Mam Blain's cottage, Norley

I found another house – and here it is, snipped from Three Parishes, Tom Wright's splendid collection of photographs and memories of Delamere, Norley and Oakmere, by kind permission of the publishers www.cc-publishing.co.uk

This one is particularly special for me. It's Mam Blain's cottage and it stood on Ashton Road just at the edge of Delamere Forest. It was the home of Mam Blain who was a very well-loved woman of the forest. When my Mother was a child she lived for a while with Mam Blain, presumably because my Gran was ill, though I am only guessing. Mother always had very fond memories of her time there and, from what I can recall of her stories, other children too spent time there as foster kids, really, of Mam Blain. I wish I knew more about her.

When I started writing my current novel I had a vague idea for a character suggested by Mam Blain. Mam Tunstall, I've called her and her entirely fictional cottage must be somewhere near this one. During the early stages of writing, she was merely a background character, but she grew in importance until at last when Susan, my main character needed to... Well never mind. You'll have to wait for the book. But that's when Mam Tunstall took on a very special role. She isn't Mam Blain, she's not a fictionalised version of her. She's a character who has grown out of a very sketchy picture that I had in my mind. But I hope that she will be a fitting tribute of sorts to someone who was, by all accounts, a very good friend to lots of kids of my mother's generation.

Snig's Foot House

I found Snig's Foot House! Every once in a while when I'm cyberskiving I browse images of houses and cottages in forests. I hope that one day I might find something that comes close to the picture I have in my mind of the house that features in my current novel. Today I found it - so here it is:

(I've borrowed this pic from http://gothicbohemianstock.deviantart.com/ Hop over there for lots more great pics.)

In my novel, of course, the house isn't derelict (and in real life it isn't derelict any longer.) That lean-to on the side is an old timber-framed cottage and to the rear there is a granny annex. Otherwise, it's perfect. So, lots of gratitude to Gothic Bohemian for taking the photo in the first place and allowing use of her work.

Spring is coming!

Well, the festivities are now in the past. I cooked my end of the hols brisket and drove my son to the station on the first leg of his journey home to Andalucia. And I'm gradually getting back into a working frame of mind and picking up from where I left off three weeks ago.

And I really do need to catch up for spring is on its way. the buds on the trees are beginning to change, the catkins which were set a few weeks ago are ready to lengthen. And this morning I saw this in the garden:

The Red Admiral is one of the earliest British butterflies to emerge from hibernation - someone else spotted one on New Years Day in Sussex. It's a timely reminder to get on with everything.

Getting there

For most writers success, if it comes, is built up in stages. At the time each step along the way will feel pretty good. But with the passage of time it fades. Robert Hull, writing in the current issue of The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors, reflects upon his status as publication dates fade into the past. “what do I do then as one of those who feel they're en route to un-authordom, and who exist in a ghost world of out-of-printedness?'

I'm very familiar with Hull's feeling. Soon after my book Counting the Days to Armageddon was published I joined the Society of Authors and I cracked on with trying to write a follow-up, building on that modest success. I was thirty thousand words into that project when I abandoned it because I wanted to change direction altogether.

I wrote a novel over the period of about three years. It did, in a way, build upon Counting the Days, being a story typical of some of the real people caught up in the kind of belief system I had studied as an academic. But it got nowhere and when I came to read it long afterwards I could see all too clearly that although it was utterly different in style from my first book, it was clearly an academic's attempt at fiction.

With Bunderlin I found my writer's voice. I loved it, I was pleased with it and hopeful for its success but every time a new issue of The Author dropped through my letterbox I felt like a fraud because publication was long in the past. Bunderlin found a publisher. It went on sale this time last year. And it even got reviewed on The Spectator's book blog. So at last I had topped up my modest success.

The most gratifying honour came to me only this morning. I received an invitation to become a Member of The Welsh Academy. “Membership and Fellowship is by invitation only and is offered to writers as a mark of peer recognition of their contribution to the literature of Wales.” I feel greatly honoured.

Advent Tour

This time last year the view from my study window looked something like this:

Dreaming of a white Christmas, hey? Bah, humbug! Not if it would mean another decidedly scary drive to pick Margaret up from the back of beyond where she was very nearly snowed in last year. Well, that's not likely to happen this time. But Ben, our son, will be flying home from Andalucia in Spain on Christmas Eve. He's a teacher in a college out there and we haven't seen him since the summer so the Christmas hol will be a special treat for us all. So here's hoping for no distruptive weather during this second half of Advent!

