Creepy 20

Stepping back for a bit.

Creeper's Cottage seemed like such a straightforward concept when I started out. It's not just the Hookland details that have been burning my grey cells, it's a whole heap of stuff. Polish swear words were just the tip of the iceberg. A building relocation project seemed like a good idea, but then I realised I'd never built anything in my life.

I've been face-first into a report from the Black County Museum titled A Pit-pulled Cottage from Gornalwood, all about the real life relocation of one of their exhibits. I've had to research types of mortar, brick and solvents, alongside caravan models, electric generators and antique teddy bears.

Today has mostly been devoted to 3D laser imaging equipment. Thanks ever so much to Mark Russell at FARO, for patiently answering questions. It's amazing how many minutes of YouTube video you need to watch and re-watch just to get one paragraph of convincing text.

I need a break.

I have a blog post promised to someone, and I'd like to see whether I can approach Hookland from a different angle. There's a funerary theme in the Hookland Writers' Bible that I'd like to explore. I'm not sure if it'll be fit for the anthology, but I won't know until I write it. Even if it falls short, there'll be space for it in the wider Hookland mythos. 

I think it'd do me good to take a crack at a short story. 

Come back refreshed to this one.

Avocado Chocolate Mousse

Just a totally random non-writing related post.

#avocadochocolatemousse has been on my mind a lot recently.

So easy to make. 

• 3-4 large avocados 
• 1 lady finger banana, or half a big one
• 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder per avocado
• Sugar or honey to sweeten (add as you go)

Blend it all together and pop in the fridge for 30 mins.

#nomnomnom

Hookland Hootenanny

Had such a lovely day yesterday.

My questions about Hookland finally started to get out of control, so arranged to have a Skype chat with David to fill in the blanks. 

What was going to be a quick Q&A turned into a four hour discussion on folklore! So enjoyable.

You can follow along with Hookland at @HooklandGuide and David at @cultauthor

Also, every Thursday, Twitter goes wild for #FolkloreThursday/@FolkloreThurs

I think David's writing something for their website. You can also catch him at the Spirits of Place Symposium in Liverpool next month. If you get the chance, go - he's endlessly fascinating on all things mythological. 

Hookland is starting to feel like something really special. I know there are other authors and artists starting to develop projects around it. It feels like a centre point for creative collaboration.

There's an anthology in the pipeline. Once Creeper's Cottage hits 20,000 I think I'm going to step back for a week to see whether I can develop something suitable for that and catch up on a couple of blog articles I owe.

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with Creeper's progress via this tab.

CCTV makes us all data ghosts except in Hookland, where the cameras have a lot more actual ghosts to focus on. pic.twitter.com/sVXoffySz4

— Hookland (@HooklandGuide) March 8, 2016

Creepy 15

Just taken Creeper's Cottage to 15,000 words.

Now we're getting somewhere.

I'm having to put a few placeholders in. Hookland is highly complex. David's written a writer's guide akin to something like Titan. There's a lot of detail in there, down to the newspapers printed across Hookland, the parliamentary breakdown, and local cuisine.

On the one hand, that's tough because you have to stop and fact check a lot of stuff. I mentioned before, it's a bit like Historical Fiction in the amount of research it requires. That can be quite time consuming, and some things even David maybe doesn't know yet, so I need to pop a [descriptive] or [name] holder in there until he can clarify. One of my main questions at the moment is whether the Hookland Messenger is a broadsheet or a tabloid.

That's really the level of detail I'm aiming for.

On the other hand, it can be a blessing. Imagining stuff takes a lot of time. Yes, there are the odd moments when things just happen spontaneously, flowing from your noggin like it was placed there by some mad musey genius. But, most of the time, it's work. As you may know from my tweets:

So Marion, the life of a writer, what's it like? Well, for the past three hours I've been looking up swear words in Polish. #amwriting

— Marion Grace Woolley (@AuthorMGW) March 12, 2016

Every time you try to come up with a fictional place, character name, publication, you need to take a moment to Google whether it's been done before, and consider whether it's dramatic enough, realistic enough, too cheesy, room for more cheese...

Having a manual that cuts ninety per cent of that out can be a real advantage. I think some writers dislike working within other people's worlds, because they really enjoy inventing their own. I do too, but when you're on novel number eight, you kind of welcome a breather.

So, things are going well. I'm enjoying it. I have a fairly good sense of where this story is headed, though I mysteriously stumbled upon a Polish girl about five thousand words back, and she's quickly becoming a mainstay of the plot. In the words of Jamie Lawson: I wasn't expecting that.

