Two Women and Some Books
I’m an Amazon girl
I know how to prowl
Through the jungle of pages
To find my new towel
I’m an Amazon girl
I know how to stalk
In the dense product forest
To track down a fork
I’m an Amazon girl
I know how to hunt
Cross scarcity deserts
But I’m at the front
I’m an Amazon girl
A fine honed consumer
If I need a new PC
Or a posh poodle groomer
I’m an Amazon girl
I just make a few clicks
And all that I desire
Arrives in a few ticks.
Dear Reader Who Writes,
One somehow cannot bring oneself to address you as ‘Dear RWW’. Mummy has always insisted that one should be punctiliously polite (a skill she herself was taught by the nuns at a frightfully expensive Swiss Finishing School). Thus such a contraction of the words feels too informal for a budding relationship, although please know that is how one thinks of you, one’s little chums, since we have become so much better acquainted. I shall, however, make free use of that reduction in the main body of my text. You will have heard I am known as ‘Ivy’ to those whom I allow close familiarity – but you may call me Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV.
As the author of science fiction and fantasy – “Fatswhistle and Buchtooth” – Amazon’s one millionth on the bestseller charts and a masterclass in ‘how to’ in its own right – I feel I have the perfect credentials to offer you the highest of heuristic insights to release your own inner writer.
For those of you who have been following one’s bon mots, one will continue to offer you the benefit of one’s deep and sympathetic wisdom. And to those who have only just had the inestimable good fortune to discover my erudition and brilliance, I bid you welcome.
Tuneful tintinnabulation: Summoning the muse with music has its antecedents in acts of sympathetic magic from across our spinning globe. Like summons like. So with the aid of Eurtepe and Aoede we may bring forth Erato and Calliope. One’s musical accompaniment should be reproduced in the most audiologically pleasing manner that one’s pecuniary resources may obtain.
Oh how one longs for a full orchestra, seated in the shrubbery and serenading as one captures the essence of the Muse! But that is not to be, and, as Mummy genteelly opined when I requested this: ‘Don’t be such a twat, Moony, the bastards would only trample the euphorbia’.
Therefore one has had the inestimable good fortune to become acquainted with a young lady named Alexa, who responds to one’s every whim and command. Sympatico….
Before I even think of adding a single word to my new magnum opus ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth Go Forth’, I must first suffuse the atmosphere with my own especially blended symphony of scent (see the last lesson) and listen to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth exactly eight times. I follow this with the closing sequence of the 1812 Overture – ensuring that it is a recording with real cannon – to awaken my inner author from his sophoric slumbers deep within. Then either ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ or Handel’s ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’, so as to appease the higher cognitive aspects of my psyche. I am then ready to soothe the sybaritic segregations of my soul with something profound and sensitive and will put on Pure Peruvian Flutes, Whale Songs or Perry Como.
Please, gentle RWW, do not be fooled into thinking I actually write to any of this. No – this is all about preparing the psyche from heights to depths in order that the eventual overlay of choice melodies, selected to match the mood and theme of one’s authorial flow, can wash deeper into the creative mind. It is indeed a ritual akin to religious profundity and it is worth the hour and a half which one gives over to it before one begins to write. Without it, one could not unlock the core of one’s essence and allow the riches within to leach from one’s tender soul onto the polished whiteness of the page.
You are welcome to adopt my musical rites of pre-writing within your own sanctuary to the muses, or develop your own as mine are intended only for a higher mind which is capable of scaling the peaks of literary prowess.
Until next. Adieu estudas. Bon Ecrit!
Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV
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.
Rosita lit cigarette from the stub of the last and scrubbed a yellow sock.
“Me and Manuel don’t get jiggy no more. He’s so fat I can’t find his cojones. Last night he’s begging for it, so I go looking. What’d I find under his great belly? I’ll tell ya. I find the biro pen he lost last month. I find a half-eaten sucking candy. I find cannoli from the ristorante we went for his last birthday. What don’t I find? His pênis. I’m shouting out the list and he laughs so much the bed collapses. Hombres. Who knew…”
At Binti Hammam, the veiled ‘woman’ jumped lightly down from the litter and hurried into a big skin tent. Once inside, and with the robe and veil cast away it could be seen that she was certainly no lady, being a leanly-built brown-skinned man with untidily cropped whitish hair and a poorly stitched scar bisecting his left cheek.
