In the calm before the storm we walked. Two fools together
Spoke of this and laughed of that. Unmindful of the weather
When the first fat raindrops fell, we saw we’d wandered far
You pulled my hood about my ears. Said: race you to the car
But you didn’t run ahead. You waited at my pace
And smiled the smile that warms my heart. With raindrops on your face
Back at the car, you and the dog. Discussed your hopes and dreams
While I dodged the dancing rain. Returning with ice creams
We licked and laughed, and had no care. For those who judged us mad
Life is to short to hear their rules. Too precious to be sad
In the calm before the storm. The splashing puddles shined
Two fools who walked it side by side. Made everything sublime.

jane jago

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…

It is that time of year again when tinsel and fake snow are seen liberally strewn over windows and every house in the neighbourhood is illuminated by thousands of watts worth of multicoloured flashing bulbs. Giant inflatable Santas bend at the waist as they slowly prolapse onto the lawn and herds of plastic reindeer can be found grazing on every municipal greensward.

Ah yes, Christmas!

The time every writer remembers the magic as a child of seeing the Christmas tree lit up after hearing swearing coming from the front room for an hour. Or the apparently endless amounts of food on a groaning board, whilst relatives are sitting, groaning, bored and picking fights for the sake of it. Or the sound of carols through the shopping-mall loudspeakers being interrupted by non-sequitur advertisements and announcements. Or the excitement of unwrapping presents so quickly replaced by the despair as another Christmas jumper hand knitted by Great Aunt Tracey is revealed beneath the gaudy paper or a pair of thermal, odour-reducing socks in vibrant tartan from Mumsie.

This, dear Reader Who Writes, is the very magic you need to ensure you capture on the tip of your quill and then spread in decorative loops and swirls of language to fill the pages of that essential for every aspiring author – the Seasonal Short.

To be honest, a wise beginner will start with the lesser festivals of the writing calendar. Maybe a little romantic flash fiction for Valentine’s, working through to a Halloween Horror so that by the time you reach the height of over-played, sentimentalism that is Christmas literature, you will have the technique somewhat practised.

But fear not, mes petites, even if you have not been preparing, even if you have never set pen to paper or finger to keyboard in a literary endeavour afore this moment, follow my three golden rules and you will be in with as much of a chance as the most famous author.

Rule One: Make it Maudlin.

Do not stop at soppy and sentimental, instead toboggan through the more flaccid emotions and pitch straight into the point where Merry marries Melancholy and keeps up an affair on the side with Nostalgia.

Rule Two: Make it Short.

This is Christmas. Your reader will be well sozzled, exhausted from family rows and trying to avoid the Queen’s speech. Their attention span will not be long. A novella is too long.

Rule Three: Make it Shiny.

Use lots of words like ‘sparkle’, ‘glitter’, ‘glow,’ ‘luminescence’, ‘coruscation’, ‘shimmer’, ‘gleam’ and ‘twinkle’.

So there, in a Nutcracker Suite, dear Reader Who Writes, is my Christmas gift to you. Use it wisely and every future festive season will bring you joyous prosperity from your literary endeavours.

Happy Christmas.

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.

