This is from an online challenge imagining your characters being interviewed by a self-absorbed, somewhat sexist, not especially bright media person called Vic. I thought I’d share this one – an interview with Rose, the main character in The Incomer. It’s not part of the book, but may give you a bit of an insight into Rose’s situation and what she’s dealing with as the story starts…
Vic: So [drinks coffee and checks reflection in mirror], what’s the story with you then?
Rose: Are you sure you haven’t just invited me to ask about my brother Simon?
Vic[chuckles]: Of course not! I don’t need to ask about a TV presenter, I know all about him and his rather arty programmes. I’m sure if he were here, he’d be asking me for tips on how to fend off his fanbase [flicks hair]. No, no, this interview is all about you, Rita.
Rose: Rose. My name’s Rose.
Vic[coy smile]: Just teasing, Rosie, so tell me all about yourself. What was it like growing up as Simon’s little sister?
Rose: Well he made me lug the family video recorder around while he made films with our toy animals. I got my own back by—
Vic: Of course, the camera angle, I’d forgotten. Your husband David was his intrepid camera man, wasn’t he, Ramona? Of course, it’s a bit like always the bridesmaid, never the bride, a camera man – no offence Charlie on camera 1 – but being a presenter is a unique skill requiring charisma, sexual magnetism, brains; whereas waving a camera about: well it’s mostly brute force.
Rose: David won awards for his work.
Vic[suddenly sombre, dropping voice]: Of course, I should say how sorry I am for your loss. Roz.
Rose: Thank you. But my name is Rose.
Vic[still serious]: Tell me more about the impact of that terrible accident. I understand your brother Simon is still recovering. PMT I expect.
Rose: I think you mean PTSD.
Vic: Trust me dear, all these acronyms are hard to remember, I’ve interviewed more medical specialists than you’ve had roast dinners.
Rose: Probably, because I’m a vegetarian. But weren’t they your cosmetic surgeons? Anyway, I thought you wanted to ask about me.
Vic: Well, yes, I wanted to know how you’re coping. I gather you’re looking after Simon as he recuperates and pulls together the tattered remains of his career.
Rose: The series he was filming when the accident happened is about to air and he’s got a new series lined up with even more funding and he’s generally quite well. He just has… episodes… when he has to tune out a little. As for me—
Vic: I can’t imagine what it’s like living in the shadows Rani.
Rose: Rose. I was in an orchestra when I met David. I’m sort of investigating new music now, doing a bit of composing and –
Vic: Oh so David was filming your band back in the day and that’s how you met.
Rose: No, he was a wildlife photographer. Simon is a naturalist remember, one with a PhD (that’s not a disease by the way). You don’t tend to find much wildlife in an orchestra. Except possibly in the timpani section. I met David in a pub on Simon’s 30th birthday. It was only five years ago but since the accident last year when David died, it seems…
Vic: Well time’s a great healer Roxy. Plenty more fish in the sea for an attractive girl like you [adjusts tie and waggles eyebrows]. But maybe you should have stayed in the city. I gather you and Simon have moved into the middle of nowhere. Whatever do you do with your time? I suppose you’ve joined the local ladies’ guild or whatever they have out in turnip country.
Rose: I’m trying to avoid those women like the plague, but they won’t leave me alone. They’re up to something, I’m just not sure what, but I’m pretty sure it’s not knitting they do in the wee small hours. Anyway, I’ve got enough on my plate trying to work out why this girl keeps turning up naked, borrowing my clothes and running away. It was more peaceful in the city, I swear.
Vic[sitting up with mouth open]: Naked? Tell me more…
Rose: You’ve got a bit of toothpaste on your cheek and you missed a bit when you shaved. Oh and the naked girl is one of Simon’s fans. Haven’t you got one like that? Anyway, I’ll see myself out, Vince.
A few years ago, a scene popped into my mind and I wrote it down. This happens quite a lot, and often these ‘snippets’ are just mental exercises which will never turn into anything. But this one was different.
In those five hundred words, a young woman with magical ability who’s suffering from unrequited love is asked to do something she’s not sure about and needs to decide whether to or not.
I knew the ‘snippet’ wanted to become a contemporary fantasy novel, but I also knew it wanted to be a romance. That was where I started to struggle. All my books have elements of romance in them to a lesser or greater degree, however I’d never written a straight romance and I didn’t really feel confident to try.
A year or so later Liz Hedgecock and I were talking about starting a new co-writing project to add to our others and began batting ideas about.
We both thought it would be nice to try a different genre, maybe fantasy, maybe romance, and we sat down with a large piece of paper and some post-its and jotted down ideas. At this point I mentioned my ‘snippet’ (which Liz had read) and wondered if it could be a prompt. Liz had already written some contemporary fantasy novels (The Magical Bookshop Series) and some rom-com novellas (Tales of Meadley), so had a much better idea than I did about how to proceed.
Several conversations later, we’d fleshed out the main characters and developed a skeleton plot and A Tale of Tea and Dragons was born.
As usual, we have taken a character each to feature in alternative chapters. This time however, one character is female and one is male, rather than both female. And the familiar (to me) plot beats of a murder mystery, have been replaced with the (new to me) plot beats of a romance.
In the end, with Liz’s expertise, we got there.
We had lots of fun writing A Tale of Tea and Dragons. Disappearing into it was a lovely contrast to current affairs.
It’s set in a world that’s ours yet not ours.
Some people have magic powers and some don’t. Some towns are ancient towns dripping in magic, others have no magic in them at all (I’m sure you can make your own list of which might be which). Both are populated by a mixture of magical and non-magical people.
Magical people may or may not have familiars (in this world they’re magical creatures who are part-protector, part-voice-of-conscience for the person they’re assigned to). Magical people will have a range of potential power which needs to be honed and trained – but are there enough skilled teachers left to help?
