A Day Off...

I've been hard at it, working on the Sterkarm rewrite, working at school events, at indie publishing... Suddenly I felt a strong need to run away into the hills, stretch the legs and get some fresh air.

I went to the Clent Hills, of course. May all Powers that be bless the National Trust, who saved them for Birmingham.

A View From A Clent  Hill

 It wasn't a sunny day, and rather chilly, but the colours were bright...

I've become quite interested in mushrooms and other fungi. They talk to the trees, are some of the largest living organisms on earth, are as much animals as plants, and have symbiotic relationships with oak-trees.You can eat some of them, and others are interestingly poisonous. What's not to like?

It all makes me rather glumly aware of how much there is to know and how little of my ignorance I am even aware of.

On my way back to the car, I decided to take a more adventurous route, straight down a steep wooded slope. So I started into the trees...

However, I'd hardly taken a step under those trees when I saw an elderly couple - both of them grey-haired and well wrapped up - having a snog. So I withdrew discreetly and left them to it. I even restrained from taking photographs.
     But it just goes to prove that while this is in bloom...

 ... kissing is in season.

Winter Scene - and Pubowrimo 2

Joan Lennon, author and poet, often gives us beautiful photos - she's given us some this year of the snows in Scotland.

So I'm answering with winter scenes from the Clent Hills, near Birmingham - and invite you along on the walk my friend and I took.

Icy ruts and puddles at the bottom of the hill.

There wasn't a lot of snow, in fact. Much of it was thick frost. But it was proper cold. Colour us blue.

Near the start of  the climb.

Climbing up - cold but sunny.

The top of the hill - blue sky and snow

On top of Clent Hill there is an entirely fake stone circle. It's made of concrete. Despite that, it can look quite dramatic.

Oooh, but it was taters up there, in the teeth of the wind. We started thinking fondly of the pub.

On the way back down, a favourite old tree.

Back at the car we spotted this character on the mooch. He hung about, posing hopefully for quite a while, but unfortunately, we hadn't any mealworms, or even bread, about our persons. Perhaps next time.

 With cold fingers, toes, ears and noses, we went off to the pub for another pubowrimo. Soft leather sofas, cider, and scribbling on scrap paper or in notebooks. Again, it worked. The friend wrote over 700 words - not as many as last week, he says, because he crossed out a lot. He's still very happy with what he did write, as it's all good, solid progression - and without pubowrimo he probably wouldn't have written it at all.

I'd made a couple of previous attempts at writing my piece at home. It's a part where one character - first person narration - realises that another character is not the nice, ordinary person she took her to be, but, in fact, a malevolent danger to her family - and who has caused most of the trouble they've experienced recently.

The problem was making it convincing that the POV character would come to this conclusion - without making the character herself appear deluded - and keeping the reader engaged while the reasons for the conclusion are spelled out.

I hadn't made much progress at home. I kept thinking, not enough reason! - Boring! In preparation for pubawrimo, I went back through my file and made a list of all the clues that, taken together, might reasonably set alarm bells ringing for my character. I took this list, and the last couple of printed-off pages of my book to the pub with me.

And again, once in the pub with a cider, the words just appeared from whatever strange, subconscious cave they were lurking in. There was some fairly arresting/interesting chat going on at the table near me - "It's by far the best house up there, but it's haunted by the ghost of a child," for instance, said in a completely matter-of-fact way, as if mentioning that the garden was a bit small - but somehow the writing went on despite this, for the full hour.

I managed 2,235 words. I'm not totally happy with it. I think I can improve on it, make it more darkly comic - one of my aims in the book is to make it frightening and funny - but it's something to work with.The words wouldn't be there at all if it wasn't for this exercise.

And my agent is phoning me this week, so useful to have on-going work to talk about.

Blue Remembered Clent Hill

I went bluebell looking again for what will probably be the last time this year.  They don't last long.  These views are from Clent Hill.

On Clent Hill, you pass from bright sunshine, where the bluebells are a pale sky-blue, into the shadows of trees, where the flowers become a deeper, more violet blue.  But their wonderful scent is always the same.

There's even the occasional white bluebell.

And here are bluebells beneath a blue sky.  The birds were yelling all around us - sounding like creaky gates and tin whistles, but nevertheless singing peace into our breasts.  For that hour or so, walking in the sun and bluebell scent, I couldn't have been happier.

Bluebell Looking

I love the colour blue. I think there's no other colour as vibrant in all its tints and shades; and I love blue flowers. Germander speedwell, cornflowers, forget-me-nots, delphiniums, monkshood. And bluebells.
Every year I look forward keenly to the flowering of the bluebells. I watch their rosettes of dark green, strap-like leaves. I watch the stalks appearing. And as soon as I see one flowering in some crack in a wall, I head for the Clent Hills.

The Clent Hills are a National Trust property, north of Birmingham. Every spring, on Walton Hill, the ground under the trees on the hillside turns blue with bluebells. On Clent Hill, the flowers grow on the open hillside, in the sun, and you can look over miles of unbroken blue. Such stretches of bluebells are a sign of ancient, undisturbed woodland. It takes a long, long time for such masses of bluebells to seed and grow.

Walking along these paths I walked through a dense cloud of fragrance: bluebells are wild hyacinths. No wonder folklore says that, if you fall asleep in a bluebell wood, you may go mad, or be transported into another world. They are Elvish, eldritch flowers, according to legend.

They are certainly blue. Sky-blue, dark-blue, purple-blue in the tree shadows. I love them. Next week I'll be here again, and the next week, until they all die. But next year they'll flower again, and I'll be back again, to look at bluebells.