Showing posts with label ice hockey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ice hockey. Show all posts

Ice Dancing - My Scottish Village Novel (with a bit of Ice Hockey thrown in for good measure!)

 

Cover image by Alan Lees

This week, my slightly quirky love story, Ice Dancing, is being serialised in the Dundee Courier. It seems appropriate for that newspaper, since not only is Ice Dancing set in and around a small rural Scottish village - and Dundee has a rural hinterland - but a theme of Ice Hockey, players and fans, runs through the novel and Dundee is a good hockey town. 

All the same, you don't have to know anything about the sport to enjoy it, because the novel's narrator, farmer's wife, Helen, knows nothing at all about it either, till she meets Joe, a visiting Canadian Ice Hockey player. Then she finds out all about it.

The book was a labour of love for me. I never expected it to be particularly successful. I just wanted to write it (probably the best of all reasons for writing anything) but to my surprise, I find that people who find it and read it seem to love it too. I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the hockey. It has more to do with what turned out to be a fairly sharp-eyed but loving observation of the realities of village life. After all, and with occasional spells elsewhere, I've lived in a rural Scottish village for some 40 years. And, as one lovely reviewer pointed out, it's about the realities of love and desire at first sight as well. 

The reason for the title, which gives me no end of trouble when people think it's a how-to manual, will become very clear if you read the novel! 

You can download it as an eBook here and as a paperback here. If you're reading this in the USA you should be able to find it on Amazon there as well.






Like a Puck to the Head: Ice Hockey Memories - and Ice Dancing

Village in the Snow,
by Alan Lees
I've just edited, polished and republished a new edition of a novel called Ice Dancing for Kindle - and there will be a paperback available before too long.

It's a story about Scottish village life. It's a very grown up love story with a heroine who is almost ten years older than the man she loves. (Why is that so unusual?) There's a dark side to it. But it's also a story about the beauty and skill and poetry of a sport that I've loved for a very long time.

There's a Canadian hockey song that talks about love being like a 'frozen puck to the head.' If you've never seen a hockey game, and never felt the size, weight and speed of a frozen ice hockey puck, that won't mean much to you. But once felt, never forgotten. Even when the puck occasionally flies over the protective plexi glass and connects with a spectator, it can be painful, and people are advised to keep their eye on it at all times. So not a bad way of describing the kind of love that comes out of nowhere and strikes like a bolt of lightning.

My own love affair with ice hockey began many years ago when I was a young woman teaching English to adults in Tampere, in Finland. I spent two very happy years there, and one of the first things we learned was that if you wanted to get the young engineers and other techies talking - which was our job, after all - you had only to ask them about ice hockey. We would have long conversations about the rules of the game and the state of play of the local teams. It was hard not to become involved, especially when these 'students' - who were essentially the same age as we were - invited us out to hockey games so that we could see just what they were talking about!

Cue forward some years and the UK saw a renaissance of interest in professional ice hockey, with the setting up of the so-called Superleague, involving several high calibre teams. This was a bit controversial in that these teams employed many ‘imported’, particularly Canadian, players, but it undeniably raised the standards of play for the spectators who had the privilege of watching some world class hockey on home ice. Plus the standard of coaching for young, aspiring British players, my own son included, was excellent and inspirational.

Although there are still teams throughout the UK, playing excellent, entertaining hockey, the Superleague lasted only from 1995 to 2003, after which it was disbanded and replaced with the Elite Hockey League. My own seasons spent as a ‘UK hockey mom’ inspired at least some of the background to the novel, a time I remember with a great deal of affection, not least because of the off-ice chat and laughter. Hockey was and remains a very inclusive sport. 

When I was writing Ice Dancing, though, it was another occasion I remembered. I had taken my son and his friend to a public skating session at our local ice arena, when a young man, casually dressed in jeans and a fleece, started moving gently over the ice in time to the music. Except that it was like no dancing on ice I had ever seen before. I never found out who he was, but I remember thinking that he might have been a hockey player, because most of them have the same grace as ice dancers and there was something about his movements that suggested hockey. Of course I wrote it as fiction.

