charles barrow's writing

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.