#ROW80 – Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, May 19

Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, May 19

Attendance: Chair, Secretary, Archivist, Armourer, Social Secretary.

Apologies: Mr Beauregard, Mr Winchester, Mr Frazer.

Guests:  Ms V Tugwell, Comms Wallah, Women’s Etherboat Society

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

The Archivist announced that preliminary work on the research for Project AR, a full account of Mr Beauregard’s activities in the Ottoman Empire in his early years as Consort, has been completed. The project has passed its assessment stage and is now in the design phase, well on target for an August start date under current circumstances. All involved were offered the committee’s congratulations.

Ms Tugwell updated the Committee on the proceedings of the Women’s Etherboat Society. The second volume of Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl memoirs – tentatively entitled “Boom Town” – has passed the editing sub-committee and has been formatted for copy-editing release. In addition, design work has commenced on Volume Three. A surprise discovery in the records of a Gazetteer belonging to Mr Scipio Jones has raised the possibility of a fourth volume in the series, but further work to develop this will have to wait until early- to mid-2014 pending current workload.

The Social Secretary announced that the Weblog has been rather quiet in recent weeks due to lack of resources, viz. the preparation of current projects. In keeping with the guidelines, the achievements record for these weeks will be left blank and the milestones archived.

All eligible members should now have received their invitations to the Club’s Summer Ball at Mr Winchester’s Suffolk residence. Those members who believe they are eligible and have yet to receive their invitations by Royal Mail are advised to contact their local Post Office.

No further business was discussed. The Chair thanked the attendees and drew the meeting to a close.

New Silly Steampunk Stories In Paperback

I’ve been slightly busy on behalf of another writer recently – the fabulous Vita Tugwell, no less.

Vita is the author of the Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl series of novelettes, short stories and novel(s), and while I edit her second novel (of three) I’ve also just put out print versions of two novelettes and a collection.

Here they are:

         Petticoat Shorts, Volume Two, A Collection of silly steampunk stories By Vita Tugwell (ISBN 978-1484903957)

The Voices Of Rollright, A Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl Novelette by Vita Tugwell (ISBN 978-1484903735)

          The Lights Over Cromer, A Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl Novelette by Vita Tugwell (ISBN 978-1481155526)

I updated the covers on some of them (new version of Inkscape – new software to play with, yay!). I’m working on the others too, as the new typeface effects really pop. You can see the difference between the first two above in the new style and the third, which is the old style.

I still like the overall look of the series, so I don’t intend to change that, but there’s nothing wrong with making ‘em a bit more readable in thumbnail size.

Now, back to editing novel number two in the trilogy, so I can start writing the third, and be done in time to start the long-planned Project AR…

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P.S. If you haven’t already guessed, Vita is a pen-name I use purely for this series to demarcate its subject matter separately from the Cuckoo Club series (more of this later, including Book Two in the Cuckoo Club series, which I hope to finish by Yule 2013).

#ROW80 – Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 28

Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 28

Attendance: Chair, Secretary, Archivist, Armourer, Social Secretary.

Apologies: Mr Beauregard, Mr Winchester, Mr Frazer.

Guests:  Ms V Tugwell, Comms Wallah, Women’s Etherboat Society

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

The Archivist provided a report of the  most recent research carried out at the British Museum, which unearthed further details of Mr Beauregard’s early years as Consort. In particular, technical information on the art of illustration practised by his contemporaries, including Messrs Belzoni, Pomardi and Dodwell, was added to the Club archive. Work is due to commence in late August 2013 on the first stage of  Project AR, once a full account of Mr Beauregard’s activities in the Ottoman Empire has been compiled.

Ms Tugwell updated the Committee on the proceedings of the Women’s Etherboat Society. Advertisements have begun to be placed ahead of the first issue of the Society’s Journal, but more are required to ensure the viability of the publication. A revised set of publications is in prep concerning the original cover art and editing, and will be approved by the Society’s Board of Trustees prior to release.

The Social Secretary announced that the Weblog has seen publication of a posting on influence: “Giovanni Belzoni Gets A New Assistant”, on Thursday 25 April. In keeping with the guidelines, this will be considered a milestone on the achievements record.

Early arrangements for the Club’s Summer Ball, to be held at Mr Winchester’s Suffolk residence, have been received and will be notified by post to all qualifying members before the May Day recess.

No further business was discussed. The Chair thanked the attendees and drew the meeting to a close.

In Response To A Perceived Lack Of Magic

A question pondered by Joel le Blanc (discovered via Myth & Moor, BTW) asks: Where are the magical men?

