Charlie and Manda Scott (Any Human Power) discuss her book in terms of its Shamanist contexts, her informed ideas for how we can change and thus improve the UK political system, and playing Dungeons And Dragons with Terry Pratchett and Fay Weldon. We also discuss Mass Multiplayer Online gaming in the context of both Manda’s book and, briefly, ourselves – this is an episode wherein two gamers meet.

General references:
Historical Writer’s Association
Accidental Gods Podcast
Thrutopian Writer’s Association
Ursula K Le Guin’s original quotation, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art” is from her speech in acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, 19th November 2014
Chauvet Cave artwork
The writer Charlie couldn’t remember is Max Porter, his book is Grief Is The Thing With Feathers
World Of Warcraft
Guild Wars 2
Doom
The Accidental Gods membership program

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Isabel Harman: Why We Get The Wrong Politicians
Manda Scott: Any Human Power
Manda Scott: Boudica
Max Porter: Grief Is The Thing With Feathers

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 11th March 2024; published 22nd July 2024

Where to find Manda online: Website || Twitter || Facebook

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

01:50 What was the very initial thought or kernel of this book?
08:52 What Manda would like to see happen in order to start accomplishing the environmental and political goals put forth in Any Human Power
14:13 Lan – why is she dead?
18:00 About the ‘spirit guides’ in the book, discussing crows
22:02 Lan not stopping the story thread in which Kaitlyn dies
25:42 Manda delves into all the political change in the book and her thoughts on our real UK world in this context
37:10 How far we’re meant to like/connect with the characters and how flaws are important
41:16 At the end we have the sense of cycles; do we see a chance for things to change for Lan later on?
43:43 Manda talks about one of her influences, Taiwan’s government system
46:22 Talking Manda’s use of World Of Warcraft (WoW) in the book, which devolves into a short gaming conversation
50:21 Manda played D&D with Terry Pratchett and Fay Weldon – details
53:07 About Manda’s podcast, Accidental Gods
56:30 What Manda’s writing now, including book 2

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 102. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Manda Scott who has frankly done so many amazing things I’m going to state them. Manda has been, or still is in some cases, a vet, a director of a video games company, the co-founder and inaugural chair of the Historical Writers Association, a podcast host, a teacher in Shamanic dreaming and Thrutopian Writers Association creator, and she has played D&D with Terry Pratchett and Fay Weldon – yes I will be asking her about that at the end of the show, I’m gonna have to! One thing I’ve left out – Manda’s also an author, surprise surprise. We’ll be talking today about her latest novel which sees her divert from historical fiction to fantasy thriller. Any Human Power is narrated by Lan. She has just died and finds herself drawn to the light, but there are things she feels she needs to do and a spirit guide – I’m keeping the terminology simple here for you guys – helps her see how she can pause in her path to whatever comes after death. Just before she died, Lan made a promise to her grandson Finn, to be there, and she intends to keep that promise. And the years that follow will see some monumental changes for the family that Lan will have to aid them with. Hello Manda!

Manda: Hello, Charlie. That was a very good intro, thank you very much.

Charlie: There is so much in your book; hope we’re going to be able to get to it, but yeah, I want to start with what was the very initial kernel or thought for this book, if that makes sense?

Manda: It does. I will try and keep this really short. I teach shamanic work, as you said, contemporary shamanic practise. I was teaching online because it was just after lockdown; it was still in lockdown, and I had people around the world who did not want to come and spend two weeks in quarantine just so they could come and do a ceremony with me. So we ended up teaching online. And this particular course is not one I wanted to teach online; it’s quite high tension and there’s a big journey; where I would normally think that I need to have all of my focus on the room. But anyway, sometimes visions arise, and this time visions arose. And sometimes within shamanic work, in fact, almost all the time within shamanic work, what comes is metaphor and a felt sense and an inkling and a nudge, and it can take a long time to parse it out and work out where you’re going. And then once in a blue moon, it’s really clear. And this was 100% plain text clear that I had to take – I’ve got a 30,000 year old fossilised horse’s tooth that holds one gate of my shamanic altar – I had to find some holistically derived, ethically, morally, shamanically, whatever, horse skin, go up the hill above my house to where there’s an old hawthorn hedge has been laid – and the hawthorns, they’re hundreds of years old, so the boughs are really eight, nine inches by now – and bind the tooth onto a particular place where I could then sit with my back to it, looking south-west down the valley in a particular frame of mind. And I had to do that at dusk every night for at least an hour, basically, until further notice. And so I did. And the ceremony was the 21st June, it was the solstice, took me a while to find a horse skin, so it was late July, early August by the time I was actually sitting there. And so it was lovely, the weather was gorgeous, I had never done this, and it was beautiful. So I’m sitting up there, me and the dog in the right frame of mind, watching the crows go to bed, which is what happens early in the book. And the premise of the book, the premise of making a promise, a grandmother to her grandson and of her having to fulfil that promise immediately after death, and that in doing so, she would learn to step into the void, which is a shamanic space, and split the timelines, which is a concept that I work with, and see all the ones where he dies, and infer, or have inferred for her, exactly as you said, that there will be one where he doesn’t, or she wouldn’t see that. And then her having to work out how to gain agency as a dead person to change behaviour. And then later, this is a template for how she goes into the void again and splits the timelines for all of humanity, and sees all the many, many ways we could crash and burn, and infers that there will be at least one where we swerve away from the cliff’s edge in time [chuckles] and get to this concept of a future that we’d be proud to leave to generations that come after us. And then the instruction was, okay, now write the book. Literally, it was a week. And then I was asking, ‘so, do I need to go and sit up the hill again?’ And it’s, ‘well, you can if you want, but no, you need to write this book. Just get on with that’. So that was it, really. And the rest evolved from the bones of that.

Charlie: Okay, so I feel I want to ask you then, do you get these… [makes tongue-tied sound] How do I want to say this?…

Manda: Does this happen often? No [chuckles].

Charlie: Essentially, yes. That’s what I want to ask, yeah [laughs].

Manda: Yes. So it happened at the start of the Boudica series. It was a bit different, but it was a shamanic event that kicked off the Boudica series, because I was happily writing crime novels at that point and thought that was my trajectory, and my publishers thought that was my trajectory, and it turned out not to be. So when I am heading in a particular direction and I need to kick onto a new one, then, yes, it happens. I would like to think that I’ve had enough practise that I could hear instincts to do other things sooner, but in this particular instance, I don’t think there is any other way that that would have arisen. So I’m really happy; I’m not complaining about the nature of the way that it happened.

