HIGH SPIRITS - museums, ghosts and musings

Do you love museums? Perhaps you have a favourite museum that you visit on a regular basis, even if the displays aren’t changed very much and look a bit old and frayed. Maybe you have a particular museum that you’ve got on your bucket list to visit – mine’s The Smithsonian. Or, you might even fall into that category of people that have no interest whatsoever in the past – pass the smelling salts, Maud!

Whatever you take, museums are a vital part of our cultural heritage and help anchor us to our past or assist us in understanding the past of those with belief systems outside of our own. For that reason they should and must be preserved.

So, it’s not hard to gather that I love museums. I grew up in Dover, Kent and we had a lovely if slightly bizarre museum. It was one of the oldest in Kent being founded in 1836. Originally, the town museum was situated in the Market Square, well within the range of the cross-channel guns during World War II. It was decided to move it to some rooms under the Maison Dieu – Dover’s Town Hall. And there it stayed until 1991 when it was moved back to its original spot.

From an inconspicuous door off the side of the building, one was led into an Old Curiosity Shop of wonders.

The first exhibit to greet the visitor was a polar bear – its teeth bared, paw upraised as if ready to slice down and eviscerate its prey. It was my favourite thing in the whole place. The poor creature was brought back from the Arctic in 1897 by explorer and local doctor Reginald Koettlitz. Its paw is not raised in attack but to hold a lamp! The bear stood in the surgery of the Koettlitz family from 1890 to 1960. My mother liked to find an excuse to visit the surgery, just to see the bear.

There was limited floor space within and so every nook and cranny was utilised in a way that would probably give today’s museum professional a fit of the vapours but for a child, it was exciting and wondrous.

Unlike today’s modern and often minimalist approach to displays, Dover Museum, at that time had no definite layout or sequencing. It was as if things had been randomly housed with speed, anticipating a temporary solution to the problem. Which, I should imagine it very much was but over the years nobody altered this and that was the key to its fascination; it was as if time just stood still.

The move back to its original site in 1991 heralded a new era for Dover Museum but I think, if I were given the option, I’d like to see the cosy, strange little room of my childhood, just one more time. It was there that my love of history and archaeology was born.

The question, therefore, must arise – why do we choose to house these artefacts at all, and what value do we derive from them? Are they merely passing curiosities or do we connect with them on a deeper, visceral level? Collecting objects from the past is nothing new – archaeology has shown us countless examples of an object from one era, even from millennia before, being appropriated long after its original purpose has past.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate more, the artefact not as a tangible representation of the past but its intrinsic value as something that someone once owned or even cherished. All objects, even the cheap as chips items we buy from the pound store, are created for a purpose but whether we adopt that usage or turn it into something else cannot be defined with the passage of time.

In my latest novel HIGH SPIRITS, Alec, who was the assistant curator at the fictional Partridge Hall, is finding the evolution of museums and displays a struggle, even though he has had seventy-something years to acclimatise himself to these changes. The acceleration of change would have been noticeable to him over the last thirty or so years when museums began to rely more and more on available funding streams and ideas about how artefacts should be mounted and grouped have progressed.

For Alec, the museum was a place of hushed learning where the focus was ‘inward’ towards the work of the curator. This was a world into which the general public ‘the outward’ would be welcome but kept at arm’s length. From reading the words of men who would have been contemporary to Alec were he a real person; one gets the sense of a gentleman’s club rather than a service being provided for the viewing public. The museum was their passion and they were indulging in that at the very best level. I recall visiting Dover Museum with a friend as a pre-teen and the curator allowing us to view the entomology collection that was housed in heavily polished dark wood drawers. It would never occur to us to just open the drawers, which were standing in full view in the middle of the room, and take a look. No, we waited and were shown. A very different norm from today where visitors are positively encouraged to open, prod, pull and explore things through dressing up boxes and interactive activities.