It's not just Polish swear words I've been mining Google for. They say writers exist to confound the NSA. Some things I've looked up in the past twenty-four hours include:

• Cool motorcycles from 2012
• Can you pull a snail out of its shell?
• Stately homes near Manchester
• Stately homes near Birmingham
• Breaching (boys) - (that was a thing)
• Removing grouting
• Lime-ash mortar
• Mechanical winches
• Hydrochloric/muriatic acid 
• Hairstyles of the 1600s/1700s/1800s
• 3D/laser measuring equipment
• Kriegsmarine U-boat
• German/Polish navy of WWII
• Hardy bedding shrubs
• Latin mottoes
• Baby names

Relating to that second one, I don't really want to go into why I needed to now whether you can pull a snail out of its shell, but in the process of researching this, I stumbled across this story, and it had me in tears. Better (or worse, from the snail's perspective) than any work of fiction. I think I'm traumatised for life.

I've also been raiding Google Image, as I sometimes do, for character ideas. Writing is simply painting with words. Most of the time I can paint by imagination, but sometimes it helps to have a proverbial fruit bowl. 

Main characters usually need something that makes them stand out. I'm basing Lord Evermore around this image of Arnauld de Beaufort. He was born quite-a-little-lot later than my character needs to be, but I like his style. Especially his hair. So I'm nicking it.

Hookland & Creeper's Cottage

Well, here we go again.

The Children of Lir is tucked up safe and sound with Ghostwoods, in the queue for edits. 

Secret Order of the Literati is out with beta readers.

So, next up I'm working on Creeper's Cottage.

You may notice, on the back of Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran, there's a glowing endorsement from a writer named David Southwell.

David's someone I've been in touch with through my publisher.

I often rave about #FolkloreThursday, which is an absolutely fantastic Twitter trend every, err, Thursday (doh!). They've even got a Folklore Thursday website up.

David's got a project called Hookland, which feeds into that.

In its own words, Hookland is:

[T]he psychogeography of a place that doesn’t exist built around the real myth circuits, Albionic shadows and actual places of a 1970s childhood. Stories told in the form of the sort of travel that used to be given away at petrol stations, a cultural artifact from when the TV news carried UFO sightings and ghosts on their nightly bulletins along with reports of IRA bombs.

It's a lost county in England where all the folklore you've ever heard of finds its home. 

I'm really excited by David's project, because it's a sort of creative commons playground for artists. He's busy working on The Phoenix Guide to Strange England, which is the accompanying guidebook to Hookland, and there's already a Wirter's Bible for those participating in an upcoming anthology.

Creeper's Cottage is a story I've had rattling about in my brain since visiting The Black Country Museum last October.

Creeper, in this instance, doesn't relate to a climbing vine or a feathered fowl, but to a creeper thief, the kind that steals into your bedroom at night whilst you sleep. So, I suppose Thief's Cottage would work as well, though perhaps less... well, creepy.

Anyway. 

It was going to be a novel in its own right, but the idea happened to coincide with learning about all of David's stuff, and it just seemed to fit together that the whole thing should be set in Hookland.

The manuscript is at a piddling 8,000 words at the moment, hardly even born. I started, then had to put it on hold whilst Secret Order took off. Now that's out of the way, I'm really excited to be returning to it. Even though it's a work of complete fantasy, the research for it is almost as heavy as historical fiction, as half of the places and characters already exist in David's world. Although Hookland is all about collaboration, it's important that the stuff I'm writing isn't directly contravening anything he's already conjured up. The beauty of any story set in Hookland is that it needs to fit seamlessly into that psychosphere. 

The past few months have been great fun. I've always wanted to rewrite The Children of Lir - check. I've always wanted to take a shot at a trilogy - check. I've always wanted to try collaborating on a decent project - underway.

I'm really enjoying the creativity I'm feeling at the moment. 

Gábor Csigás

I'd just like to take a moment to pay homage to a member of the Ghostwoods team who just spreads joy wherever he points his cursor. Gábor Csigás is the graphic designer at Ghostwoods Books in charge of cover art, and he's an absolute genius. Below are some of his works, including my novel Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran. There's an article showing how he created that cover on the Ghostwoods website. If you're interested in commissioning him, he can be reached via Twitter and his website.

Sharing Secrets

It is done.

Eight days of edits, 1,087 words and almost three pages added. So that's pushed it up over the 80,000 mark, which is satisfying.

I think I'm happy with it.

The Secret Order of the Literati, Book I is about ready to meet its first friendly beta readers. Little nervous, as it's not what I usually write. I've been heavily into literary historical fiction lately, what with Those Rosy Hours at Mazandaran and the forthcoming Children of Lir. 

This is a total departure from poetics. Fast-paced and fantastical. Hugely influenced by people like Borges (The Library of Babel, The Book of Sand), Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind) and Sloan (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore) in terms of magical realism, though I may just have stepped over into full-blown crazy town. 

Really, I just wanted to have some fun.

Try something new.

I've always wanted to attempt a trilogy. This is me taking a shot at an opener. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, well, back to the drawing board.

I'll be dedicating this one to Christiane. I get the sense she really would have enjoyed it. So, even if it doesn't get picked up, I think I've created something worthwhile. 

Nothing left to do but see if it can swim.

Taking a couple of days off to catch up on some other stuff, but then it's back to the keyboard to crack on with Creeper's Cottage, a creepy ghostie story I'm planning to set in David Southwell's Hookland.