Charlie: Do you think then… I mean, obviously we’re looking into the future that we don’t know necessarily, but do you think this might be one of the books that you come to think is the most important to you?

Manda: Well, it certainly is at the moment.

Charlie: Yeah [laughs].

Manda: When I wrote the Boudica books, I really thought I might go under bus. Even just after the first one, I kept saying to my editor, who really got it, the world needed this book. I needed to write this book for my own evolution, I started teaching after it. And teaching something really means you have to actually understand what you’re doing. And I thought then that if we could understand who we’d been, we in the islands of Britain, before the colonisation and the impact of trauma culture on our initiation culture of the indigenous peoples, if we could understand who we’d been, we could move back to being that again. I had this theory that we’re in the dying days of the Roman empire and we just need to put it aside, remember who we could be, and that would all be fine. I really believe that that could happen, and would happen, partly because in the shamanic event that moved into the Boudica books, I was told it would change the world. And the thing about these things is you have to listen to the language quite carefully, because it changed my world and it has, to an extent, changed the world of the people that it touches. But what was really clear by now was that it’s just not enough, and that I needed to do the thinking to understand what could be possible. But I’m really clear – the book is named Any Human Power because of the quote from Ursula Le Guin, which if we paraphrase it is basically, ‘we live in capitalism, its power seems unassailable, but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can by human agency be overturned. And often the impetus to that overturning comes from the art of writing’. That’s not exactly what she said, but that’s the kind of clean version. And I think we are heading for multiple cliff edges, and yet I am 100% certain there is still time to turn the wheel or… the ‘or’ doesn’t matter – I think there is still time to turn the wheel, but if we don’t understand what we could move towards, then we will carry on by default doing what we’re doing, because we don’t have any ideas of anything else. And the whole of our information ecosystem is designed to maintain business as usual. And so some of us need to start doing something different! And it’s hard work, I have to say; I’ve done historical novels for years, and I thought that was fairly taxing, but this is a whole new level, because no problem is solved from the mindset that created it, therefore, I had to understand what possible mindset we might move to, but then also the route to get there, because there’s no point in just writing a future that looks fluffy and rosy and baskets of kittens and dancing unicorns, because you don’t know how to get there. We’ve got to know how to get from where we are to where we could be if we’re going to fashion a future that seven generations down the line, they look back at us and think we did okay.

Charlie: Absolutely; I’ve actually got a question that I had down the list, but I’m going to bring it up now, I think. Going on from what you said, obviously the book covers a lot of changes in terms of plans. As you said, we need a plan, that’ll take a while to really happen. What would you like to see in our – I suppose if I say, if we encompass the lives of people who are currently living – what would you like to happen in our lifetimes towards this goal?

Manda: Well, you could just implement the book, that would be just fine [Charlie laughs]. Okay, so we need total structural transformation. We need systemic transformation. In order to get to that, we need a change in our value system. So I could describe for you the structural changes if you want, but underlying it, if we are still cut off from the rest of the web of life, such that we exist in a world where humanity not only has domination over everything else that is alive in the world, but rightfully so and it doesn’t matter what we do. We can see, want, to take as much as we want, pour out as much pollution as we want, and it doesn’t matter as long as we’re making a profit. If we can’t change that value system, then we’re sunk. So if we’re going from what I currently understand, the kind of upstream connections, is that we need to undertake the evolution of our consciousness, that is, I think, the next evolutionary step. And that’s probably going to sound a bit flaky to everyone who’s listening [chuckles], and it’s not my idea, conscious evolution is our corner of the Internet where there are a lot of people thinking quite hard. And basically the premise is we are currently in a space where we have Palaeolithic emotions, mediaeval institutions and godlike technology, which is one of the many cliffs that we’re heading towards. And this is not a winning combination. And yet, when we’re at our best, we step beyond the Palaeolithic emotions and the mediaeval institutions and find ways of interconnecting, inter-becoming inter-being, that are transcendent. And most people, I believe, have shared values of we want to feel safe, we want to wake up in the morning with the confidence that the world is an okay place. I might be challenged, I might be taken to the edges of myself, I might have to make new connections, I might have to do things I don’t fully understand, but at heart, we have agency, we have being and we have belonging, we have connection, we have sufficiency. Our current paradigm is – certainly in the West – is that we have scarcity, separation and powerlessness. So we need to move to the agency, sufficiency, and the being and belonging. If we can do those, and we can agree that what we want is a future where we and all life flourishes, then we turn all of human creativity to making that happen, and we switch it off, the death cult of predatory capitalism that is just about extract, consume, destroy. That’s the edited highlight. Does that make sense?

Charlie: Yeah, no, I think that was a fantastic answer; you’ve taken lots and lots of the topics and ideas, but you’ve simplified it in a way that’s really easy to understand. And I think you’ve made a very good case, I mean, that is what we’ve got to think. We think of so many different things that we have to change, but if we think of the core things, well, everything you’ve said, we’ll surely get there, it will be easier than this thing over here, this thing over here, you know?

Manda: Yeah, yeah. The whack-a-mole. Yeah, we can’t do that. We’re in a complex system. We’re in a hyper-complex system. And the thing about complex systems is everything interacts and trying to fix one thing. This is why I get quite aerated about the people who seem to think it’s only about the carbon. And in fixing the carbon, they are going to create so many other issues! You’ve got to be systemic in your thinking. I exist in the shamanic world. And so for me, the web of life is the hyper-complex consciousness that has all the answers. It’s not my job to have the answers; it’s my job to connect to the web of life and ask, ‘what do you want me to do?’ Like I did sitting on the hill, that’s exactly what I was doing. And the answer was, ‘write this book’. It’s not my job to go, ‘why?’ It’s my job to work out how and then do it. And now it’s done, then my job is to ask again, ‘okay, what now?’ And if it’s something completely different and I’m thinking I need to write the sequel, then I do the completely different. At the moment, I’m going to write the sequel until I’m told to do something else [both chuckle], but I have to keep asking that question and not make the assumptions.

Charlie: We need to trust, don’t we? And listen. And we are not very good at doing that.

Manda: Well, so we haven’t had the practise, you know [Charlie agrees], we’re not taught our cultures – healthy human cultures, the indigenous cultures are supported in that trust, and the trust is then strengthened. And, you know, we discover that trust comes in very, very slowly and runs away very, very fast. And we’re taught to not trust even ourselves, never mind each other. And earning, doing the work to learn how to trust ourselves, the people that we connect with, and the web of life, isn’t the same as just scrolling on Facebook. It just takes longer. So in an attention economy where our attention is being harvested as a product, it’s hard. But I think just even stepping back and understanding, first of all, that’s happening, and second, that you don’t have to be part of it, is an integral part. And if people listening to this are people who actually sit down and read books, which is amazing, so at least we’re a step on the way to that.

