New Beginnings

 It has recently occurred to me (although occurred is too passive a word for any of the realisations this year has brought)that theme and consistency just aren’t quite working for me. 

Not at the moment anyway. 

Certainly, I’ve stuck to things in the past, stuck like glue. But all I can really stick to now is the actual act of doing whatever it is that I’m doing. What I read will not always be in my usual genres, what I write might not be what I used to write, what I paint might be different to what I would have painted a few years ago. 

In short, I’ve changed. 

In truth, we all have. 

The selves we used to know intimately, completely have slipped away to make way for new selves. 2019 feel like another era, not just another year. It’s possible that as the oft quoted line from “The Go-Between” almost says “The past is another country” and one we can’t go back to. 

So, time to start over. 

Where do I begin? 

I suppose, with the things that go on. Do I still love art and history and literature? Yes, yes, yes to all of those! Am I a social butterfly? No. I wasn’t before and I’m even less so now. My social anxiety has social anxiety at the moment and I have no idea how long that will take to rebuild, but there you go. 

 Do I still like vintage clothes? Yes, in a new floaty, I don’t want anything to pinch or nip after a year of wearing indoor dresses. Yes, in a pass me all the soft, pretty, pastel colours I hardly ever wore before because right now I want to feel like a meadow, or a drifting stream.

 Do I still write? Yes, but differently. I mean, I’ve even been experimenting with the first person narrator (unreliable ones too) which I used to hate and now… No idea why that changed. Maybe, I’m just enjoying escaping into other peoples minds for a little while? Whatever it is, I’ll roll with it, that and occasionally using that most horrific of things to my uni creative writing tutor: the present tense. I can’t describe how much he hated present tense. I can’t describe how much I no longer care! 

Am I still creating art? 

OH YES! Though it’s gotten both cuter and, err, spookier recently. There will be festive ghostie images appearing later in the year if that floats your boat or the boat of anyone you know, love, or count as a frenemie. 

And now we come to that last big question. It’s probably the most relevant question in terms of this blog too. 

Am I still wearing perfume? 

Well… 

Ahhh… 

Yes… 

Sort of. In short it’s lots of roses. I’m loving rose perfumes all day, all year round. 

I’m dipped in Elizabethan rose from Penhaligons, drenched in Ralph Lauren’s Romance, dabbing on Yardley’s English rose (it’s actually pretty delightful for a scent so ubiquitous so do try it out). I’m here for all the roses, and I’m being completely comforted by them. 

Will I change from roses? 

Eventually, just not yet. So, if I talk about perfumes, they are going to be rose perfumes and that’s just one of those inescapable facts. 

So, there it is, the start of the start, what’s written on the other side of that new leaf.I hope, whoever you are now you find happiness and joy. I’m certainly questing after those particular questing beasts on a daily basis!

Bird Bones (a short story).

                                                                                                               ©Holly Cox 2018

 The sound of birdsong woke her in the cool half light of morning. She knew if she stretched her arm out beyond the limits of the blankets she would feel the chill and the little rush of possibilities that a new morning might bring.

For a few delicious minutes she was young again, in the country, and beyond her window the whole world waited for her. Then the dull ache in her joints came back to remind her and she recalled that the birdsong now came not from the warm living bodies of birds but from the clock radio on her bedside table.

‘Oh,’ she said, out loud. Then, hearing how the word hung so alone in the air, she said again, ‘oh.’

Minutes passed, the spell broken she rolled over and tuned away from the station of birdsong; squared her shoulders at the grown up responsibility to listen, each and every day, to the world’s misfortunes.

She studied the wallpapers pattern as she listened and weighed up all the different options she had considered for its replacement. She had seen a pleasant floral in town the other day and her friend, Elisa, had suggested a light stripe like a seaside chalet so that, with a few prints and some shells lined up upon the mantelpiece, she might always have summer in her house. Elise even claimed to know where she might get a stuffed seagull, a real one, to affix to the ceiling.

‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘too macabre.’ The floral would be better.

She stayed in bed until the news had exhausted all calamities and the weather man had confidently predicted many smaller inconveniences. Finally she pushed herself up over the edge of the bed; her feet patting about for the soft edges of her slippers whilst she felt on the table for her glasses.

