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.

“What new information did you have for me?” Julia asked. “You mentioned something when I arrived.”
Decimus frowned.
“I did?” Then his frown cleared. “Oh yes, I did, we have tracked down where Quintillas Publius Luca and his wife have been staying. They were under assumed names, of course. As he was the one banished, not her, there is no grounds to arrest her. But someone will have to go and break the news to that grieving widow too.”
“She can wait, this needs to be sorted first.”
It wasn’t too long before the sound of hurrying feet announced the return of the guard.
“Yes?” Decimus barked.
“The domina is not in the house. The rear door guard reports that she went out about two hours ago. A hovercab was waiting for her.”
“Thank you.”
The guard made a smart about turn and left the room. Julia poked around inside her head for something to say. She opened her mouth, but before she could speak the guard came back.
“One Llewelyn asking for Domina Julia,” he said woodenly.
“Let him in, man. Let him in.”
Dai came in, looking, Julia thought, distinctly uncomfortable. She noticed there was a new garum stain on his tunic. Didero gave him a wry grin.
“It appears,” he said heavily, “that my lady wife, who may well be connected to your investigation, has chosen to leave home. I have no idea where she has gone, though I fully intend to find out.” He cracked his knuckles, which sounded as loud as a pistol shot in the quiet room. “So just spit out whatever it is you are worrying about phrasing tactfully. I promise not to bite your head off.”
“I can help with the whereabouts of the domina,” Dai’s voice was flat. “I’ve just left her. Considering what she promised would happen to me and Bryn if we didn’t keep our mouths shut, I wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. But. I left Domina Lydia comforting the widow of Urbanus Hostilius Rufus.”
Didero leapt into action and before Julia had chance to think about what to do next, half a dozen grim-faced Praetorians were dispatched to the upmarket apartment building with orders to arrest anyone they found in the Rufus home.
Julia shared a grimace with Dai.
“Why do I have the distinct impression they won’t find anybody?”
Dai shrugged elaborately.
“There’s something else. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Rufus’ death came as news to the domina.”
Decimus looked at him soberly.
“You could be wrong, but you don’t think you are, do you?”
“No. I don’t.”
“So we wait.”
We do,” Julia agreed, then she had a thought. “There is something else we can do. The wife of Quintillas Publius Luca. I think she might be part of whatever is going on. You wouldn’t consider having her picked up, would you?”
“Why not? It smells to me like she could be up to her patrician titties in whatever is going on… apart from anything else she made no attempt to report her husband missing.”
He bashed his bell again and dispatched more Praetorians.

Part XVI 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.

B caused a certain amount of spirited discussion as the candidates all have adequate reasons to be detested. So. Are we disassembling Bagpipes, Botox, or Brexit? None of them as it turns out. Brenda pulled rank and thus:

B is for: Brazilian

Not the football team, or the people of that fine country, though. The Brazilian in the firing line today is the waxing of the lady garden.
Aside from the undoubted painfulness of the procedure, and the fact one is expected to go to a ‘salon’ and pay good money to have ones pubes torn out by the roots…
One has to ask why.
Why do you want your most intimate area plucked like the Sunday chicken?
What possible benefit is there to removing the protective covering from one’s fanny?
Why does an adult woman want to model her pudenda on those of a pre-pubescent child?
And, if you are saying that you want it all gone, what the actual **** is that little strip of hair, coyly (or not) known as a landing strip, for?

Let’s hit the old chestnut first. Hygiene. There are no benefits to personal hygiene in having no pubic hair. In fact it may be deleterious to such, as the hair is protective.

It looks nice. If you really think that it’s your privilege. But you’re wrong.

