A Tale for Halloween

I've just uploaded my narration of my story - a Tale for Halloween - to Soundcloud. I had wanted to make it an ACX audiobook but the audio doesn't meet their exacting standards. It's fine to my ear, but the "ground noise" is a tad too much for ACX.  Whaddeva.

I put the Kindle version up a couple of weeks ago and it's done moderately. I had hoped it would do better. I actually think the story is good - it's got a nice shape. I wanted to contrast the realism of the dismal working class streets I'm familiar with with the Gothic half in the haunted castle. The beginning is very much Northern working class realism. I have worked with mediums from my days as a ghost tour team leader. The depiction of them is perhaps unkind. It owes as much to the BBC's Abigail's Party (except with Northern accents) as to the people I knew. The mediums I knew weren't frauds and they told me some astonishing things, but that's for another post.

The medium's street is based on Meadow Road, Whitehaven for those who want to know, or one of the backstreets off it. Where they have the coffee is Workington town centre in the rain and Barrow Hall - the site of the seance is Dalston Hall near Carlisle. That is a great place, if you ever get the opportunity to visit. And truly haunted too ;)  That's where I met the spirit of John Dalston, and the ghost of my wife from a former time, Rebbeka Goffrey/ I'm not married to her now.

Recently someone on Good Reads gave my Christmas story 2 stars!!!  I often think that people give low ratings for something that disappoints their preconceptions, if not yours.  The Christmas story isn't supposed to be scary. It's an old fashioned redemption story. It's more like It's a Wonderful Life or A Box of Delights than The Shining. I never meant it to scare. But hey. I'm much more relaxed about these bad reviews these days. You put your stuff up on the Internet and someone is going to shoot it down., Some day. Some how.

Anyway, back to the self promotion

Listen to the audiobook for free here  and, goodness me, you can read it for very very cheap here on Kindle USA or on Kindle UK here.  It's a minor price either way. Tiny really. And for such a gem!

A Tale for Halloween.  That's what I said.

This blocking from bed is not all it is cracked up to be

So here I am in bed its late and I'm tired. I couldn't help but notice that the last message I recorded was full of errors. It is much harder to edit errors on your phone ran on A laptop or PC. However I wanted to share that thought with you, things will be okay in the end. This is the first step of your  last journey. Hang on – that didn't sound as uplifting as I meant it. Let me put it another way this is the first step of the last journey you will take, even if it takes the rest of your life. It's a journey. I think we established that. Return new was going to tag return. All I was trying to do that we start a new paragraph.

So now you see the problems with logging from bed. I'm reading a good book at the moment it's called the Immortals by SE Mr. That should be S space E Lister. It's about Time travel and I like time travel. Anyway that's enough drivel good night

How I'm now normal, and other thoughts.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I ran a website called Haunted Britain and Ireland. It was the first of its kind. I had worked in the tourist industry at the same time as being interested in ghost stories and the idea of this website was to compile a list of haunted places that readers could actually visit.

I had worked on producing a magazine in about 1995 when I lived in Wales, that actually never came out called Haunted Places. We realised that we could charge the owners of so-called haunted hotels and take a booking fee. It worked for a while.

The growth of the Internet allowed us to take that idea from the printed page to the world wide web. I compiled a list of hotels, and latterly castles, that people could visit and I wanted a good spread across the UK and Ireland. In many cases the stories we had of the ghosts were traidtional - someone had seen something at one point in the past. In other cases, the information was fresher and I actually met and interviewed staff who had experiences, or was put in touch with previous guests who’d “seen things”.

I encouraged people to send me their experiences and, while that didn’t happen for every hotel, it did for some. Particularly the places we returned to for our ghost tours.

