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.

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.