An everyday tale of village life and vampires…

The police car drove to the bottom of the street at a sedate pace, turning around by the padlocked gate and returning to the main road equally quietly. Em’s mobile peeped. It was Agnes.
“Them buggers are on their way. We good to go, Em?”
“Yep. Let operation ‘thwart the bastard’ commence.”
Em and Ishmael walked to the top of the street where they waited in silence. First into their line of vision came an oddly formal little procession led by the familiar figure of Ronald Dump himself, flanked by Harmsley Gunn on his left and a thin man, with an earpiece in one ear and an iPhone glued to the other, on his right.
“Where are my pipers?” Dump’s strangely atonal voice sounded querulous.
“They said this is Dorset not Drumnadrochit. Then they effed off.” It was the thin man who spoke somewhat grimly.
“Schilling,” Ishmael spoke without moving his lips.
Em studied the man who was variously supposed to be either Dump’s right-hand man, or his boss, or even his boyfriend. She discounted the last strand of rumour, but which of the two other options was correct? The man himself was as unprepossessing as his boss if in a completely different mould. Dump was corpulent, bald, and smooth of skin, with one of those small heads that seems to have sunk into the rolls of flesh around the neck. Schilling, by contrast, was thin, bespectacled, saggy around the neck and eyes, and possessed of what looked to be a permanent five o’clock shadow.
The dynamic between the pair was difficult to decode, and Em decided it didn’t matter and gave up trying. Instead she stood quietly and waited for events to move along. The first sign of rent a mob came in the form of glockenspiel music and the sound of feet. Round the corner from the opposite direction to the Dump party came a group of sub-teenage girls, and a fair sprinkling of their grandmothers, playing a vaguely familiar tune on glockenspiel, tambourine, and penny whistle. They were followed by a troupe of trainee drum majorettes inexpertly twirling a variety of ‘batons’ – including at least two sets of nunchucks – and stamping their feet in approximate time to the ‘music’.
Ronald Dump positively beamed.
“Maybe we didn’t need the pipers after all, these lovely young things have come out to welcome me…”
Both lovely and young were perhaps open to interpretation, as was the musical skill of the orchestra. Em saw Ishmael frowning.
“Little Botheringham Marching Majorettes. Affectionately known in these parts as the panzer division. They don’t win many cups, but they’ve yet to be bested in a fight. If the Morris Men see them they run like blazes.”
Ishmael grinned his approval.
As the marching ladies bore down on his group, Harmsley-Gunn opened his mouth, then obviously thought better of it. Behind him, Em caught a glimpse of Ginny’s grinning face before the marching girls, and a crowd of local (and not so local) folk parted like the Red Sea as they encountered the Dump admiration committee. Coming back together again, the marchers turned smartly into the estate. The girls of the band stopped moving and marched on the spot, while those who accompanied them passed through their ranks and then turned to form a loose wall of flesh, duffle coats and Laura Ashley print. Having effectively blocked the road, the musicians turned around and broke into an enthusiastic if barely recognisable rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome’ led by Ginny who conducted with a baton that to Em, looked very like the one belonging to Major Harmsley-Gunn.
As the crowd behind them unfurled their banners and began to sing, it finally dawned on Mister Dump that this was whatever the opposite of a welcoming committee might be called.
He turned to his cohorts and snarled. “Get these people out of my way.”
Harmsley-Gunn stepped forward. “Go home all of you.” His little moustache bristled disgustedly. “And give me my cane back you atrocious female.”
Ginny ignored him but signalled the end of the singing as they completed the chorus, leaving the protesters standing in the silence of solidarity.
Harmsley-Gunn, face puce now with ill constrained fury waved his hands at them as if shooing a flock of chickens. “You are blocking the road to progress for the whole village.”
“What sort of an idiot thinks DumpCorp’s proposals are progress?”
The voice from the centre of the crowd was as resolutely middle class as Harmsley-Gunn’s own tones.
“The parish council thinks the plans are excellent,” Harmsley-Gunn spluttered. “We are unanimous. Now unblock the road before I call the police.”
The flour bomb that took him in the middle of his face burst just as it had been designed to do and left him standing like a forlorn ghost. Ginny slid the cane under his arm as if adding an accessory to a snowman.
“Not quite unanimous,” she said curtly.
Dump looked on in increasing amazement. He waved his pudgy little hands at the crowd. “Go away. Go away nasty people.”
Nobody moved.
Schilling spoke up. “Look here you lot. You can’t go about blocking public roads and refusing people access to their own property. Just go home and we will say no more about it.”
Ishmael grinned mirthlessly. “They most certainly couldn’t block a public road. But this isn’t a public road. It’s private. And there is no right of access to anywhere leading through it. So you’d be best advised to turn around and go home yourselves.”
Harmsley-Gunn, recovering from the assault to his person and dignity, drew himself up to his full height and flouryness. “As chairman of the housing association, I invite Mister Dump and his party onto the estate.”
“Nice try, old boy, but the trustees terminated their arrangement with the housing association two days ago. A little matter of malfeasance. The letter informing you is in the post.” He turned to Em with a slight smile “By the way do tell Jamelia that her work on that was watertight. I couldn’t have done better myself.”
As Ishmael spoke, Em could see a dozen or so DumpCorp security operatives moving purposefully towards the scene. The dog handlers were conspicuous by their absence and she idly wondered if Fang and Killer were still running.

