Passacaglia

Passacaglia cover

We’re starting to plan our final short story on the Open University FutureLearn Start Writing Fiction course. My idea has in part been inspired by this graffitied door on the Via di S. Giovanni in Laterano, just up the road from the Ludus Magnus gladiatorial school, behind the Colosseum. I find it hard to look at a door like that – set in an old crumbling wall with a rusting wrought iron grille above – without trying to imagine what might lie behind it.

I’ve been trying to get away from the dour mood of some of my previous assignments, which is why I’ve moved the action on to sun-drenched Rome. I was hoping to get away from Hitchcockian thrillers and move towards to P G Wodehouse light humour, but that’s proved too difficult, so I’ve compromised and it’s a just rather sillier than usual thriller plot.

A Table on the Terrace

Google Street image of Ristorante C71 Maximum, Via dei Cerchi, Rome.
Google Street image of Ristorante C71 Maximum, Via dei Cerchi, Rome.

My story starts on the terrace of a restaurant closely modelled on the Ristorante C71Maximum, which overlooks the Circus Maximus. We called here for a coffee during our short break in Rome in February. How could you not want to use the location in a short story?

Note the door below, which is the Marmi bar, which – strictly in fictionalised form! – is going to play a small part in the plot.

Storyboard

storyboard

I’m featuring two characters from my writer’s notebook: Rosie the tattooed Egyptologist and the ‘Ophelia’-like woman who walked along our street holding a posy of herbs. She will probably be called Kiera Atkin.

Rather than launch straight into the story, we’ve been asked to try various ways of developing our character, such as giving the person an unattainable goal to aim for and writing a scene as if the character herself had written it.

The Roman gangster In my story didn’t come from real life, I’m relieved to say. When we were in Rome Netflix were launching the second series of, Suburra, in which the gangsters take on corrupt politicians and the Vatican in an attempt to seize control of the underworld in the Eternal City. A huge billboard advertised the series opposite the Ludus Magnus:

‘All’ombra di Roma c’e un altro impero.’

‘In the shadow of Rome there is another empire.’

Poster ‘Suburra: Blood on Rome’

Suburra poster
Suburra: Blood on Rome

There’s going to be time to edit and rethink the story next week but we’ve been encouraged to start with an outline, just to get things going. I often plan out my publications in a very rough storyboard form, which is what I’ve done here. Along with all the snippets of scenes, dialogue and description, I feel that I’m already well on my way to getting the story to work. Silly as it may be!

Link

Open University FutureLearn Start Writing Fiction course

Published
Categorized as Drawing

Drawing Fossils

On the University of Southampton’s FutureLearn course Beneath the Blue: The Importance of Marine Sediments, we’ve been asked to draw our favourite marine invertebrate, using the techniques of scientific illustration. My favourite would have been the octopus but, as I didn’t have one available, I’ve opted for my favourite fossil marine invertebrate, a rugose coral, Zaphrentis phyrgia. I found it in a patch of crushed limestone on a forest track in the Dales. It dates from the Early Carboniferous.

Zaphrentis
zaphrentis
Pen and watercolour drawing for ‘The Dalesman’.

We were asked to make a measured drawing but I needed to scale it up to fill 75% of the page, leaving room for captions. Using a pair of compasses, I measured the fossil in centimetres, doubled that length then converted to inches for the drawing, so the 5cm height of the actual fossil becomes 10 inches on the drawing.

Measured pencil drawing in A4 sketchbook

The scientific method of drawing stipulates line only with no shading, which is very different to my usual pen and wash technique. I drew the fossil for the August edition of The Dalesman.

Dalesman August 2019

Final Version

In Photoshop, I converted the pencil to black and white and replaced my hand-lettering with a similar-looking font.

Solitary rugose corals were common throughout the Carboniferous Period and some survived until the late Permian. There were four main radial septa which divided the coral so that it was bilaterally symmetrical. Present-day hard corals are sometimes referred to as hexacorals because they have six main divisions.

As I wrote in The Dalesman:

Zaphrentis phrygia was given its species name because of its resemblance to the Phrygian cap of ancient times: a tall, pointed felt cap, which was worn with the point tilting forwards. The living coral stood the other way up, with its pointed end in the seabed.

Richard Bell’s ‘Wild Yorkshire’ nature diary, ‘The Dalesman’, August 2019

Link

University of Southampton FutureLearn course Beneath the Blue: The Importance of Marine Sediments

The Dalesman ‘Yorkshire’s favourite magazine. Since 1939 we have been celebrating all that’s great about Yorkshire, God’s Own Country, through the pages of our magazines, books and guides.’

Developing a Character

character sketch

This week on the Open University FutureLearn Start Writing Fiction course, we’re developing characters. We’re being asked to try ways of doing that which we’re unfamiliar or uncomfortable with.

