Category: Books

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

The Chair

To ease myself back into book design, I’m trying out Pages, Apple’s word-processor, which you can use to create e-books. I’ve gone for the ‘Traditional Novel’ template and, to keep things simple, I’m sticking to the design as far as possible. So far, I’ve only had to change the colour of the title, so that it shows up against my photograph.

I took the photograph on a visit to Sewerby Hall on Wednesday. I’d already decided on my subject, so I was on the look-out for a vintage armchair. Most of the furniture in the Hall is on loan from the Victoria & Albert Museum and has been carefully chosen to recreate the interiors as they appear in photographs taken in the Hall’s Edwardian heyday.

My holiday reading during our short break at Bridlington was a paperback of a Vera novel by crime-writer Ann Cleeves. The paperback’s cover features a glowering monochrome landscape, so I’ve gone for a similar treatment for my photograph, using various filters in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CC 2019.

Apple Books on iPad
The book works well as a PDF in Apple’s Books app.

I’ve used Lightroom’s ‘black and white split tone’, with added grain and some vignetting. When I took the photograph (having first checked with the attendant that photography was allowed), I had to crouch down to get the angle on the chair that I was after. This meant that the perspective of the paneling in the background was skewed, so I’ve used Photoshop’s ‘Edit/Transform/Skew’ command to straighten it up.

The author’s name was randomly generated in my favourite writing program, Scrivener. The original story, The Chair, is by my sister. It appears in an old school magazine which I came across recently.

Links

Sewerby Hall and gardens

The Chair, eBook on the iPad
The 1962 school magazine and the 2019 eBook version, looking great on my iPad.

Apple Pages ‘Create and collaborate on documents that are beautiful beyond words’ . . . such as my mystery story cover!

Adobe Creative Cloud: includes Lightroom CC and Photoshop CC

Scrivener ‘the go-to app for writers of all kinds’

Victor Ambrus

Victor Ambrus

I’ve mentioned before how much of an influence the springy pen and ink illustrations of Victor Ambrus were on me as a student and I’ve just come across a brief account that I made in a student notebook of an occasion when I was lucky enough to get to speak to him.

sketch
Doodle from my notebook/sketchbook where I’m trying out Ambrus’s technique of adding finger prints to a drawing.

At the Leeds Children’s Book Fair, on Tuesday 16 November 1971, I slipped in at the back of the audience of children for a talk given by Victor and another historical illustrator/writer Ian Ribbons. As I walked in, Victor had just fired the flintlock pistol that he’d brought along with him; a sure way to get everyone listening!

As the smoke cleared, he explained:

“I like drawing historical pictures because I am able to go to town on the costumes and more interesting things seemed to happen in those days.”

Ian Ribbons was the author and illustrator of a series of books about events around the world on one particular date in history. As part of the research for Monday, 21 October 1805, The Day of Trafalgar, he’d climbed the mast and drawn from the crow’s nest of HMS Victory:

“The point is that you never know what you might be doing next.”


fox sketch
Ambrus-inspired drawing from my diary a couple of days after the book fair. I studied his illustrations in books that I borrowed from the children’s section in Leeds City Library. This was my impression of a character in Barbara Leonie Picard’s Twice Read Tales, illustrated by Ambrus.

But coming back to Victor Ambrus, as I’ve said before, I was convinced that if I could use the exact same nib and paper that he used, I too might be draw like him, so when it came to questions from the audience, I asked him about art materials:

“I use ordinary layout paper for my drawings so that the printers can copy it but of course for colour you have to experiment a little but I use the same sort of paints that you would use at school.”

The real ‘secret’ of Victor’s work is that he can draw.

Quentin Blake, Blue Peter and Big Chief I-Spy

Quentin Blake

The previous day I’d seen, for the first time, Quentin Blake in action, drawing animals on request for a group of children. His giraffe ran to three sheets of his A2 layout pad. I sat quietly at the back, so unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to request a drawing. A year later, he would be one of my tutors in the Illustration Department at the Royal College of Art.