Part Twenty-Nine of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, will be here next week.

Classic songs for the festive season, cheerfully and irreverently reimagined for you by the Working Title Blog…

The Choir’s Lament

(To be droned loudly and nasally to the tune of ‘Gaudete‘)

Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day
Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day

Tiddly tiddly, tiddly pom, tiddly tiddly tiddle
I have lost half of my brain and I need a widdle

Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day
Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day

Stand we all inside the choir, masters come to school us
Tempers fuggit, Dominus, smacks us with a ruler

Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day
Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day

Deus, homo sapiens, strange sounds with no glory
We don’t understand a word, cannot see the story

Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day
Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is Latin
And we have to learn it by Christmas Day

Puer nobis nascitur, rector angelorum
What the hell does this all mean? We could die of boredom

Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is boring
But we have to sing it, on Christmas Day
Bloody hell, bloody hell, this stuff is boring
But it’s now an earworm. Won’t go away.

A dictionary for the bemused by Jane Jago…

beilliance (adjective) – of elderly ladies the belligerent desire to hit people with their walking sticks

cazenda (compound noun) – Charlie and Danni from the trailer park. You will find this written over the windshield on Charlie’s truck

dence (verb) – to move to music in a very refined manner

differnet – (noun) the weird Internet

excitigns (adjective) – of rocks, prone to giggle and wet panties

fangipan (noun) – sweeties with added blood

hersute (noun) – business garment belonging to a woman

migth (noun) – furry stuff on the teeth of vagrants and others who can’t be arsed with dental hygiene

noccyer (proper noun) – rurally owned mobile phone company

oka (noun) – small rodent inhabiting the underarm area of very fat people

papperbok (noun) – erudite antelope

prasie (noun) – small ego-sucking insect

qweer (adjective) – asexual specifically of frogs 

ratehr (noun) – what your plumber charges per minute

sill (adjective) – not actually interesting enough to be called silly

teasco (noun) – a disaster in a shopping mall

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

Classic songs for the festive season, cheerfully and irreverently reimagined for you by the Working Title Blog…

We Three Folk

(To be sung with upbeat enthusiasm to the tune of ‘We Three Kings‘)

We three folk from Amazon are
One in a white van, one in a car
One on an escooter with a computer
Bearing packages afar

Oh box the items, box them right
Extra packing, wedged in tight,
Shove the lot in, all that shopping
Get it there before tonight

Books for aunties, perfume for mum
Lots of treats to stuff in your tum
Piles of hoodies, all kinds of goodies
Even a bottle of rum.

Oh box the items, box them right
Extra packing, wedged in tight,
Shove the lot in, all that shopping
Get it there before tonight

Once we went to shop in the rain
Christmas shopping was such a pain
Now you click and then double quick
Amazon comes again!

Oh box the items, box them right
Extra packing, wedged in tight,
Shove the lot in, all that shopping
Get it there before tonight

The Christmas Cake

Conventional wisdom will tell you that you should have baked a fruit cake of the size and consistency of a breeze block sometime last January and that you should have been feeding it brandy weekly ever since. That you should have handcrafted marzipan from ground almonds and other ingredients too numerous to mention. That you should have spent many hours making Holly Leaves and Christmas Roses from sugar paste. And that your icing should be as smooth and hard as a frozen pond.

Pfft, I say. And again pfft.

Number one. Nobody eats Christmas Cake.

Number two. If they did it’s fattening.

Number three. Whatever…

But:

If you must make a cake, just chuck together whatever is your usual fruit cake recipe and shove a quarter bottle of rum in the mix. Buy a slab of ready rolled marzipan, ditto icing. Shove on cake. Sprinkle Maltesers, chocolate raisins, and dark chocolate buttons. Job done. If you can be arsed.

