What is the Angels can Fly blog?

Welcome to my new blog, which over the next ten months will tell the story of the pre-publication of my new book, Angels can Fly, which I have dubbed a Modern Clown User Guide.

In May 2005, Angels can Fly will be launched in Auckland, New Zealand, and I will then embark on a world tour to promote the book, which I intend to doccument here, including reviews, and inviting your reactions.. because this is an interactive experience, and you are welcome to post comments in response to any post.

Along the way I intend to post some of the 50 clown exercises in book, to give a taste of the more practical side of the work, and also some the anecdotal sections from my personal clown experience, and also that of other contemporary clowns. You can already check out some of these on my anecdotes page.

I already have three novels under my belt, so most of Angels can Fly is a story following the adventures of ten clown characters, five men and five women... My other books are Moontan, Dance Sisters, and Believers in Love.

I am also into electronic publishing, as well as traditional print format, and I hope that the Angels can Fly blog will also provide a practical insight into the process of electronic publishing. If you are interested you can already sign up to receive a free eBook copy of Angels can Fly, in the MS Reader format.

Blogs are one of the frontiers in electronic publishing, and this is syndicated in RSS and atom formats, so that you can read it from the comfort of your newsreader, if you would rather. Click here for RSS and click here for atom.

Angels can Fly stands at 90,000 words today, and so it is substantially complete, but there is still much work to be done, and my posts here will tell the inside story of that experience. Who knows, perhaps the Angels can Fly blog may be published some day in print format, and it could even be more widely read than the book itself... we'll find out.

To kick us off today, I am going to leave you with the first few paragraphs of the book... enjoy;

Go Your Own Path

Welcome to Angels can Fly. This book has been a long time in evolution in my life, because it brings together a number of threads from my clown work, my fiction writing, my theatre teaching, and my spiritual growth.

Yet, as I set out on the journey of writing this story, I know there are many ways of doing it, and no one right way, and so I have to cast myself into the unknown of each blank page, to achieve any progress what so ever.

Similarly I encourage you to surrender yourself to the book, and to read through it in any order you choose. You may wish to read from start to finish, or dip into the chapters in a random order.

You may see it as a novel on the human condition, a clown textbook, a philosophical treatise, or a memoir. Please go your own path with this work and make it your own.

Similarly with modern clown, we have have to go our own way with the art. Pierre Byland, a clown teacher from Switzerland, surveyed the students coming to his clown school over a number of years and asked them why they wanted to work with clown.

He reported at a forum on teaching clown in Amsterdam in 1999, that no two answers to this question were ever the same, and deduced from this that 'clown is a different thing to each person'.

By extension, with so many people doing it, it must be a pretty big thing to encompass so many different facets, so more than any other art form, there is no 'right' way to do it.

This however is a modern view of the art form, for we tend to associate clown with a few classic characters that have come down to us through the recent circus tradition.

Clown is an art form which far pre-dates the circus however, and is in fact thousands of years old, existing, as far as I have been able to tell, in every culture on the planet through the ages, so it obviously also serves an important social function.

Like any art form it has to evolve to stay relevant to the culture nurturing it, and with the huge changes in society over recent years, there has been a corresponding growth in the clown art form.

This book is an attempt to chart that change, and promote that process by providing a context or reference points for thinking on the subject, and also to provoke discussion.