Things That Go Bump In The Night

Earlier this month, I headed off to Derby for the UK Ghost Story Festival. It’s a three-day event of talks, panels and workshops held in the Museum of Making. By the standards of conventions, it’s relatively small, extremely friendly, and a great opportunity to spend a weekend thinking about writing, reading and ghosts. The Museum itself is well worth a visit in its own right, and the way in which some of the exhibits are displayed is excellent for provoking ideas about haunted objects.

One of the things I enjoyed most this year was hearing about the huge variety of things “a ghost” in a story can be. Sure, a spectral Victorian gentleman rattling chains is totally an option, but there’s a whole landscape of different approaches. Your story might be haunted by something intangible, or by the ghost of an object, or a place. Your ghost might be a way of describing psychological disturbance, or embodying loneliness, or a metaphor for trauma. It might be something that appears completely mundane and solid, in the moment, or might be simply a lingering ambiguity in the story.

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You might remember that, in October, I spent a month writing and posting a drabble every day. When Drabbletober came to an end, some lovely friends of mine decided to keep it up, and we’ve had a little chat group going through Drabblevember, Drabblecember, and the less lovable-sounding Drabblanuary. At the start of this month, we realised that (a) everyone had taken a turn already, and (b) no one had the least idea how to make the February portmanteau work decently.

However, having a supportive environment to share things in is a very joyful thing, so we have moved to a less-rigid system for sharing small, creative works. In the run up to the Ghost Story Festival, I decided my works would all be ghost-related. I also decided to try and make as few of them as possible be “just” writing - writing is what I do, and the idea was to challenge myself to do something different. Having even the gentle deadline of some people expecting to see something every day pushed me into following through - why is why small groups of supportive friends are such excellent things!

At the start of the week, I had a miserable cold, and was not feeling on any kind of creative form - so I fell back on redaction, and butchered a Wikipedia article.

I’m not sure that it results in the most exciting end-product, but redaction is surprisingly fun to do. I think I first tried it out last year sometime, when I saw a challenge on Twitter to create poetry from rejection letters.

If you’ve never done it, it’s definitely a very entertaining exercise. Pick something, and get crossing out. It’s a great way to work through your feelings about boring administrative post, for example!

I had an idea for a small cartoon later in the week. I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to draw a cartoon (or, at least, not since I was at junior school) and I ran into a few issues. Some were expected: my drawing isn’t that great, and it took a long while studying line drawings of sheet-ghosts on t’internet before I could produce anything that looked even remotely plausible on the page.

Fitting a story into 6 panels also takes rather more planning than I’d expected. It wasn’t a terribly complex plot, as you can tell, but it still took me several goes to decide exactly what happened in which panel. It is very disappointing to me - as a rather slapdash, hurl-myself-into-it, sort of person - that almost every creative endeavour seems to be improved by more planning upfront.

Finally, having drawn my panel out in a reasonably large sketchbook, the paper was too big to fit in the scanner - so I had to photograph it. It’s always much more difficult to photograph something with straight edges and get it bang on than I expect. (As you can see, I didn’t quite manage it…)

And then I hit my final problem: once the cartoon was scaled down to viewing-on-a-phone size, the lettering was far too small to read. I’d written the “dialogue” in fairly large printing, but each panel was originally 3” square. At the size you’re likely viewing it now, it was extremely unreadable. Cue a lot of rubbing-out, and attempting to fit larger lettering into the space available! I’ve always been a little surprised that lettering is a specific job (distinct from writing, and drawing) in comic-world, but even something this basic was considerably more difficult than expected.

It’s only now that I’m considering that I really ought to have titled this cartoon “Scared, Sheetless”.

A Short Meditation on Domestic Horror

Filed under “daft ideas”, I made a short video just before I hopped on a train up to Derby.

