Research: perils and pleasures

Heroines 3 and The Tenant of Rookwood Hall

I couldn’t make it to the Heroines festival this year, but right now the new Heroines Anthology is wending its way to me from the wonderful team at Neo Perennial Press. I can’t want to get my hands on it to read this latest crop of stories about amazing women.

The Heroines anthologies contain short fiction and poetry which retells or re-imagines stories about women from history and folklore, fairy tales and legend. They are mythology for the contemporary age. This anthology also presents the outcome of the inaugural Heroines Women’s Writing Prize. From over 350 entries the winner of the short fiction prize was Dasha Maiorova, and the winner of the poetry award was Isabella Luna. Congratulations to them both for reclaiming heroines of the past in a way which strongly resonates with women today.

I was thrilled to make the longlist of 24 authors and poets, because that secured my story’s place in the table of contents for this third anthology.

For the first anthology I wrote Bits and Bolts and Blood – a different kind of Little Red Riding Hood, because a wolf who was better versed in fairy mythology would have known to fear a red cap.

For the second, Melusine’s Daughter considered how that marvelous monster’s daughter would have fared against Heer Halewijn, the original Bluebeard.

This time, I wrote a story called The Tenant of Rookwood Hall. I had started out thinking about fairy ointment and Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (a different tale altogether) and then wandered off on a literary walking tour of the Fells.

And, yeah, I bumped into those Brontë sisters. I don’t think anyone has ever encapsulated my issues with Charlotte’s and Emily’s novels as well as Kate Beaton did, in her web comic Hark a Vagrant.

Poor Anne! She wrote one of the first feminist novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was incredibly popular – and shocking – when published, because of its depiction of alcoholism and vice. The sound of the heroine’s bedroom door being slammed against her husband “reverberated through Victorian society”. But, her sister Charlotte was critical of the book and refused to allow it to be republished after Anne’s death, describing it as “a mistake” and Anne as “gentle, retiring and inexperienced”.

Actually, Anne appears to have been the only Brontë with much of a spine and the ability to make a go of things without falling prey to sensibility, romanticism, laudanum, etc, etc. Anyway, back to the Fells…

The lonely wild places of the north of England are notoriously beset with fairies, giants, witches, and malevolent beasts. Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous heroine, Jane Eyre, is fleeing from something which may or may not be the fearsome Gytrash when she first encounters Mr Rochester, arguably a far more dangerous creature.

So, when I wrote of an independent young woman crossing the Fells, where the ruins of the fairy king’s rath can be found, it was inevitable that a Brontë influence would seep into my story. If you want to find out how Miss Grey manages when she has to deal with King Eveling and the Gytrash and three squirrel-tailed hedgehog fairy servants, you’ll just have to read The Tenant of Rookwood Hall.

You can purchase a copy of the Heroines Anthology (vol. 3) from Neo Perennial Press by following this link (and volume 1 and volume 2 as well – I mean, they’re right there…)

And take care when you’re out walking, my dears. You never know what you might encounter.

(The banner image is cropped from a photograph of a Patterdale Terrier by Karin Laurila on Pixabay. I know the Patterdale is one of the Fell Terriers, but I’m pretty sure they’re not directly related to the Gytrash.)

A long time brewing

Some stories take longer than others to reach fruition.

In February 2018, over on terribleminds, Chuck Wendig’s then-weekly flash fiction prompt was to type “strange photos” into Google images, find one you liked and write about it. Ooh! clever…

ArthurTressimage

I found this photograph by Arthur Tress – in fact, his disturbing dream-like photographs were all over the results. At first I didn’t realise the cut-out men were soldiers in helmets and I thought it was supposed to be Paul McCartney or George Harrison in all their mop-top glory, which made it even weirder.

Anyway, the first 500 words of a story about a man called Amos Polkinghorne, the third and last of his name, kind of fell out of my brain. A creepy story. And although I knew how I wanted it to end, I didn’t know what came between.

Two months later, in April 2018, I went to Tasmania for my birthday and indulged my weird obsession with apples growing on trees.

On trees, I tell you!

bapples Look, it’s not that their arboreal provenance surprises me, but when you grow up in the sub-tropics, mango and banana and pineapple and avocado trees are everywhere but temperate fruits on trees are not. (Ha, ha, I know… pineapples and bananas don’t grow on trees. Pineapple plants are bromeliads and banana plants are just really big herbs.)

Anyway, I get ridiculously excited about seeing apples – and pears and plums and apricots etc – on trees. But especially, for reasons unknown, apples.

