Jacintha Farquhar, maternal parent of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV offers important life lessons to those who like to think they’ve got what it takes to write a damn book…

Yup. Jacintha Farquar. Again. Here to moan in your lugholes about whatever turgid pap you writers seem to think you can hurl at us poor readers with no comeback.
I mean, here to help you aspiring novelists hone your art and improve your technique.
Honestly.

Cultural References

You, yes, you, stop looking away as if this has nothing to do with you because you know you have done it. You will have dropped the names of movies you love, references to books or music you love and that esoteric hobby of yours, somehow into your magnum opus.
Along comes the reader who is twenty years older or younger than you, loving the book and then POW – you’ve lost them. They don’t care that your main character likes listening to Swooky Pizzaface or that the classic scene in Toy Story Two Hundred and Twenty Three was just soo funny. And maybe you were thinking all your fly-fishing pals were going to just love that reference on page sixty-two of your post-apocalyptic novel? Well all two of them who ever read the book might do, but for the rest of your readership you’d probably have more reach by mentioning J.R. Hartley…
Did I lose you on that one?
Go Google it.
That makes my point.
One person’s cool cultural reference is another’s ‘Huh?’ or even ‘Ugh’.

Then we come with anachronisms.
Why is it every damn character in the future has a secret passion for 21st Century movies/books/HipHop or history? Now I know for a fact there will be some of you reading this who will be saying ‘Yes, well I have a passion for 4th Century BCE Greco-Roman pottery’. Well good for you if you do, but you know what? There is a reason shows and books about that are not topping any popularity charts.
My son, Moons, won’t even watch a film from the 1990s as he says the visual quality is too crap so by the time we get another century on things from this time will just be sad and dated in the minds of most.
You may fondly imagine readers are smiling as you name check the entire cast of Farscape, but no, they won’t be. They will be being reminded that they are reading a frigging book set five hundred years in the future in which the main character has an utterly unlikely obsession with an old show they never even liked themselves. You will have broken their reading immersion at best and alienated them at worst.
It is not an effing ‘easter egg’ it’s a bloody shambles.

And what about if you write in the past?
Get your facts right. It is not hard to learn when various items were discovered/invented, Google is your friend.
Don’t have someone in Tudor times wave a red rag at a bull – that kind of bull fighting didn’t exist then, and a ‘waving a red rag’ meant flapping your tongue to no good end.
Don’t have your Viking feeling his heart pumping to circulate the blood around his body, no one knew it did that then.
Don’t have a character in the Wars of the Roses thinking about the cells in his body, or talking about a virus or about bacteria – or even germs. They were not known about then.
Don’t have your Roman Senator say he is going to handbag someone or that he fights according to Queensbury rules…
Just don’t…

So in brief make sure your cultural references fit the culture. 

1. Don’t try and shoehorn in pop-culture references to the present day in your distant times sci-fi. Far from being something the modern reader can relate to you will alienate those who dislike your referenced material and break the reading immersion of everyone else. 
2. Do check that whatever cultural references you do use fit the setting both historically and – well, yes, culturally.
3. Don’t impose your own boring geekdom on your poor bloody readers thinking you look clever. You don’t, you look an effing pratt!

And if that hasn’t sent you scurrying back to your keyboard looking for the delete key I don’t know what will. So sod off unless you are going to make me another Bloody Mary…

Jacintha Farquar, grimly enduring mother of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV.

You can find more of my son’s ramblings in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago, but you shouldn’t be seen reading it anywhere there’s polite company!

November sunshine’s more of steel than gold
Pellucid light that drips through cloud
And slides as subtle gleams
Transmuting green below and blue above to grey
Enwrapping all in chastest shades
Drawing more of shadow into each day
And close about the naked trees
Discarded twigs and leaves
Acorns, chestnuts, all next season’s seeds
And smoke that lingers in the clinging mist.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook is a whodunit set in an alternative modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules.