My husband/boyfriend/clients like it. Unless they are paying for the privilege (when even Brenda is willing to admit that men may get half a vote), you should maybe ask yourself why he likes the frozen chicken look. Does he want you to be his baby? Is he wanting to control your labia? Or does he just think he should like it because some bozo on the internet told him he should? Whatever the reason behind his championship of this refined torture, we girls would suggest a quid pro quo. Tell him you’ll get a Brazilian if he gets a back, sack and crack wax. See how keen he is then…

Though the biggers never see it, there is much going on in their own backyard where the ‘nomes make their home…

The gnomes watched furtively while some strange biggers dug, sweated, swore and laboured at building a big pond. A pond with square sides and blue tiles. Late at night, when the garden folk had the place to themselves they strolled over to stare.
It was, as Big Sid declared, a bloody big hole.
But then it was finished and filled with water, and the household biggers jumped in and out squealing gleefully.
The party to christen the pool might have been less successful if the guests had seen a line of grinning gnomes pissing into the water in the moonlight.

Jane Jago

Writing inspired by the art of Ian Bristow

The smoke which filled the interior of the Dreaming Room sneaked around the edges of Kanu’s thoughts, whispering of what was to come.
“You must lie here,” the High Priest declared, gesturing with his staff of office to a place on the stone floor which had been marked around by engraved with holy symbols. They glittered darkly in the sputtering light of the torches, having been filled freshly with the blood from the sacrifice just made to send Kanu on his journey.
He wanted to say no, to protest this was a mistake that the birthmark he bore was just that and not a sign that he would be the one to fulfil the prophecy. But the eyes of the High Priest were without compassion and the expressions on the faces of the two strong women armed with fire-spears who flanked him were invisible behind their beaked masks.
So Kanu lay down in the sacred place in the Dreaming Room and closed his eyes. The rolling chants of the priests in the god’s sanctuary reached in through the doorway lifting his inner self like waves on the shore.
Then he was standing on the shore beneath a dark star-filled sky on the shores of a blood-red sea.
“Look!”
The voice was that of the High Priest and yet also that of the god. Kanu looked into the water and saw his reflection. Talons. Wings. Horns. A towering body with primal strength.
It was true.
The prophecy was true.
He was indeed the Destroyer.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Ian is an awesome artist and cover designer, you can find his work at Bristow Design or watch him in action creating this piece on ART with IAN

Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

Mo Ryan whacked the ball back over the net and then raised his arms high in victory as his opponent failed to return it. On the next court in the women’s championship finals, Emily Payne made an identical gesture as she won her match point.

The pictures went viral, but the comments were very different.

‘Tennis hunk Ryan celebrates victory’

‘Disgusting Payne shows up unshaved.’

Later, in their hotel bedroom, Mo shook his head in disbelief.

“So why is my pit hair sexy and yours disgusting?”

Emily shrugged.

“Dual standards.”

“We’ll see.”

In his next match, Mo wore a skirt.

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…

If you tuned in expecting advice from Moons, you are out of luck this week. Instead, you’ve got me again, Jacintha Farquhar, hag of this parish.

All right you load of miserable excuses for human beings who fancy yourself the next Stephen King, pin back your lugholes and be prepared to learn. You are all very keen on writing epic battles and knights in shining armour and all that crap, but I’m willing to bet there isn’t a one of you has ever actually even seen a fight leave alone dirtied your precious pinkies by being involved in that most working class of pastimes that is a bloody good bundle.

Writing about Fisticuffs

Okay then. Here’s the deal. This week’s lesson is entitled fisticuffs and is intended to give you at least the vestige of an idea about what happens when adult human beings set out to beat the crap out of each other.

First things first. If you want to really understand your knights in shining and their trusty steeds, join a re-enactment society. Get your feet stomped on by something that feels like Mummy’s best le Creuset Marmite, crawl around in mud and snot and tears for a while, watch as the bloke on the horse breaks every bone in his body when he hits the ground from a height of seventeen hands. Then go rewrite your crappy medieval fight. Similarly, should you be romanticising the English Civil War, go join the Sealed Knot and enjoy the delights of a pre-dawn melee on a frozen moor. I’m sure those of you living in the colonies have something similar recreating your own local battles. Want an idea of modern or futuristic combat? Try laser-tag or go paintballing.

The more mundane sort of present-day scuffling is a little more problematic to become personally involved in. For two reasons.

