Life Before Computers Gave us Anchovy and Claptrap. Part One

 Remember Carbon Paper?

No? Prepare to be shocked

Yes? Welcome back to the Pre-Millennium Carbon Age

Part One

So you’ve got a story idea…

 

Back in those heady days of yore when you had an idea for a story, you didn’t fire up your laptop (‘What’s that?’ you would have cried and no one would have answered.) Instead, you grabbed your Silvine Exercise Book. There was something so wonderfully tactile about the glossy textured surface and, on the back cover, you could learn ‘avoirdupois weights’, ‘hay and straw weights’, ‘long and lineal measures’ including how many poles were in a furlong (40), the number of yards in a fathom (2). We all knew how many noggins made up a pint (4) because our exercise books told us, and as for rods, poles and perches...

With pencils sharpened, you stared at the first pristine page. If you were already inspired enough, you might actually write something - maybe the working title, or possibly a first sentence. Braver souls headed straight for the ballpoint pen; the rest of us lined up our erasers.

Meanwhile, the machine that would eventually be harnessed into service to produce a printed version sat idly in the corner of the kitchen/living room/bedroom. Most likely it was a portable, neatly zipped into its leatherette carrying case. You wouldn’t dream of typing your first draft or even your second. No, that was for later, when you had finished all the crossings out and amendments and after you had deciphered that note you made on page 32 relating to something on page 94 that was now completely obliterated or amended so many times as to be completely illegible.

But eventually the day would come when you would unzip that carrying case and take out your beloved, much cherished Empire Smith Corona, Olivetti, Imperial or whatever make of typewriter you had chosen. The smell was unmistakeable, a mix of the ink on the ribbon (more of that later) and the grease on the simple cogs and keys that kept the machine working. Next to you, was your collection of scribbled-on Silvine exercise books numbered from 1 to whatever, open at volume 1, page 1. All you had to do now was type it up. Simple? Well, yes, and then again…no.

You see your friendly typewriter couldn’t correct any mistakes you might make, or any decisions to alter a word or phrase once you had typed it. If you wanted to make a correction, you had to do it yourself. To effect such a change, you needed to call on the services of a hard typewriter rubber (that usually rubbed a hole in the paper while removing the offending error) or, if you were a little more sophisticated, you might use a white liquid resembling a cross between a bottle of nail varnish and Dulux Brilliant White Gloss Paint – called variously ‘Liquid Paper’ or ‘Tipp-Ex’ depending on your manufacturer of choice. 

This had been invented by the mother of a musician and sometime member of The Monkees (anyone under the age of 40 is advised to consult an older relative or friend). His name was Michael (Mike) Nesmith. I forget hers but I believe she was a Mrs. Nesmith, at least once upon a time. Tipp-Ex also made a paper-correction slip thingy but it’s far too complicated to explain here (that older friend/relative is going to become increasingly handy from now on).

(Mike Nesmith is on the left)

The subject of errors and revisions leads me to the next hurdle we writers from the carbon (paper) age had to overcome. Copies. Nowadays, along with everything else a typewriter couldn’t do, your computer, in cahoots with a printer, will happily print off as many copies as you want – all identical and of the same quality. Not back then they didn’t.

And this is where carbon paper came in.

It was sold in boxes, in various sorts, textures and colours. Usually you had a choice of black or, a sort of, royal blue. If you wanted more colour definition you needed to use different colours of paper rather than print. Even the most amateur writer knew that to type only one copy of the precious manuscript was to court danger of the most precipitous kind. What if you lost it? What if you sent it to a publisher and THEY lost it? Or the postal service lost it (I’m coming to them later, in part two). What if your house burned down? What if…what if… The prospect was too horrendous to contemplate so, the investment in carbon paper was well worth it, plus publishers were usually satisfied with receiving a first or second-generation copy, as long as it was neat, error-free, pristine, and…legible. As well as double-spaced, with correct margins and numbered pages (you had to type those on as you went along).

In order to create your usual mix of one top copy plus up to five carbon copies, you carefully layered your sheets of typing paper with a layer of carbon paper between each one – taking great care to load the carbon paper the right way up or else the damn thing would print on the reverse of the previous sheet and you would have to (sound ominous music here) START ALL OVER AGAIN.

