“Beyond its revolutionary technological applications and scientific impact, the evidence of an active role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality holds profound implications for our view of ourselves, our relationships to others, and to the cosmos in which we exist. These, in turn, must inevitably impact our values, our priorities, our sense of responsibility, and our style of life. Our ability to acquire, or to generate tangible, measureable information independent of distance or time challenges the foundation of any reductionistic brain-based model of consciousness that may be invoked. The lack of notable correlations in the data with standard learning curves or other recognizable cognitive patterns, combined with the repeatable and distinct gender-related differences, suggest that these abilities may stem from a more fundamental source than heretofore suspected. Certainly, there is little doubt that integration of these changes in our understanding of ourselves can lead to a substantially superior human ethic, wherein the long-estranged siblings of science and spirit, of analysis and aesthetics, of intellect and intuition, and of many other subjective and objective aspects of human experience can be productively reunited.”

You know I’ve spent the last nine years writing about this stuff in Age of Misrule, The Dark Age and Kingdom of the Serpent, right?

And then Dan Brown goes and writes about it in The Lost Symbol and gets all the attention. Bastard.

It’s interesting and inspiring research and like Brown says in his book, has the potential to instigate a paradigm shift in scientific thinking.

Several of the trails are linked to sites featured heavily in Age of Misrule - Stonehenge, Loch Ness, Thomas the Rhymer’s Hills, Tintagel – and are a great way to soak up the atmosphere and discover more about these evocative places.

You can buy the whole set of walks supplements for a tenner here.

Tenby Harbour

Next month, Destroyer of Worlds, Book 3 of Kingdom of the Serpent is published in the UK, the final volume of my sprawling fantasy series which began with World’s End, Age of Misrule Book 1, nearly ten years ago. When the final edit was complete, it seemed only right that I return to the place where I first dreamed up the story, sitting by the side of the sea on the Celtic fringes of the UK.

It’s not like I’ve been any stranger to Tenby in Pembrokeshire, South Wales – I’ve been going pretty much on an annual basis since I was about seven, sometimes for a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks. For me, the place is damned near perfect for a writer looking for inspiration: winding streets with odd little shadowy alleys, colourful houses, medieval walls, a nearby castle (which featured, like Tenby, in World’s End) the best beaches in this part of the world, and a history of mystery and mysticism. It’s always been a place artists have visited, for much the same reasons – check out the great museum and art gallery if you don’t believe me.

As it’s the start of the summer, I thought I’d give it a mention here, and in a couple of posts to follow. If you’re ever down there, take a look – you won’t be disappointed.

Many of these inspirations are not apparent in the finished product. Some are more overt, and in occasional cases designed as such to create resonances, for instance Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now and the long, difficult boat trip in the Far Lands in The Queen of Sinister.

A lot of influences went into the bubbling cauldron for my next book The Burning Man, but one of the most powerful was Songs from the Victorious City, a mysterious and evocative blend of Middle Eastern sounds and westernised constructions by Anne Dudley and former Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman. It’s a fantastically powerful musical poem about Cairo, and was an effective backdrop while I was writing a long sequence set in that city, even with the odd scratch and sizzle of my old vinyl version.

Worth a listen.

One, shall we say, creative opinion, for the meaning behind the designs is detailed here. The truth, of course, is being defined in The Kingdom of the Serpent.

So I’m going to tell you about here.

Writers are deeply troubled about the genesis of their stories. Not only that, they have nightmares about the reality of said stories, and their meaning and potency beyond the words on the printed page.

To illustrate, I’ll give you some examples from my own work. In World’s End I wrote about the main characters visiting Glastonbury Abbey where they uncovered secret knowledge encoded in the design of the ancient Abbey’s floor. Due to the vagaries of the way I work, I’d already semi-written this scene before I went to Glastonbury to conduct the research on the detail of the setting. While I was there, I came across a book which discussed how secret knowledge had been encoded in the Abbey’s floor, but the knowledge and much of the pattern had been destroyed in a fire almost a thousand years ago.

Now I had never come across this before. I swear I made it up. It’s just coincidence, right? It’s the kind of thing that could have happened, so no reason why it shouldn’t have happened.

Except the same thing happened again when I was writing Darkest Hour: something I was convinced I made up, came to light while I was researching Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh.

And it happened again during the writing of Jack of Ravens. Three times I have written about real things that were completely beyond my knowledge.

Most writers will tell you this happens all the time during the creation of a story. Stephen King has spoken (in On Writing, I think) about how he has come to consider his creative process more like archaeology: how the story is already fully-formed somewhere and he is simply digging it out of the sand.

Other authors have told me in very concerned tones about how what they have written has somehow started to affect the ‘real’ world. Graham Joyce speaks eloquently about near-supernatural happenings on a Greek island that echoed the story on which he was working, House of Lost Dreams. Robert Graves has written about the strange pile-up of coincidence and synchronicity during the writing of The White Goddess when books would mysteriously fall from shelves, open on the correct page with the information for which he had been frantically searching for days.

Both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have spoken about the use of the imagination during the writing process as an act of magic, and it’s difficult for many writers not to believe that. Strange, irrational things happen during the creative process. There’s a sense of tapping into something else, and once tapped that something else coming into your life to haunt you for a while.

So now I’ve got this out into the open I’d be interested to hear about the experiences of others…

2) Interviewing gangsters. Not the most psychologically stable of people, at one point they got paranoid for no visible reason and held me in the back of a locked shop at gunpoint.

3) Watching an autopsy (or Post Mortem if I want to use the Brit terminology). However much you prepare yourself, it’s still traumatic to see a once-living person reduced to component parts.

4) Interviewing a family who have undergone an exorcism and hearing tapes of same. However much of a rationalist you might be, those sounds and images will still pluck some ancient dread from the deep unconscious.

5) Travelling in excess of 240 mph in a race car. Exhilarating? Not when you haven’t got a seat belt and there’s a madman at the wheel…