One: there is the potential to get hurt quite badly (and should some middle-class twat turn up and randomly start throwing punches, everybody will forget their grievances with each other and unite to beat the living crap out of him or her).

Two: the real possibility of getting arrested exists.

For the above reasons I have chosen not to suggest you seek personal involvement. Instead, I’ll let you learn from my experience and debunk some of the popular and misguided myths that pepper the writing of the fight virgin.

1. It is extremely difficult to knock somebody out with one punch. And should you manage to do so the chances of having inflicted serious and life-threatening injury are very high.
2. It is almost impossible to punch someone and cause sufficient pain so that your opponent will admit defeat. This is because most people in fights are seriously impaired by drink or drugs and have had their pain threshold raised to somewhere in the stratosphere
3. If you knock somebody down, don’t be thinking that makes them not dangerous. Nine times out of ten they will get up. Fucking furious. If you should ever manage to put an opponent on the floor the only sensible action is to leg it.
4. Please do not ever think that any sense of chivalry can be found in a Saturday Night Special. When they are in the moment, men will hit, men, women, OAPs, cats, dogs, toddlers, their own mothers. You have been warned.
5. Nobody. But nobody walks out of a mass punch-up with their hair/make-up immaculate and their clothes in apple pie order. It. Does. Not. Happen. Participants (even those accounted victorious) will be dirty, bruised, smeared with blood and mucus, and, in the case of the female of the species, inevitably missing one shoe (almost always the left).

So, there we have it Jacintha’s guide to the grim realities of physical combat. Read, learn, inwardly digest and get your fucking act together. Now you have no excuse to get it wrong so go and rewrite that last fight scene and leave me to my prosecco.

Next week: Moons will be back so you can get more of his drivel on how to write a book.

Jacintha Farquar, unfortunate 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 please don’t because if you do he’ll be gloating for weeks!!

After the equinox, before Halloween
October falls in that strange place between
And has become a time that means much to me
After the equinox, before Halloween.

The last month of long days before the clocks change
The last month for sunshine afore colder ways
The high month of autumn and her golden sheen
After the equinox, before Halloween.

But for me October holds some special glow
For of all the people I have come to know
October is when the birthdays seem to be
Of those friends I most cherish, who mean most to me.

So I think there’s a magic in October’s span
Something quite precious that makes me a fan
Of that enchanted time that falls in between
After the equinox, before Halloween.

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.