More sensibly, pop along to Waitrose and buy a (insert name of famous chef here)  thing. It will taste like shite but the neighbours will be impressed….

In come I, December, with hale and hearty cheer,
With mulled wine and with wassails
With claret, port and beer.
With winter winds and woollen scarves
My breath in air a-misting
I’ve chocolate treats and holly wreaths
And presents all a-gifting
I’ve hot mince pies and sweet plum pud
And bulbs on wires a-hanging
See my pine trees in tinsel gowns
And children on drums a-banging
My carollers sing the ancient songs
That frame this time of cheer,
I bring you joy and laughter in
And leave with the new year.

E.M. Swift-Hook

Every action provokes consequences. These stories delve into the consequences of unthinking action. We begin with a reimagining of the Myth of the Minotaur…

The Lion in the Labyrinth

In the black basalt rock beneath the palace, there exists a labyrinth so complex that no-one has ever fathomed its secrets. It was made, they say, by those whose machinations broke the sanity of the Great Lion and petrified a hundred hundred janissaries whose duty it had been to guard the Golden Throne and its occupant.
Whatever the truth may be, the Labyrinth had imprisoned The Lion for as long as even the sphinx could remember. The maddened king was contained by wards of strong magic as well as by locks and stone walls…
It was the first day of a new year and a young girl in a rose-coloured gown, with the black silk of her hair unbound about her, was pushed unceremoniously through the door of the labyrinth. Those who closed the door behind her with a clang had no pity for youth and beauty. The Labyrinth was her fate, as it had been the fate of so many before her. A young body would satisfy the lust of the king’s beast and her blood would feed the clamouring stones.
But something went wrong. No screams rent the air and the channels in the rocky floor ran only with clear water.
How could it be that a female capable of surviving the lusts of the Labyrinth had slid past the eyes of The Family? There was disquiet. This creature was not what they had bargained for at all. Too intelligent. Too independent. Too sharply unafraid. It shouldn’t have mattered that she survived, even though she wasn’t meant to be any more than a tasty morsel to temporarily slake the bloodlust of the Great Lion and quench the thirst of the unknowable tunnels in which he dwelt. It shouldn’t have mattered.
It wasn’t as if all the women died. Through the centuries one or two had survived, through guile or pure luck. She, like them, should have been given a present of money and sent away. But this was different, The Lion called her his queen, and the Labyrinth knew her name.
So it mattered. She mattered, and everything she did mattered.
She knew no fear of The Lion and he doted on her. The watchers looked on in unbelief as his beast curled about her slender form. They said he laid his head among her silken skirts and purred like a kitten.
The Dark Master, who ruled the kingdom until such time as the stone janissaries reclaimed their fleshly bodies and a new Lion arose to claim the Golden Throne, thought to refuse her entry to the Labyrinth. But when the appointed time came, and he would have stayed with his grimoires and arcane manuscripts, he found his feet taking him to the iron-bound door and his palm touching the lock stone through no volition of his own. The Labyrinth decreed that she be allowed to enter, and as long as she lived he would admit her each evening will he or nil he.

You can keep reading The Lion in the Labyrinth and Other Stories by Jane Jago as it is out now on Kindle and in paperback.