A word of caution here. Imagine you are bashing away at your typewriter - not the gentle tip tap most of you do right now. Typewriters were robust and required robust operation – some more than others; the keys needed to be moved. They had to be hit with meaning and a certain sense of real purpose or they had a tendency to sit tight and refuse to budge or else all gang up on you, move together and end in a tangle which – you guessed it – you would have to sort out. Manually manipulating the little buggers back where they belonged. This usually resulted in scraped fingers (yours) and bad language (yours again).

Then, as now, editors didn’t like to receive work that showed a lack of care – spelling and grammatical errors and typos for example. Back then, you would need to add corrections to the list of their pet hates They would – if you were lucky – allow you probably one or maybe two very minor corrections now and again on a full novel-length manuscript but some were far stricter than that and would reject anything that, at least on the first ten pages, contained more than one obvious error. Don’t forget that any mistake you made was echoed through every carbon copy and was far harder to disguise on your copies. And also, Liquid Paper needed time to dry. A frequent complaint from agents and publishers concerned the difficulty of trying to prise apart sheets of type fused together with an over-exuberant application of correction fluid.

How many times have I reached almost to the end of the page only to make a stupid error and have to retype the entire sheet? More than I care to recall and, of course, when retyping the page it never seemed to quite line up with the previous or proceeding one so an entire chapter might have to be retyped. Another factor to bear in mind is that the more carbons you made, the fainter the type would appear on, say the, fourth or fifth copy, to the extent that whole letters might appear to have been missed because you hadn’t bashed that key quite hard enough. Also, the weight of the paper made a huge difference, which is why most carbon copies were produced on what we called ‘flimsy’. This was a much lighter weight – resembling tissue paper.

Like everything else, carbon paper had a limited life span although you could reuse it a number of times, only discarding it when the copies started growing fainter.

The same applied to the ribbon.

On my first typewriter, I had an all-black ribbon. You unwrapped it, sat it down on its spindle, threaded it through and attached it to an empty reel and spindle on the other side of your machine. Hitting a typewriter key would cause the selected hammer to strike the ribbon and its attendant letter to appear on the printed page. When your ribbon was nice and new, the type would be a bold, assertive black. Once the ribbon had run its course to the end, it would automatically reverse itself and you could merrily carry on typing until you saw the type beginning to move from black through dark charcoal to grey. Time to replace the ribbon. Some fancier typewriters used black and red ribbons enabling you to select which colour you wanted to type in. That always seemed a bit of a waste to me as it meant half the ribbon was barely used.

As you can imagine, changing a ribbon was messy, time consuming and inclined to result in sore, inky fingers and bad language(that would be yours again). As with all inanimate objects, a typewriter experiencing a ribbon change seemed to want to provide you with as much grief as it was capable of. And, take it from me, typewriters were born sadists.

Later models dispensed with all that nonsense and delivered you a cassette which you inserted. Slam, dunk, done. It didn’t reverse itself and stopped when it was empty. That was fine as long as you had a replacement all ready and waiting. Infuriating if you didn’t and it was Sunday afternoon.

Of course, I have been talking here about manual typewriters. There were expensive electric ones. The only real difference for many years was that they were usually a little quieter and required less heavy bashing of the keys, and they automatically performed something known as ‘automatic carriage return’ (you haven’t sent that older relative/friend home yet, have you?). In other words, once you had set your margins, the typewriter would ring a little bell when it knew you were coming to the end of a sentence and, at one finger touch from you., would send the carriage flying back to the beginning of the next line. On manual typewriters you could also set your margins and a bell would ping but then you had to return the carriage yourself (your friend/relative will explain).

Your typewriter wouldn’t ping when it came to the bottom of the page though. Oh no, you would have to take precautions against running out of paper (in my case, I would draw the faintest pencil line a couple of inches up from the bottom) or run the risk of all your efforts being in vain as you watched your paper slip to one side, along with your line of print. And guess what that meant? You’ve got it. START ALL OVER AGAIN.

Oh – and another point. If you were lost for just the right word to use, there was no point in asking your typewriter, you had to reach up to your bookshelf, heave down your copy of Roget’s Thesaurus and look it up. Yes, really. Ask…well, you know who by now don’t you?

So, are you still mad at your laptop? Do you still think producing your manuscript is tough? Wait till you learn what happened when you wanted to send it off.

Still to come, in Part Two:

I get my first Word Processor

The first spellcheckers – introducing the wonderful world of Anchovy and Claptrap

The perils, pitfalls, and expense of querying agents and publishers before emails made it all so easy (or not)

Don’t miss Part Two

It will leave you aghast and wondering why anyone even tried to get published.

