Bigger spaces

A follow up to my short exploration of trap streets. Not a street this time, but an entire, imaginary town. A mistake, says Google. No, says I, a vampire retirement home.

Saxon kings

A list of Saxon kings. Shamelessly stolen from here.

Offa (757-796)
Egbert, King of Wessex (802-839)
Ethelwulf (839-856)
Ethelbald (856-860)
Ethelbert (860-866)
Ethelred (866-871)
Alfred The Great (871-899)
Edward The Elder (899-924)
Athelstan (924-939)
Edmund I (939-946)
Edred (946-55)
Edwy (955-959)
Edgar (959-975)
Edward II The Martyr (975-979)
Ethelred II The Unready (979-1013 and 1014-1016)
Sweyn (1013-1014)
Edmund II Ironside' (Apr - Nov 1016)
Canute The Great' (1016-1035)
Harold Harefoot (1035-1040)
Hardicanute (1035-1042)
Edward III The Confessor (1042-1066)
Harold II (Jan - Oct 1066)
Edgar Atheling (Oct - Dec 1066)

I'm getting more interested in this period because it looks like a very fertile setting for stories because of the ceaseless conflict at work. For a start that romans had left and that meant a power vacuum that the kings, some of whom were little more than robber barons, tried to fill.

Plus there was the threat of invasions from Vikings and others - and that ended in 1066 with the conquest.

Alongside this goes the gradual conversion to Christianity and its wholesale pinching of earlier pagan beliefs. Given that there must be lots of people looking for their place in the world or just trying to extend their power.

There is also the great source of the Exeter Book to call on to get a sense of place and time. I've read some excerpts from it and the feeling of the times it gives is eerie.

Psycho smell

Schizophrenics have a goatish smell, if Hannibal Lecter (via Thomas Harris in

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The Silence of the Lambs) is to be believed. The claim that the sweat of schizophrenics is laced with trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid always intrigued me and it is a pity that it turns out not to be true. This paper declares "there is no relationship between TMHA and schizophrenia". Which seems pretty definitive.

There are other studies which suggest that volatile organic compounds can be used to diagnose the condition. It turns out that some of them do have distinctive odours:Image via Wikipedia

• trichlorofluoromethane - sweet smell
• pentane - petrolish
• dichloromethane - sweet smell
• trichloroethene - sweet smell
• benzene - sweet smell
• 2,2-dimethylbutane - tarry, hospital smell
• tetrachloroethene - sweet smell

I can see a pattern there. Though I guess there are caveats as schizophrenia, I think, is a broadly based condition and hard to definitively diagnose.

But that got me thinking about other odours and what they might reveal if they can be smelled. And it turns out that there are lots of them. Lots of conditions and diseases have very characteristic odours.

For instance, the smell of decomposing apples (again, a sweet smell) is associated with diabetic acidosis and that can strike diabetics if they have low blood sugar. Others too such as typhoid giving rise to a smell of brown bread or liver failure a "fetor hepaticus" (aka breath of the dead) which again is a sweet smell.

There are also research projects to develop electronic noses that can spot the characteristics odours of many diseases - particularly cancer. The thinking is that cancerous cells produce different waste products than normal cells and those can be detected - the key chemicals appear to be ethane, formaldehyde and acetaldehyde.

Fantastic. My current work in progress revolves around smell and having those to call on will help emphasise the strangeness of the central character. Ooh, not just smell either, when she kisses someone will she get a blast of what they are feeling.

Guides to the other side

19th Century mediums and psychics - stolen from The Fortean Times.
Kate, Leah and Margaret Fox
Allan Kardec
DD Home

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William Stainton Moses
Sir William Barrett
Nathaniel Talmadge
Robert Hare
James Mapes
Mrs Piper
Gladys Osborne Leonard
Frank Stockton
Hamlin Garland
Patience Worth
Frederick Bligh Bond
Charles S Mundell
Carl Wickland
Sir Hugh Lane
William Stead
Eusapia Palladino
Mina Crandon
Helen Duncan

Hyperspace glutton

Pretty much every writer of fiction craves an idea or setting that they can make their own - their signature dish. They want such a world of their own so they can stamp o

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ut their territory, stretch their arms and sign multi-book deals to keep themselves in pizza and jellybeans. I know I do.