Charlie: Yeah, that’s very true. I’m going to bring us back to Lan, I think – all the dreams and that sort of part of the book.

Manda: Sure – the actual book, rather than the theories behind it [Charlie laughs].

Charlie: No, it’s been great talking about this because, I mean, it is part of the book as well [Manda: yeah]. It’s things that you believe in. It’s things that you’re telling us in the book. And, no, it is important. I think this will touch on also what you’ve been saying so far, but effectively, why did you want to have a narrator that is dead? What was important about that in the context of, I suppose if we say, changing the world?

Manda: If I’m absolutely honest, I don’t know – it was part of the original vision, and I was not going to tamper with that. If I’m given a premise, I work with the premise, I don’t sit and go, ‘are you sure about that?’ Because all we’ve just said on hyper-complex, all that is the web of life knows what it’s doing, and it’s not my job to ask ‘why’; it’s my job to get on and do it. So that. But if I look back – you know, hindsight’s a really easy thing – part of the trauma of our culture, I think, is that we’re all afraid of dying. And I think that perhaps, and, I don’t know – I’m the least good person to know whether this is true – but perhaps experiencing the world from the perspective of someone who has died takes some of the sting from death. It also gave Lan agency and perspective that would not otherwise have been available, while also constraining her agency and her perspective. You described it as a fantasy, for me, this is not a fantasy novel – although I completely get that that may be the way that it’s seen in the world – this is how the world is. And having someone in our culture who has the capacity to step into the void – and genuinely please don’t try and do this, people, it’s an extremely… I hope the book made it really clear this is not something that amateurs want to be doing – there are not many people in our culture who could do it. There are even fewer who would do it. And then having the capacity to come back and implement what you’ve seen there is really hard. So I think, I suspect, and I’m guessing here, because this isn’t actually something I’ve asked myself [laughs], that it allowed me creative freedom that would otherwise have been denied. But it also, I think we need a new mythology in the world. We’re very confused in our mythologies; we don’t have the really long term traditions. One of the things I learned – and I have to say, doing the research, this book was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life – the cave paintings in southern France, the Palaeolithic cave paintings that we all know, they’re really iconic, were painted over a period of 25,000 years. We had cultural stability with presumably relatively shared belief systems and practises for 25,000 years. And our culture doesn’t have that. Even if we go back to the dawn of agriculture, that’s only 10,000 years, and we’ve destroyed so much. And so how do we, as 21st century humans, evolve a mythology that works for now, that is relevant now, that isn’t trying to pretend that we’re ancient Britons, because we’re not, or ancient anything else, because we’re not. We are who we are now. And what happens with the land in the between enables the beginnings of an evolution of a new mythology, I hope and believe and think.

Charlie: I’m glad I asked that question because there were things I was thinking of, I mean, your narrative just swept me away straight away, and I loved the… sounds obvious, I suppose, doesn’t it? but you’ve got the character development from the word ‘go’. You’ve got such an emotional sense of what Lan is going through and the grieving of her, I suppose I could say, ironically, because usually, obviously, it’s people grieving, but you’ve got the people that are left behind, they’re grieving as well. But I just had such a sense of… I don’t even know what to call it, yeah, just emotion, I think, with particularly that first section. So we’ve gone with the shamanic ideas and concepts, but can I ask also, I’ve called them spirit guides for the ease of it, I suppose, but can you talk more about this in the actual concept, in the actual terms of it, and why it’s included to the extent that you can tell us that, etcetera?

Manda: You mean on the basis that a lot of the answers to these questions is ‘I don’t really know’? [Laughs.]

Charlie: Yes. Yeah [chuckles].

Manda: Okay, so Lan’s main guide is the crow, and I’m struggling to know exactly why that is, other than the fact that I have a crow’s wing tattooed on my arm and I work a lot with crows. But I work a lot with other things, it could easily have been anything else. The crow is what turned out. The crow is what was there in that very first vision; I had a really clear vision of this woman lying in a hospital bed, ash tree outside the window, crow in the ash tree, young man, on the cusp of manhood at her bedside. That was really clear. So I think that’s why the crow was a crow and not one of the other things that it could obviously have been. And then my writing practise is that I do a lot of dream journeying that I’m sure other writers do the same. Just basically sit with the characters and go, ‘okay, guys, what do we need to do?’ And go with that. So the honest answer is, I don’t know. And then Hail turned up and I really wasn’t expecting that; Hail had been a character in the Boudica books, and there’s Hail. I was like, ‘Oh, hello. What are you doing here? I suppose there’s no reason you can’t be here. Thank you. That’s grand. I know you, you’re lovely.’ And then various others; later on there’s a salmon that has a particular role to play. And again, I had a need to build a heart connection and I sat down and went, ‘so who’s there?’ And I looked in the water and thought, ‘Oh, right. Okay, well, that kind of makes sense’, and go with that. So I’m really sorry, I should have absolute coherent answers, and I’ll probably think them up tonight as soon as we’re done. But ‘I don’t know’ is the honest answer. They are what came.

Charlie: That is absolutely fine. That is absolutely fine. I like that you’ve almost got a watermark, in Hail then, from one book to the other. Lovely.

Manda: Yes, yeah, totally. Yes.

Charlie: You say about the crows and your tattoo; I wondered if it was the whole thing with crows being associated with death. And I actually thought first, I think I was thinking back to, oh, gosh, what’s his name?

Manda: Odin.

Charlie: No, it’s a writer [Manda: oh okay] I’m going to forget that because I won’t be able to remember his name right now. Max something, who wrote about Ted Hughes and crows and the death thing there. So I was wondering about that as I read the book.

Manda: I think it’s very likely, actually, because crows and also Bridie, who’s a kind of off screen character in the book, and Odin, and a lot of mythologies. And back to Boudican times, one of the interesting things I found there, we had a lot of decoration of the roundhouses that you can find. Someone did a PhD on the midden remains of the Acani, which is the kind of thing you get to do in modern world! Lots of black carrion birds because they are mediating between life and death. Lots of white birds that fly there and then go underwater and appear to breathe underwater and they’re mediating from the lands of the air to the water, which is the realm of the gods, often. Not a single magpie, feather pelt, anything at any point, because it’s a carrion bird that is both black and white, which I just find completely fascinating. It’s either so taboo or so sacred that we don’t use it for decoration anywhere. So black carrion birds have always been associated with the deities of death, certainly in the lands of western Europe, about which I know most. So I think it’s very likely that now from hence forth, Charlie, I shall say, yes, of course, the crow is associated with death [Charlie chuckles]. I hadn’t thought of that, to be honest. But, yes, it makes a lot of sense.