I responded in the comments section, but I pondered my response for a while. Some of my response is here, with a few links of my own favourites.

As a woman, I find the airy noodlings on creativity sometimes too full of imaginary fairy wings, but I see magical men in every place I look.

Creative men perhaps opt for less ethereal expressions than art and poetry, on the whole; baking artisan bread or brewing craft beers, for example.

The majority of names scrolling up the screen at the end of films and TV programmes are male; those men are creative, and not just the writers. Those who use their practical skills to build the sets and programme the CGI to give us the magical worlds of Star Trek and Game of Thrones and Avatar are as smitten with fantasy itself as those who watch, enchanted. How can they not be? You only have to read interviews with people who work in the creative industries to realise how smitten they are with their work.

When I was a teenager – and this was before the Terminator II-era CGI came about – I used to read Fangoria. They always ran interviews with the special effects technicians – rammed with enthusiasm for their work. Not everyone’s cup of tea (or blood, or ichor), but creative nonetheless, and often fantastical. Magic doesn’t have to be pretty to work.

Perhaps our limitations on the perception of what is a magical life, and what is practical, cause us to divide the world into professions along clear lines – lines which ought to be less clear. An artist producing designs for computer games, or an architect designing new structures, or a bricklayer building a house – are these less magical, does the work feel less satisfying, because the finished product is practical? Do we need to see magic in each aspect of what we do, or in the round, or in just one facet?

Some names from my own list of favourite “magical men”:

Momus

The Justified Sinner

Turkey Song

Nick Park

Roger Dean

Moon Guitars

Smuzz

Bill Crumbleholme

Who are your favourites?

Firing Beaker Age pottery (Bill Crumbleholme)

Giovanni Belzoni Gets A New Assistant

A trip to the British Museum this week brought an unexpected resource to  my attention for my current work-in-plan, Project AR: the travel drawings of Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi. The work in progress is a prequel to my novel, The Last Rhinemaiden, and is about the life of that story’s hero, Louis Beauregard, as a younger man.

Edward Dodwell, Simone Pomardi, Panorama from the top of the Mousaion Hill, Athens. Watercolour, 1805. From the British Museum website.

In my short story, All Roads Lead To The River, Louis visits the pyramids at Giza in the company of two English explorers. He’s described as having “caroused around the Greek islands in the company of playboys and poets”, until he arrives with Smyth & Petherick in Libya as their draftsman.

Dodwell and Pomardi were draftsmen.

Gold mine.

All their work took place twenty years or so before Louis fictionally arrives there. The landscape hadn’t changed much in that time, although it did in the ensuing twenty years as the Greeks, having won their War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, proceeded to remove all trace of the overseers.

I originally went to see the exhibition of Ice Age Art (how could I not? I majored in prehistory at university; Ice Ages and their effects on northern Europe play a major part in the story of The Last Rhinemaiden and its offshoots). While I waited for my ticket time to come around, I took a wander.

It’s the British Museum – there’s plenty of things to see. For once I didn’t go to see to Pete Marsh. I avoided the Egyptian gallery too, and the Elgin Marbles (although I began to wish I’d zipped past them just the once after this…)

Serendipity, call it what you will, but I entered the exhibition entitled “In Search of Classical Greece”. I hadn’t heard of either of the two gents whose drawings formed the mainstay of the exhibits, but as I went around I learned a lot more about them and the circles they moved in.

The drawings of the Greek landscape were technically perfect, but lots more interesting snippets popped out of the texts. Names to look up, topographical details, local people in costume, travellers in English period costume. I was scribbling notes like a wild thing. Byron; Shelley; the aforementioned Lord Elgin. A touch of The Stress Of Her Regard (Tim Powers) in the air, perhaps, of the British Museum on a sunny afternoon.

Then yesterday, in a planned day of exploration for more Project AR groundwork, I took a trip to Bristol and wandered around their Georgian House Museum – fascinating – before going up the steep hill of  Park Street to the university area and the lovely, compact but jam-packed City Museum & Art Gallery for a lunchtime talk.

On the drawings of the tomb of Seti I by Giovanni Belzoni.

Wow.

In addition to a peek at some Belzoni artefacts – a chunk of plaster chipped from the wall of the tomb that Belzoni had marked with his name, for example – the talk also mentioned how the paintings were produced: the techniques used, the inks, the paper, the protocols for painting the scenery. I already knew some of the original Egyptian protocols, the dimensions and such like, but it was interesting to see that the copyists used much the same ideas.

