Two by ten flashes

The agony and the ecstasy - wasn’t that some film title?  Or book? - whatever, it just about summed up this place on a Wednesday afternoon.

Baby clinic.

Barbaric really - all infants being stripped off down both sides of on one long table and taking it in turns to be placed in the scales, under the beady eye of Sister Weston - called herself Sister but who knows what she really was, when she’d just sort of insinuated herself a few months before the war ended, when everyone was too tired to care very much about anything.  

And when the very existence of babies was a cause for suspicion, and counting back and trying to work out when hubby had last been on leave.   And there’d been more than enough coffee-coloured babies for it not to be a shock any more.   Cause for gossip, yes but shock - no.

Anyway, the agony, if your baby hadn’t put on weight, the ecstasy if it had, never mind if it was looking a right ugly little bruiser.

Every bloody fortnight.

The day wasn't supposed to go like this, let’s face it my whole bloody life wasn’t supposed to go like this but some things just seem out of your control.   And it’s no good doing the ‘if only’ stuff because you can apply that to almost every day of your life and believe that things could’ve been different – and yes, they could – but the point was now, where you were now that mattered, that was real.   The you had to get on and deal with.

So.  Here we were again at the bloody baby clinic.   Here I was sandwiched between two women, one of whose husbands claimed flat feet and the other was a pen pusher in some government department so neither of them had been anywhere near any fighting.   Their babies were of the bruiser variety too – well fed, because it certainly wasn’t their genes.   And me in the middle with my skinny little cocoa-coloured Leon.   No ring on my finger and his father ... well, I told everyone he was dead, but the truth is I only ever saw him in the dark (and he wasn’t that easy to see then!).   And now, like the Sea of Galilee, every woman in the place was moving away from me as Sister Weston bore down on me, with the vicar’s wife in tow.   Jesus.

Prompts from Thinking Ten

On Location (Monday) a health clinic 

Take It Away (Tuesday) The day wasn't supposed......

The blacksmith's wife

Now avalable from Lulu - this forty-one episode illustrated tale which was generated from weekly three word prompts appearing on the Friday Prediction [which will on 1st February relocate to http://predictionfiction.blogspot.co.uk/]

From under a sunshade

We assumed it was a film, to begin with.   Then when we looked round for the cameras we couldn’t see anyone other than some doting ginger-haired dick with buck teeth and stripy too-tight trunks focussing on some ghastly child, who was obviously embarrassed to be seen as his daughter even at the age of three.

So, no film.  And by the time we’d come to that momentous conclusion (blame the cuba libras we’d drunk at lunchtime – turn and turn about our rounds and then these boys who seemed to think that we’d be up for it if they coughed up - fat chance!) he’d stopped crawling and lain down, with his eyes closed.

‘Don’t look like he’s sleeping ...’ Vicky was watching him too.

‘Nah ... D’you think he’s OK ... not ... I dunno...’

She was thinking same as me, and less embarrassed about saying it.  ‘Well he’s hardly likely to have just jumped off a slave ship and swum ashore is he?   He’s not even wet!’

‘Dressed like that he’s come from somewhere hot though, hasn’t he?   Must have.’

‘He’s still not moved ...’

I don’t think we’d’ve left it much longer before getting up and going over to him, check he was all right, because no-one else was taking a blind bit of notice, but suddenly there was all these pounding feet coming along the beach behind us.   Six blokes, all as black as he, all laughing and joking and shouting at him, running towards him.   The one at the back actually hurdled us, our legs, being more unsighted.   But even as he landed there was a sudden quietness, the laughing stopped and the one at the front said ‘Oh sweet Christ, he’s dead.’ 

This was my response to Thinking Ten's Saturday canvas.

Is it just excellent observation?

I'm currently reading Anne Enright's 'The forgotten waltz'.

There is a chapter when she describes lying in bed, hearing her man get up to pee.
We've all been there, done that, heard the stop start, and the sigh, heard the cord of the light switch bounce on the mirror, the slap of the feet on the floor.
Is that why it, her writing, has such power - because we recognise and share, glad to have our inner selves confirmed as being normal?

