Two Women and Some Books
There is no greater writing gift
Than giving those who sigh a lift
No better use of word or craft
Than beating sorrow with a laugh
There’s no better plot nor ploy
Than that our work will bring you joy
I have no literary aspiration
Save to bring smiles by my creation
Holly dragged a couple of very heavy bags out of the back of the Land Rover and hauled them into the kitchen. She went back for a second load, and as she was passing the staircase Alan’s voice floated down.
“Did you get it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Bring it here and let me see it before you wrap it up.”
“As soon as I’ve finished hauling groceries.”
There was the sound of movement overhead and for one delirious moment Holly actually thought he was coming down to help. But then she heard a door slam. Her slender shoulders drooped, and she soldiered on alone.
Some half an hour later, she trudged up the stairs holding a small box in her left hand. Walking into Alan’s office she placed it carefully on the desk in front of him. He looked up from his computer screen.
“At last. Knowing how much I want to see this, I’d have thought you could have brought it to me before now.”
“I could. But then the groceries wouldn’t have been put away before the twins get home from school.”
He opened his mouth to make a scathing retort, but his wife was already on her way out of the room. Instead, he opened the box and looked gloatingly at the heavy gold bangle in its layers of tissue paper. It had cost a great deal of money and meant he wouldn’t be buying his wife or his twin sons Christmas presents this year, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. All he could see in his mind’s eye was the image of his daughter with the bangle clasped around one slender wrist. She was going to love it.
Downstairs Holly got on with preparing the evening meal, presenting the world with her usual face of calm good sense. Inside, however, she was far from being serene and happy. Not for the first time in the ten years of her marriage, she wondered what maggot had entered Alan’s brain. How could a man who was constantly bewailing his own poverty possibly justify spending four thousand pounds on a bracelet? She allowed herself one small kitten-like snarl, before popping a huge shepherd’s pie in the oven. She was just putting the kettle on when the back door slammed.
“Paddy, Sean, shoes,” she shouted. “And before anyone considers arguing, I have fresh doughnuts.”
There was the sound of masculine laughter, and a couple of minutes later the kitchen door opened and two huge young men all but fell in. They surrounded her and subjected her to a certain amount or good natured rumpling, before sitting down at the scarred wooden table.
“You are,” Sean said, “very possibly the nicest stepmother in the world.”
“She is,” his twin concurred. “Which begs the question of how the miserable miser upstairs ever persuaded her to marry him.”
“Behave, you pair,” Holly couldn’t help laughing, as she put a huge mug of very strong tea in front of each and a plate of doughnuts between them.
While they were eating, Holly looked at their broad, good natured features and did her own wondering. She wondered exactly how two such self-centred people as Alan and Corinne, came to have produced a matched pair of nice sons. Paddy grinned at her.
“Stop frowning Stepmama, you’ll put wrinkles in your pretty forehead.”
She smiled at him, and he shoved a whole doughnut in his mouth.
“He’s been practicing,” Sean explained with simple pride. “That’s school over until January. So what now?”
“Tomorrow. Nothing. Unless you’d like to go shooting.”
“We would,” the boys chorused. “How did you swing that?”
“I have my methods.”
“And after tomorrow? What are you softening us up for?” Sean was the quicker on the uptake of the duo, although Paddy was the leader.
“Sunday your mother arrives.”The boys groaned. “And what else?”
“Christmas Eve, Anna and Christabel will be here. Staying until the day after Boxing Day.”
“Oh won’t that be fun. The two ex-wives at each other’s throats except for when they join forces to have a go at you. Plus the most spoilt young woman on the planet, Daddy’s darling Christabel, expecting to be waited on hand and foot.” Paddy looked at Holly. “I dunno how you stick it. And don’t say it’s for love of our despicable father, because you aren’t that stupid.”
“I stick it because I promised myself I’d be here for you two until you were old enough to leave home. When that happens…”
The boys looked at her with round eyes before getting up from the table and enveloping her in a group hug.
“I’d give a great deal,” Sean said, “to know what the old bastard has done that’s gotten you rattled enough to admit that.”
Holly waved her hands distractedly. “I shouldn’t have said it. And I don’t want you two to be thinking about it…”
“Okay. We won’t.”
