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Ghost Stories For Christmas with Alison Littlewood
201 Plays1 year ago
As the nights draw in and we approach the midwinter, what better way to celebrate the season than dipping into that most macabre of festive traditions, the Christmas ghost story? While we're all familiar with Dickens's A Christmas Carol, more modern traditions include the BBC's A Ghost Story For Christmas, adaptations of typically M.R James stories, and which themselves are continuations of ancient storytelling customs that stretches back several centuries, when midwinter and the winter solstice, rather than Hallowe'en, was the time of year where the veil between the lands of the living and the dead was at its thinnest.
Adding to that tradition is our guest Alison Littlewood, the author of Mistletoe, a festive Gothic ghost story that follows in those traditions of tales that see the past interfering with the present, seeking reconciliation and peace. We discuss the idea of the revivification of the bleak midwinter landscape, folk horror and how Christmas builds upon more ancient customs, rites. We talk about short stories, and where the market lies for them in 2022 and 2023, the necessity of failure, and how writers can keep their heads up even when through those long bleak winters of grafting which yield little fruit.
Elsewhere The Judge updates us all on matters relating to plagiarism (don't do it, kids), and November's winner of the 75-word challenge, our very own Brian Sexton, with his reimagining of the Moon Landings. Last but not least, reports of paranormal activity emanating from the planet Earth catch the attention of the Martian Space Force Ghosthunting Division, and lead to some confusion as to the true meaning of Christmas.
Merry Christmas, and thanks to everyone who tuned in to listen throughout this year. See you in 2023!
Links and further reading
Mistletoe
Oh Whistle, And I'll Come To You My Lad (youtube)
Ralan - the place to visit for finding short story markets
Index
[0:00:00 - 35:36] - Alison Littlewood interview part 1
[35:37 - 38:07] - Skit 1
[38:09 - 53:23] - The Judge's Corner
[53:29 - 55:48] - Skit 2
[55:54 - 58:18] - Writing Challenge Winner
[58:20 - 1:33:13] - Alison Littlewood Interview Part 2
[1:33:14 - 1:35:15] - Credits and close
Next Month
Next month we'll be joined by Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey, hosts of the H.P Podcraft and Strange Studies podcasts, to talk about the 1982 cult science-fiction horror masterpiece, John Carpenter's The Thing.
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Transcript
Introduction to Crohn's Cast
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Welcome to this edition of Crohn's Cast, the official podcast of SFF Chronicles, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community. I'm Dan Jones. And I'm Christopher Bean. It's December. And as any genre fan will tell you, that means one thing, horror.
00:00:31
Speaker
Okay, perhaps not horror, unless she can't office parties. But the tradition of the Christmas ghost story, particularly in the UK. Over the past 50 years, it's become a common custom with a BBC regularly airing standalone episodes called A Ghost Story for Christmas.
Guest Introduction: Alison Littlewood
00:00:45
Speaker
Over the years, A Ghost Story for Christmas has engaged the talents of Lauren Gordon-Clark and Mark Gatiss in bringing the stories of M.I. James and others to life on our screens to the point that it has replaced Raymond Briggs' The Snowman as the nation's favorite TV show, according to a recent parliamentary review.
00:01:00
Speaker
With that said, who's our guest today, Dan? Our guest today is the author, Alison Littlewood, who is added to the tradition of Christmas ghost stories with her novel, Mistletoe.
Alison's Works and Interests
00:01:11
Speaker
Ali's first book, A Cold Season, was selected for the Richard and Judy book club and was described as perfect reading for a dark winter's night. Her other titles include The Hidden People, The Crow Garden, and The Unquiet House.
00:01:27
Speaker
She wrote The Cottingly Cuckoo as A.J. Elwood, along with the forthcoming The Other Lives of Miss Emily White. Alison's short stories have been picked for a number of years' best anthologies and published in her collections Quieter Paths and Five Feather Tales, and has won her the Shirley Jackson Award for short fiction. Ali lives with her partner, Fergus, in a house of creaking doors and crooked walls in deepest, darkest Yorkshire, England.
00:01:55
Speaker
She has a penchant for books on folklore and weird history, as do we all. Earl Grey tea, as do we all. Fountain pens, as do we all. And semicolons. So welcome, Alison.
Christmas Ghost Stories
00:02:10
Speaker
Hello. Thanks for having me along. No, thanks for joining us. How are you? Yeah, great. Thank you. It's quite a dark wintery night here, so all very appropriate.
00:02:20
Speaker
It is very dark, it's very wet, it's very windy and blustery in all corners of the UK. So this is perfect weather for huddling down in front of the fire close to Christmas and talking about ghouls and ghosts.
00:02:35
Speaker
Normally, at this point, we kick off with the question, why did we pick a Christmas ghost story? Or why did you pick a Christmas ghost story to talk about? That's kind of obvious from the biography you've contributed to that pantheon of literature. So I'm going to ask what drew you to the Christmas ghost story tradition in the first place?
Writing 'Mistletoe'
00:02:56
Speaker
Well, I'd written another novel called The Hidden People. That was the first one that I completely set in the Victorian period. And then I wrote The Crow Garden that, again, kind of went even deeper in in terms of research because that one touched on
00:03:13
Speaker
spiritualism and seance rooms and hypnotism and phrenology and all sorts of things that were going on in the period. And obviously I was very conscious of that tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas that became
00:03:29
Speaker
certainly increasingly popular in Victorian times with Charles Dickens doing things like popularizing ghost stories for Christmas in magazines like household words and all the year round. And I thought, wouldn't it be lovely to kind of hop on and join in that tradition and do a novel length ghost story that it's not set completely in Victorian times, it's actually contemporary with
00:03:52
Speaker
glimpses of ghosts that are back in the victorian era and the two and the two time zones begin to intertwine.
00:04:00
Speaker
almost like mistletoe twisting around a branch, the past starts to reach out and affect what's happening now. So, yeah, that was my inspiration for it, really.
Mistletoe's Themes
00:04:11
Speaker
Well, the mistletoe is there in the title of the book, but the idea of mistletoe as a parasite is the theme that runs through all of mistletoe, the novel, and that idea that the past is somehow parasitic.
00:04:24
Speaker
and it's leeching on the present. It is a very ghostly vibe. Where did you draw on the idea of the mistletoe being the central theme? I didn't want Christmas just to be backdrop to the story. If I was going to do a Christmas ghost story, I wanted the season to be integral to it and to play its own role. So I started to look at not only the history of some of the traditions that we follow now at Christmas,
00:04:50
Speaker
but also the folklore around various Christmassy things. And one of those I started to look up was Mistletoe. And there's such a wealth of folklore around it from old kind of housemates' rights where they'd
00:05:05
Speaker
mark a mistletoe leaf with the initials of a man that they fancied and wear it next to their hearts. Is it an old charm to kind of bring him closer? There's obviously the kissing under the mistletoe, but also found a wonderful vein of law about the way that mistletoe is associated with the dead. So in ancient Greece, Aeneas plucked a golden bow of mistletoe to be able to access the land of the dead
00:05:30
Speaker
But also, like in France, they call it Spectre's wand, and they think if you hold mistletoe, then it enables you not only to see the dead, as my character begins to do in mistletoe, but also to make them speak.
Winter Setting and Ghostly Themes
00:05:43
Speaker
That was hovering at the back of the whole plot of the novel, as it evolved, really. Yeah, so it comes from folkloric things about the plant itself.
00:05:54
Speaker
Bean is our resident folklore shipper, I suppose you would say. And he is all over the idea of the land being tied to the dead, the land being tied to the past, and the ghosts being wended into the architecture, wended into the natural landscape of the world that we build and that we inhabit and that we inherit that's all around us. Do you think that there's an idea that because winter is, well, it's the dead land, isn't it?
00:06:24
Speaker
winter is a spectral wasteland, especially in the northern hemisphere.
