Writer's Gramps

One way of finding stories that will carry their weight is to make a list. For example if I do - someone who spends too much time on the computer I would have:- 1 A games nerd who can no longer distinguish games from real life and plays out his chcarcters at wor. 2 Someone who looks at tourist attractions but never goes out to look around. 3 Someone who buys antiques on the web. 4 Someone who plants fake news. 5 A policeman looking for scams or porn. 6 Someone researching history who finds themselves in an extremist group who hate bowler hats or something. 7 Someone who diagnosis themselves from the web. 8 Someone learning a different language to go on holiday or because they are being seconded there. 9 Someone who gets hypnotised on line and robs a bank or gets married, or speaks another language. 10 Someone contacted by an alien, maybe warning about the end of the earth. 11 Someone who researches nature and is contacted by trees or bushes or a parrot maybe.  12 Someone researchin...

 Once or twice I have had people warn others to be careful or they might end up in one of my stories but when I'm writing a story I like to think of my characters in terms of who might play them on screen. Using Bubbles in the Cauldron, which is set in Scotland in 1820 at the time of the 'Last Armed Insurrection on Mainland Britain I would cast the main character, Fergus Findlay, as Mel Gibson of Braveheart, unwilling to get involved in violence but forced to it by circumstance. Tom Abernethy is difficult as he is a lawyer and basically non-violent, my first choice would be James Stewart but he's from another era and present movie fans may not be familiar with the wide variety of roles he played, this role is of the kind he played in 'The man who killed Liberty Vallance'. Deaf Davie is fifteen and is based loosely on how I remember feeling at that age, a bit confused and overawed at times but still determined and, above all, loyal. Abernethy, Tom's father is Sea...

 I've just been reading Sir Walter Scott's account of the campaign of Graham of Montrose at the beginning of the Civil War. It's accurate and readable but, like so many military and naval war accounts is bare. It tells of how the Highlanders and their Irish friends under their left handed leader tried to invade England and what King Charles did but nothing of what the men felt. They'd left their homes in the North West Highlands and, avoiding Argyll, which was enemy territory, may have felt watchful but comfortable as they drew close to Stirling and Edinburgh but the then had to pass through the relatively flat central belt with it's anti Stuart feelings and then into the strange moors of the Southern Uplands, where an ambush could be arranged. It must have been like the old films of the wagon train going across Apache country. Then, with a long stretch of hostile territory, including Argyll, and a gathering hostile Lowland army between them and their homes, an aris...

 The first mention of the navy in Sir Walter Scott's, Tales of a Grandfather, occurs when Charles 1st, in 1638/39, decided to invade Scotland in what might be considered the first arming in preparation for the Civil War. The Scots, not just the nobility, but the ordinary people, some would prefer, not just the ordinary people but also the nobility, had refused to accept bishops and, to enforce his will, Charles had called out what, in Arthur's time, would be called the Fyrd - those having obligations to their local lord. It included men from as far south as Dorset and was marched north to face a Scottish army built of men hardened in years of fighting as mercenaries on the continent. The English 'army' virtually ran away. The Fyrd were to be paid by the king  but his money ran out and it is recorded that at least one returning group beat up their officers.  Getting back to the navy, Charles had given instructions that it was to be assembled in the Firth of Forth  rea...