From Team Holly by Jane Jago
They stand, these sentinels of human pride, that ask
Silent questions, shouting out from the past in stone
Where once walked feet brought here by many urgent tasks
Now stand we, gaping.
The mighty raised each edifice that all might see
The depth of dominion they could summon forth
A legacy of tears, of wars from sea to sea,
Or maybe wisdom.
Could they guess the lessons their history would teach,
Each one who strutted proud and strong upon life’s stage?
When their sun shone and these proud buildings were upraised,
Did they sleep nights?
Listen to Granny because Granny always knows best!
I’m not against electric cars per se – although there is an argument to be had about where the electricity to power them comes from, and another about battery technology. However, the basic premise is a good one. And I’m all for anything that can help the planet.
But. And it’s a big fat hairy…
I have a shedload of personal reasons for hating the reality of the bloody things in the here and now.
How am I disappointed, shall I count the ways?
First of all, you can’t hear the bastards coming, and in the country lanes where Gyp and me walk every day you need to be able to hear what’s hurtling around the bend towards you in time to throw yourself in the hedge and mutter a quick prayer to the god with responsibility for the safety of grumpy old women. You can’t do that with Jemima and her middle-class planet saver, and she’s so busy talking bollocks to little Serpentine and Acne that she doesn’t even notice the pedestrians she has left skittled in her wake.
Make electric cars have noise generators, and make it a legal requirement to use them!
Point the second is charging stations. For more than sixty years I have shopped in a nearby small town. But I can do so no more, because half of the only car park to which it is physically possible to carry my shopping has been given over to charging stations for an expected tsunami of electric cars. Right now, of course, the only electric vehicles in evidence are a 1970s milk float, two invalid scooters, and a golf cart redolent of urine in which the Mothers Union ferries the bewildered elderly to and from its business.
All of which means, we have half a usable car park and seventeen crouching machines – most of which aren’t even commissioned.
Ergo me and my like can’t park. Which means me and Gyp hie the Micra to a German hypermarket on the outskirts of the nearest large conurbation.
And that’s the current net effect of electric cars and it will be so until somebody gets hold of the roll out and does something sensible.
Until then local businesses lose out and the pedestrian population remains at risk from eejits in silent killing machines.
But on the upside me and Gyp are saving a shitload of money, or we would be if the booze wasn’t so tempting.
Writing made easy – if you don’t mind the bumps!
The wit, wisdom, joy and frustration of a writer’s life summed up in limericks…
We all know the feeling of change
When things in our head turn out strange
It’s the imagination
That leads to creation
Not a muse, on a horse, on the range
The most photographed woman of her generation looked at him politely, and offered a practised smile. It was frustrating, but he chose not to show that, instead he searched for another way to to shake her out of her self-possession.
“Does it not worry you?” he asked in his deep, hypnotic voice. “Are you never a little afraid?”
“Afraid of what?”
“That the old superstition is true, and every time you are photographed you lose a little of your soul.”
She regarded him limpidly.
“Perhaps. Perhaps I have been photographed so often that I am just a graceful shell.”
He looked into the serene depths of her remarkable amber eyes and allowed his frustration to boil over.
“Well maybe I should photograph you like that,” he snapped with sudden viciousness. “As an empty vessel remarkable only for the elegance of its window dressing.”
She made no reply, so he stared again into the depths of his imaging device – looking for something to distinguish his pictures from the thousands of others that flooded the Internet and colonised every glossy magazine on the planet. As he concentrated it seemed to him that those famous eyes grew even wider, and clearer, and that they slowly filled the viewfinder as bit by bit they dragged his soul into the abyss that lurked in their depths.
He screamed just once, and the woman smiled the secret smile he had been looking for…
Sometimes Janice struggled with being a children’s author.
Her series of Hippity-Hop and Bunnykin sold out to pre-schoolers’ parents as perfect for precious, developing young minds.
There was much excitement when she published the retelling of a favourite fairy tale.
Until the reading parents got to …they all lived happily ever after. The story continued:
..except they didn’t as no one lives forever. In fact, they all died. Some quite terribly of various agonising diseases and some in horrific accidents.
What the parents, and Janice, hadn’t expected was the delight with which most youngsters took to this dose of reality.