Images:

Shutterstock

public domain

A Castle Full of Ghosts...

In my new novel, Those Who Dwell in Mordenhyrst Hall, a family and their ancient stately home are beset by an ancient evil. The entire fabric of the grand house is infected with a legacy of possession - and much more. Worse than that, it extends beyond them, to encompass the entire village of Cortney Abbas. The seemingly frivolous lives of a group of Bright Young Things are about to implode with the arrival of Grace Sutcliffe and before long, the secrets of the Mordenhyrst family are inexorably revealed.

Of course, my novel is just that – fiction. But, in real life, there have been numerous reports of houses cursed or possessed by demons. Sometimes these emanate from the ground on which the house was built. Other times, the builder of the house has somehow managed to impart his – or her – evil into the fabric of the place so that it becomes irrevocably woven into the walls.

In still more cases, the building itself has witnessed so much horror, violence, war and siege that the imprint of its past sticks with it, replaying itself over and over down the centuries.  Rather like a movie, scenes are played out, characters from the past - whose spirits haven’t moved on - appear to those living in the present. Sometimes inflicting little more than mild surprise and, at other times. with terrifying results.

One such place is the fortified castle of Dudley in the West Midlands of England which was founded in 1071, and has a reputation as one of Staffordshire’s most haunted spots. According to legend, the current building was erected on the site of a much earlier wooden structure.

Not just one ghost, but many, are heard and seen – in various rooms, pacing the parapets of the now ruined castle and glimpsed through the windows of the Chapel.

If you venture into the offices when the castle is otherwise empty, you may hear – as others have – footsteps in the same room as you. These ghosts are not shy. They seem quite content to be seen. An entire group of ghosthunters claim to have witnessed a spectral figure pacing across the parapets. An old woman has been witnessed on several occasions, and a drummer boy from the Civil War, who was shot from the battlements, also returns to the scene of his demise, performing different drum rolls. It is said to bring bad luck for you if you hear him.

In 1983 another ghost – that of an elderly Medieval lady – was seen in the castle.

Dudley also has a resident ‘Black Monk’. He has been reported as haunting the entrance to the keep and has also been seen through the window of the Chapel. His presence is not too surprising as the castle is close to the ruins of St James’s Priory, which dates from the 1100s. The priory housed Benedictine monks who wore black habits.

During the English Civil War, the castle became a Royalist stronghold and was besieged twice – in 1644 and then in 1646, when it fell to Cromwell’s forces and was ordered to be partially demolished. In addition to the hapless drummer, the most frightening of Dudley’s ghosts is someone else who perished in the siege of 1646. She is known as the ‘Grey Lady and is thought to be the ghost of Dorothy Beaumont. She has appeared to both staff and visitors over the years. In the 1960s, she was spotted in the old aquarium and in the 1970s, she was seen in the Chapel window.

In life, Dorothy lived in the castle and gave birth there to a daughter who sadly died. She also developed complications and died soon after, having requested that she be buried beside her daughter. She also requested that her husband attend her funeral. Neither wish was granted and Dorothy was buried in a churchyard on the other side of the town from her daughter. They have never been reunited and sad Dorothy is said to roam the castle and beyond, searching for her dead baby. Her ghost appears in many locations including a pub named after her – The Grey Lady Tavern - situated in the castle grounds. Here alarms go off for no reason, in the middle of the night. The temperature suddenly and inexplicably drops, while a strange blue mist wafts through the bar.

Of all the locations in and around the castle, the most haunted is said to be the chapel undercroft. There lies one of the castle’s most formidable lords – John Somery. People have reported seeing legs beside the coffin, others have felt their clothes tugged or thought they were being prodded by someone. One little girl was apparently flipped over a chair during a paranormal investigation and shadowy figures have been caught on camera. Strange, unexplained grinding noises have been heard emanating from the chapel above.

Dudley Castle is brim-full of ghostly snapshots from its tumultuous past. It seems one generation after another has left an indelible mark that refuses to be laid to rest.

Evil runs deep at Mordenhyrst Hall

But it is rooted far deeper than the foundations of the ancestral home. Its inhabitants and the entire village are infested with a legacy so evil, it transcends the laws of nature. In a world where nothing is as it appears to be, Grace and Coralie must seek out and find the truth – whatever the cost.