It used to be common practice for the accession number – that is, the number given to an object upon its donation to the museum – to be marked on the small cards that accompanied the artefact into the display case. These days, most museums have done away with this as being irrelevant to the visitor experience. Alec finds this outrageous!

Alec was hovering by the Roman pottery case tutting to himself about the labels that had recently been added.

“How is anybody supposed to understand anything these days,” he muttered.

“Talking to yourself again, I see.”

“I’m the only one that makes sense. Look at this – third-century grey ware.”

“I don’t see the problem.”

Jean knew exactly what the problem was, but she enjoyed pushing Alec’s buttons. It was the only bit of amusement she got these days.

“How?” Alec struggled to contain himself. “It speaks for itself. No context, no site location, no accession number if someone wants to find out more. I blame those new-fangled phones they all seem to be clamped to. Soundbites, they call it, bloody sound bites!”

For the best part of 13 years I worked for the Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service and for the last few years before I left I had the good fortune to be able to transfer over to the curatorial side of the museum working first as a Curatorial Assistant in the Collections Office and then as a Project Assistant, both on secondment. Both these roles gave me unprecedented access to the collections and how to manage and look after them. I learned how to accession objects into the collection, mark them correctly, correct storage methods and how to display them.

The storerooms of Colchester Museums contain one of the most significant collections of Roman archaeology outside of London as well as an outstanding collection of costumes and accessories, natural history and post-medieval (social history)artefacts. It was to these stores and the objects contained in them, that my mind turned when describing the workings of Bethan Andrews’s world and how Alec’s was so very different.

In what was the office of the Documentations Officer sat many old, metal card files. On each postcard sized card was carefully typed the object name, sometimes the dimensions, occasionally excavation details, or from which collection they were derived (this was the time of the gentleman collectors upon whose generosity many provincial museums were founded).

Alec would have been very familiar with these gentlemen and probably dined out with them frequently at the Old Coach House.

If Alec could’ve, he’d have passed out with the shock of finding a female curator. In his day, he oft-told Jean (who wished she could put her fingers in her ears and say ‘lalalala’), women were allowed to organise the little shop that sold postcards but never, never were they allowed to be involved in actual ‘curation’.

No, that was a man’s world. The joy of academia. Of sitting in one’s office, smoking a pipe and mulling over a particular archaeological conundrum. Women had funny ideas about how things should be done, and they most certainly didn’t involve evenings in the room above the Old Coach House, where the local dignitaries gathered for a hearty meal and putting the world to rights. Many a promise of money for this repair or that case had been made by Alec glad-handing the likes of the Hedge or Morgan patriarchs. The town had been built on personal enterprise and that always but always went hand-in-hand with cultural philanthropy.

Of course, these days, the museum services have the use of a bespoke database on which to record all their artefacts and, although the cards were kept by the Documentations Officer, they were a fall back reference as a last resort, having little or nothing to tell (Quote about knowing where everything was).

What a visitor sees on display in a museum is only a very small fraction (usually) of what the museums hold in its stores. It may seem like the simplest of tasks to select a number of objects, perhaps grouped around a theme, and display them but in reality, the various consideration that must be made in order to get an object ‘display ready’ are numerous. Such things as light levels, humidity, and text all have to be carefully thought. Bethan is working on an 18 month lead into exhibitions whereas Alec would probably have had no such considerations and could redisplay at will. No wonder he likes his way of doing things

Today, museums are no longer ‘inward’ but very much ‘outward’ focusing on being seen as less elite and more accessible with displays that make the collections relatable. It was quite natural to find groups of noisy children, roaming the galleries with dog-eared workbooks, their supervisor in tow, trying to get them to focus. Being more child or family-focused sits well within frameworks around funding. No longer is it the case of simply opening the door at 10 am and waiting for the world to wander in. Whole industries and specialists have sprung up around the heritage sector, to advise on demographics and to isolate what particular group is being left out. This gives rise to focus groups which in turn lead to workshopping.