‘Do we trust Hakim?’ he asked the very big plain-faced, sandy-haired man who had been officiating as negotiator. The man shrugged.
‘No as far as I could throw one of his camels. But when his spies see black ninjas he will at least think carefully before betraying us. Anyway. If I have this right in my head it won’t matter if he do.’
‘True. But that don’t mean I won’t hunt him down and slit his weasand if the little shit plays us false.’
‘Goes without saying. I’ll help. It would be a pleasant diversion.’
The blonde man laughed. ‘You, my friend are even worse than me!’
‘Can’t be. I’m only wanted in two countries.’
‘Yeah. But that’s more by luck than judgement.’
‘Possibly. My old mother used to say it was better to be born lucky than rich.’
‘This being the same old mother who said never leave dead enemies behind you?’
‘The very woman. But now I’m hungry. And thirsty. I’ll go see what I can rustle up.’
‘You do that’ the blonde man grinned at his departing back before moving through the tent to an inner ‘door’ where he poked his head around the leather flap.
‘You awake princess?’
‘Course I am’ came a crisp voice. ‘Come in.’
He bent his head and entered the next ‘room’. He bowed floridly to an elegant figure lounging in a hanging seat.
‘Mission accomplished ma’am.’
She laughed out loud. ‘Good. Come and sit down. Did it go as we expected?’
He eased himself to the ground in front of her. ‘Yes. Boris had a nice time intimidating Hakim and I sat in my litter like a perfect lady.’
She laughed delightedly ‘Oh, I wish I could have seen that, Gren. I’m sure you make a lovely lady.’ Then she sobered abruptly. ‘Will this work?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. And I don’t like it a bit. But the little princess may be the only chance we have to locate the prince.’
‘Aye. She might. And I like it even less than you. She is only sixteen. But if we don’t find the prince, Alba will cease to be.’
‘It will. So we carry on.’
‘We do, but I just wish I liked him a bit more than I do.’
‘Whyn’t you like him?’
‘I don’t know precisely. No. That’s a cop out, I do know. He’s a golden boy. Handsome and born to rule. Very aware of his own importance. And absolutely sure he’s right in any given situation.’
‘Oh. I see. But he’s a symbol so we hafta find him even if he is a tit.’
She giggled. ‘We do, and we need his intended to help us. But, Gren, the girl is over young to carry such a weight on her shoulders.’
‘That’s as maybe. However, young isn’t necessarily soft. If I remember rightly, you were only fourteen when Ali Turk kidnapped you…’
She smiled into his eyes. ‘When you and five knights rode bravely to the rescue?’
He grinned back. ‘Yeah, then. When we arrived to find him dead and you just about up to your knees in blood.’
‘I hadn’t realised how much a man bleeds when you cut off his cock’ she said reflectively. ‘I was damned if I was being raped then married out of hand by that piece of excrement. Even so. I was dead meat if you hadn’t arrived when you did.’
‘No doubt. But your revenge on Ali has made more than a few ambitious young men a bit pensive when it comes to the old ‘rape the wench then marry her when she has a big belly’ ploy.’
‘It has. And that is pleasing. But what happened among Ali’s silken bed sheets, with his blood staining the virginal robe they had put me in for his delectation, was much more pleasing.’
From Billion Dollar Mountain by Jane Jago
The village bus used to run twice daily. Most days the bus was half-full. Then, to save money, it was made twice weekly – in one direction on Monday morning and back again on Thursday morning. Which was no good for anyone.
A year later they stopped it.
The Councillor gave me his vague political smile.
“We would reopen the bus service, but there is no demand. No one used it. If people wanted a bus service they’d have used it.”
Irrefutable logic.
Then he got in his Mercedes and drove off.
Marie Antionette would have been so proud of him.
Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook is a whodunit set in a modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules. You can listen to this on YouTube.
