Another gothic tale

          I enjoy writing in the gothic genre. This story, 327 words, was published on a site that calls itself 330words and is devoted to flash fiction.

Edinkillie Churchyard. (I can't find a tomb with a bell in this area.)

                                                          The Bell

Emily rubbed her belly gently, smiling as she thought of the child growing in her. Somewhere in the night a bell tolled twice. Comfortable in her silken sheets she slept again.

In his lonely mansion on the edge of the moor Sir Edward lay sleepless thinking of his wife. He heard a small bell toll in the distance.

Emily roused once more from fitful slumber. She tried to refrain from fidgeting for fear of disturbing her dear husband but her mouth was dry and her head full of feathers. She raised a hand to reach for the carafe of water by her bed and heard the bell toll again. Her hand felt heavy. Something dragged at her wrist. Exhausted she dropped it back to her side. 

‘It is as though I have taken a sleeping draught,’ she thought drowsily, ‘Perhaps I did, but I do not remember doing so.’ She slept again.

Edward heard the bell and leapt out of bed dragging on his quilted dressing gown. His heart raced and his palms were wet. He threw back the curtains and stared into the night. The church spire rose above the village, a blacker blade piercing the black of the moonless night, touching the stars. Was she now amongst them?

‘I am maddened by grief,’ he thought and, sighing heavily, lay back on his bed.

After his collapse at the graveside the doctor had given him a powder to take to bring sleep, but he would not allow himself such comfort when his beloved lay cold in her grave. He tossed fretfully, the images chasing him from oblivion. Emily in her satin-lined casket. The child inside her already making a roundness to her loved form. Her face had been peaceful, but no longer that of his mischievous, teasing darling. 

Finally he succumbed. He added the powder to the water in the flask by the bed. This pain was unbearable. He must have respite for a few hours. Whilst he waited for the opiate to take effect he tried to comfort himself with the excellence of the oaken coffin he had chosen for her, fully sealed against the depredation of worms and the corrupting air. The next time the bell tolled he could no longer hear it.

Clouds and gorse.

I love sky and I love gorse. Today they were both at their best.

So sad I can't put the scent of the gorse here. Today the warmth brought out the wonderful aroma of  coconut.

Tourist guide and archivist.

I had two American ladies and a lovely Argentinian gentleman visiting over the weekend. Much as I like my solitude it is always good to show people around this area. It forces me out to view the places I don't go to on my own any more because I have 'done' them in the past. The friend who stayed with me (the other two are a recently married couple and they went to a B&B) was of the Happy Snapper breed. She took at least 100 photos in the space of three days, possibly more. More or less nothing went un-snapped. As she had been in Britain for 28 days, snapping everything, she is going to have a very busy time, home in San Diego, sorting through them all. In the same amount of time I took three photos, but no doubt will have others sent to me in due course. The weather was very April - spring showers breaking into brilliant sunshine. We dodged in and out with the sun.

The reason for the trip was to visit the place Susie's mother Frances spent so much time, the F. Foundation. The first of these photos is of the quiet garden and sanctuary where Chloë and I scattered some of Frances's ashes. The second is of Susie and Cathie in front of the first whisky barrel house.

Sanctuary and Quiet Garden

OK, the blog in its wisdom has turned them around.... you get the picture....

Susie, rather disturbingly, brought me a small stack of letters I had written to her Mom. Truth to tell I had almost forgotten I ever wrote letters. It feels archaic in this day of emails, Tweets and Facebook. Also there's the guilty feeling about not having any to show her from her Mom but I've moved a lot and things have been jettisoned or mislaid. 

I was very afraid of reading them - I've never liked being plunged back into the past. This morning I braced myself. Some were as I had feared, quite depressing because I was depressed when I wrote them. Some were much more cheery and informative. I found myself enjoying them. If I had realised I would read them 12 (and even some 20 years) later I might have written more. 

This blog has been a way of writing letters, mostly to myself. A friend has suggested I sew some together, figuratively speaking, and publish them one way or another. Probably just gathering them up and printing them out for my even older age would do.

It's a thought. 

Memo to self after editing this....Please learn to check before clicking and it's about time you learned the difference between 'where' and 'were.'

Writer's Away.

If you look hard you might see someone writing something.

Mhairi makes the most of our mentor

Not much going on here - but a nice one of our leader with coffee cup.

Glynis, thrice-published Jane with the inevitable cup of something, and Brian.

Tez, debonair as always.

Bagaduish blokes: Andy, Tez, Martin, Brian.

Tom

I went away for the weekend. Not a killer first line for a novel but for my nearest, dearest and oldest friends it’s a line that will have some impact. The last time I ‘went away’ (left home with a suitcase and at least one change of underwear) was about two years ago. It takes a lot to prise this oyster from its shell. The occasion was the writers group’s annual jolly - sorry Retreat -  into the countryside. The purpose? I’m not so sure about that. In the pursuit of fresh inspiration perhaps? Possibly the wish to hone our writing techniques. 