It was more than half an hour before she returned to the Tribune’s study, where she found the two men playing a complicated board game, which, by Decimus’ face, Dai was winning.
“Thank goodness you are back, puella. Before I got my arse whipped by a sheep-shagging provincial. What did our master say?”
“Before or after he stopped swearing?”
“After.”
“Well. First off he’s sorry he stuck you with his awkward futatrix of a daughter. Second, he’s putting the word out on Marcella Junius. Going to make it treason for anyone to assist her. It’s going out on the public screens now. With pictures of her victims, especially those poor bloody dogs. Reckons he can winkle her out, and her life isn’t worth a brass penny when he does.”
Dai looked both relieved and pained and Decimus clapped his shoulder with some fellow feeling.
“Don’t think about it. I know there isn’t any proof, but I also know in my gut that the futatrix is guilty.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any doubt of that,” Dai sounded truly disturbed, “I just can’t get my head around it.”
“Which bit in particular?”
“Why. I think I am struggling with why.”
“Money,” Julia could hear the weariness in her own voice, “money and power. While he was venting his fury on me, the boss had all the information we have run through the computers in Rome. Of course, there was other stuff we couldn’t access. Most of which he wouldn’t tell me. But when the computers added up the probability it came out at over ninety-eight per cent that three patrician women hatched a pretty plot to get themselves back to Rome as wealthy widows. It looks like the poor stupid arena curatrix couldn’t cope with the reality of murder – they found some messages she sent to Lydia which hinted she wanted out. She was probably always expendable anyway. I feel sick. And there is a thing I have to tell you, Decimus, and it’s not nice. Sorry Dai, but I have to say it in private.”
She looked into Dai’s face, expecting the shuttered look that indicated another attack of hurt feelings, and was surprised to see complete understanding as he heaved himself to his feet.
“Wait.”
Decimus looked at the pair of them.
“I trust the sheep-shagger. Just talk, Julia.”
She looked at their expectant faces and swallowed the bile that threatened to choke her.
“It’s about Lydia and Octavia Scaevia…”
Decimus actually nodded his big head.
“Lovers, were they?”

Julia felt her jaw drop slightly open and she closed it quickly.
“Probably. It looks like Marcella killed them because the two of them had fallen in love – or lust – and tried to run off together with a big part of the loot. Don’t tell me you knew?”
“Not knew, precisely. But I always suspected that was where her tastes lay. The boy she wanted was more feminine than most women. And there was the way she looked at some of the pretty butterflies that cluster around men of wealth.” He sighed. “I tried to talk to her about it once, but she clammed up like the bitter oyster she was.”
“Honestly, Decimus, what did you expect?. She could hardly admit that to you. Even if she admitted it to herself…”
Julia and her childhood friend glared into each other’s eyes for a moment, and it felt to her as if thirty years had slipped away and she was five years old again, squabbling with the ten-year-old son of her grandfather’s oldest friend. She smiled and Decimus relaxed.
“Aye. I know. But I tried.”
“You did. And honestly I don’t know what else you could have done.”
Dai coughed apologetically and Julia couldn’t help looking over her shoulder and laughing.
“Sorry Dai, are we being embarrassing?”
“No. I was just thinking. If they were planning to kill their husbands, shouldn’t the Tribune be taking extra precautions?”
“I already do. I live with people wanting me dead. Though you can be sure my lads will be extra vigilant. They are not stupid, and at least some of them will have put the clues together.”

Part XX will be here next week. If you can’t wait to find what happens next you can snag the full novella here.

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

F is for: Fat Shaming

Why are some people only happy when they are disrespecting others? How is it okay to look at someone’s picture on antisocial media and pronounce them overweight?

It’s a symptom of a serious societal failing. 

How has it gained such a toehold?

The collective theory of three elderly women who wear their bodies however it suits them, is that the body police need to eff off and eat some cake. 

However, there is currently an unhealthy obsession with body shape, which is largely fuelled by ‘reality tv’, men with twisted agendas, and the diet industry.

Let’s look at these factors one by one.

Example A: We recently saw a female reality tv ‘star’, on some pointless red carpet or other, so extremely corseted that she could barely walk unaided and seemed scarcely able to breathe. 

What the actual f*** is all that about? And what sort of image is it selling to the young and vulnerable?

That how you look is everything?

That it’s worth causing yourself pain and possible injury in order to look as though you have a handspan waist? Because it makes you feminine and beautiful?

Yeah, right. Not. 