Over time, things changed and my enthusiasm waned. The last tour I did was in 2003 and there is a great write up by Kriss Stephens here:

http://www.fab4musicfestival.com/ghostours/tr03.htm

I got another job but continued doing some ghost stuff more local to me. One thing I noticed was that the owners of the hotels, if they succeeded in getting better kinds of guests, didn’t want the ghost hunters. Ghost hunters wanted to traipse all over their hotels, down into the cellars, up on the tower roof and go all sorts of places guests aren’t supposed to go. It’s much easier to get normal guests who stick within the bounds of civilised behaviour. Hotel owners are in the business to make a living, and one unfortunate side effect of our publicity was that crazy people would just rock up at all hours and expect to be allowed into the place to sit up all night with ouija boards all completely free, gratis and without paying a penny. That meant that many of my previous contacts no longer returned my phone calls. I exaggerate, but the loony fringes of the ghost hunting fraternity, are often unwelcome guests.

Blogging from Bed

I've just discovered a new way of blogging. I've got an app on my phone which allows me to lie in bed and blog about the random thoughts occur to me as I'm lovely and cosy and warm. The only problem is that sometimes it gets the words wrong, but it's so much better-this speech recognition-then are used to be. Paragraph it's actually it's actually serviceable. I can imagine me standing on the mountain tops of my beloveds homeland. Or by an ancient stone circle having thoughts about sandwiches and when I want to eat and I can share them with people as easily as this. Been back your ears you're going to be deluged

The Ghost of a Place

I notice that in my writing I am often very specific about places. The train stops at Craven Arms; he navigates from Glasgow Central to Glasgow Queen Street station; his office is on Bedford Square; he lives in St John's Wood and drives down past Point Lobos on the Pacific Coast Highway. Places are important to me.

In fact, I have often wondered whether places have souls. This year, the beloved Sheila and I travelled to Great Malvern to climb the Malvern Hills  (from the Welsh Moelfryn - bald hill - I'm interested in words too, but you knew that.)

Then we went through Gloucestershire (see I'm at it again) Worcestershire, with a brief dip into Herefordshire before hitting Somerset and Glastonbury. As part of the trip we went to Stonehenge and Avebury before coming back through the Cotswolds on a sad and rainy Brexit day in Stow on the Wold then up to Cumbria and across into Scotland for a weekend in Kirkcubright.   Some of these places breathe when we're not looking. I'm sure of it.

In a previous career, not wholly unrelated to my writing, I was a tour leader for ghost tours. And from the age of a kid right up to dotage, I've stood by lakes and watched the snow come in, or on mountains feeling the wind, or in the middle of a marsh calf deep in peat,  or by the sea when the waves are breaking from Ireland (or even in Ireland watching the phosphorescence off the coast of Connemara).  But the feeling I get in these places, where does it arise?

Is it from the places themselves - so Glastonbury, or Tara or Whitby (or Jerusalem when woken by the call to prayer) - is it in the places - the dragon energy - that we feel. Does this cause the shiver in the haunted house, or do we take the haunting there ourselves?  My rational brain tells me the haunting is all our own, but my heart tells me the world breathes. I'm heart over head every time. Except when I'm not. What about you?

Synchronicity with Cables

I have twin daughters. Yesterday I saw one of them off to University. As the afternoon progressed, she said she had forgotten her phone charger. Luckily, I had one in the car. She accompanied me to the car and we decided we'd say goodbye there. I gave her the charger hugged her, gave her traditional Vulcan farewell and left here there. Today it was the turn of the second twin. As the afternoon wore on, we walked back to the car. I had the free ethernet cable the University had given her and I gave her the cable and we hugged and gave the traditional Vulcan farewell and I left her there.

It struck me that I had inadvertently said goodbye to both of them separately by giving them a cable. What can this mean? As we know there are no coincidences in the Universe, so the cables must be in some sense symbolic. I suppose cables join things, they pass energy - in this case love, and they transfer this energy over distance; the distance I will be apart from them.  So I guess that's what they mean. Or am I crazy?

On the other hand I just went to see the Blair Witch recent episode. The tunnel bit was the best. The rest was just people running around in a confused manner bumping into each other and screaming and playing meaningless, loud sound effects similar to I used to create for the Dark Door in 1995.  And despite what the website says, the first "game" was in April 1992. I had a lot of fun making those sound effects. At first I tried to make them relevant to the story, and I think the best ones were, but by the end I just had babies laughing and trees falling down with lots of echo and flange. Just like Blair Witch. I mean what were all those coyotes doing making that noise? Why were they even in that wood? And the tree noises? It seemed to me that the trees were getting angry, like evil Ents. But then the sister? How would she have survived all those years without shampoo?  That little plot hole was never filled.

