Interview with Lynne McVernon

Thank you for inviting me to your Author Q and A, Lynne

Please give a thumbnail introduction of yourself.

The garden of my cottage

I live in Gloucestershire, with my husband.  My career was in advertising as an illustrator. I still do some illustration, these days for books.

I’ve been writing seriously since my son, Thomas Williams, was little. Now grown up he’s a successful author in his own right and, as his early influencer, I claim all the credit. 

I’m now published by Accent Press.

 Illustration from The Tale of King Harald - by Thomas Williams

What first inspired you to write? 

What or who!  It was my older sister. In her teenage years she was a Georgette Heyer fan and decided to write her own Regency Romance. I was impressed and decided to write my own ‘book’.

My sister and me at around the time we both began writing

What was your first piece of creative writing? How old were you?

At the time I was ten or thereabouts. Although I no longer have it, I can still remember my plot.   My understanding of the history of costume (something I later learnt about in art school) was unsurprisingly hazy. I was familiar with the Empire line through my sister’s enthusiasm for that period, but I thought it was a bit boring. I was far more attracted to the full-skirted Cinderella type frock. So, my own book was set in an unspecified ‘olden days’ when women wore bonnets and crinolines.

If I ever came up with a title, I’m afraid I don’t remember it, nor any of the names I gave my characters.
Accompanied by two other older ladies (possibly mother and a governess?) my sixteen-year-old heroine went on a boat excursion to visit an off-shore lighthouse. There must have been a boatman to pilot it, but I can no longer recall anything at all about him if indeed I gave him an identity.   While on the lighthouse a storm blew up and the ladies were trapped there by the turbulent seas.

My hero was the son of the lighthouse keeper, also sixteen. (Sixteen was the optimum age for romance in my young mind.) Despite warnings not to attempt this, he nobly went out at the height of the storm to make sure the ladies’ boat was well secured. Of course, he slipped on the wet rocks, and was brought back into the lighthouse only half conscious and seriously injured.  Or was he?

The poor chap lay, heroically broken, on the chaise longue (in a lighthouse???)  Instantly going into Florence Nightingale mode to tend to him, my heroine was probably mopping his fevered brow, when he opened his eyes and smiled in a rascally way. He’d been exaggerating his injuries in order to get up close and personal!


I’m afraid I can’t supply a resolution to this tale. Unable to conjure the flirtatious banter required, or any way of conveying a growing attachment between hero and heroine, my imagination and energy failed at this point. Bear in mind that up until this time, my understanding of romantic relationships was confined to the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals that I’d avidly devour whenever they came on the TV on weekend afternoons.

Which writers do you particularly admire?

I love crime fiction and psychological thrillers, but don’t care much for cosy crime. I adore the Kate Atkinson ‘Jackson Brodie’ series, Mark Billingham, Belinda Bauer and Sabine Durrant.  And the new (to me) author, Gillian McAllister.

The historical crime author I love is C J Sansom.  His Shardlake series, set in the Henry the Eighth’s reign and just after, is absolutely incomparable.   And I don’t usually like historical fiction!

For humour and a wonderfully intelligent and witty insights into life and relationships, I love David Nicholls.

In ‘Women’s Fictions’ I am not much of a romance reader, but I love those books about relationships that are a bit more edgy.  Authors such as Lisa Jewell, Marian Keyes and Jo Jo Moyes.  Jo Jo’s books, which are typically more challenging, is the author I most closely identify with.

What do you love about writing?

Creating a believable world, and the characters to inhabit it.  I still sometimes experience a moment of wonder, thinking: None of this existed before I dreamt it up! 

What do you hate about writing?

I am not a plotter.  I have to begin by developing a scenario in which my primary characters meet, then create a back-story for each of them - initially to explain why they are there - and then to begin to establish their motivation. What happens next is often a complete blank.  Insights into my characters, and inspiration about how their developing stories interact, only occur to me once I am embarked on the story.  It means I can’t write a rough draft quickly.  The initial draft progresses slowly, in fits and starts, with loads of editing and toing and froing back and forth through the script. There usually comes a point where I become more certain of where I am going and caught up in the wonder I talked about in the previous question. In other words, until that magic moment, beginning a new novel is like wading through treacle!

Describe your ‘portfolio’ of writing 

Though I have been writing for a long time I don’t have that many published works to my name.