                                                                           ***

The cars passing in the street and the kettle boiling on its stand set her teacups rattling on the shelf. So frail in their rattling that she feared they would spring and shake to slivers. Hurrying to catch her favourite with its pattern of Chinese songbirds; she tried to hum as she filled the cup with tea but the tune seemed to perish on her lips.

Seated at the little table with her tea she found her gaze drawn to her hand, pale, thin fingers clawed around the handle of her teacup. She saw and she could not help but be reminded of the bird’s skulls her brother kept lined up on his bedroom shelf.

“Tha’s a sparrow, tha’s a little kind of lapwing and tha’ big one, tha’s a crow.” He admired them for their lightness, for the way the sunlight filtered through them when you held them up. He had told her it was the lightness that allowed them to soar up into the sky and be utterly free.

She recalled too how his adored collection used to make her school friends shudder and he, in turn, thrilled with a boys delight at their horror. “T’is what we all come to in the end,” he said and laughed.

He had been right in the end. For was she not now dry and fragile as bird bones? She might be perfectly pleased with the transformation too if only she truly could lift up and fly away.

Capturing a mood...

Once again this week I am wrestling with the short story. No specific short story but rather the genre as a whole. I love reading short stories, don't get me wrong, they are utterly beautiful works of economy which should be more widely available (it's a tragedy how few magazines and newspapers outside of the literary sphere publish short stories these days and an equal tragedy that so many genre magazines which do have to reach out for crowdfunding).

No, my specific problem with short stories is with writing them. I want to, I love to but they seem to either stick firmly on the page and work or swell hopelessly towards a less than satisfactory conclusion before I stick them in the drawer (often metaphorically since so much writing takes place on computers these days) to return to when I am ready. Well, this week, I decided to pull out a few and rework them, clearing the desk before NaNoWriMo begins in November (yes, I do do NaNo but we'll come to that in a later post). I had ideas for endings and plans drawn up. All I had to do now was get myself into the right mood for rewriting, which meant getting myself into the crisp Autumnal mood which pervades so many of my stories, no matter what time of year I write them in. This seasonal repetition may have something to do with the fairy tale influence I spoke of a few weeks ago for in the land of fairy tale it is almost always Autumn or Winter, the leaves or the snow are always falling, the land is in the midst of a perpetual transformation.

Conjuring a mood for writing is not dissimilar to conjuring the mood of a character, after all, when one writes, one writes from within the world ones characters inhabit. The autumn leaves which crunch beneath their feet are leaves from your own memory, the hot spiced tea they drink you drank once; for those elements which one cannot experience first hand, a visit to the Great Exhibition or life in Stuart England one must plunge into research and imagination until you feel confident enough to imagine the scent of smoggy air, the exhilaration of seeing new inventions, the feel of velvet doublet and hose.

Tea is always a good place to start when getting into a warm writing mood, Assam, Chai, English Breakfast: whichever you pick you are bound to need a boundless supply beside you as you write (unless you favour coffee), scent is just as important: but I would say that, with my love of perfume. When I spoke of Gothic writing I said I could well imagine my character's wearing YSL Opium or L'Artisan's Fou d'Absinth because they fitted with their personalities, but the perfume of autumn may be even more subjective, heavy and rich, crisp and spicy, the scent holds the memories of the season or of the season as you've fictionalised it. So, I plucked one story from the pile and tried to imagine what that setting would smell like: a small European village at the end of the 19th Century. A village trying to carve out a place for itself as a desirable holiday destination with a twist.
The perfumes I came up with were: Etat Libre d'Orange's Like This, a perfume of Pumpkin, musk, and Spice inspired by the beautiful Tilda Swinton and designed to capture "a magic potion of home"  . It's a beautiful scent which one can easily imagine wafting through cottage windows, out of inns and from bonfires where sweet treats were roasted and toasted.  The orange spiciness of Chanel's Coco, the incense of Caron's Parfum Sacre and the woody warmth of Penhaligon's Hammam Bouquet added the intense and ancient aroma of the castle overlooking the village. All those centuries of cedar wood fires and ladies arriving for dinner parties in the latest fashionable blend must have sunk into the tapestries on the walls and lingers in the smooth wood floors. Even when abandoned the castle, I imagined, would have been busy accumulating scents, indolic jasmine, lavender from the gardens; all waiting to flood into the nostrils of anyone who opened the door and stepped inside.

