Where do you get your ideas from?

Where a writer gets their ideas from is the question that’s always asked at literary gatherings.  It’s interesting, isn’t it?  Most people – including me – can, if asked, write a description of a place or person or recount an event but making something up from a standing start – well, that’s a bit more daunting.

The main tool in the creative box is the question, Why? with the sub questions of How? and Who? For instance, my sister, a primary school teacher wanted three short stories (very short – about 500 words) to use in class as examples of creative writing.  She had the first sentence of the story, which stated there was a statue in a park.  And that was it.

Okay…  So Who is the statue of and Why was it there?  As you can see, it gives a lot of scope.  It could be a statue of a famous footballer, a local hero, a knight on horseback, Peter Pan, or even a dog or a cat.  Once you’ve figured out Who the statue’s of, that gives you somewhere to go next.  For instance, if it’s a dog, what did the dog do?  It is a magic dog, that starred in a local folktale or did the dog rescue someone from drowning or give the alarm of fire by barking?  If it’s a footballer, what did he do to merit a statue?  Win the world cup?  Start a football team?  Lead a party of soldiers into the attack by kicking a football in front of him?  (This happened in the First World War, you know!) And what if the statue comes to life…?

I’m thinking along these lines because I’ve been throwing ideas around for a new book this week.  It’s very, very early stages and what always bugs me is how artificial it all seems.  I mean, X bumps off Y and Z notices something and then…  But then a little bit of magic happens.  Get a proper sequence of events and suddenly X, Y, Z and all their alphabetical pals  start to live in an actual place and have actual characters.  Mind you, it’s a fairly energetic process. I’ve cleaned the fish tank, cleaned the windows, strummed for hours on the guitar, mopped the floor etcetera, etcetera.  Agatha Christie used to wash up.  And if it worked for her… You might not get a Miss Marple but at least you’ll have clean plates!

Signed Books For Sale!

One of the nice things about having a book published is having a party to go with it.  Here's a picture of the last party.

....And they were just the people who couldn't get in.

Those who could get in were a little more select:



And, of course, it's nice to be able to sign books for friends



This is me and my sister raring to go.

Now if you'd like a signed book but couldn't get to the party, don't despair!If you tootle over to the Books part of the website and click on the Books tab, this will – no surprises here- bring you too the page which tells you how to buy a book.  What is new is that I’m now selling signed copies.  I’ve set it up so that postage and packing is included (I don't like faffing about, adding up postage when I order something)  both for America and for Britain, and if you’d like a special message written inside – perhaps “Happy Birthday!” or “This is the best book I’ve ever read!” there’s a space for that too.

Souper Saturday or Soup for Fifty-Odd

And yes, the title is a groan-worthy pun.  As the more liturgically inclined may have noticed, it’s Lent.  That’s God’s way of making you give up chocolate so you can really enjoy your Easter eggs come the 8^th of April.  Anyway, in a foolish – not to say feckless way – I ignored the standard advice to Never Volunteer – and rang our local church after an item in the weekly newsletter.

“Have you,” asked the newsletter hopefully, “any idea of how we can celebrate Lent as a parish together?”

“Why don’t we,” I said brightly, “have a shared lunch?  Everyone can bring something and we can all get together in the parish hall.  We can have a presentation about whatever charity it is we’re supporting, take donations and have a raffle.”  (It’s a Catholic do; there’s always a raffle and the prizes, Lent or no Lent, are usually whisky, wine and chocolate. As, indeed, they were.)

“Leave it with me,” said the prelate.  “I’ll get back to you.”

Now quite how a bring-your-own lunch metamorphosed into me making soup for fifty-odd people occurred, I’m not sure, but it did.

The actual soup I made the day before, but come Saturday, there were, thank the powers that be, a highly competent group of willing helpers to dish it out and clear away. We raised a healthy sum for charity and everyone enjoyed themselves.

Anyway, if you do fancy making soup in these industrial quantities (and you never know when the mood will strike you) here’s the recipe for (der, der!)

Lentil and vegetable soup.



This makes six pints or fourteen portions.  Therefore 12 pints equals twenty eight portions and so on and so forth, but six pints is a reasonable amount to make in one go.



Ten ounces of lentils.

Six carrots

Two parsnips

Some swede or turnip

Two onions

Four small potatoes

Two cans of tomatoes

Two stock cubes

A clove of garlic or a dollop of minced garlic

Three pints of boiling water.

Soak the lentils for twenty minutes or longer.

While they’re soaking, peel and chop the veg.

Fry up the onions (I used a wok for this part) then add the rest of the veg.

Then put the veg into a large saucepan together with the tomatoes, the garlic, the stock cubes and the boiling water.

Cook for twenty minutes.

If you put a lid on the pan, it will cook away happily on a low heat.

Add the soaked lentils and cook for another twenty minutes.

Test for seasoning and add salt and pepper to taste.

Then whiz it up with a hand-held blender.

To serve it up, you can add a drizzle of cream.