'In the control box, someone had put on Too Lost In You, and lowered the lights just a little. It was strange. Other people were still skating, but he made them look clumsy. He skated gently and deftly around them and among them, not bothering them at all, making patterns on the ice in time to the music. He skated like a dream. He was showing off now. I knew fine he was showing off for me and everyone else, unable to resist the temptation of that music and those sexy words. After a while, people went to the side, just so they could watch him. The stewards stood with their arms folded, defensive and a bit jealous. Players didn’t usually do this. They normally kept themselves to themselves. But here was Joe, putting on a display for free. It wasn’t done.

And what Joe was doing, it wasn’t exactly dancing, but it was rhythmic and fluid and sometimes it was acrobatic. A man sitting behind me tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Now you know why they call him Sky Napier. Good, isn’t he?’ And I nodded but he was more than good. He was utterly and completely beautiful out there on the ice. The music was part of the magic, sensual and insistent. He seemed like nothing but movement. I could have watched him all day. A creature of ice and fire. Bright and enticing.'

Ice Dancing is entirely fictional, but there is a darker side of the sport - of all sports  - that is a part of the fabric of the novel. And on another topic, the wartime internment of Italians who had made their homes in Scotland for many years is a matter of shameful fact. Given the more recent experiences of the Windrush generation, it is one that has by no means been consigned to history.

All the same - this is mainly a book about an unexpected physical and mental attraction, the sheer, overwhelming joy of falling unwisely in love - and the sheer joy of ice hockey too! 


Picture by Skeeze on Pixabay





Ice Dancing - My Scottish Village Novel



I've been working on a very slightly revamped version of Ice Dancing , my Scottish village novel, over the past week or so and now it's available on an Amazon Kindle countdown deal for the next few days, at a conveniently low price. (Here, if you're reading this in the US.) The book itself hasn't changed, but I've changed the cover, which was lovely, but not working the way I intended. I may even change it again, but for now, I wanted something that suggested 'village' and 'winter' although the novel isn't entirely set in winter.

As I've said elsewhere, this is my favourite of all my novels. I don't mean it's the 'best' thing I've written, by any means. In fact of everything I've written over the past forty years, I could probably name two of which I'm most proud: a stage play called Wormwood, about the Chernobyl disaster, that was staged at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh some twenty years ago - and my newest (historical) novel, The Physic Garden, published by Saraband. Mostly, as a writer, you never really think anything is 'finished'. You always think it could be better. But in terms of doing what I set out to do, I think I've more or less managed it with those two pieces of work. But for plain, ordinary love, Ice Dancing, a piece of contemporary fiction, is the one. How do I love this story? Let me count the ways, as a far better writer once put it!

I love the setting. After all, I live in a small Scottish conservation village not a million miles away from the one in the novel - although any resemblance to anyone living here is purely coincidental. Dear readers, I made it up.  Besides, I suspect you could find people exactly like this in any small lowland Scots village. I love the countryside. It's a landscape I see pretty much every day, the one most of the tourists tend to ignore in their mad dash for the Highlands: the hills and woods and the green, green fields of Ayrshire, Dumfries and Galloway. 

The green, green fields of lowland Scotland

I love the community. I love the domesticity of it and never understand why in some critical circles this is perceived as a vice rather than a virtue. One of my all-time favourite novelists is Barbara Pym. While there is no sense in which I would or could compare myself to her, (she's incomparable, in my opinion!) one of the things I love most about her work is that sense of what Alexander McCall Smith calls, when writing affectionately about her, the 'motley cluster of small concerns that makes up our day-to-day lives.' He does that 'motley cluster' so well himself and it was something I wanted to write about in this novel: the little things that add up to something big, as we dance precariously on ice, trying to achieve some sort of balance in our lives but not always succeeding.