Charlie: I think also, yeah, you’ve got the story that came to you and the characters that came to you, and you’ll also, I suppose, have things maybe in your subconscious and things as well.

Manda: Yeah, absolutely [Charlie: yeah]. Like every writer does, you know, there’s the metaphor is the iceberg, and the tiny little bit is above the surface and all the rest is below, and that’s how we work.

Charlie: So, in terms of your story, again, we’re going to work with, I’ll ask you, and if you can answer that, that’s great – Lan’s effective rewinding of the story, you said about the threads and the web of life, her choosing another variation of what could have happened. There is what was, to me, a very obvious exclusion – I wonder, like a literarily obvious exclusion – of the idea that she could stop her daughter and grandchild being killed. And that’s one of the threads that you do not change. Is this something that you can talk about?

Manda: She doesn’t know it’s happening. Yeah, no, totally. So, stepping into the void is not something that one does lightly, and it’s absolutely dependent upon intent. So in the first instance, her intention is to see, can she find a way that Finn does not kill himself after her death, because he’s been living with her. Her partner’s already dead; he’s just lost the two people he lived with. And it’s not choosing another future, it’s creating one that was not yet there. When she next goes into the void, she meets her granddaughter, Kaitlyn, who very carefully shows her stuff. And I think when I realised that’s what was happening, I guessed there probably might have been an option where Kaitlyn showed her what was happening but Lan is as much a tool of the gods as anybody else, and her getting in the way there was not what was needed of her. And also I think the thing that I keep going back to is a lot of our understanding of Lan and her journey is that death is not an ending. She’s not happy with what happens, and nobody is happy with what happens, clearly. But we all know, I hope, by then, that it’s not as final as people in our culture seem to believe it to be. So she’s not given that option. And I don’t know – I mean, I can assume that if she had, the whole of the rest of the book would have had s different trajectory. But then I could have written a different trajectory; that’s a given; you write the book that needs to be written. So she just wasn’t given the agency, I didn’t take the agency to make that happen.

Charlie: I think you’ve raised a good point there about the whole life doesn’t end after death, or at least we hope not. And how there’s more to do. I suppose I was thinking that Kaitlyn had come to Lan and maybe she – Kaitlyn – could have helped in her own way; we don’t know necessarily if she would come back at some point in the future or anything. So you’ve raised an interesting point there.

Manda: Future Kaitlyn knows exactly what was going to happen. Lan is really angry after Kaitlyn’s death that, ‘you knew and you didn’t tell me’. And we don’t go down that rabbit hole a long way because there’s other things happening that had more emotional importance. But we might well revisit it in the future because I think that’s still quite a sore point, is, first of all, you didn’t trust me with the knowledge, and actually, probably because she would have stopped. I mean, she says later to Leah, ‘I would have done whatever it took to stop that’. And one of the first things in the book is a quote from one of my early shamanic teachers saying, ‘just because you die doesn’t mean you get to be wise’. And one arc of this book is Lan’s journey into wisdom, which is not complete because she’ll be there in the second book. So it can take a long time after we die before we become wise, I think.

Charlie: Okay, all right, you saying about a second book. Yeah; I can see why you’ve got one.

Manda: Well, I might have one. I’ve got a title at the moment, but I’ve got a few other things I need to do before it starts, but yes.

Charlie: All right, yeah. I think what I was thinking at the time was we had Kaitlyn showing Lan what she did, but we also didn’t necessarily know if things would happen in the future with Kaitlyn, I suppose, is what I mean.

Manda: It was very deliberately obscure.

Charlie: Okay. All right. So, okay, we’ll move on to the social changes in the book. So I wanted to kind of hone in – you’ve got it set in 2023, which is obviously last year, and the mentions of current events. You’ve also mentioned a few real people. I did look up a few people because I wasn’t sure how many real people there were in the book! I suppose, within the limits of what you’ve said to us, are you able to talk about how you’ve written… the whys and the hows of why you’ve written about 2023, exactly, how you have structured the book in this way, if that makes sense?

Manda: I think so. I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking, but I’ll give it a go, and you can tell me if it’s what you wanted. So, 2023; when I started writing in 2021, 2023 was the far future. And I fully expected the book to be published before the action actually started. Publishing cycles being what they are, this hasn’t happened. But we did have an option of shifting the time frame; I could have just changed all the dates that’s copy editing issue! But it seemed to me that the world was changing so fast that there were going to be things… because basically, I stopped writing actual new text at the solstice of 2022, and then the rest has been edits. And I could have kept updating; I did, in terms of ideas, keep updating until probably about six months ago, then it became apparent that I could keep tweaking the text, or we could get the book published. You can’t have both. So the ideas, this is what really took the head space and the time – and if I was not hosting the Accidental Gods podcast, I would have had no idea – but I’d had three years when I started, and now I’ve had four and a half of talking to the people who are at the leading edge of change, who are thinking about this all the time. And, you know from doing a podcast, it changes how you think [Charlie agrees]. So what I had to do was take a lot of ideas of how could we have the total systemic change – given that, I believe the upstream change of value change is more of a spiritual change and an emotional change and a human developmental change, but the actual structural changes of how do we shift our whole death cult to something that actually is working in service of life rather than vice versa took a lot of thinking and a lot of working out. So the timeline stops when it stops because it seemed prudent. I would have loved it to be a future book. I would love to come out May 2024 and actually has to be looking forwards rather than looking back. But even while I was writing it, there was a time when I thought Boris Johnson was going to call a general election to avoid being sacked as leader of the Tory party, and I was just sitting there going, ‘no, please don’t do this. Please. Much as I would love there to be a general election, please don’t do this, because I’ve written that happening and I don’t want it to look like I stole the idea and I didn’t! I wrote that way back in, you know, December ’21, and you’re not allowed to do it in real life. Please!’ And so many of the things, I’ve had a really lovely voicemail from a young friend of mine who’s read the book, and she said, ‘I keep wondering whether I’ve read it or it’s happened, and there seems to be a lot of blurring happening’. And that’s, you know, stuff is not hard to predict, is it? You just have to have your ears open and your eyes open, and the world is going in particular directions, but I still believe there’s time to turn. So the question is, how do we turn away from this cliff edge that we are barrelling towards? And there’s social and political change that I think is absolutely obvious: we do not live in a democracy, we live in a kleptocracy, and we are lied to consistently about what’s happening. So what would it take to change that? And we have the three suggestions that arise out of the immediate aftermath of Kaitlyn’s death, and I think any of those we could implement tomorrow. Do you want me to say what they are?