Julia Lucia Maxilla stood up to her full four feet and eleven inches and stared at her co-investigator. She saw a tall, handsome man with black hair, pale skin and a square jawline. He glared down at her, and she was surprised by the blueness of his eyes. Her dogs came to lean against her, and this would have alerted her to the idea the man wasn’t precisely pleased to see her if her own intuition hadn’t already made that clear.
“Llewellyn, is it?” she kept her voice cool.
Behind him she could see another man trying to blend into the wall.
“Yes, domina.”
“If we are going to work together, I think we can dispense with such formality. The name is Julia.”
“Julia,” he hesitated fractionally, “I’m Dai Llewellyn. This is Decanus Bryn Cartivel, and is it permitted to ask what those dogs are?”
Julia decided to let the hesitation pass. She summoned a smile.
“Canis and Lupo are wolfhounds,” she turned and indicated the huge Saxon who stood at her shoulder. “The dogs and Edbert guard me. In case you missed it, I’m not very big so if I need to intimidate somebody they help with that too.”
For a moment the Briton actually grinned, then he must have remembered whatever grievance was wearing at him and he started looking sulky again. Julia sighed inwardly. He was going to be difficult and that was a shame because he was really, really pretty. Before she got chance to snap his handsome nose off for him, he surprised her by holding out a hand to Edbert.
“Greetings.”
Edbert actually grasped his wrist and the two tall men stood eye to eye for a moment.
“You play nicely with my lady. I don’t want to have to hurt you.”
Her bodyguard spoke rarely, and when he did his uncomfortably deep voice always reminded Julia of a thunderstorm in some far valley. She winced inwardly, rather wishing he hadn’t chosen to speak now, and was surprised to hear a thread of amusement in the Briton’s response.
“You can be sure I’ll bear that in mind.”
“If you two have finished bonding, I have a visit to make.” Julia turned a carefully blank face to Dai. “You had better come with me. Edbert and your decanus can take a break.”
He frowned.
“Does it pertain to the investigation?”
“No. And yes. It’s a duty visit to the Tribune. The Prefect is just a time server and she’s a complete waste of time as far as I can see. The Tribune is a different matter. Aside from policy, he and I have known each other since we were children.”
“Since you were children?” Llewellyn frowned. “But wasn’t the Tribune born in the Suburra? I heard he was raised in the insulae at the foot of the Capitoline Hills before he was adopted.”
“He was. And so was I. Any questions?”
Dai shut his mouth with a snap. Julia could all but hear him thinking, and took pity on him. It would make little sense to a Briton, who was no doubt raised on TV crime dramas which featured the poverty and criminality of the poorest slum area in Rome, that someone from that place could be in any position of influence or power.
“My father was a soldier, but my mother was a lupa, I think you use the term ‘whore’. My father was killed when he was twenty, in a border skirmish with the Mongol Empire, my mother died soon after of an occupational disease – she succumbed to morbus insu, an STD. I was raised by my father’s family who took me in because I was his only child and I think they wanted something to remember him by.”
“Oh. But how did -?”
“How did I get to be an inquisitor? A long story. And mostly painful, so can we leave it?” She essayed a smile and her new colleague managed a half grin in response. Julia looked at him more closely.
“Your tunic,” she said severely, “is pretty grubby. That fish sauce must be days old. Do you have another?”
He nodded, wearing the expression of a schoolboy caught cheating in a class test.
“Good. Decimus is a fussy blighter. We’ll swing past yours on the way.”
Once Dai was tidied to her satisfaction, Julia led the way to the Tribune’s apartment, which backed onto the barracks housing the cohort of Praetorians that were stationed in Londinium under the Tribune’s command.
“There was a reason I didn’t bring Edbert and the hounds,” Julia admitted.
Dai raised an eyebrow.
“The Lady Lydia don’t like them.”
Dai grinned tautly.
“If rumour is correct, she isn’t seeing people right now.”
Julia treated him to a quick, incurious, glance.
“Oh. Who?”
“One Titillicus. Inquisitor and nasty piece of work. Sent home to his mother in a body bag.”
