Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

Every morning for thirty years, Geoff walked past number forty and saw the stone elephant. It stood three foot high with flowers cascading, changing according to the season, from the howdah on its back. It had been part of his morning commute.
As the years went by he found himself making up stories about it on the train.
The day he retired, he saw the elephant for the last time and made a decision. Taking a picture of it on his phone. He got home and started writing a children’s book – about a garden ornament elephant that came to life…

E.M. Swift-Hook

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…

Howdy again,

It is I, your inspirational instructor in the arcane literary arts, Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV. Again it falls to me to remind you of my impeccable credentials as the author of ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth’, once described as ‘amazingly….written….incredible….story’. One comes to you this week, bright-eyed and bushy tailed. If a little physically worn. One comes to you in the full flood of joy. One comes to you in the full knowledge that one is becoming a better and more sensitive writer day on day. One comes to you replete, but still hungering. One comes to you with reluctance but determination. A teacher must teach, I tell myself. A teacher must teach. So teach one shall.

Today’s lesson concerns a literary device about which one has mixed feelings, but one it is unwise to ignore as its usefulness cannot be overstated, although it can be overused. Of what does your beloved pedagogue speak?

Cliffhangers

Ah yes. The cliffhanger. Those little hooks of anticipation one sets in the flesh of one’s besotted readership leaving them like the cocaine addict without his fix, like the lover deprived of an adored one’s skin, like half of a loving pair left suddenly alone. Craving. Craving….

Properly used, the cliffhanger can ensure that one’s readership awaits with baited breath the next instalment. That they turn the page with shaking hands barely able to contain the excitement that one’s literary efforts stir in their innocent breasts.

Improperly used, the cliffhanger becomes as the drumbeat of the music that ends each episode of some trashy soap opera or another. It becomes as the dying fall at the end of a popular melody. As the cawing and rook-like scratching of the comic-book hero who will live to fight another day be it limbless or headless.

Beware the crass and sensational.

Compare and contrast.

• Artimesius lay bound and gagged across the cruel iron of the railway lines and even as he strained and writhed in his bonds the vibration through the unyielding metal to which he was tethered told him that the seventeen-twenty to Euston was on time.

• Arty: tied to the railway, screaming inside, hearing the scream of an approaching express train. Will our hero survive?

I rest my case as I rest my head as on a lover’s breast.

I leave you to consider the use of the cliffhanger with an example from my own literal life.

Last time one left you in the knowledge that some great and cataclysmic occurrence had brought a newness and brightness to one’s life. Now read on.

It was nine of the clock and the front door of Myrtle Villa was flung open with such force as to throw it back against the fading floral print of the wallpaper with a reverberating crash.
“Moons, I’m home…” Mumsie’s voice was slurred almost beyond recognition and I readied myself for either maudlin sentiment or vicious physical attack. But it was neither of those things. It was much worse. “I’ve brought the gang along. We’re going to have a welcome home Moons party.”
One quickly gathered together one’s papers and secreted them in the depths of a cretonne cushioned ottoman before assembling a welcoming smile and turning to face the doorway. The usual gang of halfwits, deadbeats, alcoholics, out-of-work whores, and accountants began to dribble into the room. And each found it necessary to greet one either with loose-lipped and unpleasant kisses or by slapping one painfully about the back and shoulders.
And then IT happened. Just as suddenly as that. One minute one was cringing in the corner. The next instant…

What?

You will find out next time. Perhaps…

Until then. Hasta la vista muchachos!

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound advice in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

The rain is gone, the morning shines
Where I can rest a while
Sheltered from the teasing wind
And by the warmth beguiled
The humans pass and never pause
To smell the first of spring
But sitting by the kindly wall
I hear the robin sing
Here, as I doze I hear the feet
Of ghostly builders pass
As through the earth old voices sing
And I’m at peace at last

©️jane jago 2024

Since Ben and Joss Beckett took over The Fair Maid and Falcon, they have had to deal with ghosts, gangsters and well dodgy goings-on. Despite that they have their own family of twin daughters and dogs, and a fabulous ‘found family’ of friends.