I'm looking back over the year's reads and forward to the coming year's treats. Last Christmas, I spent a little of my gift money on a book I'd been promising to track down for years – Beatrice Tunstall's The Shiny Night. That was a real treat – unputdownable.  It has to be the highlight of my reading year. Then I got bogged down in some heavy stuff. Emile Zola's Lourdes, A gripping read but an all too real portrayal of the insalubrious pilgrimage of healthless crowds. I followed it up with Camus's  La Peste  - maybe not the best bit of reading planning I've ever done! 

So Christmas this year will lift my reading a different level starting with... I don't know yet. But a book which is definitely on my list as a present for someone – after I have read it myself - will be Richard Dawkins's The Magic of Reality. I've read a couple of excerpts and it looks very promising. Must see for myself how this guy approaches science for kids.

And now a recipe for when the festivities are over and good plain food is so appealing:
Rolled brisket done in slow cooker. Friday evening prepare marinade with a can of dark beer poured over a large finely chopped onion. Add a fair old dollop of Worcester sauce. Put brisket in jug and cover with marinade. Poke and prod it at intervals on Saturday. Sunday morning, put the beef and marinade into a large saucepan. Add beef stock as necessary. Chuck in some chopped root vegetables, leeks, onions, whatever you fancy. Bring it all up to temperature and then transfer to the slow cooker. Leave it all day. Serve in the evening with jacket potatoes and veg. All leftover veg and any extras can go through the blender with the marinade to make a tasty soup.

Crazy but real?

Do you ever come across someone who is just so quirky you want to write them into a story? The trouble is, of course, it's all to easy for the wonderfully odd character to appear unreal and unbelievable on the page. Of course, characters don't simply transfer from real life to fiction – and if they did we would land ourselves in a bit of bother from time to time. They need work to transform them and bring them to life. But can we make those crazy quirks real and believable?

Peter Bunderlin was such a character. I've written elsewhere about how he emerged from my raw material into the reality of fiction so I'll not repeat it here. One of his oddities was compulsive playing around with words. Here is a snippet from early in my novel. Martin, the finder-out-of-what's-been-going-on has been wanting to buy a classy old car. He's had his eye on a Sunbeam Talbot in a second-hand yard but he has dithered for too long and it's been sold. All this time he has been uneasily aware of someone following him. This is where that man speaks for the first time:


As he came out of the yard, the big man emerged from behind a Commer van and his dog trotted at his side. 'Caveat emptor, caveat empty.'
    'Er, yes, whatever you say,' Martin replied warily.
    'Jesus wants me for a sunbeam,' said the big man and walked on towards the row of shops further along the street, laughing as he went.
    'Daft bugger,' Martin muttered to himself. And then he realised that the man must have been watching him for he apparently knew which car he'd been interested in.
    He was in the Haymarket a few days later. Martin had gone in for a game of pool and there he was, at the far end of the bar. What on earth is this guy up to? Martin thought. But what do you do? Go up to him and demand an explanation? Don't be daft, Martin told himself. You're being paranoid. He made his way to the bar where the big man was standing and caught his attention as he pushed past. 'Oh, hello again,' he said.
    'Moonbeam, hornbeam, sunbeam. Been and gone.'    
    'Yes, gone. Already sold,' Martin responded.
    'Try, try and try again. Try a Triumph. Triumph Renown. A much better car, if you ask me.'
    'A Renown?'
    'Renown. Renown. Renown.' He pronounced it as if mimicking the impatient revving of an engine. Then, with a laugh, he added, 'John Gilpin was a citizen of credit and renown...'


And did Martin ever see that Triumph?  Yes, but not until about thirty years later.

Planning ahead

Help! I've committed myself to finishing the first draft of The Snig's Foot by next May. There's not really a vast amount left to do, only about 20.000 words or thereabouts, so it shouldn't be an insurmountable task. There will be a couple of big chunks of time taken out of that so I need to plan for how I'll match my projected work to the calendar.

And here's what I'm going to do: I'll divide the work into sections, not according to length, but according to events. Then, if I get towards the end of January, say, and I'm slipping behind I won't think, hey, I've got so many words to catch up. I will switch to italics and finish the section in note form. Then February can start where it is supposed to. Just to let you know, then, summer will be in January.

And now I had better get on with it because Tom Sparrow has to make up his about how much of what he is getting drawn into he will tell Louise, his girlfriend, before she returns from a six months secondment to a Ugandan hospital. Could be tricky.