It’s been three months since I last posted a blog post. I’m very sorry. Life has been unexpectedly sticky.
Nothing major, you understand.
The last book in the Margaret Demeray series came out in September, and I’m still suffering book bereavement. On the other hand, since then several readers have written to ask me to continue the series, so I’m thinking about that and Margaret and Fox may have to put up with the inside of my brain again sooner than they’d thought.
Then, I retired from my long career in October.
The plan, such as it was, was that once I had my involvement in a local literary festival was over I would concentrate on writing, scheduling more talks and working more effectively on the business side of both. I had a novel to finish which I’d started in early 2025 and which had been interrupted on and off for months. But I’d plenty of time now didn’t I?
Best laid plans, as Robert Burns would say, gang aft agley. My involvement took a lot more out of my time (and me) than I’d anticipated, and then, of course, came Christmas.
Christmas meant the arrival for several days of children plus one of their friends, my in-laws and my mother (although my mother doesn’t have to stay overnight). Complicating matters in terms of space, sometime in the summer, my husband started to redecorate the hall, which meant moving the piano, shoe racks, bureau, wine rack into another room where they are blocking a bookcase and various things I periodically want. He promised the decorating would be done by Christmas. I probably should have specified which Christmas he meant. It clearly wasn’t 2025.
Around about mid-December, there’s always a part of me that wonders why on earth I’m cooking yet another Christmas dinner for lots of people, having done it most years since about 1981. This feeling usually wears off by Boxing Day when we’re happily eating cold cuts and contemplating a Turkey Curry for the 27th. Next year, perhaps I will hand the whole lot over to my children and hope they clear up after themselves. (Flying pigs may assist them.)
Through all this, the work in progress stopped and started until the whole thing got stuck. It feels as if the book doesn’t quite know what it wants to be – a murder mystery? A straight historical novel? This is the most muddled ‘first draft’ I think I’ve ever created, and that’s saying something.
The third book in the Lulmouth Bay series will hopefully be out this Spring. I also want to start the sequel to The Incomer soon if not Margaret 7. But somehow despite the fact that I now have more days to write in, all this seems overwhelming.
I feel mentally stuck. Part of this is possibly Seasonal Affective Disorder. It’s been dark and miserable in my part of the world for what seems like years rather than on and off for months, but could part of it being to do with no longer working in the ‘day job’ and finding a new rhythm for my life in which writing isn’t ‘as well as’ but the main focus?
I never thought that I would miss my job, and truthfully, I don’t. I don’t think there’s been a moment that I’ve regretted retiring, but there have been several days when at nine a.m, I half want to join a daily team catch up to talk about goals and challenges for the day and have a general chat about what everyone’s watching on TV or their family dramas.
I even dream about my former job and colleagues and supposedly, that means I’m yearning for something about who I was when I was working. Is this true? If so, what is it I’m missing?
I never felt defined by my job, and I am up to my ears with things to fill my time now. But maybe I’m missing the validation which a paid job with an employer gave me.
It’s hard to explain that what I’m doing now is work and takes up as much if not more of my time as my job did. People tend to think that writers divide their time between talking intellectual nonsense in cafés with other authors, wandering with the Muse in meadows and pouring deathless prose onto paper. But for myself I spend very little time in cafés, and conversation with authors is most likely to be despairing over deadlines and edits. As for the Muse, she’s frequently AWOL or providing too many contradictory and/or nonsensical ideas at once. ‘But you enjoy writing!’ people say. Not always. Sometimes even housework seems more appealing.
As I once wrote in ‘Feeling Failure’ the most useful course I ever took was on the change curve. I knew retiring would be a change, but it was a change I’d been looking forward to for a long time and I didn’t expect to feel much in the way of loss, and I’m not sure I do. But I do feel a little discombobulated and a little stuck, which is, in fact the bottom part of the change curve. I know from experience this needn’t be where I stay. Even writing this down and admitting to it helps me remember that maybe I just need to let my mind process things in its own sweet, peculiar way until I climb out.
I have to remind myself that while I don’t have a daily team meeting, I have people to talk to about the little things, and I have at least one good writer friend to whinge at regularly about writing (poor woman – you know who you are and thank you) and others less regularly.
And I think my characters will forgive me eventually. They too are navigating change. And, if they don’t change the plot too much in edits, they’ve a murder to solve too. So all three of us had better get a move on.
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.
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!
‘The girl stared at Jenny with cold blue eyes and…’ ‘Dear Karen, I don’t like…’ ‘a shape so dark and stealthy…’ ‘somethingmoves in the still …’ ‘tympanist hits his drums with two sticks so…’ ‘Leçon onze – un lapin = …’ ‘Heat of room 20°, heat of ice 0°’
These are on the back pages of a notebook I had when I was twelve. In the front is a novel I wrote around the same time. In the back, as you can see – all sorts of stuff.
The cover has long gone, but I suspect this was a school notebook hence the little bits about Music, French and Science. I doubt the school intended me to write stories in it. But there you go – it was paper, I had ideas, what’s an aspiring novelist to do?
Apart from the finished novel (a searing tale of a quest against dangerous odds, magic, romance), there are scraps of sentimental poetic drivel, and the start of another novel, including blurb and chapter headings. There are also various drawings of characters and animals.
But I was twelve. So I confess that one page is entirely dedicated to the fact that X loves Y next to a drawing of two stick figures under a love heart with the word ‘censorded’ across them, and a variation in X’s handwriting of ‘Paula loves Z’. X was my best friend and definitely wasn’t in love with Y, and though I was in love with Z, the closest he’d ever got to realising I existed was to pick up and hand over stuff that I’d knocked off my desk in clumsy agitation at his proximity as he passed.