I smiled at the idea I was hunting and followed Simeon out of the door into what was now a pale moon-washed night. We formed a sort of loose procession with Simeon in front followed by me, Ben, Neil, Stan and Ollie. The rest fell in behind walking quietly and saying nothing. At the market garden, Jed, Finoula and Clancy joined us, while two hard-handed guys with baseball bats peeled off to guard the gate.
Around the next bend in the lane a scruffy looking Mercedes minibus was parked in the middle of the road. It was facing the other way which prevented them from blinding us with their headlights and Simeon casually opened the driver’s door. The guy who fell out was visibly uncomfortable, but game nonetheless.
“What you wanna go and do that for?”
Simeon gave him a hard stare and he wilted a bit.
“What are you lot doing here?”
“None o’ your business. It’s a public road. We can be here if we want.”
I took two paces forwards.
“It’s not a public road.”
The sliding door at the other side of the van opened and I presumed some person or persons intended to join the argument. However, there was a modest reception committee and the sound of fists meeting flesh was loud in the night air.
“You keep still. Unless you’re up for another smack.”
Finoula stepped into a patch of moonlight. “Bring forward your clairvoyant and let me see if it’s a big a charlatan as it smells like.”
The sound of someone hastily climbing over seats made me think my friend had hit a nerve. In a very short time a youngish man, whose cropped hair was so pale that looked peculiarly greenish in the moonlight, climbed out onto the road surface and glared about him.
“Who dares to name me charlatan?” he demanded.
“Finoula Lovell.”
He obviously knew the name because he flinched visibly. Then he bowed from the waist and stepped closer to Finoula and Jed. Clancy growled, a deep sound in his barrel of a chest, and blondie stepped back a pace.
He said something in Rom to which Finoula replied in a voice that crackled with power. I heard footsteps behind me and Danilo stepped out of the shadows to stand beside me.
“Do you seek to contend with my family, outcast?”
I felt the weight of that and wondered at the necessity, until I heard Grandmother’s voice in my head assuring me that it was both necessary and proportionate.
“How do you judge it right to stand for a gadjo woman against one of your own blood?”
Danilo snapped his fingers. “That for your prejudices lulo bull. She is as a sister to me and to every Lovell that draws breath. Now. I repeat. Do you seek to contend with us?”
“I am not that much a fool.”
Danilo put something in my hand before moving to stand shoulder to shoulder with Finoula.
“Do we believe him?”
“No.” Finoula sounded icy cold. “I will have his blood oath before I trust such a one.”
Jed materialised beside me and bent his head to mine.
“Finoula says this one cares for naught but money, and I would say Danilo thinks the same as he just called him a whore.”
“Oh right. And I have to go into the garden with him don’t I?”
“You don’t have to.” That was Ben from my other side. “Also what did Danilo slip you.”
“A pistol. And I do have to. If we want this farce to end I have to take him into the garden and convince him Cherry isn’t there. Which might have been more difficult next week.”
I heard Grandmother laugh inside my head. The ghosts, it seemed, were perfectly willing to take a hand.
Ben put a big hand on my head. “Will I come with you?”
“No love. You and the dogs need to stay out here.”
“If you didn’t have a gun in your pocket, we might have a row about that.”
I leaned into him. “We wouldn’t, because without a pacifier in my pocket I’d not be going in.”
“I take it that thing in your pocket is loaded.”
“Grandmother says it is.”
“Well I guess she’d know.”
He wrapped me in his arms and we stood quietly. I was taking calming breaths and husbanding my mental resources, while Ben was probably worrying but carefully not mentioning his worry.
The three clairvoyants were deep in low-voiced conversation and I had drifted to a place of inner peace when I felt Ben stiffen. As my ears caught the sound of something being driven quietly up the lane, a crunching in the gravel of the lane also alerted me that someone was coming on foot.
“Only us, Joss.” It was Mark’s voice and he stepped into the moonlight with his brothers at his side. “Morgan called me.”
“Fair enough. But who’s driving up the lane?”
“I don’t know. Though I think we need to fade into the background until we find out.”
They blended back into the deep shadow and I smiled at Jed.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I said.
He chuckled. “You’m not much like my idea of Alice.”
“She isn’t indeed,” Neil agreed quietly. “More like the Red Queen.”
“Off with his head.” Ben quipped gently.
Mark grinned and for a couple of seconds his teeth showed strong and white in the shadow of the hedge.
“Cheshire Cat?” I looked at Jed.
“It do so appear.”
Whatever was coming up from the village was being driven quite slowly and with only minimal lights.
“I don’t think whoever this is is necessarily on the side of the angels,” I spoke quietly.
“Me neither,” that was Ben.
The vehicle that rounded the bend was another Mercedes van, though it bore as much relationship to the grubby, dented workhorse at the gateway to the memorial garden as I do to Marilyn Monroe. Blondie hissed through his teeth while the guy Simeon held in one negligent hand looked as if he was about to piss himself.
“What have we here, my friends?” I whispered.
The Merc sighed to a halt and the back of the thing opened up silently and smoothly. A chunky figure in a sort of modified nurse uniform jumped out with something in his hand. I took a careful grip of the pistol in my pocket, but it was unnecessary as the ‘nurse’ pointed what I could now see was a remote control and the van extruded a ramp down which came an electric wheelchair.
The cold moonlight revealed the man in the chair to be worn and beyond thin. He was possessed of a face that looked to have been carved from flint so sharply were the angles cut. He turned his chair to face us.
“I would have speech with Mrs Beckett.”