This sort of look is all about female subjugation, making women physically frail and mentally suggestible. Do we really want to return to the era of ‘the vapours’ and women fainting right, left and centre?

If we believe the current crop of shape police, that would represent the ideal of female beauty. That or exhibiting the appearance of a prepubescent boy.

If your body falls naturally into either camp (though the very tiny waist is unlikely in the extreme), then enjoy it. 

Example B: This takes us back to those self-defined alpha males with their lack of chins, lack of empathy, and complete disregard for women. These guys are oh so willing to tell us about their exacting standards for bedmates. Which should be a relief for anyone who doesn’t meet the blueprint. Ignore them. Aside from the insulting level of arrogance, it’s also worth wondering whether these guys will be as poorly endowed in the love-making department as they are in the thinking dept. It would be such a waste of life to try and change one’s body shape for seven seconds of ineptitude.

Example C: Women need to take diet pills (and suffer stomach cramps and diarrhoea), or fast ‘intermittently’(and be hungry and grumpy), or have some ‘simple’ surgery (and take the inevitable risk). 

Yeah, course we do. Not.

These greedy bar-stewards need ignoring and starving of financial incentives. 

If a young woman has a perfectly normal girlie body – even, perish the thought, featuring a little bit of a belly – then nobody has the right to tell her she should change her body shape to meet their standards. She needs to look them straight in the avatar and tell them politely, but firmly, to f*** right off!

Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

***** ***** *****

Jane Jago

Writing inspired by the art of Ian Bristow

The Pain,
Lightless, black as night
It Burns,
Salt water scores your skin
Red Eyes,
Have pity not, nor sight
They Stare,
Yet understand your sin
Your Prayer,
For sight of that far home
Too Far,
Too lost beneath the deep 
Your Wish,
To be no more alone
His Answer,
The last and final sleep

Jane Jago

Ian is an awesome artist and cover designer, you can find his work at Bristow Design.

Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

It happened again.

It had happened once already. She was sure. Just as she took the key from her pocket, the door opened by itself. 

Or had that been in a dream?

An oddly familiar tension gripped her stomach as she hesitated on the threshold.

Burglars? Poltergeists? Had she forgotten to shut the door when going out?

It was like rethinking the thoughts, standing in a reflection of herself, watching an event that had already happened. 

“Is that you dear?” Her mother’s voice. The sudden familiarity banishing the demons of déjà vu. “I let myself in and put the kettle on.”

E.M. Swift-Hook

Jacintha Farquhar, maternal parent of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV offers important life lessons to those who like to think they’ve got what it takes to write a damn book…

es, it is me. Jacintha. Struggling to be sober enough to write something sufficiently significant to be worthy of putting out in public, which is more than many of you lot try to do.
I have been making a point of reading you ‘indie’ authors a bit over the last few weeks and I have to say there are some really stunning books out there that you people have written. Wonderful, captivating and more than worth my Kindle Unlimited sub five times over. Well, maybe not that good, but pretty damn good.
I must also say there is also some really dreadful drek which some of you seem to feel you have a right to inflict on the rest of us. The sort of writing that, were I the author, I would be embarrassed to put my name to it.
So maybe I can address some of the problems from the drek pile.

Too Many Heads

Oh. My. Effing. God.
I have no idea what it is with you writers, but get behind the wheel of a story and the first thing you want to do is tell it from five thousand different perspectives. Either by hopping from head to head like a libidinous frog, which I surely have no need to tell you is a terrible idea, or by having a character change break every other page.
No.
Don’t do it.

In my extremely humble opinion as a mere reader of your wonderful creative ramblings, I can spot a newbie a mile off by the fact it is page thirty and I have already run through five or six different characters’ heads like a bad dose of Montezuma’s revenge.
There seems to be this conviction that every last detail of the story has to be fed to the reader in a scene through a character – and sometimes the same scene from more than one character as there was this tiny nuance the reader might miss. I blame those so-called creative writing classes who ram ‘show don’t tell’ so far up the jacksie of every would-be writer that they are incapable of writing a sentence that says ‘It was snowing’ but have to write ‘The soft bosomy whiteness settled from the skies upon the reluctant face of mother earth.’ So they then think they have to ‘show’ every last effing nuance of the whole damn plot!
No.
No.
And again …NO!