At that light switch level I could do this too - but am in a way reluctant - scared, maybe, of boring my imagined reader with mundane (but she is not mundane!)   

She describes love and death, sex and arguments, much of which I also recognise, but I am far less confident that I could write it, fearing that in doing so, in describing something which I am having, from the paucity of my experience, to make up, to pad out with my imagination, I am getting it horribly wrong.

Edge: retribution [a Neolithic serial]

Not loudly said but always known:  in hungry times, when fish and corn and meat are scarce, new-borns are let to die, more so girl babies than the males.

Not widely known, and said to me but once by my then-mourning father, my survival tributed my mother, his first and favoured woman.   She died birthing what would have been his second son.   Similarly a second woman within the year but this third is stronger, sweeter-natured and has two moons still to go.    

Yet Yarl speaks less to her than me, watches more anxiously my brother, and consults most frequently the son my mother bore to a grey-haired man of lower rank ere Yarl came to this place. 

I’d fifteen darkest celebration times and never bled, but my rank, if such it could be said, was high for the holding in my head of family names and happenings, and what important and what known by my mother’s ancestors.   

 This began life as a to-be-entry for an Orcadian crime story competition,, for which I ran out of words, and time.   I am now converting it into six sentence episodes and posting it on 6S;  it is the fourth in a series which began two years ago on MuDJoB and subsequently became an illlustrated book.   The first past can be read at http://sandra-linesofcommunication.blogspot.co.uk/p/curve-of-early-learning.html

A lesson in inequality

The body belonging to the single foot resting its gritty weight on my clasped hands heaved and he had to grasp the top of the wall to steady himself.
‘Ow, bloody hell you stupid cow, what’re you playin’ at?   Stand still I told you!’
The hem of his prickly woollen jumper brushed the tip of my nose, tickling, and I moved my head from side to side, trying to use the self-same bit of jumper to scratch it, but then he stretched a bit more and it moved higher, leaving me sniffing.  I remembered reading about a Japanese torture where they kept putting a drop of water on the end of your nose but your hands were tied so you couldn’t scratch.   I could scratch now but he’d fall for sure and would be even madder and I wanted him to like me, to be pleased I was here, helping him.
‘You nearly done?’  I didn’t like the squeak in my voice as I craned my neck up.
‘Nearly.  Would’ve been finished if you hadn’t kept bloody fidgeting.   Another one.’
I braced myself, back against the brick wall, arms rigid, knowing, from before, that there’d be an imbalancing and another heave as he twisted and threw another empty beer bottle the four feet it needed to go to be sure of landing on the grass – no point in going to all this trouble only to smash it.
‘How many’s that?’
‘Um ...’ I peered round his legs, the one I was supporting and the unsupported, swinging one, ‘that’s six I think.’   I didn’t know but he usually stopped at six and I was cold and fed up and my hands hurt.
‘OK, I’m jumping down.’  But he said it at the exact same time as he did it and his elbow caught my mouth, pinching my bottom lip between tooth and bone.   Instant taste of blood, like sucking a door key.
‘Right,’ he said, all full of himself, bending and gathering them up, ‘I’ll take them into the Offy.   Should get six shillings, which is four for me and two bob for you, ‘cos I did all the work.’

Yesterday's Thinking Ten challenge: 
Take it Away (Tuesday):  The (fill in the blank) heaved and he/she had to....

Karen Campbell - 'After the Fire'

I've just put my life on hold in order to finish reading this.

Heart-gripping, throat-aching, peer through my metaphorical fingers in the hope that justice will be seen to be done - and the undeniable fear that it won't be, because these folk are real and happy endings not guaranteed.

Karen Campbell does suspense like nobody else and I get high on her writing. Wow. (And thank goodness I've two more yet to read.)


