Ma’s Weird B****cks!

Normally I write books adventure stories, tales of daring-do with soldiers, woodsmen and assorted heroes and villains, but these are proper books with things like chapters and a large word count. They take me a while to write, mainly  because I am incapable of writing to a plan, I have enormous admiration and not a little envy of those authors who have a detailed guide to what they are going to write, it all set out chapter and verse  (yeah…sorry about that, I couldn’t help myself) , I know how my books start and I have a vague idea how they will end, but the journey from one to the other is an exciting adenture in re-writes as I try to make sense of the fun stuff my brain comes up with.

But. there is another side to my writing, what my darling children refer to as “Ma’s weird bollocks.”  Seriously, all those school holidays when I managed to keep my hands from their throats and this is the thanks I get, however  MWB as we shall now refer to it, is my short story addiction.

I love writing short fiction, for me it’s the petit fours with coffee part of the writing menu…. home made chocolate truffles, tiny macaroons, smooth soft fudge….damn, now I’ve got to wipe the drool off the keyboard….back to short fiction, sometime it’s serious, if you look around this blog you will find some of it, but mainly it’s MWB, my tales of the paranormal, of ghosts and mediums. of the fae and the shadow you see out of the corner of your eye, but is gone when you turn around.

I blame J. , I sure it was him who gave me the Dracula graphic novel to read before I got into double digits, frightened the life out of me and left me with a supernatural itch I have to scratch. I got the Wiccan bug as well, but that is another story.

Back to MWB…I like to plant the weird in the every day, in the kitchen and in the garden, with the jobs women have done down the centuries, the dairy, the laundry and the still room and with the bobbin, the needle and the loom.

Not to decry these jobs, with the exception of laundry which I most definitely don’t love, I enjoy the rest, I like to cook and make jams and pickles,  and I like to sew and about once every five years I convince myself I like to knit, it usually doesn’t last long, but like flu, I have to odd attack. I’ve even had a go at the dairy stuff, I can make a nice soft cheese, butter and yoghurt and I have an enormous fancy to make my own clotted cream.

All these things go into MWB stories. I’ve set one in a diary, another in a kitchen and two involve gardening, Someone once said food and water are a regular theme…quite right I say, you can’t live without either.

You can find those stories here in “A Solemn Curfew and Other Dark Tales”. Title “A Solemn Curfew” is about mushrooms and the name comes from Shakespeare “….to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice To hear the solemn curfew; ..”

https://tinyurl.com/y4e3oxny

I have recently branched out and taken MWB to another arena, the 1930’s. That gloriously named organisation The Occult Detective Quarterly have given a home to Mrs Lillicrop, a mysterious and elegant lady with a talent for the weird and dealing with the unsettling. Her first appearance c.1934 “Mrs Lillicrop Investigates” appears here

https://tinyurl.com/yxemgvrn

Mine is just one of many in this book and I am both proud and humbled to be amongst such talent.

The next instalment will be “Mrs Lillicrop’s Trip to the Highlands“, it is still 1934, but “Mrs Lillicrop Intervenes” is underway, the year in 1935 and war is coming. I will let you know when Mrs L. comes to the light.

In the mean time, I’ve a couple of novels in my head, I suppose I better get on with things.

 

 

Soldier, Soldier!

Judging by the number of people who have liked my FB page recently, this title will go straight to their hearts. Yes, I like soldiers, but, as I have said on many, many occasions, this does NOT mean I stand on street corners near barracks swinging a handbag and asking passing squaddies if they are looking for company, it means I feel a deep respect for those who put on a uniform in defence of their home and a deeper respect for their courage in being willingly doing so.

I discovered this Affection for the military mainly through reading, but I am of that generation whose grandfathers fought World War One and whose fathers fought World War Two.

My first “date” was inevitably with the likes of Harry Smith, Johnny Kincaid and Sir Arthur Wellesley, you can’t be a teenage girl, read all those Regency Romances without wondering why all those young men went off to “The Peninsula,” …well I suppose you could, but I’m not made like that, I read and I read and I read, so when I met my husband and we had our first date and he found not only did I know about Elizabeth Longford’s “Wellington : The Years of the Sword”, but I’d read it and could talk. without sounding like an idiot, on the Napoleonic Wars, he tells me he was hooked. I think we knew we were made for each other even before we had agreed on the superiority of square over column, although it might all have fallen when he kept referring to my beloved Rifle Brigade as “cocky little bastards in green uniforms”. He still does it and I grit my teeth.