“Oh. Whoops.” Julia frowned. “Why doesn’t she realise he is never going to divorce her?”
Dai looked down at her, his expression suggesting a genuine curiosity.
“Is she stupid?”
“Probably…”
“I always think bed-hoppers must be the lowest of the low,” Dai told her. “If you can betray your avowed spouse, you are not going to find it too hard to do the dirty in other ways.”
Julia smiled, pleased that they were beginning to find common ground in their values. It eased the conversation as they waited for the Man himself.
At Christmas, Dad played a trick on the cat. He fed her a chocolate with mustard in the middle. She was very sick. Mom was cross. “Never piss off a cat,” she said.
Dad laughed.
August, and we were packing for a family trip to Florida. Dad was in a good mood, fooling around with my baby sister and kissing Mom on the mouth. Then he tripped over the cat. Broke his hip and his knee. We left him in hospital and got on the plane.
Mom looked at me and winked.
“Never piss off a cat. They don’t forget.”
He opened his eyes to get his bearings and realised that it was day. For a time he just lay still, trying to take stock of his situation and condition. He seemed to be in some kind of covered wagon which was being rattled and jolted across rough ground and the old woman whom he last recalled trying to drug him, sat near the end of the wagon, looking at him nervously. The physical pain in his head had been reduced to a persistent dull throb, but the emotional pain left him clouded, even though as far as he could judge the drug effects had worn off. Physically he felt better than before and he knew that his body would respond, even if sluggishly, at need. Perhaps the enforced sleep technique these people had applied was a more effective cure than he would have considered.
Raising a hand to inspect the wound on his head, something pulled cold, hard and unresisting around his wrist. Glancing down he saw a length of sturdy chain linking loops of metal around each wrist, allowing him no more than the width of his body in arm movement.
Annoyed, he tried to sit up and found a similar solid resistance holding his ankles in place. He spent a short time testing the extent of his captivity and found that beyond being able to shift the position in which he lay, he was effectively immobilised. A prisoner. The old woman seemed concerned by his movements and jabbered something at him in her alien tongue. But when he showed no signs of responding, she sank back into silence, watching him as if he were a poisonous reptile she expected to bite.
It took a while before he accepted that there was nothing he could do to free himself for the time being. The manacles on his wrists were too tight to permit him to slip his hands through, even when lubricated by the blood which flowed from one wrist as a result of his attempts to try. The sight of his blood prompted the woman to another outburst of angry chatter, but she made no move to approach him.
At last he gave up, lay back and closed his eyes. If he could not free himself, he must conserve his strength until a suitable opportunity presented itself. The lurching motion of the wagon was uncomfortable, but he withdrew his awareness from the external, focusing his consciousness into a meditative trance. The familiarity of the discipline brought its own kind of peace. From within it he could now face and disperse the powerful emotions with which he had awoken, yet remain essentially unhampered by them, slowly releasing the tensions of self-accusation, guilt, anger and grief.
From The Fated Sky part one of Fortune’s Fools Transgressor Trilogy by E.M. Swift-Hook
She knew it made good sense. Great-aunt Tiffany had given an understanding smile and patted her hands, folded like pinioned birds in her lap.
“It will keep the money in the family and it’s not like Cousin Richard is a monster or anything.”
Not a monster.
No.
Kind, but thirty years older than her and smelling of foot powder and stale pipe tobacco.
At the altar, he took her hand.
“You alright, m’dear? We can call it all off. Even now. I’m an old bear but not a grumpy one.”
For a moment she hesitated.
“My old bear,” she said.
What if the Ripper had kept killing, Hitchcock had directed Titanic, or an alien attack forced two adversaries into an unlikely alliance? Visit worlds where wartime experiments unlocked genetic potential, where magic and magical creatures flourish, and where two detectives solve crimes in a world where Rome still rules.
The third Tales From Alternate Earths arrives with more fourteen stories and includes award-wining authors. Discover these worlds if you dare!
“Blueprints for a plough?” Bryn Cartival, decanus to Dai Llewellyn, vigiles investigator, sounded incredulous. “Let me get this straight, Bard, you’re saying we are being assigned to find some old sketches of a horse-drawn plough?”
Dai nodded.
“Ox drawn. Except you’re missing the point. These are not designs of any old plough – these were the original designs of Lugh Tasgo.”
There was a silence and Dai realised the puzzled look on Bryn’s face was not lifting.
“Who’s he when he’s at home?” Bryn sounded as if he thought Dai was playing some joke on him.
Dai gaped and shook his head. “Didn’t you learn anything when you were at school?”
Bryn shrugged. “Enough to get by. I was the kid sitting at the back of the room playing games on me wristphone or listening to music on my IXI.”
That produced an odd snort from the decanus whose greying hair betrayed his middle-age in a way his tough body still did not.”So who was he? Someone famous? Sounds British…”
Dai shook his head in mock despair.”He was British. He was an agricultural engineer back in the time of the Divine Diocletian. He invented the heavy wheeled plaumoratum and was hailed as a hero. He saved the Empire.”
Bryn laughed.”Now I know you’re joshing me. How could a ploughmaker save the Empire? Besides, Romans don’t make farmers into heros. Not even clever farmers. And never if he were a Briton.”
“The Divine Diocletian had a passion for gardening. Even a spado like you must have learned that. And Tasgo’s plough is what saved the Empire. Because of it, places like Britannia and Gallia could grow enough to feed the people living in our towns and cities. Without it, they would have starved and civilization broken down, taking the Empire with it over a thousand years ago.”
Miming a yawn, Bryn cut to the chase.“So, ancient history aside, who would want the designs of his plough nowadays? We have hydroponics and automated combine harvesters today. So not like it’s exactly cutting edge technology.”
“No. But they are unique historical documents. Extremely valuable historical documents. In fact, priceless historical documents. They were on loan from a private collection somewhere to the Bibliotheca Britannica. Theft was reported by the courier about twenty minutes before she died from the stab wounds she received in the robbery. No info on her attacker – not even gender as he or she was wearing an obscuring helmet and a hoverbike outfit.”
“We’re investigating a murder then?”
“You’d think.” Dai made no attempt to keep the wry note from his voice. “But we got the budget for this from Antiquities. Our masters value the stolen document as ‘an artefact of Roman significance’ more than the life of the courier – but then she was only a Briton.”
From Dying to Alter History by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, one of the fourteen alternate history short stories in Tales From Alternate Earths III from Inklings Press.
Q1 – What do you most enjoy about co-authoring the Dai and Julia stories?
EMSH – Writing can be a pretty lonely business and there is nothing better than having another person just as invested in what you are writing as you are. Someone to share ideas with, discuss possible plots and characters and work with to bring about a really great story.
JJ – Having someone make me concentrate on one thing at a time. Also my co-author is rather clever and makes me keep my nose clean. But. Enjoy? Mild squabbles and loud giggles I think.
Q2 – What is it about alternate history that attracts you to write in the genre?
EMSH – I love history, indeed my latest project is pure hisorical fiction. So with alternate history you can think about how things might have been if something slightly different had happened, if someone who dies had lived or if a battle won had been a battle lost or if an invetion was made much sooner that it was – or was never made at all. Then you take that notion and think how that might have turned out. It is playing with history.
JJ – It feels a bit like being a pagan goddess. One can say ‘I’m okay with history up to this point, but then I want x to happen’. And it happens and you then have a whole bucketload of consequences to play with. It’s a lot of fun.
Q3 – Will there be more Dai and Julia in the future?
EMSH – The answer to that is a solid ‘maybe’. It is something you will just have to wait and see.
JJ – I have no idea. If the captain so decrees it will happen
The writing team of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago has produced a
number of books following the characters of Dai and Julia in a world where the Roman empire never faded.
E.M. Swift-Hook has had a number of different careers, before settling in the North-East of England with family, three dogs, cats and a small flock of rescued chickens.
The term genre-hopper could have been coined to describe Jane Jago and her books, modern-day thrillers sitting side by side with sword and sorcery, wicked dragons, and short stories and verse. You can find then both right here, on this blog every day!
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