Karen Campbell
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6635236-after-the-fire

Itch of writing - best found scratch

I've only ever read one 'how to' write  book, and that was more of a how NOT to  

I have also read quite a few folks passing on the rules they have found most useful, with more or less insistence, but the one that really works for me, time and time again, because of the high level of common sense ('there are no rules'), the tone in which the information is imparted, and the relevant examples, is Emma Darwin's 'This itch of writing' - check it out for yourself.

Conversation familiar to co-habiting couples everywhere.

One hand brushed the hair from her eyes, and inadvertently spread further the daub of paint on her forehead so that, being more or less skin-coloured, it appeared to reduce the length of her left eyebrow; the other hand held a half-inch paintbrush.   Clearly hoping that I would give her a logical, well-reasoned and incontrovertible decision, she moaned, ‘I can’t decide between ‘Calico Cupcake’, ‘Limpet Love’, ‘Prairie Pancake Dawn’, or ‘Crumpled Neolithic’.  What do you think?’
  
I looked at the wall she was gazing at with such intense concentration and knew that any sort of logic – the sort she was looking for – was way beyond me.   he cream wall had upon it four recently painted, four by four squares of ... cream, I had to say cream, of also-cream paint on them, and I could only see those because the paint, still being wet, caught the light from the window and shone.

‘Um,’ I said, trying to sound if I was giving it an acceptable amount of thought.   Nothing occurred, so I repeated ‘Um’ and then, with a flash of inspiration, asked, ‘How much?  How much does each colour cost?  Per tin?  And what's the stated coverage?‘

It was not the sort of answer she was looking for.

This was posted on today's Thinking Ten, today's prompt being :  One Word/Sentence Two (Friday):  In the second sentence include the following word: Prairie

Of gods and men

‘I heard just the other day that some people actually worship cats, and birds ...’
‘Yeah, the Egyptians, the bird was a hawk, Horus, not something as stupid as a duck ... or a seagull.   I could be your hawk, you my cat.’
His voice vibrated something low within her stomach, and, mobile phone to her ear, she smiled. She’d got the phone for her birthday and two days later he’d phoned and although he’d said ‘Sorry wrong number,’ he’d kept talking to her, had made her laugh.    He’d rung her again a couple more times and yesterday had asked about where she went when she wanted to take refuge from the world.   When she’d told him about the old barn, and the cart propped up on bricks he’d said ‘Go there on Saturday afternoon, I’ll phone you there, then we can talk some more.’
It was ages before her phone rang, she’d lain on the cart watching her cat trying to catch mice, laughing whenever he missed.   She’d straightaway told him about that, her cat pretending he didn’t mean it, which was when he’d said about Egyptian gods.  
Then he said ‘The Egyptians called their cat god Mau ... I can see your cat from where I’m standing ... I’m going to come and see you now.’
Even before he appeared she wondered whether this was one of those errors of judgement her mother said she hoped she’d grow out of, before she got herself into trouble.


[This was my response to yesterday's Thinking Ten Capstone challenge, when the six prompts for the week have to be combined in one ten minute piece of writing.   Usually I also try to keep it short, but this one had a mind of its own.   As ever I am aware that the daily challenge - and challenge it often is - to write for ten minutes about whatever prompt is thrown up - is a hugely beneficial way of exercising one's writing muscles, but the site could do with a lot more support.]

Resolutions for 2013...

A couple at least:

1] To declutter. 
And yes I know that goes with the time of the year, but I do mean making a start on our loft.   I also know (because our last conversation on the subject was on 21st December) that my dearly beloved and I have opposing views on the best way to do this, but since that has, for the past decade or so (I do not exaggerate) resulted in nothing getting done, I am simply going to see how much can be achieved my way.

2] Make a start on producing four Family Histories for the four branches which extend from my parents and those of my husband.   I already have fairly fact-heavy narratives; the challenge is to incorporate this into something which will hold the interest of generations to come.   Biggest problem, as I see it, is knowing how much evidence to include ...

One of last year's was to do something about getting myself an agent/more actively marketing myself, but that failed and I see no likelihood of it being ahieved this year, so have ditched that.

