charles barrow's writing

The Hardy Tree can be found in the Old St. Pancras Churchyard in London. It is an Ash tree (Fraxinus Excelsior). It is named for the author Thomas Hardy. Before he gained fame as a novelist he worked as a trainee architect and the task fell to him, in 1865, to relocate the tombs and bodies in this churchyard because the expanding railways needed the land. He re-arranged the headstones around the ash tree as you see them in this photo. Old St. Pancras Churchyard also features in the Charles Dickens novel Tale of Two Cities, written in 1859. Photo is the author's own.

I recently watched singer Adele being interviewed by Graham Norton. She sang some old hits and some tracks from her new album 25. I was struck, watching her sing, how very old fashioned she seemed as a performer. I mean old fashioned in a good way. She's like a chanteuse from another era, like an Edith Piaf. Bette Midler is a more contemporary equivalent. Like them, Adele's song is the story of her life and she lives it in the telling. Some of her freshly minted new songs sound like classics already.

I'm at a loss really to know what to say about this piece of woodcraft. I came across it during a walk through the local forest, a forest famed for its red squirrels. It's obviously meant to be a squirrel but it looks like an alien. I would usually tag a photo with the term 'Writing inspiration' but not this one. This is just weird and I wanted to share the weirdness.  Photo is the author's own

I've been reading short stories recently; micro-fiction, flash fiction. This morning I've been dipping into 'Stories On The Go- 101 Very Short Stories By 101 Authors.' Edited by Andrew Ashling. This book was the culmination of an idea launched by Hugh Howey (author of the Wool trilogy) on 'Kboards', a forum for Kindle readers that has attracted a community of indie authors too, it tells me in the introduction at the front of the book. 'Stories On The Go.' is an anthology of indie writing and each of the 101 stories is of 1,000 words or less and can be read on laptop, tablet or phone in under five minutes, even when you're on the go. I tore through a dozen tales this morning in no time so I know that last fact to be true. As ever, with an anthology, I found I liked some stories more than I did others, and they were of varying quality. Each story is followed by a short author bio and I fancy I could soon tell by the quality of the story writing wheth

I spent a few hours in Portsmouth City yesterday. Charles Dickens was born there. I'd like to have visited the house where he was born, now a museum, but it was closed. There is also a fine statue of him but I didn't find it in my wanderings. Arther Conan Doyle also lived in Portsmouth for a while. He wrote his first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet while he was living there. I did find the spot where he used to live but his house is gone and there is just a small purple plaque on the wall of the building that stands there now. So, I was breathing the same air that two literary giants breathed but I have no souvenirs to show for it, no better understanding of them as writers or people. I feel rather disappointed that I didn't try harder to track these great men down, I merely glanced at the Conan Doyle plaque and then moved on. I could have walked out of my way to find the Dickens statue, that wouldn't have put me out. But I didn't. An opportunity missed.

I saw a little girl running around in the park with a feather in her hair. It was pale grey and black, a Seagull's wing feather perhaps? The girl's Mother had tucked the feather into the elastic band that held her ponytail in place. It was upside down, quill end skyward. That's what struck me, the perfectly casual rightness of it being the wrong way up. What struck me also was the pleasing lack of regard for cleanliness on the Mother's part. A bird feather in her daughter's hair and not an anti-bacterial wipe in sight. There is probably a Health and Safety ruling against this, at the very least Social Services would want to poke their nose in. What I most liked about the scene is that it spoke of a carefree childhood, both the little girl's now and the Mother's in memory. My Sister found this hawk feather. I say hawk feather because she thinks it might have come from some kind of raptor, although as I post the picture now it occurs to me it might have come

I found this feather on the lawn, while doing some gardening for my mother. Earlier I'd been watching some Goldfinches on her bird feeders. She'd put out some tiny, black Nyger seeds especially for them. Goldfinches hang around in small groups. There are several collective nouns for a group of Goldfinches; a charm, a chirm, a drum, a troubling. They really are no trouble in your garden beyond a lively clamour they set up, you'd be lucky to have them visit, they are beautiful, but I like the sound of a troubling of Goldfinches. They are small birds with red faces, white cheek bars, black caps, buff coloured bodies, and black wings with a brilliant yellow flash, and some black and white striped wing feathers. So this found feather may belong to one of them. It's tiny, I should have put a 10p coin in the picture for scale. I never used to like bird feathers, would never have picked one up, I thought they were unclean, I'd been told that as a child, told I'd catch

I listened to poet and author Frances Leviston talking on Radio 4's Front Row about her short story 'Broderie Anglaise'. It was nominated for the BBC National Short Story Award. She mentioned that she used the term broderie anglaise (the name for a needlework technique) as a 'place holder', a term she dropped into a sentence as she was writing so as not to stop the flow of words, fully intending to return and replace it with a different, more considered one. But, as it turned out, when she returned she realised she'd got it exactly right first time, so much so that she used it as the name for her story. My ears pricked up when I heard this. I've used place holders many times in my writing, doing exactly what Frances did, just dropping a similar, an associated, an 'almost the right word' word into a sentence when I can't think of the perfect one and don't want to pause or I'll grind to a halt. Usually, as I read back through what I'