To this latter end we had a visit from a professional, a thrice published, often staged, depressingly young, Scottish writer who entertained us for a couple of hours and left us with a couple of useful metaphors to work with. The first was ‘show the fin, not the shark.’ The obvious root of this was ‘Jaws’ which was so very successful as a terrifier. The shark isn’t seen until quite near the end (so I’m told. I’ve never seen the film in its entirety, only extracts.)  What is enough to scare the living bejayzez out of viewers is the sight of the fin (and that music of course.) The principal being that we create far scarier things in our mind than can ever be shown or written about. Keep the reader riveted by their own imaginings with just a tiny taste of what’s to come now and again to heighten the tension.  

So from now on it’s: fin, fin, fin, fin, fin, SHARK!

The second metaphor, in much the same vein, is to liken the process of the generative event of the story to the creation of a tsunami. There has been an earthquake or some catastrophic happening deep under the surface. The shock wave it sends out stays low on the ocean bed, sending out long waves that merely raise shipping a foot or two as it passes underneath them. As it approaches land the combined force of the original disruption causes the wave to erupt to the surface creating appalling devastation.

Both of these metaphors seem to me to serve as well for poetry as for prose.

All in all I do feel more inspired, and the creative Slough of Despond I’ve been in since Christmas has lifted along with the recent virus (which took long enough to submit.)

On an entirely personal level, being with eleven people that I only know through a once-a-week meeting (and what they reveal of themselves in their writing) was much more enjoyable than I had imagined it would be. I should have more faith in my fellow human beings. 

Two evenings passed merrily with not a single sentence being written (so far as I could tell). The vast amount of beer, wines, and spirits, brought along to keep us going, may have had something to do with loosening inhibitions and priming vocal chords so we were treated to songs written by Martin who accompanied himself on his guitar, then Tez and Tom in turn sang various a cappella folk songs with noisy sing-along choruses. Mindful of my Guide Captain, who told me to move because I was putting people off, I stayed largely silent and just enjoyed.

The icing on the cake was the discovery that the area between Aviemore and the Cairngorm Ski Resort has been developed since the long-ago days when I took my children in that direction. It’s a beautiful region with lochs and glens, streams, woods, and wetlands. Now there are cycle paths and footpaths, and centres like the one we stayed in that offer accommodation for large or small family parties and groups. It has given me some happy ideas for Christmases in the future.

Portable characters

Elizabeth George is one of my ‘re-read’ authors. To get into that elite club the author has to have written a series of novels in a genre I enjoy, in a setting I find comfortable to abandon myself to. The novels have to have layers, psychological, social and motivational. They have to be well written, grammatically and structurally intelligent, but, more important than that, they must introduce complex, three dimensional characters who appear on a regular basis so they become ‘portable’ (a word that stays with me from the last MOOC.)  This ‘portability’ I would probably have described, before I read ‘Reading a Mind,’ as the characters that are rounded, incarnated in flesh and bone with recognisable foibles and quirks; the ones that step out of the page and accompany me into my daily life often becoming friends. 

Phil Rickman does it with the Merrily Watson series, but also with the stand-alone supernatural thrillers he wrote before he happened across Merrily. The characters he created in his early novels do sometimes show up again in a new story. I like that. It creates a whole new universe for me. Merrily is his most constant protagonist now, the C of E Deliverance Minister, and single mother of Jane, her ever-questioning, defiant teenager who rebels against her mother’s relationship with God and the Church and thus speaks for readers like me who have little time for the church and no belief in a god. 

It was Elizabeth George who started this train of thought, so, back to her novels. She is American and, as far as I can tell, an afficionado of the women writers in the Golden Age of crime. She puts in place many of the ingredients of those early novelists: the elegant, well-bred and desirable old-Etonian investigator; the ways of the English aristocracy; the English country house; the English countryside. Her descriptions of the levels of English society are somewhat clichéd. Cancel that - they are VERY clichéd. For example, the DCI assigned to Lynley (Old Etonian trying to escape his onerous family duties as an Earl by having a ‘real’ career in the police force,) is drawn rather in the manner of an old family retainer. Working class, scruffy, overweight, an inveterate,  junk food eater, her socialist hackles are raised against this floppy-haired, Saville Row clad, entitled driver of a classy car, but she comes to recognise his talents, and thereafter is constantly loyal and dependable. It would not be too strong to say she worships the ground he walks on, as all good old family retainers must. 

In her early novels I felt George was labouring her use of long words (I can NEVER enjoy the use of ‘rebarbative’ except as irony.) When I re-read these I suspect her of trying to lend an air of English usage that isn’t natural to her in order to reinforce the Englishness of the experience the reader is getting. Maybe she feels she is emulating the way we English speak. Maybe she is simply trying to give literary gravitas to her work. I find it less obvious in the later novels as she gains confidence in what she has created. 

My only other grievance is her treatment of the group of people who appear regularly, and around whom the subplots form. She gives them such a terrible time, a positive snowball of disasters. It’s quite distressing. I would be happy of they had some luck for a change.

Despite my grumbles, these novels give me great pleasure. The dialogue is believable. The plot are well-constructed and intriguing; the hooks and the fins (see next entry) keep me absorbed and the wide variety of personalities involved is highly enjoyable.