Charlie: Go for it. Yeah.

Manda: So – let me see if I can get them in order – random drink and drugs testing in both houses of parliament with three strikes and you’re out. First strike, you get a couple of days out and some counselling. Second time, it’s a week out – and first one, you’re offered counselling, second, the counselling is mandatory – by the third time you’re out and you don’t get a huge payoff for the rest of your life, you just get sacked and there’s a by-election and you’re not allowed to stand in it because this is a job and you don’t get to go in there drunk and drugged – and I’m sorry because you’re driving the country. I think that’s completely obvious, and I think we should be doing it now. Second one is putting all government expenditure, all government spending on the blockchain, so that it is completely open and transparent. And if any company wants to get government money, it has to have all of its accounts on the blockchain, too. Transparency; I think wherever you are on the political spectrum, you can argue about how the government is corrupt, but nobody is arguing about the fact that it is corrupt. No one that I know, anyway! They spend money and they give it to their friends in the billions, and then they tell us they’ve got nothing left. I did a Masters in economics. It was another of those slightly strange, shamanic events of me chugging along, thinking I’m doing what I’m doing, and then ‘I have to go to Dublin and do a Masters in economics. Are you sure about this? Okay. You’re sure. Right’. And Regenerative Economics, it was the only Master’s degree on the entire planet, then, that took as its baseline that the current system is broken and how do we fix it. And so I spent a year in the company of some very smart people trying to work that out. And again, it’s not hard, but it does require that you view the functionality of money slightly differently. You look at how it actually works instead of how we’re told it works, and you look at the end points slightly differently. But we need political change before we can have economic change. So the third of the suggestions was a change in voting patterns, and this is the one that is designed. It’s a bait and switch. So originally I said, okay, so ten to 16-year-olds, 80 to 85-year-olds, if you want to vote, you have to talk on Zoom for at least three separate hours to someone at the other end of the age spectrum with facilitators, so there’s no abuse happening in the room, and so we help you listen to each other. And if at the end of that time, you all agree that you’ve been listened to – you don’t have to agree on the outcome, but you have to agree that you’ve been heard – then everybody gets to vote. Both sides get to vote. If one of you says they haven’t been listened to, neither of you get to vote. That’s between 10 and 16, 18-85. Over 85, I’m sorry, you’ve had it. You’re too old; because you don’t have enough stake in where we’re going. And then I dropped the voting age to 16. Almost everywhere around the world, voting is at 16. In Wales and in Scotland you can vote at 16 for the national parliament. Voting in the UK is 18. And every single poll I’ve ever seen says that if you lowered the voting age, you would change the outcome very significantly. So that – those three together are enough to bring the government down, actually, in the book. The people who are characters in the book are all fictional. The people whose ideas they pick up and use are not. And I am in the process of crafting a resources page for the website so people can go and look them up. But flatpack democracy exists. We could easily stand independence in every constituents under the flatpack democracy concept and then see where we get to. We need to change the voting system, we need to move to something that’s a lot more flexible. And Proportional Representation is quite old and quite clunky, and I know someone who’s developed quadratic voting on the blockchain as an app. There’s so many different ways we could actually get people together. We need distributed democracy, where we have citizens assemblies at local level, feeding up towards a national assembly that is composed of people. Ten of us around here pick a spokesperson who goes up to the next level, and if they don’t say what we want, we have the automatic right of recall. And then that next level picks someone who goes on up to a level where they pick someone who goes on up until you’ve got an assembly at the top that is not there to make the decisions, it’s there to work out who’s best to ask how to implement the decisions that are made at a local level. None of this is rocket science, and it is being done in different ways around the world. It just hasn’t been brought together at a national level yet. And then we’re going to fork democracy, which has happened in Taiwan, which is where the government is obviously sclerotic and corrupt and not doing what we need, and we could create a parallel polios that has been voted in on slightly different demographic lines, but with no voter suppression. And very quickly, if you have those two running in parallel, asking themselves the same questions, and you, everyone, can see this is what the corrupt version is doing, that basically is full of people whose sole qualification for being elected is that they were able to gain the system of their own party. We have people making decisions in our country and we do not expect them to have any qualifications for doing so. And then you have people who are there because they’ve demonstrated actual agency and intelligence and sufficiency and power, and wisdom move together. And you see what happens when they use a different style of decision making, because, again, having two sides of people who are emotionally unintelligent, sitting slightly more than two sword lengths apart, screaming infantile schoolboy insults at each other, is not a useful way to manage decision making in the 21st century. So we just need to see how we could do it better. I’ve talked a long time. Is that what you asked?

Charlie: No, that’s fine. The thing that struck me in the book was I found it very interesting that obviously, at the moment, we are saying, we need Labour, the other side in this time, and you’re saying, no, we don’t need any of it [Manda: it’s all corrupt]. We need something completely different. Yeah.

Manda: Yeah, I mean, I speak as someone who has lost a lot of pairs of shoes pounding the streets for Labour, and the system is not going to create a system that could actually meet the needs of the moment. It just isn’t going to happen. And we don’t have time to work through the very slow process by which evolution of the current system might work. But whatever we do, it has to be peaceful; that’s absolute core of the book. Kirsten, who is Kaitlyn’s older sister, is our moral arbiter, and she’s the one who has the voice, who explains why what we’re doing has got to be peaceful. We have to work within the current system to evolve the current system. We’re not trying to replace it with something else that’s equally hierarchical. We don’t have the biophysical means, we are hitting biophysical limits. We don’t have the space and time to play with fancy ideas that in a hundred years from now, we might have got a democracy that actually works. We need it tomorrow.

Charlie: Yeah, that was a very good point you made in the book, that you can’t just have effectively, what we see on TV and stuff, an effective slagging match of each other. Please get on together and just do it.

