Dilation Exercise 77
In an effort to promote my new novel, A PARLIAMENT OF CROWS, released by Lazy Fascist Press, I created the Dilation Exercise below using an excerpt from the novel. The novel is inspired by the three infamous Wardlaw sisters. This Dilation Exercise breaks my rule of only two lines of caption.
Need a further explanation? Go to Imagination Workout—The Dilation Exercises.
“Detective Robert Walker testified that burnt fragments of the bones of a human infant were found in the furnace of the tenement where you and your family lived in Brooklyn. Do you know anything about the tiny bones, Miss Mortlow?”
Although she had her suspicions about Orphia’s role, and that of her sister, Carolee, in the disappearance of the infant, thankfully Vertiline didn’t know the truth. “No,” she said. She clenched her jaw, glanced at the jury, and was disturbed that she couldn’t read their expressions.
Artwork: “In the Furnace” copyright © 2012 Alan M. Clark.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon
Dilation Exercise 74
In an effort to promote my new novel, A PARLIAMENT OF CROWS, released by Lazy Fascist Press, I created the Dilation Exercise below using an excerpt from the novel. The novel is inspired by the three infamous Wardlaw sisters. This Dilation Exercise breaks my rule of only two lines of caption.
In the late fall of 1898, persuaded by his mother that suicide was his best course of action, James boarded a train headed for Louisville, Kentucky with the intention of leaping from the locomotive at a great speed and dashing his brains out on the rough ballast around the tracks. He leapt shortly after the train left the station in Christiansboro, before much speed had accumulated. He broke a leg in the fall and was a burden to the family until he healed many months later.
Spring of 1900, James leapt into the well, but he thrashed about and cried so long and hard for help that trying to ignore him became an embarrassment, and a rescue commenced. With each attempt on his life, the activity and drama served only to draw unwanted attention from the parents of the college students and from folks in town.
Artwork: “Down the Hole (revised)” copyright © 2001 Alan M. Clark.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon
Dilation Exercise 73
In an effort to promote my new novel, A PARLIAMENT OF CROWS, released by Lazy Fascist Press, I created the Dilation Exercise below. The novel is inspired by the three infamous Wardlaw sisters.
When they were all young, Vertiline’s miscreant twin sisters frequently succeeded in avoiding punishment by remaining silent and thereby creating a confusion of identity.
Now that they were adults and their larger crimes might raise suspicions, Vertiline employed something like the twins’ early tactic, insisting that she and her sisters continuously wear mourning clothes.
Artwork: “The Twins in Black” copyright © 2012 Alan M. Clark.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon
Dilation Exercise 72
In an effort to promote my new novel, A PARLIAMENT OF CROWS, released on Halloween by Lazy Fascist Press, I’ve created a Dilation Exercise to help promote the book. The historical fiction novel is inspired by the life and crimes of the three infamous Wardlaw sisters. This Dilation Exercise is inspired by a courtroom scene in the novel.
The prosecutor turned to Vertiline and said, “Are you asking us to believe, Miss Mortlow, that the additional suicide notes, seemingly one for every occasion, apparently written in your handwriting and found among your effects in a house devoid of writing implements and ink, were in fact penned by the deceased who was at the time bedridden in your care?”
Vertiline took a quick, panicked breath before responding, knowing the jury would never believe her answer.
Artwork: “Original Sin” copyright © 1992 Alan M. Clark. Revised version of an interior illustration for Asimov’s Science Fiction, appearing with the novelette, “Original Sin,” by Phillip C. Jennings.
Captions are original to this post and have nothing to do with the literary project with which the artwork first appeared.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon
Writing the Human Experience: Guest Blogger Molly Tanzer on her Debut, A Pretty Mouth
(With Molly Tanzer’s permission, I have copied here her guest blog post from my Imagination Fully Dilated Blog. If you’d like to see her post on my blog, here’s a link. In her post, there’s a link to her blog where you can read my part of our exchange. —Alan M. Clark)
I asked Alan Clark about the possibility of doing a blog-exchange to give readers (and 
potential readers) some insight into our most recent works—my debut, A Pretty Mouth, and his 5th novel, A Parliament of Crows. He graciously agreed, so huzzah! Today, you can read my post on his blog—actually, I guess you already are—and his on mine.
I specifically asked Alan about doing a blog exchange because his 5th novel, Of Thimble and Threat, was one of the best books I read last year. Oh, and his latest has a bit of overlap with mine. (Alan talks about this very thing over on my blog, so that’s another reason to go read it!)