And down in Tassie, I talked to my cousin Matt about weird apple cultivars – like Lady in the Snow and Geeveston Fanny which you never see in supermarkets because they bruise too easily, or they don’t have a good shelf life, or they’re best for making apple jam or pies and not for eating – and he said he’s met people in the Huon Valley who’ve forgotten more about varieties of apples than we’ll ever know.

I tucked that away in my head, and found it had sidled up to the photo of the old man who looked suspiciously like someone who’d know an unseemly amount about Westfield Seek-No-Furthers or Winter Kings. And anything he knew probably wouldn’t be good news for anyone else.

Malice and Malus pumila started stewing together in my brain. Another 800 words bubbled up like warm cider hitting the frost-hard ground when you’re wassailing to appease the trees…

This is the odd thing about inspiration – bits collide and make a whole new thing. It’s the chemistry of story, I suppose. It’s why writers hate being asked ‘where do you get your ideas from’ because the answer is rarely ‘fully-fledged in a dream’ (although that does happen) and never, as far as I know, ‘I subscribe to a mail-order service which posts them out to me’ (although there are plenty of online story prompts including the inimitable Mr Wendig’s).

So, whatever happened to Uncle Amos?

He stewed, for more than a year, in the nether regions of my cortex, while I worked on other things and appeased characters who were more clamorous about their stories being told. I read about the rediscovery of a lost apple cultivar – the Kittageskee – and about Appalachian folk magic and about mummified scarab beetles (yeah, delightful, thanks Juliette). Amos didn’t go away. He just sharpened his bone-handled knife, curled his lip at the world, and waited.

What I needed to push me into finishing, as usual, was a deadline. I picked an anthology with the right kind of theme, and a submission deadline of the 31st of December and promised myself I’d get it done. Finally, while I was tinkering with the voice of the story’s narrator, Amos’s nephew, I realised that it needed to be Amos’s niece and it all came together.

And then it all fell apart, when that anthology call was cancelled at the last minute.

And then… a bit of serendipitous deliciousness happened and I found a submission call for another anthology which fitted my unsettling little story even better. Yes! In a gratifying burst of resolve to finish and submit more of my writing, I sent off my bad apple on the first day of the year and, even though it’s taken me nearly two years to write, I’m happy with that.

So charge your glasses, my friends, and toast to a good vintage of stories in 2020, even if they do require a slow ripening and a leisurely fermentation.

Oh, and let’s hope Uncle Amos is happy too. We don’t want him haunting our dreams.

An update: Amos was not best pleased to be rejected, and spent most of 2020 in a foul mood. Well, he’s not alone there. But you can’t keep a man like Amos Polkinghorne down (Lord knows, his niece has tried) and I’ve just had confirmation that ‘Bad Apple’ will be included in the ‘Good Southern Witches’ anthology being released by Curious Blue Press on 13 April 2021.

Words you didn’t know you needed

I’m a word nerd.

I love bang up to the elephant articles about weird words to add to my vocabulary, like this list of slang from the Victorian Era, and collections of obscure words. One of my favourites of the latter is The Phrontistery with its Compendium of Lost Words.

Feel free to share your favourites in the comments – I’ll be forever grateful!

I have beguiled many a happy hour reading through the Compendium. I could try and justify it by saying it’s research for writing historical fiction, but that would be entirely disingenuous. I just love words.

It has occurred to me, though that there are no words for things that should have words for them, and other words out there which can hardly come up much in conversation. One of the latter, courtesy of The Phrontistery, is brephophagist. Try and recall, if you’d be so kind as to indulge me for a moment, the last time you needed a word for “someone who eats babies”.

Never, I thought (or, at least, I hoped.)

And now, to prove me wrong, a good friend reminded me of the fascinating collection of online oddities at Atlas Obscura, and whilst taking a circuitous route through its treasures, I stumbled upon the Child-Eater of Bern. (That’s him caught in the act in the cropped header image, photographed by Andrew Bossi, available in creative commons on Wikipedia. See the full image at the linked sites.)

The good folk of Bern refer to the subject of the horrific sculpture that tops their fountain as a Kindlifresser – a child eater, or brephophagist. He’s been there since 1546 and, for all I know, it may have been all the rage in Europe during the 16th Century to decorate one’s town with such things. Suddenly, I can imagine the word ‘brephophagist’ arising quite naturally in all manner of conversations.

That’s my disturbing thought for the day.

A serendipitous hare

I love it, when I’m researching for my writing, and I have a kind of tenuous plan of where I want to go with something and I’m following the trail along, reading this and that, which leads to the other and then – BOOM! – I find stuff that’s just so perfect for what I want, I feel like I couldn’t have made it up.