Letting the character develop from a starting point is the way that normally works for me. I’ve found that, once I’ve established my basic character, whether that’s a tattooed lady, a Hitchcockian gangster or a travelling tyre-fitter, I enjoy imagining the dialogue they’d use and I find out more about the character by virtually ‘listening’ to them. I can always visualise my character quite vividly, so I often make a quick sketch of them.

One rare method, that writer Alex Garland describes in an interview on the course, is of a character coming and tapping you on the shoulder, like a ghost. That’s something that I’d probably find impossible to conjure up. However, I will jot down any ideas that come to me unbidden, just in case a likely character manifests itself.

Getting to know Uncle Joe

As a back up, I’ll try a method that Monique Roffey sometimes uses, of writing a 5-15 page biography. I think that I’d enjoy doing that as it sounds a bit like researching your family tree. However much I know about a character, such as my real life Great, Great, Great Uncle Joe in Victorian times – who survived attempted murder by his wife Mary with a pair of decorating scissors – I want to know more about them:

  • Why were the scissors in the house?
  • Had he and his wife been drinking at the same pub before the incident?
  • Did he ever visit her in prison?
  • What happened when she was released 11 years later and was seen heading back to Sheffield?
  • And, yes, what did he have for breakfast?

The mundane stuff would fascinate me and this is why it’s so interesting if you do come across a murderer in your family tree. The newspaper reports include information that would otherwise never have been recorded, such as Joe and Mary’s sleeping arrangements and the kind of quarrels they had behind closed doors.

‘Ophelia’

As I was reading through the assignment on my iPad, a woman in her early 30s with long dark hair,in camel-coloured coat and purple silky scarf walked thoughtfully up the road holding a little bouquet. She looked like a character from a television drama serial. I decided that I’d have no difficulty writing about such a striking figure, so I’m using her as the starting point for my imagined character.

Any long-haired, thoughtful, youngish woman holding a posy of herbs is sure to remind me of Ophelia, but hopefully I’ll get beyond that archetype as I go through the suggested checklist we’ve been given and build up a CV for the character.

The kind of character I would struggle to elaborate on would be an ‘ordinary’ everyday person doing nothing in particular and looking blank and expressionless, such as a shopper standing in a queue. But I realise that these ‘ordinary’ characters would probably turn out be the most surprising to explore, when you really get to know them.

Live at the Osiris

Live at the Osiris

One of this week’s assignments on the Open University’s FutureLearn Start Writing Fiction course is to take a flat, stereotypical character and to re-imagine them in some unexpected way.

In my writer’s notebook, I had this sketch of a larger-than-life tattooed lady and her friend chatting at a table in a pizza restaurant. I could imagine her holding the stage as a stand-up comedian but I was struggling to find an unexpected twist until we got chatting to John, a dog walker, who always has a few odd stories to tell us.

‘They’ll hide behind a tree, next time they see us coming!’ his wife warned him, as he got into full flow.

He was telling us about a school friend who had gone on to take a degree in Egyptology but had then taken a job compiling bus timetables, as ‘there weren’t many opportunities around here for an Egyptologist’.

That could explain why some bus timetables are as hard to read as hieroglyphics.

Live at the Osiris

‘It went really well last night.’ Stephanie clinked her lime soda against Ruby’s Diet Coke.

‘You think so?’ Ruby seemed sceptical as she reached for another olive.

‘The audience did!’ Stephanie insisted, ‘Your riffs on using a hieroglyphic typewriter really got them going!’

A larger than life personality, Ruby could hold the floor on the stand-up circuit just by standing there. Every visible surface of her ample form was decorated with the baroque flourishes of extravagent tattoos. The strappy back to her baggy top revealed snaking designs running alongside her spine.

Her raggedly-cut blue hair with tousled grey-blonde ends wouldn’t have looked out of place on a kick-ass character in one of the big-screen blockbusters at the multiplex across the road.

Stephanie leaned forward, arms crossed, resting on the table, and hesitated, ‘Well, your closing routine went a bit above my head. That weird dog you were taking for a walk, Anna something? What was all that about?’

‘Anubis? I’m glad you mentioned him. Steph, there’s something I need to tell you: I wasn’t always in stand-up.’

‘I know; you worked in Cambridge before we met. Some kind of secretarial job at one of the colleges?’

‘Something like that. Yes, I did a lot of typing but it was at the Department of Archaeology. I was studying Egyptology: Anubis is the Egyptian god of the dead.’

‘So not a dog, like in your act?’

‘Sometimes a dog, sometimes a man with a dog’s head.’ Ruby leant forward and rested her left elbow on the table. She pulled back the top of her sleeve and looked up at Stephanie.

‘Oh, like your tattoo!’

‘All my tattoos are inscriptions from the tomb of Perenbast, a temple singer at Amarna.’