Christmas Traditions and Pagan Roots
00:06:29
Speaker
So if we're taking the UK as the backdrop to this story and France and Greece, so when we get cold, bleak winters, the land is dead. And traditionally, I think it was around the mid-winter, around the winter solstice time, that the veil, that liminal space between the land of the living and the land of the dead was at its thinnest.
00:06:48
Speaker
so that humans and mortals were closest to the spirit world than at any other point of the year. So before Halloween metastasized into what it is today, it was actually this time of year. Yeah, indeed. And this is one of the reasons why people have traditionally brought evergreens into house at this time of year, because all of the other plant life did just look dead. But the evergreens had this special power of retaining life in a dead season. So
00:07:15
Speaker
there's that connection with eternal life and it got tied to spirituality. The Roots of Christmas, the reason they chose the 25th of December was, I mean, it harks back to several Roman festivals, one of them being Saturnalia, which was just before, but also Sol Invictus, which was the festival of the unconquered sun. So they believed that the sun was gradually dying at this time of year because the days are getting shorter. And then
00:07:44
Speaker
at the solstice, which in the Roman calendar was the 25th, it began to, you know, it was resurrected and began to come back to life. And though there were also various cultures had sacrifices, midwinter sacrifices to kind of to bring the earth back to life and make land fertile again and move back towards springtime. So yeah, definitely that association with death has always been there.
00:08:06
Speaker
because people can see that in the land and the shorter days and so on. You mentioned this in Mistletoe, it's quite astute of the Christians to impose their nativity story over a pre-existing mythology or a pre-existing festival at the very least.
00:08:24
Speaker
which is far more ancient than the Nativity story itself. So it's piggybacking on these ancient rites. But what was sitting underneath the Nativity story, as well as the Old Testament stuff, there's actually a far more ancient pagan history and mythology sitting under that, and that is still reinforced to this day. Yeah, it was always easier, I think, to subsume the different religions as opposed to killing them dead.
00:08:51
Speaker
I think probably one of the reasons why Christmas is so popular now is I think it's probably quite a natural thing to want to enjoy ourselves against the dark. There's this feasting at a time when the land isn't productive and giving gifts to people and just enjoying ourselves a little bit.
00:09:12
Speaker
That actually harks back to kind of what those early festivals were like. So Saturn earlier was a time of feasting and giving gifts to people. I think it would have been a very difficult thing to quash that really. Yeah, Christianity came along and subsumed these old festivals. But even centuries after, there was some sort of decree given by the church to remind people
00:09:38
Speaker
that they weren't worshipping the sun. And it was actually Jesus, you know, so these things kind of lingered on in ways that weren't intended at all.
Victorian Ghost Stories Influence
00:09:49
Speaker
Were you drawing on the, well, I say the more modern, but that Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories when you were writing mistletoe. So did you look at people like M.R. James? Did you look at Jerome K. Jerome, Henry James, that sort of thing?
00:10:04
Speaker
I looked at Dickens more than the slightly later ones. Yeah, I've read a lot of Victorian short stories. It's funny though, because although they became very popular at Christmas, a lot of the stories actually aren't very Christmas-centric. Some of them aren't even set at Christmas. It's just the tradition of telling them really. I mean, even something like
00:10:30
Speaker
The Turn of the Screw is set in a framework which it's easy to forget actually. It starts off with a bunch of guys sitting around at Christmas Eve saying let's hear a spooky tale and then they tell this story of The Turn of the Screw which has nothing to do with Christmas and it's easy to forget that little kind of preface to it. But yeah I was very conscious of the tradition and A Christmas Carol is the obvious one of course.
00:10:52
Speaker
and because it's actually about christmas and it was massively popular it sold out almost as soon as it was published and there were just lots and lots of additions that came out even in just in the following year and it was made into a stage play and it was performed by dickings in various venues and
00:11:10
Speaker
A Christmas carol, I don't think we should dwell on a Christmas carol too much. On this podcast, we always do spoilers for whatever we're talking about, but I don't know. Do you think we should give away the ending of a Christmas carol? I think everybody knows it by now, don't they? You reckon? Okay. But I don't think we should dwell on it too much because it's so all pervasive. But you can't talk about Christmas ghost stories and not at least acknowledge it. But it's because a Christmas carol is imposed on
00:11:38
Speaker
on an ethical framework and it is said it does in body the spirit of the season in in a way that i don't suppose any other ghost story does but it is still in its own way it is still a horror story at least at the beginning it's quite unsettling is quite disturbing when i win marley makes his first appearance and in some of the flashbacks when marley and dick in molly and dickens holly and scrooge take make the takeover of the mortgage company,
00:12:06
Speaker
It's horrific in a different way, in the human element, the way that both of them treated their fellow man with utter contempt. And that, again, that past is parasitic and it leeches on present-day Scrooge. So there is that theme of the past, what goes to Christmas past is emblematic of that.
00:12:27
Speaker
of the past leeching on the present and sucking the life
Research and Storytelling in 'Mistletoe'
00:12:30
Speaker
out of it. Now, I like that idea in mistletoe, but that's a common theme of ghost stories per se, wouldn't you say, Chris? Yeah, and I think what's really nice about mistletoe is that it wrongfoots the reader because, well, I don't know, it depends on your own cultural capital because for me, whenever I think of mistletoe, it's either being asterisk or Christmas, come here and have a tricky smooch, a non-consensual kiss, basically.
00:12:57
Speaker
But no, I mean, it's always been associated with positive things, even though I've known about it being parasitic and seen the trees, especially in France, they have these trees where they look just like the nests of these globes of mistletoe in them. But actually, for the mistletoe to be almost like a cat's paw for evil or something wicked, and then also we start to drift into elements of folk horror as well. So it's so much more complete than a simple
00:13:22
Speaker
Well, it's a ghost story in a set at Christmas because we've got the baggage that Leah brings with her to the cottage, what she's had in to the farmhouse, what she's had in what's happened to her and the effect that's had on her. And then this this numbness about her, which, you know, there's this parasitism of mental health in terms of, you know, loss and grief and the kind of things that I was thinking about comparing it to the loss that I've been through. It really is. It's it takes it's not as simplistic as a horror story for Christmas.
00:13:50
Speaker
or a horror story or a ghost story written for Christmas or at Christmas, because there's so much other horror in it. I thought the folk horror element was probably the most explicit. Leah, she's described as a comerina. That's the phrase, isn't it? Johnny come lately, the outsider. And that is weird fiction, isn't it? That's that's folk horror. That is the outsider entering into a
00:14:16
Speaker
a sort of a zapped closed off community which has its own rhythms and its own fluxes and refluxes and she's unaccustomed to them. I mean there is a twist and this isn't a spoiler and we probably won't go into spoilers for mistletoe in case people pick it up.
00:14:33
Speaker
Everything else, you know, the M.R. James stuff, I think that's fair game. The twist early on is that she is the descendant of the original owners of the farmhouse in Yorkshire that she buys after being bereaved of her husband and son. There is that sense that she is a comerina, but she's also not.
00:14:51
Speaker
Her blood and her past is already there and it's leeching on her in a couple of different ways. It's leeching on her through the bones of the building itself, but also through her own grief. Grief is a common hook on which to hang a ghost story. It is, but she is, as you say, going back to an old family home. I think that's often a role of ghosts as well in that they are memory and they are unfinished business.
00:15:19
Speaker
And in this case, it becomes very personal to the protagonist. So there's a definite connection that she had with that land to begin with. I was going to say coming back to the thing about folk horror. I wouldn't put this as a folk horror tale. I would say there's elements just because you're talking about something that's
00:15:37
Speaker
that's happened. I think folk horror is about forgotten skills and the old ways coming back. And there is that element of that here, but there's also that element of moving on from those, which is what, of course, happens at the end. Oh, we're not doing spoilers, are we? Well, that's kind of par for the course that, you know, at the end of the ghost story, you have to move on in some form or another. But, you know, we won't go into the details of how that happens. Yeah, for sure. And it's not Leo's purpose to kind of
00:16:07
Speaker
bury herself in the past. She's actually trying to move on and to return to living life, really. But in the meantime, she's in this place that's almost shrouded in snow. And the isolation of it is quite unexpected. So, yeah, it's a little hiatus in the process, really, of moving on.