Whoops

In the last two days I have ordered thirteen books from Amazon ...

and not yet broken into the voucher my dearly beloved gave me for Christmas ...

Good, eh?

Top ten books of 2012

Never until this year have I kept track of what I'm reading - thank Goodreads for that - and I'm not a Top Ten sort of person - but yesterday my younger son sent me his Top Ten and it was easy enough to select, from the 127 read so far, the twenty I'd awarded five stars.   Duplicates of all but one author were eliminated, as were books read for the second time (Angla Carter's 'Love', Iain Banks 'Espedair Street', Ian Rankin).
All were memorable except for Sarah Moss's 'Waking' which, from my review, I was impressed with at the time but cannot now recall -   obviously I need to re-read that one.
What is left is in no particular order, but is surprising insofar as there are not that many crime fiction there - most of them fell into the four star category, which totalled forty-seven.

Denise Mina                Garnethill

Louise Welsh              The Bullet Trick

Angela Carter              Heroes and villains

Jose Carlos Somoza    The Art of murder

Michael Robotham      Shatter

Sarah Hall                   How to paint a dead man

Cormac McCarthy      No country for old men

Stuart MacBride         Birthdays for the dead

Cormac McCarthy      Blood Meridian

Douglas Coupland      Eleanor Rigby

Ian Rankin                  The St. Leonard’s years

 Emma Donoghue       The room

Louise Welsh              Tamburlaine must die

Angela Carter              Love

Ian Ayris                     Abide with me

Iain Banks                   Espedair Street

Louise Welsh              The Cutting room

Susie Nott=Bower      The Making of her

Sarah Hall                   Haweswater

            Sarah Moss                 Night Waking

Christmas eve ...

Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, pebble beach in black and tan and skies of palest blue and silver-grey, the sea slip-liquid putty with edging of crocheted lace, ever re-patterning itself.   Regent Cottage itself blood-orange brick, white paint and door matched to the sky.   Julia has rented it to allow us a family holiday close to but not inconveniencing the family at Blacksmith’s Cottage - three small children take up a surprising amount of space.

And yesterday they came here to tea - up and down the narrow stairs, the youngest very perilously, not yet understanding gravity (which also threatened the safety of the floor-standing wine) but of course we had already cleared many of the too-intrusive, other person’s taste (and much too twee) ornaments out of the way, putting them on a high shelf above the stairs.

Tomorrow we go from here to theirs, for a full-on family Christmas

[A response to T10's  prompt of 'ornaments on a shelf'']

Pet hate

Headline over a small story in today's paper:   "Great-granny in a hood makes Tesco jumpy"
- she was sixty-nine for goodness' sake - not the aged crone the words automatically conjure up!!!

Back story and Stuart MacBride

 In real life I'm one of those over-earnest people who fears being misunderstood, especially by people whose opinion I value or expect to value.   So it's not surprising that I made sure that in my fourth Bridie and Sean novel I felt the need to ensure that the reader knows all he needs to to 'get' who they are and (briefly) what has happened so far.   The first chapter of 'Making good' wrote itself, full of impact and ending on a brilliant page turner.   Chapter two was inserted partly to add variety and delay the 'reveal' signalled in chapter one, partly to provide what I felt to be required back story.   Reading it was, despite my best efforts, despite changing as much as was feasible into dialogue, liking to digest an uncooked suet pudding and when I found myself skipping it when re-reading I knew I had to find a different way of doing this.

Stuart MacBride doesn't do back story.
In Len Wanner's first volume of 'The Crime Interviews'* in which best-selling authors talk about writing crime fiction, MacBride says of his first Logan McRae novel:  "I didn't want it to read like the first novel of a series. I wanted it to read as if it had appeared in the middle of a series. I loathe back story in all its myriad forms."

I've just finished reading his 'Birthdays for the dead' ;  a stand-alone novel which has Ash Henderson as the first person main character.   Aged forty-five, he has led a helluva full and complex life, knows lots of people, at all levels.   None of this, or the relationships referred to in the first chapter, are spelt out, and I have to make and remake assumptions as the story goes on, exactly as you do in real life.