I read Thimble because our mutual publisher, Cameron Pierce, sent me an ARC. He thought I would like it, and I did, I did indeed. It’s a wonderful book, perfectly appealing to avid readers of genre and those who prefer straight literary/historical fiction. It also had the effect of forcing me to ratchet up my game for Mouth. I knew if I was going to be published side-by-side with Alan I needed to get real and start taking things seriously. It was extremely intimidating, but in that way that gets me excited about a challenge. (That said, if Cameron had sent me Parliament, I might have just thrown in the towel and given up on writing. Yeah, it’s that good.)
Anyways, blog exchange! As it turned out, I got the easy job. Alan wrote his piece first, and I liked it so much I decided to just riff off his. Which, if you must know, is pretty much how I wrote the largest chunk of A Pretty Mouth. More on that after a brilliant quote from Alan’s post that I found so inspiring:
“… The period a writer chooses for a story will define the characters in it to some extent. Obviously, some experiences we have today are not possible for characters set within a time, say, 100 or 500 years ago. This can present real limitations unless the writer is willing to learn about the period and really open up the character’s world, discover the possibilities, and share that with the reading audience. … No matter the period, the emotional characteristics of human beings are just as subtle and complex as those of human beings today. The everyday realities and events that shape their feelings and motivations can be very different, however. In creating characters, I try to take advantage of the similarities and the differences, setting up parallels and contrasts with what we know today to express something about human experience.”
That’s Alan for you. Saying pretty much everything there is to say on a subject, and more concisely than I, perhaps especially, could ever dream of doing. I mean, read Of Thimble and Threat and tell me there’s more to write on the fourth victim of Jack the Ripper. (I mean, his introduction to the book was shocking in its simplicity, honesty, and wisdom.)
I suppose the above quote struck me in particular, because it’s talking about exactly what I wanted to do with the biggest portion of A Pretty Mouth, which, depending on what you want to call it, is a novel told in parts, or a collection of related short stories. You see, the title novella is a (hopefully) witty Restoration comedy re-envisioned as an 80s teen sex romp.
Huh? What? Yeah, I know. I figured I was going buck-wild with genre in the book anyways, so why not have a “school story” kind of thing? I love school stories, always have. But how do you write something realistic and fresh about school experience when writing about a educational system long gone?
Wadham College, in 1660, was an interesting community of intellectuals, half middle/high school, half university. Boys from 12 years old were required to take courses in Astronomy, Physics, Logic, and Latin; older students attended more college-style classes, as we might think of them. Girls were not allowed. In fact, at that time the only female servant employed by the college was the laundress, who was required by the statutes to be older (and lower-class) as to not distract the students. And she was only allowed to come to the gate of the college, lest her presence inflame the boys’ passions. Kind of hard to stage a panty raid, or whatever, under those circumstances, you know?
And yet, when you read Restoration-era texts—let’s say, for example, the poetry of John Wilmot, the novels/plays of Aphra Behn, or the diary of Samuel Pepys—it’s obvious that some things haven’t changed that much. Worrying over things like popularity, academic performance, uncertainty over one’s future, all those concerns existed then, as they do now. So I hoped to exploit those similarities to make an unusual setting familiar.
Now, my stuff is more anachronistic than Alan’s, deliberately so. Alan’s the kind of writer who shocks you with the horror of reality; I’m the kind of writer who thinks it’s funny when 17th century schoolboys say things like “Busted!” and, I dunno, “motherfucker.” Which let me walk that line between historical drama and 80s comedy.
Maybe. I say that, but you, dear reader, must be the judge of that.
Terrible Twins and Their Easter Eggs
I met Molly Tanzer online after she read and commented on my historical fiction novel, Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Jack the Ripper Victim. This year Molly and I discovered that we were both writing within historical settings, and we agreed to serve as readers for each others’ developing work. Both Molly’s book, A Pretty Mouth, and my novel, A Parliament of Crows, are historical fiction since they are inspired by real events within history. Both books tell dark, disturbing tales, hers an erotic horror, mine a southern gothic. Both were released by Lazy Fascist Press this fall. A Pretty Mouth is sort of a novel in short and long fiction set in England during several different periods, much of it in the 1600s, and A Parliament of Crows is set in various locations within the United States between the time of the American Civil War and the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.