Both the finished novel and the planned one sum up me aged twelve. I was naïve and immature. My stories were an amalgam of the sorts of supernatural/paranormal older children’s books I was still reading and themes of adolescent angst, bereavement, threat, and of course a bit of romance. (In my books the hero wouldn’t just hand over the stuff and go back to his desk, but gaze into the heroine’s eyes and fall in love.)
But whatever my lack of maturity and sophistication, and despite being generally shy and lacking in confidence, I clearly wasn’t shy about being seen writing stories at the back of notebooks when the lesson got boring and the teacher wasn’t looking. At that point in my life, if you’d asked me what I intended to be when I grew up, I’d have said ‘writer’ and no one would have questioned it.
I admit that even into adult life, while probably not so upfront about it, I’d still find moments of boredom in the office to scribble ideas and scenes on bits of paper now and again.
Properly writing in public though? When I started up in earnest again in 2015, I was still travelling a lot with work and consequently wrote large amounts of stuff on trains, oblivious to who was nearby. Once I thought I was alone in an empty carriage, writing a murderous scene and suddenly a voice from behind said ‘ooh!’ and made me jump out of my skin as I turned to find someone reading from between the headrests behind me.
Nowadays I find it a lot harder. I’m not sure whether that’s because the trains are busier, I’m more tired, or older, or what. But it’s rare that I write anywhere other than indoors in private. I struggle to write with certain noises in the background: songs (I start singing along in my head which interrupts my flow), chatter (I find myself listening in), teenagers playing video games (I mean…). My son (to stop me shouting at him for loudly playing the video games) put me onto https://mynoise.net/. Now, if there’s too much extraneous noise when I’m writing, I listen to Rain on a Tent, Irish Sea or – believe it or not – Train and Railroad Sound. It helps me disappear into my own world where I find it easier to focus on writing.
But the other week, for long complicated reasons largely involving an inadequate bus service, I went with my husband to a nearby town where he was meeting a friend, and went somewhere else with my laptop to work while they caught up.
I thought the library would be a good place to write. But the only free table was by an automatic door which opened every two minutes with a sound like Ivor the Engine’s ‘pssht-coom’. It was also full of surprisingly noisy pensioners and I didn’t feel like putting the headphones on when I was sitting by a door in case one of them came up behind me with evil intent when I couldn’t hear them.
I next went to a chain coffee shop and tried that. But pop music was blaring and it too was full of noisy pensioners. This time I did put the headphones on, but even with the volume ramped up I could still hear the two pensioners who sat down next to me and started a loud conversation.
Finally, I went to an old coaching inn. It’s very nice. A lovely setting to write historical fiction plus they served cream teas.
Two ladies had a laden cake stand and sat by the fire talking quietly. On another table, three ladies were drinking wine, one talking incessantly at the top of her voice. Music was playing, but it was fairly innocuous (and was turned off after the loud lady left.)
I gave my order then put my headphones on and drowned out Ms Noisy with train sounds. No one paid me any attention except to bring tea and scones with jam and clotted cream. I typed away happily for over an hour. Will I do the same again? Maybe. I might pick somewhere else though.
When it was time to go, the young waiter overcharged me. He’d seemed rather vague the whole time – admittedly it probably isn’t the most exciting job but even so. It took a lot of explanation to get him to understand how he’d done it (a simple enough mistake but a mistake none the less). Eventually he went for a manager who agreed that I was right. Throughout this, the young man kept calling me ‘my love’. I’m sure he was trying to be friendly, but I doubt he’d have done this to someone his own age and it made me feel like I was his granny. (All right, so I’m old enough to be his granny, but I don’t yet feel old enough to admit it.)
It was annoying to the point where I felt like picking up the carrot cake and squashing it in his face. In fact, the last time I was at that coaching inn, it was with my own gran, and she might have done that if he’d tried it on her.
But I’m a writer, so I have my own type of revenge.
I included him as a very minor character in a scene I was writing. A lot less messy, and somehow more satisfying. I doubt he’ll ever realise, but if he does he ought to be glad. I write murder mysteries. The character based on him might not have made it out of that scene alive.
So if you see any writers writing in the wild – be nice to them. You don’t know what they’ll do if they put you in their book.
Mwahahaha.
Copyright (c) 2024 Words and Picture Paula Harmon – not to be used without the author’s express permission.
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.
Am I alone in seeing stories everywhere? I can’t remember when I didn’t think ‘what’s their story?’, ‘what if X happened next?’, ‘why are they/is this/am I like this? What led them/it/me here?’
I dealt with long boring journeys by imagining the lives of the people we passed in the car, or what might be behind a high wall/hedge (lots of Cornish trips), or why a castle was in ruins. I coped with bullying by imagining situations in which I managed to express my feelings and the bullies changed their ways (biggest fiction exercise of my life). I enjoyed subjects where there was a story (English, History, RE), or patterns (Maths, Physics) or a challenge deciphering a pattern (Maths, Languages). If I’d spotted the stories in Geography and patterns in Chemistry, I might have enjoyed much them more than I did. If I’d been taught art differently, perhaps I’d have got to grips with that at school too. I stopped taking art at fourteen, in what was then called the Third Year, and is now called Year Nine, and in both eras called ‘Options Year’. This was when you study a million subjects at exactly the point of adolescence when you have become really truculent and know all adults are idiots, yet have to decide what you’re going to do for your first set of public exams (in my case, O levels). Long story short, I dropped art at fourteen.
Ever since I could create a word, I have been by nature a writer. But Liz Hedgecock has been encouraging me for some months to do art challenges with her giving me the chance to play catch-up on those art lessons I put to one side. I’ve found it really freeing, tapping into the part of me that writes short stories rather than novels. It’s a chance to try a narrative in a few lines rather than huge number of words. When she suggested we try Inktober, I was happy to give it a go. But when I looked at the prompts, I knew almost immediately that at my skill level I was definitely going to look for a ‘story’ for each one, not only to cover up my inadequate skills but to keep me motivated.
