The Magic of Nature: A Remembrance of Shelducks

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illustration, Nature, shelduck, writing

Shelduck among sea aster

My earliest memory of shelducks is easily nailed down – I mistook them for avocets. Youthful wishful thinking, of course. They were standing on the far-out tideline of a bay near my home in Kent, looking very black-and-white and I jumped to conclusions, silly girl. And however they might look from a distance, they are not actually black and white. There is a deep glossy greenness to the head and neck, and a band of orangy-tan across the chest. Add in the bright scarlet bill and pink legs and feet and this is quite a multi-coloured bird if you can get close enough.

After this beginner’s error, I came to know shelducks quite well. When we went upriver by boat, their heads would pop up from the marshy fields to see what was going on. They were such a regular sight, we named one of our boats after them. No, she wasn’t the Shelduck, she was Tadorna, from the species’ Latin name. On a trip down to the river estuary one day, a family of shelducks appeared and Tadorna was surrounded by her namesakes. That was a surreal moment. We cut the engine and watched the troop of pied ducklings skittering through the waves after their parents.

These days I see shelducks along the Dorset coast. They don’t seem to stray very far from the sea, feeding in the shallows of a saltmarsh, their heads go up, just as I remember them, checking you out. Sensibly wary, I’d say.

But for all that, last winter a shelduck took up residence among the gulls on the sheltered side of Chesil Beach – right opposite the window of the wildlife centre, so I and everyone else could sit in the café admiring the bird from close quarters while drinking our coffee. My kind of bird-watching, these days. Just another duck, really, but what the heck – I gazed at it and whispered Tadorna, remembering the birds and the namesake boat of half a century ago.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Magic of Nature: a Haunting of Herb Paris

Tags

Artwork, flowers, illustration, Nature, wild flowers, writing

Herb paris from my illustrated magical tale The Herbarium

 When I was first learning my plants as a teenager, I had an advantage: there were no identification apps, no smartphones to download them onto, indeed no computers at all so far as ordinary people were concerned. If you wanted to find out what plant you were looking at, you used a handbook. I say this was an advantage because there was no instant identification – you had to slog your way through the book, compare the pictures, learn the botanical terms and generally put in a bit of work to find the name of your plant. It was slow, but you learned an awful lot along the way. Another benefit was that you looked at all the other pictures in the process and began to realise how many other wonderful, colourful and interesting wild plants were out there waiting to be found. Many a dark winter’s evening I spent poring over my book, anticipating what plants I might see in the coming year.

One of those I dreamed of finding was herb paris. Was it the intriguing name? Yes. Was it the strange appearance? Yes, again. Four flat leaves with an odd knotted bunch in the middle.  It could have been beamed down from a passing starship.

I longed to see one for myself, but I had a very long wait – the better part of fifty years. Deferred gratification taken to extremes, you might say. As I walked through a Dorset woodland one early summer day, my eye was caught by a patch of yellow among the trees. The plants were past their best, the leaves turning, but I recognised them at once. They were unmistakably herb paris, and every bit as weird and alien-looking as I had imagined. It was an extraordinary moment of wish fulfilment. I had finally seen my mysterious herb paris after so long!

Now tell me, could someone walking along using an app to identify the plants they see ever experience the sheer joy I felt at that moment? ‘Oh,’ they might say, ‘it’s called herb paris. Strange looking, isn’t it?’ and walked on. But for me the plant, until that moment just a picture in a book, had become an almost supernatural being – the possibility of ever finding one had haunted the back of my mind whenever I walked in unfamiliar woods. Yes, it was all in my head – of course – but that is the magic of nature at work over a lifetime, isn’t it? It’s not very scientific, but I don’t think I’d want to see either nature, or the herb paris plant, in any other way.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Magic of Nature: A Joyfulness of Skylarks

Tags

Artwork, Dorset, flowers, illustration, Kent, Nature, Skylark, writing

Skylarks among the buttercups. Kathy Sharp 2022

I was hanging out the washing the other day when a small bird chirruped overhead. ‘Skylark,’ I said to the peg-bag, without bothering to look up. This kind of thing makes my family roll their eyes, but it’s a habit of so many years that it’s unlikely I’ll grow out of it now.

As for the skylark, well, I learned to know its chirrup, and to love its song, from childhood. On the chalky cliffs of east Kent, these little birds would hurl themselves into the air, fluttering and overflowing with song like a gutter in a downpour.

The poets of the 19^th century attributed this vocal outpouring to sheer joy, and it’s hard not to think of it that way. The sound strikes the human ear as ebullient and life-affirming, especially in the early spring. It cheers the heart as a sign of the return of light and warmth. If it makes me joyful, can the bird not feel joyful too? That’s an old-fashioned question, of course, and we are sternly reminded that the bird is marking out a breeding territory, advertising its presence to females – definitely not larking about.

