Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

For the next month and 3 weeks, we're trying something a little different on the Yorkshire Writers' Lunch blog.  A few years back, prior to COVID, a few of our members collaborated on a project titled 'Year of Darkness', at the suggestion of Jo Cameron-Symes. This refers to 536AD, a particularly grim year during the Dark Ages where Europe, the Middle East and areas of Asia passed 18 months without sunlight due to abnormalities in the climate.  As you can imagine, this provided quite a tantalising premise for our collaborators to adapt. As well as 536AD, we moved forward 250 years at a time, allowing elements of each entry to echo down the future plots. There will be eight entries in Year of Darkness trilogy, featuring 6 collaborators. Here is the running order: 1. 536 by Nick Stead - 01 August 2. 786 by Nick Stead - 08 August 3. 1036 by Jo Cameron Symes - 15 August 4. 1286 by Vivien Teasdale - 22 August 5. 1536 by Vivien Teasdale - 29 August 6. 1786 by Annabel Howarth -...

  In prose, I constantly admire a writer who is able to drop poetic sentences like jewels. Sometimes these aren’t entirely appropriate and may even slow plot momentum but they are no less beautiful for it. It’s the literary equivalent of stopping to smell the roses.             However I’m not particularly adept at writing such stunning imagery, at least not for longer stories. When it comes to my more plot-focused fiction, each sentence serves to keep things moving. They’re often short, simple and riddled with inoffensive cliché.             It’s in my character-focused fiction where I find the time to make a moment pretty and quotable. However this doesn’t always work, usually because I’m trying too hard to catch the eye.             My most egregious offences include drawn-out metaphors that don’t comfortably a...

I leave the house and bury my cold hands in my coat pockets immediately.  My breath steams in the frigid air, and the returning inhaled icy breath shocks my lungs, nearly making me cough.  I’m almost tempted back inside for another hot coffee, but I’m pulled back by the magnetism of the place. Walking gingerly on yesterday’s slush, now glistening and rock hard in the watery, early morning light, I walk down to the footpath that leads through the fields.  With each footstep I take, I slip a little on the ice, and it feels like hard going even though it’s a route I’ve taken hundreds of times, a path burned into the neural pathway in my brain. The path up through the field crunches under my feet - frozen ice and grasses alike giving way at each step.  How silent it is! - no traffic sounds to break the stillness of early morning, not even a hardy dog walker, with their charge wrapped up against the cold. This liminal space is mine for a little while longer. I reach the r...

‘Tis a lonely Amazon Wagoneer Who stoppeth for the first tyme And he thinks unto hisself “the first of four score and nine” Sun was warm and day was clear, Leather and brass were shone. Waggoneer took a last look round, Took his seat, egg’d his shire on. With map read and route set, And shire leading up front, The first stop, up a long steep hill, Made the animal snort and grunt. On they went thru town and village, Each parcel safely delivered Into hands or to a safe place; There was even one for a wizard. Ev’ry road Wagoneer travelled ‘Til he was smote with sleep So he sat him down upon a stone And Eftsoones made not a peep. So Wagoneer’s shire stood guard In case varmints got too near To all the booty in his wagon, ‘Til he woke for a cup of beer. With beer drunk and cheese ate, Feeling rested and ready to go, The Amazon Wagoneer Checked the remaining cargo. Off they set, Amazoneer and shire With the last one score and three, When round a bend a highway man Shouted, “I be going to rob...

I wonder how many of us wander around a town without ever really looking at the buildings? We look in shop windows, perhaps notice if the door is easy to open or not, but do we ever bother with the skyline? With the shapes of the roofs, the style of the windows or even what the buildings were made of? Try it. Look up and see what is under the eaves. If you look closely, you might even spot a few grotesques or even a gargoyle glaring down at you. What’s the difference? Well, the terms tend to be used interchangeably these days, but technically a gargoyle is a grotesque, but a grotesque is not necessarily a gargoyle. From Ely Cathedral Grotesques were named after the strange heads found in the underground or buried ruins of Roman buildings known as Grottes. They often are in the form of animals, real or imaginary, such as lion heads or dragons. Others show human heads, such as monks, or possibly to honour the person paying for the building, though many seem to have a very different pu...