles, the latest one is hovering over a desk or two, waiting for responses. It’ll grind through the terrifyingly slow process that is publishing, and yes, you’ll definitely get notice of when it’s going to hit the real and virtual shelves. The working title is ‘West of the Sunset, North of Tomorrow’. I’m already dreaming the cover art.
Planning the next book during a windswept break in Cornwall BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT Manda’s New Novel: Mapping the ways to a future we’d be proud to leave behind Why we need Thrutopias… A New Project for a New World On Prizes and what they Mean The Year’s best Crime Fiction in the Financial Times FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address. Name
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February 28, 2022
Why we need Thrutopias…
THOUGHTS | DREAMS | ACTION Thoughts from a writing life…Why we need Thrutopias…
Imagine waking up in the morning to that fuzzy ‘not-quite-awake’ sense, where you know the day is going to be completely inspiring. You have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen, but whatever it is, you’ll hit the mattress in 14 hours or so feeling that life is amazing and you’re utterly, heart-explodingly grateful to be alive. Is that hard? For many of us, it’s not only hard, it feels impossible. We live in a system where scarcity, separation and powerlessness are baked into everything to the point where they feel like the only way life could be. And because we think this, we’re right on the edge of existential chaos.I spend my life immersed in what we might call the regenerative movement and there are some immensely bright people reckon we have 8 years to turn things around.Eight. Count them. Eight.And that was before the old white men decided it was fun to start a war so they could burn mega-tonnes of carbon over and above all that already burning.Which leads anyone sane to stick their head right back in the sand because what can we possibly do in eight years? And anyway, what is it we’d want to do if we could? Because even if it’s twenty eight, we’re stuck in a political and economic system that’s designed to strip-mine our ingenuity, crush our creativity and make sure we’re suitably frightened wage slaves, working our fingers to the bone to keep feeding the endless ‘growth’ that keeps the people at the top happy.Because from a certain perspective, unlike the beautiful forest-meme that floats round on Facebook once in a while, in this system, we are born to just to pay bills and then die.Except, obviously, we’re not. The last mass extinction was sixty four million years ago and it’s taken us till the last couple of thousand years to create a system that annihilates our spirits. And even then, the really radical thought is that… for thousands of years, thousands of people in other communities managed to structure their ways of living so that they *didn’t* end up with psychopathic kleptomaniacs at the top of a linear hierarchy, siphoning out everything that is good and right and beautiful from the ninety nine percent beneath them: that’s pretty much our creation, it’s just we’ve told ourselves stories for millennia about how clever we are, and until recently, we didn’t look at the ways other people did things with any kind of lucid assessment.The recent book by Davids Graeber and Wengrow has changed all that. If you want your world view overturned, I heartily recommend The Dawn of Everything as a fascinating, inspiring, life-changing read. The realisation that other cultures have gone out of their way to avoid exactly the idiocy that we’ve embraced is like a breath of fresh air. It’s not that – say – the Wendot of north America, didn’t have the occasional despot arise and try to take over, it’s that they saw the danger and structured things to make sure said despots didn’t gain any traction.All of which leads me full circle back to the power of story. I’m a novelist and stories are the air I breathe and the sea within which I swim. And I am realising that we need a whole load of new stories if we’re going to make it through whatever window we still have left. We need stories that tell us about the thousands of people within our system who are striving to change it for something that works much, much better. We need stories of ways we could shift our political and economic structures to ones that are regenerative by design: where the economy is based on values that ensure people and planet thrive whether or not the baseline numbers grow – as opposed to the current one, where the number has to grow even though people and planet are manifestly not thriving. We need loads of these. We need them on Netflix, on TV Soaps, in theatres and in poems, in songs and blogs and articles in the local Parish magazine. They need to give everyone, whatever their current political shade, a sense of a future we could reach if we all worked together. And then we need to get on and head for it.Imagine a future where our great grandchildren look back and say, ‘Yes, it was hard. Yes, they made mistakes. Yes, they left it way, way too late, but that was because they didn’t know what to do. And my goodness, when they had the visions, they threw themselves into making them happen. And we’re here now, living lives we love, because they took the risk to change the way things worked.’That’s the world we’re aiming for. If you’re a writer, actual or aspiring – in fact any kind of creative person – then figuring out clear road maps that inspire people to a new future has to be, I think, the single most important thing we can be doing. However long we have between now and the tipping points, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will thank us for starting on the road to thriving sooner rather than later.That’s why we’ve set up Thrutopia Masterclass – to create the space where the broadest possible range of writers can come together over six months to listen to some of the people who are at the leading edge of change: people who are living in worlds that are already regenerative, and planning ways forward. If we’re going to write futures that will inspire everyone across the globe to strive for something better, then we have to understand how we get from here to there. We have to walk the maps in our heads, plan out the routes, finds the moments of challenge and uncertainty that are at the heart of every good story whether it’s a novel, or a film script, a Netflix binge-watched 10 season set, or a haiku; a stage play or a blog, or a TikTok video; a song or an Instagram post… whatever our format, we need to get to grips with the potential, road-test our ideas in a safe space with other writers and then support each other in getting the resulting work out into the world.This is what we plan – so that we can create the stories that will be the bedrock of a future we’d be proud to leave to our children, and our children’s children down all the generations. Come and join us – we still have places left! VISIT MY NEW THRUTOPIA WEBSITE BROWSEAmtalkingAmreadingAmthinkingAmwriting RECENT Why we need Thrutopias… A New Project for a New World On Prizes and what they Mean The Year’s best Crime Fiction in the Financial Times Spies & Ciphers: the Poem Codes of the SOE FOR THOUGHTS, DREAMS & DARING DEEDS, JOIN MANDA'S LIST Success! Thanks for joining my Readers' List. Look out for an email asking you to confirm your address. Name
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