Two Women and Some Books
Poems of puppy Fozzie Jago as he is exploring and experiencing the world!
Wot is this krissmus?
Who is the fat man?
They say he gots treatoes
In his caravan
They sez there is trees
Inside peepses howses
And something called stockings
And sugary mouses
They say there is turkey
Like very huge chiggun
Foz hopes that his hoomum
Is buying a biggun
What is this krissmus?
What chune do it play?
Foz gives hoomans and dog frens
A big kiss that day
Bonjour mes petites,
And as I place my fingers upon the keyboard to reach out to you, dear Readers Who Write, I feel a certain powerful link has now been established between us. I, your pedagogue, creator of the seminal classic science-fiction opus, ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth’, and you my disciples, minions of literature, striving to bring to birth your first fumbling fantasies.
What, you may wonder, led me to this pivotal point of realisation in our ongoing relationship? Well, it was that I received a missive from one Adoring Fan, asking – nay pleading with me, to come to her aid. And so, moved by her desperate plight, I shall don my metaphorical armour and ride to the rescue on my white charger.
Dear IVy,
Sometimes my characters do things that I don’t mean for them to do and it affects my plot. What should I do?
Regards,
Melonie.
Dear Melonie,
How I feel your pain and anguish! It is such a grief when those very characters which you have nursed and nurtured within your own bosom, turn on you like ungrateful lovers and spite your best intentions.
But you must first remember that these characters are brought to birth by the delicate insemination of the Muse into the fecund womb of your own creativity. These are the delightful love-children of Calliope and as such they are bound to challenge your parental authority and demand their own way in all things.
Now, there will be those who will say ‘Be firm!’ and insist you impose your will on these unruly offspring. It is your story and these characters are mere brain-foibles – figments you have postulated to carry the plot. Force them to do what you demand and be done with it!
But to such, I say ‘Fiddlesticks!’ and I say ‘Phooey!’. Those who take such a view understand nothing of the higher levels of authorial inspiration. To them is forever barred the inner sanctum of creative intimacy. They will never know the delight of engaging with the fruits of their literary loins. No, dear Melonie, I counsel you quite otherwise.
Be bold and invite your rebellious muselings to meet with you. Remember, these are not mere stirrings in your synapses, these are real and pure individual characters, formed from the life-breath of your soul. So then, in an atmosphere of trust and empathy brought about by your deep familial bond, open your heart to them and show them the reasons for the choices you wish to make about their lives. And more, you must listen! Listen to their dulcet voices, their tones of appeal, their hopes, their fears, their aspirations. If well done, with the love and compassion every creative parent owes to the true and legitimate heirs of their art, then – and only then – will you reach a consensus and be able to progress.
Regards,
Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV
PS. Please do not address me as ‘IVy’ again that is a privilege I reserve only to my close and intimate friends and you do not qualify. Unless you happen to have written an incredibly popular fantasy or science fiction book of course, in which case I will send you my contact details by return and we may be able to enter into some form of carefully modulated acquaintanceship.
You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.
Take this exclusive opportunity to explore the mysteries of the zodiac through the wisdom of the esoterically enigmatic Madam Pendulica…
You will be butting heads with everybody this month. Just be sure to ram home your point in every argument. Woolly thinking never wins!
This is the month you need to be bull-headed and stand by your decisions. If anyone accuses you of being stubborn just beef up your strong stance against those trying to horn in you.
You will find yourself in two minds about the best way to handle things. Don’t be divided against yourself – you can have your cake and eat it too!
You will be scuttling into some sticky situations this month. Be sure to snap up any opportunities and think laterally as that is always your strong suit.
People will be lionising your achievements this month, so don’t let any catty comments from work colleagues or loved ones dent your pride!
This is the month to finally start that project you’ve been meaning to get around to. Either that or have an affair. You need to stop blushing so much.
That decision you’ve been weighing up will need to be addressed. Whichever way you tip the scales, you will need to balance your work and your personal life.