Amazon

Flame Tree Press

Barnes and Noble

Simon and Schuster

Waterstones

and all good bookshops - in the high street or online

Images:

Flame Tree Press

Shutterstock

The House That Threw Them Out

  

My novel – The Devil’s Serenade – mostly takes place in an imposing Gothic-style mansion built by Victorian industrialist Nathaniel Hargest. When Maddie Chambers inherits it from her Aunt Charlotte, she soon discovers she has acquired far more than mere bricks and mortar. From the strange appearance of tree roots growing in the cellar to the manifestations, noises and a nostalgic wartime song played again and again, Maddie’s fears grow and intensify. What is going on here – and who, or what, is seemingly hell-bent on driving her insane?

Of course, my novel is just that – fiction. But, in real life, there have been numerous reports of houses cursed or possessed by demons. Sometimes these emanate from the ground on which the house was built. Other times, the builder of the house has somehow managed to impart his – or her – evil into the fabric of the place so that it becomes irrevocably woven into the walls.

In Hollyhill on the north side of Cork in Ireland, a family fled their house after being terrorized by a supernatural force. They summoned exorcists to try and cleanse the house of its unwanted and uninvited ‘guests’.

 According to Ritchie Hewitt and Laura Burke who lived in the house with their son, Kyle, the strange phenomena started off quite slowly with holy pictures and icons being thrown around. They heard screams in the night, and then their son was lifted off the bed and hurled to the floor while he was still asleep.

The family also reported seeing orbs flying around, in mid-air, from room to room.

They were left convinced that their house was possessed by an evil force that wished them harm. When they tried praying for it to leave, all they heard was the sound of furniture being moved around upstairs. Drawers were turned out, clothes tossed around the bedrooms.

They asked local people for any help they could give in tracing the possible cause of all the disturbances, but drew a blank. It seemed the house did not have any prior reputation for hauntings or poltergeist activity.

Mediums have reported strong impressions of a young man hanging himself in the house and they believe it is his negative energy that has infected the household. On stepping over the threshold, one such medium – John O’Reilly – had an instant impression of “Someone who is very angry.”

The house itself was owned by the local council and they refused the family’s request for a transfer. Neighbours were reported as having turned on the family accusing them of a “scam” – that the family’s claims were a ruse to get them moved off the estate and into more ‘salubrious’ accommodation. This is a claim the family vehemently denied. Furthermore, they continued to pay rent on the property even after fleeing from their home to live with relatives.

As for the house itself, its previous owner, Adam Payton, lived there for 26 apparently poltergeist-free years prior to selling it to the council. Other people living on the estate said the property was empty for several months, during which time it had been frequented by gangs of youths. There were even reports of séances being held there, often involving Ouija boards.

A local radio station facilitated a visit by Shaman Paul O’Halloran who detected the presence of hundreds of spirits trapped within the house. These included children and famine victims.

The family never returned there and the house remained boarded up and empty for some years. It is now occupied once again - apparently without further incident. So did Paul O'Halloran's cleansing do the trick? Or do the spirits merely lay dormant, only to emerge again when circumstances prove favourable?

They certainly weren't dormant for long at Hargest House, as Madeleine Chambers discovers, to her cost...

Maddie had forgotten that cursed summer. Now she’s about to remember…

“Madeleine Chambers of Hargest House” has a certain grandeur to it. But as Maddie enters the Gothic mansion she inherited from her aunt, she wonders if its walls remember what she’s blocked out of the summer she turned sixteen.

She’s barely settled in before a series of bizarre events drive her to question her sanity. Aunt Charlotte’s favorite song shouldn’t echo down the halls. The roots of a faraway willow shouldn’t reach into the cellar. And there definitely shouldn’t be a child skipping from room to room. 

As the barriers in her mind begin to crumble, Maddie recalls the long-ago summer she looked into the face of evil. Now, she faces something worse. The mansion’s long-dead builder, who has unfinished business—and a demon that hungers for her very soul.

Available in ebook and in a shiny new paperback edition from:

Amazon
Barnes and Noble 

Waterstones

and other online and high-street retailers

Images;

Crossroad Press

Shutterstock

Come along and say hello!

I shall be at Geek Bazaar at The Liner Hotel, Liverpool |(just behind Lime Street Station) 10-4p.m. on Saturday 27th April, so why not pop along and say 'hi'?