Happily, that’s the way the week’s gone with my research on hares. I like hares. I’m not a huge fan of rabbits, although I’ve been reading some interesting things about rabbits and warreners in The Brecks area of Norfolk and Suffolk. But hares are really fascinating.

There’s a scruffy, fugitive-looking hare that I sometimes startle, late at night, as I drive into my suburban street. I love the way they move, and the way they look. And the things that have been believed about hares – the myths and legends that have been passed on as fact – are just sitting there begging to be told in more stories.

I’m happy to oblige. Not the least of these is that hares would change their sex, just as they changed their coats from winter to summer. According to Sir Thomas Browne, writing in 1646, hares may transition from one sex to the other, or they may be hermaphrodites, either way it is the reason for their vices of “unnatural venery and degenerous effemination”.

Well, how can I resist that? If it wasn’t 1834 my main character would be wearing a T-shirt that read “Warning: may display unnatural venery and degenerous effemination”. And really, now that I’ve thought of it, I may have to design one, because who wouldn’t want one of those?

Happy trails and horses as characters

If I had a horse, today would be the day that I gave it cake. So, happy birthday horses of the world.

I don’t know a great deal about horses, not practical things, never having had anything much to do with them, unless you count reading a lot of horse adventure fiction when I was 9 or 10. Which I don’t. I’m making that sneery ‘you’re kidding me, right?’ face at myself right now.

I think horses rate high on the aesthetics of form chart and I adore the words that are associated with all things equine – fetlock, snaffle, currycomb and withers – as well as all the different words that only get used to descibe horse gaits and horse colours and, of course, different breeds. A whole lexicon in itself.

But, while writing historical fiction, if one wants to get one’s characters from point A to place B then one needs, quite possibly, a horse. And while I think the idea of naming a car is vaguely ridiculous, a horse is a character and needs a name. And a personality. And a description. And a relationship with its person.

And so my main character’s horse went through four name changes because, frankly, I think you can tell a lot about a person from what they choose to name their companion creatures and how they interact with them. Quite early on I had settled on Argus for my main character’s hound, because he is a rangy, spotted dog and, obviously, Greek mythology has both the multi-eyed giant and Odysseus’ faithful Argos.

But that ruled out another mythological or Classical name for the horse.

A virtue name, perhaps? It was 1832, after all. But, no, it’s not really the sort of thing the character would do.

An everyday kind of person name? No, not quite right either.

And then I saw a photo of a beautiful black and white horse, which didn’t really look like a funny little seabird, but something about the white blaze and white chest reminded me of a puffin. And so Puffin got her name.

Which was fortuitous, because it provided an unforced, lightly jocular piece of dialogue when some of the characters were getting to know each other. And even though she’s not real, still I wrote her so she is kind of my horse, so happy birthday Puffin!

Any suggestions on great horse names very welcome…

Historical fashion faux pas

1830 fashion plate History is full of fashion that clashes horrifically with current aesthetics.

I’m fairly certain that one of the reasons for the popularity of Regency-era historical fiction is that the women’s fashions were, for a brief period there, relatively simple. They look a lot better, to our modern eyes, because of it.

My WIP is set in 1832 and by then women’s fashions had swung away from the simplicity of the Empire style to something a little more atrocious. OK, a lot further along the ugly scale than most of us are comfortable with. The ideal female silhouette had wide, wide skirts, a tiny little waist, sloping shoulders, leg of mutton sleeves and hair bunched over the ears so that one looked like a spaniel.

But, as you might imagine given that my working title is “This Unnatural Masquerade”, there is some gender obfuscation going on. And in this respect, the 1830s are the perfect time for a young woman to pass herself off as a man, as you can tell from the fashion plate to the left.

Is he not the last word in manliness?

Playing in the graveyard

I spent a lot of time in graveyards when I was a child.

Well, I guess it wasn’t a lot of time, but my mum had a thing about stopping at old cemeteries and walking along reading the headstones out loud to us, with suitable asides about the names, the dates and the mundane tragedy of death as experienced by complete strangers a century before.

So there are graveyards in the story I’m writing, and I added in another one when I was writing a scene today. Despite working on historical fiction, I was aided by Google maps – I knew exactly where I wanted the event to take place, around 300 years ago. I had a look at the street view of Duns to get a sense of the layout, and there directly across the road is a fabulous old cemetery, raised up above the road. What a perfect stage for a dramatic declaration.