Mistletoe's Symbolism
00:16:28
Speaker
And the snow and the setting and the winter is a part of that, I think. It reflects what's going on inside her.
00:16:34
Speaker
the isolation as well, the numbness. We had a really interesting conversation. The last podcast we did was with Emily Inkpen on the left hand of darkness. Yes, of course, with the icy wilderness. We were talking about the absence of light
00:16:51
Speaker
if you don't have dark and vice versa and the yin and the yang and stuff. And there's an interesting sort of flip on that I was thinking in this text in terms of the mistletoe being the implacable middle ground of non-black and non-white and that it, okay, it's got the berry and the leaf.
00:17:08
Speaker
the male and female principle in the text, but also the fact that it goes in between. And it's this dependent on the tree and that it goes in between it. I don't know, I just picked that up as a really nice comparison to the left hand of darkness, you know, and the stuff that happens on the ice there, which is so polarized of good and bad.
00:17:29
Speaker
hot and cold, black and white, male and female. It's so strongly drawn because of the subject matter of that book. Whereas for this, mistletoe is this middle ground where you might be used to hearing it in terms of a positive way, but there is a side to it. Well, I'd always say that sinister side of mistletoe because I sound like a
00:17:44
Speaker
you know, a discovery channel program. But yeah, the fact that it's a very unplaceable cipher. The mistletoe is a symbol of death. And yeah, we bring the symbol of death into our house. Is it because it occupies that sort of liminal space, that represents that liminal space that you're talking about, that sort of, it's not one thing, it's not the other. It's
00:18:07
Speaker
a sort of a crack in the veil, a crack in the mirror. Well, I never really picked that up until I read this book. I never really thought of Mistletoe like that until I read this book, but those thoughts came to me as this liminal middle ground. But it wasn't until reading what Lear goes through and the way that Ali's written it, it makes you automatically think about Mistletoe in a different way without sounding
Seasonal Setting and Character Journey
00:18:28
Speaker
trite.
00:18:28
Speaker
Well, it's weird though, because we all know that everybody says, oh, do you know mistletoe is actually poisonous? Yeah, yeah, we know. So we do have that idea that mistletoe is quite pretty, it's decorative, it's associated with the season, but it's also a poisonous parasite. So we kind of already know that, but yeah, it feels like this, the idea is developed a lot more in this and it's given time to grow, again, if you excuse the pun.
00:18:53
Speaker
And it becomes the central motif. It entwines itself around the whole environment that she's found herself in. Because it also destroys the orchard as well, doesn't it? So it's not just in the house, it's destroying outside of the house. So her whole local environment is being infected by the mistletoe. It does. I mean, and there are these associations of mistletoe and death, but it's also associated with life. So
00:19:18
Speaker
You know, being in Evergreen in winter, it has that connection with vitality and life and fertility as well. And where it's connected with the dead, I mean, for example, in Norse myth, there's the myth about the death of the god Baldr, who interestingly was the god of the summer sun. And he was killed by a weapon made of mistletoe.
00:19:40
Speaker
But then his mother's love brought him back to life, and her tears were said to become the berries on the mistletoe, and she made it into a symbol of love, which is one of the explanations for why people kiss under it. So it has that dual thing again. And you mentioned it being toxic, which it is, but over the centuries it's been used in folk medicines, you know, and people have drunk tea made out of it and things.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, it does have very much a dual nature going on. So would you say, because you said you wanted to write a Christmas story where it wasn't just happened to be set at that time of year without any justification, but would that therefore make mistletoe the plant more important than Leah to you? I mean, what was the focus for Leah for her story? How did that come about?
00:20:29
Speaker
Well, do you know, I just pieced it together. My starting point was the research about mistletoe, but obviously just writing about the folklore of a plant is nothing without the character. It's got to sort of have an effect on someone and make the reader feel something and that's where it becomes all about Leah's story.
00:20:50
Speaker
and her living her life now and trying to move on from difficult times. Yeah, so one thing just led to the other really. When I start to write, it's not kind of recounting a text about
00:21:07
Speaker
about mistletoe, it's a person's story, so it becomes about their thoughts and dreams and ideas.
Christmas Expectations and Personal Experiences
00:21:14
Speaker
So as soon as I started to write the book proper, yeah, the character takes over. It becomes more self-governing, doesn't it? A story, the more and more you write, it starts to write itself in a certain extent. Yeah, definitely. It's that weird magic, isn't it? That you don't quite know how it all pieces together, but somehow your subconscious makes it happen.
00:21:33
Speaker
Yeah, but it's all about, for me, I've got that character in my mind and I tend to visualise what they're experiencing. So it's almost like transcribing in a way that when I've set down that first draft of a story. So yeah, it becomes all about the character.
00:21:49
Speaker
And I've jumped away onto, um, le, le, sorry. So what I wanted to ask about Leah, but I've jumped away from the middles, mistlestost, middle, I can't, I know, sorry, mistletoe. Have you been at the Jamesons again? No, I haven't, I haven't been at any alcohol. I've had a tea, a cup of tea, Yorkshire, Yorkshire tea in honor of, uh,
00:22:09
Speaker
Have I guessed? Yeah. Yeah, no, just the whole thing about plants, holly, the ivy, and the one thing that's really enjoyable for those, anybody who's into the sort of mythology folklore of plants, any kind of New Age even and pagan, anything Wiccan, there is a really nice elements peppered throughout the story where Leah is thinking or reading or having some kind of discourse about a plant, whether it's ivy, mistletoe, holly, and you get a little bit, like a little tab
00:22:39
Speaker
like a wiki tab of information about it, the stuff about the ivy, what's the male, what's the female, what the berries are for, why the leaves are shaped the way they are in the mistletoe. And I really enjoyed that as well because I'm an absolute huge nature freak. I really write a lot of nature stuff in my writing.
00:23:00
Speaker
So to read that was really, really rewarding because I felt it wasn't like I was listening to a TED talk, you know, especially with genre fiction, like science fiction, somebody can be banging you on the head about rail guns or the mechanics of whatever. We don't get any of that in your story. We don't get any of that. Okay. And this is the mistone. This is why. Do you understand now? She's considering Christmas, of course, as well. And her memories of Christmas,
00:23:26
Speaker
with her family who have died and they're gone. So she's remembering Christmas's past really. So things like that just occur to her as and when they're relevant to her story and what she's feeling and are related to those things. So yeah, they are intertwined with the story, but they're not.
00:23:44
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't a case of, oh, I want to shoehorn this into mine. You know, it was really as they occurred to me in relation to her story. We tried to talk about useful, well, we tried to explore what things work in particular books because a lot of our listenership are writers themselves as well as readers. And we try and tease out what works to try and see what's best practice and how to approach things.
00:24:10
Speaker
What I think you did really well was wear your research lightly, if that makes sense. There's clearly a lot in there. I can't tell whether you'd research that specifically for this novel or whether that's just stuff that you have banging around in your head and you knew that off-pat, which is great because it can be all too obvious sometimes when somebody's, as Chris said,
00:24:35
Speaker
You know, you drop a Wikipedia page on how a rail gun works, for example, and it's just information overload. Whereas you drop in the idea about Saturnalia. I didn't really know much about Saturnalia. I knew about pre-Christian festivals, but I didn't really know the details. So it was quite nice and a little bit educational and informational for me to read that. But that's an example of conveying the information that's factual, but also relevant to the story in a light-handed manner.
00:25:02
Speaker
Yeah, and some of it was researched, and some of it is just stuff that's banging around my head, and probably banging around all our heads after, you know, however many Christmases we've had. Yeah, and there are things that are put in there that are just very personal to me at Christmas. So for example, when Leah discovers her Christmas decorations in the box, and each one of them carries a memory, so it's almost like she's laying out the story of her and her son's life together.