As it’s a modern world, it’s full of cynics.
Non-magical people from non-magical towns might visit magical towns for a kind of theme-park experience, but they may view magical people are viewed as at best charlatans and at worst suspect and needing to be kept under control. Magical people, especially in non-magical towns, may feel that they’re better hiding their abilities.
Against this background we start in Lulmouth Bay – an ancient magical town, but also a modern seaside resort.
Living there is Hannah, owner/manager of the teashop her grandmother left her along with more magical recipes than she’s prepared to use. She’s fed up, frustrated and pining for a man who keeps friend-zoning her.
Arriving from the extremely non-magical town of Mundingham is Max, magical but cynical, burnt from a failed romance. He’s also feeling trapped by his job, but he’s ready to get rich so he’s free.
Will either of them try to get what they want even when the cost may be too high?
Will anyone find love?
Come and visit us in Lulmouth Bay by clicking here – the sea’s warm, the tea’s sparking, and the magic’s lovely!
Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. Cover image created by German Creative 2025. These are not to be used without the authors’ express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).
When I was a teenager agonising over my hair, my paternal grandmother told me about her brother cutting hers when she was around the same age
At the time of this conversation my own hair was long, straight and mousy-brown. In theory it had been in fashion for a while (although it would have been more fashionable if blonde), but somehow it – along with me – never was. Now, a new fashion was coming in: shoulder length with curled sides. I needed a good hairdresser, possibly a perm and definitely curling tongs. None of these were things my mother thought worth spending money on. She considered me too young for a perm, could trim my hair herself and from bitter experience suspected it would take more than curling tongs to curl my hair.
‘I rather regretted letting him do it,’ said my gran, touching the nape of her neck where there were some adorable grey curls sticking out.
This stopped my whinging in its tracks. While my sister and I are now best of friends (which we weren’t at the time), I still wouldn’t trust her with my tresses and a pair of scissors. And what I knew of friends’ brothers, I definitely wouldn’t have trusted them.
‘Whatever did he do?’ I said.
‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she said. ‘He did what I asked him to.’
Halted in my tirade against parental unreasonableness, I asked the obvious question: ‘Whatever did you ask him to do?’
‘Bob my hair,’ she said. ‘My parents wouldn’t allow it. The bit where he shaved at my nape has never quite grown right since. Before my parents found out, I sold a lovely necklace I’d been given so I could go to a barber and have it done properly. They were horrified all the same, even though my mother once did something similar.’
Her parents were horrified? So was I. My gran was the archetypal housewife. She had married young, had never had to work for a living and never had an urge to. She’d fallen happily into running a home efficiently and well. She gardened, styled her home, baked and sewed with high skill and also joy. She was calm, conforming and believed in obedience and the status quo. The last thing I could imagine her doing was anything that horrified anyone. But what did she mean about her own mother ‘doing the same’?
It turned out that it all went back to cultural perceptions of femininity, modesty, and being a good Christian woman which we’ve now largely put aside.
My great-grandmother was in her late teens in the 1890s, one of the youngest of eight (I think) children. Her father would have been well into his sixties. While not remotely poor, they certainly weren’t in the ‘going to balls’ class, so when she obtained a party dress which exposed lower arms and neck, her father was apparently horrified. (Although I have a photograph taken of her in this extremely modest – by today’s standards – dress, so she must have been forgiven.)
Her daughter, my grandmother was the youngest by far of four, a teenager in the 1920s. The brother who cut her hair must have been a good six years older, since the eldest one had been killed in WWI. Their father would have been in his fifties and her mother in her forties. Bare lower arms and neck were one thing. Short hair and short skirts were something else altogether.
But WWI had accelerated what had already started in the 1910s – more sensible, practical clothes and hairstyles for women – and by the 1920s there was no going back. My great-grandparents forgave her. It was a very loving and accepting family, and they must have realised that the world was never going to be what it had been before the Great War and that fighting over the length of someone’s hair was pointless. Plus Gran had a married sister who was eleven years older and probably took her side.
The whole conversation came back to me recently as I started writing a new project: a mystery set in the 1920s where the female main character is twenty-three. She hasn’t had her hair cut into a bob yet but a number of the other female characters have. (At the time, you went to a barber to have it done, holding a page from a newspaper with possible hairstyles in your shaking hand.) Will she get it cut or not? Haven’t decided yet.
I don’t think having her hair bobbed was Gran’s only rebellion. I believe that there was some concern about her marrying my grandfather. It wasn’t because he was unsuitable in any way as a person, or is family was less than acceptable. I think it was because there was a possibility of mental illness in his family since his father had tragically died by his own hand. Somehow my grandparents prevailed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.
I never did get that fashionable curled sides hairstyle while it was still in fashion and stopped nagging my mother. Perhaps I realised maintaining it required more skill than I had (or would ever have).
At Christmas, some months after the conversation I’m relating, my paternal grandfather unexpectedly died. A little after a year after that my paternal grandmother did too. We’ve always felt that a broken heart was more of a cause than anything medical.
For reasons I still can’t explain, one of the first things I did in my grief was to demand to go to a hairdresser, where I had my long hair cut into a short bob. Ever since then, my hairstyle had been fundamentally one of three styles: long and straight, long and permed, or in a bob.
But for the record, so far I haven’t got my sister to do it, and no one has ever taken a razor to the back to create the adorable curls that stuck up at a funny angle which my grandmother had.
(NB for anyone not in the know, Barnet Fair is Cockney Rhyming Slang for Hair. And I will be writing more about the subject.)
The local women’s guild threatens to uncover what Rose is hiding. Who can she trust? Is it Sky who fears the guild? Or Rob who hates it?
As odd becomes sinister, Rose begins to wonder: does the Guild want them to leave…
or to die?
