charles barrow's writing

I just read Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens, for the first time. I thought I knew the story well; I've seen the film (the musical version) many times. I know, I know, the movies are never like the books, they are never as good, read the book. Well I did, and it surprised me. It's much longer and far more involved, plot wise, than I knew, and with many more characters. Oliver, Fagin, The Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes, and Nancy, are some of Dickens' best known characters, and probably some of the best known in any fiction, and I enjoyed spending more time with them (if you can enjoy spending time with thieves, child abusers and murderers). In fact, this story will linger for a long time. Dickens evokes Victorian London and its people better than anyone.

Here is an image that really intrigues me. Saw this book, on the railway line, on my morning walk to work. Annoyingly I couldn't see what the book's title was. Maybe I should say, intriguingly I couldn't see what the book's title was. It could actually have been a notebook rather than a novel. It looks artfully arranged there, rather than tossed randomly from a passing train window. It is pristine, not at all scuffed. Was it unloved and discarded, or is it missed and mourned? Did the owner have to get rid of the evidence it contained? Is someone else now searching for it? Images like this make really great prompts for stories. Photo is the author's own.

Ok, so, my autumn reading is organised. Being October, the month of Halloween and all things spooky and dead (I guess), I've loaded up with Stephen King books. I've written before about how I used to be a fan in the early days (both his and mine) and devoured titles like Carrie, Salem's Lot, and Pet Semetary but then drifted away to other genres and authors, but have recently returned. And I've become an admirer once again. I suspect people sneer at his writerly skills because he's so popular (and popular can't be quality can it?) and prolific. But he is a really good writer...which is why he is so popular. I loved 11.22.63 and Joyland. And his book On Writing (part biog and part 'How To Write') is a great read with untold amounts of advice and tips on writing and how he pursues the craft. I heartily recommend that to any aspiring authors. So, anyway, I picked up a few of King's titles and will be enjoying them as the evening's draw in and the

I love autumn. I know many people find it melancholic, marking the end of summer as it does, but I love its sights, colours, sounds, and smells. It always lifts my spirits. I've been having a hard time of it lately. I've been struggling with depression and anxiety, brought on by a torrid time at work.  My writing has fallen by the wayside over the last months, and I've not been able to summon the energy to do much about it.  But autumn has been working its magic and I find myself slowly resurfacing and feeling interest in my surroundings and with a sense of urgency about the future. Below are a few of the images that I've been posting to Twitter, on the theme of autumnal. I suppose taking these, and other, photos has been my creative outlet while I've been incapable of writing anything. Photos are the author's own.

A fantastic charity shop find. Pulp Fiction - The Crimefighters. Edited by Otto Penzler, introduction by Harlan Coben. It cost me only 75p, an embarrassingly small amount for such a treasure. It includes stories by such masters of the genre as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and many other writers that are new to me. The cover alone sold it to me, never mind the promise of the stories it contains. It conjures Bogey and Bacall, James Cagney, Edward G Robinson, Gloria Grahame; all dressed in black, harsh white lighting throwing deep shadows across the walls, snarky dialogue delivered through thick clouds of cigarette smoke, to the soundtrack of squealing tyres, and the sharp crack of gunshots. And then it's edited by a guy called Otto, who in the movie would be played by Sydney Greenstreet. I'm kicking around ideas for short stories at the moment, so reading this is research. Honestly, I am working here.

I took this picture 15 years ago. I was walking home from work, along my usual route, and I saw this piece of graffiti, which had appeared overnight, and it stopped me in my tracks. I remember it made me feel uncomfortable to linger in front of it, I felt like a voyeur witnessing the miserable end of someone's relationship, and I felt very guilty taking this photo and freeze framing their pain and despair. It is such a personal message to Theresa from the wo/man who wrote it and yet it's been very publicly declared. All these years later this kind of thing would pop up in someone's Twitter feed, but back then graffiti was about the only option for posting a message to reach an audience. Although the graffiti appeared on a wall only two minutes away from where I lived at the time, I had no idea who the people involved were. I have to assume that Theresa lived nearby and would walk past this wall on a regular basis, perhaps this is even the wall of her house, otherwise what

I didn’t turn up here at all in July. I was absent from many things in July. The day job took a toll through June, and July saw the train come off the tracks. There was no multi-carriage pile up, thankfully, but many weeks have been spent in a siding while repair work has been carried out. But, enough of this train wreck analogy. My health took a nosedive. My physical health (a nasty chest infection) and my mental health too. Stress, anxiety, panic attacks. Not a good state of mind to take into a busy working environment, not that I had much choice in the matter, mind. So, I also took myself off to a doctor and asked to go back on medication, again. It’s been a few years since I had need to take anti-depressants and I seemed to be doing really well, but that’s the thing about mental health issues, they can ambush you at any time. It really doesn’t take much of a real-life issue to nudge you back over the line into illness. So I don’t suppose I’ll ever be able to say, ‘That’s me fixed,

Today is the last day of my fifties. Tomorrow I'll blow out sixty candles on my cake, as I enter a new decade. So I've been doing an inventory of the last ten years. This taking stock is something I'm prone to do on a New Year's Eve usually, I mull over the previous 364 days and count up my high points, my high days and holidays amidst the humdrum, just to prove to myself that I do manage to achieve goals that I set out to reach, that I do join in and contribute, that I don't spend my entire life plugged into Netflix, it just mostly seems that way. Obviously, with a decade to consider, there is a lot more road in the rearview mirror, but don't worry I'm not going to rehash it all here. Suffice to say, there was a big change of location and career, some of those sought after highs, and some low points; neither more, nor less than you might expect really. I also formulated a plan for my future, which is a novelty for me. But the thing that stands out, the th

Really happy to announce that my books are finally available to buy as ebooks on Amazon.co.uk About four years ago I set out, with a plan, to write some books and get them published on Amazon. It's been a long road to get to this point, with lots of ups/downs/caffeine/tantrums/midnight oil burning/fist pumping etc but I finally got here, to this red letter day.