IV

Julia was rapidly getting annoyed. There was something big and bad going on, she knew it in her gut but she couldn’t pin it down. As she had feared, talking to the lion keeper’s wife had proved a waste of time although it wrung her loins with pity. Somebody somewhere had to know something. But whom? She kicked the wall of the office she had been allotted and swore sulphurously. Edbert looked up from the dagger he was polishing the nicks out of.
“Why don’t you go have a word with the lovely Lydia?” he rumbled. “I heard a rumour that she’s thick with the wives of both the dead Romans and with the Arena boss.”
Julia gave him a grim look, knowing full well that asking him about the source of his rumour would get her nowhere. Praetorian barrack-room gossip was her guess. Stamping her feet into her boots and striding out of the room, she crossed the courtyard and was admitted to the Tribune’s lodgings without comment. A moment later she was at the door of Lady Lydia’s rooms. She tapped and a homely female face appeared.
“You after her ladyship?”
Julia nodded.
“She ain’t here.”
Julia was nonplussed and the woman sighed.
“If you was to ask me, she don’t intend coming back.”
Julia stiffened.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I just found out that she took her jewel box.”
“Come with me,” Julia snapped.
She stomped off along the corridor, not bothering to check whether or not the woman followed her. Hurrying as fast as she dared without causing too much remark, she was soon knocking on the door of the Tribune’s suite of offices. The secretarius came to the door.
“I need to see the Tribune,” Julia demanded.
The man frowned, but she heard Decimus speak sharply.
“Who is it, man?”
“Domina Julia,” the man mumbled.
“Let her in then, and bugger off.”
The secretarius glared at Julia, but he opened the door wide and shuffled through it and passed her.
“Come in, girl. Come in.” Decimus bellowed.
Julia went into the room followed by Lady Lydia’s servant. The Tribune stood in front of an open window with his big hands clasped grasped behind his neck. She stopped quietly and waited for him to speak.
“I hate all the admin and paperwork that goes with this job and I hate that little pederast of a keyboard-fiddler. Hate him and his computer equally.” He did not trouble to modulate his volume and the secretarius would still have been in earshot. Then he dropped his voice and turned to her with a smile. “I was about to contact you with some new information anyway. But what brings you here, little sister?”
Julia shuffled her feet and he stopped smiling.
“So. It’s not a social call?”
“No. It’s about the Lady Lydia.”
“What about her?” He sounded long-suffering rather than surprised.
“I went to talk to her and she seems to have gone missing.”
That summoned a frown to his face.
“Missing? What do you mean missing? And why did you want to speak to her?”
“Missing as in not in the house, and her woman here says she has taken her jewellery box. And I wanted to talk to her because one of her close friends is dead, and two have been recently widowed.”
Decimus glowered at her from beneath his thick, black brows then hit a bell on his desk with one hard fist. A guard came scuttling in.
“Will you please find out if Domina Lydia is in the house?”
“Sir.”
The guard left at a gallop, and the Tribune turned his fulminating gaze on the serving woman who shook her head and returned it stoically.
“You might have known she was up to something,” the woman said, her tone inappropriately accusing. “She has been too quiet. Except for that Titillicus and he was in the nature of a diversion.”
Decimus showed his teeth.
“Shut up Boudicca. If you can’t be anything but right you can just shut up.”
The woman actually smiled at him. There’s a story here, Julia thought, but she was too exercised with the puzzle in hand to add another set of questions to her list. However, Decimus obviously felt the need to explain.
“Boudicca here is a Briton by birth, but she was sold to Lydia’s futatrix of a mother when she was a little girl, just before enslaving anyone was outlawed. Of course every decent person promptly freed their existing slaves, if they had not already done so, but as it was not a legal requirement, the old cunnus didn’t. So Boudicca came with my lady wife as a body slave. I freed her. Annoyed the merda out of Lydia, but you know how I feel about slavery and those who keep trying to get it reinstated.”
“I do.”
It was not the whole story, Julia thought, she got the impression she was being told the details as much to distract as to inform. But right then there seemed no more to say on the topic and she was not about to enquire, so the three people in the room stood in silence for a moment.

Part XV 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.

A is for: self-described Alpha Males

Specifically those who pontificate endlessly about how to be a ‘real man’.

Let’s unpick this particular idiocy.

Firstly. Is there such an animal as a human alpha male? We beg leave to doubt this as an unproven theory. It is a possibility that certain animal societies subscribe to hierarchical maleness, but they are a little less evolved sociologically than all/most/some humans. Where creatures who have to kill to survive may prize size and aggression. Humans should have reached a point where intelligence trumps proddy behaviour, and quiet competence is prized above loud mouthed shoutiness.
However. If we really are looking for male leaders, we certainly won’t be scraping the bottom of the pond in order to dredge up misogynistic idiots who seek to camouflage their own lack of intellectual rigour by calling any man who doesn’t look up to them ‘gay’.
On which point we note that there are various overpriced ‘workshops’ where the sad and the stupid seek to become ‘alphas’ by means of enduring humiliation at the hands of a set of con artists who possibly even believe their own con trick.
Note: if allowing some guy in army surplus fatigues to urinate on your head is what it takes to become alpha. What does that make it worth?

Though the biggers never see it, there is much going on in their own backyard where the ‘nomes make their home…

Big bigger got someone to come and make a mess of the orchard. There was sandpits and holes with plastic cups inside.
He spent hours there hitting a ball with a stick.
The gnomes were fascinated, but the moles were incensed. It seems them cups echoed something rotten and woke up baby mole.
They stood it for a week.
Early one morning Big stuck his hand into a cup to get the ball he had just knocked in there.
His screamed and ran with blood pouring from his hand.
Mole looked out of the cup and showed his sharp teeth…

Jane Jago