It was hastily edited, on a mobile, on the train. The default video-editor on Android is horrible, and during the whole journey I never seemed to hit enough mobile signal to download a better one. I figured I’d break out my laptop and go full-hog with the video-editing software I’ve got there… but Adobe (in their wisdom) refuse to run the software without being able to check that the licence is valid. Which mine is. But that fact cannot be ascertained without… of course, enough mobile signal to communicate with the mothership.

Still, the video actually came out rather better than I’d hoped.

My final ghost artwork for the week was courtesy of an act of travel-failure which left me sitting at a very minor edge-of-London railway station for fifty minutes. The failure was a combined effort: Transport for London had shut large chunks of useful railway line for maintenance, but I had also failed to read the timetable properly and realise that my options were limited to one-per-hour and I really needed to get a move on and get to the station slightly earlier.

Anyway, since the platform was all-but-abandoned, I thought I’d take the opportunity to do a spot of ghost-hunting. Would you believe, I found one almost straight away…

London is a city with a lot of history, so is pretty thoroughly haunted, but even I didn’t expect to have quite such good luck on my first venture. And in almost-broad-daylight, too!

The Curse of What Happens Next

Many years ago, I shyly sent the URL of one of the first stories I ever had published - Violent Silence* - to a colleague. He was very nice about it, but said something that took me completely by surprise.

"I want to know what happens next."

The story, at least as I'd written it, was complete in itself. I had no plans for what the characters would do next; the entire premise of the story was to reveal something that was now, well, revealed. It hadn't occurred to me that Garth and Latimer had a "next".

My colleague urged me to consider it, and for a while I tried. However, the only logical direction was for a future story to be the sort of military SF that I have absolutely zero interest in writing (or reading). Garth and Latimer go about their further adventures undocumented.

Over Christmas I - unusually for me - watched a whole series on Netflix. It was Bodies, an 8-part adaptation of the Si Spencer comic of the same name.

[Note: I am going to write about the ending of Bodies here, but - I believe - not in a way that constitutes a spoiler.]

Bodies was delightfully comicbook detective mystery, spanning four separate timelines. I loved it (though I also had to listen to a good friend of mine for around thirty minutes explaining all the reasons it was awful, so your mileage may vary). I loved the way all the disparate threads came together and formed a coherent story, with a satisfying conclusion.

And then - and then - right before the closing credits on the final episode, two things happened. Neither of them really made any sense, and both screamed "setting up for a sequel". I haven't read the comic, but I'd taken it as read there was no second volume (there isn't). The mystery was wrapped up neatly, all the things were explained. Sure, one could take some of the characters and send them on more adventures in the same world, but the fundamental engine of the plot had run its course.

This is, of course, not a new problem. Humans like things that they like: if we enjoyed a film, we want the sequel. This is why franchises are so popular, and why the Harry Potter novels slowly inflated in spine-width as they took over the world.

My first encounter with the issue was watching Highlander as a teenager. Again, the film tells a complete story whose arc finishes, leaving no room for "what happened next". I was completely baffled to find out that there was a Highlander II - and, to be quite honest, I wasn't any less baffled after having seen it. As a friend of mine was fond of saying: Highlander, there should have been only one.

You will observe from this that, even though I couldn't see how a sequel would work, I still watched it. And yes, the attempt to make a story that kept the vibe of the original, while having none of the actual plot-parts still in working order, was a disaster. This was a valuable lesson: when it seems like a sequel is going to be awful, give it a miss. If it turns out to be brilliant, I'm sure someone will let you know.

Mosca Mye (a character from Fly By Night, by Frances Hardinge), says towards the end of the novel: I don’t want a happy ending, I want more story. Of course she does. We all want more story. But the key is in not wanting the ending. Once you've had the ending, you don't get to have more story.

Highlander, Bodies, my own Violent Silence - they all ended. Although in each case some characters survived, writing "what happened next" would either be quite dull - MacLeod gets married, settles down, and enjoys a nice domestic life - or require something completely new to drive the story forward. And if it's completely new, it may well not contain any of what delighted people in the first instalment.