Manda: Yeah, use some emotional intelligence, and I think there are emotionally intelligent people in parliament. I don’t think there are very many, but I think there are one or two. But the whole system is designed to crush them. There’s an amazing book called Why We Get The Wrong Politicians. I can’t remember who it was by – a former political editor of The Spectator. I read it and it’s like, oh, my God, I had no idea. But if you are a human being at the start of that process, it’s really, really hard to hold on to your humanity through it. And then you get to parliament, where any shred of humanity is going to be bullied out of you very fast; and it’s not the fault of the people there – it’s the system is broken and we need to create a new one. But the system is designed to maintain the system, and will continue to do so unless we can find creative and communitarian ways to make a new system that works.

Charlie: Well, I know you’ve got your own podcast, and I’ll ask you about that in a bit, but I think you need to go on other podcasts and talk to people about your ideas.

Manda: Anyone out there listening? I’m happy to do that [both laugh].

Charlie: Okay. I thought it was interesting, the characters. I loved Lan and I liked Connor. I liked Kate; I was wondering if we were going to hear from Kate more, and it was very interesting that we didn’t. But I wasn’t sure, effectively, how far we were meant to, support the other characters. I think I was always there wondering if they were going to… not change their beliefs, but with all the things that they were changing within themselves, I suppose I wanted to ask how we’re meant to feel overall about this group of characters. Is there anyone we’re supposed to particularly root for, in your mind and…?

Manda: Yeah, I don’t know that I write with a ‘supposed to root for’ concept in my head. I started with Finn as my anchor. Lan, obviously. Lan, but there needs to be more than one. Over the course of the book that morphed towards Kaitlyn, and then it morphed towards Niall and Leah, and I was not expecting that at all. And Connor, obviously, Connor’s just; Connor just arrived out of nowhere. I mean, a lot of all this arrived out of nowhere; I only had Lan and Finn as my starting point, and then everything else evolves. So the honest answer is, I don’t know. And I think different age groups, different sexualities, different political views are going to end up identifying with different people. That’s the nature of the book. Of any book, really.

Charlie: No, you say that, I think that’s what I found when I was like, ‘I’m not sure about this character’. I thought, ‘but if I see them in their context,’ and all that kind of thing, and then the other characters. But no, I think for me, when I was reading something, I thought, ‘I’m not sure about this person,’ and then they have someone else coming and saying, oh, we shouldn’t do this. I was like, ‘okay’, and then you have that happen a few times. I suppose what I want to say is, you’re showing that everyone’s flawed [Manda: yeah], but everyone contributes [Manda: yes]. You’ve got you’ve got loads of people that are all coming together and they’re going to, presumably, I suppose, in my head, I was thinking they’re going to make, effectively, a commune or a parliament of communes sort of thing, and everyone’s welcome – I suppose what I’m saying is it was an interesting exploration of real people.

Manda: Okay, thank you.

Charlie: Through fictional people. You can tell I thought about this a lot [laughs].

Manda: Yes, well, but also, it’s… so what you’re getting to is the heart, I think. And again, this is, you know, the beautiful clarity of 2020 hindsight – I was writing a Thrutopian novel. I didn’t have the concept of the word Thrutopia at the time when I started. But the whole point, now that I’ve thought about it a lot, of Thrutopian work, fiction, non-fiction, film, poetry, song, novels, is that we start where we are and we show the roadmap, our roadmap, step by step forward to a future that we would all be proud to leave behind. And if we don’t show those steps, nobody will know how to get there. And if you only show perfect people taking huge, bounding leaps to a future that only they can see, nobody is going to know how to get there either. You have to see the ‘yes buts’ and the ‘no, I don’t agree with that, and you cant expletive deleted do that. Oh, can you? How?’ ‘Because that’s how we’re all going to be.’ ‘No, that wont work. You know, I am so used to business as usual, I cannot see beyond it. Ive been told there is no alternative, and I believe it, because I’ve never seen an alternative.’ And you got to ease your way into the alternative, and so, exactly, thank you. It worked. Yay! [Both laugh.] That’s exactly what we’re trying to do, is show the messiness. Creating total structural change is never clean and neat, because people are people. And conflict, and the resolution of conflict, is how we find the edges of ourselves. What we need to be doing, and what I hope we’re doing in the book, is finding the edges of ourselves and resolving the conflict, rather than turning it into yet another reason for binary tribalism.

Charlie: Yeah. They made sure to try and not make the mistakes, aren’t they? All the time. They’re trying to.

Manda: While still making mistakes.

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely.

Manda: They try not to. And we all will make mistakes, it’s how you recover from mistakes is what defines what you’re doing, really. So, yeah.

Charlie: I get onto the end, if you’re okay with that [Manda: sure]. So, I know you said about a book two, but I suppose working in the context of this book only so as not to try and ruin what you are doing unless you want to share it [Manda: haven’t written yet]. Yes. At the end, we’ve got the sense of cycles. And I did wonder what you were doing. I liked it so much. Do we see at the end a chance for other paths to be taken in terms of where we see Lan splitting and she is crow coming back, and then also we see Lan dying again, effectively.

Manda: Yes. So every iteration through the past is a new iteration. She goes as crow with the wisdom she has evolved in the arc of the book, but she’s new as crow. So we do see the beginning of the first scene again, the book is exactly a wheel for the ouroboros, whatever you want to say, its beginning is its ending. And again, that’s the other thing that I saw in the vision. The very first vision was that. And at the beginning I said, I thought, how many expletives-deleted are we going to do that? But worry about that when we get there. And then when we got there, it was obvious. So I’m not going to write through a different variant, because I don’t think that’s useful. If people in fan fiction feel like doing it, that’s up to them. But every iteration of every timeline depends on the agency of the energy that is there. That’s a principle of the worlds that I work in. And so it’s not guaranteed that it’ll be the same, which is why the crow is so very nervous when it takes her into the void for the first time. Because who knows what will happen, including total extinction. So that. Yes, exactly that.

Charlie: Okay. I thought it said a lot, also, that obviously, when you get to the end, you think back to the start and you’re like, ‘okay, that’s where we’ve gone’. And also, you think of how crow… I believe crow went with Kate at the end of crow’s part.

Manda: Yes. So part of Lan does get to move into the beyond, and you know that. And that, I think, for me, also changes her path and who she is. And I don’t know how she’ll evolve in the next book, she will have to evolve, that’s obviously a given, but I don’t know how. And you were right, previous question. So now we are doing the splitting of the governments. Leah will be in parliament in Westminster, and then Niall and whoever chooses to join him will be in the people’s parliament, and we’ll see how they both run. And I don’t know the answer to that either.

