Work in Progress - March 2019

The draft of The Lost Lady is complete.

Having done two major fixes (shifting from third person to first, and rewriting six chapters to accommodate a mistake in historical dates) I have put the book away and will look at it in a few months.

Julie is proofing a collection of short stories, Undivulged Crimes, which I hope will appear in time for the summer rush. (Great train, plane and beach reading!)

Next project? I will publish a very short story on this site soon. It's an homage to Stephen Leacock, the master of the very short story.

The Rock Pool is also being proofed and, with luck, will also make a 2019 appearance.

I now will have time to catch up on reading: Church of Spies, by Mark Reibling, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Labyrinth of Spirits.

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First Lines

First lines are first impressions Teachers of creative writing are always bleating about the importance of first lines. They're not wrong, but a first line isn't make-or-break. Many excellent novels have indifferent first lines, but their significance is often created by the fact that they are the opening lines of great books; they are not great books because they have killer opening lines. Consider the first line of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities . it rambles on for 119 words, and demonstrates that Dickens had no understanding of the semi-colon. Most people can only remember the first dozen words; show-offs know the first two dozen. Dickens was being paid by the word, and was a master at turning one good idea into a whole chapter. (Don't misunderstand me: A Tale of Two Cities is one of my favourite books.) First lines are like book titles. They can take a while for the writer to feel satisfied with them, but often, they don't really matter. When asked what he...

Reflections - Moby Dick

Has anyone read all of Moby Dick ? Congratulations if you have. I hope you enjoyed it. I've started it half a dozen times; it was required reading for at least three courses I took over the years, but I never finished it. Each time I began, I felt that this was a wonderful book, to be read at the pace that a whaling ship travelled. If you read it carefully and let it go at its own speed, you can feel the roll and pitch of the Pequod , and catch the fresh scent of the sea, and the stale smell of Ishmael, Queequeeg, and the crew. Forget the interpretations people have told you about the symbol of the whale; of Ahab's vision of a malevolent God. Let the whale and Ahab explain themselves. Try to listen to Ishmael, and put your own urgencies and the 21st century world out of your head, and slow to that pitch and roll. The detail about whales and whaling is almost overwhelming. Melville is like the best of hunters: he knows - and one suspects, loves - ...

Was Scrooge Conned?

It would be interesting to trace the tradition of the Christmas ghost story beyond the superficial (see below). I am sure it is related to the darkness and cold of the year and people huddled around a fire for comfort and warmth, but the association with Christmas and ghosts is incongruous - or is it? Yes, there were pagan mid-winter feasts, but it's hard to see why they would emerge in the 18th and 19th centuries when ghost stories rose in popularity. Dickens is, of course, associated with the genre and wrote the quintessential Christmas ghost story. Ironically, given its Christmas theme, God barely gets a look in in A Christmas Carol . There are only a dozen mentions of God - mostly in passing "God bless you"s or the singing of God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen. There is no mention of Christ, Jesus, or Saviour, and no one is seen going to church. So, what we have is a ghost story trading on a secular commercial Christmas so that Dickens and his publisher can sell a few...

A J Lattimer & Co. - Michael Reidy

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