Ben responded . “Who demands to speak to my wife?”
“My name would mean nothing to you.”
“Meaningless or not, we do not speak to those who hide in darkness and anonymity.” I could hear the berserker that lurked just under the surface of Ben’s cool demeanour and I hoped nobody poked a stick in his ear.
It seemed that the man in the wheelchair heard it too because he inclined his head.
“Lantern,” he barked.
His nurse reached into the van, producing a large electric lamp which he placed on the ground beside the wheelchair and switched on. The light was bright, shadowless, and pitiless, revealing our visitor to be a man not far from death if I wasn’t mistaken.
I walked forward into the circle of brightness and said the first thing that came into my head.
“Will you please put your oxygen back on?”
He laughed, though it was a sound without much underlying amusement, and lifted a skinny claw. The nurse charged up the ramp returning with a small cylinder and an arrangement of tubes. Once life-giving oxygen was being gently pumped through his nostrils the man in the wheelchair looked in less immediate danger of death.
“What is so important that you come here in the dead of night?” I kept my voice neutral.
“You know what,” he snapped.
I stood straight and still in the pitiless lantern light. “I do not. I may have a suspicion, but that isn’t knowing. And you are close enough to the veil to know the truth when you hear it.”
His dark fathomless eyes bored into mine before he smiled.
“Cherry had eyes like yours.”
I took a chance. “Who is Cherry?”
“Cherry was my wife. I am given to understand that her bones, and those of our unborn child are buried here. And I would visit her while I can.”
Of course that didn’t come close to explaining a visit in the dark of night, but I thought I’d let that one go.
“If Cherry’s were the bones uncovered in our orchard, then she is not buried here. The police took her away and I have no knowledge of where she is now.”
He sagged in his chair and I felt a stab of pity before he dragged himself back into his habit of command.
“Do you swear this is the truth?”
“I do. And if I knew where her bones were today I’d tell you.”
I felt the spirits of the girls who were buried in the garden as they clustered about him. Esme came into my head. ‘Beware the white-haired one.’ I reassured her that I had my eye on him.
“Perhaps if I could visit the place where her bones were found.”
“You could, but not in the dark and not until the ground dries a bit.”
“Why not? I’m here now.” He waved a hand towards the memorial garden. “It looks like there’s a proper pathway.”
“If the bones were found in the memorial garden there would be no problem. Only they weren’t. When I said uncovered in our orchard that was precisely what I meant. The orchard is down at the bottom of the lane bordering on the pub car park it’s grassy and bumpy and currently boggy.”
He seemed to understand that I spoke the simple truth because he turned his attention to the blond clairvoyant.
“Why have you been telling me that Cherry is here?”
“Because she is. The woman lies.”
“I don’t think so.” The man in the wheelchair carried an aura of real menace. “I think those who told me you were a charlatan were saying nothing more than the truth. Now. What do you think the reward for lying to me might be?”
Finoula’s voice broke into what had become an icy silence.
“He’s not entirely a charlatan, he just magnifies what is truthfully a tiny talent for gain.”
“What should I do with him, then?”
“That’s your decision. I am not permitted to make it for you. But what I can do is call your wife and ask if she has words for you from beyond the veil.”
“Why would you do that for me?”
“I would do it in the name of love, and to ease your passage to the light.”
“Will you then. Please.”
Finoula nodded. “I will.”
She lifted her face and the moonlight sparkled in the pale blue depths of her sightless eyes. Jed went to be as a bulwark at her back, and Danilo walked soft-footed to stand and face her. Finoula’s started to sing a wordless eerie tune.
Danilo joined his voice to hers. “Come forward if you have any words for your grieving husband.”
I felt the other spirits forming a sort of guard of honour and then the scent of orchard fruits filled the air.
The voice that spoke was soft and carried with it a sweetness that even her death and the death of her unborn child hadn’t eroded. But she was angry too, with forty years of anger to get out and she let him have it all. She berated her husband in Irish and he replied humbly in the same language. It felt as if we were eavesdropping, and I was very glad to only understand tone, not words. Everything about this was too naked and too painful so l looked about for something to distract me, which was when I noticed that Blondie was definitely up to something.
Moving very slowly he put one hand inside his leather waistcoat and drew out an object he sought to hide in his left hand. Unfortunately for him I have very good eyesight and the moon glinted on what I determined must be a knife. As Finoula’s song reached its crescendo he slithered towards her. He looked truly reptilian in the moonlight and something hardened inside me. There was no way he was going to hurt my friend while I had it in my power to protect her. I took the pistol out of my pocket and, as he punched an awkwardly curled fist towards her face, I shot him through the wrist.
He made a noise the like of which I had never heard before, and I’d rather not hear it again. But even as he screamed he dropped the knife and Jed put a big foot on it. Simeon grabbed Blondie, with one huge hand around his skinny neck, and stopped the noise by the simple expedient of holding the other huge hand over his mouth. Ben was at my side in two enormous strides, gathering me into the security of his embrace. I leaned against his strength, but I was surprisingly unmoved by having shot a human.
In a matter of seconds it was all over and Finoula closed the door between the worlds.
The man in the wheelchair sat bolt upright.
“He is a naughty little albino isn’t he? Will I take him off your hands?”
“I’m not sure he was ever on my hands,” I was proud of how steady was my voice.