Nowadays, from what Alec could gather, they had meetings with ‘stakeholders’ and were given ‘relationship managers’ from government-funded bodies, who talked in a whole new language about such things as ‘early adopters’ and ‘twilight subsistence’.

Museums had developed in a whole new way, and he didn’t like it one bit.

“How is that any way to do business?” Alec would grumble as the next suit passed through the door and ‘hummed’ and ‘hawed’ and went away with the promise that if the bid was good enough, the money would be forthcoming.

“Since when do museums have to ‘bid’ for money?” He shook his head. “Where are the civic-minded? Do people not give any more?”

Jean would listen with ever decreasing patience to his moaning, and when she couldn’t stand it any longer, she would retreat to another part of the Hall and let him sulk in peace.

In HIGH SPIRITS I’ve tried to relay how Alec feels about his beloved museum, the changes he sees and the sense of frustration he feels. He is stuck at thirty-years-old and 1944, at a time when things were so very different but around him, the world keeps changing and moving forward. I empathise with him, in many respects. The museum of my childhood has long (and quite rightly so) gone. Wandering the galleries at Colchester, I would see children darting around, seeing but not seeing these amazing artefacts and I would wonder why they didn’t experience the same sense of fascination that I did in that one large room under the Town Hall of Dover.

HIGH SPIRITS is now available in paperback for £9.99 or to download to your Kindle or Kindle apps for £3.99

Haunted Mansion Part Three

Welcome back to my tour of haunted mansions.

In this post I've selected three wonderful buildings.

The first is Belgrave Hall, a Queen Anne-style Grade II* mansion, constructed as a family home for Edmund and Ann Craddock in 1709 in the city of Leicester. John Ellis, a businessman with connections to the Midland Counties Railways, purchased the mansion in 1847 as a home for him and his family of seven daughters.

The White Lady reputedly haunts the rooms of Belgrave Hall and is said to be one of these daughters, Charlotte.

Other apparitions seem to favour the Victorian garb, with one receiving the nickname 'Victorian Lady', whilst another is called 'the Green Lady' and 'the Grey Lady'.

Often, sightings are accompanied by smells of fresh bread and gingerbread.

After one of these spirits was caught on camera, a Paranormal Society was brought in to investigate and reportedly encountered a hostile male spirit, a child who had died of tuberculosis and a man who had died in a fall.

Another interesting sighting is a ghost from before the Hall was built.

Excerpt

Pol, on the other hand, had completely come to terms with her death. She’d been here before the Romans had found a use for the river; at a time when the Ancient Britons ruled the land.

For over two thousand years she’d been here, trapped inside various structures or none at all but tethered to the place she had lost her life at the age of eleven.

She’d witnessed the building of Partridge Hall, and the comings and goings of the families therein. She’d sat around their firesides of an evening watching the women sewing, or reading.

She’d sat on the landing when the balls were held, watching in wonder at the changing fashions until the last Partridge had departed this earth.

She had been at his bedside, as he took his final breath, she’d greeted his spirit as it left his body, not to linger, as she had done, but to rise up and be greeted by his long-gone relatives.

She had witnessed the transformation from family home to a museum, and she’d ached with longing for the days of laughter, of small children rushing through the room, of the singing around the piano at Christmas. For the first time, in a long, time, she’d felt alone – until that fateful night.

Next up: Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, Suffolk.

Christchurch Mansion, originally called 'Withipoll House' by its owner, is a Grade I listed Tudor era mansion which now serves as a museum.

The ghosts of Christchurch Mansion include a young Edwardian lady who witnesses describe as dancing and laughing in the upper picture gallery. Some even say she is accompanied by two young children.

Downstairs, a female spirit is seen. Described as a lady in grey who suddenly appears from nowhere and is recognisable by the swishing of her gown.

A third ghost, that of a young servant girl is said to have been seen in the property having passed away under mysterious circumstances.

Excerpt

“Have I ever told you, how beautiful you are?” he said.

Jean smiled.

