Tuesday Tangle – Much Ado about Lighting

Today’s Tangle doesn’t involve any mathematics, but does require lateral thinking (I was hopeless at it, but Handsome Husband triumphed). I’ve included the answer in today’s post, for those who just can’t wait until tomorrow.

While renovating a house, Meryl discovers three light switches, side by side, on the second floor. When she asks the builder what the switches are for, she learns they control the three bare bulbs that hang in the attic, one floor above. He can’t, however, tell her which bulb is controlled by which switch.

Meryl, being lazy, wants to climb the attic stairs as few times as possible to solve the mystery. Is there a way she can determine which light switch controls each light bulb, with only ONE TRIP up to the attic?

(Solution below)

Cameo: Mrs Beeton - move over, Martha Stewart

Welcome to Thursday's Cameo!

Thursday is the day where I tell you about a weird and wonderful person from the Victorian age. They may have  invented a steam ship, protested slavery, written a great novel or just died in a spectacularly cool way – but whatever they did, it was done with true Victorain style and aplomb, and I think they deserve some modern kudos.

Mrs Isabella Beeton

Imagine your apartment after a long, boozy dinner party. Now imagine your table cloth, splashed with a lurid red wine stain. What do you do? You call your Mum, of course.

Now imagine your telephone was some sort of time-travel transmitting device, and you could actually call your great-great-great-grandmother. Do you know what she would do about that wine stain (assuming she didn’t die from shock when you explained who you were)? Why, she’d reach for Mrs Beeton’s book, of course.

Dear old Mrs Beeton was the Martha Stewart of the 19^th century. A married woman, she wrote a series of magazines called The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. As popular as it was (and with that scintillating title, how could it miss, right?), the first three years (1859-1861) were condensed into a hard cover book, entitled: 

The Book of Household Management

And because the Victorians liked the titles lo-oo-ong, it was subtitled:  

Comprising information for the Mistress, Housekeeper, Cook, Kitchen-Maid, Butler, Footman, Coachman, Valet, Upper and Under House-Maids, Lady’s-Maid, Maid-of-all-Work, Laundry-Maid, Nurse and Nurse-Maid, Monthly Wet and Sick Nurses, etc. etc. (why settle for one “etc” when you can have two?)

And as if that wasn’t enough, it was additionally subtitled: 

also Sanitary, Medical, & Legal Memoranda: with a History of the Origin, Properties, and Uses of all Things Connected with Home Life and Comfort.

Seriously, with a book of that magnitude on your shelf, there was very little you couldn’t do... including giving a burglar serious concussion when you used it as a weapon.

Some of the fun parts of Mrs Beeton’s advice included:

Huge dinners. Enormous dinners. Gastronomically, astronomically, astounding dinners. Here is Mrs Beeton’s idea of the dishes required for a dinner party (of up to 18): two different soups, six kinds of fish, fourteen miscellaneous meat and fish dishes, three kinds of game, and seven puddings. Dig in.

How to treat your babies for illness:

• Chicken pox: warm baths and laxatives (not at the same time, I'm hoping.)
• Measles: put the child in a cool room and use leeches on him. You'll cure the measles, but he's going to need years of therapy...
• Typhus: dose the infant with wine and spirits. Finally, a cure I can relate to! (Not sure about using this on infants, though.)
• Whooping cough: laxatives and leeches, whilst “keeping up a state of nausea and vomiting”. Considering the age of the child, I suppose you could reach for those wines and spirits again....

And a few extra facts you may be interested in:

Dying of things we don’t die of any more. Two of her sons, each called Samuel Orchart Beeton, died in their infancy, one of croup and one of scarlet fever. Not to be outdone, at the ripe old age of 28, Mrs Beeton herself gave up the ghost: she died of puerperal fever, which is a serious form of septicaemia contracted during or shortly after childbirth.

Naming children things we don’t name them anymore. besides the ghoulish tradition of naming the next child after one which just died, Mrs Beeton also gave her sons excellent examples of Victorian names: her surviving boys were called Orchart and Mayson Moss. Brilliant.

So You Want To Write a Novel: Five Bad Habits That Can Kill Your Chances of Getting Published

Gentle Reader,

Thanks to MSWord and similar programmes, most of us can now avoid embarassing embarrassing spelling mistakes. Word will even address many grammar errors, baffling though its suggestions might be (“Consider revising”?! How is that advice?). Unfortunately, Gentle Reader, what these programmes have failed to remedy is the issue of clarity in writing – or, to be precise, non-clarity. 

A sentence is the basic tool of the writer, and it needs to pack a powerful punch. It benefits from simple constructions, direct language, and powerful imagery. Sounds straight-forward enough, doesn’t it? 