So we got married and I learned more than I wanted to know about “The War of the Spanish Succession” , but never enough about The H.E.I.C and The Indian Army. In time I came to write stuff and inevitably soldiers became a part of much of what I wrote, even the paranormal stories, which my adoring family refer to as “Ma’s weird stuff”…seriously,  eleven hours in labour and this is the respect you get. My  lady occult detective, Mrs Lillicrop” is the wife of an Indian Army officer, even though no-one yet knows what has happened to Major Lillicrop, maybe I’ll tell you one of these days.

I wrote a book called “Jabin” which is stuffed with soldiers. It is currently out of print, but I will get around to re-publishing it soon. Amazon frightens the life out of me and I need to build myself up to the trauma of adding a book, it always ends with me in tears and wailing for help from several long suffering friends.

However,,,should you feel like seeing if I can handle the military successfully, may I point you in the direction of “The Lord of the Faran Hills“, a tale of muskets and mercenaries.

https://tinyurl.com/yyzd7hve

I am currently working on a new Mrs Lillicrop story and at the back of my mind there is brewing a new book, Time will no doubt bring both to the front if this irritating fatigue lets up, it is one of my the main bug bears of the embuggerance, this feeling of being sand bagged every now any again, however, we will not allow it to stop the advance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Occult Detective Quarterly

Hi everyone, sorry I haven’t been around for a while, but here we are again.

There are in this wicked old world some publications with the most delicious names, but few can match the delightfully named “Occult Detective Quarterly”.  This journal makes no attempt to hide its content, it does exactly what it says on the cover.

To quote its own web site

“OCCULT DETECTIVE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE is devoted to those intrepid investigators who investigate the weird, exotic and bizarre. These are the people who explore the darkness, both within and beyond, often to their own peril and the expense of their very lives and sanity.”

As some of you know, when not writing scific/fantasy novels packed with soldiers and young heroes of dubious morality, I like to indulge in writing short stories of the weird and wild and wicked, some of you will remember the man who had sex with his garden pond and the one about the mushrooms.

If you also feel the need to have fingers crawl up your spine and to check behind the curtains every time a draft makes them move, I’m sure the contents of the quarterly will be just the thing to interfere with your sleep pattern.

If you are interested, may I direct you to John Linwood Grant’s excellent blog where he talks about the OCD and about his beloved long dogs (lurchers). There are links to were to obtain copies of The ODQ as well.

greydogtales.com

 

So far I’ve not had the honour of being published in the journal, but I am to have the privilege of being part of their first anthology.

There I am, first on the list 🙂

I’ve mentioned before my occult detective, Mrs Lillicrop, and this will be her first outing. I hope it won’t be her last. The story is set in the 1930s and Mrs. Lillicrop may or may not be, a war widow. She lives in Chelsea and it is important to note that she doesn’t knit.

 

 

 

“The Root of Earth”

Human beings aren’t supposed to be alone. I know there are some individuals who like their own company and don’t need others, but they are few and far between, taken as a whole humans need other humans. Withholding social contact is one of the unkindest things you can do to another person, but it is so very easy to do it without malice, some people are very easy to over look.

Loneliness has been occupying my thoughts for awhile now, worrying me and bothering me. Not for myself, I am surrounded by a crowd of loud self-opinionated extroverts who wouldn’t allow anyone to be alone no matter how hard they begged, and I have my lovely sewing friends as well, but I am concerned for others and as always happens with me, a story began to form in my head., so after a period of inactivity, my oddly wired brain has dragged me away from the sewing machine and back to the key board.

I have begun a new book with the working title “The Root of Earth“…kudos to anyone who can tell me where I have nicked that from. If all goes to the plan which is scribbled on the back of half a dozen receipts and in the posh notebook The Military Historian bought me for the purpose of note taking and which I keep forgetting, it will be a sci-fic story about a colony ship.

I can almost hear the groans of “Oh god, not another one“, but I think I may have found a bit of a twist on this well trodden path. The first one being the ship gets to its destination which I notice rarely happens in most colonisation stories, so often they get lost, have a mutiny or find someone else got there first causing endless problems – none of this will happen here, I promise. The story is more about what happens when you land a lot of people on a place they are now going to have to call home whether they like it or not, because there is no return ticket if you change your mind. This is not the situation best suited to loners, loners won’t survive.

