Story to tell

This is one of those photographs whose story I should like to tell but do not feel equipped to do.   It is one of too many from the half dozen or so albums I inherited from my grandmother, two-thirds of which originally belonged to her father, which are unlabelled and unidentified.

This is also seemingly unidentifiable, at least as to place.   Obviously a photographic studio - were it not possible to read the name above the window - 'ROWLEY & CO.  PHOTOGRAPHERS' - the enormous windows and skylight would indicate that, but local enquiries within the Halifax area and searches through trade directories have failed to suggest its whereabouts.   And none of the posters on the wall to the right hand side are decipherable as to place either.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that the woman apparently looking in the window is not doing so with complete attention, perhaps she is waiting for someone.  Alternatively, the viewpoint, from across the street, beside another brick building suggests covert observation ...   Nothing so dramatic as a murder, I am certain ... but what?

Expressing oneself

Pretentious sod.   Why couldn’t he just say ‘We’re finished, I don’t want to see you any more, I don’t think this is working out’ or some such thing?   The usual phrases.  
I know why – because he regards them as ‘terribly clichéd’ and wants to make out he’s a cut above all those sort of people, the ‘vocabulary-challenged’ he says.   Talks as if he’s swallowed a dictionary most of the time, not realising what a prat he sounds – he obviously doesn’t know that his mouth gives that nasty little marble-chewing twist each time, just before he pronounces, pontificates ... comes out with whichever of the six words he set himself to learn the night before.  
Ha!   He thinks I don’t know that, but then he thinks that nice people don’t go scrabbling (Scrabble – that’s another bloody thing!), don’t go scrabbling around in other people’s private drawers and cupboards, don’t read other people’s letters and diaries and notebooks.
Pity he didn’t realise sooner that a) I’m not a nice person and b) I’d got pissed off with him long before he got tired of me.   But I wanted to find out which of the phrases he’d choose to finish it with.   He had a list – a dozen to start with, then he whittled them down and then had a short list of three.   I have to say that telling me I was ‘merely a splash in the river of experience’ wasn’t one of my favourites.   Which is why I kicked him,   Right where it hurts.

Cannaregio confrontation

I woke to the sound of a cell phone buzzing... at least that what I thought it was at first, before realising that it was the doorbell.   Ten past nine – on a Saturday for Christ’ sake – whoever it was couldn’t possibly be anyone I knew – or who knew me!  
I pressed the button on the entry phone ‘Yes?’
‘Penny?’
‘... Yes ...’
‘Get down here, now   And let me in.’
‘Wha-a  ? Who is this?’  Obviously someone who knew at least my name, and he repeated ‘Avanti cara! open the door.’
Still unrecognisable, but such command in the voice I did as I was told, running barefoot down the bare wooden stairs, dusty but too worn to be splintery, me scruffy but sufficiently decent, thanks to my preference for white cotton Victorian style nightdresses.  
I turned the key and pulled open the door, the cool early morning air rushing in, only to find no-one there, just the two old men I had christened Marco and Polo, after the one of the district’s more famous residents, having their usual early morning conversation beyond the capped-off well head, but taking a couple of steps out I saw him, leaning on the wall to my left, his face pale, but still recognisable.  
He turned his head ‘Penny – I’d’ve known you anywhere, nightdress or no,’ and he laughed.  ‘It’s taken what, five years, but I’ve found you at last.’
‘Guido.   Christ, Guido.   You’d better come in ...’
Headed back up the stairs my mind was in a tumult – was it really wise to let this man into my home, into my life again?   He always had been able to command me, until that last time ... And had he tracked me down with the intention of telling me, forcing me to listen to the truth – a truth I’d been running from for perhaps too long?
Once in my flat again I paused and he caught me up, panting more than slightly and I turned and looked at him again.   Saw immediately that whatever my preferences, he needed to confess, because his time was running out, and he’d be dead soon, certainly before the two old men in the Campo below.