I've never claimed to be good at taking photos, far from it, I'll admit to knowing that I'm actually rather bad. But that doesn't stop me from taking snaps of things that interest me, especially if they have a relevance to my writing. That relevance may not be obvious to the casual observer (note below the shrouded statues and the 'Beware of the Hound' pictures) but they do all feed my imagination, spark ideas, and therefore count as relevant, even research to me. This photo is a good case in point. A building of rooks in a tree. A building being a collective noun for rooks*. It was a windy day so the tree was shaking but I'm sure I contributed to the general blurryness by adding a hefty dose of camera shake to proceedings. I'm also sure that almost everyone else would have deleted this picture and tried again but to my untrained, and unartistic, eye there is an element of menace that I like, it says something to me about how the people in my stories,

I'm keen to put John Mann to bed. If you've read either of my published stories then you'll understand that sentence on more than one level. What I'm saying is that I'm impatient to finish this last John Mann story. I want it finished so I can move on to writing other stories. It's been a great experience, one big, long learning experience. And it will, for me, have been a big achievement. A trilogy of self-published stories? I'll be very proud to admit to that. But I've been thinking about what I'll do afterwards. I want to avoid resting on my laurels (whatever they are) for too long, because that period of 'afterwards' could easily stretch from weeks into months or even (whisper it) years of resting, doing nothing. Any hot irons (whatever they are) will be colder than a very long-dead thing. So I've been making plans, sketchy plans, but plans nontheless for more John Mann stories, short stories, follow-up stories, linked stories, preque

Guilt has spurred me to check back here. I wrote in a previous post that I find I can be writing here or I can be writing my book and I don't always find it easy to keep up with both simultaneously. So I haven't been here but I have been working on John Mann book 3, At Day's End. I've been writing and editing. It has been slow going but I'm still on track to meet my own deadline, so I'm not worried. I've also been planning an exciting research trip back to London in December. I've got some story wrinkles to iron out, and I'm looking forward to hitting the streets on my fact finding mission. I want to research facts certainly but also sights, sounds, and smells. I want to make sure I capture something of the atmosphere of the big smoke.

With a geographical nudge this beach made it into a scene in The Darkening Days of John Mann. The photos are the author's own.

I just turned around and walked quickly away when I saw this. Photo is the author's own.

So the Government continues to slash public spending and public services continue to suffer. Ensuring that those with the least have access to even less.  There is more talk of yet more library closures. Those that survived the first few rounds of cuts by tightening their belts until they could barely breathe will finally have their oxygen machines switched off completely. A defender of this policy missed the point, I thought, on a radio interview when he claimed that libraries are an irrelevance because all the literature that they contain is available on the internet. All apologists for library closures miss the point I reckon when they offer up the internet as an alternative library.  I think there is an obvious distinction to be made here. Literature is available to download from the internet, books aren't. Books as physical objects are available to borrow free from a library. Books as beautiful physical objects to be handled and cherished. As a child I fell in love with

I'm reading a science fiction thriller at the moment. The Stone Man by Luke Smitherd. It's an ebook, self published I'd guess. It's gripping stuff, I'm enjoying it so far. Someone should make it into a movie. Reading the book I was reminded of this photo of a stone man I took a while ago in the grounds of an Abbey. It's not anything like the stone man described in Smitherd's story, his is featureless. I remembered this one looking as though he was in pain or torment, perhaps frozen in time as Medusa turned him to stone. Now I see the photo again I'm thinking he looks more rapturous, with his face turned to heaven. Photos are the author's own.

This is a Victorian ice house. A curious brick structure built into a bank of earth in the woods. The doorway leads into a short tunnel. Beyond that grille is a circular brick chamber descending, perhaps, fifteen feet into the ground, this is where the compacted ice would have been stored, covered in layers of straw. It's light but damp and cold in there which is the point I suppose. It would make a great prison cell, or place to hide a dead body. The photos are the author's own.

'When he was younger he would race for a dare between the city's livestock pens, terrified of the big farmyard beasts grunting and snorting beyond the slats. Now, he might just drop by on a blue moon to trade with the butchers for jerky and biltong, though there were fewer animals to be seen these days and then mainly sheep, with their black faces boney and their eyes uncurious.'  An excerpt from John Mann - At Day's End.  Photo is the author's own.

I've no idea of the story behind this statue. A folk tale maybe? Whatever it is I don't suppose it ends well for the goose. In John Mann's world birds and fowl are a public enemy and no one would choose to get hands-on with either. Photos are the author's own.

I've now lined up my Spring reading. It seems to be quite 'murder and mayhem' heavy. I don't know what that says about my current mood I'm sure. Maybe I'll fit in some lighter themed stuff as well.