Yes, Rotten Tomatoes gave it 37%. So I'm not the only one.

Point of View

You will remember Save the Cat by the late Blake Snyder and Story Physics by Larry Brooks. I think that screenwriting has done a lot for writing writing. It introduced the idea of structure and it helped people focus. With the idea of structure came the idea of the Hero's Journey. Goodness knows I like Joseph Campbell and his grandfather Carl Jung, but I also think these things are overdone.

When I look back at the books I like, I think of books like The Glastonbury Romance by Cowper Powys and the Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic and they certainly don't have the structure that now all film-makers and increasingly all writers espouse. Yet they're still good. I'm not sure that the greats of literature follow the three act structure slavishly either. Increasingly, movies become boring because they block out the same pattern. Books too.

One of my observations is Point of View. I've been involved in writing groups before and the PoV has become a shibboleth. You have to stick in one guy/girl's head. You have to. You must.

This is the third person limited. You can only see out of one person's eyes in a film, so by extension if we base all writing on film scripts, we can only have the third person limited. Yet, when I read older works, they absolutely don't keep to this. Most are written in the third person omniscient and dib and dab in everyone's head revealing their feelings and thoughts. So, I think the third person limited is an artefact of novel writing being dominated by screenplay writing as everything is now filmic. It's not a rule that you have to keep to one PoV. Readers don't care as much as fiction writers who have read writing manuals based on screen writing.

Just saying.

Audiobooks (again)

I got my pop screen today. No more excessive plosivity for me no more. I have been recording tons of stuff. I did some auditions on ACX, but then I thought - it takes ages to record audio. I would end up recording audio for other people and have no time to record my own, so I am thinking on.

I have been recording a few of my stories and uploading them into Soundcloud.  Just click the rinky-dink link and there I will sink. I'm tired now because it's late and I've been recording and I start to talk in rhyme when I'm tired. That's how my family know. They say "Dad, you're talking in rhyme again - get to bed!" Also I talk nonsense. I need to be careful of that now because I don't want to create the impression on you that I am a fool.  Maybe you already got that one.

So, other problems I've had with audio. Accents - if you listen to my audiobooks, this will instantly reveal itself as an issue. The other issue, which you might get is the fact I live opposite a f*g garage. The road itself is busy but the mechanics insist on repair folk's engines. That means big revving all the time. They finish about 8 pm. But I have to get all my recording done before Sheila comes back because she can't abide it and she forbids me to do it.

But after saying that, recording the audio and then listening to it through iTunes was a pure wheeze. I laughed my socks off to hear my luscious voice. And it is luscious. Click and try and if you don't think it's luscious I will email you the image of a Malteser. If you came by my house I would give you one, but I'm not telling you where I live in case you are weird.

Yes, I'm quite tired now. I'm also pretty wired and tomorrow I think I'm going to get fired over what I did today, which was to merely say that one day I want more pay. Ole.

I'm off to bed.

Doing American

I am revealing here that I am going to serialise my book Unreal City by Podcast. Yes, with a capital P. Now I practised recording it the other day. I was in the back room. There was a lot of seagull noise. And a dog. It was not acceptable, but I spent a long time polishing and editing and took it downstairs to play to Sheila.  

She commented in passing that my American accent wasn't as honed as it could be. You see, in the first chapter there is a French/American private detective in London. Okay, that makes it sound confusing. But in any case, I decided he would talk with an American accent as he'd learned English from his American mother who was from Cherryvale in Kansas.  I think she was from Cherryvale. I picked Cherryvale because Louise Brooks was from Cherryvale. It's set in the 1920s see and for a time in, I loved Louise Brooks. Unfortunately she was dead at that time, so it wouldn't have worked out. What a dish though. Anyway back to my accent.

There were times when the accent sounded okay, but I heard some New York in there. Sheila said that my "b"s sounded like someone from West Cumbria would say. I don't even know what that sounds like but it's not American. That much is sure.