I was so lucky with my tutors right through college. On the morning of the day that I saw Quentin at work, I ‘talked with Derek Hyatt about composition’ and the following day before my return visit I had a music tutorial with Alan Cuckston (I was working on a project about the Yorkshire composer William Baines, 1899-1922).

After the Ambrus talk I saw another familiar face at the book fair:

Big Chief I-Spy
Peter Purves

‘As I walked away I saw someone smiling at me – it was Peter Purves of Blue Peter.’

And was there someone else?: ‘Also nearly walked into Big Chief I-Spy? I don’t think so.’

The I-Spy books were one of my early influences, with their encouragement to children to get out spotting, jotting and drawing. I won several prizes in the I-Spy summer holiday competitions. There was a daily I-Spy column in the Daily Mail and during August the Big Chief set something to find and to write about every day. I’ve still got my prize-winning books and I’ve never grown out of the habit of getting out and just looking.

Stan Barstow’s ‘Bright Day’

Filming Joby, 1973 Photograph from TV Times, summer of 1973

“I just selected this,” novelist Stan Barstow told me, as he gave me a well-worn Pan paperback of Bright Day, “as perhaps my all time favourite novel, certainly my favourite of J.B. Priestley’s, but it’s quite a suitable subject for you as it involves ‘disenchantment with the celluloid industry’, and part of it is set in pre-World War I ‘Bruddersford’, so you should be able to get some subject matter locally.

“Also, as it happens, I believe Yorkshire TV are in the process of filming a version of it at the moment, so, if you were stuck for costumes and sets, perhaps they’d oblige.

“Don’t worry about the cover illustration, which is nothing like. The story is so beautifully constructed and flows in such a fascinating way that illustrations seem irrelevant anyway.

“Apologies for biro marks.”

Stan had used the copy when he dramatised Bright Day for a BBC Radio 4 play. He’d met J.B.Priestley and more or less got him to admit the Bright Day was his favourite amongst all his novels.

He gave me this in the 1970s and his reference to me being disenchanted with the celluloid industry probably means that it was after my three or four months’ stint working as assistant background artist on Martin Rosen’s animated version of Watership Down in 1976. With the publication of my first book  looming, I was making efforts to put together a folio to show the range of my work, which for the past few months had consisted entirely of drawings of the interior of Cowslip’s Warren!

I loved Priestley’s description of the first room that the would-be writer in the novel sets up for himself, as I’d recently settled into a similar room, which had to serve as both studio and bedroom, in a shared flat and was enjoying attempting to start making a living from writing and illustration. I liked one of the minor characters in the story, Jock Bamiston, who ‘does nothing of any consequence’ but through it all:

‘remained cool and amused yet friendly, like a well-wisher sent to us from some other and nobler planet’.
I think that sums up the role of the illustrator pretty well: to be an amused observer.

Printing Booklets

Stapling
Saddle stapler, bone folder and long-nosed pliers for the occasional bent staple.

Printing booklets has been a cottage industry for me for the last twenty years. It took me all day to print a hundred copies of various walks and local guides, so it’s very labour intensive, however it’s satisfying to turn sheets of laser paper and card into A5- and A4-size booklets.

Surprisingly, there were no serious hiccups, other than the printer running out of paper and on one occasion running out of toner.

Rickaro Bookshop

Bookshop window

Book coverIf you’re trying to track down one of my books, this bookshop on Horbury High Street is a good place to start. In addition to my local booklets, walks guides and sketchbooks, bookseller Richard Knowles often has copies of my long out-of-print titles such as my first, A Sketchbook of the Natural History of the Country Round Wakefield; I spotted two copies of the paperback version on his shelves recently.

This is the first time that I’ve tried the Adobe Illustrator trace option on a colour photograph. The results remind me of the British Library’s reprints of vintage detective fiction, which often have a period travel poster or similar artwork on the cover, hence my book cover design (all I’ve got to do now is write the mystery novel to go with it).

Bookshop

I could learn something from Illustrator when it comes to being bold and confident in the use of colour. In comparison with this posterised effect, my watercolour is soft and tentative. Not always a bad thing but bold and confident would be good from time to time.

Link

Rickaro Bookshop, High Street, Horbury