JUST BEFORE DAWN and DESIRES and DREAMS were published by Love Stories. JBD was also published in a Polish version.  The rather strange cover pictures a close-up of a woman's face with what looks lie a cocktail umbrella stuck on her nose!

I independently self-published TORN, LIFE CLASS and FLY or FALL.
The latter three books were then republished by Accent Press.
All three have won a Chill with a Book award. http://www.chillwithabook.com/

I had a short story, Holiday Romance published in TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY the anthology of short stories, by members of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.

What is your proudest achievement?

When my first book – JUST BEFORE DAWN - was published.  Though I’d continued to write as a teenager, I’d not taken the hobby seriously.  I was not clever or educated enough to aspire to be a real writer. I stopped when I went from school to art college. I only started writing again, this time with the serious intention of trying to find a publisher, in order to give myself an income  which would enable me to stay at home with my son.
But what started simply as an attempt to make a contribution to the family budget, morphed into an obsession.  This was JUST BEFORE DAWN, the first book I had ever finished. Within four months of completion I was in talks with Love Stories, a small new publisher whose ambition was to fill a niche for more unconventional and edgy romantic fiction than was supplied by Mills and Boon.  Love Stories also published my second book, DESIRES & DREAMS within a year. Sadly, Love Stories went to out of business unable to fight the big boys in the industry.

Looking back, I am even more proud, given how hard I found it to repeat the trick.

What is your current project?

My current project is set in the world of costume design.  I can’t say a lot about it, as I am only a quarter of the way through, and if you read my “What do you hate about writing?” answer, you will know that even I don’t quite know yet how it is going to pan out.  But my last book, which is waiting in the wings to be published, is BURIED TREASURE. I have had great fun designing the cover.

One of the images I played around with

To give you a flavour, I’ll first give a bit of background that led to the writing of the book.
I’ve been involved for many years in the organisation of biannual conferences held at Queens’ College, Cambridge. I also have personal experience of, and interest in, archaeology.  My great uncle Sydney Ford uncovered the hoard of silver Roman table-ware, known as the Mildenhall Treasure, on his Suffolk farm. It is one of the most famous UK discoveries housed in the British Museum.   My son, Thomas Williams is a curator at the British Museum and the author of Viking Britain (for which I also provided illustrations), and of the upcoming Viking London, published by William Collins.

Given all the above I decided it would be fun to weave together these threads and create the story that became........

BURIED TREASURE

it's not always what it seems 

Educating Rita meets Time Team, when the conference planner meets the university lecturer. Their backgrounds could hardly be further apart, their expectations in life more different, and, more importantly there is no wish or reason on either side that they should ever connect again. But they have more in common than they could ever have imagined.  Each have unresolved issues from the past which have marked them. Each has an archaeological puzzle they want to solve. They’re stories intertwine and they discover together that treasure isn’t always what it seems. 

The official cover reveal is happening on June 8.  Until then, watch this place.

Life Playlist

I was invited by Jo Lambert to write a piece choosing 5 songs that have been important to me in my life.  I enjoyed dong this so much I've decided to reblog it on my own site. Thank you Jo. 

When I first heard about Jo Lambert’s concept of a Life Playlist, I thought it a wonderful idea. Even after she kindly invited me to take part, I was still excited and pleased. Music thrills me. But when I began seriously to think about the songs……. Oh no! How could I not choose all of the R & B, Soul and Motown songs I loved, or the singer-song-writers going as far back as Bob Dylan, through Joni Mitchell…. Too many to list. At my first attempt I was overshooting my allowance by a multiple of ten.
In the end, the songs I have chosen aren’t necessarily my topmost favourites – if I could even decide which those are – but they are the punctuation to important times in my life.

Jess Conrad

I was a snooty child. I looked down on friends and classmates who were “in love” with pop singers. How stupid! I thought. We’re children! How can you be in love when you’re only eleven? Stars like Elvis, Cliff Richard, and Adam Faith left me unmoved. There were individual songs I liked, and I did think Jess Conrad was handsome (shame about the voice), but it was not until the Beatles – there arrival on the scene coinciding with my awakening hormones – that I ‘got it’.