If Shakespeare managed to have action take place ‘offstage’ and still keep his audiences at fever pitch, you can too – unless you are a truly crap writer in which case go back to reading until you’ve learned how to do it better and stop inflicting your vile ‘brain babies’ on a long-suffering world.

Gods I need a drink now, where did I put the tequila and pernod?

So, let me try and explain this again for those of you at the back who were busy on your smartphones.

(1) Before you write your book choose no more than four characters (and that is pushing the limits) through whom you can tell your story and accept that now and then you will have to find some other way than character presence to explain to the reader something that has happened. And yes, there can be one ‘guest’ POV in the book as well, but no more. You. Can. Do. It.

(2) Do not think you have to give your reader insight into every last damn thought of every last damn character. You don’t. Those that really matter can be conveyed to the reader through your POV character. That is what good writers do. Yes. Really.

If you don’t learn these lessons, you’ll be dug deep and drowning in the drek pile for life and good luck to you.

Now bugger off the lot of you, I want to watch the reruns of Bridgerton in peace.

Jacintha Farquar, who strongly wishes she could deny being the mother of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV.

You can find more of my son’s ramblings in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago, but only if you are truly masochistic!

It’s November now
Chilly rain and fog
Wind shakes the house
Like a wet smelly dog
It’s November now
Nights are growing long
But leaves still hang on bony trees
Like forgotten notes of a song

©️jj 2024

Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook is a whodunit set in an alternative modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules.

As she wavered on the edge of tears there came a polite tap on the door. Boudicca stepped away from Decimus as he straightened his spine.
“Come.”
The Praetorian who came into the room looked about as shocked as it is possible for a properly hard man to be.
“Report, man.”
“Sorry dominus. Marcella Tullia Junius. We went to her apartment. There was nobody there. At least nobody alive. There was a dead servant, female, poison suspected, and two lap dogs.” The man stopped and Julia could see a muscle working in his cheek. He got himself together and carried on. “Two lap dogs. You know sir, them little balls of fluff. My mother has one, it’s a soft little thing. They was kicked to death.”
Julia could understand the soldier’s repugnance and gave him the ghost of a smile. He thanked her with his eyes before pressing on.
“We thought that whoever had taken the lady must have killed her dogs before abducting her. But it doesn’t seem as if that can be true. One of the neighbours saw her leaving. On the arm of a very well dressed man. Overheard her saying that all loose ends were now tied up.”
“Good man,” Decimus spoke kindly. “Cut along now and get yourself a big drink. Tell them I said.”
When the door had closed behind the obviously shaken man, Julia looked at Decimus.
“Cold culpa,” she said before pouring a cup of mead and draining it in one gulp. “One assumes,” she spoke carefully lest her voice shake, “that Domina Marcella had no more use for her lap dogs.”
“So it would appear,” Dai sounded just as sick as she felt. “And can anybody tell me why that seems worse than killing her servant?”
“I can,” Boudicca volunteered, “them animals was small and helpless and she will have petted and spoiled them until she turned on them. I’m doubting whether the servant was ever a pet and she must have known what sort of person her mistress was.”
Julia lifted one small shoulder and spoke softly.
“Indeed. I just don’t think we’ll ever find their mistress and that disturbs me almost more than I can say. But for now I have to go and make a long and complicated call.”
Dai offered her a conspiratorial look.
“You want me to come and hold your hand?”
“Tempting. But I won’t put you in the firing line. Himself is liable to fry my ears until he calms down.”
“Wait with me,” Decimus said with gruff entreaty, “I could do with another drink and somebody to talk to.”
Dai looked uncomfortable and Boudicca favoured him with a singularly charming smile.
“You are all right,” she said. “I’ve got work.”
She kissed Decimus and rolled out of the room. Julia followed her, trying very hard not to laugh at the men’s faces.
“Score one to you,” she said as the door shut behind them.
Boudicca laughed and clapped Julia on the shoulder with one meaty hand.
“You need not worry about Decimus. I’ll look after him.”
She headed for wherever, leaving Julia to make for the comms room and a secure line to the Praetor.

Part XIX will be here next week. If you can’t wait to find what happens next you can snag the full novella here.