A spray of each, a little tea, a moment to absorb the mood and...

The scented spell woven by the perfumes worked and I was soon typing away, weaving new scenes and sharpening others. At the end of all of this, the short stories I was working on are nearly completed and there are ideas for two or three more maturing in my notebooks. Colder winter short stories which will require their own perfumes.

Writing Wednesday... Immortal words (hopefully)...

October is upon us, the air has turned chill, the leaves are falling and Halloween beckons to us from months end. 

What better time then to whisper of the Gothic?

I mentioned once before that, although my most recent book was more in the genre of fairy tale it's predecessors were Gothic novels, so let me add a little more detail on that.

Three or so years ago when I was still studying for my degree in English Literature, and taking modules in Creative Writing, I happened to watch a film which will remain nameless in which saccharine creatures of the night emoted boldly. I'd  read Dorian Gray and Dracula by this stage and was beginning to immerse myself in the works of Gautier and his fellow flaneurs of the Parisian dusk. This may help to explain why I emerged from that viewing experience with a rueful shake of the head, certain that these were not my creatures of the night. In the morning I plucked one of my notebooks from the teetering to be written in pile (like a TBR pile but blank) and put pen to paper. I wrote the first four chapters in one day before being pulled away by the task of writing an essay, then of revising. For a few months the novel slept until the years exams were over and I could return myself to it's pages in earnest. 

The rest just flowed after that, as it turned out a large cast of flamboyant immortals living in my head who wanted to make their presence felt. 

Their home was the 19th century, their habits not dependent on the moon and their lust for life and love quite extravagant. Theirs was a Gothic existence complete with stone arches and peacock feathers.

The research was as pleasurable as the writing, books on the Exposition Universal of 1889, the art of the Baroque, the English Civil War, Oscar Wilde and Victorian fashion were greedily devoured. Museums were visited and notes were taken. At the risk of sounding pretentious (always a danger for me) I wanted to immerse myself as deeply as possible in as atmospheric a world as possible.

Spending time reading anything and everything Gothic was no hardship to me. Every book was a delight and the Gustave Dore prints pinned to my notice board for inspiration were (and still are) a pleasure to look at. 

Even my perfume choices took on a Gothic edge with plenty of heavy, musky and alluring scents taking up space on my dressing table; my scent of the day today is Yves Saint Laurent's delicious Opium. Heavy folds of sensual amber, myrrh and vanilla sharpened by  by mandarin orange. It's not a perfume easily overlooked, it announces itself with a seductive fanfare and keeps on radiating. It wants, above all, not to be forgotten. What could be more appropriate for immortals?

The characters I wrote would also admire the scandalous idea of a perfume inspired by the 19th Centuries most mythologized vice: opium itself. I suspect they would also have adored my current favourite: Fou d'Absinthe by L'Artisan Parfumer too, such a sharp tribute to their green tipple of choice (they have a reverse colour wheel thing going on in their drinks cabinets). 

  Unlike other immortals I'm afraid my creations could never make it in the 21st Century, the harsh brightness of electric light has none of the glamour of gas and candle, the car can never be a sensitive or easy to talk to as the horse. They would admire the great steps forward humanity has made, yes. By necessity they long ago abandoned the default prejudices of their own eras and are sublimely glad to see that such shadows are fading, slowly, but fading. However, the 1980's with their plastic fantastic show glamour were their Waterloo. Not for them white powder with red braces; no, they would far rather be sipping Absinthe with Wilde and since that is not an option they have faded back into the shadows. You might see them occasionally, on a winters evening, wrapped in velvet as they scurry from a museum or stroll along the banks of the Seine. The hat of a hipster might make them shake their heads and smile because they remember when such things were new and bold. In many ways my creature are not so different from myself. But that's the nature of the Gothic, it should possess our dreams and our inner selves. 

The book I began three years ago is now the first of a series and currently out looking for an agent to represent them whilst i keep writing and, of course, I'm still reading gothically. 