There will be more from Joss, Ben and their friends, courtesy of Jane Jago, next week, or you can catch up with their earlier adventures in Who Put Her In and Who Pulled Her Out.

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.

Dai pulled the man out of the computer chair. Njord might be big-boned but he clearly was not one to keep himself much in shape.
“The domina is asking you a polite question, Torkel. I am not quite so polite. I want to know how a virus that affects your security surveillance on two separate occasions could have got onto your system without you knowing about it.”
The blond man’s face had turned red as Dai’s grip tightened.
“I don’t know,” he gasped. “I told you. I didn’t even know it was a virus the first time. Even your people didn’t find that. I only found it after the second outage.”
Dai decided that as he was getting some degree of cooperation he could be generous and let go. Njord dropped back onto his chair again.
“So how could it happen?”
The blond man started pulling up information in streams that meant very little to Dai, but he could see Julia scanning it rapidly, her expression focused.
“Here,” Njord said and pushed a finger at a line of random numerals.
Dai tried to look as though he had some idea what it meant, but it was Julia who asked:
“So where is that? Have you a plan of the arena – a schematic to show where that is geographically?”
Dai saw the refusal form on the blond man’s lips.
“Torkel,” he cautioned, “I don’t need to remind you to be polite to the domina, do I?”
The blue eyes glared at him with hatred, but Njord pulled up a 3D schemata for the complex and stabbed his finger at a small flashing pixel on the lowest below-ground level. 
“It’s there,” he said.
“What’s there?”
“Absolutely nothing. It’s a blank wall.”
“So someone uploaded this whilst standing in that corridor,” Dai pointed to two clearly marked cameras even he could identify as such. “If we have the recordings from these for that time we -”
“You misunderstand,” Njord said. “If I am right and this is the signal that did it, then it was not uploaded from somewhere beside the wall – it was uploaded from somewhere inside the wall.”