I made the acquaintance of many more larks, hovering over the drained Kent marshes, cavorting over sheep pastures and vanishing into the brown furrows of onion fields.

One lark taught me an important lesson, many years ago. Out walking in a wild, grassy area, looking for wildlife, I strayed off the path and was startled when a skylark jumped up from under my foot. She revealed a nest of four tiny speckled eggs, and I had so nearly trodden on it. It was a bleak reminder that my wish to go out and spend time with nature could so easily have resulted in my destroying the very thing I loved. These days I’m thoughtful about that and stick to the pathways. You can’t conserve nature by trampling all over it.

These days I hear the larks sing over the grassland of the narrow causeway between the Isle of Portland and mainland Dorset. The Causeway is a regular flightpath for migrating birds. I listen there, for the first larksong of the spring, around February, and it’s always a great moment. In the autumn many of them are on the move, heading for the continent, and it was just such a bird of passage that chirruped overhead as I hung out my washing. I don’t know if the bird felt joyful, but I certainly did.

My illustrated, magical nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Magic of Nature – A Delight of Violets

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books, flowers, illustration, Nature, nature writing, plants, violets, wildlife

Dog Violet from my magical tale The Herbarium

I don’t know if delight is the proper collective noun for violets – I just made it up – but it’ll do nicely. Violets are delightful. They were one of the flowers that made many a 19^th century poet go all lyrical, and endow them with the human characteristics of modesty, determination in the face of snowy weather, even loneliness. That romantic and deeply human-centric view of nature is deeply unfashionable now, but it was very much the way I learned to love the natural world from my mother and grandmother; beauty and language played a strong part. I’ll stick my neck out and say it’s as good a way as any for a child to develop a love of, and respect for, nature. Scientific understanding can come later.

But back to the violets. They were one of the first plants I learned to identify. In the garden of the big old Victorian house where I spent most of my childhood, sweet violets would reliably appear under one of the scrawny hawthorns. My sister and I would pick a little bunch for our mother’s birthday every March. This had nothing to do with science and everything to do with sentiment – but we still learned at an early age where the violets grew and when they flowered. As I said, there are worse ways to develop a regard for nature.

Later, I learned there were other types of violet – unscented dog violets that spread more purple delights along woodland paths and edges, and the hairy violets that grew among the grass tussocks on the open Surrey downland, as well as violets of wet places and heathland that I never did manage to find. But the sweet violets always spoke loudest to me. There was, and perhaps still is, a tradition of planting them beside gateways. A field gate on the downs was a reliable place to find, year in, year out. White-flowered, those were. And here in Dorset, I could take you, come next spring, to a field gate only a couple of miles from here where a traditionalist has planted violets. They were well-established twenty years ago when I first found them, but they could have been there two hundred years, for all I know. It’s the sense of continuity that appeals, and the toughness of those fragile little plants weathering the weather, hooves and tractor wheels, down the ages.

I’m perfectly aware, of course, that the flower’s beauty of form, colour and scent is aimed at pollinating insects and not at me. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy and admire them, just like the 19^th century poets. So, unfashionable or not, I shall continue to delight in violets.

My illustrated, magical, nature-inspired tales The Herbarium, The Chesil Apothecary and Dropwort Hall are available from www.veneficiapublications.com

The Wrong Path?

Tags

books, Flash Fiction, writing

This is the final little story about the Reverend Pontius to celebrate the release of my novella Call of the Merry Isle.

The Wrong Path?

The Reverend Pontius had always considered regrets to be a serious self-indulgence. Why waste valuable time on choices that could not be changed? And yet… And yet, here he was in the early hours, wondering about the might-have-beens in just the way he promised himself he wouldn’t. He was thinking about the woman he might have married, the family they might have had. ‘Would that have been a joy – or a burden, I wonder?’ he said aloud to the bed-post. The care of others tended to be both, as he knew from his years as a minister. The bedpost declined to offer an opinion.

But the night-thought was persistent, even when morning came. Had he made the wrong choices, all those years ago? That other life he might have lived plagued him as he attacked his breakfast egg, lurked under the duster as he polished the pews, and tried to barge its way into the sermon he was working on.

‘Enough!’ he said, at last. ‘I cannot change the past, and the future will be what it will. I can only accept that the Spirit chose this path for me, and that the Spirit is always right. The subject is closed.’

Nonetheless, he scribbled a note in the margin saying, ‘Spirits; possibility of being wrong. Investigate.’