It was a love affair that lasted for years and even now I watch old footage, and hear those songs with a great deal of nostalgia. But the song I choose from that era isn’t even one they penned themselves. I had never heard anything like it – the rawness, the pulse, the power, the passion – stirred the fourteen-year-old me in ways I’d never been stirred before.  And if you were around at the time this will bring back a smile. 

TWIST AND SHOUT, by the Beatles,  

Though my time at Art School is a very significant milestone in my life, and I look back on it with great affection, it was a relatively brief period. I emerged after two years still the gauche, introverted girl I’d been, living at home and without ever having had a proper boyfriend. Jan, my older sister, was always more out-going than me and had a far wider and more interesting social life.
We went to a party together. Even to my inexperienced eyes it turned out to be a rather staid affair, but the music being played was good. Both my sister and I love to dance. So, when two very flamboyant, loud and funny young men arrived at the party the whole atmosphere changed, and the girls they wanted to spend the evening with were the girls who danced. Shortly after this event Jan decided she wanted to leave home, taking me with her. She organized a flat that we could share with two girl-friends, and a new phase began.

The song that epitomized that life-changing party, and the very many subsequent parties during the next episode of my life as an independent young woman in London.

007 (Shanty Town) by Desmond Dekker.

Read into this choice what you will. Enough to say it was a very happy time of my life.

A few years later I was working happily in an advertising design studio, but was still very unlucky in love. Or perhaps I should say, too choosy. The men I wanted never wanted me and vice-versa. Jan and I were living as a twosome, by then.

Geoffrey

I had never met Geoffrey before he turned up in our flat with a band of Jan’s friends and workmates after a leaving party. I immediately liked the look of him, but there was a drawback. Geoffrey was too perfect. A year older than me, he was good looking, clever, in a good job, and interested in art.


But my own social life had recently become more adventurous and I was enjoying myself. I was definitely not ready to settle down. We became friends. My parents loved him. Jan loved him. He was the best friend of her partner, Roger. It all looked too pre-ordained. I could see the road ahead of me running out of other options, so the rebel inside my head would not give in to it.
I was already a fan of 10CC – their discography up to that time is a list of witty, catchy, danceable songs and Dreadlock Holiday has to be a contender for my ‘favourites’ playlist. But around this time the band brought out an iconic song that was a complete change from what had gone before.

I'M NOT IN LOVE by 10CC

It immediately became our song – mine and Geoffrey’s – and, of course, I married him.
But it was not until I had our son, Tom, that life REALLY altered dramatically. I gave up work planning to go back to it later. I’d recently learnt to drive and we bought our first car. My husband had changed jobs. We moved house. And, when Tom was just three, I resurrected a teenage hobby. I began writing again, but this time with serious intent.

Tom and his Great Grand Nan

I was a young mother, was doing something I loved and, unbelievably, was soon to be published. I had my own car in which Tom and I were able to go places and do things. It could be as simple as driving to an out of town super-store, or to my art class where, he attended the creche, but this was an unbelievably exciting and fulfilling time in my life. There is a great soundtrack to this period, the mid-Eighties, which vividly revives those emotions. Think Live Aid! Because I can only pick one, I choose a favourite song of Tom’s.  It brings back those memories of driving around, just the two of us, our music blaring out from the car’s cassette player.

MAN EATER by Hall & Oates

Needless to say, Tom’s interpretation of the lyrics was entirely different from mine. His involves a lurking monster.

My fifth is a totally brilliant song that we used to play, over and over again, on the juke box of a beach bar in Greece. It always makes me want to leap up and dance. But its importance to me is because this was the first holiday I’d taken with my sister since we were single girls. Now that Tom was at University and we were free-agents, it seemed a really lovely idea to go away as a foursome – she and Roger, me and Geoff. We settled on Parga in NW Greece, or more specifically Volos Beach next door. For years I misremembered the name and thought this song was called ‘Or just forget about it’ by Santana.  I have found an utterly thrilling live performance which has had me bouncing around in my typing chair. The vocals are supplied by the amazing Rob Thomas.

SMOOTH by Santana

I very much wanted to bring this piece up to date with the song I’ve adored since the instant I heard it. The first time I actually saw the performer his appearance took me totally by surprise. I’d assumed he was black for one thing. Beards have never been my thing, but given my own son now sports the full Victorian, I have to put my prejudices aside. Even though I’m cheating - having run out of my allowance of song tracks - I have to mention

HUMAN by Rag'n'Bone man

Memories of Noddy

    On Mothering Sunday......