There is a website that suggests I should say "Oh My God" and "So, I'm like..." and I knew already about "Totes" and "Rad".  But this is a Franco-American from 1925 whose mom (see how I'm coming along) was from Kansas. A Kansasite. A Kasasian. A Kansaw.   I realise this could be offensive, and that was far from my intention. I can't afford to alienate people, Heaven knows.

Anyway look out for my Franco-American accent, on Soundcloud if I can figure it out. Or I was considering going with Libsyn.  It's slightly more expensive but more plugged into iTunes and I guess that's where the bulk of these audiobooks are going to sell.

Laters, homie.

The History of the Runestaff by Michael Moorcock

I still love it. Hawkmoon is a bit less utterly heroic than Elric (who is also a bit dreary) or Corum, but I like the jewel in his skull. Hawkmoon oddly leaves the all powerful amulet he obtained in The Mad God's Amulet at home when he sets out to find The Sword of the Dawn. But, I'm always forgetting things too.


The first two books in the series - Jewel in the Skull and the Mad God's Amulet are written in a way that would have got Moorcock thrown out of his writing group these days - his use of adverbs, his stylised nodding, frowning and especially his flip flopping Point of View, now in one person's head, now in another's. He's still doing it by the third book - Sword of the Dawn, but his writing is getting better by this time. I am not sure that readers care as much about these things as writing groups anyway, and they didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book. 


Also he isn't doing the philosophising that features in the more recent books on the Eternal Champion, I'm a bit bored with that now. However, I remember when I was a young lad reading these how I loved the ideas about Chaos and Law. In fact Dungeons and Dragons's Lawful Evil/Chaotic Good alignment set up wouldn't exist without Moorcock. He should get a cut. 

Where Moorcock utterly triumphs is how he manages to introduce questions at every chapter so you keep turning the pages. He is also astounding in his use of striking, novel and bizarre images - the animal masks of Granbretan, the descriptions of Londra and the Kamarg and the various vanished cities, odd technology and everything. That's why he's great. It's a feast for the senses and though it's pure pulp, it's fantastic fun.

Issues with Audio

As avid readers of this blog (who he?) will know, I have been experimenting with audio. I managed to upload A Christmas Ghost Story to Soundcloud and that went quite well.  The quality seems ok, via Audacity, a reasonable soundcard in my PC (installing for playing Dungeons and Dragons online...) and the Blue Yeti microphone, which is lovely.

The issue I have is that we live by a road. It's an old house with shutters but only single glazed windows so it doesn't keep the noise out. Mostly it's road noise but also dogs, kids, drunken people and earlier in the year the enormous row of seagulls. We live by the sea.

You can do some fancy things with Audacity to edit out the noise where it falls between speech ("in the gaps" to you) but sometimes you can hear it behind the speech. I went up to the back bedroom away from the road, using a borrowed laptop but in fact the laptop's sound card wasn't as good so the sound was tinny. Also I was getting wind noise (from the wind, not me) and kids and dogs.

Sheila's suggestion is that I wear a quilt over my head. And you know, that's not so silly. I mean it will look silly, but I think the deadened, dampened sound (I had to explain what I meant when I talked about dampening a sound to Sheila, but then I was a drummer in a punk band once, so I used to damp my bass drum all the time. With a quilt as it turns out.)

So learning points from this post:

1. Wear quilt over head.
2. Audition as a narrator to make fortune.
3. Post picture of where I live so you can get an idea of the seagull problem.

Erotic Tingles and How They're connected to my Story for Halloween.

Well I've just finished the first draft of my Story for Halloween. I swear down, I've been walking into spider webs for the past two days. I like the shape of it. I knew each scene before I began to write and they just went into the old scrivener - 5 scenes of a 1000 words each. Though in fact it's ended up as just over 7k, so that doesn't work out. Never mind arithmetic wasn't my strong point.

But, as the young folk say, I'm pumped. I think it's really good and I was scared when I was writing it. I remember reading an article on the Internet thing by someone who wrote erotica who said that what you write has to have the requisite effect on the writer before he/she can hope to have that effect on the reader. I don't know how he ever finished a story is all I can say.