This was my response to Thinking Ten's Saturday canvas challenge (the photo being one of my own) which became a 'Capstone' by including all the week's prompts in the story too:
On Location, Monday:  ...heading back up the flight of stairs...
Take It Away, Tuesday: I woke to the sound of a cell phone buzzing...
Words Inc., Wednesday:  (1) penny (2) numbers, (3) home
Thursday:  heading out the front door
Friday Challenge:  Your character seeks out an old friend; why? At some point, your character needs to confess; what?

Pantsing and plotting ...

A few months ago Milo James Fowler wrote on Write 1 Sub 1 about the relative merits of pantsing and plotting when writing.   I am definitely an almost 100% pantser, and my fiction almost always character-driven.   Trouble comes when, as I have said before, the characters develop minds of their own and start to do and say things I had no expectation of them doing.  But it's not only the conversation:  three chapters ago a thoughtless, throwaway little episode inserted itself into another paragraph:

"And while they were out Sally phoned Sean and asked him to go and see her.   He refused, she was pressing and in the end he did as she asked, at lunchtime.  They didn’t so much as touch, although he would have liked to comfort her.   And she didn’t apologise, as he had expected she might.   Neither told their spouses of the meeting, because each was smarting from one or more of their misunderstandings."

Now these chickens have come home to roost - now Sally's husband is demanding that Sean tell him what Sally said.   Whatever it was had the effect of making Sean really bad-tempered and I have already delayed the explanation once, with a few pints, a walk along a river, a confession of something completely different, but I can delay no longer ... and I don't have anything in the way of a convincing explanation of what she could possibly have said to him that was so inflammatory!

BUT I could no more plot this than fly - for me plotting would take the heart out of what I write.   Fingers crossed that the answer will come - it almost always has in the past, even though it sometimes takes a couple of weeks.   In the meantime I write elsewhere on other subjects ...

Regret unreconciled - Jake Rainbird [Book Blurb Friday]

This latest collection of Jake Rainbird’s poetry, written after the death of his wife, folk singer Judith Hillyard, in 2009, explores the consequences of passion, of regret, of betrayal and of responsibility and the tensions inherent in the deterioration of a once happy and successful marriage.

Without doubt this volume will provoke controversy:    Hillyard’s suicide was adjudged to have almost certainly resulted from her discovery of her husband’s affair with racehorse owner Meg Trumpton, yet this body of work is in no way an apology but an attempt to tell his side of the story, not gloating, not avenging but a truthful and compassionate recognition of human frailty and the overwhelming power of physical compulsion. [136 words]

‘searingly, brutally honest – one’s heart weeps blood’ –   InVerse Truth

‘poetry for adulterers:  lies and laments, truth and consequences’ – Casa Nova Poetry

Week #11’s response to Lisa Ricard Claro’s Book Blurb Friday challenge and Lyn Obermoeller’s photo.   Each week Lisa posts a photograph which represents a book cover.   Participants are challenged to “Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book”   The number of ought-to-be but not-yet-written books, sadly, increases weekly.

http://www.writinginthebuff.net/p/book-blurb-friday.html

I used the word bemused - and it was suggested by my daughter it was a good thing for a writer

at times today
some dislocation
of how others see my self,
misunderstand

Instilling confidence in the writer

On Sunday my youngest son phoned 'What are your plans for tomorrow?' he asked
'Writing' I tell him then, conscious that that won't actually move the conversation on much, I tell him
'I'm a bit stuck at the moment - not sure what Bridie is going to do next ...'
'Bridie!   You can't have a heroine called 'Bridie' - you'll have to go though the whole lot and change it!'
'Umm ... why?'
'Because you can't - and I bet she's blonde too, isn't she?'
'Umm ... yes as a matter of fact she is ...'
'Well you'll have to change that too ...'
He doesn't seem to have realised that this is book four with her as heroine - and he hasn't asked to read any of the preceding ones either - but of course he knows best ...

I love Orkney

Birsay, Orkney, a September afternoon  in 2005, a day when the blessings and merits of a digital camera really were well proven.