AND YET... we writers are constantly coming up with convoluted phrasing, flowery words, and confusing descriptions. We prefer to use twelve words when three will do. In fact, if at all possible, we prefer to use twelve words and four adjectives and three adverbs, where three words will do. We end up with sentences like:

With an irritated toss of her sun-kissed hair, the sultry blonde sank her pearly white teeth into the shiny skin of the Granny Smith.

...when we could have written: The blonde bit moodily into her apple.

This kind of “purple prose” is a sure way to turn off your reader, be she your beta reader, a potential agent, or a kindly friend who’s offered to edit your work.

So, which are the most heinous clarity-killers? I’ve compiled a list of those which are, in my opinion, the Top Five. These are based on my experience of my own writing, errors I have seen in my writers’ groups. Feel free to comment below, if you think there are important ones I’ve missed.

So You Want to Write a Novel: Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard...

Welcome to my new feature, So You Want to Write a Novel

In this edition, I'm going to eschew the usual information about plot, characters, genre, etc, and focus on something much more fundamental:

Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard... aka BICHOK.

Q: So, how do I become a writer?

A: You write.

Q: Haha, no, seriously, I really want to write a novel. How do I do it?

A: Write.

Q: Yes, but, what are the tricks to writing a publishable book?

A: Write. Every day. That's tricky enough to start off with, believe me.

If you, Gentle Reader, want to become a novelist - published or unpublished - there is no better tip than this simple advice above. After all, you will never hold your finished manuscript in your hands if you don't write it. (Once you have your first draft completed, then you can worry about silly little things like a coherent plot and believable characters. we'll cover this all later.)

The problem is that the simplest advice is often the hardest to follow: stop biting your nails. Eat better. Exercise more. Life gets in the way - and when it comes to writing, that is no different for published, career authors than it is for the first time novelist.

So how does a writer get around to it?

Recommended Daily Diet for a Victorian Mystery Writer

Gentle Reader, 

as any writer will tell you, mining one’s imagination for inspiration burns a heck of a lot of calories. So it stands to reason that a writer must fortify herself with good nourishing food.

This is especially true of the Victorian mystery writer, who spends a good deal of her time plunged in the depths of despair (and occasionally the depths of the Thames). What’s more, if she is to stand any chance of recreating the Victorian world on page, she must attempt to emulate it in real life – in all its ten-meals-a-day glory.

Therefore, for your edification, I present The Recommended Daily Diet for a Victorian Mystery Writer:**

So You Want To Write A Novel

Gentle Reader,

From the files of "it's funny/achingly tragic because it's true," I present an hilarious video, filched shamelessly from YouTube (posted by dwkazzie here). I know we were all newbies once, but I cringe at how many utterances from this video I remember coming from my own mouth at some point...

Hoping you're as happy as a sooty scamp in a chimney,

Charlotte

“Mummy, why is that lady muttering to herself?”

Gentle Reader,

November 2010 was my second year of Nanowrimo madness. 

For the uninitiated, Nanowrimo is short for National Novel Writing Month, or “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon” as the organisers call it. The idea is simple: over the 30 days of November, Wrimos (that’s the participants) write a novel of 50,000 words. If you are one of those rare creatures who work steadily, that’s 1666 words each day, every day. If, like me, you’re more of a short-bursts-of-madness person, you’ll probably churn out no words whatsoever for the first week, and then average 2500 words for the rest of the month in a desperate attempt to cross the finish line.

You may be thinking, wait – isn’t this a form of masochism? And wouldn’t any novel you write in a month be fifty thousand words of utter bollocks?

The answer to both these questions is Yes. 

Yes; it’s an addictive kind of masochism, which has people like me coming back year after year.  

Teaser - Unseemly Conduct

Unseemly Conduct

When the mutilated corpse of heiress Georgia Fenwick is found floating in the Thames, the Honourable Isabel Crawford has no intention of becoming involved. Isabel has enough problems of her own – it isn’t easy for a Viscount’s daughter to adapt to life as an under-paid governess. But a regrettable act of kleptomania has put Isabel into a delicate position: either help the strange Inspector Victor Dennehy to find Georgia’s killer, or be exposed as a thief.

Armed with her acerbic wit, questionable charm, and a sensible brolly, Isabel enters the seamy life of the nouveau riche. Middle-class London, she soon discovers, has a shadowy past, a penchant for vice, and a bottom drawer full of ether bottles. And, as if she didn’t have enough to keep her gloved hands full, Inspector Dennehy is proving to be a man who knows how to misbehave. It seems that he is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” – but perhaps that’s just how Isabel likes him...

Meanwhile, there are more domestic issues to manage: her employer is either going mad or to France (whichever is closer), and the handsome young artist Shaw, whose talent doesn’t quite match his reputation, will keep insisting she take off her chemise – it’s enough to make a governess reach for the smelling salts. 

But far more worrying is the proof that no good deed goes unpunished: when the last piece of evidence falls into place, it seems that Isabel herself will hang for Georgia Fenwick’s murder.