I love my narrator, Helen. She isn't me. She's a lot younger for a start. And although I've lived among farming families for some years, that isn't what I do. I don't think she's much like me. But I like her a lot. I like her 'voice', I like her uncertainty and her sense of honour, even while she's behaving inadvisably, even while she knows it. I like her gradual renewal of her youthful ambitions, something I think many women who have married young come to in early middle age. And I love her 'niceness' which I think is an underrated virtue in this cynical age - and her struggle to balance that inner goodness with her need to consider herself for a change. I know quite a lot of people like her even if they seldom do what she does in the novel.

Perhaps most of all, I love my other central character, Joe, a young Canadian athlete, an ice hockey player to be precise. My hero, if you like. This is a love story and why not? But it's a grown-up love story as I think most of my love stories are, even those that err on the side of romance. It's a novel about the physical imperative of mutual attraction. The coup de foudre of love at first sight and what comes after. It's a story about the incomer, an 'interlowper' as they are sometimes called here. A disruptive incomer at that. But Joe, thoughtful, intelligent, articulate Joe, has a terrible secret which is only revealed slowly.

  
Dancing precariously on ice
Cally Phillips, reviewing Ice Dancing, says, 'Everyone, it seems, carries a skeleton in their closet, a secret which they hold from their nearest and dearest. Joe is no exception and one unforeseen consequence of his affair with Helen is that his past is revealed in all its horror. But Czerkawska doesn’t overdo this, it comes out piecemeal and then with a tsunami, and then life goes on – but changed. Just like in reality. You take the hit and you carry on. Damaged, changed but you carry on. Because that’s what people do.'

The novel is mildly subversive. After all, it concerns a heroine who is ten years older than the hero and although if it were the other way round, nobody would bat an eyelid, some people still seem to think this is a bit odd. Plus, it's a story about heading towards middle age and wondering about the decisions that brought you here and whether they were the right ones. It's set in lowland Scotland, not London. The 'secret' when it is revealed is not at all a nice one and readers have to be aware that the tsunami described above is raw and distressing. 

All in all, I can see how this was probably a book that was never going to find a traditional publisher. It doesn't tick half enough 'breakthrough' boxes. But I always thought it was probably a book that might sooner or later find readers. So thank heavens for eBooks and indie publishing. The people who have read it seem to like it, describing it as an 'intelligent love story'. I loved writing it. Sooner or later, I'll have to write the sequel, because now, a few people have also started to ask me 'what happens next?' and I realise that I know exactly what happens next and it isn't quite what they are expecting. It won't be this year. But maybe next ...











A Kindle Countdown Special Offer and a New eBook Release as well


I have so much going on at the moment that it's hard to find the time to blog about it! 

But if you're reading this post any time between 30th January and the 5th February, you can download my novel Ice Dancing for less than the price of a cup of coffee. It will be on a Kindle countdown deal for a week. In fact you could get the book to go with your cup of coffee and read about Scottish  village life in all its engaging reality at the same time.

I'm seriously considering rebranding the way this novel is presented. I think the cover, which is very beautiful, actually gives the wrong impression of the book. This is not the artist's fault, but entirely mine. She had much better ideas but I wanted the hockey player. I think I was wrong. I often am! We feel our way into this business and sometimes we make mistakes. So later this spring, I'm going to ask her if she can redesign it for me.

Anyway. What IS it about, if not about hockey? And why the Ice Dancing? 

 It's what I would call a very grown up love story with a lowland Scottish village setting, a novel about the lightning strike of love at first sight, a story of past suffering and the possibility of healing. I think it's quite literary, but then what does that mean? It's intelligent, I hope. But not inaccessible. And - glory be - it has a slightly older heroine. She's approaching forty. And she falls in love. With a younger man. 

Which is probably why this novel just HAD to be indie published. 


It's set somewhere a bit like this.
Helen - who narrates the novel - has almost resigned herself to the downward slide into mildly discontented middle age. She's a Scottish farmer’s wife, living in a rural backwater, with her only child about to fly the nest. But when she meets and falls in love with Joe, a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a local team, she realises that nothing will ever be the same for either of them again. 