Incidentally, the pan and the soup will be slightly hotter than the surface of Mercury by the time you’ve finished, so it’s worth while transferring the soup to another pan before you whiz it with the blender.  Otherwise, your blender will probably become warped by contact with the very hot bottom of the pan.  I know; I’ve now got an excellent but very oddly shaped blender!

Finding Your Inner Welshman

The lst of March: Spring is (fingers crossed) just around the corner, I no longer wake up in the pitch dark and, as the day progresses, peer into the gloomy murk which is the North of England in Winter.

It’s amazing what a bit more daylight can do. If I was an ancient Druid or something, I think I’d be moved to nip down to Stonehenge and start chanting at the sun or sacrifice something. It probably wouldn’t cause too much comment in Wiltshire but I’d be looked on as distinctly odd if I started erecting stone tables, wearing long white robes and greeting the dawn with public prayer in Greater Manchester. (I mean, people would look; and comment.)

What I don’t do in the garden: not recently, anyway.

But, in this censorious age, I have to fall back on the more industrial and domestic Signs of Spring.

I’ve been told at least three times by people who come under the category of I-know-them-to speak-to-but-I-don’t-know-their-name-if-you-know-what-I-mean (in the bank, by the bloke behind the ticket desk in the railway station and the pet-shop owner) that it’s getting lighter in the evenings.  It is, we tell each other in awe-struck tones, still daylight at five o’clock. I’m thinking about painting the fence. I’m told to Chill and Stop Stressing when I adjure the offspring in a voice of motherly concern to Wrap Up, It’s Bit Parky Outside. (Mind you, I did think it was a bit early for shorts, even when teamed with the tights and the Ugg boots thought suitable for college wear)  and, in the more traditional signs of Spring, the birds in the garden are kicking up a dickens of a fuss about random bits of twigs and the snowdrops are venturing forth.

Do you know that terrific medieval song, Summer is y-comen in? Although it says Summer, the songster is obviously talking about Spring.  It obviously is a song and not a poem and I can imagine it being bellowed out cheerfully by peasants and Aged Crones in Ye Saracen’s Eyeball, or DunCrusadin, quaffing ale or mead or whatever the equivalent was of half of Carlsberg or a gin and tonic with ice and lemon and a little umbrella.  (Quaffing, as I’ve heard it said, is like drinking, only you spill more.) There aren’t many songs about flatulence, not that are printed in anthologies of poetry, anyway, so it’s worth noting for that alone.

Excuse the medieval accent:  Summer is y-comen in, Loude sing, cuckoo! Bullock starteth, bucke fartheth, Merry sing, cuckoo!

Anyway, the 1^st of March.  I hope everyone dined exclusively on leeks to celebrate St David, the patron saint of Wales, and his Day. Despite beating us at Rugby (which caused some major distress and heart-searchings in the Gordon-Smith household) the Welsh are OK.

An Irish friend of mine refers to the Welsh as The Irish Who Can’t Swim but there are some pretty good reasons for staying in Wales, such as mouth-watering scenery and some of the daftest road-signs in Britain, which adds humour to your journey.  St Davids itself, the smallest city in the UK (a city needn’t be glittering sky-scrapers or urban deprivation but merely a town with a cathedral) is a lovely place.  So, altogether now; plunge deep within to find your Inner Welshman and let’s let rip with a rousing chorus of Cwm Rhondda.

A Heroic Failure

I was poking around in the attic yesterday and came across a copy of a book I used to love so much it was like finding an old pal. Less startling, perhaps, than actually finding an old pal sitting dustily in the attic, waiting patiently for me to arrive, but fun all the same.

It’s The Book Of Heroic Failures, which was published at the end of the 1970s, championing the utterly incompetent in all their rich variety.  For instance, the most unsuccessful version of the Bible has to be the edition which was printed in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas.  It was peppered with mistakes but the most glaring was the omission of the word “Not” from the seventh commandment (the adultery one) which would add a whole new slant to the dos and don’ts of family life.

My favourite is though, is the section Law and Order.  If we were having a real cup of tea/ glass of wine/hot Bovril/insert your favourite beverage here instead of a virtual cup of tea/ glass of wine/hot Bovril/insert your favourite beverage here together, I certainly tell you this tale, so consider yourself button-holed and sit back, sup up, and enjoy it.

In 1975, three bank robbers tackled the Royal Bank of Scotland in Rothsay.  It went wrong from the beginning, when the got stuck in the revolving doors and had to be helped free by the bank staff.  They sheepishly thanked everyone and left, to return a few minutes later and announced they were robbing the bank.  The trouble is, none of the staff believed them.  They demanded £5000, then, in the face of the head cashier’s increasing mirth, reduced the demand to £500, then to £50 and eventually to 50 pence.  By this time the head cashier could hardly control herself for laughter.

Then one of the men jumped over the counter, fell awkwardly, and writhed around on the floor, clutching his ankle.  The other two robbers made their getaway, but got trapped in the revolving doors again, frantically pushing the wrong way.