And when he’d finished despoiling the tombs he excavated, what did Belzoni do with the goodies?

Belzoni toured with his discoveries. This in the collections of Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery.

He shipped them off to Europe and toured the provinces at their expense.

Belzoni produced the drawings as part of a touring exhibition, and they formed a mock-up that people could wander around in. If I hadn’t been to the Dodwell & Pomardi exhibition the day before, I wouldn’t have known how common that was at the time, to the extent that special rotundas were built in the 1790s-1800s so people could go into a landscape and experience it in 360 degrees – the original Imax.

The Museum staff handed round a handbill of the exhibition of two mummies, an excellent example of the over-wordy printer-going-bananas-with-his-art. And there was a guidebook – a genuine one, from the period, with a map of Egypt that folded out, and about 8 pages of tight typescript explaining the excavation and the exhibition.

Wow. Again.

As a historian, even Belzoni’s artefacts are cool. I have handled a 180-year-old booklet produced for Giovanni Belzoni’s exhibition. Cool.

And in addition to being cool, both exhibitions gave me a nice set of reference points for Project AR and how Louis Beauregard would actually do all that carousing around the Grand Tour with poets and playboys.

The exhibitions are totally free. The talk was totally free. The British Museum, and Bristol City Museum, are getting a big acknowledgement in the front of the finished novel.

But first, I have to write the blasted thing…

#ROW80 – Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 21

Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 21

Attendance: Chair, Secretary, Archivist, Social Secretary.

Apologies: Mr Beauregard, Mr Winchester, Mr Frazer, Club Armourer.

Guests:  Ms V Tugwell, Comms Wallah, Women’s Etherboat Society

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

The Chair asked the Archivist to provide an update to his action of last meeting to review the foundations of Project AR. The Archivist reported that more documentation has come to light covering the early years of Mr Beauregard in his tenure as Consort, chiefly concerning his educational influences and some early poetry. Whether this material is included in Project AR is doubtful, but it may provide an insight into the Consort’s character and motivation at this point in his life.

The Armourer submitted a memorandum to the effect that the sword-cane captured from Sylvester de Winter in 1888, sent to the Tower for its annual cleaning, had been duly returned and signed back into the Club Inventory.

Ms Tugwell updated the Committee on the proceedings of the Women’s Etherboat Society.The second volume of memoirs of the founders of the society is complete, in first draft, and is awaiting editorial attention. The weblog of the society continues to be developed but is not yet in a publishable state. The original publications of the Society are undergoing a refresh to include improved notes on the accommodation and diet of the members, this work to be complete by the end of April.

In addition, Ms Tugwell provided a packet of chocolate bourbons for the meeting, for which she received generous thanks from the Committee.

The Social Secretary announced that the Weblog has seen publication of a posting: “On Devilled Kidneys And Marmite”, on Saturday 20 April. In keeping with the guidelines promulgated at the April 2 meeting, this will be considered a milestone on the achievements record. Due to the comparative success of this communiqué, the Committee voted to continue the venture until further notice.

The Social Secretary also noted that the aforementioned posting was in response to a conundrum posited by Mlle C Laguire, also known as The Daring Novelist, regarding Characters At Breakfast, upon which a comment was passed and thus fulfilled the outward communication requirements of the original guidelines.

No further business was discussed. The Chair thanked the attendees and drew the meeting to a close.

On Devilled Kidneys And Marmite

Camille Laguire has a series of posts on her blog about characters at breakfast. Apparently it’s a follow-on from a Guardian piece. Anyhoo, Camille suggests that what a character has for breakfast tells us a lot – especially if that character has to have something different from normal, and their reaction to that.

There’s a whole lot of sense in this. There’s also a lot to play with, as a writer. Here’s my take.

For the household of 36a Centaur Street, breakfast is a peremptory affair. They share lodgings, three of them, with a tiny kitchen off the parlour. The setting is a fictional dieselpunk 1910, so while they have a cellar full of gadgets not one of them is a chest freezer…

Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl and Darius Fitzgerald, the third member of the household, rely on the kitchen equipment you’d find in a small kitchen of the time: maybe a cold box, where they’ll keep the butter, milk, eggs and cheese, and bacon or sausages, for a day or so. They don’t have space for a pantry.

Cooking equipment isn’t much more advanced – they have a gas ring, maybe two, and a kettle that goes on top, for tea or coffee.

The time period has a lot to answer for. There isn’t much pasta in the standard English kitchen in 1910, although probably more rice than you’d think, with the Empire including India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. One of the housemates has a slightly overseas background too, but that doesn’t extend to breakfast.

So…

There’s a lot of toasted bread products going on. Lack of storage – lack of practice in buying for bulk – means yesterday’s fresh bread is stale and only good for toasting.

Plus, there are toasted teacakes.

Yummmmy.

Oh, the toasted teacake. Cinnamony like a hot cross bun, bunny like a Sally Lunn, sliced in two and toasted and slathered with butter and jam/honey/marmalade. Known to tempt even us desayuno-skippers.

So my characters eat a lot of toasted teacakes for breakfast.

The alternative is Marmite on toasted bread, which is where a lot of people are divided. Petticoat Katie might survive on peppermint creams all day but not without a good solid breakfast. And in The Nessie Collector, both Petticoat Katie and Sledgehammer Girl encounter Scots porridge on a train, to which they add raspberry jam (sacrilege!).

Mainly, however, I don’t put them into a breakfast situation.

I wonder why? One of my friends gets out of bed naturally at six in the morning because she’s hungry and can’t sleep. I can’t say I’ve ever got out of bed because I was hungry, unless I’d managed a long lie until lunchtime. Maybe I don’t picture my characters at breakfast because it’s not action-y enough. Perhaps I ought to.

In The Last Rhinemaiden there isn’t much time for breakfast either. The junior hero, Alf Winchester, skips breakfast to catch an early train and the two female leads skip breakfast because they’re penniless. The real food only arrives at lunchtime, by which time they are gagging for it. Alf, especially, accustomed to a hearty schoolboy breakfast, and encountering events beyond his normal experience, has had enough of hunger and is so vulnerable to the offer of lunch by the anti-hero (and not enough of you have read the book to make that a spoiler) he can’t wait.

Given that the whole story takes place during a single 24-hour period, there isn’t much time for anything other than a light supper at the Cuckoo Club before the action kicks in.

The only main character who manages breakfast is Louis Beauregard, and we don’t dwell on what he eats, only what he reads in the newspaper. On reflection, I rather suspect Louis would have devilled kidneys for breakfast, and we know it’s served with tea. The kidneys might come with a single egg, scrambled, or mushrooms – but not both – and a slice of fried bread or toast, again. But I never thought to put that much detail in the book. It wasn’t as important as what he reads in the morning news.

Notice the absence of coffee?

And no processed cereals in either of these stories. You need to store those somewhere safe from weevils and mice.

And what of muesli? How many characters have I created that eat muesli for breakfast? None.

So far. Heheheh.

#ROW80 – Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 14

Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 14

Attendance: Chair, Secretary, Archivist, Armourer, Social Secretary.

Apologies: Mr Beauregard, Mr Winchester, Mr Frazer.

Guests:  Ms V Tugwell, Comms Wallah, Women’s Etherboat Society

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

The Chair noted that since the last meeting, questions have arisen regarding the foundations of Project AR, and the Archivist has been asked to review the material upon which the project has been based so far.

The Armourer requested a note be made in the minutes that the sword-cane captured from Sylvester de Winter in 1888 has been sent to the Tower for its annual cleaning.

Ms Tugwell updated the Committee on the proceedings of the Women’s Etherboat Society. The Society is not yet in a position to continue work on the second volume of memoirs mentioned in the previous meeting’s minutes. However, a preliminary outline of the Society’s journal has been mooted and approved in draft by the Committee. Further news will be forthcoming at a later date.

The Social Secretary announced that the Weblog has seen publication of a posting on influence: “How I met Lord Brandoch Daha”, on Tuesday 9 April. In keeping with the guidelines promulgated at the last meeting, this will be considered a milestone on the achievements record. Due to the comparative success of this communiqué, the Committee voted to continue the venture until further notice.

The Social Secretary also offered apologies for the lack of outward supporting commentary and set a personal objective for the next meeting.

No further business was discussed. The Chair thanked the attendees and drew the meeting to a close.

How I met Lord Brandoch Daha

I picked up The Worm Ouroboros in a second-hand bookshop more than ten years ago. The title intrigued me, with its hints of esoteric mysticism and its old-fashioned use of the word Worm. The Worm, or wyrm, is an Old English word for dragon, but the ouroboros is Greek, alchemical, and is signified by a serpent biting its own tail – it’s the equivalent of a Möbius strip, the never-ending and ever-repeating flow of energy that is harnessed by Enochian magic.

Fascinating, indeed.

When I turned over the cover I was even more intrigued by the book. The art on my copy was the 1960s paperback, a childish style that mimics the woodblock style that Tolkien favoured for his own art and also references Lowry and Bruegel. The artist is unlisted, and according to the ISFDB there is no record elsewhere, which is disappointing.

My childhood, in the 1970s, was littered with books under these type of covers, and the jumble sales I frequented in the 1980s also steamed with this sort of artwork on book covers, mainly for children. There’s a touch of Noggin The Nog about it.

Anyhow, the appearance of The Worm Ouroboros in my local Oxfam bookshop coincided with my reading of the Histories of The Lord Of The Rings. The cover copy emphasised that Eddison  had been the writer used as comparison when Tolkien first appeared. I’d read the C S Lewis Cosmic Trilogy by then, and the full five volumes of T H White’s Once And Future King (which I adore – more on that elsewhere).

I was eager for more of the same.

So far, without even opening the book, I was intrigued. I had to be careful, though – it was a paperback which had obviously been well-loved, and was wrapped in sticky-backed plastic, and the glue along the spine that kept the pages in place was growing brittle with age. With gentle care I parted the covers to see if the words inside were what I was looking for.

It was.

Eddison’s language, when I flipped through the pages, was a challenge.

He challenged me to read him.

His prose is old skool even for those of us who love old skool. He’s been compared to Elizabethan English, to Shakespeare, and his use of language in The Worm Ouroboros certainly has that cadence and complexity of form.

He challenged me.

I rose.

I’ve read books where the story is sometimes tangled up in the writer showing off their mastery of something more than writing. Umberto Eco’s Name Of The Rose is one example – I came to the book after falling in love with the film, watching it more than a dozen times, and also with the words of my English-teacher father ringing in my ears that “Eco shows off” in his writing.

When I got round to reading the book of Name Of The Rose, I found myself skipping parts of the page when he got too tied up in monkish politics or descriptions of church procedures. Nice, but a bit like the raisins in a rum’n’raisin ice-cream – adds texture, doesn’t change the flavour. (At least I didn’t do what I did with Moby Dick [short of hurling it at the wall] and skip whole pages.)

Anyhow.

Eddison isn’t one of those writers. His prose is elaborate where needed, and adds juice to his fruit. The characters are mega-characters, straight out of the heroic epics, as if the Norse Gods had grown up in Ancient Greece or Turkey, and they act with such mature grace it makes us all feel like awkward adolescents.

The textures he evokes, the journey, is purposeful, and makes you want to follow wherever he goes.

The Worm Ouroboros itself is a trope, a meme, a theme throughout the book that lends an edge to the story but isn’t part of it. There’s no dragon hunt, no actual worm, no rescue of maidens.

There are enormous characters who live their lives with the strength of mythic beasts.

I wish Eddison was more accessible, because he deserves it. The Lord Brandoch Daha and Queen Sophonisba deserve it, the epic journeys they undertake across the landscape of his world. Game Of Thrones has nothing on this.

But I also like Eddison’s obscurity. It’s like a secret handshake. A key to a hidden land, perhaps, and only on Goodreads have I found fellow travellers.

If you’re up for a challenging read, an epic of heroes and villains and opulence and mythic elegance, for characters that glow with life and landscapes that maim the mind’s eye with their beauty, come join us.

Again, and again, and again.

#ROW80 – Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 7

Minutes of the Cuckoo Club Committee Meeting, April 7

Attendance: Chair, Secretary, Archivist, Armourer, Social Secretary.

Apologies: Mr Beauregard, Mr Winchester, Mr Frazer.

Guests:  Ms V Tugwell, Comms Wallah, Women’s Etherboat Society

The minutes of the previous meeting were approved.

The Chair noted that since the last meeting, groundwork has commenced on Project AR, with the initial framework in place and first notes on construction recorded.

The Archivist confirmed that Mr Benton’s report on the 1922 Expedition to the Nile Valley has been received, and is being collated for distribution to members by the end of this month. As a result, work has commenced on the third volume of Tales From The Cuckoo Club Archives, which will hopefully be published by the end of the year.

Ms Tugwell updated the Committee on the proceedings of the Women’s Etherboat Society, noting that work has been completed on the second volume documenting the adventures of founding members Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl. This will be published in early summer 2013, with the third volume under way by the Summer Solstice. Short works are also being prepared for release in the next few weeks.

The Social Secretary announced that the Weblog has seen publication of an inspirational posting: “Why A Pool is not always A Pool”, on Saturday 6 April. In keeping with the guidelines promulgated at the last meeting, this will be considered a milestone on the achievements record.

No further business was discussed. The Chair thanked the attendees and drew the meeting to a close.