‘Wow! That’s incredible!’

‘Yes, and that’s just what my professor thought about my dissertation. He refused to accept it. And I refused to rewrite it. My doctorate was suspended. I’d put everything into that monograph and no way was I going to get dragged into pointless arbitration. Professor Dwyer’s word was law. I knew that I wouldn’t get a fair hearing. I fell back on what I’d loved doing with the crowd down at the ADC. I’ve made a good living from stand-up.

‘That’s why I need to talk to you, Steph. I know how much you’ve been looking forward to our sea, sand and sangria break at Makadi Bay. I’m afraid there’s been a slight change of plan. We’re still flying out to Cairo as planned but from there we’re heading south, through the desert, to Amarna.’

‘Amarna, what’s the big attraction of Amarna?’

‘Well, there’s no sea and sangria . . . but there’s plenty of sand! In March, Dr. Hawass and his team broke through a collapsed wall into a new chamber. What they’ve found there looks certain to rewrite everything we thought we knew about Akhenaten. They need the world’s leading expert there, on the spot.’

‘Don’t tell me, that awful Professor?’

‘No, Dwyer’s been totally discredited. There’s only one person they can turn to . . .’

Ruby shrugged modestly and raised an eyebrow in a distinctly conspiratorial fashion: ‘Tar-rah!’

‘And one more change of plan,’ she continued, ‘Can you pack your case now? We fly tomorrow: the thirteen ten Lufthansa flight from Manchester.’

Oil of Cloves

My latest assignment on the Open University’s ‘Start Writing Fiction’ course, is a study of an imagined character:

The effects of the oil of cloves were already wearing off as she wandered aimlessly around the aisles in the co-op. Shrink-wrapped displays of fruit and veg and a bargain bin of pumpkins that had missed out on halloween did nothing to lift her mood. Golden Delicious from Spain? Bobby beans from Kenya? What’s wrong with seasonal produce home-grown right here in the village? The Howgate Wonders from her orchard wouldn’t get held up at the Channel Tunnel and why pay for beans that have flown halfway around the world when you can save enough broads and scarlet runners to grow a crop for free each year? She was still growing the old varieties that her mother had grown thirty, no forty, years ago, when she’d kept the family allotment.

fruit shop

When people called her old-fashioned, she’d smile politely and suggest that sometimes the old ways were the best. But one old remedy really wasn’t working any more and very soon she’d have to face the consequences. The sharp ache deep in her lower jaw was coming back with a vengeance. She walked across the green to the church and paced around amongst the headstones.

She felt like a condemned prisoner awaiting execution. Perhaps, like them, she could allow herself one last cigarette. As she sat on the bench, going through the familiar routine of rolling her Golden Virginia, she felt a little calmer, even though, if anything, the throbbing pain was increasing.

The church bells chimed for quarter past. Tuneful, yes, but no character. Why had they melted down the old ones? When they’d hoisted them down from the belfry she’d seen an inscription on one which showed that it was as old as the church itself. Cracked and tarnished with age. Why can’t things stay just as they are?

She stubbed out her cigarette and dropped it in the bin. She couldn’t leave it any longer. Ten minutes later she was there in the waiting room. The last time she’d been in here, Mr Emmerson’s father had run the practice. Bored-looking goldfish pouted and flounced their diaphanous fins as they rose, then subsided, in the tank in the corner. Why did a creature with no teeth take pride of place in a dentist’s waiting room?

A soft but insistent beep. Her name came up on the screen:
‘Rosemary Lister, Benjamin Emmerson, Surgery 4.’

Mr McGuffin

Cover artwork from my art foundation course at Batley, 1967.

I’ve gone into writing pulp fiction for my latest assignment on the Open University’s FutureLearn Start Writing Fiction course. The prompt we were given this time, a couple of lines about a woman in red carrying a Pekinese in a handbag on a bus, immediately had me thinking of Hitchcock thrillers and, because of the red sweater she was wearing, Hitchcock’s Technicolor movies, such as North by Northwest. The sharp-suited man in the story is the Martin Landau character from that film.

Hilary appeared as a character in an editing exercise in Week 3 of the course.

Mr McGuffin

San Francisco, 1963

Every dude and his dog, every popsie and her pooch, was in town for the Mays Plaza Dog Show.

As the streetcar lurched away from the stop on the corner of Union Square, she watched as a lugubrious man with two Sealyhams strolled out of Davidson’s Pet Shop. He looked just like Alfred Hitchcock. In fact it was Mr Hitchcock: she’d heard that Universal were back filming on the Bay. She was slipping, she told herself: in her line of work, she should have spotted the camera crew, hidden in the studio truck, which they’d disguised as a furniture van to avoid attracting unwanted attention.

