Tag Archives: Charles Dickens

It was a dark and stormy night. If only…

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Joanna is becoming obsessed with the hot weather

Image by vat loai from Pixabay

Sophie’s blog last week, about the blessings of water, was timely. The heat continues, though here in the Midlands, it’s more bearable than in London, I imagine. But what would we give for dark and stormy or just a bit of rain? Perhaps we’d go outside and dance in it?

Not necessarily a storm as bad as the one shown, though 😉

I’ve blogged before about weather during heatwaves and, specifically, about that fount of weather wisdom, Snoopy. He usually began his pearls of wisdom with: “It was a dark and stormy night”. You can see some of the cartoons on that earlier blog. I particularly enjoyed Snoopy’s more subtle start to a story: “It was a sort of dark and kind of stormy night.”

The originator of It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

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Female characters : fun and games with female names

Joanna is having a giggle over female characters…

Charles Dickens had great names for female charactersSomeone, somewhere recommended my old blog on Naming Minor Characters and it resulted in hundreds of hits last week. When I checked, I saw that most of it was about male characters. Certainly the game at the end was about males. So I thought I might do another version focusing on female characters instead.

When I look back at the literary canon, I see more interesting male names than female ones.

There aren’t many female characters with names to rival Mr Pecksniff or Scrooge in Dickens. But search around, and there are some. What about Lady Dedlock in Bleak House? Since much of the plot revolves around the deadlocked court case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, the name seems very appropriate.

But there are others, even better. What about this pair of chancers? Continue reading →

Writers and their cats…

Liz ponders writers and cats:

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.” ~ Terry Pratchett

Cover of Seriously Funny. The Endlessly Quotable Terry PratchettWriting tends to be a solitary business. Many of the authors I know have a dog who will happily sit at their feet while they’re working.

Egyptian cat goddess

Egyptian cat goddess that lives on Liz’s desk

Cats, on the other hand, are unfamiliar with the “sit, stay” command. It’s not that they don’t want to be with you. On the contrary. When they aren’t sleeping, they demand your full attention.

American fantasy author, P C Cast, put it perfectly.

“You know how it is with cats: They don’t really have owners, they have staff.”

“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, loveable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.” ~ Robertson Davies

I like that quote for obvious reasons, but how accurate is it? Continue reading →

Popular Fiction of the Past

Edwardian man with stiff collar holding hands across a desk or table with Edwardian lady, leaning towards each other as if about to kiss.

Image by No-longer-here from Pixabay

Popular fiction of the past has fascinated me since I was a child.

This has certainly intensified since I helped put together the 50th Anniversary Memoir of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. And many of those I have read since have, indeed, been romantic.

But the itch to read over the shoulder of my forebears was already there. It covered just about every genre, too.

I had access to three sets of bookshelves when I was a child. My parents, marrying late, also united their reading matter.

Gone With The Wind First Edition coverMy father brought a complete set of Dickens, H G Wells and Wisden to the marriage; my mother a rather wider selection, including Gone With the Wind and golden age mysteries. The extended family offered encyclopaedias, a lot of household tips (which I loved) and gloomily improving childhood literature, like The Water Babies, which I detested. Continue reading →

Points of View

I’ve called this blog Points of View because that is what I’ve been thinking about, off and on, since the Romantic Novelists’ Association Conference two weeks ago.

Not just in a relation to writing, either, as you will see.

I admit, however, that I have been struggling for some time with POV issues. I’m in the process of an Absolutely Last Edit of a book that, when I first imagined it, had a first person vibe. It didn’t last and it has much improved as a result. But in some places the “I voice” has left an uncomfortable shadow.

At least, I think that’s the answer. Especially after a really excellent workshop on Psychic Distance from Emma Darwin.

RNA Conference

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PGW’s Royal Romance

I have just read PGW’s royal romance, The Prince and Betty. When I first wrote about romantic novelists in Wodehouse World, I knew that the book existed but I had never read it. Now that I have, the story itself and, indeed, the history of its publication is a jigsaw puzzle.

However, I’ve also learned something about how it fitted into PGW’s life and other writing. And it has made me think again about Wodehouse’s place in romantic fiction.  And, indeed, of romantic fiction in his own life. So I thought I would share.

PGW’s Royal Romance – before the beginning

gold coinsWodehouse made his reputation initially with school stories. By 1909, however, he wanted to leave that behind and “butt into the big league,” as he told fellow free-lancer L H Bradshaw.