I think that largely Liz did the same, although with a different approach. You can see what Liz did here. But if you don’t follow me on Instagram – here is what I came up with and a summary of the background behind the stories that came into my head. to help me make sense of the prompts.
Dream, Spiders, Path, Dodge, Map
To start with I dug out a bottle of ink I’ve had forever and a lovely fancy glass ink dipping pen and did what I could with them.
I used the ink and pen for the first three and found myself sketching in a fluid, free-form way which tapped into my subconscious quite nicely.
As a vivid dreamer, it was hard to know where to stop for Dream. I included all my recurring dreams and nightmares but tried to make sure my bed was heading into happiness, even though I remembered too late that pictures should read left to right, not right to left. Ho hum.
I don’t like hurting Spiders, but prefer them at a distance, so looking at photos of them to draw from made me feel queasy. I decided to turn our treatment of them on its head which sort of coincided with our daughter (home for a break during peak house-spider season) talking to us through the Ring doorbell in a husky voice ‘Hello! I’m Simon the Spider. I just want to be friends. Please let me in.’
Path – the last I drew with ink and dipping pen for a bit, depicts me at some point in my life in my early twenties, deciding between the risky route of chasing my creative dreams where the dragons were (left) and the sensible career route (right). I picked the latter but am now in a position to go back to that fork in the path and change direction.
However, that’s not to say it’s all easy running and Dodge, the first one I drew with a fineliner (can’t remember why I changed, but it changed how the drawings turned out) has me trying to get to my happy place while being attacked by household duties, work/writing deadlines and to-do lists.
By the time I was drawing Map, I was away from home and had a mini art kit, so it was drawn with a fineliner and is perhaps the last one digging into my subconscious for all the things that prompt or hinder creativity. I wasn’t terribly happy with Map, but that’s how it goes. On the other hand I was an avid map drawer as a child, so it was good fun and I just wish I’d had a bigger piece of paper and fewer distractions.
Golden, Drop, Toad, Bounce, Fortune, Wander
A dragon was the first thing that sprung to mind for the prompt Golden. I went straight back to being six and the teacher reading from the Hobbit about Smaug the dragon in class, though my dragon of course is less murderous and mostly understood. I’ve always wanted to draw a dragon but thought I couldn’t, but I decided to give it a go anyway and found all those scales rather therapeutic to draw.
Drop – I regret to say that the word ‘drop’ just made me think of a running nose, so I had to do a bit of lateral thinking. I knew what I wanted to draw for Toad, so it seemed logical to draw what happened before… It nearly ended up with being a potion to turn a man back INTO a toad after a regretable spell. You’ll just have to decide whether it’s his fault for dabbling or the soup-maker has a naughty intent.
As for Bounce – I thought of the bounciest thing I could think of and tried not to remember the Spacehopper my father ran over when I was seven. I was very fond of it, and it never recovered. It gave my Dad a fright though.
Fortune was difficult for a number of reasons. I couldn’t think what to draw at all – or rather I could, but it was too complicated. It was difficult day at work and I wasn’t really in the mood that evening. I decided to go back to the ink and dipping pen and then regretted it. Everything went wrong! But what I was aiming for was the idea that there’s definitely a rich man in the seeker’s life but it’s at her expense. No idea if that comes across.
Wander was easier and is based on two photos of my daughter in different forests in different years, wondering which way to go next. (Bless her, my daughter ended up as an unwitting model and doesn’t look anything like the way I’ve portrayed her but I’m pleased that she’s braver at trying different routes than I was at the same age.)
Spicy, Rise, Castle, Dagger, Angel, Demon.
I could have drawn my husband’s numerous chilli plants for Spicy, or the contents of our spice cupboard, but of course ‘spicy’ has another meaning and I decided to have fun and go down that route as well! It took me four attempts to write ‘chipotle’. I could type it, but I couldn’t write it with a pen. This is one that I’m planning to do again and/or colour.
Likewise Rise – I suppose I could have saved this idea for Fire, but a phoenix rising with hope from disappointment and fear of failure seemed apt that particular day.
By the time I was drawing Castle, I was away from home again, and trying to deal with the intricacies of a real castle didn’t appeal. A sandcastle while more manageable felt a bit dull, so guess what – a story came to mind. My daughter loves octopuses and in a story world, one would come to her rescue if she needed it. (in reality she’d probably just biff anyone stomped on her sandcastle).
Despite writing murder mysteries which occasionally involve daggers etc, and despite thinking that daggers can be very beautiful and nearly drawing the one from Murder Dunovaria, the news being what it is, I didn’t fancy drawing a Dagger. The phrase ‘beating swords into ploughshares’ came to mind so I decided to draw (not very well as you can tell from my having to redraw the hammer) daggers being turned into doves.
The Angels in the nativity play come from the disappointment of never having been one as I described in Advent Calendar and also from remembering when my son was a shepherd in a nativity play aged five. He had his crook confiscated after rehearsals because he kept tripping up the primmest angel. When the day of the public performance came however, somehow he’d managed to get hold of a crook again and guess what he did? The primmest angel flat on her face as she walked down the aisle. He swore it was curiosity not malice but… I was the one dealing with her cross mum.
I didn’t want to draw a Demon for a number of reasons, so decided to do the sort of thing I’d have done at school and re-interpret the brief. So instead of demon, we have demonise. It was close to National Black Cat Day apparently, so that’s what I went for. Poor black cats. They don’t deserve the bad press. It’s time for them to fight back.
Away from home again with a simple art kit, I was wondering what on earth to do for Saddle, then remembered a story I had in Weird & Peculiar Tales, itself prompted by a dream, in which a hapless goblin cross breeds a werewolf with a chihuahua and went from there. (Admittedly my husband asked why I’d drawn a chicken being put on a dog, but hey.)