The Radio Times described it as "disappointing news" when Bodies' director appeared to play down the idea of a second series. I don't. I think I'd find it more disappointing if he were planning one; declining it, letting the original story stand by itself, would be a brave and admirable choice.

Success doesn't have to mean a sequel. We, as consumers, don't have to howl for more, and demand to know what happens next. Some things are complete in and of themselves, and let's let them be that way.

* At the time of posting, the story was free-to-read online. However, since then the magazine has taken the decision to remove all past issues from their website. You can still read Violent Silence by purchasing an e-book or p-book copy of Issue 38 of Luna Station Quarterly (available from Amazon, or from all kinds of other retailers).

The Advent of Advent

Advent has always been one of my favourite seasons of the year. Legally, and liturgically, Advent began this year on Sunday December 3rd. But for most people’s purposes, Advent starts on December 1st when you get to open the first of the little doors.

Growing up, Advent was always counted down in two ways in our house: one, a conventional calendar and two, an Advent candle. The candle stood on the tea table, and each day we burned down another one of the little gold segments. (At least, that was the plan. In reality, we sometimes all had our noses stuck in books and would inadvertently burn through several days at once before someone noticed. Not to mention ending up with candlewax all over the tablecloth.)

Fast-forward a couple of decades, to those dim and distant days of the internet when the phrase “social media” had yet to be invented, and the medium in which most of my friends chose to be social was a blogging platform called LiveJournal. For several years running, I managed to persuade a bunch of LJ’ers to manufacture “some means of counting down the days of Advent”, and post them around the country to each other. I think most people created calendars in the usual format, but there were some wildly creative ideas being sent around - often between people who had never, in the real world, met.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have, fundamentally, not grown out of the concept of Advent calendars. I enjoy tracking the steady progress through December to Christmas - which goes at just the same speed as any other month, whatever anyone tells you. This year I have three countdowns on the go: a conventional calendar, an Advent tree, and a role-playing game.

The conventional one features some very hairy cattle, and is actually a combined Christmas card and calendar, sent to me by a friend who lives on a Yorkshire farm (surrounded by not-especially-hairy dairy cattle). Its tiny doors are opening to reveal various woodland creatures - today was a fox and two cubs.

The tree is a tradition which I invented, wholesale, about a decade ago. I usually travel to visit family at Christmas, so don’t have a Christmas tree in my own home. Instead, I have a little wooden tree (which folds flat into a wardrobe the rest of the year), and a box of baubles. Every day, I add a bauble to the tree and - because I haven’t yet accrued 24 of them - every year I acquire a new bauble. I am using the term “bauble” loosely - as you can see from the exceedingly not-spherical felted dinosaur hanging front-and-centre in the picture above. This year’s acquisition was unexpectedly presented to me on Sunday, by a friend who replaced her Christmas cards this year with crocheted festive octopuses. Did you know a festive octopus was a thing? No? Well, neither did I. But now I have one, and it will go on the Advent tree.

The role-playing game is from the lovely people at Black Armada. Advent of Abomination is their December Patreon gift, although you can also buy a copy. When this month’s email rolled in, with the news that they were producing “an advent calendar that’s also a solo folk horror TTRPG”, I felt that it couldn’t really have been aimed more specifically at me if it had tried. I immediately printed it out, scored its windows, and glued it up. Six days in, and I’m having a thoroughly lovely time working my way through the story prompts. Plus, of course, it has the added benefit of making sure I do at least some writing every day. (I’ve always had very strong feelings that Advent calendars should have 24 doors, not 25 - since this one actually has 31, I’m not entirely sure where I stand!)

A couple of years ago I bought The Ticking World’s Adventure Calendar, which combined Advent with a choose-your-own-adventure game. Sadly they’ve sold out this year, although it looks from some of their retweets as if someone is streaming their own experiences of the Adventure on Twitch. They’ve also mentioned that there will be an all-new Adventure Calendar next year, so I’ll be keeping my eye on that.