Alec stood and held out his hands in an invite to dance. Jean placed her hand on his shoulder, and he cupped her other hand inside his and waltzed around the room. As they gathered momentum, the lights in the office began to flicker, as if someone were turning the switches on and off. Jean threw back her head and laughed as Alec guided her steps in a dance all their own.

Lastly, let's hear about Chillingham Castle in Northumberland, the seat of the Grey and Bennet families from the 15th century until the 1980s.

Originally a monastery, it commanded a strategic position between England and Scotland.

Today, Chillingham Castle enjoys the reputation as one of England’s most haunted castle.

From the White Pantry Ghost to the Voices in the Chapel, Chillingham has a chilling history of hauntings.

The White Pantry Ghost is that of a frail woman who appeared one nigh to the footman whose job it was to sleep in the inner pantry where the silver was kept.

He was about to turn in for the night when a woman in white begged him for some water. At first the man believed it to be a castle guest then realising that he’d locked the door, he quickly realised that it was not possible.

The pale figure is still seen to this day, begging for water leading some to believe that she was poisoned.

A dark creeping sensation has been felt in one of the chambers, leading to an oppressive atmosphere. Something unseen yet moving lurks therein.

In the Chapel beside the Great Hall, visitors often hear two men talking. Those who try and follow the sound of the voices soon find that the men have disappeared.

Excerpt

Pol had spotted the shadow, and her eyes grew wide with fear.

“I can’t,” her voice trembled. “He’s coming.”

Bethan followed Pol’s petrified stare. Some of the audience members closest to the wall looked down and could see the swirling mass.

Instinctively, they leapt back, causing their chairs to tip and in the attempt to not topple, they did topple into the laps of their neighbours who also jumped to get out of the way. The domino effect caused people to fall between chairs and then scramble to their feet. The chairs scraped against the tile flooring, causing gauges as the audience tried to get away from the creature that now had some shape, like a human on all fours, sniffing at the ground, blind to what it was trying to find.

“Pol,” said Bethan, trying to get the girl to focus, “Pol, listen to me, you must focus okay, we have to end this now!”

Pol nodded. “He took a pig skull into the store; its smell helped to mask the gas.”

The shadow began to rise, taking a new form, that of a man, with clothes that hung loosely on his gaunt frame.

Here's a little bit more...

Just a little corner torn to start the reveal. I hope you will like it.

Tales for the Fireside...what's it about?

Hey, Happy New Year! Hope you all had a fab holiday season.

So, my second work is now published, up there and live on Amazon but what's it about and should you bother with it?

Well, in answer to the first question, the backstory goes a bit like this....

The five stories I've collected under the title 'Tales for the Fireside - Five stories of love and friendship' all started out in a very different way, as short scripts

Way back when I got involved in an amazing local group called Colchester Filmmakers. This incredible bunch of talented folk loved making films and I came on board from a writer's angle. Now, I'm not the most sociable of creatures I'm afraid. I'm a total introvert and I don't feel comfortable with new people but these guys were amazing and I felt right at home.

With regular meet ups, film nights, talks, and actual putting together shorts, it was a great group to be involved in. I began to try my hand at short films with the aim to get them filmed. I got an IMDB credit (Lisa Barrass) thanks to taking part in a short with a great up and coming director and I even got to direct one of my own shorts. I think it was then that I decided that I didn't really have the creative temperament for that type of gig! All these guys have gone on to do some pretty special stuff.

With careers in filming taking off, the group pretty much wound up when the organisers went on to bigger things with their own production company which left me with some shorts, littering up my folders.

After the publication of Since You've Been Gone the aim was to get another novel out as soon as possible to capitalise on the momentum. That didn't happen for various, personal and family reasons. Several projects were started and remain in limbo on my computer. Feeling as though I was failing fast, I decided that the best way to get up and running and back on the horse was to do what I did with SYBG and that was to adapt existing material. A thorough look through the myriad of folders, all containing either completed scripts, germs of ideas, or a fleshed out treatment, yielded five pieces that I could work with.