00:25:28
Speaker
and she's putting them back onto the Christmas tree and recovering those memories. That's just because that's what my Christmas tree's like. I always like to pick up different things every year from different places that mean some things to me so that when they come out of the box, it's like, oh yeah, that's from a festival in Lincoln or that's from holiday in Germany. It's like telling stories to yourself. Because it is so heavily seasonal in a way that the summer isn't. The summer is sort of hazy and it's
00:25:57
Speaker
It sort of drifts over the course of three or four months, whereas Christmas is focused, it zones in on this one day of the year. Even Easter is a movable feast, literally. It changes in relation to the equinox. But Christmas zones into this one day, so everything is very, very tightly seasonal. And you do accrue these very specific memories which are embodied in these little bits of tinsel and little baubles and strange little decorations. You can lay out a chronological
00:26:25
Speaker
recollection of your life and I like that. Yeah and they're individual to that character as well but they're also things that everybody can relate to because of those rituals at Christmas that we all share. I mean there's not many of us that are all that religious anymore but there are certain things that you know we all recognise and have often experienced ourselves so yeah hopefully it taps into that.
Writing Style and Folklore Integration
00:26:48
Speaker
And also, I think the constant dilemmas, well, not dilemmas, but one of the things that I felt was in Leah's mind was what she should be doing as opposed to how she felt or didn't feel of any emotion or whatever. And there's a one year where I didn't put my Christmas tree up and I didn't put it up, not in assault, but because I was in such a dark place, the thought of even
00:27:14
Speaker
decorating it with these memories of happiness and this performative element of Christmas. Whereas, you know, Daniel mentioned in summer and we don't, as human beings, we don't have to do anything in summer except just burn ourselves. At Christmas, you're expected to make this sort of supplication, you're expected to make something if you're, you know, actually even if you're Christian, to be honest, now it's more of a cultural thing than a religious thing.
00:27:38
Speaker
Well, I mean, it's still there, isn't it? You mentioned Saturnalia, and Saturnalia was... But I'm talking about what Christmas has become, because I don't think anybody will look into, oh yes, this is the ancient festival of Saturnalia or whatever. What I mean is...
00:27:53
Speaker
My point was going to be that the Saturnalia Festival was almost an act of defiance, like shining a light in the encroaching darkness, in the knowledge that the light is going to shine again because the sun will start to grow. You said Sol Invictus, the sun is unconquered.
00:28:09
Speaker
The sun will start to rise, the days will get longer. So it's a defiance against the light, the dark. And if you don't do it, people always say of people who don't get into the spirit, to use, you know, it's a bit of an awful phrase, but get into the spirit of Christmas. And, you know, it's an interesting turn of phrase, spirit of Christmas, but maybe we'll park that for now, that people say, oh, they've got very grumpy and not getting into the spirit of Christmas. And it's almost like giving into the darkness.
00:28:36
Speaker
you know, going towards the darkness, the darkest point of the year without holding that light up, even if that light is a tawdry neon sign, you know, as you're drinking a triple Bailey's. Yeah, Leah, at the start of the story, she is running away from all of that because she's in a difficult place. And she doesn't want anything to do with Christmas, actually. But it's strange events in the house and seeing these visions of the past that
00:29:01
Speaker
start to draw back into it. There are new connections being made within neighbors and things, so she's almost like pulled into it unwillingly and rediscovers it. Because there's so much you could take from that as a central thesis, are there any things you had to cut? Because it clips along the book, it's a short quick read rather. Did you have to cut stuff out?
00:29:27
Speaker
Did you rather not have to? I know this is a bit of like a hidden extras on the DVD thing, but I felt that maybe there could have been a real deep dive in places onto certain sort of folkloric or cultural observations. Is that something you wrestled with? I mean, there's always the question of where somebody's getting their information from, if they're an isolated character. She's not kind of an encyclopedia, so all had to relate to something and come from somewhere.
00:29:54
Speaker
or she had to, you know, find it out from neighbors or look it up or, you know, something. So there were limits really to how much information was sent. Sorry. Sorry, because she learns a lot of stuff from the visitations of the dead as well. She does, yeah. And they're kind of conveying information about old sort of rituals of mistletoe through their actions and through story. But yeah, I didn't really cut a massive amount from it. I think there were certainly some things that I felt I'd overloaded with information and I cut it back.
00:30:23
Speaker
You have to be clear. I did want information to be carried by a story and not to info dump you or anything. It's weird, isn't it? There's some things if you're into them, you'll let an author get away with murder with info dumps if it's something that interests you. But then other times you can read something, you can be completely unforgiving. So you never know what's the right thing to do as an author with stuff like that because you can't guess your audience.
Writing Industry Challenges
00:30:46
Speaker
Yeah, I think if it keeps carrying the plot forward, you know, if it's important to character development or if it's conveyed in action, then I think it's pretty safe. The other thing that we say, especially Bean is a big advocate of this approach. The other thing is if it's just beautiful writing as well, sometimes I don't think you can sustain an entire book on that. No.
00:31:11
Speaker
But sometimes you can just let the writing be. If it's that good, you can just let it be. It doesn't have to, it can just build mood. Yeah, but mood and atmosphere is so important in the ghost story as well. It wasn't said that details are everything in a ghost story. So I think you're building a specific sense of place. And, you know, I tried to make the descriptions in the book really immediate. So
00:31:35
Speaker
I wrote it one winter and whenever it snowed that winter I chucked on a coat and ran outside, you know, and I was like standing in the snow and making snowmen out there on my own feeling like an idiot but just experiencing it all and touching it and feeling the cold and just writing down all my first impressions of that straight away so that when I came to write particular scenes I could draw on those notes.
00:31:55
Speaker
and try to make the descriptions really immediate. I wanted to talk about M.R. James and you gave me a nice, well, I say nice, a bit of a ham-fisted segue into that by saying, writing about detail and writing about atmosphere and the master of the atmospheric ghost story is M.R. James. But shall we do that in the second half of the podcast? Yeah, let's do that in the second half. There was one thing I wanted to ask actually, are you thinking of moving on?
00:32:21
Speaker
moving on in what sense into the liminal into the afterlife? We can all hope. I mean, I mean, I'm on to away from the story and more into writing and Christmas ghost stories and stuff, just because there was something I wanted to ask about mistletoe.
00:32:37
Speaker
Oh, go for it. Yeah. I want, you know, we're talking about geography, nature and place and with geography, I wondered where your, you know, if your inspiration for the setting was just because of that's where you live, or if there was some place you'd been specifically that you had in mind, or, you know, there were elements to it that, you know, were, you could imagine was a deep farm, a farm in the Deep South.
00:33:05
Speaker
although it's winter, whereas mostly there were elements where it was like, okay, this is what the moors would be like for Heathcliff if it was snowing all the time. That's exactly the thought that I had. Wuthering Heights, absolutely. Yeah, it's not a specific village. It's somewhere I've made up, but it's an amalgam of lots of places where I've been. So when I was growing up, I spent time in friends' farmhouses. And when we were house hunting,
00:33:32
Speaker
A few years ago, actually, we went and visited quite a remote, very broken down shabby farmhouse.
00:33:39
Speaker
that certain aspects of that have found their way into the book. But actually, I looked on Rightmove. I don't know if this is standard practice for writers or if it's cheating a little bit, but I just looked at farmhouses for sale in Yorkshire and found reference photos of the very place that fitted perfectly in my mind. So the exterior of the farm is based on some random person's farm on Rightmove. That's brilliant.
00:34:06
Speaker
I had all the reference photographs in front of me but the interior is kind of based on, it's an amalgam of a few places. I love that and I'm going to shoehorn in a reference to Shirley Jackson because you won the Shirley Jackson award but didn't she base The Haunting of Hill House on a floor plan that had been drawn out by people who had conducted a séance? I don't know that one.