Isn’t that wonderful?

Trouble Brewing and Aristotle

I was poring over the proofs for the new book this week.  I use the word ‘poring’ advisedly, because that’s one of the words I had to change.  ‘Poring’ means to examine something closely (in this case, a dead body) whereas ‘Pouring’ refers to the cup of tea (or stiff whisky) the porer needs after having so pored.

You need to be on your toes when proof-reading.  There’s all the usual stuff, such as random commas, missing scene breaks – they could really trip the reader up – and dialogue without speech marks.  Spelling mistakes, as such, are rare, because of Microsoft Word’s handy little spelling tool which flags up a misspelling with a red line.  However, you have to keep your eye on Word.  A word can be spelt correctly, but still be the wrong word.

For instance, in ‘Trouble Brewing’ (Brilliant book!  Order it now!) there’s a scene when a character is describing what happened to him in the war.  (First World War, as the book’s set in the 1920’s)  Anyway, he says that after being caught in a shell burst, he woke up in a casualty-clearing station.  A casualty-clearing station, as you might know or can guess, was the first port of call for injured troops, a sort of MASH-type unit to deal with the immediate effects of injuries, from patching-up to referral to a permanent hospital.

Only my chap didn’t end up in a casualty-clearing station, he ended up (in the proofs) in a causality-clearing station.  Whoops.

Now causality is associated with Aristotle, and brings a whole different slant to the  scene.  Naturally, I have Aristotle at my fingertips, as you would expect.  (Okay, I checked on the internet!) but I had the idea that the poor bloke would encounter something like this:

“Hello, Doctor.  I believe this is the causality-clearing station”

“Indeed it is, young man.  Let me see, you have the Material cause, or the elements out of which an object is created, do you?  Good, good.”

“Yes, Doctor.  That would be this nasty hole with the bullet in it.  It’s creating quite a pain in the… well, nevermind, but I’ll have to watch how I sit down for a bit.”

“I see.  As a matter of fact, by referring to the aforesaid bullet hole, you are confusing the Material cause with the Efficient cause, or the means by which it is created.  Guard against this!”

“So what do I do now?”

“Hmm.  Have you formulated the Formal cause, or the expression of what it is?”

“Yes.  I’ve got a pain in my Final cause, or the end for which it is.”

“In that case, take two aspirin and lie down. Next case! Hmm.  I see you need your axioms testing…”

By the way, I came across a blog I really liked about Agatha Christie and how she’s not so cosy as some people think.  Here it is:

http://at-scene-of-crime.blogspot.com/2011/11/rant-against-word-cozy.html

Microwave Jam

I've been busy in the kitchen this week making jam.  You might think it’s a rum time of year to be making jam, but this isn’t fruit I’ve grown, it’s from the bargain section of Tesco’s.  Maybe it’s something innately primitive, but I just love a bargain.  Anyway, faced with three baskets of plums, I decided to turn them into jam.  The advantage of making jam in the microwave is that you haven’t got a lot of burnt pans to clean and it’s very quick.

Here’s a recipe that I think is fairly bomb-proof.

First of all, you need a biggish microwave to take a biggish bowl.  The bowl has to be sturdy, as the jam will get very hot. Pyrex is fine, but I use an old-fashioned mixing bowl, a pottery one with a glazed inside.  I’d be iffy about using plastic.

Check if your fruit has enough pectin in it. Pectin is the natural “glue” that makes jam set.  Here’s a link that should tell you the pectin content of your fruit.

http://susan-morris.suite101.com/natural-pectin-content-of-berry-and-tree-fruits-a106156

If it’s low in pectin, you can add a lemon.  Cut it into quarters and add it to the mix – but not yet!

You need:

A microwave – mine’s 850

Oven gloves – the bowl is very hot so be careful!

Two saucers or small plates

A bowl

1 1lb of fruit

1 1lb (or maybe just a bit less) of granulated sugar

A lemon

About two or three clean jars with lids.

Okay, here goes:

Put two saucers in the freezer.  You’ll need them for testing the jam.

Chop the fruit, remove stones and stalks etc, and weigh it.

With a tidgy bit of water give it about 6 minutes at full power.

Take the bowl out of the microwave and add the same weight (or perhaps just a bit less) of sugar.

If necessary, add the quartered lemon.

Microwave at full power for 20-22 minutes, giving it a stir every now and then.

Now you have to test it.  Take the cold saucer and spoon a bit of jam onto it.  Leave it a minute or so, then see if it’s set.  If it is set, the surface should wrinkle when it’s touched.  If it’s not set, give the jam another 3 or 4 minutes.  That’s where the second saucer comes in!

Then warm and sterilize the jars.  The easiest way to do this is to put about a tablespoon of water in each jar and microwave the jars for a minute.

Then empty out the now hot water and spoon the jam into the warm jars.  Put the lids on and bingo!  Home made jam.