Charlie: No, it’s a fascinating concept. It took me a while to get my head around what you were doing, because I was like, ‘okay, hang on. We’ve got a parliament’, you know, and I was so fixated, I think, on the idea of, ‘they’re going to parliament, they’re going to parliament’, then you’re doing something else. And I was like, ‘hang on’.

Manda: The thing is, that has happened in the world. It happened in Taiwan; they did it back in, I think, 2014. The government of Taiwan was extremely sclerotic and was refusing even to debate a particular motion to do with their relationship with China – I don’t understand the politics of it, but they were refusing to have the debate. And the students held a revolt, during which they took over the parliament buildings, and the speaker of the parliament supported them, and they just held the debate, that’s all they did, was go in, and Audrey Tang, who is now the youngest digital minister anywhere in the world, went in with a bunch of Ethernet cables and made sure that the whole country saw it happen. As a result of which they are now the government. So they called it ‘forking the government’ because you fork blockchain – it’s a bit complicated, but anyway, you fork the code and you get new chain, it’s… let’s not go there. But they forked the government, and then they became the government. And they are using a lot of the ideas that I began to touch on in book one, and I will, I am assuming, use more in book two. They have social media that are not divisive, that are designed to help people to collaborate and cooperate instead of mining their attention and provoking their outrage because that’s how you sell more stuff. They use blockchain apps to help coordinate people. It’s what happens when you have somebody intelligent using 21st century technology, someone emotionally literate using 21st century technology. It’s not hard to see how it could go. And I have Audrey Tang as my model, so all I have to do is build it in in a way that feels real and exactly, as you said, where we can see the conflicts happening. I had a fascinating conversation with somebody the other week from Dark Matter Labs, who, again, are right on the edge of this. And they’re evolving doughnut economics at city level and net zero at city level, and I am hoping I will be able to sit in on some of their conversations so I can hear the pushback of what is not working. Where are the conceptual blocks? Because that’s what we need to get into this kind of work is, ‘yes, and here are very valid reasons why we just can’t do this. And here’s how we might get around it and here’s where it goes to.’ So its exceedingly exciting, actually.

Charlie: Well, I mean, I think you said ‘exciting’, I think we need to view it that way, don’t we? Instead of saying, ‘oh, you know, if people bring up things that we’re doing wrong or whatever’. No, view it as a positive that you work with what people are saying isn’t working and you work it out and you go to something that’s even better because you’ve had those criticisms as such, you work with it. Yeah. So I’m going to go to a completely different topic within the book: World of Warcraft, or some people might call it, WoW [Manda: me too], and your use of games. Now, I’ve said to listeners that you were a director of a games company, so I suppose that comes in. I’m a gamer as well, so it worked for me.

Manda: I want to know what you play. What do you play?

Charlie: So I haven’t ever played World of Warcraft [Manda: don’t], but I’ve played Guild Wars 2.

Manda: Oh okay, I used to play Guild Wars.

Charlie: So I could understand some of the references [laughs].

Manda: Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, WoW is the crack cocaine of online gaming [Charlie laughs]. I don’t recommend anybody takes it. I am currently given up for the fifth time, so you can tell how effective my giving up is. I haven’t got time at the moment. And it just ends up feeling like a second job and there’s other things I need to do. What was the question, Charlie?…

Charlie: Just talk about your use of games in the book, really. Yeah.

Manda: I was playing a lot when I was writing it and I wanted a way for Lan and Finn to have bonded that nobody else knew about; that was their secret. And what better is there? For most of this time he was up in Glasgow and then he was living with them down in East Anglia. But what you’re doing when you’re sitting on your computer is basically anybody’s business or nobody’s business. I mean, you could be doing anything. And so technically, and theoretically, I think we might find out due course, way down the line that actually everybody knew, but Lan thinks its their secret and Finn thinks its their secret. And when I was doing a lot of the research for what people believe might happen after we die, and this, first of all, it hits belief systems, which is big amygdala stuff – people will kill each other for boundary disputes, but they do it cleanly. The times we kill each other, really nastily is when someone’s offended our belief systems. So belief systems are a big trigger area, but there’s an increasing amount of really good hardcore science done on people who’ve had near death experiences. A lot of it done by a guy who was previously a neuroscientist who then had a near death experience and came back and remembered a bunch of stuff when he was flatlining. And it put his career on the line because you can’t say, ‘I’m sorry, I remember all this,’ and everyone else is going, ‘no, you’re a vegetable. I’m sorry, we got the traces. You didn’t’. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff. And how did the newly dead connect with the people they cared most about? And in one of them was a man, and he and his friend had played one of the really early games and it had this ‘whee!’ noise every time he scored. And his friend drowned. And he didn’t know… I think maybe he did – anyway, he went on and just played this game against PvE – that’s ‘person versus computer’ for those who don’t play games. And he got the highest scores he’s ever gotten. It just went ‘whee! Whee! Whee!’ All night. And I thought, ‘oh, wouldn’t that be interesting? If that was Warcraft, how would I do that?’ I didn’t know – I mean, this came long after the first visions, I’m stuck with Lan in the void going, ‘I can’t pick anything up. I can’t move anything, I can’t write anything. How do I connect to this person I love most in the world and let them know that I still love them?’ And I thought, what she does is patterned; she’s quite a long way along the spectrum because she’s basically me. And how could you do it? And I had that as a model. So I thought, okay, let’s give it a go. And there we are.

Charlie: Okay, I feel we should clarify then. You said PvE, and we’ve got PvP in the book, which, if you’ve missed the reference, that’s player versus player [laughs].

Manda: Thank you, fellow gamer! Yay!

Charlie: I’m guessing you have a guild. How do they feel about you going off for a few months? Are they right? You get back in the fold and you carry on?

Manda: Yeah I will after. Well actually, these days, guilds are not so much a thing as communities. So I have a community. I used to run the battlegrounds Monday night and Thursday nights. And I just said, ‘sorry, guys, I just can’t for a bit,’ so I’ll go back. But it takes… I mean, you must know what it’s like, you give up for a while and it takes many months to get back up to speed again, get the right gear and even just figure out how they’ve changed the basic gameplay [Charlie chuckles]. Let’s not go down on too many gaming geek, or we’ll lose all your readers. But yes.

Charlie: True, Okay, then. So one more game we’re going to have to talk about, as I said, D&D with Terry Pratchett and Fay Weldon [Manda: oh yes]. Tell us about that.