It's a great day out for the whole family - cosplay, artists, authors, traders of all sorts of cool stuff... Not to be missed!

The Pendle Witches

On August 18th 1612, eight women and two men were found guilty of witchcraft at the summer assizes in Lancaster. They were all hanged two days later.

Three of them - Elizabeth Device and her teenage children, James and Alizon - were convicted, in part at least, from evidence supplied by Elizabeth's daughter, Jennet, variously thought to be somewhere between the ages of nine and eleven. So small was Jennet, that a table had to be brought in for her to stand on so that she could be seen. Whether she could be heard or not was a different matter, as the courts were notoriously rowdy places in those days.

For such a young child to be brought in to testify was questionable at best, but she spoke out against her mother, sister and brother and identified others of the accused who allegedly attended a Sabbat on Good Friday of that year, held at her grandmother's house, called Malkin (or Malking) Tower. She spoke of witches' familiars, clay images and curses and appeared calm and collected. As she accused her mother, the poor, wretched woman screamed abuse at her.

Included in this motley bunch of suspects were two feuding families. Anne Whittle (known as Old Chattox) and her daughter, Anne Redferne hated the Devices. The feeling was mutual. It seems they were only too ready to accuse each other of various damning acts of witchcraft. The origin of the bad blood between them is unknown, but it certainly proved fatal for both families.

One of the most interesting characters in this story is Alice Nutter, who ranked far above the others in social status and wealth but was nevertheless identified by Jennet Device as having been at Malkin Tower on that fateful Good Friday. Alice refused to say one word in her defence - possibly because, far from participating in witchcraft, she was a practicing Roman Catholic, a dangerous pursuit in the intolerant Protestant England of James I.

Between them, the unfortunate ten were convicted of no fewer than sixteen murders, along with a catalogue of bewitchings, curses and dark deeds. Their principal prosecutor was the local Magistrate, the ambitious and ruthless Roger Nowell. His methods, along with those employed by the jailkeeper of Lancaster Prison, Thomas Covell, were highly suspect. Although illegal except in cases of suspected treason, there is little doubt that torture was used on at least some of the suspects, in order to illicit confessions. It is also likely that Nowell tricked some of his prisoners into accusing others.

The trials of the Lancashire Witches in 1612, have been kept vividly alive as a result of a detailed account made at the time by Thomas Potts called The Wonderful Discoverie of Witches in the County of Lancaster. He was commissioned to write this by 'his Majesty's Justice of Assize in the North Parts'. Not that his account could ever be accused of avoiding bias!

The conduct and methods employed in Lancaster were drawn upon eighty years later when a magistrates' handbook, used at the Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts, 1692, cited Jennet Device's evidence as a perfect model for the use of child witnesses in trials for witchcraft.

Visitors to Pendle today will find little remaining of the buildings significant at that time. Malkin Tower is long gone and its location hotly disputed. Only Pendle Hill remains, brooding over hilly landscape which has changed little over the centuries. The wind whips over the grass, gunmetal clouds swirl and rain lashes down. It can be harsh living up there even today.

Lancaster Castle, which houses the former prison and the court (still in use), is open to visitors. On the eastern side is the infamous 'Witches Tower', properly called the Well Tower, which is rarely opened to visitors. A flight of steep stone steps leads down to a grim dungeon, in the depths of which are two large metal rings secured into the stone floor. Here it was that the accused were chained, possibly for up to four months, awaiting their trials. Here the mother of Elizabeth Device, the notorious Old Demdike, died before she could be tried. The walls of this place drip with water, allegedly still contaminated by enzymes belonging to bodies buried nearby.

It's not hard to imagine.

My novel, The Pendle Curse, is now available in a lovely new print edition from Crossroad Press! Here's a taste of what to expect:

Four hundred years ago, ten convicted witches were hanged on Gallows Hill. Now they are back…for vengeance.

Laura Phillips’s grief at her husband’s sudden death shows no sign of passing. Even sleep brings her no peace. She experiences vivid, disturbing dreams of a dark, brooding hill, and a man—somehow out of time—who seems to know her. She discovers that the place she has dreamed about exists. Pendle Hill. And she knows she must go there.

But as soon as she arrives, the dream becomes a nightmare. She is caught up in a web of witchcraft and evil…and a curse that will not die.

Available from:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Blackwell's

Images:
Crossroad Press
Shutterstock