I remember when I lived on my own before the arrival of the blessed Sheila and after the departure of the sainted twin daughters, I would be sitting writing spooky stories and I would get the tingle of fear up my spine and look warily over my shoulder. Every creak made me jump.

I'm only glad I wasn't writing porn.

Synchronicity.

So last night my lovely daughter came to visit me with her cat, Dylan. Dylan's house has a flea problem through no fault of his own. He came to visit me while they let off some toxic smoke bomb. We watched Imperium, which was quite good actually. Harry Potter even sounded properly American, to my untutored ears anyhow.

I took the opportunity of outlining my new story - A Story for Halloween - (just sayin', not pluggin' - it ain't even writ yet). Without letting go any major spoilers like white icebergs of truth floating over an ocean of uncertainty, I can merely hint that it contains a spider. So, anyway, wind on an hour or two until Imperium has finished, Dylan is getting restless and night has fallen. I open to door to let out my modern Miss and guess what - a spider has spun a beautiful web across my door. I open the door and there he is, eye-level with me and his web a geometric wonder. He sat right in the middle like a prince. And I thought - hot damn! That surely is a synchronous sign that this story, of all stories, the spider one, is going to be the ka-boom best.  I can probably retire on the proceeds. The spider told me.

You heard it here first.

Lay versus Lie and the lies they tell about it.

"Lay, lady, lay - lay across by big brass bed..."  That is not an invitation, but a lyric by Bob Dylan. Let us go further.  "Lay down, Sally, and rest you in my arms..."  sang Eric Clapton.  "Lay your sleeping head my love, human on my faithless arm..."  wrote W H Auden.  

At the risk of weakening my case, I will note here that these are in the second person imperative.  Grammarist  says that the difference between lie and lay is that lay needs an object - you lay something (I titter a little here and perhaps snigger), and you lie yourself. That is lie is instransitive, while lay is necessarily a transitive verb. 

But this is one of those modern distinctions created by Grammarians. While I am a good boy and obey the rules, we should know that historically and colloquially, there is no such clear distinction between lie and lay and they are merely variants. 

Let's look at Psalm 4, verse 8, in the King James Bible where it says - 

 I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.

Technically you could argue that here (and with the Auden quote above) there is an object - namely "me" (or in Auden "your sleeping head".) But to the ordinary Joe and Jane it sounds pretty much like I am "laying down" - "I lay down".

In Anglo-Saxon, lie was licgan which Bosworth-Toller list as meaning "to be in a prostrate or recumbent position" [not prostate - careful! Reminds me of St Pancreas that too)] while lay was lecgan "to cause to take a horizontal position".  I think this is exactly what Slowhand had in mind for Sally.  

If you're like me you are already seeing that these two verbs weren't orginally two verbs at all, but one! And it's to do with umlaut. It always is with Anglo Saxon.  But when I look I see that as well as Anglo-Saxon licgan and lecgan, we have Gothic ligan and lagyan and German liegen and legen (I note with interest that the word law is also from this root *lagu - that which is layed down).  Unhelpfully for me, it seems the Germanic languages are preserving the difference between lie and lay. The online Etymological dictionary gives me some succour in that it notes that the root of both these words is the Primitive Indo-European *leghe- meaning both lie and lay. So before the pesky primitive Germanics differentiated them, they were the same word. And that differentiation was probably the decision some old Germanic pedant in a marsh somewhere in Friesland, or Gotland. Not Kent, certainly, it was before they got to Kent. 

I am helped also by Peter Trudgill in his Dialect Matters: Respecting Vernacular Language, p 51 (Cambridge University Press) where he discusses lie versus lay.  He says that the umlaut change (though he does not dare mention umlaut) between lie and lay to create a difference between doing something yourself and causing something else to do that action was preserved in other pairs such as Middle English sink versus sench "cause to sink". Don't worry about the palatalisation of the -k, just take my word for it it's the same word. He also mentions his Norfolk dialect distinction between sit and set -  where people will ask you to "set down..."  But Trudgill says "the distinction between lie and lay is being lost in most forms of English"   Yes! Hooray!