 Noddy

Irene Kelsey aged sixteen 

In thinking about writing a short piece for Mothering Sunday, I immediately hit a snag. There is no way I can convey my mother - known by the family as Noddy - without considering her relationship with my father.  My understanding of their developing early relationship depends very much on the cache of letters I found after my father died. The letters begin just before he left for France, and continue throughout the war into 1946, when he was out in Germany with the British Army of the Rhine. 

Irene Kelsey's background was solid working class cockney going back a couple of generations, but her own parents had “stepped up in the world” from the East End to owning their own house in Orpington - a middle-class dormitory town in Kent. 

John Allan's character was undoubtedly influenced by his background, which was far more of an odd mixture than my mother's. Theatrical on his father’s side (Music Hall, Musical Comedy, and, going back a further generation, D'Oyley Carte), and quite privileged on his mother’s side. But his family deserves a blogpost of its own and I don't intend to go down that road today!     
                                                 

L to R Irene & John, and my mother's sister, Joyce,
with a boyfriend of the time 

My parents met and became friends before war was declared. My father enlisted, falsifying his age, and was sent to France with the Expeditionary force.   He was sent back after a few months, following my indefatigable grandmother's repeated appeals to the War Office, thus luckily avoiding Dunkirk. For the next few years  he was stationed quite near to my mother's family home, but they didn't have telephones and communications were solely by letter and an occasional telegram.. 

They married in 1943

In the first letters, the communications are quite formal. It was apparent they didn't know each other very well.  My mother's evoke a shy girl, lacking in self-confidence. 

The letters from my father, however, portray an apparently secure and confident chap. It’s obvious he saw himself - as did she - as a sophisticated and cultivated Professor Higgins figure. His project to lift her up from her humble origins and educate her in music and in art, and in the ‘proper’ way of comporting herself in polite society.    

It was a bit of a con. His parents had fallen on hard times and his own family life was probably a good deal more hand-to-mouth than hers, but he was something of an autodidact and, having stayed on a couple more years at (art) school, he was definitely more educated and worldly than she was when they met. My dad talked the part and it's clear he impressed my sixteen year old mum. And he enjoyed the fact.  

En route to Cornwall in the 1950s

My mother was truthful, open, demonstrative, tolerant, left wing.  My father was more closed, and economical with the facts if they didn't suit him - though not exactly dishonest, he didn’t like to spoil a good story for the sake of few facts. But he was also funny, broadminded, left wing and generally good humoured. 

She was an enthusiastic rock-pooler

As their relationship developed my mother found him out. She was just as intelligent, deep thinking and sensitive as he was – if not more so – and increasingly stood up for herself.  It drove her mad when he pretended knowledge in subjects he had no real understanding of.   

In company with her mother and father, all "Having a fag"!

Noddy was a 'confronter' and, like dog with a bone, would shake a subject to death when she wanted resolution to a problem. But he was an 'avoider', whose method of handling stress was an explosive temper.  

And yet and yet.....  despite the fireworks, my childhood was very happy and secure. I loved them both dearly. And one of my mother's greatest delights was that we, her children, also loved each other, and enjoyed each other's company.    

Doing a turn at Christmas

Charades - Sultan's of Swing. 

Painting in Cornwall

My father was the acknowledged artist in the family - but his talent in lettering and design led him to a career in graphic design, rising to Creative Director of an ad' agency (that no longer exists).  He never painted or drew as a hobby until his retirement. 

My mother was creative, but her need to "make" did not really extend beyond sewing and making most of our clothes. But with the passing years, my mothers interest in art, fostered by my father's support, grew  obsessional. Particularly after they had moved to Shoreham Village in Kent, where she attended local classes and became an accomplished oil painter. 

Exhibition held in Shoreham Village Hall

It was a devastating shock and a huge loss to us all when she died far too young, a few days before her 64th birthday. After her death  our father organised an exhibition of her art, In support of Diabetes UK.  

A gingerbread house made by my Mum
 for Tom's second Easter

Lying on the sofa with Tom for a cuddle

Thankfully she lived to meet her grandson, Tom, and to enjoy his first five years.  I am sad she didn't see me become a published author, but at least she knew I'd signed my first contract. and my book, 'Just Before Dawn' was published 8 months after she died.  