The Dragon and Leek was a small but substantial wayside cupona on a narrow, but well-travelled, road skirting through the foothills of the mountains. It seemed to lack any kind of village and stood, half-hidden by the forest in its deep valley. Here the road tracked the path of a brook which locals considered worthy of being considered a river. Used to the Tamesis, Dai was not convinced.
It was mid-morning as the vigiles piled out of the all-wheeler in the car park which doubled as a stableyard and were met by the worried landlord. Blaen Aderyn was a man who looked past the age of retirement and leaned on a stick to walk, but had a fierce briskness which defied anyone to consider him too old for his role.
Introductions made, Dai sent Bryn and his team with one of the staff to begin the usual investigation preliminaries and let himself be coaxed into the warmth of the lounge area, by Aderyn. A few locals, presumably from the hill farms around, were gathered at one end watching a game of harpastum on a big screen. Now and then the image broke up or the screen blanked, but the small audience didn’t seem to mind. Aderyn found them seats well away from the sports fans. The two of them were served with mugs of honey sweetened mulled wine that Dai only agreed to when assured it was mostly just spices and water – and on the promise a tray would be provided for Bryn’s team as they worked.
“This is a terrible shock to us all, I don’t know how it could be. They were fine when they arrived early evening, ate quietly – the men here and the lady upstairs in her room. It is not anything we have had happen here before and I can’t imagine how it could be. This is so very, deeply disturbing.”
Dai nodded along sympathetically and brought the topic to the point.
“So they came in last night, rooms were pre-booked in the name of,” he checked the entry in the book – handwritten. “Deliciae Parnassa Devotius?”
The man nodded. “Yes. She came all cloaked and hooded. Could barely see her face beneath the fur.” “And her escort were Roman – are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be. They spoke like it and they both wore one of those.” He gestured to the broad silver ring of citizenship on Dai’s index finger. “They ate their food and went up to their room soon after.”
“Did they say or do anything you recall whilst they ate?”
Aderyn frowned and shook his head.
“Not aside what you might expect – the weather, having to travel at Saturnalia – that kind of thing.”
“Anything about their employer?”
“Not a word as I heard. I can ask the staff of course, or you can.”
“Did they talk to anyone else? Any other guests?” “Well, it being Saturnalia and all they were the only guests. Most of our trade comes from those who have business at one of the medical or care facilities on Ynis Mon. Romans don’t like to stay there overnight and we make a good stop-over before they run back to Londinium. But trade has not been so good lately, what with the latest economic downturn and -”
Dai cut across him.
“Did they talk to any locals?”
The old man shook his head again, a worried frown on his face.
“Not that I know. You lot are going to pin it on me though, aren’t you? Just like the last Submagistratus did over the contraband they they found in the cellar of The Fox and Radish. You don’t care who gets the blame long as someone can be tried for it. They took Geddy Haps and had her executed for it within the week. And she was as innocent as they come.” His voice was rising in pitch as he spoke and some heads turned from the game towards them.
“Won’t happen,” Dai said in the brief space when Aderyn paused to draw breath. “The man you speak of is himself disgraced and dead. There will be no miscarriage of justice on my watch. You have my word.”
“The word of a Roman?”
“The word of a Llewellyn – and a citizen.”
The old man reacted to his name, which was not so surprising. The family was very well known throughout Cornovii and beyond.
“A Llewellyn you say? And a citizen? How can that have happened?”
“When this is all dealt with I will happily come back, sit by your welcoming hearth and buy us a jug of your finest ale to share as I tell you the tale of it. But for now I need your honesty – so we can find who did this and what has happened.”
From Dying as a Druid, a Dai and Julia Mystery by E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.
Writing made easy – if you don’t mind the bumps!
The wit, wisdom, joy and frustration of a writer’s life summed up in limericks…
It isn’t a matter of talent precisely
It’s more the decision to write something nightly
Of maidens forlorn
Or a dip into porn
It need not be good but one day just might be
The downside was that living on Invercallus was like living in a furnace.
Jaz hated that you couldn’t go out in the daytime without wearing full on protective gear to shield from the heat and solar radiation. But at night it was very different. The air was cool and clear and the red rocky landscape looked beautiful. Even so the only habitable zone was at one of the poles – it was the only place water didn’t all evaporate away and the only place some stubby plants had managed to put the odd splash of colour on the dull ochre-grey background.