Story I - the tale of Emily and the elder gentleman, started out as a two-minute super short. In script writing, the standard is one page = one minute of screen time. This script was written to be a two-minute production. In fact, it was written as part of a competition entry in 50 Kisses. The remit was to write a two-page script that involved a kiss. It didn't have to be a romantic kiss; kiss could be interpreted in any way the writer wished. The only other caveat was that it had to take place on Valentine's Day.

Originally, it was called A Walk to Goodbye and was set in a card shop. The gentleman had just lost his wife and this was his last visit to see her before her funeral. He tells the story of how they met. It was long-listed in the competition but didn't go any further.

So, I completely re-worked it and put it into my collection.

Story II - the tale of Madeline and Porphyro is a modern adaption of John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes . I thought it rather suited a modern telling. It's one of my favourite poems having discovered it during my days of English Literature O-level.

It's written in the style of a play but with more of a narrative edge and with an omniscient narrator in the form of a young man charged with looking after the boss's daughter, Madeline.

Story III Tells the tale of the unfortunately named Alice Mutton who finds herself unexpectedly dead, squashed by a herd of stampeding cows. She is taken to heaven and begins a whole adventure trying to appeal against the decision to assign her to DOSE or Department of Stupid Endings (otherwise known as TWATS - Total Wankers at the Start).

As you've guessed, this is not to be taken seriously. Originally, in a slightly different format - 30 minutes - it was pitched to a contact in the world of TV over coffee in the Century Club, a rather exclusive members-only establishment in SoHo frequented by the acting and theatre world. My contact liked the premise and asked me to produce a script version. Sadly, as happens more often than not, it was never taken up. So, it sat on my computer, a lost little piece nobody wanted.

Involvement with the local filmmakers caused met to resurrect it, pare it down and call it Chain Reaction. I then went one step further into madness and directed it myself. Sadly, I don't think it will see the light of day but it was a great experience and made me realise that I would never make a director!

Heaven is a bureaucratic dream - the Orders of Angels are assigned roles within it but the Divine Creator is one bored deity, given over to childish temper tantrums and outburst of eccentricity.

DOSE is the office that deals with people who have died in the stupidest manner possible (ever heard of the Darwin Awards?) - thrown away the gift of life the Creator gave them and thus causes his to have a seriously bad day. It is not my intention to cause offence with my vision of heaven but I'm guessing somebody will hate it!

Story IV Tells the tale of Scarlett who is visited by the spirit of Robbie which unleashes her latent psychic abilities as she tries to unravel his murder.

Scarlett is a reluctant psychic, having problems of her own. Originally called Dead Reckoning, it started out as a fifty-minute pilot with two further scripts being written that teamed up Scarlett and Robbie as they battled various demons intent on getting a permanent footing on the earthly plane. If I'm of a mind I might dig out the two other scripts and start a new book!

V is set the day before and during a school reunion and brings together five characters who are all linked in some way to each other, It's a tale of secrets, lost love, infidelity and friendship and began as a two-parter script.

So, should you bother with it? Well, that's up to you; reading is too personal a habit for me to insist that you do! However, if you enjoy something to dip into (this is a dipping into book, not a sit-down and read in one go) on a wet Sunday afternoon then yes, please do give it a go and let me know how you find it.

So, that's the lowdown on the new collection. During my foray around long forgotten folders, I discovered two completed scripts, the first of which I am currently adapting.

Tales for the Fireside has been selling well in its first few hours and sales for Since You've Been Gone have picked up so I'm hoping more readers will discover my work and enjoy it.

Dude-Lit

We all know what Chick-Lit is, right? Chick-lit is usually light, romantic, boy meets girl; the written words equivalent of a rom-com. The cover tells you exactly what you are going to get when you open the page – girls who shop, have a great circle of friends but always has that one true best friend, can sink wine like water and have a crush on the boy next door.