Next…my main cast of characters has no men, not one. I have a woman and four girls and a gender neutral computer. This is a complete change of direction for me,  I have on several occasions been criticised for “not having a positive role model for women” in my work. My argument has always been that surely the fact the books are written by a woman should be enough to show I am positive. There will be make characters of course, but I don’t think many of them will be taking centre stage. I could be wrong, characters have a habit of demanding a part of the action despite a writers best intentions.

Changing the subject, the nameless military tart in my last blog has been named by a contributor as “Gordon Pasha Tart” after General Gordon who was killed at Khartoum. Since then another recipe experiment has gone extremely well and “Younghusband Tart” will be shared here in due course. We are still going down the Victorian soldier route and as this one has mountains of nut brittle, Younghusband got the honour.

I am working on a very decadent idea involving chocolate, hazel nuts and butter and if it works it will be “Charles Napier Tart” because it will be a sinful pleasure.

I will add the recipes soon.

 

 

 

Can’t Spell.

Who can’t spell?

Me.

Call yourself a writer and you can’t spell?

Yes, I do, despite a very nasty comment by some troll who picked up one of my blunders on a forum with no spell checker. God, how I love a spell checker function.

Why can’t I spell? Because, like so many others I am dyslexic, what was once called “word blind”. It’s been the bane of my life, it stopped me from writing many, many years because I couldn’t get down on paper what was rampaging through my head. When technology and I finally got it together and I was let loose on my first word processor, all the stories and people inside my head could come flooding out.

And, oh my, did they flood.

I wrote three full length novels (very, very full length) in the space of a year. Will they ever see the light of day ?…not without a hell of a lot of editing and revising and deleting the bits which make even me wince they won’t. Although “Jabin” is a distillation from that pot. I’ll tell you more about him another time.

What is it like being dyslexic?

It’s a pain in the backside and it makes you a very easy target for all the bullies out there, one more thing for them to point their destructive finger at and mock. For me hell on earth used to be reading out loud, because there was sure to be a word I would struggle with, one where the context wasn’t giving me a clue and where my carefully learnt phonetic tools didn’t play the game…the English language is peppered with these little “got ya” gems. It was even worse in a foreign language. One particular teacher of French got her kicks from picking on me when it was a difficult passage. I can see her smug self satisficed smile even now and the gloating smirk she had when ridiculing my struggle. Not all school bullies are kids.

Words like “were”, “where”, “was”, “what” etc. all had a tendency to look the same and out of context, especially on a flash card (possibly the worse way to tell a kid to read ever), I was stumped and, because I could recognise words like “church”…its got steeples…and “aeroplane”…cos its got two wings up and down…accused of not trying with all those so called “easy” words. “Through”, “though,” “tough”,”thought”, “there”, “their”, “then” and “them” were a bloody mine field.

When it came to essay writing and every bit of homework I ever produced, they were decorated with red ink and a curt “use of dictionary if you do not know how to spell a word”.

Great advice…if you know you’ve spelled it wrong! And no matter how often you read through something, if you are dyslexic, you are unlikely to see you’ve gone wrong. I once used the same word in an essay five times, I spelled it wrong each time and each time it was different!

Today I am much better than I was, you learn loads of little tricks as life progresses and the spell checker helps, but only up to a certain point. I often know the word I want to use, but I have NO idea how it is spelled, so little idea in fact that the spell checker does its equivalent of throwing in the towel; then it is off to Roget and The Concise Oxford to see if I offer them enough clues to find it. These days I quite enjoy the search.

How does this all work with the books I write? As an Indie and now a self publishing author, I have never had the luxury of a content author, but I have a small number of wonderful beta readers who do not hesitate to tell me if I have let standards slip or have made a complete hash of the plot line…thank you, people, I love you and couldn’t manage without you.

And I have my two line editors. One is the military historian of course, whose complete inability to understand subtly or poetry in words keeps me from almost all moments of self indulgence (not all of then, I manage to slip the odd bit of romanticism by him every now and then) and the other is Dave, who finds all the nits. I feel bad asking him to do this, but he recently said it was not too bad, because he now knows all my dyslexic stumbling blocks and spot them coming. Thanks, hon. I am so grateful to you and for all you do for me.

If you want to check out Dave’s brilliant work, go and have a look my book page.

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