The fun of writing within historical settings is that it’s a bit like time travel. The period a writer chooses for a story will define the characters in it to some extent. Obviously, some experiences we have today are not possible for characters set within a time, say, 100 or 500 years ago. This can present real limitations unless the writer is willing to learn about the period and really open up the character’s world, discover the possibilities, and share that with the reading audience. That’s the time travel I’m talking about. No matter the period, the emotional characteristics of human beings are just as subtle and complex as those of human beings today. The everyday realities and events that shape their feelings and motivations can be very different, however. In creating characters, I try to take advantage of the similarities and the differences, setting up parallels and contrasts with what we know today to express something about human experience. If done right, a reader gets to time-travel too, experiencing a long lost world through the eyes of a character they can understand emotionally, even if the character’s feelings and outlook are shaped by a different time.
A Pretty Mouth was so well realized that it sent me back in time, and allowed me to view a bizarre and terrifying world through the eyes of fascinating, very human characters.
Another thing Molly and I discovered about our writing this year was that both of us were writing about twins. A Pretty Mouth has a supernatural genetic line of evil twins. My novel, A Parliament of Crows, has one set of evil twins whose connection to one another has a supernatural aspect. I thought my twins could use a hint of long, dark genetic history, and suggested to Molly that we might create a connection. Adding more evil twins to her character’s lineage was desirable to her, so she agreed to creating a tiny link between the projects with one or two sentences in each. To get there, we traded messages via facebook “chat,” looking for a solution that was both minimal, but undeniable. I had fun, and I think she did as well. I could almost hear her laughing in her messages. The lines we added had to be of a sort that would not confuse and would not distract a reader from the story at hand, but would be an Easter egg for those who read both books. I’m curious to see who will be the first to notice.
—Alan M. Clark
Drawing for OF THIMBLE AND THREAT Painting in Less than a Week
Less than one week left before the the raffle of a free painting by Alan M. Clark to promote Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim, published by Lazy Fascist Press. The image on the left is the painting by Alan M. Clark for the raffle [details below]. The image is inspired by Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim, and is currently unpublished. The painting is acrylic on hardboard with dimensions of 12″x18″.
For those of you who missed the initial announcement, here’s how to enter the raffle:
A. Take a picture of yourself with Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim and post it online (on your blog/website, Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere). Send a link to the photo to lazyfascist@gmail.com.
OR
B. Correctly answer the following trivia questions (send your answers to lazyfascist@gmail.com):
1. What song did Katie sing in the novel during her cousin’s execution?
2. What was given to infants by the childminder, Patricia Ennis, in order to quiet them?
3. What item in the novel is referred to by the slang expression “nose warmer”?
No purchase necessary. If you have any questions about the raffle, please email lazyfascist@gmail.com. The winner will be announced on June 4th, 2012.
Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim is a story about the intense love between a mother and a child, a story of poverty and loss, fierce independence, and unconquerable will. It is the devastating portrayal of a self-perpetuated descent into Hell, a lucid view into the darkest parts of the human heart.
Alan M. Clark is a World Fantasy Award-winning artist. He has illustrated the works of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Jack Ketchum, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Laymon, Brian Lumley, F. Paul Wilson, Brian Keene, William F. Nolan, George Orwell, Poppy Z. Brite, and Christopher Golden.
In 2 weeks the Raffle Alan M. Clark’s OF THIMBLE AND THREAT-inspired Painting
Two weeks left before the the raffle of a free painting by Alan M. Clark to promote Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim, published by Lazy Fascist Press. The image on the left is the painting by Alan M. Clark for the raffle [details below]. The image is inspired by Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim, and is currently unpublished. The painting is acrylic on hardboard with dimensions of 12″x18″.
For those of you who missed the initial announcement, here’s how to enter the raffle:
A. Take a picture of yourself with Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim and post it online (on your blog/website, Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere). Send a link to the photo to lazyfascist@gmail.com.
OR
B. Correctly answer the following trivia questions (send your answers to lazyfascist@gmail.com):
1. What song did Katie sing in the novel during her cousin’s execution?
2. What was given to infants by the childminder, Patricia Ennis, in order to quiet them?
3. What item in the novel is referred to by the slang expression “nose warmer”?
No purchase necessary. If you have any questions about the raffle, please email lazyfascist@gmail.com. The winner will be announced on June 4th, 2012.
Of Thimble and Threat: The Life of a Ripper Victim is a story about the intense love between a mother and a child, a story of poverty and loss, fierce independence, and unconquerable will. It is the devastating portrayal of a self-perpetuated descent into Hell, a lucid view into the darkest parts of the human heart.