I've long been jealous of Charles Stross' use of abstruse mathematics as a way through to other dimensions where man can truck with named and nameless horrors. I really enjoyed The Laundry series of books that update the Mythos (so peeved by that use of Lake Vostok) and add in Turing's well-known paper "Phase Conjugate Grammars for Extra-dimensional Summoning" to give it a modern twist. How I'd love to have such an idea for myself. Oh, mustn't forget that it all first appeared in A Colder War - though that is much bleaker than the subsequent books.

It's not entirely his own though because, even though he did not perhaps realise it, HP Lovecraft made use of such an idea in Dreams in the Witch House. Keziah Mason escapes jail by using mathematics to reach other dimensions enabling her to reach the modern world and kill again. Fritz Leiber pointed out that this was one of the first uses of hyperspace. A term coined by John W. Campbell and that first arose as a concept in the 19th century.

Mention of not the "spaces we know, but between them" crops up in other stories too - including one of my faves The Dunwich Horror. The whippoorwills! Here's something I didn't know - it was turned into a movie - twice. Looks like neither was any good. Though the 1970s one has Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee in it. Dean Stockwell pops up in the second too but as the good guy rather than one of the Whateleys. The Wikipedia page lists lots of times it has been turned into media of one sort or another.

I first read that story in a book of classic ghost stories. Lots of MR James, HH Munro et al - all very staid and Edwardian. In that context HP Lovecraft's story stuck out a mile. To this day I'm still struggling to picture what the Horror looked like but can remember parts of it clearly. How old must I have been when I read that? 12? 13? No wonder I ended up playing so much Call of Cthulhu. Shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles anyone?

Character notes

Hmm. I'm getting back into writing pretty well and have a few stories bubbling up. But, sigh, most of the rejections I have been getting have to do with character. Either the characters are not well enough drawn for people to sympathise with or there are too many of them or

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yadda yadda. It's all about the character. This worries me.

In some senses I don't think it should. Part of that is because I know that often the editors of many of the magazines I am submitting to are looking for reasons to say "no". They will seize on any deficiency so they can reject a story and clear a space in the slush pile. I've realised that it is not the best stories that get published but the ones that the editors like the most.

Plus I am not getting rejections on the basis of character from the pro-mags. Perhaps those smaller mags have higher standards. Perhaps.

Now that I have extracted the upside from this I need the downside. What I also worry about is that there is something that needs fixing. What?

Well, it has to be said that the last few stories I've written have been done in a more ad hoc fashion. I've avoided doing all that thinking and note making and just plunged in. The results have not been great. I realised today that the story I've written has almost no conflict, no resolution and almost no peril for the main characters. Not good. Maybe that is what needs fixing. The story I am about to write feels better already because I've done lots of thinking beforehand.

What I might try to do for the next story after this one is make sure that it is a character piece. Explicitly ensure that I know the main character and do all the things the book says to do.

Though this is tempered by the thought that if I do fix this lack then it may not lead to more acceptances from those mags.

Tools you can trust

I've long lusted after Scrivener but never had a Mac on which to run it. Now I have a MacBook Pro, thanks to work, so have downloaded it and I am giving it a whirl.

Lots of people have written about the tools they used when writing and I would guess that writers have many different reasons for pursuing the perfect aids to composition. For me, it is partly a way of avoiding work but at the same time feeling like I am making progress. Just as a poor workman will blame his tools a mediocre workman looks for a crutch to help them limp along.

In 2008 I used Rough Draft for a while and it did help me think about the way some of the stories were structured and how all the bits should go together. A couple of things stopped me using it. Some craziness at work meant I fell off the wagon in terms of regular writing so did not have as much need for it. Now I have got back into it I have relied on Word because it is installed on every computer I use.

The other reason I stopped is because my working methods are so chaotic that it did not quite chime with that pattern of writing and revision. I think that is the reason that, so far, I'm a bit underwhelmed. That might be because I am only getting used to it and have yet to plumb all its features. There are some bits I like about it but so far I have only used it for a work in progress rather than a new project.

The downside is that it only works on the Mac so whenever I do have to do some work I'll have to use that. That is a problem because I don't think it will be easy to export a document prepared in Scrivener. Time will tell.