As a contemporary fantasy, ‘The Incomer’ may seem like a major diversion from murder mysteries, but if you’ve read some of my short stories, you’ll know that I have always had a fascination with the magical and mystical.
And while this book involves werewolves, shapeshifters and selkies (and a little romance), it is chiefly character driven as are all my books.
It is about what happens when people find themselves in an extraordinary situation. It is about brother and a sister coming to terms with and overcoming more than one grief. It is about fighting someone or something that is trying to destroy them. It’s about learning who you really are and starting again. And more importantly, perhaps, it’s about friendship.
I actually started it long before any of the characters in my other novels even popped into my head, and I thought you might like to know some of its background and how it reflects my writing – if not personal – journey. (Which, while it involves small towns, doesn’t – so far – involve werewolves, shapeshifters and selkies. As far as I know.)
Back in 2010, my husband gave me a laptop for my birthday. Up to that point, we’d shared a PC , but he knew how much I wanted to start writing again and this was his gift to make this happen.
I started a few stories, but one of those t I didn’t finish was called ‘Reverse’. It is now ‘The Incomer’.
It started much the same: Rose and her TV presenter brother Simon have moved to the Highlands to hide a secret. Simon has become a werewolf in an incident which killed Rose’s husband. There’s a possibility of a cure, but they need to keep their heads down for the time being.
Unfortunately no one will let them hide.
First Emmeline of the local women’s guild turns up, then a peculiar young woman called Sky who seems to fear Emmeline.
That’s as far as I got.
I realised that the story needed more space and I didn’t know what to do so it went in the cyber drawer and stayed there.
In 2016 I thought ‘Reverse’ might be a good project for Nanowrimo (a challenge to write a complete – if first draft – 50,000 novel in November). I got half way and… I can’t remember what got in the way at the time, but I stopped again.
Roll on five months. I’d taken leave from work to spend with my children during their Easter school holiday, but as teenagers they were more interested in hanging out with their friends (and of course, revising for that summer’s exams) than day trips with me.
I suddenly realised that I wasn’t remotely upset. On the contrary, I was ecstatic.
This was the first time for years when I’d have whole days to myself, to do what I wanted, without worrying about keeping other people entertained.
So I dusted off ‘Reverse’ and finished it. My husband came home from work on the Friday evening moments after I typed the last sentence.
It needed work and was way too long, but I was happy. In as much as I’d had a clue where it was heading in 2010, it had ended up somewhere much better.
The short story was going to be entirely about Simon and Sky with events seen through Rose’s eyes, with her in the background.
But as I wrote, Rose changed, and because she changed, so did the direction of the story.
The start is the same: Rose is a widow. She’s her brother’s PA and also his protector, because he’s not good at protecting himself. Simon is the extrovert celebrity. She is an introvert, perceived by others to be in his shadow.
But as I developed the story, Rose started pushing against other people’s perceptions and tackling the sinister things they’re facing by herself.
Suddenly the novel became as much about Rose and about her friendship with Sky as about anything else.
It wasn’t until I was reading the first chapter act to my writing group and discussing it afterwards, that it occurred to that Rose had changed, because I myself had changed.
When I started that short story in 2010, I was juggling a job and caring for primary school age children. I was lucky I found time to sit down at all let alone write. I wasn’t in the background in my job, yet I felt I was in my domestic life.
By 2017, my children were more independent. I was to, to a large extent, the good deal freer.
Also, I had joined a writers’ group, and ‘met’ writers on line. Many of these people are now my closest friends.
The creative side of me which had been stifled for a long time, was no longer in the shadows. I’d stopped worrying about trying to explain creative ideas, because I’d found a tribe who wouldn’t dismiss them as mad or stupid and laugh at me.
In fact, I had stopped being in the shadows and stopped letting life just happen. In the process, my characters had stopped being people who largely observe or suffer events, but instead take action even if their personality makes that hard.
Rose is still the introvert I imagined her to be. She is still a little shy. But she’ll fight for her brother, and she’ll fight for herself.
If I’ve whetted your appetite, you can pre-order the e-book here. It will come out on 1st July 2025. The paperback and hardback will be out on 30th June. Although there will be other books in the series, ‘The Incomer’ can be read as a standalone, so I hope you’ll give it a go.
And if you do, I hope you like it.
Words copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. Image created using Canva. Book cover by 100covers.
I was a little girl who felt as if she’d been born into the wrong era. This particularly applied to clothes. I longed for elegant colours, long, flouncy skirts, bodices, frilled petticoats and lacy gloves. I just knew that wearing them, I could swish down a sweeping staircase. (Important note – I wanted to live in a former age whilst also being rich.)
Alas, when I was a little girl fashion meant flares, bold day-glo polyester, tie-dye, A-line mini-dresses, jeans with patches on them, shiny boots, floppy hats if hats at all. Even if we’d had a sweeping staircase rather than the usual sort, one can’t swish down a staircase in any of that.
My first memories of dressing up was for school or Sunday school plays. Apart from a lovely Olde Englishe costume my mother made for me to wear in my role as an Olde Englishe Villager (I have no idea what the play was), most of what I had to wear ranged from unromantic to ridiculous, especially the rabbit costume. My sister meanwhile got to be a fairy or angel.
At home, we dressed up in Mum’s clothes from the late fifties– a full scratchy starched petticoat, silk covered dancing stilletos, a dirndl, a beautiful silk Chinese cheongsam which had originally been below Mum’s knees but then later tragically hacked off in the sixties to mini skirt level. We also annexed her wedding dress, the tiara that went with it, a hand-sewn Victorian cotton petticoat and a Victorian Paisley shawl. I’m not sure what we were trying to be, but we liked to think it was regal.