Alan M. Clark is a World Fantasy Award-winning artist. He has illustrated the works of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Jack Ketchum, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Laymon, Brian Lumley, F. Paul Wilson, Brian Keene, William F. Nolan, George Orwell, Poppy Z. Brite, and Christopher Golden.
The Life of Catherine Eddowes, Ripper Victim, by Alan M. Clark
My latest book, Of Thimble and Threat (now available from Lazy Fascist at amazon.com), is a novel inspired by the life of Catherine Eddowes, a woman believed to be the fourth victim of Jack the Ripper.
I first became interested in the life of Catherine Eddowes after reading the police report about her murder, particularly the part that listed her articles of clothing and the possessions found on her person at the time of her death.
Here’s the list from the police report:
Clothing
• Black straw bonnet trimmed in green and black velvet with black beads. Black strings, worn tied to the head.
• Black cloth jacket trimmed around the collar and cuffs with imitation fur and around the pockets in black silk braid and fur. Large metal buttons.
• Dark green chintz skirt, 3 flounces, brown button on waistband. The skirt is patterned with Michaelmas daisies and golden lilies.
• Man’s white vest, matching buttons down front.
• Brown linsey bodice, black velvet collar with brown buttons down front
• Grey stuff petticoat with white waistband
• Very old green alpaca skirt (worn as undergarment)
• Very old ragged blue skirt with red flounces, light twill lining (worn as undergarment)
• White calico chemise
• No drawers or stays
• Pair of men’s lace up boots, mohair laces. Right boot repaired with red thread
• 1 piece of red gauze silk worn as a neckerchief
• 1 large white pocket handkerchief
• 1 large white cotton handkerchief with red and white bird’s eye border
• 2 unbleached calico pockets, tape strings
• 1 blue stripe bed ticking pocket
• Brown ribbed knee stockings, darned at the feet with white cotton
Possessions
• 2 small blue bags made of bed ticking
• 2 short black clay pipes
• 1 tin box containing tea
• 1 tin box containing sugar
• 1 tin matchbox, empty
• 12 pieces white rag, some slightly bloodstained
• 1 piece coarse linen, white
• 1 piece of blue and white shirting, 3 cornered
• 1 piece red flannel with pins and needles
• 6 pieces soap
• 1 small tooth comb
• 1 white handle table knife
• 1 metal teaspoon
• 1 red leather cigarette case with white metal fittings
• 1 ball hemp
• 1 piece of old white apron with repair
• Several buttons and a thimble
• Mustard tin containing two pawn tickets, One in the name of Emily Birrell, 52 White’s Row, dated August 31, 9d for a man’s flannel shirt. The other is in the name of Jane Kelly of 6 Dorset Street and dated September 28, 2S for a pair of men’s boots. Both addresses are false.
• Printed handbill and according to a press report- a printed card for ‘Frank Carter,305,Bethnal Green Road
• Portion of a pair of spectacles
• 1 red mitten
Catherine Eddowes had spent each of the two nights before the night of her death in a different casual ward. The casual wards were part of the workhouse system, a place for the transient, the ill, or those known to be criminals to receive temporary shelter in what was considered at the time to be appalling conditions. Like many of the homeless today, she was wearing many layers of clothing. She carried over fifty personal items. It is likely she had everything she owned on her person.
With a sense of what her time and circumstances were, I found this pitiful list more compelling than anything I’ve read about Jack the Ripper, and I had the idea of seeing in a work of fiction how all those possessions and clothing came to her. Our possessions say a lot about who we are, and hers spoke to me about a hard-scrabble life and a desperation—not without hope—that made for good storytelling.
The story begins when she is thirteen years old and concludes at her tragic death at the hands of, what they might have called at the time, a fiend. We don’t say fiend much anymore. We don’t call the Green River Killer or BTK a fiend. It just sounds weak in the light of what we know about these killers today. But that was strong language to describe a killer in Victorian London. I use it here to make a point—if I was going to transport readers to that time and give them a reasonable taste of what her life was like, I’d have to get the atmospherics right.
I would not be inventing her life out of whole cloth (an old expression that fits the theme of the story well) since there was much information about Catherine Eddowes, but to build the world in which she lived, Victorian England, I would have to commit to extensive research. The thought of it was so daunting, it took me over 15 years and finally a request by Cameron Pierce to write a novel for Lazy Fascist Press before I would seriously consider it.