Invariably, like the three act structure, there is Act 1 when the plot is set up, little bombs are primed to go off and foreshadowing is announced and the love interest is introduced. Act 2 is the fun and games, the nights out with the girls, the shoe shopping, the witty banter that is exchanged between the two would-be lovers until the mid-act turning point when it may all go south; a misunderstanding, a rival for affections, a row. Then the downward slope to the break into Act 3 when it all gets a little darker, maybe it’s all going terribly wrong but then, the eureka moment and ta-da, the protag knows what to do and the two would be lovers are reconciled and go off on a haze of pink fluff into a bright new future.

They are fun to read and the main character is always likeable in the same way as the object of her affection is always the best of men, even if she doesn’t know it at the time. So, what about those who, maybe, you know, what a little less chick and a bit more dude or have just got over Chick-Lit as a genre.

More to the point, what about men who want to read light fiction

Well, they can have a dose of Lad-Lit.

To be honest, Lad-Lit sounds a little bit too blokey for me; am I likely to find much talk of cheeky Nandos and some bant with the Archbishop of Banterbury?

Turning to Wiki for a bit of help I find this description:

Lad lit typically concerns itself with the trials and tribulations of urban twenty and thirty something men, faced with changing heterosexual mores and the pursuit of a desired lifestyle. The stories revolve around issues like male identity crisis and masculine insecurity in relationships as a result of the social pressures and the expectations of how they should behave in work, love and life, men’s fear and final embrace of marriage. In other words, the final maturation into manhood.

And it’s history:

"Lad lit" is a term of the 1990s that was originated in Britain, where it was developed for marketing purposes. Several publishers, encouraged by the increasing sales of glossy magazines (Maxim, Esquire, GQ, FHM), believed that such fiction would open up a new readership. Thus, lad lit is not its own phenomenon, but rather part of a larger cultural and socioeconomic movement. This new publishing category ostensibly sought to redefine masculinity. The protagonist of these books is the young man on the make, mindlessly pursuing booze, babes and football. His ineptitude, drunken-ness and compulsive materialism were part of his charm. The figure was created in contrast with the New Man of the feminist era and, beneath the crass surface, the lads are attractive, funny, bright, observant, inventive, charming and excruciatingly honest. They are characters who seem to deserve more from life and romance than they are getting.

Nick Hornsby, apparently, is the man for this type of genre, which is seen as a backlash against the phenomenon of chick-lit. Interestingly though, the Oxford Reference website states that in answer to the question, which came first, the chick or the lad, the answer is, the lad.

Hmm…so much for the 1990s, what about today. Is Lad-Lit still relevant or have we moved on? I think so. Welcome to the world of Dude-Lit. So, dude lit then, what is it? Who writes it? Do I want to read it?

A simple but effective description by blogger Brie Clemintine:

“Lately I’ve read books who main character is a man who goes through a self-discovering journey that make(s) me feel like I’m reading a “Chickless” Chick-Lit story, or, as I’ve come to think of it: Dude Lit”

The blogger on Giant Squid Books goes onto say:

“In many ways, dude lit seems to me to have many elements of chick lit, but told from the POV of a male narrator. It is said that if chick lit were a movie genre, it would surely be romantic comedy, and I think a lot of the same thing can be said about dude lit.”

If Lad-Lit was on the back of some kind of rebellion against Bridget Jones and her diary, or the dawn of New Main, then perhaps DL has rolled in on the crest of button down check shirts, nice leather brogues, beards and craft beers.

I don’t know, when did hipster arrive on the scene because Brie was writing about dudes in 2012 and I've found references to it from 2010.

Well, having had a fish around on the web I’ve found some links to book recommendations in the Dude-Lit range so I’m going in.

One thing that has definitely struck me is this; I always floundered when trying to describe Since You’ve Been Gone. To me, a male protagonist wasn’t symbolic of traditional chick lit yet, I didn’t feel it feel into the Lad-Lit realm either. However, now, I think I’m very happy to describe it as Dude-Lit, which doesn’t mean that it is the sole preserve of men (as Chick-Lit wasn’t and never should be considered the sole preserve of women). Getting Amazon to rethink my browse categories however, is another matter!