Many moons ago, a good friend gave me a copy of The Christmas Mystery, by Jostein Gaarder. It’s a short novel, following a boy with an Advent calendar, and is told one-chapter-per-day - making it excellent as a calendar in itself, because you can read it in “real time”.

Although I am still firmly in favour of opening a little cardboard door to reveal a picture each day, there’s a whole world of alternate possibilities. Are you tracking Advent? If so, how?

Drabbletober 2023!

Last year, on something of a whim on the last day of September, I declared my intention of inventing drabbletober. By November 1st, I had slightly mixed feelings about whether it had been a worthwhile exercise or not. However, we are now back round to October, and I’m going to do it again.

So, you cry: what is #drabbletober? It’s a writing challenge, in which I attempt to write a drabble - a one-hundred word story - every day. And because I am broadly dreadful about sticking to things if no-one is checking up on me, I’ll post all the stories here.

My rules are:

• one story of exactly one hundred words (not including the title)

• written on the day

• posted on my blog before the day ends - which is when I go to bed, not at midnight

In particular, the goal is to do some writing every day, so no writing spare drabbles at the weekend to get ahead in busy weeks. Obviously, if you choose to join in (and please do! #drabbletober for all your tagging needs!) then your rules are totally up to you.

If you follow this blog, then you might have noticed that there has been… a lack of action of late. Some might almost argue that it was January when I last posted. The past year has been somewhat full of brainweasels, and I have spent a lot of time feeling unable to settle down and get any writing done. I’m going to try and ease myself back in with a bite-sized quantity of writing every day.

In particular, I’m keen to remind myself that writing is fun, and that I actually enjoy doing it. And - even if it doesn’t necessarily help unstick any of my major projects - I definitely remember that writing drabbles was fun.

So, since today is October 1st… on with the drabble number 1!

Scrap Paper Philosophy

When I was growing up, my parents (being right-thinking types) kept me well supplied in scrap paper and crayons. My mother was a journalist and - since most press releases at the time arrived as hard copy, printed one side only - she brought home stacks of the things, and turned them over to me to draw on.

I cheerfully motored through the paper, dimly aware that other people’s drawing paper didn’t have announcements and product copy and recipes printed on the back. I also learned the word “pressrelease” with absolutely no idea what it was, beyond something that was a good start for a picture.

And at some point I was struck by a sudden realisation: my drawings didn’t have printing on the back. The printing was, in fact, intended to be the important part. The printing was the front. I was drawing on the back. To a small child, this was an absolutely world-shattering discovery.

I still regarded the pictures as the important part, of course. But every so often I’d turn the page over, look at the printing on the back, and remind myself that some people thought that was the front.

During lockdown, one of my highlights has been the weekly Saturday-afternoon Skype call with friends. We’ve been slowly working our way through the Puzzled Pint archive of puzzles, doing our best to adapt to solving them remotely but collaboratively. Despite some sterling on-the-fly PDF-editing from the people with graphics tablets, I still find it surprisingly hard to solve anything at all without a paper version to hand. There has, accordingly, been quite a lot of printing going on.

When I needed scrap paper for scribbling anagrams and ciphers, of course I turned one of the puzzles over and wrote on the back. Ditto for notes, to-do lists, shopping lists, recipes… so much so, that I was surprised to discover that a first draft of a piece of creative non-fiction had puzzles printed on the back.

You may have noticed that both sides are now the back. And, conversely, both are the front.

Stay flexible.

Empiricism (or “I've got a banana”)

Earlier this week, I saw the notice pictured above. It was stuck to an office fridge, a casual talking point for those grabbing milk for their tea and coffee.

Now, I reckon there are basically two responses to this. No, actually, there are three - some people will shrug and move on, or ignore it, quite unconcerned about the habits of bananas when exposed to UV. Let’s not worry about them.

The other two responses are basically:

• “Wow, bananas glow blue under black lights!”

• “Bananas… do they? Really?”