Just when you thought things were looking good you will discover the sting in the tail. Don’t start anything new this month, you’re facing venomous opposition.
If you trot over to that attractive individual you’ve been horsing around with for a while now, you will find the pair of you could hoof it to sunnier climes. Take aim for the stars!
There will be a problem with your plumbing this month. Most likely a blocked toilet but it could be a major flood from a burst pipe. Good luck.
You’ve been thinking there was something fishy about that offer that seemed too good to be true. Now you need to decide if you want to be a big fish in a small pool or make the leap to waters new.
Madame Pendulica predicts she will return…
January explodes upon the world
With fireworks and cheers
And auld lang syne.
Then creeps she neath her soft blankets
Of snow and mist
Within her house walled with ice
And roofed with frost
And on the casement panes
She prints star patterns,
Draws icicles on eave and gable,
Paints the lawn from green to white
And with bony fingers reaches
Like the leafless trees
To caress the greyness of the sky.
Eleanor Swift-Hook
Dying to be Cured is set in a modern-day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules. Dai and Julia take on a fight against institutional corruption whilst dealing with the demands of family, friendship and domestic crises.
Kalends October MDCCLXXVII Anno Diocletiani
In the space before the small temple – so small it had been considered a mere shrine just a few years before – the crowds had gathered as usual for the chance to be chosen. They sat in their wheelchairs, or stood, faces drawn with pain and fatigue. All had given up just about everything, to make the journey here on the off chance that they might be deemed worthy to be healed by the grace of the Divine Diocletian.
It was not easy to get through the new barriers that surrounded the site. Security guards patrolled the perimeter and manned the gates. Dai Llewellyn and Bryn Cartivel had left their vehicle in the small car park behind one of the new cuponae that had sprung up to provide accomodation for those waiting their chance to visit the temple. They approached the gates on foot, beside the queue that wound back to the road. Dai felt it would give them a chance to get a better idea of the atmosphere of the place. Which was also why he had not bothered to tell anyone at the temple that he was coming to visit.
“You do have to wonder why this place is so popular,” Bryn observed, scratching at his greying hair as they walked past the queue. “Over on Ynys Mon there is a state of the art medical research facility in the Asclepieion there, always seems to be offering people the chance to sign up for clinical trials. Can’t see as how this is going to be better than that. And there they pay you to take part and you get full on comfort and care – here you have to pay just for the chance to be summoned and get to stay in a miserable pilgrims’ dormitory.”
“I read the brochure too, it makes it very clear no money is charged for the healing. But those who want may offer small donations,” Dai observed.
“Ah, right. That would be why the cuponae here do such a roaring trade and the temple just built a whole new wing for the Pontifex of the place. Small donations.”
The two guards at the gate wore the haloed head of the Divine Diocletian on tabards over their paramilitary outfits. They were also armed with nerve whips which meant they would be Roman Citizens.
“Oy! You can’t just push in where you want,” one of the two called out as Dai and Bryn reached the gate.
“We have business here, we’re not here to participate in the rites,” Dai explained politely.
“Can’t you read, spado? Sign back there says ‘Closed during divine service’.”
“Yes. So I saw. But my business means I would need to observe the proceedings. Respectfully of course.”
The gate guard gave a short laugh.
“Listen, you stupid British irrumator, only those invited to attend are allowed in. now, whatever your ‘business’ might be, I suggest you take it elsewhere before I call the local Vigiles and have you arrested for creating a disturbance.”
Beside Dai, Bryn gave a forced cough and cleared his throat.
“Senior Investigator Cartivel here, can I help you?” He held up his ID and pressed it against the fence so the gate guards could see it clearly. “And this is Submagistratus Llewellyn, who is my boss.”
Dai mirrored Bryn’s gesture and produced his own identification, holding it up so that the ring of Citizenship on his index finger was obvious too.
“If it’s no trouble, perhaps you could let us in now?” he said mildly. “We are here on a murder investigation.”