Within a short time I found myself deeply envious of not only Ash but other characters - where does MacBride find them?   How does he portray them so vividly?  And that is what I need to do next - re-read, try not to get caught up too much in the headlong rush of the story, and try and spot how and then to transfer the skills to my writing.


*Wanner, Len (2012-02-28). The Crime Interviews Volume One: Best-selling Authors Talk About Writing Crime Fiction (Kindle Locations 879-880). Blasted Heath. Kindle Edition.

Thinking Ten - 'Toasted thoughts'

Bedsocks and hot water bottles, that rubbery smell, how hot they were when you first got into bed, how her mother had said not to hold them between your thighs because they gave you chilblains (or blotchy skin, she could never remember.)   And also, whenever they stayed at Granny’s house, toast, done over the fire with a long-handled toasting fork.   Granny had two of them and used to let her and her sister hold one each, always saying, ‘Don’t tell on me, your mother’d have a fit if she knew, though she used to do it herself often enough.’
Becky knew that her mother didn’t care what she and Elspeth did these days, so long as they were out of her way at the weekends.   It had been all right at the beginning, when Paul first used to come to the house, he always said ‘I like seeing the girls, you don’t need to send them away,’ but ever since that night last Christmas, when it had snowed, soon after one of the bottom panes in the window got smashed when she’d forgotten to latch it, and in the night the snow blew all over her pillow and she had woken up and cried and Mummy hadn’t heard her but Paul had and had come in to sort her out, finding her another pillow and sticking a carrier bag over the gap, Mummy had been sending them to Granny’s to stay at the weekend.


On Thursdays at T10 the prompts need to be used to denote a change in plot, today's prompts were:
 a cold night and a broken/leaky window.   This, as with so many T10 pieces was begun before I knew where it would end.

Sarah Hall - Goodreads review

Haweswater by Sarah Hall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Strictly speaking I would have awarded half a star less, but for its strength and ability to ensnare me it deserved the extra.
I'd come to this after several well-writ, fast-paced, dialogue-heavy detective novels; the slow and rich descriptions took some adjusting to but the strength of the characters and of the developing love affair was irresistible, the inevitability of the end compelling, the pain real. Superb.

I picked up, from a charity shop in Sedbergh, Hall's 'How to paint a dead man' (How could I not!) and was enthralled;  this is the third one of hers I have read, all very different, but equally vividly, addictively-written.


View all my reviews

Thinking Ten is back again!!

After a few weeks hiatus, when Life and it's myriad challenges got in the way of its hitherto smooth and enthusiastic operation by Travis, Kerry Logan has volunteered to resurrect Thinking Ten.

Since 2010, previous to which I could write efficiently and grammatically but had done nothing in the way of creative writing, I have relied on three different sites to develop and hone those writing skills:  Six Sentences was the first, leading me from surprise that so much could be said with (apparently) so few resources to the making of many good friends, several of whom I have met at various gatherings in America (another first for me)

Thinking Ten requires a different approach.
Themed prompt words: On Location (Monday), Take It Away (Tuesday), Words, Inc. (Wednesday), Plot Thickens (Thursday), The Friday Times (Friday)
Canvas (Saturday), Capstone (Sunday)   each  spur a quick thought of a subject and then a frantic ten minutes trying to get the beginning middle and end mapped out.   It IS worth sticking to the rules, because that's the challenge of it, but there is then the opportunity to edit and tidy, thus avoiding embarrassment.

And I have found a third, equally and immensely valuable, site to be Phil Ambler's Friday Prediction where the challenge is to write just one hundred words which incorporate three prompt words and require writing in the 'genres of horror, fantasy or science fiction', none of which I could do, or was interested in doing, to begin with but the stretching of imagination allied to the very limited word count - and there's a week in which to hone it - has proved extremely beneficial, as well as, with 'The blacksmith's wife' a lot of fun, (not to mention the enjoyment to be had from reading all the other posts.)