When I was about nine or ten, a much richer and slightly older cousin sent me some old party dresses. They were just up my street, made of pastel taffeta with sashes and flouncy skirts, but they definitely belonged to a different social set to the one which was inviting me to birthday parties and expecting me to wear something a good deal more fashionable and a lot less soppy.
Undismayed and ignoring my sister’s embarrassment I wore the dresses to church where I tried to look Victorian despite the modern hymns and bright surroundings. Then I asked my arty grandmother to paint me wearing one and make me look Victorian. She normally painted landscapes and hated painting people, so wasn’t too happy about it, and also unexpectedly commented ‘Goodness, I never knew your eyes were brown. I always thought they were green.’
Both of us hated the end result. She’d captured something of my day-dreaming self but hadn’t managed to make me look remotely Victorian. I looked like a 1970s girl playing dress-up with greeny-muddy eyes that were slightly cross (yes, she’d managed to capture my emerging resting b*tch face.) The portrait was surreptitiously put into the attic after a month and eventually disposed of by my mother. I hope it was painted over and isn’t haunting anyone (or isn’t haunting anyone despite being painted over).
My dad also liked dressing up. His go to costume was that of a tramp (hobo). I have no idea why. He was normally very smart and rarely without a tie, jacket or hat. (He never received the memo about the sixties and seventies.) Maybe it was the contrast.
When he discovered Science Fiction conventions, he embraced early Cosplay with joy. At the only one I was dragged to, I had to endure watching him and Mum parade dressed as the two main characters from a short-lived TV series called Kinvig in which Dad was the eponymous hero – owner of a run-down electrical repair shop and Mum as a beautiful alien. I had thankfully left home by the time he dressed up as Ming the Merciless and painted his whole (mostly but not entirely) bald head green.
At uni, slim and young but still deluded, I’d go to fancy dress things as Cleopatra (plenty of excuse for all that eyeliner and cheap costume made from a sheet) or a black cat (more eyeliner and a slinky black dress). It was a few years after that when the photo of me as Miss Muffet below was taken. It was nearly the last time I went to a fancy dress party, my outfit constructed from a bridesmaid dress and my then boyfriend’s spider legs from stuffed tights.
Shortly afterwards (but not as a result), the spider and I broke up. A year or so after that, I met my husband who doesn’t do dressing up at all, except for the time when we went to a murder mystery dinner.
Husband had to be a smart playboy, so he just had to wear his wedding suit and best tie and drink wine in a rich man manner. So he was happy. I so wanted to be the glamorous elegant rich character or at least the slinky femme fatale character, but no, luck of the draw meant I was the girl from the wrong side of the tracks wearing most of the contents of my make-up bag plastered on my face and a garish blouse probably visible from space.
And that was that. Would I ever get to play dress up again?
Well… I now give talks at fairly regular intervals. They’re about the inspiration behind my books in the main – the real women, real events, weird and wonderful facts that I uncover when I’m researching. One of them ‘Dressed for Detection’ is about how Victorian and Edwardian women did while wearing what they wore.
The first time I gave this talk (I will be giving it again on Saturday 5th October 2024), it was at a fashion museum where I was surrounded by authentic clothes from the era I was talking about. I had a bit of a think and …
Was this a chance to dress up in elegant Edwardian clothes? Was it also a chance to rekindle my neglected sewing skills which used to give me so much pleasure (and buy some gadgets inspired by the Great British Sewing Bee)?
What do you think?
Words and images copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used without the author’s express permission.
Some sixteen years after I left the family home to create my own, my parents moved to a bungalow in another village. I never lived there, but when I visited, I’d say something like ‘I’m going home to Mum and Dad’ because somehow they themselves were synonymous with the concept of home. I mentioned this to a friend recently and she thought I was mad. But then she probably does anyway.
My husband’s parents still live in the house where he grew up. If we’re visiting them, we might refer to it as his ‘home home’ as opposed to ‘home’ which is where we live.
I have a complicated psychological relationship with the house I grew up in. I loathed it the whole time I lived there (eight to eighteen) because it represented being uprooted from a place I yearned for so much it eventually became a fiction of itself.
Nevertheless, that house was ‘home home’ until my parents moved out. Now it’s just somewhere I once lived.
There’s a concept of what ‘home’ should be, just as there is an idea of ‘family’ or ‘parent’ or ‘Christmas’ should be. For many people those concepts are hollow shells. They ought to be a happy things, yet aren’t. I’m lucky in that for me, they always mostly been happy and still are.
As an author, I think of my characters’ homes a good deal, because I feel it frames them. Some of the following I’ve explored in my books, some I plan to. What have I missed?
Can a character feel at home if they hate the house but love the person/people in it?
Can a character feel at home if they hate the person/people in it but love the house?
Can a character feel at home anywhere if they’re rootless and/or running from the past?
Can a character make a home in a new place if some of the people around them don’t want them there?
In Mr Rosenblum’s List by Natasha Solomons (alternative title: Mr Rosenblum Dreams in English), Jack and Sadie Rosenblum are refugees who flee Germany in 1937 for London where they are given a book of instructions on how to assimilate. Jack is determined to follow it so that he can blend in, leave the past behind and become an English gentleman in a new home. Sadie doesn’t want to forget her lost home, her lost family, or submerge who she is. When Jack moves them to post-war Dorset to build a golf course, she is even less happy, especially as the locals have mixed views on German Jews living in their village. Among other things, the book explores a concept of home. Will it forever be somewhere Sadie has lost and can’t replace? Can it be the place Jack has moved them to even if they have to fight to be accepted? Or can they create something else? Set not far from where I live, and inspired by the author’s grandparents, it’s an interesting (and often funny) read.
I have friends with hundreds of years of ancestors buried in their local graveyards. I sometimes feel sad that those friends have roots that I don’t.
I’m a mixture of Scottish, English and Irish with a few odds and ends chucked in. All of my ancestors over the last two hundred years had itchy feet. It would take years to work out where I ‘come’ from and visit everyone’s graves. While I might feel a little rootless, the greater feeling is a sense of freedom.
I’m not tied. I’m not obligated to tradition. I don’t have to follow my ancestors in their beliefs or lifestyle. I’ve been free to change and adapt and grow without feeling I’m betraying anything or anyone.
I wonder if my itchy feet ancestors felt the same?
One great-great-grandfather chose to leave not only a country but a community behind for a new life in England. I know he was valued by his new community and loved by his new family. Did he yearn for the previous place: its scenery, its language, its familiarity? Or was he happy creating a new home in London?
My Scottish grandmother moved shortly after marriage from Glasgow to Herefordshire and then Greater London. Surprisingly, for someone born and brought up in a city, she preferred Herefordshire and never quite reconciled herself to London. She spent two periods of time during WWII in rural Scotland, along with (among others) my mother then returned to London. Eventually she moved to Wiltshire. Where was home for her? I don’t know. How she felt about Herefordshire is the only personal information she ever shared with me.
Home is certainly not a geographical location to me. Largely it’s close family and close friends. But it’s also something else because ‘home’ needn’t mean people.
When I lived alone, my flat was no less ‘home’ because I was on my own there most of the time and was, to some extent, very lonely. I loved going ‘home’ to that flat. I loved living to my own rhythm with my few belongings and my sunny kitchen.
Home is being myself. I don’t have to put on a front, or attempt to be extroverted. Lucky enough to have family and friends who accept me as I am, I can express or discuss my thoughts or frustrations or doubts or faith without fear of judgment even if the other person doesn’t understand or agree.
If I’m alone, I can enjoy my own company, pottering about in silence without music or radio, listening to garden or weather noises, letting my thoughts wander, being creative.
For me ultimately ‘home’ is feeling safe.
In a world which seems to be currently insane, perhaps it’s worth remembering that for the vast, vast majority of people a safe home is fundamentally all they want. Surely that’s something everyone has a right to.
Trigger warnings in books, films and TV are contentious.
I’m often irritated when I’m watching TV after 9.30pm and a sombre announcement warns me about what might offend or upset me in the programme I’m about to watch. I’ve usually enough knowledge of what I’m about to see to anticipate it, and if I didn’t want to watch, I wouldn’t. (And often don’t even if the drama is going to be excellent.) Other times, if I wasn’t aware there might be a particular scene, I’m glad of the warning beforehand so I can make a choice about whether I watch.
I admit I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trigger warning a book. However, I have a question for you.
But here’s a quick trigger warning about this blog post if you want one before you read down and find out what I’m asking: it refers to human trafficking, slavery and obliquely to prostitution.
The image below may look fun, but it very much isn’t. It’s from a larger image that was printed in the Illustrated Police News on Saturday 17 June 1899 with the description: ‘Alleged Immoral Traffic in Chinese Girls – they are packed in crates and treated as freight on the railways’. The article (on page 3) says ‘An investigation has been ordered into the recent revelations regarding the sale and shipment of Chinese girls, a practice which, it is alleged, has been customary for months. The climax was reached a week ago, when two girls, aged fifteen and sixteen years respectively, were bought at Vancouver. It is asserted they were placed in a crate and shipped as freight over the railway, the train hands giving them food and water. The car containing them was placed on a side track one night, and the girls, being each clad only in a wrapper, caught cold. The man who purchased one of them demanded damages from the railway company for the injury thus done to his property. The girls, it is alleged, were sold for immoral purposes.’
This small picture is in the corner of a larger one depicting what looks like a rough (presumably Canadian) bar with two (possibly supposed to be Chinese) girls in low cut mid-calf dresses, sitting on the laps of two bearded men, watched by a crowd of other men.
If you saw the larger image without context, you might be reminded of an archetypal scene from a Western where everyone – including the girls – is having great fun in a saloon, in contrast perhaps to the stuffy citizens of a frontier town.
However, when you include the other image and what it’s describing (and a cockroach of a man who’d purchased two girls and had the face to publicly sue the railway company for their damage because he might not be able to profit from what damage he did to them afterwards) you might wonder how many if any of the girls in that bar/saloon (or any equivalent) chose to be there and were happy with what they had to do. Some did/do choose that job not simply out of desperation, but because they want to and they keep their own earnings. But many, many didn’t and still don’t.
There’s a prevailing view that refined Victorian and Edwardian women would faint if any reference to sex came into their hearing. Maybe it was true for some, but evidence suggests that there were plenty for whom it wasn’t.
In the UK at least, women fighting for suffrage in the 1800s did not simply want the vote. They also wanted better treatment for women and girls – not just in terms of educational opportunities but also their personal, moral and mental safety. And they weren’t afraid to tackle the subject head on.
Josephine Butler for example, had long campaigned for the raising of the age of consent to be raised from thirteen to sixteen. Why this was such a battle is mind boggling, but eventually, working with journalist W.T. Stead and Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army, she was involved in the infamous Eliza Armstrong case. They proved to a horrified Victorian general public how easy it was to buy a child for immoral purposes, conspiring to purchase a thirteen-year-old girl for £5 (six months salary for a maid) from her mother who provided proof of her purity plus some chloroform to drug her, knowing that she would be destined for a brothel on mainland Europe. Instead, Eliza was rescued and subsequently had a safe and good life. W.T. Stead was, believe it or not, subsequently prosecuted for abducting a child from her parents, despite what they’d been happy to do to their own daughter. But ultimately, the case raised awareness of what was happening, and the age of consent in England and Wales being raised to sixteen in 1885.
By the 1910s when ‘The Suffragette’ was also campaigning about what they called ‘the traffic in humans’, the international White Slave Traffic Act (also called the Mann Act) had some into force, as had the International Agreement for the suppression of the White Slave Traffic (also known as the White Slave convention). Legislation was also introduced in the UK to allow for any procurer to be publically flogged if convicted, though whether any were I’m not sure. There were certainly plenty of procurers, some more sophisticated than others, from strangers posting apparently innocent advertisements for legitimate jobs, through mothers of young girls making money out of their innocence, to coercive husbands/boyfriends who just had one little job for them to do ‘if you really love me’.
‘The Suffragette’ and other papers however, were willing to point out that although the term ‘White Slave’ had been coined in the mid 1800s to refer to trafficked people of European descent where the perpetrators weren’t of European descent, by the early 20th Century there was a recognition that the race of the victim was irrelevant to perpetrators who were more likely than not to be white, and simply wanted to make money.
It was also recognised that victims weren’t only forced into ‘immorality’ but into illegally run factories, mines, farms etc etc; often abducted and/or imprisoned, sometimes a long way from home. The good old days huh?
So what about my question? The fifth Margaret Demeray book ‘A Justified Death‘ is coming out in the Autumn.
It’s November 1913 and while Margaret’s personal life involves being under pressure to work more days at the hospital and wrangling her unpredictable elderly father, the political world around her is still edging towards war. Britain and Germany are having a ‘my torpedo/canal/warship/zeppelin is bigger than yours’ contest under the guise of friendly demos. The ‘Irish Question’ is bigger news for once than suffragette militancy, with the leader of the Conservative Party, Andrew Bonar Law, hinting at major trouble from Unionists if the Home Rule Bill goes through.
But as I said in How What When – it’s not just politics which affect my characters. In ‘A Justified Death’, a young girl runs out into a foggy street and is knocked down more or less in front of Margaret. Before long, Margaret suspects that the girl was not only running from traffickers but is afraid her friend will get caught up in the same ruse. As Margaret and Fox try to find the girl’s friend and close down the operation, they start to wonder if everything is as depressingly simple as it looks or is something else going on too.
So here’s my question, assuming you’ve got this far. If you were considering buying this book, would you want a trigger warning?
Within the book there is reference to trafficking, but there is NO description of what physically happens to anyone trafficked, it is only hinted at and suggested. I don’t want the book to be gratuitous, or (heaven forbid in context) titillate, but I’m quite happy if it makes the reader angry on behalf of the characters.
The book is not just about trafficking of course, as I say, Margaret’s got a whole lot of other things going on as usual, and it’s not all dark and dreary either. The twins are getting more mischievous, her nephew may be suffering from first love, and Margaret’s father has found another bookshop to get lost in.
But I’m conscious that from a book description which refers to procures and trafficking, potential readers may be worried they’ll get more than they bargained for.
Some authors deal with this by including a statement to say: ‘Trigger Warning; please be aware that this book includes…’ Others have a link to a place on their website which readers can access if they’re at all concerned. Others put nothing and assume that the potential reader should guess what the book is likely to include by the description.
If you’re in favour of trigger warnings, what sort of things do you want warnings about? And how do you think I should approach it in this instance?
If you’re against, why?
I’d love to know.
(NB: Sadly human trafficking is still alive and well and often invisible – cheap clothes, cheap food, cheap goods, cheap services – they’re often cheap for one reason only. Please find some websites about modern slavery/human trafficking – how to recognise it, how to help, how to find help below.)
Words copyright 2024 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.Image courtesy of the British Newspaper Archive and taken from page six ofIllustrated Police News – Saturday 17 June 1899.
2. How do Liz and I co-write without killing each other?
3. Re historical mysteries, does research come before plot or vice versa?
4. When do I find time to write?
The simple answers are:
1. The first draft of a 50,000 word book written with Liz is usually completed within a month. The first draft of a 90,000 book I write alone takes at least three months.
2. We co-write without killing each other partly because we live too far apart to pop round and have a scrap.
3. Historical accuracy is essential but ultimately it’s the character’s personal battles (and perhaps interaction with real events) which drives the plot.
4. Theoretically between 9am and 2pm on days when I’m not doing the day job.
In more detail:
Liz and I are developing an online session on co-writing for the near future, so please keep an eye on the Hints, Tips and Masterclasses tab on this website to see when this will be available. But what I can share here is that one of the reasons why it’s quicker for me and Liz to write quickly is that we plot the books in minute detail in advance – a process more natural to Liz than I – and diarise a specific window of time to write in.
My own books are typically longer and I don’t plot in as much detail. I am not a pantster (someone who just starts with an idea and no idea of where they’re going till they get there). I know the character’s challenges, the main plot points, the middle and the end. I usually plot tightly up to the mid-point after which it’s a lot more vague. I aim to write at least one chapter a day, five days a week if I can. This theoretically takes seven weeks, but sometimes longer. While detailed plotting for co-writing makes my teeth itch, not being 100% sure what’s happening between chapter twenty and thirty-seven of my own books keeps me awake at night – I’m not joking. I almost always end up with a first draft that’s 40,000 words longer than it should be, so I have to revise the whole shebang, often moving or ditching whole segments. Sometimes those ditched segments (often ones I most enjoyed writing) get reused. Occasionally they are gone for good. Eventually it’s ready for the editor after which I will have more revisions. End to end, the whole thing (with various breaks) can take the best part of nine months.
Do I think one technique is better than another? No. What works well for me and Liz together, doesn’t work for me alone. I’ve tried it but still go off at a tangent. Maybe one day. I actually enjoy the revision more than the first draft. It’s where I start to ‘find’ the story.