The body had been found washed up on a beach near Segontium and would normally have attracted little, if any, attention as no one had been reported missing. However this corpse had a ring of Citizenship lodged in its throat, with the finger still attached. To Dai’s impotent fury, Rome reserved the full benefits and privileges of justice for her own children – and it seemed this might be one such case.
Despite the body being partially decomposed, dental records enabled them to trace its identity. Zirri Yedder had been a freelance journalist with a history of producing cutting investigative pieces that highlighted local issues – local to Mauretania Tingitana that is, the province, where he had lived in the capital, Tingist. Although the pathologist report that Dai read was not sure of the cause of death, the body had been tortured beforehand.
But the finger was not the finger of Zirri Yedder and he had never been a Roman Citizen. He was, however, registered at a cupona in the village of Canovium and the landlady there said he had been there awaiting an invitation to the temple. She had last seen him as he set off to answer his eventual summons and no one had seen him alive since then.
Which was why Dai and Bryn now stood on the edge of the crowd watching as the service began. A security guard hovered nervously nearby, trying not to make it too obvious that he was watching them as they observed proceedings.
“Who’d have thought a man who died nearly two thousand years ago having self-labelled as a deity, would still be honoured as a worker of miracles in the modern age?” Bryn’s voice was pitched so it was lost in the chanting from the crowd. Even so Dai looked at him sharply.
“You should be careful saying those kinds of things, SI Cartivel. Especially here.”
Bryn lifted his wrist and tapped the screen on his wristphone.
“Not me, Bard, I’m just reading what our friend Yedder put up on his social media. It was meant as a teaser for his next piece.”
“And I missed that, how?”
“You are a busy man, Submagistratus and these little details…”
“I checked his social media feed, right back for the last three years.”
“Ah, that would explain it then.” Bryn was looking almost smug. “It only posted today – less than an hour ago in fact. It must have been one he scheduled before he died.”
“Spado!” Dai said, but without real rancour. “Was there more?”
The other man shook his head. “No. That was it. Just says: ‘My current investigation is going to make a lot of people sit up and think’, then what I told you. Seems to be his style. Putting up a teaser a couple of days before the main article comes out. This time though, I think he hit the wrong kind of deadline first.”
Dying to be Cured by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook first appeared in Gods of Clay: A Sci Fi Roundtable Anthology.
Advice on growing old disgracefully from an elderly delinquent with many years of expertise in the art – plus free optional snark…
If you’re old then the world will forget
All the things that you did to upset
And now you can do
All those things that you
Did before – but without the regret!
Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV takes time from his immensely important life to proffer profound advice to those who still struggle on the aspirational slopes of authorhood…
Dear Reader Who Writes,
I will admit to having sipped on a small soupcon of eggnog over the festivities and today I was less than delighted to find Mumsie glaring at me over the breakfast table with something between pity and incredulity. “Gods Moons! How can you get to be so old and not know how to deal with a hangover?” She pushed her glass over to me. its interesting aroma of bath salts and battery acid curling the hairs on the inside of my nasal cavities. Mummy was without mercy. “Stop pulling a face and drink it. Hair of the dog.”
The flavour was indeed not unakin to canine fur if it had been marinaded in fecal matter and turpentine. However, maternal wisdom won through and having consumed her panacea I am now sitting sprightly in my writing cave and able to share with you the hard-won fruits of my years as a writer-in-waiting. But now, dear RWW, it is you who are the bridesmaid and I the gushing bridegroom of the Muses.
So, to business. The new year is upon us and it behoves us all to pay heed to the ancient traditions of this especial time. No, I do not mean carrying a black cat over your shoulder backwards across the threshold of your house, or hailing your neighbour with gibberish at midnight, or singing Scottish songs about those acquaintances from the past you most certainly do want to forget. No. I mean the important tradition of making a New Year’s Resolution for your literary year ahead.