If you like this story, and would like to meet the Reverend Pontius again, you can find out more about him in my novella Call of the Merry Isle, available at www.veneficiapublications.com and now available in ebook format from Amazon.

The Purpose of Porpoises

Tags

books, Flash Fiction, Larus Series, writing

Another wander into the slightly odd world of Larus, and we find the Reverend Pontius in need of a holiday…

The Purpose of Porpoises

The Reverend Pontius was searching for something, and that something, he realised with a twinge of guilt, was an excuse.

‘What I am seeking,’ he said aloud, ‘is an excuse for a day off.’ There, it was out, and no less shocking for there being no-one else to hear it.

The guilty words reverberated round the chapel rafters. There is nothing quite like an echo for emphasising something shameful. And shameful it was. Day off, indeed! Pontius looked at his shoes. The buckles, not quite silver, had been a gift from the people of the isle in grateful recognition of his years of service. He had tried to make himself useful, and had clearly succeeded. Yet here he was looking for an excuse to spend a day doing nothing useful at all.

Pontius tried to distract himself. ‘I should read an improving book,’ he said aloud, letting those words rattle round the rafters, too. ‘If only I had one,’ he added, under his breath.

But he did have a copy of the Olde Salte’s Guide to the Worlde. It was a strange book, a sort of seagoing encyclopaedia, though most of its pearls of wisdom were buried pretty deep. Pontius sat before it and opened it at random. The spirits will guide me to the right page, he thought, and bring me enlightenment. He peered short-sightedly at the book with its antique script and unpredictable spelling:

‘Porpoise Day,’ he read aloud, ‘according to ancient fishing peoples, this be a holiday that may be called on any day of the year for any porpoise whatsoever.’

Was porpoise an ancient spelling for purpose, Pontius wondered? But no, there it was, in black and white: porpoise. Porpoise the sea-creature not purpose the intention. Whatever it had originally meant, it would be very acceptable to an island full of fisherfolk and he saw himself calling such holidays with a perfectly clear conscience. ‘I shall use it sparingly, of course,’ he murmured. ‘For emergency porpoises only.’

If you like this story, and would like to meet the Reverend Pontius again, you can find out more about him in my novella Call of the Merry Isle, available at www.veneficiapublications.com and now available in ebook format from Amazon.

Introducing the Larus Series

Tags

books, Flash Fiction, Larus Series

Today’s offering is a brand new little story featuring the Reverend Pontius, one of my endearing Larus Series characters:

Mothballed

‘Ah, this oppressive heat!’ said the Reverend Pontius, fanning himself with his hat. It was a moment before he realised he was not wearing his hat and was actually fanning himself with his wig.

He didn’t often bother with the wig, saving it for Sunday sermons and special occasions. But today was Sunday and there was the wig. His own hair, rather sparse these days, was damp with the heat and his scalp prickled as it dried. The Reverend stepped into the shade of a stone wall and regarded the wig doubtfully. It was of a very old-fashioned style, and looking a little moth-eaten these days, but it did add a certain gravitas to his sermons. Or, rather, he hoped it did. Would it be acceptable to leave it off, he wondered, at least until the weather should break? He looked up, hoping for a hint of a distant storm-cloud, but the sky remained obstinately blue from horizon to horizon. Very inconsiderate of it, the Reverend thought, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. Why was there never a convenient cloud when you needed one?

He thrust his hands into his coat pockets in annoyance, and found, in each, a mothball. How did they get there? The Reverend did not know, but surely, nay certainly, this was a clear sign from the Spirit of the Sky. Wigs were best kept for winter and should be safely mothballed at this season!

The Reverend tied knots at the four corners of his handkerchief and put it on his head against the sun. Then he tossed the mothballs into the upturned wig and set off for the chapel. He would fill the wig with healthy, preservative camphor against the moths! Whether those in the front two rows at his future sermons would be similarly enthusiastic when the wig surfaced again remained to be seen.

If you like this story, and would like to meet the Reverend Pontius again, you can find out more about him in my novella Call of the Merry Isle, available at www.veneficiapublications.com

The Writer and… Entertainment

Tags

books, Entertainment, writing

Entertainment. As a writer, I often forget the fact that I’m in the entertainment business. But unless you work in the highest level of literary writing, which is in a world of its own, it is a good idea to keep it in mind. Entertainment takes many forms, of course; whether it makes you laugh, cry or experience a moment of jaw-dropping horror, entertainment takes you out of the real world for a while. That’s why we enjoy it, and why we come back for more.

I was thinking about all this while I was putting together some of my books for a display, shared with other writers, in one of the local libraries. We are all in the story-telling business, I thought, but entertainment isn’t a factor often mentioned in the writers’ groups I attend.