The tunnel was an old one, dating back to the days they had fed people to the lions in the arena for denying the godhood of the divine Diocletian. When that had ceased to be a crime during the Enlightenment, the menagerie had become a place for keeping all the exotic animals a lanista might desire to put on interesting displays. But the animal fights had finally been outlawed throughout the Empire, along with slavery and discrimination on grounds of race or gender, a few years before Dai had been born. At which point the menagerie became a place to take your children to see the animals. The only deliberate deaths you could expect to witness in the arena nowadays were the public executions of traitors and murderers.
There was a popular joke that made much of the fact it was easier to get yourself accused of treason than murder. Even if you killed someone in front of witnesses you could get away with your life. But the slightest hint you might be involved in any anti-Roman activities and you would be arrested, tried and executed within the week. That was the usual job of the men Decimus had allocated to work with Julia and Dai, uncovering and arresting potential anti-Roman agitators, and Dai found it gave him an uncomfortable feeling between his shoulder blades every time he turned his back on them.
But it was their technology and their brawn which first found and then broke into the tunnel behind the wall and tracked along it in one direction to a manhole cover on the edge of the arena’s playing field and in the other to the menagerie.
At the menagerie end, it finished in a solid metal door. Whilst the Praetorians sent out for the appropriate equipment to break through. Dai and Julia left them to it and headed to the menagerie overground.

Part IX will be here next week. If you can’t wait to find what happens next you can snag the full novella here.

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

The glazier was a buffly handsome young man with no shirt and some tattoos. Female teenage bigger exerted herself sufficiently to make him a cup of tea.
Bertha watched over her spectacles.
“Trouble brewing,” she muttered to herself when the young people wandered off in the direction of the summerhouse.
Mother Bigger emerged from the house ten minutes later. She found a half-finished window and no glazier.
Sprinting down the garden she was in time to interrupt a romantic tryst, leading her daughter away by the ear.
The man who came to finish the work was a leathery sixty.

Jane Jago

A dictionary for the bemused by Jane Jago…

ahde (noun) – marsupial with a very short memory

blubbly (noun) – the colour of belly button fluff

borwn (verb) – to drone on endlessly about one’s prostate, or the bowls club, or any of the other preoccupations of men of a certain age

cahmring (noun) – cock ring for mechanical beloved

desret (noun) – what’s left on the sweet trolley by the time it gets to your table 

dulcking (noun) – monarch with little personal charm 

fukle (verb) – to play folk music on a home-constructed instrument 

grmmra (noun) – ancient language akin to Ogham with very strict linguistic rules

liek (noun) – floppy vegetable, used a lot in BDSM

mayrt (noun) – type of country dance heavily reliant on pink sweaty farmers wearing big boots and very little else

muthaflic (exclamation) – word from bowdlerised swearing thesaurus beloved of yummy mummies

nomral (adjective) – small, pink and plasticy 

omifok (exclamation) – see muthaflic

practive (adverb) of motion crabwise but very fast

qwen (noun) – specialist stick with beer tops nailed to it, used only in the performance of the infamous stick and sharpened clogs dance

syutable (noun) – surface on which fortune teller lays out tarot cards

talkign (verb) – moving mouth but making meaningless noises

tochis (noun) – stuff found between unwashed toes

uncommen (noun/adjective combo) – uncouth males

vrgni (noun) – goat of indeterminate years and such evil temper that no human has ever been able to get close enough to even attempt a guess at gender

winnim (group noun) – the ladies of the WI after ‘bring in your homemade hooch’ night

znorin’ – (verb) what the winnim are likely to be doing well into the morning after BYHMH night 

Disclaimer: all these words are genuine typos defined by Jane Jago. The source of each is withheld to protect the guilty.