Writing Wednesday... The land of Fairy Tale

I have always been fascinated by Fairy Tales. Something about them sings to the blood. That might be a strange way to describe it but Fairy Tales deal in the elements of existence, blood, water, snow, woods and shadows. They make our dreams flesh and our fears manifest. When I think of fairy tales, I think of a low hanging apple, bright red and crisp but perhaps when one bites into the flesh one will find a pale little worm writhing away from your sharp toothed kiss.
Strange truth, it has been many years since I last found a worm in an apple. Sometimes I find the thin paths they make. Perhaps the worms have begun to tell fairy tales about people and know to run away in fright.
Like many children of the 20th Century my first introduction to fairy tales was through the bright, wide eyed fantasies of Disney. Like many children of the 1990’s my first princess was Belle, heroine of “Beauty and the Beast”. How I wanted to be her!
Strangely, if I try to recall Belle now, almost twenty years after our first encounter I can call to mind only the rose and the bell jar of the film. A few notes of songs linger but it’s the rose I can see clearly. Year by year, the image becomes a little more steampunk, darker and more Victorian.
Interesting, since my relationship with fairy tales did not end with those flickering cinematic images.
I moved on from Disney to my Mothers collection of Arthur Rackham’s Grimm and Angela Barrett’s Snow White, to a world where Queen’s expressions shift imperceptibly like sweet glaciers as they lean out from their windows and marvel at the contrast of a drop of blood on the snow.
From Rackham and Barrett I moved on to Angela Carter and the reinvention of fairy tales, tracked down editions of Grimm’s fairy tales which included those tales which they included in their notebooks and not in their finished editions for the fear of upsetting the children.
Now, I have moved on to Marina Warner and her marvellous analysis of Fairy Tales: “From The Beast to The Blond”. Since this beautiful tome arrived in the post, my second hand edition from 1994 even came with the delightful bonus of newspaper reviews clipped out and tucked in by it’s first owner, I have been fixed to the page absorbing detail after detail.

 From Anne of Austria and Louis XIV’s adulation of St. Anne and childlike spontaneous spirituality influencing the emergence of Fairy Tale culture in 17th Century France (not to mention womens writing and the Frond) to the symbolism of hair in fairy tale, every page one turns overflows with gems a little like a brush through enchanted hair.
The path into the land of fairy is a strange one, as much in the shadows of the woods as in the clearings and who knows where it will finally lead you.
In my case, it has led me back to my own writing. Whilst my first books were very much the product of Victorian Gothic, Stoker and Wilde ran in their blood, my most recent novel and the ideas in my notebooks have been rather more fairy tale than hansom cab in the fog (of course, some have been a little bit of both).
When I write I often begin with an image I know has drifted down from the vast library of fairy tale knowledge. I begin writing with falling snow, a crisp apple, a fat red rose, a monstrous key or a glass coffin dancing in my head. I have developed a slight obsession with a version of “Beauty and the Beast” recorded by the Grimm's called “The Winter Rose” and find it’s themes dropping like snowflakes into my paragraphs. Perhaps that is only natural, after all we now know that audiences have been delighted by that particular story for over 5,000 years just as Cinderella and her lost slipper have struck a note with thousands of generations and across continents. Something old stirs in these tales, maybe we don’t yet know how old? But I’ve played with that idea before, asked if stories so strange might have roots of truth
Once you begin to pursue fairy tales you risk toppling over and falling headlong, like Alice, down a rabbit hole of imagery and allegory, see I am doing it now. I don’t expect to ever be an Angela Carter, to her alone was left some rare knowledge of the human heart. But I cannot help but follow the thread of fairy tales and ask my own questions: what would have happened if Cinderella saved herself, if Sleeping Beauty were a man, if Little Red Riding Hood had not gone into the woods?
Such exploration can take strange paths but they can pay off well, Terry Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm is far from a conventional retelling of fairy tales or of the lives of the brothers themselves but I adore it’s playful inventions and the way it conjures old imagery into fabulous new forms. Authors as disparate as Tanith Lee, Neil Gaiman and Helen Oyeyemi have all done remarkable things with fairy tale building blocks Nothing is set in stone, the fairy tales are not exhausted as a source of inspiration, please do pick them up and have fun, from ancient lips to our modern ears they are still singing.