RIDIN’ THE BUS

The bus plays a big part in my life because I never learned how to drive. Some days it's a complete drag; getting stuck in traffic (okay, so every one gets stuck in traffic but, c'mon, I'm on a bus!), babies screaming, people talking loudly on their phones so you know exactly every minutiae of their lives. I have to catch two buses and the second one has to go over the railway lines, so invariably we're stuck at the gates for a while. Yeah, it can be a drag.

Then again, I'm a writer so going on the bus is like a field trip. Seriously. People like to know where you get ideas from, or inspiration, or language and I say: take a trip on the bus. Get a day ticket, ride as many as possible - if you're not a regular bus user - and just...listen.

Dialogue can be really hard. We all have our own unique voice and sometimes that is the voice we use in our writing but that's not how all people talk. Some repeat themselves, some use 'like' and 'you know' too much, and some listen and nod and say 'yeah, yeah, yeah'. Actually, if you listen to people talking, you can see that we don't all stop and wait for the other person(s) to finish; we inject, interrupt, zone out. That's really hard to convey in a narrative sense but pretty easy if you're writing a script - there's a button to show that everyone is talking at once - but, honestly, would your reader want all the extraneous words we spout in everyday conversation? Probably not. Take this conversation I overheard on the bus a few weeks back:

Woman 1: I saw Ruth yesterday. I never had her down as a snob Woman 2: Oh? Woman 1: She was with her boy and he's off up to secondary school in September so I asked where he was going and she jumped in and said, the high school and I thought, you know, she meant one of them out at Lexdon, so I said to him, oh, I thought you'd go to Stanway and she said, yes, Stanway High School. Well, I've never heard it called that before, you know, because it's not a high school....secondary modern probably...but I thought, you know, she meant the high school. Woman 2: Well, yes, you would. Woman 1: We've got several of those haven't we...the girls high and the boys grammar and that private one. Woman 2. Well, I thought that's what you meant when she said high school...the girls high or St Mary's, you know, the private one. Woman 1. That's what I thought she meant when she said it, that's why I said, I thought you'd go to Stanway and she said, he is Stanway High School.

There was a short pause before Woman 2 started the conversation up again with a repeat of: Woman 2. Well, I thought that's what you meant when she said high school...the girls high or St Mary's, you know, the private one.

So, everyday conversation can be boring, repetitive and not for you but....but, it's not what they are saying per se that you should be interested in but the cadence, the variances in pauses, the words like 'yes' or 'yeah' that are used as a shorthand for not saying a lot; the tone of delivery of a 'yes' can be quite loaded., is it conveying anger, agreement, sarcasm, sadness?

lso, there's the variety. Slang is very transient and probably best avoided if it's really of the now as it will date quite rapidly however, it is interesting to listen to young people using slang.

I sat in front of two teenagers who were discussing gang culture on the two large estates in Colchester. Two phrases stood out in the conversation: getting switched up and on your onesies. The former, a quick check in the urban dictionary informs me is when your mood changes from calm to mad in an instant and the latter is when your on your own. In this case, the boy told his friend that it 'wasn't on for seven to do that when you're on your onesies.'

Of course, you can differentiate between characters by using regional accents. I did this in Since You've Been Gone by having Michael, Hal's best friend come from up north but even then, regional accents are not homogeneous. I based Michael's rhythm on Guy Martin - it was a tough gig watching hours of Mr Martin but he's interesting because he has a very unique and identifiable way of talking. However, a note of caution, be sparing in your use of dialect, readers don't necessarily want to have to fight through obscure words and saying just because you've found them during research (I loathed reading North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell for this very reason - her repeated use of the word 'hoo' which means 'she' bugged the life out of me). So, less is more, I think. Use it to convey but don't let it swamp the reader with idioms.