00:34:29
Speaker
I'm not sure, okay, we don't have to do anything with that, but I thought I'd slot it in there. Let's take a break. We'll talk about M.R. James a little bit later, because we have to talk about Ghost Story for Christmas. I'm sure it'll be a bit of a revelation for our non-UK listeners, but it's worth talking about. Yeah, it's been great talking about mistletoe, and it must be good to contribute to that niche sort of Christmas ghost story literature in your own way.
00:34:55
Speaker
I suppose when you're writing a book like that, you're sort of hoping that you're going to become the naughty holder, aren't you, of Christmas ghost stories? You can just survive on the Christmas royalties for the rest of your life. Well, that would be nice. I enjoyed doing it anyway, put it that way. But yeah, I don't know about that part. It's quite the same way for writers.
00:35:15
Speaker
Well, I heard that he could receive £800,000 a year off of that song. Even if he just sat on his arse the whole year and didn't do anything, he'd still rake in £800,000.
Martian Skit and Christmas Traditions
00:35:27
Speaker
So there you go. That's something to aspire to. OK, thanks, Ali. We'll see you later on in the show. Hello. Is that SSF Chronicles? Look, I'm ringing to complain about the standard of broadcasting coming from marriage.
00:35:45
Speaker
Now I know technically I'm not in the same jurisdiction and I don't pay a license fee but I still have the urge to complain and to be honest it's an absolute disgrace. There's no end of cursing on it. There's pop music. Like I was saying the cursing like you often hear the word flump and fiddlesticks. You can't move for fiddlesticks on marching radio in fact. Look hold on I'll give you an example.
00:36:12
Speaker
Hi Hello Listers! Welcome to Mars Radio 14, the 3rd best radio station in the Martian Space Force Broadcasting Spectrum. My name is Private Half Mill Carton. And today I'm going to be looking at a phenomenon known as Ghosts. And to tell you this, we have sent Lieutenant Bungalow to Planet Earth. Bungalow, can you hear me? Yeah, okay, F. Mill Carton. I'm at the house now. Wait, wait. Wait, wait. Hold on, there's someone here.
00:36:40
Speaker
Hello, ma'am. Yeah, my name is Lieutenant Chubble on Bungalow of the Marsha Space Force. I'm on a fact-finding mission to Earth to see what we can find about ghosts. Do you mind me asking you a few questions? Who did you say you were with? The Marsha Space Force, ma'am. Best space force in the solar system. Solar system? Never heard of that. Outer space, ma'am. Outer space?
00:37:04
Speaker
Is that the new laser tag place in Ballasadir? No, ma'am. I'm, uh, the Cosmos. Like I'm from the stars, you know. Well now, fear play to you. What brings you here? A rocket ship, ma'am. I'm looking for ghosts. But Temple House Manor isn't haunted. I'm sorry, ma'am, but we've had reports of strange damp patches on the floor and a French dresser that moves slightly to the left. You know, all by itself. So this place is definitely haunted. Well,
00:37:35
Speaker
I don't know about that. Sounds to me like someone was having you on. Don't be foolish, ma'am. Why wouldn't an interplanetary detective travel 83 million kilometers to Mars telling us stuff that didn't happen, huh? I don't know, but they're wrong. With respect, ma'am, how can you be sure? Because we've never had a French dresser. I've been the cheerleader here for 367 years.
00:38:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Judge's Corner with me, Damaris Brown. Back in my first talk in January, I discussed copyright and what it means for us as writers. For this final talk of the year, I thought I'd return to the topic, this time dealing with the more complicated issues of plagiarism and copyright infringement, at least as they appear under the law of England and Wales.
Plagiarism and Copyright Discussion
00:38:32
Speaker
There is no single standard definition of plagiarism.
00:38:36
Speaker
but it most often relates to passing off someone else's work as one's own. And in academia and journalism, at least in the West, it's seen as a serious breach of ethics. In artistic circles, of course, taking inspiration from or paying homage to other work is commonplace, as Picasso might or might not have said, good artist copy, great artist steal.
00:39:02
Speaker
In the UK, and I believe it's the same in the US and other common law countries, there is no specific taught of plagiarism, so we have to rely on the law of copyright. But while the two concepts overlap, they're not identical. As I explained in January,
00:39:19
Speaker
While copyright gives us rights over our original work, for example the right to say who may reproduce it and on what terms, ideas aren't protected, only the expression of those ideas. However, as has been said in the Court of Appeal, no clear principle is or could be laid down in order to tell whether what is sought to be protected is on the ideas side of the dividing line or on the expression side.
00:39:48
Speaker
So it's impossible to say exactly where we can draw a distinction between the legitimate use of someone else's ideas as expressed in their work and the unlawful copying of the expression of those ideas.
00:40:01
Speaker
in the words of one Lord Justice, it is easier to establish infringement of the copyright in a literary work if the copying is exactly word for word, verbatim or slavish copying, or if there are only slight changes in the wording, perhaps in some optimistic attempt to disguise plagiarism.
00:40:22
Speaker
The copying of that kind without consent is on the expression side of the dividing line, and the original will be protected subject to any defence such as fair dealing or fair use.
00:40:34
Speaker
Conversely, a simple broad concept, a school for magical children, for example, would be on the ideas side of the line without legal protection. That's because copyright is granted in recognition of the investment of effort, time and skill involved by the author. And that tends to lie in the detail with which the basic idea is presented.
00:40:59
Speaker
But between these two extremes, verbatim copying on the one hand and vague abstract ideas on the other, is a grey area involving issues such as themes, characters, incidents, scenes, structure and choice of material. This is where legal arguments get complicated and some lawyers get rich. So if there is no set principle as to which side of the line plagiarism of this kind will fall, what can we learn from decided cases?
00:41:29
Speaker
Well, first and foremost, according to the Court of the Peel again, if material is found in a later work, which is also in an earlier copyright work, and it is shown that the author of the later work had access to the early work, an inference of copying is raised.
00:41:47
Speaker
However, similarities resulting from coincidence or from the use of the same or similar sources arouse suspicion, but they are not actionable as infringements of copyright. So whether there was access to the earlier work, or if similarities can be explained in other ways, are matters that must be considered.
00:42:10
Speaker
What this can involve was shown in a judgment handed down only in late October in a case brought by Anna Pasternak, the author of Lara, the untold love story that inspired Dr. Sivago, which for shortness sake I'll simply call Lara from now on.
00:42:27
Speaker
Her book, which was published in 2016, is a factual historical account of the relationship between her great-uncle Boris Pasternak and his lover and muse Olga Ivanskaya.
00:42:41
Speaker
The defendant in the case, Lara Prescott, also wrote about the couple in one of two narrative threads in her novel The Secrets We Kept, published in 2019, and it was Anna Pasternak's contention that Prescott had copied a substantial part of the selection, structure and arrangement of facts and incidents from Lara.
00:43:03
Speaker
Note that, substantial by the way, as that's a necessary part of a claim for copyright infringement in England and Wales.
00:43:13
Speaker
Prescott readily accepted that she'd read Lara soon after it was published, but by then not only had she undertaken a good deal of research herself, but she'd also completed the first draft of her novel. She admitted using Lara in subsequent drafts, and she'd mentioned it in the acknowledgements in her novel, but only as a secondary source material, checking facts against other sources and looking for details not found elsewhere.
00:43:40
Speaker
because in her view it contained nothing major that was new, large parts of it having been taken from other books she was already using. Pasternak didn't return the compliment of reading Prescott's work, which the judge called extraordinary, and one might think it raises the question as to how she thought her book was plagiarised.
00:44:01
Speaker
Apparently, a review was prepared on her behalf, and though it wasn't admitted in evidence, it presumably formed the basis of a court document which listed in detail the specific facts and incidents or events in Lara which Pasternak claimed were copied, together with supporting allegations of minor copying, which in themselves were not enough to have copyright protection, but proved that Prescott was indeed taking material from Lara.