Plump coincided with the launch of Booker & Fitch omnibus of books 1-3 so here I am being plump (I’m plumper in real life) plumped down on plump cushions in Hazeby-on-Wyvern reading the book.
Frost was easy in theory, although I was in a very hot place at the time, so it was hard to imagine, and I found it hard to draw with black on white and wished I were home with black paper and white or silver pen, but I wasn’t. So here I am as a child, when I didn’t have a radiator in my bedroom with the view of mountains from my window obscured by frost as happened quite often.
Chains was a horse who was waiting, poor thing, to cart tourists around in a sort of cab in 30+ degrees Centigrade (86+ Fahrenheit). It didn’t seem too bothered, but it was happily chewing on the chain attaching it to a railing. I don’t think it was trying to get away, but it was hard not to imagine it (I would have been).
Scratchy – this is the cat we had when I was a little girl, scratching on a piece of wood which we’d brought back from the New Forest after a camping trip. Why? Because I’d spent several days pretending it was my motorbike (give me a break, I was about four or five years old) and I talked my dad round into bringing it home (Mum was not so keen). At home, the magic dispersed and it became the cat’s scratching post. But I like to think she was clever enough to know it was a motorbike really.
Shallow – again, I had something quite ‘deep’ in mind, but didn’t have the skills (or time) to draw it, so instead, here is a nod to all those summers when I (or later my children) thought they’d actually catch something in a rock pool but never did because the creatures were too clever to be caught.
And Celestial (by now I was back at home with black paper and silver pen) speaks for itself – or does it? All astronomists should look away, but there are the Pegasus and Draco constellations together (possibly unlikely) waiting for me to fly amongst them.
Dangerous, Remove, Beast, Sparkle, Massive, Rush, Fire
Finally we’re into the last week of October/Inktober. By now I was getting tired of working out what to draw, and was, once more, away for a couple of days (it really was that sort of month). By now, the prompts seems even harder to draw. Even though I’d taken photos to help me, it turned out they didn’t. So I had to dig down a bit.
For Dangerous, I remembered when my husband bought a Shun knife and kept telling me (the person who does most of the cooking), every time I cooked (e.g. generally) how sharp it was. One evening, while considering that he should be glad I wasn’t seeing how sharp it was on something other than onions, I rolled my eyes… and sliced into the end of my finger. Glad to say that it healed up fine. Sorry to say that onions aren’t improved by being pink. Will honestly say that my husband and I do not look this young although the expressions are broadly accurate.
Remove was tricky. I had a few ideas including someone removing hate from their heart and being ready to replace it with love, and someone pinching a piece of someone’s jigsaw just as they were about to finish it (sorry – that’s my brain – goes from sentimental to mischievous in the blink of an eye) and then remembered I was going to be drawing while on a train and I couldn’t face trying to draw a jigsaw. Something someone said made me think of masks or make-up and that’s what I decided to draw. I don’t wear much make-up and certainly haven’t worn this much for years, but am really fascinated by make-up artists’ skills and occasionally wonder if they could improve me. Sadly though, at the end of the day it would come off and the real me would be there underneath. The train-ride wasn’t exactly smooth and that’s my excuse for any errors (cough).
Beast was potentially as hard to draw as Demon, but by this point in the challenge, both Liz and I had decided that hands were ‘a beast’ to draw and so I went for the image above. In the pencil sketch I have the right number of finger joints. Somehow when drawing in fine liner, I added one in. This proves the point about drawing hands.
I knew from the outset that I wanted to draw my lovely daughter’s lovely eyes for Sparkle. I categorically didn’t do either the exercise or my daughter justice, but will definitely try it again. I was, by this point, really missing the opportunity to use watercolours or acrylics to add colour, or just use various pencils, but there you go. It’s all a learning curve and I’m glad I can do it without a teacher marking my efforts.
Massive was another where I didn’t quite know what to draw, then we passed a group of tourists queuing to have a birds of prey experience. The birds of prey looked as bored as the horse waiting to cart tourists around (though the temperature was more manageable where I was then). I wondered if they were thinking ‘why do the tourists get all the fun? What if we were big enough to carry them instead of the other way around?’
I had some photos of people on the underground to use as inspiration for Rush, but then thought back to when I was a child and spent time watching nature – the driven clouds, the busy insects, the running river, the the little creatures in the river marching about, oblivious (thankfully) to the adult world of being so head down rushing from A to B. Somewhen I stopped doing that, and am only just starting again.
Finally, for Fire, this is another from Weird & Peculiar Tales – or rather it’s what might happen one day. I have a sort of myth-story in there about when dragons and humans were friends – the humans providing friendship, the dragon providing warmth and protection. Then, because humans are involved, it all goes wrong. This is imagining a future which I think we’d all love – -when we stop fighting and pointing fingers and just sit down together and enjoy friendship and warmth.
So there you have it – a bit of my soul laid bare. As I said before, I’m proud of some of my drawings, not proud of others at all, may retry some, may not with others. But I had a go. It’s back to the writing now, but I’m not going to stop the art. I’m going to keep doing it. Tapping into that part of my brain that likes to tell a quick story and isn’t worrying about judgment feels like going back to a freer, less disciplined me. And that’s not a bad place to visit now and again.
Words and Images (c) Paula Harmon 2023 – not to be used without the author’s express consent.
I’ve just undertaken the annual calendar ritual. The old calendars are in the recycling and the new ones are ready for action. Though the concept of new year (and its date) is a human/cultural construct, there’s always the hope that like shedding a skin, as we say goodbye to the old and hello to the new, things might change.
Even if just now, the shadows of war, unrest, financial crises and political shenanigans persist, any reasonable person must hope that something lovely will be in the offing for everyone in 2023, or at the very least, something better.
As I’ve said before, I’m not terribly keen on looking back and beating myself up about things I haven’t achieved, or patting myself on the back about things I have. Nor am I keen on making pledges or resolutions. After thirty odd years of working in a target-driven environment – with aims, objectives, service level agreements, milestones and so on – I’m not desperately keen to tie myself down too much in the rest of my existence too.
But all the same, here are some of things that went as planned plus an unexpected bonus:
I went on a short break with my adult daughter to Barcelona, which was just lovely. We spent a few days walking miles, visiting Gaudi sites, eating lots of lovely food and otherwise just relaxing.
Two of my books became available as audiobooks and over the next year or so, I intend that others will be too.
And the bonus? Liz Hedgecock and I decided to start writing a new series – contemporary cosy/cozy murder mysteries set in the sort of English town where nothing ever happens (or does it?) The first is out later in January, and if you want to know more about the series look no further than The Booker & Fitch Series.
Things that were mixed blessings (and out of my control):
My team returned to working in the office in Croydon two days a week. In some ways was hard to adjust to after two years of home-working. After the quiet of my own space, it was odd to be in a noisy office again, especially as most of our meetings are still online (even with each other), so it’s often very noisy. But it’s great to see my colleagues in person again and go out with them after work. And the other plus side of commuting to and staying in the outskirts of London is that I’m able to visit Val Portelli, after a few years when it hasn’t been possible.
Later in the year, my team moved from the Croydon office back to the central London one, which was another shift again. This coincided with the death of the Queen, so I was able to go and see the floral tributes in Green Park, though I didn’t queue to view the coffin. We’re not a monarchist family, but even the children were moved that someone who has been there in the background all our lives has gone.
Both my children have now ‘moved out’ (though they do keep coming back). It’s lovely to see them be independent and start carving their own creative furrows, and it’s great to have a tidy(ish) house, but… yup I admit it, I miss them. Thank goodness for modern communication methods – family group chats and video calls.
My writing shed came into its own, even if I do have a tendency to want to fall asleep rather than write when I go in there as I’m so relaxed!
And then, here are my ‘failures’:
I planned to read a lot of specific books in 2022. I didn’t even get close. I read a lot of books. They just turned out to be different ones. Some were serious, some silly, mostly novels, a few non fiction. So I’m just moving that particular goalpost.
I planned to publish two books. As above, I published one, but due to some of the international politics of 2022, I decided to change some of the themes relating to a specific country, and also contracted a relatively mild bout of covid, so this took longer than expected. The other book is part written and I hope to get back to it in 2023.
I planned to take early retirement in September so I could concentrate on writing. The current cost-of-living situation meant this was adjusted to partial-retirement, so I’m still working part-time and yet to get into the routine I need. But I’m getting there.
I went to buy a calendar on the internet for the kitchen, large enough to write on and didn’t check the dimensions. Shame I don’t have a dolls house handy and some dolls who have pressing appointments to record….
Are these failures? I refuse to think so. (Except maybe the calendar.)
For me, family life, mental health, my friendships and marriage will always be more important than anything else.
The day-job even (or perhaps especially) now being part-time remains pressurised, and added into that are now the challenges of the commute.
(Of course, there’s the fact that I am very easily distracted and side-tracked, but we won’t talk about that.)
I’ve spend the last ten years in project work, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned is how to accept ‘slippage’: shifting goalposts and milestones with the mile number crossed out. Targets and milestones can be inspiring and motivating. They can be stressful, depressing. There’s nothing wrong with them in themselves. The important thing is to know when to move them.
So Happy New Year. And may 2023 for all of us involve more joy, more calm, more knowing when to move a target and more time to sit down and enjoy a treat or two.
Words copyright 2023 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.
In March I was involved in a literary festival, both as an organiser and as a contributor. One of the things I did was to talk about suspense fiction with Helen Matthews and Katharine Johnson. At the end, we opened the floor to the audience. Here are some of the questions, and some of the answers I gave. Feel free to ask me more!
Why choose a woman as a main character in eras when women couldn’t do much? Wouldn’t a man’s life be more exciting?
Who says? Just because until fairly recently, history portrays women (if mentioned at all ) as weak, ineffectual, sentimental, irrational, puppets or playthings, the epitome of purity or full of evil intent, does that mean they really were? History may record queens who changed the destinies of whole countries for good or ill, but there were other women, whose names tend to be forgotten, who made strides in science and arts (see list below), many of these came from very humble beginnings. They climbed mountains and traversed deserts, unhindered by long skirts and corsets. They were private detectives, social reformers, physicians. Why don’t we hear about them from contemporary writers? Perhaps because the writers were mostly men. Maybe those men feared or reviled powerful women or perhaps just simply weren’t interested in writing adventures involving them. Weak? Ineffectual? Not a bit of it. I want to celebrate the sort of women who really existed – not especially important in the greater scheme of things but full of life, intelligence, spirit and determination – and give them something more exciting to do than wait for their menfolk to come home from an adventure.
Why did you decide to write about particular eras?
Partly there’s so much potential. By the late second century in Britain of the Murder Britannica series, the Britons in my books have a degree of political control, and are undoubtedly enjoying everything the Empire has to offer: new foods, easier trade routes, the chance for their sons to join the army and travel and come back with citizenship and wealth. The Empire isn’t as rotten as it will be, even if the Emperor is bonkers. And in Western Britain there’s a reasonable chance you can get away with a little more (and have some fun) if you keep your head down a little.
The late Victorian era of Caster and Fleet is one where women are starting to flex muscles of independence. Careers are starting to open up Nursing has become respectable. A university education (if not a degree) is possible. The bicycle has revolutionised the lives of anyone who can afford one and train travel is affordable for many, opening up the country to people whose ancestors had barely moved five miles for generations. So what does that mean for two young women who can maybe get away from chaperones long enough to investigate crime? Will they rise to the challenge or be held back by convention?
By the late Edwardian era of the Margaret Demeray series, things have moved on again, the old age pension, national insurance and paid holidays are being introduced. But the popular images of the times (often called the Golden Era), full of glamorous elegant clothes and bright parties and rapidly developing innovations like aeroplanes and cinema, contrast violently with a dark underbelly of misery and discord among the poor, the increasing militancy of the suffrage movement, discontent about immigration and working conditions, so there’s a lot to throw at a woman who’s neither rich nor poor, who knows rich people and works among poor people, who wants the vote and social reform but has to decide what price she’ll pay to get it.
Do you ever feel conflicted about what’s going on in an era you’re writing about?
Yes it’s difficult not to be anachronistic about things which sit uncomfortably.
Slavery. Slavery in Roman times was an economic normality – no one would have questioned it at all. It was not a matter of race, but of conquest and also occurred among many of the local peoples of the Empire whether the Romans were there or not. It was unfair and mostly cruel, and a slave was without any form of basic human rights. It was a different sort of slavery to the kind which we tend to think of now. If a slave was freed, there was no social barrier to getting on in life. It was quite possible (and happened) for the grandson of a freed slave to become Emperor regardless of ancestry. However it was still slavery.
The British Empire in the later books. The Caster & Fleet series is set at perhaps the Empire’s heyday, in the Margaret Demeray series, twenty years later, cracks are starting to show, but an average subject in Great Britain might not have noticed. British actions in the Boer War were internationally condemned though how much of this filtered down to the general public is uncertain. The Indian independence movement was gaining ground, and of course the Irish Question was still waiting for an answer. As a modern person, it’s impossible not to feel an abhorrence for the jingoism of the late 19th/early 20th century, lauding the glories of an Empire the wealth of which was built on the suffering of people from across its many nations and which treated native peoples as second or even third class citizens in their own countries. It’s also hard to stomach the way the British government played cat and mouse with the Irish people less than a hundred years after the potato famine had been so woefully handled and probably in living memory of some of the survivors. Margaret and her sister Katherine can see a lot of this for themselves, but it’s unlikely that they’d have viewed it with exactly the same disdain that I do nowadays.
Are your characters’ conflicts ones you recognise for yourself?
Lucretia’s aren’t. She’s stinking rich and I’m not sure she’d recognise an internal conflict unless it hit her on the head and robbed her of her money. She had one once, but she’s long buried it. Or maybe she had two… Tryssa perhaps – having to decide whether to tackle Lucretia and rake up old memories for the sake of the truth, and then having to decide whether or not to move away from the only home she’s known – I can relate to that.
Margaret’s situation is much more relatable. She’s a career woman who in the third book has also recently become a mother. Combining a job she wants to excel at with a family she loves and never quite feeling like she’s giving her best to either, is something I remember very well.
Which character is most like you?
As other authors will say, most of my characters contain aspects of myself. But in terms of who’s most like me, in personality Katherine probably is – she’s a coper whom everyone thinks is confidant but who actually isn’t and who wishes people noticed when she’s struggling. In terms of size, shape and looks, I’m like Lucretia – short, plump, middle-aged. On the other hand, Lucretia wears three inches of make-up and is completely self-deluded. Sometimes, I think it would be quite nice to be self-deluded! But I couldn’t be doing with the make-up.
If you’d been there, what questions would you have asked about my books?
One was definitely some sort of leg joint, the other, which had snapped, was harder to distinguish. ‘I assume they’re not human,’ I said, dubiously.
For the record, we weren’t on an archaeological dig, but clearing a part of the garden which was once thought of as a bit of No Man’s land between us and the house behind, until the house behind wanted to do some building work and everyone looked at their deeds and realised the No Man’s land was actually ours.
Equally for the record, I’m not talking massive country estates or old manor houses here. Our house is an average sort of house and the oldest bits of it are from the 1950s, prior to which acres and acres of land around us, now covered in houses, was farmland. But the boundaries for our house are so inexplicably and unnecessarily complicated, the solicitor spent two hours explaining them to us when we bought the house.
No one in their right mind would call me a natural, enthusiastic or good (or even adequate) gardener but there’s something about doing battle with hidden roots, identifying what to keep and what to dig up, and nurturing the new things I’ve planted, that helps my mind do much the same to any plot problem. What do I need to remove that’s killing the thing I need to live? What needs more care? What looks like a weed but is in fact something useful and precious? Or vice versa. So I’ve been enjoying putting my back into something different over the last couple of weeks, to help straighten things out creatively in my subconscious.
I’ve found working on the current ‘work in progress’ hard, because it’s part of a series set in the run up to World War I and naturally, right now, it’s impossible to ignore the parallels between the tensions in the 1910s and what’s happening in 2022. I consequently decided a while ago, to change to a slightly different tack – removing most of the international sabre-rattling and worse that were the background to a plot set in 1913 because it felt far too much like what is going on just now.
But of course this put me back and meant removing perhaps thirty thousand hard-written words. It also meant I needed to review the backdrop to my story, which is now what on the surface appears to be a slightly calmer 1912.
Maybe this was unnecessary (and the excised work won’t be wasted) but it feels right to me.
But it’s not all bad. Whatever the era, for most people, most of the time, while the things to worry about range widely from impending international crises to what to have for dinner, for most people, most of the time, the latter is higher up the list of importance, largely because it’s easier to control. Otherwise, at the point when the crisis directly impacts on us, we would not have the mental or physical resources to handle it.