The Appeal of the Knave?

....or, what influenced me to become a writer? 

In my view writers are born not made. But I imagine there is always a spark, perhaps a book read at a particular moment, that gets under the skin and turns the vague "if only" into a need.

So many books captured my imagination when I was a young reader. But if I am really honest, the first book that inspired me to try to write romantic fiction was not Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre, or even one of Georgette Heyer’s sparkling Regency Romances, all of which I read and enjoyed at a ridiculously young age.

I must have been around 12 - a critical moment for girls, when hormones are on the rise. At that age I was actively looking for someone or something to feed the romantic impulse which was blossoming inside me. I fixated first on a boy who lived a few houses up from ours and who travelled on the same train as me in the mornings to go to school - him to Dulwich College, me to Bromley Girls Grammar. The crush lasted for a year or so, but I never even spoke to him.

Ethel and her older sister, Ella - known as Nettie and Sissie 

A more reliable source of sustenance was the dusty old hard back I found on the book shelves at home. ‘The Knave of Diamonds', by Ethel M Dell, had belonged to my grandmother (maybe even my great grandmother originally). Although she didn’t try to stop me, my mother did try to dissuade me me from reading this book. Looking back, I don’t think it was the subject matter or the sexist attitudes that worried her so much as the critical disdain then prevalent about the quality of Ethel's writing.

My Book Shelf

Prolific, and a huge bestseller, Ethel M Dell was (arguably) the first writer of romance, as we understand the term. Born in 1881, in Brixton (or Steatham - the accounts vary) she was shy and reclusive, and lived with her older sister, Ella. The two women even adopted a baby girl together. She had begun to write while very young and had many stories published in magazines. Most were stories of love and passion and, for those times, were considered very racy. Her cousins would count the number of times she used the words - passion, tremble, pant and thrill. By the time she met and married her own hero, Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Tahourdin Savage, she was in her forties and very successful. He gave up his commission.

The Knave of Diamonds was her second novel - published in 1912. In this story Nap Errol, the hero, is of questionable lineage. As far as I recall, he is the product of a liaison between a “white” American and a “red” Native American. This flaw is physically represented by his one blue eye and one brown, and it also accounts for the fact that he’s a womaniser and a cad. He even refers to himself as 'a savage'.
The heroine, Lady Anne, is unhappily married to a drunken brute, considerably older than she is.  Nap falls for Lady Anne, and does all in his power to seduce her but, although she is miserable and quite obviously fancies Nap, she is bound by honour and duty to fend him off and stay true to her marital vows. I can’t recall precisely how we get from this dilemma to the happy ending, but in between are all the ingredients of a good melodrama - drunkenness, beatings, abduction, near rape and redemption. What I do recall is that Nap, when on the point of ravishment, was brought to his senses by her high-mindedness and purity of heart.  One could be forgiven for inferring that had he had a woman of less obvious rectitude in his clutches, he would not have stopped at a fierce embrace.  It goes without saying, however, that all ends well with the timely death of the horrid husband.


Even when I first read it I knew it was very old fashioned, with a strong sermonising moral tone, but I loved it. These days it would be considered shockingly un-PC. But I now believe the influence of this book was seminal in my early attempts to write romance. I can see in it so many of the ingredients that informed my own writing in those early teenage years. The bad-boy hero and the good-girl heroine - throbbing with unexpressed physical passion - who tames him.

Ethel M Dell was a trail-blazer, and I still admire the woman for her output and her imagination. But I do not recommend her books as a style guide. The emotions are over-wrought and melodramatic. The heroines are always tired and in need of lie-down, but the headaches and exhaustion they suffer is certainly not the result of hard, physical work. This was a time when well brought up ladies of a certain class - and all of EMD’s heroines are well brought up ladies of a certain class - had servants. What wears them out is the expenditure of so much breathless emotion.

 PB reprint - undated, but 1950s I guess

By the time I acquired the second book in my collection, ‘Charles Rex’- bought second-hand in Bantry, on a family holiday to Ireland when I was seventeen - I still enjoyed it immensely, but my critical faculties had sharpened considerably. Though still a teenager my appreciation was now a far more complex mix. I’m afraid that the bizarre plot, outlandish antics and overwrought (but never physically expressed) passions made me laugh.  I do not possess the complete canon, but I have something like 20 Ethel M Dell books in the place of honour on the shelf above my computer. Including that original copy of Knave of Diamonds I read when I was a girl. I love them all, but they are of their time, a window onto a world long gone, when a heroine's feelings of desire and longing were “unutterable”.