00:44:31
Speaker
but the document which Pasternak relied upon towards the end of the trial was greatly changed from the one originally filed with the court. Taking one chapter, the judge noted that the final list of allegedly copied events was a considerably pruned version, with the first 12 events noted in the original having been removed in their entirety, because it was apparent that the defendant had written her own treatment of these events before acquiring a copy of Lara.
00:45:00
Speaker
therefore they couldn't possibly have been copied from Pasternak's work. This, the judge said, was an apt warning in a case where authors are using common sources and making reference to actual historical events against assuming copying simply because of a similarity or apparent similarity of events and their selection.
00:45:25
Speaker
A second point the judge made about that chapter was that the list of events set down in the document represented only a small number of all the events Pasternak had covered there. She'd written about a good many things in the chapter but was claiming only a few had been copied by Prescott. The judge noted that
00:45:44
Speaker
In making the comparison between the relevant chapters of the books, it is important to make sure that the comparison is a full and fair one, rather than isolating certain events. In this respect, he'd already referred to an earlier court decision where a judge had warned of the danger of being misled by what may be called similarity by excision.
00:46:09
Speaker
where the court is concentrating only on matters that are similar, losing sight of any differences, and thereby creating an illusion of copying. He explained this with an analogy about two people dropping similar small quantities of sand on the floor. The original pattern of sand would be very different of course, but
00:46:31
Speaker
If one removes all the grains of sand which are not in equivalent positions, all you are left with are those which are in equivalent positions. If you look at those remaining grains, it is possible to say that similar patterns of distribution exist.
00:46:47
Speaker
It is even possible to say that these similarities are surprising. But the similarities and the surprise they elicit are an artefact created by the very process of ignoring all the other grains.
00:47:04
Speaker
In addition to considering the document setting out the alleged copying, together with all the other court papers in various incarnations, over some six days in court, including three and a half days of cross-examination, and with evidence from eight witnesses, the judge was taken through the minutiae of Prescott's writing history, the various drafts of her novel, and the structure of both works.
00:47:28
Speaker
The length of the case is shown in his judgment, which deals with each and every allegation of copying in detail and runs to over 82,000 words, longer than the first draft of Prescott's novel. His judgment must have made for grim reading for Pasternak. She had one small victory over a translated passage, which had been copied without sufficient acknowledgement.
00:47:54
Speaker
But the judge decided against her in respect of each and every point relating to the selection, structure and arrangement of the facts and incidents in Lara. He found that Prescott had used other books as her primary sources and had copied nothing of substance from Pasternak. Some details claimed as supporting allegations which were taken from Lara
00:48:17
Speaker
a reference in wonder after Boris Pasternak's loopy scrawl, for instance, were entirely consistent with Prescott using the book as a secondary source, as she claimed, and did not on their own account amount to substantial copying and therefore did not enjoy copyright protection. The judge went on to say that even without going into specific detail, taking the material as a whole, he would have reached the same conclusion.
00:48:45
Speaker
because the two books were fundamentally different. A non-fictional historical work on the one hand and on the other a work of fiction, described as a spy thriller, loosely based on real events woven into a story devised by Prescott and adapted to suit that story. Furthermore, the works were written in very different styles with different content and arrangement,
00:49:09
Speaker
And the fact they followed the same basic chronology was unsurprising when they dealt with the same basic historical events using the same principal source materials.
00:49:21
Speaker
One significant legal point in contention between the parties was whether Pasternak was actually entitled to copyright in respect of the event she claimed had been copied. She had herself made extensive use of work from other books, and the judge found that this included direct copying of text from her source materials.
00:49:42
Speaker
As a result, the defence argued that the material allegedly copied from Lara was either not original or was of only a low level of originality and therefore not protected. In this matter, Pasternak was successful, with the judge confirming she not only had copyright in the book as a whole, but also in all the areas alleged to have been copied, since
00:50:06
Speaker
copyright can subsist in the original skill and labour or intellectual creativity used in selecting and arranging material taken from other sources.
00:50:20
Speaker
One case which the defense relied upon in this argument arose from the book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, two of the authors of which brought a copyright claim against Random House, the UK publishers of The Da Vinci Code. The authors alleged that Dan Brown had copied a substantial part of their work in the course of writing some six chapters in his novel.
00:50:42
Speaker
He patently hadn't copied their exact text, say for a few instances which were held to be so minor as to be irrelevant, but they claimed he had taken their book's central theme, which they said was their original work.
00:50:57
Speaker
To quote the judge in the Pasternak case, the claim failed, essentially on the basis that the so-called central theme, so far as it could be found at all in The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, existed as no more than a selection of features from the book, collated for forensic purposes, which did not qualify for copyright protection as a substantial part of the work.
00:51:20
Speaker
The claimants lost the Holy Blood case at first instance and at appeal, but the Court of Appeal laid down guidance as to what was protected.
00:51:30
Speaker
The literary copyright exists in The Holy Blood by reason of the skill and labor expended by the claimants in the original composition and production of it, and the original manner or form of expression of the results of their research. Original expression includes not only the language in which the book is composed, but also the original selection, arrangement, and complement of the raw research material.
00:51:57
Speaker
It does not, however, extend to protecting information, facts, ideas, theories, and themes with exclusive property rights, so as to enable the claimants to monopolize historical research or knowledge and prevent the legitimate use of historical and biographical material. Theories propounded, general arguments deployed, general hypotheses suggested, whether they are sound or not, or general themes written about.
00:52:28
Speaker
So, regardless of the fact that, as the Court accepted, it takes time, effort and skill to conduct historical research, to collect materials for a book, to decide what facts are established by the evidence, and to formulate arguments, theories, hypotheses, propositions and conclusions,
00:52:47
Speaker
There is nonetheless no copyright infringement if someone replicates or uses that research regarding historical facts, virtual history, events, incidents, or makes use of those arguments, theories, propositions, and conclusions.
00:53:02
Speaker
But what if someone copies not from a factual source, as in the Pasternak case, or what may be only semi-factual, as with the holy blood, but from someone else's original fiction? To find out, you'll have to wait for my next talk on copyright infringement.
00:53:30
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to Mars Radio 14, the third best radio station on the Martian Space Force Broadcasting spectrum. Now listen to this, there have been reports of strange activity taking place.
00:53:43
Speaker
on the planet art. Lieutenant Bungalow has just traveled there to find out what is going on. Can you hear us, Bungalow? Yeah, okay, half mil car, now I'm trying to see what's going on. Oh wait, wait, wait, there's someone here now. Excuse me, sir. My name is Lieutenant Bungalow of the Marsha Space Force. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions? You're from what? The Marsha Space Force, sir. It's the greatest space force in the entire solar system. It's not a podcast.
00:54:06
Speaker
No, well, yeah, sort of. You know, we're trying to find out more about Earth. And in particular, why you have so many candles, and psychedelic lights, and ornamentation strung around your dwellings, and public transportation arteries. It's...
00:54:24
Speaker
You mean the festive decorations? I mean if that's what you call them, yeah. They're for Christmas. It's a Christian tradition. It's just something people do to celebrate the birth of Christ. Where did you say you were from? Monster! The greatest planet in the universe. With the greatest space force in the universe to which I... But did you mean Jesus Christ? Yes. I mean he came to... to Earth? Yeah, hold on.
00:54:48
Speaker
Why did you say it like, ugh, hurt? Well, because, you know, this place is, uh, well, how do I put it? Diplomatically. I mean, it's kind of a dump, you know what I'm saying? I'm sorry. I didn't think you'd want to visit here. Well, he did. How do you know him? Oh, Marshes know Jesus Christ. I mean, he swings by every month for the EVM races. That fellow loves the anti-gram circuit.
00:55:08
Speaker
Boy, does he know how to party. I mean, I gotta have the day booked off for when he arrives. His visits are legendary, man. There was just one time, there was just one time we put out an angleball game between the Mars of Space Force and the Navy firm, and Jesus got so fired up on spacecraft that he accidentally teleported the whole planet to him, dropping an old man. He still talks about it. Great times. And what did you end up doing when he called him?