Joe is nine years younger and a hero to die for, attractive, polite and articulate. But like many of my novels, which so often deal with friendship and betrayal as well as love, this is a story with a dark side. Although Joe skates like an angel, he has his own demons to cope with, a sadder, more complicated and much more shocking past than Helen could ever imagine. 

A bit like this as well!
The title is all to do with partners. Helen has been doing Line Dancing in the village hall. You don't need a partner for Line Dancing. You don't have to touch anybody. But if you're dancing on ice, and you're unsure of yourself, a partner can certainly come in handy.

Anyway, if you'd like to give it a try, and you have a Kindle or a Kindle app, you can get it cheap, here in the UK and also in the USA, (at this link) for seven whole days. You don't have to be a hockey mom or even a hockey fan to enjoy it (although it won't harm) and it might help if you're a wee bit curious about the joys and occasional sorrows of life in contemporary rural Scotland. But really, it's a story about love, about betrayal and damage, and about healing. 

I'm keen to see this novel selling well because I badly want to write the sequel. And I probably will write the sequel sooner or later. But it would be kind of nice if a few people were asking for it!

Meanwhile - but also on the subject of betrayal and friendship as well as a lot of other things besides - my new historical novel The Physic Garden is due to be published in its eBook form on ALL platforms, on 1st February. You'll find it on Amazon, but everywhere else as well. And then, ta-dah! - it will be published in paperback on 27th March with the very beautiful cover below. This one is published in the traditional way by  SARABAND, a publisher in a million and Scottish Publisher of the Year for 2013. Check out some of their other excellent titles. I'm very proud to be published by them, glad to be in such company,  and - if all goes well - I'm hoping to be able to work with them in the future. 

Cover picture, courtesy of Glasgow Museums.

















MORE ICE HOCKEY MAGIC

Cover Image by Claire Maclean

This is an updated post of something I wrote back in October, when my new novel, Ice Dancing, was first published. It isn't really a novel about 'dancing' though. Or only in the sense that we dance through life, and sometimes we dance alone, but if you find yourself dancing on ice it might be easier to do it with a partner to support you!

The novel, currently available only in eBook form, has been selling pretty well here in the UK, but I'm about to start spreading the word to readers 'across the pond' as my sailor husband would call it. Especially - of course - to Canadians, although some of my Canadian friends have already bought the eBook and are telling me that they love it. That's a relief. The hero is Canadian, after all.

But how come I found myself writing a novel with a hockey background? Well, it's a little more than that. It's a warm contemporary love story with a charismatic hero, but it's mostly set in a small Scottish village. And as one UK reviewer pointed out, it's a novel about a coup de foudre  the lightning strike of love at first sight, the irresistible thunderbolt of intense attraction which changes everything in an instant, however unlikely, and however disastrous the results may be.

It's also a novel about a relationship between an older woman and a younger man - the kind of ten year age gap which, were it to be reversed, wouldn't so much as raise an eyebrow, but which still seems to be a cause for comment in these supposedly enlightened times. And which makes the thunderbolt even more difficult to deal with for all concerned.

But still - there's the hockey. So let me explain how I came to write a novel - my sixth published novel - with this particular background. My love affair with hockey goes back a great many years: to the time when - as a young woman - I spent a couple of years teaching English Conversation to adults in Tampere, Finland. My students mostly worked in the large paper mills of Tampere, which is a long, thin and rather beautiful town, sandwiched between two lakes which freeze solid in the winter. I taught engineers, management, secretarial staff. Sometimes I went out to the factories by bus and sometimes students travelled to the language school which was above a department store in the middle of town. There were a few other people - all ages and stages - doing evening classes for various reasons. When we weren't teaching, we clustered in the cafe downstairs, chatting, drinking coffee and eating rice porridge with milk or piirakka munavoi, the cheap and cheerful Finnish equivalent to scrambled eggs on toast.

