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.