00:55:37
Speaker
It's not the time. Sorry. I just remembered I have to do something somewhere else. Goodbye.
00:55:52
Speaker
It's time to journey down to the writing challenges for this month. It seems that all the Kronskast's team are going through a little purple patch at the moment on the challenges, so in October, yours truly was the winner, and I set the challenge for November with the genre of historical speculative and the theme of questions, and it was won by our very own Brian Sexton.
00:56:17
Speaker
So if you think you can do better, then all you have to do is go to sffchronicles.com and join up for free. If you are a writer and you're listening to the challenges that we have on the show and you're thinking, you know what, I think I could do as well as that, maybe a bit better.
M.R. James' Influence on Ghost Stories
00:56:35
Speaker
then you've got nothing to lose by trying. In fact, it's a great way of improving your writing chops. I found it really useful over the years, Christopher would say the same thing, and so would everybody else that's been involved in the challenges. It's also great for getting ideas. My novel, Manowar, came out of a 75-word challenge. So if you are a writer and you hear these challenges and you think, I want to get involved, then toddle on down to sffchronicles.com and sign up for free.
00:57:05
Speaker
Anyway, here is the November winning entry, read by our very own Brian Sexton, and it's called... Ah, sure. Nobody'll ever know the difference. Houston, your go for landing. Over. Ryder, understand. Go for landing. Copy. We'll go. Hand tight. We'll go. Altitude, 1600. Altitude, 1400. Looking very good.
00:57:34
Speaker
1201. Roger, 1201. 47 degrees. Roger. Houston, Olympus Mons base here. The Eagle has landed. Roger, Olympus, we copy. Wait, wait, what? The Eagle has landed. Not that bit. Did you say Olympus Mons? Yes. Oh, God damn it. You numpties just landed on the wrong celestial body. I was thinking it looked a bit red. Oh, sorry, Houston. What now?
00:58:04
Speaker
You you your three head home, we'll see if we can cobble together some studio footage or something
00:58:17
Speaker
Welcome back to part two of the Crohn's cast. This month we're with Alison Littlewood. We've been talking about her novel, Mistletoe. But now we're going to move more towards the Jamesian things with A Ghost Story for Christmas. More talk about that. But we'll also drift into influences and stuff that Ali has to say about horror. So what I want to say is that I love A Ghost Story for Christmas.
00:58:43
Speaker
Really? Yes, particularly the Lawrence Gordon ones. Two towns. Lawrence Gordon Clark did a lot of the ones in the 70s, which are phenomenal. You know, when you think about 70s genre stuff, and I don't know, you could come up with some of the aliens in Doctor Who being ropey, you know, poorly rendered, poorly executed special effects.
00:59:03
Speaker
something about the ghost story for Christmas, the way that the way it's filmed, the actors. Also, you know, when you watch something from the 70s nowadays, you automatically feel some sense of time having passed. And there is some chilling stuff to these old things. And they're all available on YouTube as far as I'm aware. Well, that's where I
00:59:22
Speaker
And I think part of that is because you don't read an M.I. James story or The Signal Man by Dickens or whatever where it's rah, rah, rah, and this happened and Godzilla comes and that happens. It's just this slow build up and this quiet sense of dread that gets worse and worse. Or that you know the environment or the environs rather than something's going to happen. But when it actually happens,
00:59:45
Speaker
on the, what's that podcast called? The James, the M.R. James podcast. Well, it's quite hard to remember that name, isn't it? The M.R. James podcast, they use the term, the Jamesian wallop. And I think that's such a delightful term for what happens in an M.R. James story. When you get the punch at the end, you have the sheets from a whistle, you have the spiders in the ash tree, you have the, well, I can't remember his name and I'm going to be shot now.
01:00:09
Speaker
We should translate for people who are not familiar with the M.R. James canon. So I whistle and I'll come to you my lad. Well I'll translate for them is get your bloody books out and find out who M.R. James is and then go on to YouTube and watch them just like any other person has to do. The ghost story for Christmas started with I whistle and I'll come to you my lad. I don't know. Is it the omnibus one?
01:00:31
Speaker
The Omnibus. So there was an old BBC programme called Omnibus, which is an arts programme, and you have to be really of a certain vintage to, I mean, I only remember the very tail end of Omnibus, but it was an arts programme that went on for donkey's years. And it did an adaptation of Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad, which is about an academic, as is often the way with M.R. James protagonist, who has a sort of sceptical outlook
01:00:58
Speaker
towards ghosts and ghoulie things like that. And well, it all goes a bit wrong for him. But there's no need to go into spoilers because it would ruin the atmosphere. But the 1968 adaptation is in black and white. It's made on clearly a shoestring for minutes long.
01:01:16
Speaker
But it's 45 minutes long, it's on YouTube. But it is one of the most masterful pieces of ghost storytelling. It really is. Committed to TV or film that I think you could find. It's genuinely creepy. I mean, it's very funny. It's very funny. And that's mainly because what's the name of the actor? Michael Horton. That's it. It's genuinely funny, the way he sort of potters about and labels things in his sort of
01:01:43
Speaker
halfway eccentric, genial, academic, professorial manner, but when the wallop comes at the end, it's very creepy. It's genuinely a horrible moment in the story, I think.
01:01:59
Speaker
It's the key moment and they just had to get it right, but they do genuinely make it creepy, don't they? It really does. It's got this almost cinema verite feel to it. It's as if you're watching something that's been recorded live on someone's camera, even though it's 1968, black and white, or it's this even earlier than that, the omnibus version itself, but you get this sense of being witness to something incredibly... Intimate.
01:02:25
Speaker
But what I'm saying is you can't even place it. It's not like, okay, here's a man wearing a she going, because it isn't. We never know what the spirit is. We don't know if it's a ghost. We don't know if there's a link with Templars and the precepts. It's never explained. It is just there. And it's so unsettling. Yeah, it's very pared down, isn't it? There's nothing...
01:02:44
Speaker
particularly explained in it or not very much at all. Some of it's simplified really. The preceptor isn't really in it. He just goes and takes the whistle from an old grave that's broken open on the cliffside instead. It's just very visual, isn't it? It doesn't require a lot of dialogue. Although it only occurred to me
01:03:05
Speaker
recently why they've made him almost this bumbly fella because in the written story, Mr. James has him as a young man who's very neat and precise in his speech. He specifically says that and this character on film is actually very bumbly and he mutters to himself and he's almost irritating. You know, if he was in real life, you kind of want to slap him a little bit. Definitely. I think because it is made very visual and he's on his own a lot of the time, it's in these long scenes where he's
01:03:33
Speaker
just looking at things and gaining impressions and it's working by suggestion. But if he didn't speak, if he didn't mutt it to himself, you'd have no dialogue at all. And it would just be the sound of the sea in silence and perhaps people would drift away from that. And it does enable him to kind of explain things a little bit. So when he's examining the whistle that he's found,
01:03:53
Speaker
he kind of goes, bumble, bumble, bumble, oh, inscription. And then he kind of tells you what the inscription is. And it seems natural. It doesn't seem like it's information that's stopped him because that's his character. And it's all it's it's not painted a very good picture of anyone that age, really, because when he arrives at the hotel, and he's being shown around the hotel by the owner, the hotel owner doesn't use words, he goes over there. Yeah, he does it back
01:04:18
Speaker
to him, doesn't it? It naturalizes it, but it's slightly, I mean, if that was reality, yeah. And when there's, and like Dan says, it's very funny, but also it's that tightrope of cringe and that the horror of watching somebody being inept, you know, not just the horror of the story itself and this sitting, you know, and I suspect a lot of that down is they must have allowed Michael Horton some freedom and ad libs.