Is it because we think, deep down, that mere entertainment isn’t serious enough for us? Or are we simply too engrossed in our own created worlds to pay attention to it? Maybe. At the other extreme, are we so lacking in self-confidence that we dare not ask if our writing entertains others – in case we don’t like the answer?

I think it’s a question worth asking. I’m the first to admit that assessing the entertainment value of your own writing is fiendishly difficult. But you can assess what you find entertaining in other peoples’ work. Is it humour? Action? Romance? Beautiful writing? Erudition? And then ask why. It isn’t an easy question to answer, but thinking it through can give you some insight into what others might enjoy – and this might help you to identify the entertainment value in your own writing.

If our books don’t sell it’s almost traditional, now, to blame ‘lack of exposure’, big publishers getting all the attention, and other factors beyond our control. But perhaps our books simply aren’t entertaining enough. If, after due consideration, you think your book does pass the entertainment test, then you need to say so, in your blurbs and advertising material.

I made a start by shoe-horning the phrase rattling good entertainment into the description of my books for the display. It may only be seen by a few passing library-goers, but it’s a reminder to me to keep both the idea and the word in mind in future. I am in the entertainment business, after all!

My entertaining novella, Call of the Merry Isle, is available at www.veneficiapublications.com

The Writer and…AI Art

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artificial intelligence, Artwork, books, illustration, self-publishing, writing

Artificial Intelligence. Now what do I know about that? Not a great deal, I admit. When I was younger I loved new technology and couldn’t wait to find out how it worked. These days, I confess, technological progress is more likely to induce a sigh: yet another new thing to learn. Despite this, my eye was caught by a post from a writer friend. She had been trying out art produced via AI with a view to using it as a book cover.

Automatic artwork! As a writer, I was intrigued; as an artist I was mildly horrified. So I read on. My friend had been using Midjourney, part of an ongoing AI research project, and I have to say the result was quite impressive. Access to it is free, at least to be begin with, too. It works by the user giving it an instruction in the form of a short sentence describing the required artwork, and anyone can have 25 goes for nothing. After that, you would need to pay for access. Obviously there is a degree of skill in wording your instruction sentence in order to get the result you want, and, interestingly, you specify anything you don’t want, too.

Some of the results you can look at on the site are remarkable, Dali-esque, almost unimaginable, and there are numerous controls to modify the appearance of your artwork. It’s probably fair to say that unless you know what you’re doing, you’d need your 25 free goes to get reasonably good at it, and you need to have some grip on concepts like aspect ratios, too. But oh, the possibilities for the self-publisher (or the small publisher) seeking unique artwork for their book covers!

It certainly makes the current usual method of slogging through online image sites looking for something to suit your work seem decidedly old-fashioned. I doubt if it quite beats commissioning an artist to create something to order – but if your budget doesn’t stretch to that, or you’re willing to learn to use this sort of technology, the future beckons.

If I don’t try it myself (and I’m tempted) it’s largely because it means more screentime for my less than perfect eyes, but if anyone has tried AI art, I’d love to know how you got on, and what you think of the results.

The artwork for my new novella Call of the Merry Isle was provided by my lovely publisher Veneficia Publications and the book is available at www.veneficiapublications.com

A story is never really finished…

Tags

book series, books, Isle of Larus

It’s always difficult returning to old haunts. It’s particularly difficult, as I discovered last year, when the old haunt is a figment of your own imagination.

The last novel in my Larus series was published back in 2016, so it had been quite a while since I’d thought about those characters and that setting. In between times, I had written another novel and a series of illustrated books; the Larus novels were out of print and I thought I’d left it all far behind.

But the creative imagination is a wilful creature, and as we came out of the last lockdown (in the UK), I found there was a story determinedly forming, a prequel to my old Larus tales. It was strange to reimagine my grumpy old parson, the Reverend Pontius, as a callow young man just setting out in life; but reimagine him I did, and the story, as they say, wrote itself. It took a great deal of effort to remember the original tale, and, indeed, I went back and rewrote some of it as I went along. Even so, I soon had a neat little novella, and an idea for another. And another.

My lovely publishers, Veneficia Publications, have now issued Call of the Merry Isle, as I titled it, in paperback, and I am hopeful that the other stories and the original novels too, will all be published in due course. Merry Isle is a delightful story, though I say so myself, with the serious young Reverend Pontius encountering some unlikely people and even more unlikely events as he seeks his way in life.

It just goes to show that a story is never really finished. I had thought the series complete with the third book, but here it is bursting out again. It feels good to have the Isle of Larus and its quirky inhabitants back in my care once again. I have more ideas for them than I can cope with, but that, as they say, is another story!

Call of the Merry Isle is available from Independent Publisher | Veneficia Publications| United Kingdom