Jaz had never figured why they didn’t go full dome for the settlements here. Instead people shifted their way of life and spent the days sleeping and the nights transacting whatever of business or labour they needed to do. Maybe that was because many here came from Thuringen and were well used to days that were nights.
There were plenty of domes. But not connected in any proper way. The entire settlement was pretty much a huge spaceport and nothing else. Except unlike most spaceports, each bay had its own attached residential mini-dome. Maybe some of the privately owner-occupied ones had lavish fixtures and fittings, but as the Tarams didn’t even really live in theirs it was pretty basic. Jaz could compare it with the kind of comfort level he’d endured in barracks during his time with the Specials – except the food here was a lot better.
Much of the time, Jaz had the place to himself. Thuringen was a short hopper ride away and, like most else of the people who called Invercallus home, the Tarams preferred to be there, or anywhere else, as much as they could. He wasn’t surprised. Going over what they had was depressing enough. The bulk of their finances were tied up to pay for the bay. The ship, such as it was, belonged to them. And that had been the first big row – Day One of the new plan.
“Sell it. We need something newer, faster. Something that you don’t need to worry if it’s going to break up from gravity stress each time you hit into FTL.”
He had been sitting with Marche going over the team’s resources. Big lists on remote screens all over the walls. She shot up, her face snarling like he’d said something to insult her.
“It’s my ship. It’s all I got. If I sell we’d have to lease a ship and that’d eat more than we can raise from the work we got offering.”
Jaz ignored her snarling tone.
“The work you had offering. You might recall we agreed you’re not taking that kind of thing anymore.”
Marche had her fists tight and for a moment Jaz was calculating where he’d need to go to put her on the ground without hurting her too bad or damaging anything. But she didn’t attack. Just stood there glaring.
“So,, we spend out on a lease ship and pay for it with what?” She gestured to the bleak land beyond the dome. “Sand? ‘Cos that’s all we’d be left with. We’d not even be able to pay the rent on this place.”
“You would. Even at breakers’ prices your flying scrapheap’s going to be worth enough to keep this place and pay the lease on a decent ship for half a year – and get you some specialist gear. But, I’m thinking you’ll likely find some scrimping freetrader willing to pay over that base. Besides, you got no choice. That deathtrap is getting to the point it’s going to cost you more to run it for a year than it’s worth. It’s holding you back, like a fucking great stone.”
Marche looked like she’d run into a wall. “Specialist gear? You mean more than standard stuff?”
Jaz nodded, trying to put as much conviction as he could into his words. “That’s what you need. Something you can offer others can’t. Something you can make a name for. The big mistake most teams make starting up is doing what you’ve been doing – taking whatever’s on offer and not thinking strategically.”
She was gawping at him now, like she wasn’t sure if he was looped or genius.
“And if we don’t make enough money in them six cycles?”
Jaz shrugged.
“Then you know you’re not good enough to cut it, and you go find a decent team that’s already established and sign up with them instead.”
“But if we still had the ship -”
“You could turn freetrader instead. ‘Cos by that time, with the big advantage you got in having me along on this, if you can’t make it as a team you’ll never make it.”
He could see she was unhappy. Chewing it over like the remains from a day old synth-meal.
“And if I say no?”
Jaz shook his head.
“If you say no, I’ll still give you some basic training. But won’t bring you much. Maybe get you the chance to tag on some mediocre commander’s reserve list in the long run. That’s the closest you’ll get to what you want to be.”
She’d still baulked.
“I need to think. Ask the others. It’s not just my future.”
“Take the time you need. Just not too much of it.”
She hadn’t needed much. He’d still been going over the lists, checking prices, juggling figures and looking into what kind of work was most in demand – or at least most in demand and not going to get them all stint in the Specials if they got caught doing it.
Marche came back with the others close behind, looking like school kids being up for misbehaviour in front of the class. Jaz wiped off the screens and stared at them expectantly. Shit. Just standing there, freshfaced, they made him feel ancient.
“Well?”
“We’re in. We’ll sell the ship.”
Result.
From Iconoclast: Not To Be a Fortune’s Fools book by E.M. Swift-Hook
Working Title Blogspot 