An everyday tale of village life and vampires…

Saturday morning, and Em was in the box seat in the window of Lillian’s house on the edge of the Brownfield Estate watching, and awaiting her moment to bring DumpCorp’s farrago of lies and half truths crashing down about the ears of its founder.
It wasn’t often she took actual pleasure in the possible discomfiture of a fellow human being, but this looked as if it might be one of those times. She rubbed her hands together and smiled what Agnes called her alligator smile.
Everything was in place and all they had to do now was wait. Tristram and his camera crew were drinking coffee and scoffing chocolate digestives in the kitchen of one of the trim little houses, while she and Ishmael sat in Lillian’s front window. The rest of her seven, having been fortified with blood tea against the sunlight – and with the exception of Ginny who was part of the ‘official’ reception committee – waited in the village hall with what Agnes referred to as ‘rent a mob’ complete with banners, flour bombs and air horns.
Ishmael smiled his smooth practiced smile. “I’m rather looking forward to this,” he said in a voice whose very mildness was a threat to whoever might be foolish enough to get in his way.
Em supposed she should have been lecturing him about civilised behaviour, but this was a special occasion so she just shrugged.
For a while, the cul de sac dreamed quietly in the morning sun but the quiet was broken by the sound of marching feet.
“What the hell?” Em craned her neck to see a bagpipe band, in full kilt regalia, marching down the road towards the simple farm gate at the end of the road, with their skirts swinging in the wind. She sniggered. “Can’t they tell Dorset from Dumbartonshire?” “It would seem not.” It was less amusing when the pipers started to tune up, as the noise stung the ears and made Em, at least, feel quite queasy. It seemed she wasn’t the only one unamused by the racket. The front door of the nearest house to the squealing, skirling pipes flew open and a large young man wearing only a pair of baggy tracksuit trousers ran into the tidy driveway. “Shut that effing noise,” he bellowed.
Needless to say nobody took any notice, but he was a determined fellow and he dashed over to where a man in a strange furry hat was waving a baton. Ishmael opened the window with the evident intention of missing none of the fun.
“Oy, you. What the bloody hell is all the noise about?”
The conductor didn’t deign to answer. He looked down his nose at the barely dressed young man in his carpet slippers and smiled a supercilious smile.
Before Em had leisure to think what a bad idea that was, the conductor felt the full weight of his own stupidity in the form of the large fist that landed somewhere in the region of his midriff. He folded in the middle like a half deflated balloon and the noise of the pipes began to draw to an untidy close.
One of the pipers said something to his mates in a dialect Em found incomprehensible and they dropped their instruments and made a concerted dash for the lad who had dropped their conductor.
It should have been simple murder, but the faultless instincts of Saturday night fighters everywhere brought hefty young men out of every front door.
As the two groups met head on, Em glanced up the road to where Tristram and his cameraman were just about capering with delight. She frowned, then shrugged her shoulders. A couple of dozen young men attacking each other with fists, feet and teeth, would probably make very good television.
One of the locals had a smallish man by the neck and was holding him about six inches off the ground.
“What d’you think you’re bloody doing waking me up on a Sat’day morning making that bloody awful noise?”
His captive seemed just about apoplectic with rage.
“Awfu’ noise is it. Ye jest put me doon and I s’ll give ye awfu’ noise.”
The fight was going quite nicely when Ishmael prodded Em.
“Oops,” he said.
Two men were coming purposefully down the road, and each led a pair of slavering German Shepherds.
“Do we think that swings the odds in favour of the Caledonian contingent?”
Of course that is what should have happened. But this was Little Botheringham and unpredictable at the best of times. The previously quiet houses up and down the cul de sac erupted into action as the women took a hand. Or rather a paw. The two men and four German Shepherds were faced by upwards of a dozen women valiantly holding the collars of a number of dogs, anything from ferocious Jack Russels upwards in size to several of a variety that made the shepherds look like chihuahuas. The GSDs didn’t fancy the odds one bit and slammed on the brakes – dragging their handlers to a halt then making a sharp about face. They fled the scene, still dragging the uniformed ‘security’ men, protesting loudly at ‘Killer’ and ‘Fang’ for unwarranted cowardice, behind them.
One of the pipers stopped stamping on the gonads of the man he was matched with long enough to whistle.
“Them,” he said reverently, “is whit ye call dogs.”
He ducked a blow aimed at his unprotected stomach and dived headfirst back into the fray.
“What happens now?” Em hissed.
Ishmael grinned. “This.” The sound of a police siren acted like magic and the fighting horde rapidly sorted itself into two groups, with the odd crossparty backslap and nod of respect and appreciation. The local men then disappeared as if they had never been outside their front doors, and the pipe band swiftly wiped each other down and collected their instruments. They marched smartly out of the cul de sac just as the police car came in….

Part Twenty-Eight of Much Dithering in Little Botheringham by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook, will be here next week.