I’m reminded of the letters that my grandfather wrote to my grandmother during WWII which I ‘inherited’. He was in his forties and working in a reserved occupation in central London during the day and a Home Guard at night. My grandfather stayed in the family home in London, while my grandmother took my father (then about two) to live with relations in the countryside. (My mother’s family did something similar, but that’s another story.) My grandfather wrote to my grandmother about all sorts of things. He rarely mentioned the war at all. This stops me from trying and cram every significant historical event into a book, because at any given time, people don’t always realise which events are significant and often give many of them more than a passing thought or moment of interest.
In the period covered by the book I’m working on, the enquiry into the sinking of the Titanic has just begun and over five hundred households in Southampton are mourning a family member due to the disaster. The latest in a series of major strikes across the country is one by East End garment workers. Meanwhile, the Royal Flying Corps has started up as a branch of the armed forces and warplanes are being constructed. Suffragettes are stepping up the militancy of their campaign for the vote. So far, so gloomy.
On the plus side the National Insurance Act is about to be passed, which will ultimately put an end to the need for workhouses. And on the ‘moving forward if nothing else’ side, the Home Rule Bill has been passed in the Commons as a stepping stone towards Ireland’s long-awaited independence.
On the plus plus side, the Stockholm Olympics are on, and Britain wins ten golds, fifteen silver and sixteen bronze. British female athletes win medals in tennis, diving and swimming.
And on the plain ridiculous front, one of the Olympiad events is Tug-of-War, in which only two teams competed. A team of Stockholm police from the host nation Sweden are up against a British team comprising London police (five from the City of London Police and six from ‘K’ (Stepney) division of the Metropolitan Police). The game ends when the British team succumb to exhaustion and sit down, thereby conceding defeat.
In the book, my characters are ordinary people whose lives are trundling along peacefully (with the possible exception of Fox’s life) until something happens to derail them.
Some of them – Margaret Demeray and Fox in particular of course – are more informed than others. Some characters are more reliable and honest than others. Many read about current things in the paper and then largely forget them. Others don’t read about them at all. People get up, go about their daily duties, go to bed. Some lose someone or something. Some grieve. Some fight. Some heal. Some commit crime. Others solve crime. They fall in love, they bring up families, they laugh and play. They all wonder what’s for dinner.
(Not all the same people are doing all those things at once of course. That would be very exhausting.)
While most of the ‘events of 1912’ above will have a mention in the book, only a few will have a personal significance to any of the characters. The key thing will be that someone, somewhere is dead before their time and Margaret and Fox need to find out why and do something about it.
I’m sometimes asked why I enjoy writing and reading murder-mysteries when I’m naturally a peaceful sort of person. The answer is that I think there is something in the psyche of most of us that enjoys reading something where we can face our fears in a fictional format and see justice to some extent being done. To me, that perhaps explains murder-mysteries’ popularity and certainly explains why I like reading and writing them. Why historical murder mysteries? That’s a whole other subject.
So it was helpful to root through these thoughts as I dug up weeds and brambles and endured the stings of nettles on my hands and arms. (No, I didn’t save any nettles to make soup and yes my arms are still tingling.)
But none of the thinking got No Man’s land cleared.
I threw another long, unidentified and unwanted root into the composting bag, while my husband contemplated the bones.
‘I don’t think these are human,’ he said, scanning me from head to foot and clearly doing a mental comparison of what might have be a femur in his hand and my (rather short) leg. ‘But I gather there was a piggery here once, and pigs will eat anything. Who knows? Mwhahahaha!’
‘It’s no good offering that to me as a plot suggestion,’ I said. ‘It’s been done.’
‘Meh,’ said my husband, chucking what was hopefully nothing more sinister than someone’s dog’s long lost treasure on the pile of non compostable stuff.
‘Why can’t we find something useful that might earn us some money?’ I complained. ‘Like an Anglo-Saxon hoard of gold coins? Or a Roman mosaic?’
‘I don’t fancy digging that deep,’ he muttered. ‘And you never will, you slacker. Come on – get back to nettle-pulling or there’s no wine for you later.’
So I did.
Words copyright 2022 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission. Image from Pixabay.(No, it’s not my garden!)
I recently saw one of those memes on a Facebook page where you had to choose between This or That for your mystery reading preferences.
I’ve never been too good at choices. When I was doing A level languages, if I was under pressure and had two options for a translation, I invariably chose the wrong one. I get slightly stressed by menus and even more stressed when handed a book token and told to pick just one book. What kind of monster is capable of that?
Anyway, I thought I’d share my thoughts as a reader and a writer and I’d love to know how you’d answer the same questions. I’m not necessarily answering in relation to mysteries by the way.
Series or Standalones?
As a reader, I like a variety.
I enjoy a good series where I become invested in the world and the characters’ personalities, triumphs and failures and see how they cope with whatever plot is chucked at them in each book. Then, after so many books (so far the most I’ve read in a series is about eleven) I become a little bored, because it’s hard for any author to come up with a way to keep changing the personal and plot challenges for a character and there’s a risk that both will become repetitive.
I also like standalone where an author has captured a period in time for the character(s) and created a complete, satisfactory tale. If it’s really good, of course I want to know what happens to them after the book ends. I’ll miss them, I’ll miss the world, but at the same time I’m content to never find out and simply imagine.
As a writer, I like variety too. Of my novels, all that I’ve published so far have been in series or will be. As a writer, I too wanted to know what happened next. In the first book in each series, I’m getting to know the main character myself and it’s an adventure. Subsequently I don’t have the same element of discovery, so I have to find something different to explore. E.g. in the first book, you deal with at least some of the character’s wants, fears and challenges. In the second book, you don’t want to revisit all of them, so what’s left over and what’s new? As a writer, I don’t want to get bored with the characters either and feel that at some point, you have to wave them goodbye as they head into their own unknown future (hopefully to get a rest).