Drawing a Naked Male Model Can be Challenging

They can't always keep as still as you would like

All my books have grown out of the “What if...?” question.  LIFE CLASS is no exception.

Initially I had the title but no story, so I began to reflect on the accumulated experience of attending life drawing lessons over many years, and there was one incident that cried out to be revisited. 
Before I arrived at Croydon College of Art (now called Croydon School of Art)  aged sixteen, I knew no boys, apart from my cousins.

Here between my first and second year

For a shy, gauche and inexperienced suburban kid from an all-girls Grammar School - becoming an art student was a very big deal.  I’m sure it was a big deal for all of us in First Year Foundation.  Within days, however, we’d relaxed with one another enough to become noisy and brash, and to show off. Then we had our first life class.

NOT the drawing from that first lesson

Of course, we all knew this weekly lesson was a part of the curriculum, so at least we weren’t taken by surprise. But knowing that something is going to happen does not necessarily make it easier to deal with when it does. Imagine us, not yet entirely comfortable with one another, suddenly confronted by a very ample naked woman who we were expected to draw. The lesson passed in a stunned silence from the mixed class of very young students.  The teacher made up for our unusual hush by raising his voice, as if suspecting we’d all turned deaf as well as mute.

“Observe the landmarks of her body and how they relate to one another,” he boomed. “Her crotch ... her belly ... her navel ... her nipples!”

In retrospect, it was funny.  At the time it was more agonising than amusing.  I found it a challenge to even look at her without blushing, let alone to closely study those parts of her body I was too bashful to say out loud!  But, despite the initial embarrassment, I swiftly became used to studying a naked stranger.  In fact, the life class rapidly became my favourite part of the week.  I was captivated by the challenge of trying to interpret the human body in a drawing. 

Peter Robinson (Strand branch) 

When I left college I was unable to find a job in the art world, and for the next few years I was a depressed sales assistant in various London department stores - many of which no longer exist.

The aspect of art I missed the most was the life drawing, and I signed up for an evening class at the London School of Printing. I continued with this for a year but, after a day’s work, slogging over from the Strand to the Elephant and Castle on public transport became a bind and I gave it up. 

At the time it felt like my life was trickling away. In truth it  wasn’t so long before I managed to secure my dream job as an illustrator in an advertising design studio and for the next few years I was very happy earning my living doing what I’d always wanted to do.


As I became more accomplished, however, the work became more demanding and stressful. The workload was always erratic and, when a new commission did come in, it was typically wanted first thing the next morning. 

So when I had my son, I was content to take a break from commercial art. Now at home full-time, I revisited my teenage hobby of writing, and I also signed up for another life drawing class.  Baby-sitting responsibility was my husband’s for one night a week, enabling me to do something just for me.


On that first evening I set out feeling excited and tense.  I had the directions and, as I drove over to the school in Wandsworth, I rehearsed in my mind what faced me.  I knew that my life drawing skills would be rusty, I’d not employed them for years, but there was something else on my mind.   In my experience ‘Life’ models were predominantly female.  At college, over a decade earlier, we’d occasionally had a male model but, maybe to spare the blushes of the very young class, they’d always worn boxers or posing pouches. (One old fellow always wore his black beret, as well!) Surely in these more liberated times, and in an adult class, a male model would be stark naked.

My tension about the evening ahead ratcheted up a few more notches when I couldn’t find the school.  I must have been ten or fifteen minutes late when I eventually burst into the studio.

 Everyone turned to look at me.  The teacher was male.  All the students were male.  And - lying stretched out sideways on a mattress, his head on his hand - the entirely naked model was male.  Wanting to disrupt proceedings as little as possible, I grabbed the first empty spot I saw.  I didn’t think about the position I’d chosen until I’d sat down on the donkey (a wooden bench with an adjustable front flap), unwrapped my drawing pad, and raised my head.  Everyone else had arranged themselves in a semi-circle behind or to the sides of the model.  I was the only one with a totally full-frontal view.  I looked at him, and he looked at me...