This rant was caused by a person reviewing my ebook The Haunting. (Yes I know I just plugged that) and saying I was illiterate because my main guy talks about someone laying on the bed. In his first person vernacular speech. Most of us don't talk like Government reports lady!   Not when we're about to be eaten by monsters!!! Sheesh. Now, I know this might reflect on me badly, going to such length to defend this. And I don't even mind criticism.

A's gaan for a lig doon, noo. (as we would say)

My First Audio Book

For the longest time (as they say), those who know and love me have said, "My my Tony, you have such a lovely voice, could we have a recording of it?"

This may not be strictly what they said, but the gist was plain. After some humming, and a little hawing, and a non-trivial amount of havering I got a Yeti Blue USB microphone. I have spent the last few days messing around with this.

I have a number of discoveries to report. Firstly, I always knew that reading my writing aloud helped with rhythm and flow. You just gotta get the cadences right. And then when I was reading out loud for recording, it really helped me refine the flow of the written word.  So that was one thing.

The next thing was that my front room is incredibly noisy. I didn't even know. The traffic sound from outside is stupidly loud. Why are they driving past my house anyway? Then this morning some kind of light aircraft buzzed the house. I was sitting with the curtains drawn and shutters shut, but still it must have known I was in there.  Also children running by. Adults swearing. Then the headphones give a little buzz every now and again. I know I'm writing in fragments and some of the more punctilious readers of my books say they don't like fragments but that's another post. Cormac McCarthy does them, Charles Dickens did them. I can do them.  I have been dipping into a great book by the way - The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth - and he says it's ok to use fragments (not in so many words). So I will continue to use fragments.

Anyway, that was a digression from the audio book. My front room is not the perfect studio. It will not be able to produce sound files of sufficient quality (that is with no background noise) so that I can upload audiobooks via Amazon. I'd like to do that and I am scouting another studio. I am thinking of my mother's airing cupboard. I said that to her and she says, "Do you want all the linen and clothes in there?" I replied, "Most certainly; they will damp shit down."

Also, I now see a future stretching ahead of me as a voice narrator. Apparently you can make tons of money narrating other peoples' books. Mind you they might not want my Northern English accent. I noticed I dropped a few Ts and a couple of Hs. Although I can see a new genre of gritty Northern smut being narrated:

"Eh up, our Ethel. Get tha' kit off, sharpish."
"Weel, hinny, ah nivver kna'd ye cared, like. Eh, divvn't dee that!"

I have been practising my Dumfries-shire accent too. The main character would have to be called Ken, ye ken? And everything would happen "the noo".

But I digress again. What was I saying? Audiobooks! The new future. I am cautious about most stuff these days, but where there's an airing cupboard there's a way, as my auld mam says.

Oh, yeah - a link to my soundcloud audio book:

A Christmas Ghost Story

It's about 25 minutes long .... and FREE!!!!

Give Away Book!

I worked out how to make a book giveaway and add it to my blog. It was staring at me in the face all the time. I had tried to add links to my Facebook page (failed). I had tried for ages to get a perma-free Kindle Book. The old way was to make your book free on another site and then point to it and say to Amazon - look! This is free! Match the price!

Well, I tried that and got a very pleasant response from Amazon saying they reserved the right to match price and in this instance they chose not to. That's fair enough.

Anyway, I had a book free on Smashword - The House of Bones - and Smashwords allowed me to make a gadget that I could post into my blogger page. Feel free to download the free book. I hope you like it. I did.

Facebook Pages

I just added a facebook author page. I was using my normal facebook page but I thought that ultimately I would be annoying people who were not interested in my writing and I had thought it was neater to create a separate "author" page.  So far so good.

I have added a Good Reads tab to the page so people can see the books and reviews. I wanted to add a blog feed to the page, and it seemed that there was a way of doing this up until at least 2014 through the app Notes, however this no longer seems to work. Or at least I can't get it to work.

I also wanted to be able to give away a free story. I might still be able to do that. I will report back later if it works (or in fact if it doesn't)