Ride the bus and happy writing

MY WRITING PROCESS

Here is my version of The Writing Process

What am I currently working on?

Actually...I've kind of got three things on the go. I know, spreading myself a little thin. One is a Young Adult novel provisionally called What Are Ghosts Afraid Of? This one is quite a bit of the way through but I've reached a halt and am still working out my demons on that one. Secondly, an untitled chick-lit piece that started off with great panache and good intentions but then stalled. Not because I don't know where it's going but because my third project took over. The Winter Rose is proving to be a genre mash up - a romance/historical/supernatural murder-mystery (I'm not even sure you can have that much of a genre mash up to be honest). We shall see.

What makes my writing distinctive?

I don't know...I use third person omniscient although I do generally have a distinctive protagonist. I guess it's up to the reader to decide if I have a distinctive writing voice.

Why do I write what I write?

I like ideas that amuse and intrigue me. I also enjoy looking at the weirdness of relationships. I don't really want to write straight chick-lit with the boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back dynamic. Relationships are messy and they suck sometimes. They're also amazing and make you feel alive so I want to go down that route rather than the soppy will they/won't they road. With Since You've Been Gone I had the need to express something about how I felt going back home to Dover (also the home town of my protag Hal Bartlett) but also I was quite determined to subvert expectation. I think, in the most part, I succeeded with that.

How does the writing process work?

I'm a pantser - I write by the seat of my pants. I can't plan for toffee. I get an idea, a starting point. I get the measure of my characters and I get an ending. I just then work to join up that initial opening 'scene' with the final closing one. I started off writing scripts and putting them into contests. I think I probably write my novels in the same way. I 'see' a scene and I write that 'scene' (maybe that will translate to one side of an A4 piece of paper - I do it all long hand and type it up later). Then I will use that to progress to the next 'scene' and so on. So, when other writers/authors talk about word counts they like to achieve every day - 1,000/2,000/3,000 words, I talk about maybe 800 words. I do short, sharp blocks of writing.

Since You've Been Gone was relatively easy to write because it started out as a 90 page script that had been through tough feedback from a professional script reader. It had also been in competition - Prequel to Cannes (2nd place) and was only one of 25 scripts picked annually in the BAFTA/Rocliffe New Writers Forum Prize. It had its structure in place. So, writing from scratch is taking me some time.

What next?

I'll keep going. At them moment I've resumed work on the untitled chick-lit and managed to work out some of the bugs.

Planner or a panster?

ARE YOU A PLANNER OR A PANSTER Re-blog from 2014

So, here's the thing - are you a 'plotter' or a 'pantser'? In your writing I mean.

Do you spend hours plotting the A story, the B story, the sub-plot, the bombs, the pay offs...marking them on coloured cards that denote this character or that character. Maybe you use a spreadsheet like J.K.Rowling. If you do then you're a planner.

Or, maybe, like me, you have a very good idea of your story and characters and can even see the last page but the bit in the middle is a whole adventure waiting to happen. I'm a pantser.

It's just the way I write. To a degree I have notes - usually scribbled on bits of paper that find themselves tucked away in a pocket, written down as the thought occurs. But I tend to start off with the idea, incorporate the thoughts and let the story carry me along.

I've never really enjoyed the process of writing a treatment. Invariably I find that after I have spent an age doing that, once I start writing, the story goes so wildly off track as to be totally organic and seemingly with a life of its own.

I know some writers swear by the planning and plotting stage and love the feel of a fresh block of coloured index cards in their hands but me, never got my head around it.

Well..I say that...but then today I've given it a whirl. I found a fairly simple template to use (believe me, some of them were so complex as to fry my brain). I've modified it to suit my own needs and I've printed off the format. I've started to add ideas to it but I don't know...

So, what brought about this change of heart...I'm trying to write a story set both in the present and the past and it's going to get out of control if I don't round it up and bring some order to the proceedings! Maybe this will help.