I recently read The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, a.k.a. JK Rowling, on my tablet's Kindle app. I'd been wanting to read a 'grown-up' book by JK for a while and I wasn't disappointed. However, there was some weird shit going on with the text formatting. Random words would appear in a much smaller font size, or be italicised for no apparent reason, or change font together. Weird. Weird but comforting. If the JK juggernaut can't get the formatting right then I don't see that I should lose sleep over mine. Of course, I suspect it was probably perfect at the point of sale and simply got mangled by my reader, but this is the problem with ebooks, they are at the mercy of reading devices of varying quality. We never have this problem with printed books, apart from the fact that they are read by optic nerves of varying quality. Customer, 'I want my money back, all the print in this book is out of focus.'  Maybe one day there will be just the on

I've been posting photos under the title 'Sparking Ideas' and the images are beginning to work, to earn their keep. Only this morning I was writing a scene that mentions a statue shrouded in swags of ivy. This is a meld of two images, the first the one of the tendrils of ivy encroaching on the stone eagle (posted previously), and the second this one here, shrouded statues. I'll continue to post further pictures and hope I find inspiration in them. The photo is the author's own.

This gravestone, in the shape of an open book, was only about two foot wide. So, small for a head stone and it's sinking into the ground. Photo is the author's own.

A trip to a grave yard last week produced this photo and the one above. I especially liked this one because of the proximity of the tree and the gravestone. I've heard tell that in the far, long past a person would be buried with an acorn clutched in their hand so that an oak tree would grow out of the heart of them. Photo is the author's own.

I was doing a review of character names in The Stolen Days of John Mann and in The Darkening Days of John Mann. I've made that sound like a very complicated admin task involving a database, or at the very least a spreadsheet, but actually I have all my character names written in columns on a sheet of A4, pinned to the wall above my writing desk. Very low-tech. I had just written in a new, young female character, she'll enter stage right, say her few lines and then exit and probably never be heard from again. But still, I wanted to give her a decent name, and more importantly I didn't want to repeat one I may have used for another minor character. I have a cast of thousands now and can't keep track, hence the name list. Anyway, as I scanned through that list I realised, with a jolt, that I haven't used, discarded, or stored away a single name that has more than two syllables in it. And I don't know why that should be either. But it's odd isn't it? I fel

I started writing this post, in draft, way back in January. After several posts in the closing months of last year detailing the progress of Book 2, The Darkening Days of John Mann, I suddenly leapt to a post declaring it finished and published without me having said anything about the very last part of that process. That is what the bulk of those January scribblings were concerned with, so rather than let them die a quiet death I post them here now.  I published The Darkening Days of John Mann on 26th December 2014. I self-published it in ebook format, on Smashwords.com and was very happy to see it ship quickly to Barnes and Noble. I'm thinking though that I could have chosen a better time of year to launch it, and wonder if its impact wasn't blunted by putting it out at Christmas. At the time I just chose a moment when I had a bit of breathing space in the mad dash that is the festive season. Two weeks prior to launch day I had drawn up a list of some 20 tasks I needed to

I always carry a notebook with me wherever I go. Sometimes more than one. And I'm getting much better at noting down ideas, thoughts, street names (currently), descriptions; anything really that I think I may use later or which just sparks ideas for future (or current) stories.  I've now taken to carrying a camera with me too and taking snaps of things that fire my imagination. And my pictures are 'snaps'. I make no grand claims for them. I've never had a good eye for a photograph. I've been uploading a few here, you may have noticed, and will continue to do so. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, well, as a writer I can't bring myself to agree wholesale with that but I do find a photograph is  a handy way to capture an idea.

Great texture and detail on this feather. Seagull? Magpie? I'm sure someone will set me straight. Photo is author's own.

Eagle statue being reclaimed by the ivy. Photo is author's own.

The Frank James Hospital, East Cowes. Deserted and derelict now, it's an atmospheric old buiding. Photo is author's own.

The London Eye. Photo is author's own

St James Park London. Photo is author's own

Just got back from the first of two story research trips to London. What an amazing, inspiring City. I'm not sure I'd want to live there again (having lived there for a short time as a student) but I love to visit occasionally, and this time I had a very good reason. I went to do some research on some of London's parks for book 3 of John Mann's story, tentatively called John Mann - At Day's End. I'd been to these parks before but this time I needed to explore them, see what of London could be seen from them, generally get a sense of atmosphere, and take photographs. It was a great thing to do because a) research is always fun and I want to be sure I have my facts straight, and b) London is just inspiring and now I feel more energised creatively. 'Tired of London, tired of life.' as someone famous once said. I can't wait to visit again soon.

Part two of John Mann's story, The Darkening Days of John Mann is currently free to download at Smashwords  here  

The first part of John Mann's story, The Stolen Days of John Mann is free to download at Smashwords, Kobo, iTunes, and Barnes and Noble.