Guido, at the Turk Street club, insisted that Hilary was a dead ringer for Hitchcock’s latest leading lady, Tippi Hedren, but this morning, in her headscarf and red sweater, she was hoping that no-one would give her a second look. Certainly, with so many ladies with lapdogs here for the Show, no-one seemed to have noticed the little Pekinese that she was carrying in her handbag. Until now.

He’d jumped on board at the last stop: the tall guy in a sharp suit frowned as he glanced from side to side, passing several vacant seats before stopping next to her.

‘Is that seat taken?’ Not waiting for an answer, he pushed past her and sat by the window.

‘Hey, aren’t you a nice little fella!’ the little dog enjoyed his attention, ‘Big baby eyes and a cute snub nose.’

As he patted the dog with one hand, he reached down into her bag with the other and made a grab.

‘And I’ll take this little snub-nosed beauty!’

He’d found the Pico Baretta that she always kept in her handbag. He clicked off the safety catch and held it under his jacket, pointing right at her.

‘I’ll call the shots now! I’ve seen your magic act at Guido’s and I watched you at Mays this morning: just another of the dog-mad dames in the crowd at the press preview. Sooo clever the way you switched the mutt from your magic act with the Supreme Champion, Mr McGuffin, everyone’s favourite Pekinese. And what a nice touch, the way you switched those ribbons, so that McGuffin matches that sweater of yours. What I didn’t see was how you stashed away McGuffin’s silver-gilt lead: that would have been a dead giveaway.’

But Hilary was giving nothing away. She stared forwards, a blank expression on her face.

‘Silent type, huh?’ he snarled, ‘Well, my boss has a nice little sideline with a puppy farm out Bodega way, and he’s very keen to meet Mr McGuffin, so let’s take this nice and easy and no-one will get hurt.

‘Hey, the tourists might like these old streetcars but we’ve been sitting on these slatted seats for long enough. How about you and I take a walk in the park? Looks like Lafayette’s our next stop.

‘You get up with that precious pooch and remember that I’m right behind you.’

Still looking straight ahead, she touched his wrist as a signal she was ready, stood up and walked calmly down the aisle.

‘Hey!’ He’d been so intent on clutching the handgun that he hadn’t noticed her sleight of hand. Looking down he saw that his right hand was firmly tethered to the seat by Mr McGuffin’s silver-gilt lead.

A tap on the window. Hilary raised an eyebrow and blew him a kiss. It was a perfect day to take Mr McGuffin for a walk across Lafayette Park.

Links

Mr McGuffin PDF version

The Chair, a short story by Chloe Fox

Sometimes it never goes

Our latest assignment on the Open University’s Start Writing Fiction FutureLearn course was to write the start of a story in just 200 to 350 words. Even though this scarcely amounts to two pages in my PDF version (see link below), I’ve given it a moody, atmospheric cover taken on a moody, atmospheric, rainy day during our break in the Lake District last week. This was Calfclose Bay, Derwent Water, looking west towards Rampsholme Island (wild swimming ladies in their bright pink outfits cropped out because they didn’t really fit in with the Nordic Noir ambience!)

Sometimes it never goes

The couple at the door brought Carly out of her reverie. ‘Is it still raining out there?’ she asked them.
‘It comes and it goes,’ said the woman.
‘Sometimes it comes and it never goes,’ said Carly, as she showed them to a table, ‘You learn to deal with the rain if you live here.’


But the famous Cumbrian rain hadn’t doused the flames that destroyed Penhurst Grange.
She’d been shocked to see the photograph on the front page of the Westmorland Gazette: the gothic silhouette of the Grange picked out against sheets of orange flame.
It wasn’t that she’d never wished to see the old place destroyed, but she’d worked hard to put those disturbing memories behind her. The picture brought them all flooding back and now they wouldn’t leave her.


‘Sometimes it comes and it never goes.’


Gauzy streaks of rain hung over the lake, floating down from the craggy vale beyond.


Eric prided himself on finding even the most remote of farms without the aid of a sat nav but even he was struggling with Far Ings. As he drove along the narrow lane in the glowering light, the drystone walls loomed so close that it felt like one of the all-too-familiar corridors of Penhurst Grange.
He’d tried to put the place out of his mind. He’d got back on track at last and proved himself reliable and efficient at his new job with the mobile tyre-fitting service. But now he was lost.
He pulled into the next passing place, by the gates of a Victorian shooting lodge, Crossghyll, sheltered amongst tall, dark firs and lush hollies. He took out his phone to open the app.
No signal. Hardly surprising in this remote valley, ringed around by rugged fells.
Then he saw it. He could hardly forget that cerise Range Rover: he’d fitted it with a set of Pirellis just three weeks ago.


Boynton Doyle – the property developer who’d taken on the Penhurst Grange project – but what was he doing here?

Link

Sometimes it never goes PDF version

Open University Start Writing Fiction FutureLearn course