In my cyber drawer, however, there is one standalone and others planned. I was once asked whether the one which is written could ever be a series but I feel as if the answer is ‘no’. The story is complete in itself (or will be when I’ve finished editing it) and I’m happy to let the characters go and wish them all the best for the future without feeling the poke about in that future myself.
Below Thirty or Over Forty?
As a reader, I honestly don’t care! As long as the characters are rounded, believable and interesting, they could be two or ninety-two.
As a writer, my characters range in age because that’s how they came to me.
Katherine in The Case of the Black Tulips in 1890 is twenty-five. Her younger sister Margaret when it comes to 1910 and The Wrong Sort to Die is thirty-six. Lucretia and Tryssa in the late second century of Murder Britannica and its sequels are fifty-something. Each had their challenges to deal with.
Katherine is in a class where women aren’t supposed to work but sit around waiting to get married. She’s also living in an era where at twenty-five, she’s somewhat on the shelf but her ‘intended’ has disappeared. Many of her options (if she doesn’t want to lose her reputation) are limited but… it’s also an era when things are starting to change for young women in terms of careers and mobility and escape from scrutiny. The advantage of being twenty-five is that she is that she is ‘of age’ but still young enough to have plenty of time to marry and have children if that’s how things work out.
Twenty years later, Margaret is widowed and being in her mid thirties could be considered very much on the shelf and potentially running out of time if she wants children. However, she has a career (even if that’s a struggle in a male dominated world) and she is old enough to have more confidence in herself than a younger woman might.
Lucretia and Tryssa of course lived in an era when fifty was relatively old. But once someone had got to that age, having survived the first five years of life, subsequent infections and bearing children, they had as good a chance as anyone of living to perhaps seventy and they are both very much of the view that they frankly no longer care what anyone thinks. They will do exactly what they please.
The point is – every age has its advantages and disadvantages to explore and none of them need to be boring or stereotypical.
Private Eye or Regular Citizen?
I like reading both, although I probably veer a little closer to ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary situation and having to resolve it. Because they have no real training, it makes it more interesting to see how they manage.
As a writer, I think I feel much the same way. I used to sit on the bus on the way to work thinking ‘what if one of these average people going to an average job suddenly had to deal with something completely and utterly out of their experience?’
Small Town or Big City?
My gut reaction is that I prefer to read about small towns but when I think of it, many of my favourite books have been set in cities. There’s all the gossip and curtain twitching and established relationships in a small town where everyone knows everyone else which makes for a narrow playing field of characters and consequently strong tension. But then there’s the anonymity of a city where it seems no one knows or cares about anyone and characters have more freedom to roam or get lost or be hidden, and sometimes the city itself becomes a character in its own right or rather, the different districts become different characters – the genteel aunt, the rough diamond, the snooty toff.
As a writer, my books are set in both. While the Caster & Fleet series and the Margaret Demeray are set in London, the Murder Britannica series is a little more parochial. Murder Britannica itself is set in Pecunia, a fictional town so far off the beaten track most of the locals don’t even know there is a track. Murder Durnovaria is set in Durnovaria a real civitas (a town set up by the Romans but run by the local nobility). It’s therefore fairly large, but certainly not city size, so they have all the amenities and a lot of the politics but not many places to get lost in. Murder Saturnalia is set in fictional Vademlutra, a small town a short distance away. It’s larger than Pecunia and knows precisely where it is (not far from a lot of more important towns and rather too close to a Roman fort for the locals’ liking), but basically everyone knows everyone else and have grown up together. Does this mean they know each others’ secrets? Nope.
Contemporary or Historical?
As a reader, I’ll read anything at all as long as it grabs me. As far as mysteries are concerned, I possibly choose more contemporary than historical books, but only just.
As a writer, you can see that so far, the mystery books I’ve published have all been historical.
There are some advantages to that, since I can find out what was what in any given year (or a close approximation) and it’s not going to change even if I delay publishing the book. On the other hand I have to get things as accurate as possible from language to attitudes. Some of the later don’t fit into modern thinking. Concepts and acceptability of Imperialism and colonisation for example, are very different nowadays. Margaret undoubtedly has some pride in her country, but she is keenly aware of its faults. She is one of many who want greater democracy and equality and she’s also growing doubtful that imperialism is a good thing. She is certainly aware that some of things the British Empire has been responsible for are unquestionably shameful. There’s a limit to how far I can push this without making her sound anachronistic, but there were sufficient British women fighting for Irish and Indian independence who would have been contemporary with her to make it more than likely that someone like Margaret, with a strong social conscience, would at the very least question the status quo.
I haven’t so far written a contemporary mystery although that’s not to say I won’t! My cyber drawer novel isn’t a mystery precisely but it is contemporary. The downside of a contemporary book is that I started it five years ago and already some bits are a little out of date! Digital technology and social media for example are now totally different. And we won’t mention certain viruses.
Saves The Day or Gets Saved?
As both reader and writer, I don’t want my character to need saving all the time. I’d much rather they were saving someone else (and/or the day). But they have to have some vulnerability or they become ridiculous (like those films and books where basically the hero has been shot, beaten, crushed etc etc and ought to be dead and yet is still going and has the energy to kiss the grateful heroine at the end). And now and again, it’s nice to give my character a rest from solving everything and let someone else get them out of a pickle (and also to get a kiss afterwards perhaps)!
Birds or Snakes?
I have no idea how to answer this as either reader or writer!
If it’s a threat then… I think on balance, I’d find birds a little more scary and harder to outrun than snakes.
If it’s a pet however, then I’m picking a cat, a dog or, of course, if the book is right, a dragon. Please let it be a pet. And please please let it be a dragon.
What about you? How would you answer?
Words copyright 2022 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission. Credit for image Pixabay.