In New York, on leave of absence from his UK employer, The Globe, he found a literary agent who sold the two short stories PGW had brought with him for US$500. He was earning less that 10 guineas a pop from magazines in the UK. Continue reading →

Space Breaking Up Text, the Reader’s Friend

Punctuation was invented to help the Reader. And the very first invention was space breaking up text — so you could tell one word from the next. Seriously.

A couple of months ago I was putting the final touches to an online course on punctuation. Not a subject to rock them in the aisles, I thought. Mind you, I love the stuff. But I have learned that, as a subject of conversation, it doesn’t generally draw children from play and old men from the chimney corner.

exclamation mark in fireSo when I was preparing the course, I thought I’d throw in a bit of history for context.

Only then, of course, I had to check online whether what I remembered was a) accurate and b) still received wisdom. And found something new to me: Aristophanes, Head Librarian of Alexandria aged sixty. He was sitting there, receiving rolls in Greek, the language of the prevailing empire.

Most people then, of course, would be illiterate. So the purpose of these scrolls was to provide a text for someone else to deliver in the market place or to perform as an entertainment.

BUT they arrived with all the letters in a continuous line. Presumably to save papyrus and possibly time, as they were being hand-copied by scribes.

So Aristophanes thought of a way of marking up copies of the text to help the Poor Bloody Orator who had to read them out loud. Continue reading →

What to choose for Reading in Lockdown?

Rather to my surprise, people have been asking me to recommend books for lockdown reading. Virtual strangers, some of them. I suppose they think a writer reads more than other people. Well, to keep abreast of the competition, if nothing else.

Now, I like talking about books. And I am congenitally incapable of ignoring a request for help.

But this particular question throws me into a quandary. I mean I can happily spout for hours on books I love. As you probably know. But…

Finding a story that somebody else might like, especially someone I barely know (not to mention that someone’s son, daughter or grandchild) is hard. To be honest, it has left me  with eyeballs swishing about, looking for the escape hatch.

So far I’ve blundered through, hauling up titles from the cellarage pretty much at random. Do people want books they can read together? Or are they trying to read to block out the effects of too much togetherness?

With a very uncertain Christmas coming, I thought I’d try to be a bit more disciplined.

New Lockdown Bookworms?

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Animals in books: cute, endearing. Risky?

When its eyes met mine…

cover Crazy For You by Jennifer Crusie“On a gloomy March afternoon, sitting in the same high school classroom she’d been sitting in for thirteen years, gritting her teeth as she told her significant other for the seventy-second time since they’d met that she’d be home at six because it was Wednesday and she was always home on six on Wednesdays, Quinn McKenzie lifted her eyes from the watercolour assignments on the desk in front of her and met her destiny.”

Jennifer Crusie is famous for putting wonderful dogs in her books and this is no exception. Quinn’s destiny is a small black dog with desperate eyes and he isn’t a prop, a cute accessory for her heroine. He gets the opening line in Crazy For You, because he’s about to change her life.

Animals in books? Dogs, more dogs and a duckling or two

Georgette Heyer put animals in books, shown here with her dogGeorgette Heyer, seen here with her dog, was another author who used dogs, kittens, even ducklings to delight us. In a long scene in The Grand Sophy the ducklings escape, are recaptured and generally cause chaos. 

ducklings

Image by Adina Voicu from Pixabay

Venetia‘s Flurry flew to her rescue when, shockingly, Damerel kissed her. Unfortunately Flurry desisted the moment he was commanded to “sit”, recognising a master when he heard one. But he was enough of a distraction for Venetia to extract herself. Once she’d done that, she was more than a match for the man!

And Ulysses, the disreputable mongrel Arabella foisted on Beaumaris, is a joy. 

But writers beware!

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Fictional Blondes

fictional Blonde La Dolce Vita Mastroianni and EkbergA recent lecture on La Dolce Vita started me thinking about the variety of fictional blondes I have come across in my life. For there is something special about The Blonde. She grabs our attention the moment she appears. Indeed, in twentieth century western culture she became almost an icon.

Yet at the same time she has as many aspects as a Greek goddess, positive, negative and sometimes just plain loopy. And we all know them.

Fictional Blonde“Having a blonde moment,” my friend, author Sarah Mallory, will say, as she discovers the sunglasses she has been searching for are lodged securely on the top of her head.

She’s channelling the Airhead Blonde — charming, disorganised, sometimes a little naïve, sociable, and so good-hearted that you forgive her any amount of stuff that would irritate the hell out of you in a grey-haired matron or a sultry brunette.

Forgive her and maybe even love her. We pay to go and see movies about her. That shows you! Continue reading →