It was one of those moments when he knew whatever decision he made could affect the entirety of the rest of his life. 

This was it.

There was no way to avoid making a choice and no way to prevent the cascading consequences reaching down through the years ahead. He could be losing a chance at a lifetime of happiness or maybe committing to the first step of something that was doomed to fail.

For a moment that awareness paralysed him completely. Even his thoughts. Then he looked at the screen in front of him and carefully swiped the picture.

E.M. Swift-Hook

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…

Howdy y’all.

It is one. Your perspicacious pedagogue. Your towering tutor. Your world-travelling writer. Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV, author of the speculative fiction classic ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth’. Man of means. Man of moods.  Man of delicious madness (of which more later).

One is, needless to say, back chez maman – that muscular and impressively moustachioed female of uncertain age and equally uncertain temperament – who was nonetheless flatteringly pleased to see one, and absolutely thrilled to learn that the guns of one’s skinny, wrinkled, orange sperm donor have been so carefully and completely spiked courtesy of a small man with a Bronx accent and hairy earlobes. The woman even went so far as to throw her arms around one and blow draconically alcohol-laden breath in one’s face. However, I digress and I know my adoring students will be agog to know the wellspring of their beloved maestro’s ecstatic madness. Learn patience my children

One’s distaff parent. Having fed one a lucillan repast of gammon, oven chips and corns (which always evacuate in precisely the same state as that in which one ingested them), mater took her increasingly humongous hips and breasts to the  Bear and Bare Breast to celebrate the safe return of her ewe lamb. One declined the kind invitation to accompany her, having very little taste for darts, cribbage and warm beer, preferring to sit snuggled beside a roaring fire with an improving volume and a small glass of Tia Maria penning your latest lesson in the epistolary art.

Adjectives

Adjectives. How beloved of the sane and how abused by the unimaginative. Let us consider for a moment something as prosaic as grass. One could say grass is green, but how unimaginative. How much better to wax lyrical about its verdant and virtuous viridiannness. Or it’s sleek, sensuous, smooth coolness. Or how its tiny saw teeth can lacerate the delicate soles of a loved one’s feet. Or how laying in its lush greenness can leave a delicate tracery of greenish lines on the pale goldenness of a lover’s skin. Or how its fragrance can fill one’s nostrils as one is laid face-down under the delicious firmness of a lover’s hand. Or… But I need say no more, need I. Adjectives are called add-jectives for a reason. That reason being that you add them in order to add texture, colour and sensuality to your otherwise stagnant prose…

And this was as far as one had progressed when it happened. IT – that thing which has changed forever the heart which beats in the breast of your beloved teacher. IT – that light that has shone into the darkest corners of one’s psyche. IT – …

I think I shall leave you there waiting with puttering heart and wetted lips and damp little palms to learn what may have occurred to stir the heart and loins of your beloved tutor. And wondering why he should chose to greet you in the parlance of our transatlantic cousins.

Thou shalt wait and see…

Gold skin
Eyes like amber beads
Voice that
Uplifts
Understands one’s needs
Sighs and
Skin
Eye to eye
Thigh to thigh
Is this madness?
Or reality at last?

One can tarry no more. Dream of amore…

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound advice in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.

Dewdrops shyly shining
Reflect the early day
And spread a silver blanket
As we walk our weary way
When night becomes the morning
And ourselves are homeward bound
The dewdrops and the sunrise
In beauty wrap us round

©️jane jago 2024