charles barrow's writing

I had to be very patient and sit very still in order to get this Jackdaw to come close. I like a Jackdaw. They are strutting little characters. I  like their silvery cap and black face. Plus they have pale grey eyes which sometimes look blue in certain lights. In my current John Mann story (the one still in progress) I do have a character called Jack but not Jackdaw as I thought that was too on the nose. Photo is the author's own

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, ...