As regards historical research: the historical context may be a backdrop or a major factor depending on the book. So for example, The Case of the Black Tulips is set in a world in which Katherine has a job meaning she travels alone, and Connie is sent out without an escort, meaning they meet each other and start investigating against a general backdrop of late Victorian fog, hansom cabs, music halls etc etc. The Treacherous Dead and Dying to be Heard on the other hand, are set against real events that occurred in 1912 and 1913 (and also 1900). It’s Margaret’s reaction to them which drives the plot.
Caster & Fleet are in 1890s London when opportunities for young women were expanding and when improvements in communications, transport and education were changing the world rapidly. We made use of that, but we didn’t tie anything to any specific historical event therefore what they’re dealing with is more important than who’s Prime Minister etc.
Likewise the Murder Britannica series is set in the late second century Britannia. There are a lot of political shenanigans going on and the emperor is, frankly, insane, but Rome is a long way off. Lucretia and Tryssa feel broadly safe straddling Roman and Celtic life, going with the flow to keep on the right side of the invaders but otherwise more interested in what’s happening right in front of them as it’s more ‘real’ to them than a distant emperor who thinks he’s Hercules.
The Margaret books are slightly different, because the backdrop is an essential part of the plot. Six books will cover the period June 1910 to August 1914. Threading through are: the build up to World War One; anarchist and revolutionaries; people arrested for spying in Britain and Germany; the fight for Irish independence; conflict in the Balkans; industrial unrest; the drive of the labour movement calling for safer working practices; increasingly militant suffragette activity.
I research real newspapers of the day to see what Margaret might be faced with every morning in terms of current affairs. The likelihood is that she’d read about suffragette activity and ‘the Irish question’ on the front page, but have to turn into the depths of the paper for anything on spying and war-mongering manoeuvres in mainland Europe. Was this deliberate on the part of the media – keeping people worried about the things the status quo wanted them to worry about and oblivious to other things that might ultimately be more problematic? Mmm.
But like most of us, Margaret is no different to Katherine aand Connie or Lucretia and Tryssa, and current affairs are not at the top of her things to worry about. More often than not, she’s concerned about being a good wife/mother/sister/daughter/friend/pathologist (not necessarily in that order), wondering about bills and deciding what’s for dinner.
Which reminds me: should I wake my husband up from his Sunday afternoon sleep since it’s his turn to cook, or turn the oven on myself? Is the washing dry? Who’s visiting this week and what shall we eat?
Which leads me to the real answer to question four: how do I have time to write? Sometimes I have no idea!
When I was young, when my maternal grandmother addressed me, she would often go through my sister’s name, our cousin’s, her own sisters’, her nephew’s and my mother’s, until she got to Paula.
These days I do the same, swapping my son’s name for my husband’s (my excuse is that they start with the same letter), my daughter’s for my sister’s (my excuse is that they have similar personalities) and recently my brother-in-law’s for that of the mutual male friend’s who was hosting us all for dinner (my excuse is that they both have Scottish names… OK that’s no excuse).
Very occasionally I suffer from face-blindness. E.g. once in a blue moon, I don’t recognise someone even if I know them very well. This usually happens when I’m deep in thought and/or daydreaming.
I regularly suffer from name-blindness, which is possibly linked. This means I can look at someone I know very well, recognise them, know who they are, but absolutely blank their name. Completely. It’s just gone.
This particularly traumatic when I have to introduce people to each other and can only recall some random irrelevant fact in lieu of a name (‘This is M’s mum’ or ‘This is my friend who makes great cupcakes’ or ‘This is my friend, the wife of another friend who cycles with my husband’).
Perhaps it happens in social situations or introduction scenarios, because I find both very stressful and they take up most of my ‘pretending I’m confident and sociable’ resources. An article called Is This Normal? “I Can’t Remember Names or Faces.” | The Swaddle, give reasons for this phenomenon that make sense to me at least. But it doesn’t stop it from being mortifying.
What about my book characters’ names? After all, I invented the characters (shh – don’t tell them). I waded through lists of potential forenames for the right era, or unusual British surnames (I’ve managed to get five of these into my books so far), and even researched how common certain surnames were in certain parts of London in the 1881 census.
So are their names easier to recall? Nope. Apart from main characters, I quite often can’t remember what I’ve called some people after writing a book at all. Sometimes I can’t remember what they’re called while I’m writing it, because I’ve changed their name halfway through.
For example, in one of my more recent books I realised that I had five female characters with names starting M and about four with surnames starting T. One of the female characters was called Mary (which was the number one name for girls in England and Wales for decades if not centuries). I decided to change it to Lois and did a search and replace for Mary throughout the document, happily ‘accepting all’ without thinking. This resulted in a lot of action taking place in Loislebone, and someone providing a sumlois of information etc. One of the T surnames had to change but in my head, the character still has the original name, which means nine times out of ten, I have to dig about for what I changed it to when thinking of them.
To avoid this sort of thing, also avoid duplicating names within the same series, and to keep a series bible of background info on characters whether or not it would ever be used (birthdays, details of parents and children and pets etc), I called upon my clerical career and started a card index system.
Fortunately I didn’t need to buy anything. When my daughter was studying for her GCSEs, she asked me to get her some cards to help with revision and a storage box to put them in. She obviously inherited my tendency to create revision schemes but lose interest before actually doing anything, because there were plenty of blank cards for me to use.
Then I found another set of index cards in a drawer.
Only they weren’t blank, and they didn’t have random facts about English Literature or The Cold War or Spanish verbs or whatever else my daughter had been studying on them. They were written in my father’s writing and furthermore, they were the details of characters he’d written stories about!