It needs to be something that encapsulates in a single intention all your writing aspirations and plans for the forthcoming twelve months. When deciding what is fitting, be not modest or parsimonious about your talent. Set yourself the greatest goal you can imagine, scale the heights of ambition, unleash the inner yearning to follow your dreams and commit yourself to that and that alone.
I will keep to myself my own resolution for the coming year as it might undermine the determination you bring to your own or even lead you astray from your petty path in some vain attempt to mimic mine. But here are a few I consider might be fitting for you, my students.
Choose well and be sure to keep it, disciple, that way lies the path to true authorship.
Happy New Year!
Yule love this!
It is the festive season,
The time December sees in
And that’s our very reason,
To grant each day for you
Something that’s old or new
Perhaps a gift or two!
TODAY’S DELIGHT – A classic song for the festive season, cheerfully and irreverently reimagined for you by the Working Title Blog…
(To be sung earnestly and with zest to the tune of ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear‘)
I came upon a crate of beer
Left out behind a bar
And as t’was closed cos t’was New Year
I shoved it in my car
Police were out in strength that night
With breathalyzer bags
But I was sober as a judge
And got through all their tags.
I took the booze to my best mate’s place
And there we had some cheer
Invited round the blokes we know
And shared out all that beer
‘Peace on the earth, goodwill to men’
I told my drunken crew
We sang the verse of Auld Lang Syne
And then began to spew.
Yule love this!
It is the festive season,
The time December sees in
And that’s our very reason,
To grant each day for you
Something that’s old or new
Perhaps a gift or two!
TODAY’S DELIGHT – A Giveaway!
Transgressor Trilogy by E.M. Swift-Hook is an omnibus of the first three books in the Fortune’s Fools science-fiction saga.
Caer sat on his pony looking at the dead body on the ground and wondering if he should send more scouts back towards the road, almost a day’s trek behind the caravan. This man had been alone, half-mad and no threat to the caravan, but others might even now be following the same path that they had taken from the road and for the same reason they had taken it: others who were scouts for brigands, bandits or bigger caravans than his own.
He spat in the dirt and narrowed his eyes as he looked past the file of wagons, ponies and people. It was late afternoon and his breath misted slightly in the air. The long cold winter was over, but in the barren Wastelands, spring was always slow to come. The air still carried a biting chill, even in the heat of the day and the distant peaks kept their mantle of snow and ice, tinged with crimson by the light of the huge red sun. Spring was having to claw its way free of winter’s greedy clutches so that Temsevar could bask in an all too brief season of warmth and growth.
The Wastelands were vast and magnificent. Here and there, standing proud and alone in the plain, like the lost sentinels of a forgotten age, were towering flat-topped mountains of rock, some so massive they were too big to cross in a day on foot. It was as though at some point in the distant past the ground had simply dropped away, leaving the high plateaux stranded above, like giant stepping stones, creating a two-tier terrain. If in the winter, these high grounds were the coldest and most exposed, in the spring they seemed always flushed with new vegetation before any managed to creep out of the more parched stones below.
Caer made his decision. With the work to be done, the four men he already had out scouting their back trail were all he could spare for the moment. He called to one of the mounted men who was riding with the caravan.
“Shevek, we are camping here.”
The man he spoke to wheeled his pony away and rode at a brisk pace towards the front of the train of wagons and animals, issuing sharp orders to make the night’s camp around the rocky debris beneath the steep cliff face of one of the high monoliths. Caer felt a familiar sense of satisfaction as those orders turned the straggling ranks of moving people, ponies and wagons into a brief flurry of chaos, before brightly coloured awnings, tents and pavilions sprung up from the chaos, like strange blossoms. Caer and his men rode through the quickly forming encampment, shouting instructions, solving problems, helping secure ropes and encouraging any who were slow to respond with the whips they carried curled in their belts.
In a remarkably short time, the caravan resembled a miniature town with streets and open spaces, stables, and pens. Fires were being kindled, children tending the animals as women kneaded dough and cut the vegetables for the evening meal. Toddlers screamed and got underfoot or rolled like puppies amongst the big, sharp-toothed dogs, which ignored them and begged for scraps with soulful eyes and then turned on each other snapping and snarling when an unsavoury morsel was cast their way.