Now, I am firmly in the latter group. I was also, I realised immediately after wondering whether bananas really did glow blue, in the fortunate position of someone who possesses both a banana and a black light (not literally about my person, of course - I had to wait until I got home).

The initial experiment was not terribly promising. This looks very much to me like a peeled banana illuminated by a light with a bit of a purple tinge. There’s definitely nothing I’d describe as “glowing blue”.

I was all ready to give up and add a stroppy post-it to the fridge on Monday saying “no, they don’t” when I realised a couple of things. My UV torch, which is basically a toy for looking at invisible ink, probably isn’t that great. And I’d assumed we were talking about the flesh of the banana - maybe I should have checked the skin as well.

Unfortunately, by this stage, I had made the banana into a milkshake and drunk it. I imagine this sort of problem doesn’t arise in the best scientific establishments.

Fortunately, I had a second banana.

What I didn’t have, though, was much of a grasp of what a banana-yellow object would look like under UV light anyway. How much of the blue-ness of the above picture is down to shining a blue-ish light onto it?

Obviously, this experiment required some form of control object to allow me to tell whether there was something special about the banana.

After some hasty hunting, I lined up three banana-coloured objects. One of them is, of course, a banana. One is part of a vintage 1980s puzzle recently retrieved from a parental attic, the other is the container for a popular brand of milkshake powder (banana-flavoured, as it happens, though the chocolate one also comes in a yellow tub).

Holding the UV torch a little further away seemed to improve things.

However, I still wasn’t really seeing the “glows blue” effect. Everything looks blue, of course, but the banana isn’t noticeably more exciting than the puzzle.

Hang on, though… what’s that?

OK, it’s faint. But that definitely looks like fluorescence to me!

Around the darker, riper spots on the banana skin there are definite glowing rings.

I’m not writing this blog post to demonstrate that ripe bananas fluoresce (other people have already written scientific papers about that), or to flaunt my ownership of fruit and fancy torches.

Instead, I’m advocating for an approach to life. If you put yourself in the group that says “why?” and “really?” and “can I try that?” then you will never be bored. You’ll be better informed, and you’ll have more fun.

Be curious.

Be the person who thinks “well, I’ve got a banana….”.

Support Your Local Library

Yesterday morning, I walked into an estate agent’s and had a long chat. Before I left, I gave them my name, address, email and phone number. I’m not planning to rent a new property any time soon, or indeed use any of the services they offer.

I was, however, keen to put my hand up and join the campaign they’re running. They’re an independent, local estate agent, with close ties to the community - and right now, they’re determined that our local library isn’t going to close. So I signed up. I also did the next most useful thing I reckon one can do to help a threatened library: took myself through the door and borrowed some books.

When I moved here ten years ago, I had a daily commute which involved a 50 minute train ride in each direction. I was also absolutely broke, and couldn’t afford to buy new books at anything like the rate I was reading them. Getting my first library card in some years, I got to be surprised all over again that libraries have loads of books that you can just borrow for no money. Really! Just shelves and shelves of books, and the staff let you help yourself and take them away.

My local is small, a sort of satellite to the main library in the centre. (The main one has recently been redeveloped and moved to a new, modern space so it can offer greater access to digital and self-service facilities, provide a range of study areas, and be a flexible events space. And, what do you know, it’s also about 50% smaller. But I digress.)

In the time it took me yesterday to choose a book, and pick up a second because it had a cool cover, around fifteen different people had passed through. A small child was reading aloud, an even smaller one was reaching upwards valiantly to pass a giant stack of returns to the librarian. A few older people were reading papers in companionable silence, and people from teenage to middle-age were using the public computers. You want community? Try your local library.

During the week, I saw this amazing Twitter thread from a UK librarian. I also read the Hugo-nominated story A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies, which makes almost exactly the same points in a very different way. Libraries are lifelines, and safe spaces, and vital local hubs and magical places full of books.

And if it means mine might stay open, I’m even willing to talk to estate agents.