I still have boxes of Dad’s writing – typed, handwritten in notebooks large and small and on floppy disk. I have one ready to edit, and others I remember him reading aloud to me when I was a child (including a science fiction novel which if he’d published at the time, would now be reality). I have no idea what I’m going to do with them all. But seeing those index cards so unexpectedly brought a moment of serendipity, surprise that I could read his writing for once and of course a pang of what’s called in Welsh hiraeth and in Portuguese saudade – missingness, nostalgia, loving reminiscence.
I wish I could show Dad what I’ve written and help him do something with what he wrote. I can’t and he wouldn’t want me to fret that I can’t. But his characters’ index cards are now stored with mine as a reminder of the things he and I had in common: a love of storytelling, words, names, random facts and near illegible handwriting. And while I have no idea who Dad’s Janine Bex (below right) is, I do know that Roderick Demeray (below left) is based, with love, on Dad.
Maybe in some alternative universe, our characters hang out together and complain about us. ‘Look what she made me do!’ ‘Why would he call me that?’ ‘What’s going to happen to me next?’ ‘Why can’t she ever remember my name?’
After all, who’d blame them?
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2023, not to be used without the author’s express permission.
Start work in earnest on a recipe book I’ve been planning for a while.
For one reason and another, I only managed number three, and my long suffering (his words not mine) husband has been playing guinea pig again.
My first proper job involved working in a bookshop/coffeeshop. My then manager/friend/housemate, properly trained in catering college, was mesmerised by the way I cooked while muttering to myself, ‘I’ll bung some of that in, then throw in a bit of this and taste and see what happens’. She suggested I ought to write my recipes down and call it ‘The Bung and Throw Cookbook’.
I never did of course, partly because I never measured anything, and it seemed like too much work to figure things out. Besides, after twelve months, I left to work in an office and never had the urge to return to a job in catering, Nevertheless at home, I continued making up and collecting recipes. For a good length of time, cooking was my main creative outlet, whether making something complex or simply trying to produce something quick and tasty from what happened to be in the cupboard or fridge. I still think it’s a wonderful way to relieve stress – as my mind has to leave troublesome things aside while it concentrates and creates.
Then I started writing historical fiction and wondered ‘what would my characters eat?’ as I explained here. From that point, I wondered if I could create a cookbook re-imagining what Lucretia (2nd Century), Katherine Demeray (1890s) and Margaret Demeray (1910s) might have eaten (that I might like to eat too).
The books I’m working with are The Roman Cookery Book which includes recipes from nearly two thousand years ago under the name of Apicius (translated and compiled by Katherine Rosenbaum and Barbara Flower), The Best Way published in 1909 and The Women’s Suffrage Cookery Book published in 1912.
It’s harder to re-imagine the food than you might think if you don’t know old recipe books, which are all written for people who fundamentally just needed ideas, not techniques. E.g. all three books are pretty much a forerunner of the ‘Bung and Throw Cookbook’ my friend suggested I wrote all those years go.
Would I eat any of the recipes? Yes (though not all).
Can I cook them easily from the information provided? Well…
Working out recipes from The Roman Cookery Book is the hardest. Are all the herbs safe? (Or easily available?) What can I substitute for the ubiquitous garum (fermented anchovy paste)? How do I decipher some of the recipes? They mostly simply list ingredients and vague instructions without quantities or timings.
Some things are hard or undesirable to do: ‘cool in snow’, ‘remove the spines from your sea-urchin …’, ‘take your jellyfish …’, ‘best served with peacock’.
There are a lot of chicken recipes in the Roman book, but since until relatively recently a young (e.g. potentially tender) chicken was most valuable as an egg layer and hard to mass-produce, do they mean chicken or some other fowl?
The simplest way I’ve found to decipher some of them is following the wonderful Tavola Mediterranea website, but otherwise, I’m on my own.
The Suffrage Cookbook and The Best Way are more comprehensible to a modern cook. The ingredients can be easily bought (with the possible exception of brains which I don’t want to eat anyway). But some of the instructions are just as much ‘bung and throw’ as the Apicius book. ‘Enough of…’ ‘Some…’ ‘A bit…’ ‘The usual amount…’ There aren’t many chicken recipes but a fair amount for meat which is nowadays comparatively more expensive. There are more vegetarian and spicy recipes than people might think. Timings, when given, would turn most vegetables, pasta and rice into mush.
My idea is to take a selection of these recipes, work out the instructions and cook them as if Lucretia (or more likely her cook) or Katherine or Margaret would do with access to modern equipment (and less inclination to boil things for hours).
I’ve shared some deciphered recipes before here, and I’m ploughing ahead. It’ll be a long process, involving working the recipes out when necessary and then trying them on willing volunteers (mainly family).
On Saturday evening I cooked Chicken stuffed with Saccotosh (sic) for my husband and mother. Until recently, not being American, I’d honestly thought that ‘Succotash’ (along with sassafras) was a mock swearword made up by Looney Tunes, so it was interesting to find out what a British woman in 1912 – who obviously knew otherwise – had come up with.
The ingredient quantities are vague, the cooking instructions even more so. The main warning was ‘chicken should be sewn up to prevent the corn bursting out’. Anyway, I worked out what the missing details probably were, and without sewing anything or having the chicken explode, it proved delicious and was eaten to great appreciation.
On Sunday night, I made a Curry Pie. In terms of instructions, there’s sufficient filling information, but no explanation as to why it’s called pie when no pastry is referred to. But it does say to cook it in a pie-dish. So I sort of assumed the pastry and went for it. It was tasty too, but needs a bit more tweaking before I’m happy with it.
In the meantime, my husband remains the main recipient of all this experimentation. Do you think he’s insisting on cooking tonight to give me a rest, or because he’s worried that one day he’ll end up like the guy in the drawings below? Well, he’s going to make jambalaya using the leftover chicken from Saturday’s Succotash/Saccotosh recipe, so he can’t be too worried about my recipes.
Can he?
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2023, not to be used without the author’s express permission.