For some reason, the light, low and bright, the state of the tide, well out, and presumably the season, encouraging, amongst other things, a proliferation of orange algae, I was able to 'get my eye in' and in the space of forty-five minutes took around eighty-five photos along the beach to the west of the spit that leads to the causeway across which one reaches the Brough of Birsay.

Deep cut shadowed rocks, barnacle patterns and seaweed strands - a session which left me high with visual delight.

Returning less than a month later, similar state of light and tide, nothing at all was perceptible of these riches.

5 a.m.

Clear sky, when cloudless, shows no wind.

Sunday morning

Dreamt of thunder
Woke and listened to the roar of pouring rain

One prize – the exquisite Framleigh Hall

Two major drawbacks - the boorish, brainless and repulsive son and heir along

with his merry widow of a mother who will move only as far as the Lodge upon his marriage

Three would-be-wives - two plain, one beautiful;  two with brains and one with native cunning;

one sweet, one sour and one whose past is cloaked in shadows

Four red herrings - a profligate, promiscuous younger son;  the merry widow’s aristocratic and intelligent lawyer lover;  a premature birth and a blackmailing bigamist of a butler

Five hundred pages  - the drama begins at the last of the Season’s summer balls

and ends fifteen years later with the only possible, legitimate winner finally

in triumphant possession

You cannot afford to skip a single page of this engrossing, enthralling tale

[130 words]

Week #10’s response to Lisa Ricard Claro’s Book Blurb Friday challenge and Becky Povich’s photo.   Each week Lisa posts a photograph which represents a book cover.   Participants are challenged to “Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book”   The number of ought-to-be but not-yet-written books, sadly, increases weekly.

http://www.writinginthebuff.net/p/book-blurb-friday.html

Inside outside

Inside outside - acrylic on board 48" x 24" 2000

Another re-discovered photograph.   This of an intermediate stage of a painting begun in response to CCAD's summer holiday theme of' 'inside:outside' - alien and experimental and rather disliked.

I had already promised myself a final holiday at our part-owned, sadly-to-be-sold house in Orkney, spectacularly situated on Scapa Bay, and this was to be a time without limit, on my own there, for the first time ever;  a period of mourning for the fact that the place would no longer be available for me to explore ways of depicting its magic.

My aim was to capture the way the view dominated, flowing into the house - in actuality a converted, blocked-in sea-plane station - and impacting on our days there, to pay homage to the seventeen years we had been holidaying there, and to express both celebration and sadness.   Far too much, as I now know, to try and fit into one painting.   Hence it was never completed to my satisfaction, nor to that of the tutor who marked it on my return.   The fact that she had replaced the much-loved Les who, though we did not know it at the time, was mortally ill, added to the general dissatisfaction with the whole piece

Pigeon Bike and 6 cups of poetry

If you like coffee and poetry check out Pigeon Bike's 6-cups-of-poetry - an e-chap book which took just twelve hours to assemble from calls for submission to publication - and some fascinating poetry too.   I'm on the first page.

Place of importance

I took this photo of one of the work benches, next to the hotplate, in the Print Studio at Cleveland College of Art & Design, some time in the early half of 2005, the year I graduated.

It was where I had been interviewed, nearly seven years previously, then a terrifying room full of brooding alien machinery, high ceilinged and with tall, tall windows in a elderly brick building that had once been, so rumour has it, a lunatic asylum.

Over the course of the next six years (I was a part-time, mature student) I was introduced to printmaking.   My first tutor a skilled lithographer, meticulous and precise in his instructions, less so in his professionalism, but endlessly encouraging.

While he was off sick a second tutor was found, casual, very different in approach, much more encouraging of experiment which, in conjunction with the skills already learnt set me free.

After six years I was heartbroken at leaving this haven, with its toxic smells and liquids, it's mysteries mostly explained.   I cannot go back since the following year the BA course was transferred to the University of Teesside and the studio re-sited, sans magic.