I caught a great shadow on my wall yesterday and took this photo. And now I want to write a noir style crime story so that I can use this image as the book's cover. I've had a great title idea before, and then written a story to hang on it, but it's a first to conceive a cover first. This photo is the author's own.

We have a saying in our family, if someone is being restless and can't settle to anything, 'You're just like Jim Hay's dog.' Apparently the dog always wanted to be somewhere else; outside if he was inside, inside if he was out. Actually, I've not heard it said for a long time. It was something my father, and my grandmother and grandfather, used to say. It definitely came from that side of the family. I was thinking of my dad recently on what would have been his 88th birthday, he died at the age of 72. I was wondering how long he would be remembered. They do say that no one really dies while they live on in someone's memory. It's a comforting thought. My dad will go on while my siblings and I remember him. And he has four grandchildren that would remember him too, and two that wouldn't. So the memory of him is secure for a good few decades yet. Hopefully. Jim Hay I never met, and I don't even know whether he was someone that my dad met, or may

I'm re-reading books 1, 2 and 3, and giving them a buff and a polish: a comma here, a carriage return there, a shiny new adjective dropped into a sentence. No major changes, then, just a few tweaks. All of this is in preparation for them being uploaded to Amazon, to make them available on Kindle. I have had qualms about doing this, but I have to concede that Amazon is the largest shop window in the world, and if I want to find a wide audience for my writing, for my stories, then they need to sit on a shelf in their store. I don't think I can afford to have moralistic qualms when I'm an unknown writer looking for readers. I've given myself thirty days to get my reading and editing done, and to get the books uploaded and launched.

Day 23 of the Couch to 5K words writing course and I'm still hanging in there. Though I have fallen two days behind, one deliberately - as in I deliberately chose to save one of the exercises for a later date. And then yesterday I was too ill to write. I had a vice-like clamp of pain around my head and couldn't have strung a sentence together if I'd tried. And the exercise was a difficult one to unpick - introduce a well known fictional character into a different well known plot, and see what ensues. My thumping brain couldn't deal with that at all, at the time, so I set that exercise aside too. Now, today, I can see the fun and challenge in it, though I'm still not up to tackling it. Not all of the exercises have been so taxing. Occasionally we get a day away from creating to recharge on someone else's creativity, by reading a book for 20 minutes. Permission to read, that's my kind of writing course. I was reading Fahrenheit 451, so chose to continue with

I'm sticking with the Couch to C5K challenge. Today's exercise was interesting. On previous days a topic has been set, but today I had to write to my own tune. I had to get down the scene that has been running around in my head for days, if not weeks. I had to make a start on my own story. Which was a canny idea of Writer's HQ, who are running the course. For 5 days I've been working hard, stretching my brain, sweating to complete the challenges that they've set, on topics they've chosen, and this all made making a start on my own work so much less daunting. No worrying beforehand, no finding excuses, no running errands instead of sitting down in front of a blank page, which I might have been tempted to do in the past. I got straight down to it and wrote a couple of hundred words, in the time allowance. And in so doing, I've set the scene, got it underway, so that I can return to it, pick it up, later.

I signed up to Writer's HQ February writing challenge - Couch to C5K. Everyday they are going to email me inspiration, encouragement, and a task. In response, I write my arse off. Hopefully, by the end of the month, by completing the challenges (or assignments) I will have formed a strong idea of the next story I want to write, and even produced some pages. I felt really smug this morning when I completed the first challenge; a ten minute exercise, not too onerous, I know. I Tweeted about my accomplishment, and then I posted about it on FaceBook. And then I checked my February calendar... I have four free days in the whole month ahead. Four! This is going to be a challenge of Herculean proportions, I now realise. Finding the time, making the time. I could steal ten minutes from my morning routine before I set out to work. I could find ten minutes each evening while the dinner is cooking. This is going to be more of a challenge than I bargained for.

Smoking. Diet. Exercise. Hobby. Career. Charity. Finances. Mental wellbeing. A new language. Stop this. Start that. Do this more, and that less. Try something else entirely. My finger hovered over the 'Buy Now' button for another self improvement book in the Amazon January sale. Another self improvement book to sit on my virtual bookshelf alongside the other titles I've bought over the years; and rarely, if ever, read let alone acted upon. And then I stopped myself. A new me might be intriguing (though probably exhausting to achieve) but wouldn't be me . I'm already me. And I'm not so bad, I decided. I could probably do with a bit of a trim, some buffing up, a kick up the arse, but actually I'm not so bad. I get there, I get things done, more tortoise than hare I'll admit, but that's my way. So I stepped into 2019 in the same suit of clothes that I wore through 2018 - a little wrinkled, in need of a press, a bit faded, but still comfortable, still