Finns are friendly but quite shy and private people. Teaching conversation to people who are naturally quiet was challenging. The majority of my students were young men. And the only thing they really wanted to talk about, even in English, wasn't business. It was ice hockey about which, back then, I knew less than  nothing. But I sure learned a lot about hockey over the next two years, from my weekly conversations with Lasse and Jorma and Matti and Heikki with their bright blue eyes and old gold hair. (Especially Jorma!) I was young, footloose and fancy free as were many of my students, and I and my fellow teachers were often invited out to hockey games. Tappara and Ilves were the town's two teams and there was a good deal of rivalry between them. My landlady's cute ten year old son, Esa, played hockey too, and I got used to seeing him clumping about in hockey kit. I got used to tripping over it in the hallway too. I loved it all. I was smitten by the magic of this fast, enchanting and oh so physical game.

Cue forward some years. I'm married with a young son myself - and we're living in Ayrshire in Scotland. For a few blissful years, we get to watch Superleague ice hockey - The Ayr Scottish Eagles - in a brand new arena with one of the biggest and best ice pads in the UK: the Centrum. Ice hockey appeals to young and old, male and female, even in Scotland. Spectators include grannies and babies and all kinds of people in between. The captain of the Eagles offers hockey classes to the kids. Our son learns to skate and then learns to play hockey. For a few short years, I'm a UK hockey mom, helping him to haul kit about -  unbelievably heavy, smelly and expensive kit although fortunately much of it can be bought second hand even in Scotland - tugging on long laces, ferrying him to and from hockey summer schools, learning about cross-checking and high-sticking, wrist shots and slap shots.

Time passes. Our son hits sixteen, major exams loom and he's forced to make some tough choices. He wants to go to university, has ambitions to work in the video games industry, and he's in pursuit of a karate black belt too. Hockey has become just too time-consuming for him. And besides, the arena seems to be in trouble.  Regretfully, he decides that karate fits in better with his academic work, so he stops playing. All too soon, the Centrum is gone, demolished to make way for a supermarket, taking many thousands of pounds worth of public money with it. And here in the UK, the Superleague has gone too, although the Elite League has now taken its place and our 'local' team plays forty miles away at Braehead, in Glasgow, a difficult journey along our winding rural roads in misty winter. But not impossible. And this year, a few NHL players are drifting our way because 'hockey is hockey' and they'd rather play than not. And we love to watch them, we really do. We've remembered just how much we love hockey and miss it desperately when we don't see it, even though it's a minority sport in Scotland and our newspapers are only ever full of football. And when they call a television programme 'Sportscene' what they actually mean is 'Football, lots of it.'

All of which goes some way towards explaining the unusual background to my new novel, Ice Dancing. It may be a hymn to hockey - it probably is - but  just as there's a darker side to the game, there's a darker side to this novel as well. If this is a love story, it's one with a wry and painful twist because visiting Canadian hockey player Joe, who skates like an angel, has his own demons to cope with and Helen, a farmer's wife, living discontentedly in a rural Scottish backwater, finds her life disrupted in unexpected ways by this young incomer. And so, with their two quite different worlds in unlikely collision, Joe and Helen find themselves balancing precariously on ice, dancing between past disappointments and future possibilities, between hope and despair, together and apart.

My literary agent, on first reading Ice Dancing, thought it had echoes of The Bridges of Madison County and I can see what she meant. But this is also a novel about the quiet - and sometimes funny - joys and equally quiet frustrations of Scottish village life. It's a novel about coming to terms with your past, but it's also a story full of hope for the future. I've already been asked if I'm going to write a sequel. I don't usually do sequels, but with this one, I just might. Partly it's because I fell in love with the characters, Helen quite as much as Joe, and want to spend a bit more time in their company. Mostly though, it's because a good friend told me that she thought she knew what might happen next. But she was wrong. And I realize that I know exactly what happens next. So I might have to write it.

Of course that's a story for another day and quite possibly - given that novels are big undertakings - a story for another year.

Ice Dancing is available to download from Amazon's Kindle store
here in the UK and
here in the USA and now
here in Canada

.