Here are some interesting things I discovered about Catherine Eddowes:
• Her first common-law husband, a man named Conway, wrote gallows ballads and was a chapman. Catherine worked at this business with him and most likely contributed to the writing of the ballads. They made a living attending public executions where they sold their chapbooks for a penny apiece. These were composed of several broad sheets folded together that included a ballad and other written material about the life, the crime and trial of the criminal being executed. They did this at the execution of Catherine’s cousin, a murderer named Robinson.
• She went to the infirmary at the Work House to give birth to her children.
• While living with a man named Kelly, one of Catherine’s aliases was Mary Ann Kelly, an alias also used by the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper, Mary Jane Kelly.
• Two days before her murder, Catherine told friends she knew the murderer and would turn him in for the reward.
• The night of her murder, Catherine was arrested for public drunkenness and held in a cell where she slept for several hours. When she awoke, she said she could take care of herself and begged to be released. The police would not let her go without knowing her name. She gave it as Mary Ann Kelly. Within an hour of her release, she was found dead.
Here are some interesting slang expressions from Victorian London that I used in the novel:
• Cuttie or Nose Warmer—short pipe, mostly smoked by women.
• Billy—silk handkerchief.
• Bludger—violent criminal.
• Dollymop—amateur prostitute.
• Fakement—pretense for begging.
• Flag—an apron.
• Glock—half-wit.
• Gulpy—gullible, easily duped.
• Haybag—woman.
• Lump Hotel—Work House
• Lumper—dock worker.
• Lushington—a drunkard.
• Mumper—beggar
• Muck Snipe—someone “down and out”
• Patterer—someone who has hawks using a recited sales pitch.
• Prater—conman preacher.
• Rookery—slum.
• Square rigged—soberly dressed.
Here are some interesting things I discovered about Victorian London and British culture:
• London Particular—A mix of pollution and fog, sometimes called pea soup fog for its yellow color, resulting from the extensive use of coal during the industrial revolution in England. The British government in recent years has admitted that the killer fog was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of its citizens.
• The Great Stink—A time in London, during the summer of 1858, when the amount of waste entering the Thames and hot weather combined to create a miasma so potent it nearly shut down the government and brought the city to a halt. Those who could afford to do so evacuated the city.
Phosphorism—A disease that was common among matchmaker (those who labored in match factories). Handling the chemicals used in the production of matches inflicted upon the laborer damage to the teeth and jaw, often resulting in the loss of some or all of the teeth and occasionally requiring the removal of the jaw bone.
• Godfrey’s Cordial—An opium and alcohol elixir used to keep toddles and infants quiet.
• Various Scavengers—Mudlarks (children who scavenge the river Thames, looking for anything of value), Toshers (those who scavenge in the sewers, often children), Bone Grubbers (those who collect bones to sell, either asking for them door to door or scavenging for them along the river).
• Night Soil Men—Those who muck out cesspits, the receptacles of human bodily waste in the basements of tenements and private homes.
• Pig Wash—Primarily the leftovers of a middle class to wealthy household, food that has been to the table too many times and has gone bad or is close to it. The rejected food is given to those in service to the household who have requested and been granted Pig Wash.
• Broxy—the meat of diseased sheep—a cheap source of meat for the poor.
• All Sorts—a drink composed of all the drinks abandoned on tables at a pub, gathered up by the barman or barmaids, and mixed together—a cheap source of alcohol for the poor.
In writing Of Thimble and Threat, my effort was not to create a character we would relate to as one from our time, but one whose words and actions were shaped by her environment and circumstances and whose driving emotions were seen as reasonable within that context. Victorian England, with it’s social structure, polluted environment, the quality of sustenance for its people, labor conditions, the state of scientific and medical knowledge in that period, the prevalence and pervasiveness of disease and the seeming ease with which people became ill and slipped quickly into death, was a very different world from the one in which I live. All these elements combined to create quite different priorities and concerns for the people of that time and place from what most of us experience today. The average person was most likely much more aware of mortality day to day since something as simple as a cut on the finger could easily become infected and lead to death. Choosing an occupation—if one were lucky enough to have a choice—was to choose between compromising one or another aspects of one’s health.
That’s not to say we don’t have these concerns today, but time and experience has led to systems which mitigate much of the extremes seen in Victorian London. Human beings haven’t truly changed—we experience the same emotions we always have. The stimulus for those emotions is what changes from environment to environment, generation to generation. We would certainly relate to those of another time, but having a conversation with someone from the 1800s would be an interesting and singular experience for someone today.
The possessions of Catherine Eddowes started that conversation with me, providing a glimpse of her priorities and concerns, and Of Thimble and Threat is my response.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon
