Hi Everyone,
Many thanks for the congratulations and in particular:
for the votes.
And many many thanks for the shortlistings. I realise I haven't posted mine, as I stealth-voted on the hop, so, for the record:
Votes*
Johnnyjet*
VenusanBroon*
Chrispy*
Cul
TBP
Moonbat
TJ
Littlestar
Ursa
Regarding Dan's book... well, here's the thing... I don't really want it. I'm not into techno SF thrillers and I don't like Dan, so I'd like to congratulate
@M. Robert Gibson as the recipient of
Man O' War.
Don't thank me, just throw money, please.
Okay, the real reason.. I had already bought a copy of Dan's book and at the last LonChron he signed it for me (with the best comments I have ever had in a signed book - even better than my Stephen King
Bag of Bones signing) so I think it is only right MRG gets it.
Before I shuffle off, I was discussing with others how often there's a disparity of stories we've written and thought, 'Boom! Winner!' and then get few votes, if any, compared with the amount of stories we're 'meh' about that do well. In that regard, I was genuinely surprised to have done so well. I usually am able to write my first draft within 20-40 words of 300, but this one came in at 452 (and made much more sense, I'd say). I whittled and edited, and after a couple of weeks got it to what I posted.
I knew I wanted to have someone folding stone along a dotted line because I'd been listening to Kate Bush's awesome
Aerial album; there's a track called
How to be Invisible and the lyrics include:
I found a book on how to be invisible;
Take a pinch of keyhole,
And fold yourself up.
You cut along a dotted line.
You think inside out,
And you're invisible
"The dotted line" and "fold yourself up" lines stood out and I had the concept. As far as the voice is concerned... well, I've been inhaling M.R.James (if you haven't subscribed to the Podcast 'A Podcast to the Curious', do so now!), Arthur Machen etc and I really wanted to do a Jamesian feel.
Using Monty as a starting point made for easy ideas; obvs had to be in first person, the POV had to be of an Oxford-educated scholar who was probably an antiquarian. James was Provost of Eton and his college in Oxford so that got chucked in the mix. He likes to take the pee out of golfers so I needed some golfing reference, and as a Daarzet boy, I was competitive about the Jamesian Suffolk beaches and the Brat-ian Dorset ones.
Swyre Head, Worth Matravers and Black Man's Stile are real places. Swyre Head needs a whole blog to do justice to, so I won't go on about it here, but there is (or was when I was a teen) a stile at the site of Black Man's Stile. Worth Matravers is a tiny hamlet up in the hills over Swanage and there is a very old pub there called
The Square and Compass. The tables are immense slabs and when there were shipwrecks, the dead bodies used to be laid out on them. Those tables are still used, and I recall from 1993-96 when I spent much of my spare time in Swanage and Worth, being really enamoured of the local smuggler and maritime legends.
My favourite horror film is
John Carpenter's The Fog, so that was that, in the end I had a poor man's James mixed in with Lovecraft,
The Fog and a bit of phantom slavery.
I did not, however, think; 'Boom! Winner!'
So thank you all, again.
Now, let's talk about those who once again posted but didn't vote...
pH