Manda: Okay, so this is when I was still a vet. I worked at the vet school in Cambridge, and there were very, very, very narrow frames within which you’re allowed to take time off because you’re basically on an academic year. And it turned out that two years in succession, I could take a week off in the autumn. And what I did was to go on an Arvon style writing course, which was held at a local place in Norfolk. So you go and be residential for a week, and the tutor comes in and you all stay together. And the first time around, the tutor – trying to remember which way around it was – I think, first time around, the tutor was Fay Weldon, and the second time around, the tutor was Terry Pratchett. It gets the Friday night and they hand you a bottle of wine each – not quite – and you sit around, and I happened to have my D&D dice in my bag and brought that out, anyone want the game of D&D?’ And in each case, Fay Weldon and Terry Pratchett, went, ‘I’ve never done that’. ‘Oh, I could DM for you. Okay, here we go’. So I am the only person in the world who has DMed, which is, for people who don’t know, Dungeon Mastered for Fay Weldon and Terry Pratchett. It’s my claim to fame [Charlie: yeah!]. And it was enormously good fun because they were both extremely creative people. Fay, famously, about an hour in, went, ‘you know, with pauses for food and water, one could play this for the rest of one’s life’. [Both laugh.] She was grand. They were both grand. They both really helped my early writing career. I was very, very grateful to both of them. Fay said, ‘find your voice’. I didn’t even know what a voice was. I was a vet, I had no clue. She said, ‘you need to be coherent. You can make anything happen as long as it happens within the reality of your book’, which at that point, again, this is revelatory stuff. And then Terry read the early chapters of the book that later on went to be Hen’s Teeth and made some really, really useful comments. So they were both extraordinarily generous and have led me to do a lot of writing, teaching, and endeavour to step in their footsteps.

Charlie: That was lovely. That’s a really awesome story. I remember going to, I think it was Salisbury, after Terry Pratchett had died and they made an exhibition and they had made, I suppose, half of his office up, recreated it, and he had six screens and one of them was playing Doom, I think [Manda: oh was it?] , and I was like, ‘that was an awesome man!’

Manda: God, and he still managed to write. Most of my Rome books were written in the graveyard of the battlegrounds. So you’re dead for 25 seconds [Charlie laughs], then you’re back live again. And it’s quite frightening looking back, actually.

Charlie: Yeah, I’m going to stop because I could carry on and yeah, you’re right, we can’t keep going on with gaming references. Right. Okay, tell us about your podcast, Accidental Gods.

Manda: Oh, thank you. So it arose out of the Accidental Gods membership program, which arose out of another shamanic vision. It sounds like I have lots, which I don’t, it’s just that they then influence the rest of my life! So Accidental Gods membership program is aiming to give people the tools to take us towards that edge of conscious evolution, how to connect to the web of life, but to do it – here’s a meditation for today, all you have to do is do this, then do the next one. And then I got three months into that and thought, actually I need a podcast to explain the neurophysiology of what were doing, why were doing what were doing. So that was the first nine. And then I thought, you know what, it’d be good to talk to a few people who are actually doing this stuff. So I thought I’d maybe do six months [chuckles]. And that was four and a half years and 230 episodes ago. And it’s amazing because there are so many people doing stuff that is right at the leading edge of change. Really heartfelt, grounded, desperately trying to work towards a future that will work. So the premise of the Accidental Gods podcast has evolved into equipping us and giving us the visions of if we all work together, how we would get to that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us, by bringing in the people who are doing it. And we look at spirituality – how can we move from being a trauma culture to initiation culture? We look at economics, we look at regenerative agriculture, food and farming systems, science, business, anything that I can think of or that we can find. I just spent this morning talking to an extraordinary systems thinker in Sweden who is helping to set up a primary school on doughnut economic lines. Oh, the kids that come out of this school are going to transform the world, we just need to hold everything steady till they get here, that sort of a thing. So it’s all feeding into the book. It all did feed into the book. And you know what its like, a book takes a long time to write, and then you’ve got to get into the publishing cycle and it’s there and it’s concrete and it reaches people podcasts would never reach, but I can record a podcast today and its out a week on Wednesday, and the ideas are fresh, so the two complement each other. So it’s there to give people vision and hope. I genuinely believe that if we can see where we could go and feel that we have the agency and the tools to get there, then we’ll do it. And our crisis, first of all, we’re in a meta-crisis; I don’t imagine many people listening to your podcast would disagree with that, there are still some people who would, but on the whole, I don’t think there are many people who think that the current system is working. Where we disagree is why it’s not working, what to do about it. But if we can get into the fact that humanity is a storied species, everything that we do is based on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and tell each other about each other. If we can generate the stories of ‘here are the ways we go forward, and this is a future that we all actually want’, then I think we’ll do it. That’s what the podcast is for. Thank you for asking.

Charlie: If anyone wants to dive in, there is plenty there for several binge watchers – binge listens, I should say.

Manda: And I’m doing meditations now at the quarter days. I started at the summer solstice – solstices and equinoxes – and I am planning to start at the cross quarters as well, so that we can begin to evolve more of a relationship with the way the world is outside, rather than the way it is on our screens.

Charlie: So, last question then. What are you writing now?

Manda: Actually, this minute I’m writing module seven of Accidental Gods, which is endeavouring to be at the baseline of the heart mind; so the foundations of the heart mind are gratitude, compassion for self and others, and joyful curiosity. However, actual writing-writing, I’m genuinely just about to start book two. I’ve got the outline, I’m fleshing the outline out a bit more, because it wouldn’t hurt to have slightly more of an outline before a start than I had before. But also I know from past experience that my chances of actually following the outline are remote [Charlie chuckles], but my plan is to get module seven done this week and start writing the book this time next week. So before this goes out, I should have started writing. I want to have started it before the book is published, basically, before the existing book is published. That seems to matter.

Charlie: Yeah. Yeah. Perfect timing then. There’ll be more podcasts that can talk more about what you’re doing and stuff. Manda, this has been absolutely lovely having you today.

Manda: Thank you.

Charlie: Thank you for the talk on gaming, that’s been incredibly fun. Yeah. And I hope book two… well, I’m interested to see where it goes. I’m interested to see where the characters go and where the world goes. Definitely. And I will be looking out for it.

Manda: Thank you, Charlie. It’s been such a delight. You’re such a good person to talk to. And thank you for the gaming stuff, that was spot on.

[Recorded later] Charlie: And thank you very much for listening. Please do share this episode with anyone you think would be interested in it. The Worm Hole Podcast, episode 102 was recorded on the 11th March and published on the 22nd July 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

Disclosure: If you buy books linked to my site, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops