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…

Yes, it’s me, Jacintha Farquar, the unfortunate mother of the abominable Moons – that’s Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV to officialdom and ‘IVy’ to those fools who think him capable of stepping out of his self-centered and self-satisfied little world long enough to offer them some tenuous parody of friendship.
Well as always I have to go around behind him like the proverbial pooper-scooper cleaning up the mess he makes and, specifically, I have been asked to contribute to this blog to try and remedy some of the dreadful drivel he spewed here in the past about how to write.
He has no fucking clue – seriously!
Go read his book if you don’t believe me, no not that god-awful supposed sci-fi thing ‘Fatswhistle and Bucktooth’, I mean the laughably titled How to Start Writing a Book . I did my best to try with that too, but you’ll see if you take a look at it.
Anyway, back to the task in hand and one thing I see many of you writers struggling with is people having social intercourse. No, get your minds out of the gutter the lot of you! That means conversation, discussion, argument – communication between people.

Social Intercourse

In the world of writing you don’t call it that of course, probably because the schoolboy giggles would get the better of you and then you’d not write a bloody word for the next week. You lot call it ‘dialogue’.
Do I really need to take you back to school, sit you down and explain simple things like where to put commas in dialogue and the difference between a speech/dialogue tag and an action tag? I hope not, but if you need that then stop trying to pretend you are writing a book and go and look them up so you have the faintest notion of what I’m on about.
Let’s assume you are over the baby gate and romping along at least at school pupil level here.

First thing to remember is to avoid ‘talking head’ syndrome when the reader has no idea of where/how the conversation is taking place. Begin by setting the scene, tell us where the chat is happening and who is present:

Mary and Tom sat down for dinner at their dining room table with their daughter Ella and her new boyfriend Paul.

Next important point ‘said’ is good. Consider:

“This tastes lovely,” Tom exclaimed.
“Thank you, dear,” murmured Mary.
Ella tapped her plate with her fork. “Well done, Mum,” she cheered.
“What is in the pie?” Paul wondered.

You get the point. Of course you wouldn’t just put in ‘said’ for all those which brings us to the third point, use action to indicate who is talking where you can:

Tom smiled across at his wife. “This tastes lovely.”.
“Thank you, dear.” Mary blushed, she had been working on the meal all day in honour of this special occasion.
Tapping her plate with her fork, Ella drew everyone’s attention. “Well done, Mum.” She lifted her glass in a toast.
But Paul didn’t seem to notice, he was poking at the food on his plate. “What is in the pie?”

Hardly brilliant prose, but you can see how it brings the conversation to life.

Next point, try to keep your conversation appearing real. Now that means you leave out all the repetitions and ‘um-ing’ and ‘er-ing’ that we all do in natural speech, but it also means you don’t have your characters declaiming speeches full of posh words at each other either. If you have a character who does that they will seem like a pompous twat to your reader!

Oh yes, one more thing. Don’t do this, it drives me bloody potty, like scraping a fork over a plate:

After the happy couple had left Mary and Tom cuddled up together on the sofa.
“Oh Tom, do you think they will be as happy as we are?”
“I’m sure they will, Mary, they seem made for each other.”
Mary sighed and looked thoughtful.
“Well, Tom, I am not so sure of that as you seem to be.”
“What do you mean, Mary?”

People do not use each other’s names all the time in conversation when it is obvious who they are talking to.  Do. Not. Do. It.

Alright, that’s your bloody lot. I’m not paid by the word for this you know, so bugger off the lot of you and let me get back to Netflix and pernod – one of my favourite cocktails…

Jacintha Farquar, unlucky to be mother of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV.

As mentioned above 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 if you do have a bloody stiff drink before you read it!

The streets are a-dancing in autumn’s lost gown
A scatter of leaves that sprinkled the town
Blown with the crisp packets to catch on a hedge
Swept with the dogends under each ledge.
Played with by the children, in drifts in the park
Lifted by blustery winds for a lark
Packed by the tramp of feet, wet from the rain
Swirled down the gutters and blocking the drain.
Golden and orange and yellow and brown
Streets filled with the beauty of autumn’s lost gown.

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.

Another tap came on the door and a sentry stuck his head in.
“Bryn Cartivel, dominus.”
“Who?”
“My decanus,” Dai provided.
“Send him in then.”
Bryn came in looking, Julia thought, a bit nervous. Dai obviously agreed with her because he barked out a laugh, which he covered quickly.
“What is it?” Decimus shot a disapproving frown at Dai as he asked the question, but from the way the decanus’s face froze and he straightened up, Julia realised Bryn thought the frown was aimed at himself.
“It’s them toughs we apprehended, dominus. We’ve been talking to them nicely and they decided to come clean, in the interests of furthering justice, you understand. But I don’t really want to repeat what they said.”
Decimus looked at the decanus and then smiled – the one Julia recognised as his nice smile, the one without wolffish overtones.
“I don’t shoot messengers,” he said mildly.
Bryn took a run at it. 
“It’s all very well to say that, but I never expected to ever be in the same room as you even, dominus. And now I am, I have to tell you that the street toughs who attacked my boss and domina Julia were paid by your lady wife and another woman. A veiled woman with two of them little pompom dogs.”
At which point Julia got up and stomped around the room kicking furniture.
“I’m guessing that those two women didn’t want us investigating the murders.”
“No domina,” Bryn was polite, “it doesn’t seem like they did. According to the vigiles we are also talking nicely to, they expected Titillicus to be in charge of the case. And they had him precisely where they wanted him.”
“They did. Thank you, Bryn,” Dai spoke softly.
Instead of subsiding, Bryn stuck out his chin.
“That’s not all. Them Vigiles reckon that the woman with the dogs paid a couple of junior investigators to pass on details of which Game players were in trouble with the big betting syndicate in Rome.”
Dai swore and he met Julia’s fulminating eye with some embarrassment.
“Now I feel responsible too. I’ve been blaming it all on Rome, but now…”
Julia decided not to belabour the point, just shrugging eloquently.
“This smells very bad. We should all be very careful.”
Decimus rang the bell at his elbow and when the sentry poked his head around the door frame he spoke briskly.
“I think we will double the guard for a while.”
The sentry saluted and could be heard outside relaying the order. Decimus turned to Bryn.
“Thank you, decanus. I would prefer it if you and your men remained here until we smoke out the last of the rats. I hope that isn’t a trouble to you.”
Bryn’s face and voice were wooden.
“No sir. Thank you, sir.”
He saluted awkwardly, as if he had not had much practice at making the gesture, and backed out of the room.
Julia looked at Dai to see him battling some powerful emotion. He managed to keep a straight face for a few seconds then started to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped, “but Bryn has been my decanus since I was promoted, and I’ve never managed to get the better of him. Not once. It’s probably petty, and entirely out of place in a murder investigation, but I did so enjoy watching him squirm.”
Decimus actually forgot his woes sufficiently to snort out a laugh. Julia looked at the pair of them with at least an attempt at proper Roman dignity and gravitas.
“Behave, you two.”
Dai went so far as to poke his tongue out at her, so she gave up trying to bring them to a sense of decency and went to look out of the window into the parade ground. That proved too much for her hard-won composure as Bryn was standing in the middle of Dai’s posse, waving his arms and mugging frantically as he related what had transpired in the Tribune’s office.

Part XXI 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.

G is for: Greedy bastards (yes, I changed it in the title for those of a delicate disposition)

Having no wish to stray to deeply into the faeces infested water that is politics, we will, for the purposes of this rant, make the sweeping generalisation that all those with political ambition see their political careers as a way to line their pockets and the pockets of their families/friends/bedmates/etc.

So, with apologies to the honest brokers out there beavering away for the common good …

We have questions:

How can you ‘forget’ to pay tax on squillions of pounds?

How can a married couple who work in the same building think it okay to claim mortgage allowances on two properties near their work?

How can a person whose whole avowed purpose in life is to bring down an institution happily claim an inflated salary for being a part of said institution?

How can you forget about your own property portfolio that is worth millions of pounds, while demanding that a colleague face the strongest possible sanctions for an unproven underpayment of about fifteen hundred quid?

We could go on. But I think you have our drift.

Add to this the perfectly legal ‘benefits’ of travel and office allowances, subsidised food and booze, annual above inflation pay rises, and it is little wonder that the population at large is extremely sceptical of our political masters and the circus that performs daily around them.

Particularly when the greedy, sweaty-palmed, self-serving little dickwads scream poverty and take on immensely lucrative ‘consultancies’. Or host radio shows for weirdly well financed niche broadcasters. Etcetera 

Just stop it.

If you can’t live on £91k, don’t stand for election to Parliament.

It’s nothing short of greed and absolutely symptomatic to try and stamp on the poor and weak and ill in order to camouflage your own shortcomings.

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

About his feet the little people quaked and cried. He curled his lip in scorn. 

He felt a strong desire to cook the soldiers in their metal cuirasses but chivalry demanded that he kill only where necessary so he reined in his fury.

Instead, he turned his face on the invading king and allowed himself one roar of rage.

The man fell to his knees and covered his eyes.

“Die infidel.”

As the king grovelled, a ballista twanged thickly and the iron bolt buried itself in Draco’s noble heart.

His dying flame razed a swathe of death a mile long.  

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’s been cold in the house since Karina left. There’s an emptiness. A Karina-shaped hole through my heart, just as the cushions on her favourite chair still show the marks of where she sat.

I never stop regretting the argument. What did it matter she’d bought herself a new shawl? 

If I could take it back…

I still light the lantern each night, I’d not want to think she might pass this way and miss the house.

Footsteps outside.

A knock.

I rush with hope to open the door.

No one’s there.

Just a basket – and a smiling infant within.

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…

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.