Once the familiar routine was well established, Caer’s men guided their mounts towards the middle of the camp. The ponies’ short stubby ears, thick coats, wall-eyed glares and powerful necks, made them far from beautiful to look upon, but their split hooves could splay to grip surefooted even on snow and ice or could run fast on firmer ground. It was their broad backs which carried the burden of human traffic in both trade and war with a sturdy strength and agility which, for Caer, had a beauty all of its own.
The men who rode were as tough as their ponies. The older ones amongst them wore their hair long, stained red and tied back into a heavy braid, the greater length of the braid telling of ever greater age and experience. The youngest men had their hair shaved so close to the scalp as to seem bald. They were not even allowed to begin to grow a braid until they had served a year of apprenticeship with the caravans. All the men wore coats made from a brightly coloured heavy-felt cloth, over shirts with billowing sleeves, patterned skirted jerkins made from fleeced hides and plain felt britches which gathered loosely into calf-high boots. All were armed: every man wore a bandolier of wooden cartridge boxes over one shoulder and carried a crude pistol; one or two had a long-barrelled musket or rifled carbine, on their backs and each wore a long-bladed knife with an ornately carved hilt and whips hung looped at their belts.
These men were of the Zoukai, a brotherhood of warrior guardians, hiring themselves to protect the caravans which carried the trade of Temsevar. Named after the swift and ruthless, red-plumed predatory birds which hunted from the skies in these very wastes, they were bound by a strict code of honour which placed loyalty to their captain and their caravan above all else.
From the opening of The Fated Sky the first part of Transgressor Trilogy, and the first book in Fortunes Fools by E.M. Swift-Hook.
The omnibus collection of Transgressor Trilogy is now FREE for you to download until the New Year!
Yule love this!
It is the festive season,
The time December sees in
And that’s our very reason,
To grant each day for you
Something that’s old or new
Perhaps a gift or two!
TODAY’S DELIGHT – Granny offers some great advice on throwing a New Year’s Eve Party!
With Christmas over you might assume it safe to stick your face back up over the parapet.
Wrong.
When your finances are at their lowest ebb, and your face and figure are showing the ravages of Asti and chocolates the new year and its attendant horrors sneers at you from the pages of the calendar emblazoned with inspirational quotes that his mother bought – meaning you can neither throw it in the bin nor deface it horribly.
However. I digress.
The best advice is to be anywhere but at home. Sadly that isn’t going to happen. And when your dearly beloved suggested inviting a ‘few’ folks around for New Year’s Eve you should really have pinned him down on the word few.
So – you have just discovered that ‘a few folks’ consists of the rugby club, the darts team, his running buddies and most of the local Young Farmers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t constitute grounds for justifiable homicide (or divorce)…
What to do.
After you finish kicking his ass, make him empty the garage and borrow his Aunty Betty’s caravan awning. This party is coming nowhere inside your house. Get straw bales for seating. Hire a couple of horrible portable toilets and some space heaters. Get the ancient ghetto blaster out of the attic. And dress warmly
Catering should be basic.
Booze wise offer only beer. Anybody wanting anything else can effing well buy it themselves.
Food? Tempting though it is to go down the route of crisps, nuts and the sweets nobody likes from the selection boxes this is a dangerous way to go .
Better by far is to construct a huge vat of stew with the leftover turkey and as much root veg as you can blackmail the husband into peeling. Vegetarians can be catered for with a bean pot of equally large proportions. Serve in paper bowls with plastic spoons and huge chunks of bread.
Job done. Zero washing up and enough stomach lining to prevent alcoholic poisoning, drunken orgiastic behaviour, or the annual drunken brawl…
A final word of warning.
Let nobody in the house or you will discover said person asleep under the stairs on about January 5…
Working Title Blogspot 