You will find a fairly accurate account of what happened next at the start of Chapter Three of LIFE CLASS.  I have given the experience to my heroine, Dory, who is a novice artist attending her first life drawing class. She is no shrinking violet but she finds it an unsettling experience.  It unsettled me at the time, but I didn’t allow the incident to put me off. 
I attended this particular class for a couple of years and we never had the same model again. Then I changed to another, a daytime class with a crèche.  And throughout the years since, I’ve continued to attend life classes wherever I’ve lived. 

I don’t do life drawing because it’s easy. Sometimes it is, but often it’s hard. It can feel almost impossible - particularly if there’s a weirdo model (and some have been very weird!)
But, thankfully, they’re the exception not the rule.  Despite the failures and the frustrations of the discipline, I am drawn back again and again, trying to capture the mass, the angles, the points of balance, the fall of light and shade on that most intriguing of all subjects - the human body. 

LIFE CLASS
Four people hide secrets from the world and from themselves. Dory is disillusioned by men and relationships, having seen the damage sex can do.  Her sister, Fran, deals with her mid-life crisis by pursuing an on-line flirtation which turns threatening. Dominic is a lost boy, trapped in a life heading for self-destruction.  Stefan feels a failure. He searches for validation through his art alone.
They meet regularly at a life-drawing class, led by sculptor Stefan. All want a life that is different from the one they have, but all have made mistakes they know they cannot escape. They must uncover the past – and the truths that come with it - before they can make sense of the present and navigate a new path into the future.

Snow!

I woke up the other morning and couldn't get back to sleep.  Realising it had snowed in the night I got up and came downstairs to get my camera.

7 a.m. in a Gloucestershire garden

Black bird on the scavenge. 

It continued to snow heavily through the day, but by the next day the sun had come out and a thaw was in progress. First thing in the morning the virgin snow was networked with animal prints. 

Who's been strolling around in our garden as if he owns the joint?

 We suspect this miscreant was the culprit - s/he was caught red-handed just a week earlier.

With a suspect firmly in our sights for the majority of prints, we were baffled by these markings, which almost looked like the patterns on shoe soles, or car tyres, but the shallowness of the imprints, and the swirly snaking shapes were mystifying.

 

Thank goodness for social media.  A friend, Kit Domino, came up with a credible answer.  She suggested it was an owl swooping low to snatch up its prey.  I feel sorry for the innocent mouse or shrew, but I am very pleased to have an explanation and also pleased that the owl (or even, possibly, an early morning  buzzard) managed to find a meal.

A Tasteful Christmas

I was recently talking about the excesses that some people go in for at this time of year - priding myself on how tasteful our decorations are compared to the lit up sleighs, snowmen, and Santas that adorn some peoples houses. Then I reflected.....

The above left bust is a reproduction of a winner from the Olympic Games - so my husband calls him Victor (although, as he points out, Victor is Latin but the sculpture is Greek). For several years now, at this time of year, he has worn this festive hat. The above right bust is also a reproduction of a Greek head. It is inherited and came to us unnamed, and we have never assigned one to him or her. Though usually sporting a tartan bow-tie in honour of the season, it is only this year that I had the brainwave of applying the antlers. 

The red reindeer always sits on this little shelf in the guest bedroom, but at Christmas his little knitted rider is always placed on his back.  Eric the Sea Gull sits on the sill in the downstairs loo all the time,  his tiny hat comes out annually.  I had to repair it the other year, and replaced the "fur" trim and pom pom. I confess I am a person of habit.

The innovation I am most proud of this year was Toby the Jug.  He's a fairly hideous character who belonged to my grandparents, and because we have a love hate relationship with him, he sits relatively out of sight, at the turn of our top staircase. At this time of year he will usually have either an evergreen or a glittery arrangement growing out of his head. 

But when I was rootling through the boxes and bags of decorations and other ephemera, I came upon our old Santa beard.  There are no grandchildren and we don't do stockings anymore (although I'm ashamed to admit it has only been a couple of years since we drew a line!) so there is no need for anyone to dress up and go through the mad morning pantomime of distributing what had become large sacks to a family of  adults. Standing there holding the beard, and knowing there was another more modest Santa hat in the bottom of the bag, I had the brainwave.  I have to say Toby has never looked so handsome.