01:04:47
Speaker
But when he's sitting down in the dining room. There's not much dialogue. I imagine a lot of it was ad lib because there was not much dialogue at all. Yeah, because he's saying, he talks to his plate. I quote, I use him in one of my books and he says, didn't ask for tomatoes, don't want tomatoes, didn't ask for tomatoes and fix them off. And then another bit, he's... I love it when the dog goes past him and he says, sort of dog. Yeah.
01:05:15
Speaker
funny and he tells like you're going on about when he's cleaning up the whistle oh scription of some kind and 50 tricks a boy scout can do i mean it's just so painful but it is compelling and you know he's all this character is an academic yeah and he's he's an emblem of competence what he's learned he's he's yeah i've learned yeah you i learned from a book that sort of competence
01:05:40
Speaker
Yeah, whereas he's confronted. I love that theme. When I was writing my manuscript for The Green Man, that's the principal theme that I was trying to nail, which James does masterfully in just a short story. The fact that there are, well, I guess if you boil it down, is there more things in heaven and earth than your philosophy as a ratio?
01:06:02
Speaker
which is meant, which is a line that the kernel actually uses in a whistle on dialogue about, you know, he needs the question qualified before he can even answer the question. He needs the question verified as a verifiable thesis before he'll even entertain it. It's it's the danger of limiting oneself to only proposition based thinking rather than Excuse me, that's what happens when I drink non Harrods tea.
01:06:28
Speaker
Yeah, he does say some, I mean, it was one of the James Ian things, isn't it is in that he felt that protagonists should be very level headed and ordinary, so that when they're faced with something off kilter and supernatural, I guess it's all the more rattling for the reader as well. Yeah, I mean, and I mean, we look at it now and you know, it seems like the period settings, but actually he wanted contemporary settings and
01:06:55
Speaker
And for that to be characterful, but in a way quite ordinary as well. So that by contrast, the supernatural would be all the more effective when that final stab of horror comes. The protagonists of an MR James story, typically these academics or these antiquarians who are about to have the entire paradigm shift of this is what my life is. This is what I can expect just from sometimes a very simple paranormal experience. And I think that it's quite on one hand, it's quite hard to sympathize with them.
01:07:25
Speaker
no, it might be quite hard to empathise with him, but it's quite to sympathise because even though Parkins in O'Whistle is this young academic, I always will always see him as Michael Horton because of that omnibus thing. I also feel slightly protective of him, like this is my clunky grandfather who I really need to look after. This is
01:07:44
Speaker
oh he doesn't really understand how to use an iphone so i'm gonna help him do you know what i mean he's that kind of character and the way he he bites his his thumb at the end where he's just saying no no i mean it's it's everything about that version on youtube the omnibus version is
01:08:00
Speaker
The idea of the protagonist, I like the idea of the protagonist being this fastidious, not just of a whistle, but across the Jamesian canon, is in the installs of Rochester. The protagonist relating the story is a library, he's a, what's the word? He's a categoriser, that is not the right word. What is it? He's an antiquarian. He's an antiquarian, but he's also. That's not being a library. That's the word.
01:08:27
Speaker
which is something that Emma James did himself at some point, isn't it? It's a good job you're here, Ali. A lot of the stuff he did is what we're responsible for, you know, a lot of data that's being used these days by academics, Emma James transcribed. I like the idea of the character being a cataloger or catalogist. So his existence is defined by putting things into their rightful places.
01:08:51
Speaker
Which is kind of quite a Victorian thing to do, actually, in the Victorian scientific mindset. Putting everything in its proper place, categorizing everything, making sure we understand the world in proposition-based thinking. And then something happens and it blows all of that out of the water. And you're left with, when you've only got proposition and catalogue-based thinking, you've nowhere left to go. All of the pillars that hold up your worldview are just
01:09:14
Speaker
knocked out from under you and you're left in this more like Parkins at the end of O'Whistle, you're left in this sort of chaos of nothingness and you don't know what to do with that. I wonder if the idea of a ghost story for Christmas as well as being in touch with the ancient pagan rites and that liminal space between the living and the land of the dead is also a bit of an antidote to a time of year that can become super abundant in with respect to its saccharine nature.
01:09:43
Speaker
was it? Would you have imagined it like that though when M.R. James was writing these? They might- Well, the Victorians, they said that the Victorians invented the modern concept of Christmas as we understand it. They didn't take it in the direction, say, of Coke with Santa Claus train on the 13th of November every year or whatever, just
01:10:05
Speaker
heralding Christmas in so early. I think there's still a sort of magic about it in those in those areas. But I see what you mean like this. It's also very British to have this. So it's a lovely time of year. So let's write a horrible story. Some of those ghost stories are pretty horrible. I love the ash tree. One of my favorite and my James stories is absolutely horrifying.
01:10:27
Speaker
And that's on YouTube too. Yeah. And that's really good, really good. The end part of the Ash Tree, that will give you the ick, the YouTube version. It's very strange, isn't it? The Ash Tree. I love this story, but it's not going to be very good because I know in the 70s, how the BBC are going to produce that. Special effects, how they do the special effects, but they manage it. They do it so well.
01:10:51
Speaker
Not so well if we can stick with a whistle. Ali, have you seen the, shall I say, deplorable or shall I just say, what do you think of the John Hurt 2010 version? I have watched it. I'm afraid I just can't really remember. Is that a terrible? No, it's probably for the best. Yeah, I've worked on a lot of stuff since then. I think that's the problem. There's only so much
01:11:19
Speaker
your memory can take before stuff starts falling out the other side. I mean the last one that I watched was the stalls of Barchester Cathedral and I mean that came out the year I was born 71 and I was astonished at how professional it all looked. Is that awful today as well?
01:11:35
Speaker
It was just beautifully done, beautifully put together, a great representation of the book. And actually, if I dare say, some of the moments in it are actually creepier than when you read the story, I think. That's the timing of it. For example, when the arch deacon Haynes in it is waiting for a man servant to come and collect a letter from his room. And he hears this ghostly whisper at the door saying, may I come in? And he says, certainly you may. You know, in the TV version, the door opens and there's just that little space of time where you wait and nothing appears.
01:12:05
Speaker
and then he opens the door and there's nothing there and it's just so beautifully timed that's a genuinely creepy moment that actually you could gloss over quite easily in the story and not really pick up on much about it. There's something about the actors as well I think because yes it's James's source material but having 70s actors, especially before people who might have cut their teeth before the massive bloom of television,
01:12:27
Speaker
are these theatre actors, these incredibly dour or declamatory Shakespearean performances from some of them. I think that's another reason. It's remained about the character rather than, oh, this entire thing is up to the reveal at the end.
01:12:45
Speaker
All we're working for is the reveal of the sheet at the end of A Whistle. Well, really, it's actually these are people, these are characters, and by having a well-chosen cast and a good script, you're going to care about them.
Upcoming Projects and Short Fiction
01:12:57
Speaker
So when that one little thing happens at the end, there is a much bigger gravity to the entire story. It's weird. I found that the old Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations, a lot of them
01:13:07
Speaker
Apart from maybe the quality of the actual film itself, I don't think they're that dated. Maybe because they're period pieces, I think, to begin with. And so once you do a period piece, it doesn't really matter when it's actually filmed. I don't think it's dated because they have so little reliance on production effects.
01:13:28
Speaker
visual if there's no visual effects at all. Yeah, I take your point about the spiders in the ash tree, which is very disturbing. I'm not sure how they would have done that on their shoestring budget, but I don't think it's as dated as you think. A BBC special from the 1970s is going to be wobbly cardboard sets and Daleks, but it's not.
01:13:49
Speaker
Or you shoot on location, a crumbling old stately home, use some great character access, and you've got the whole production off the bat. And they stand up remarkably well. And also, that's the good thing with ghost stories, isn't it? It's always, well, actually, not with M.R. James, because he does a lot of demon stuff. But with ghost stories, you don't have to have that effect. You can create an actor as a dead part, like in, what's the, you know, the famous one that everybody loves? Warning to the curious.
01:14:17
Speaker
Yes, the ghost of the Guardian, and that is not particularly scary in any way, but it's a presence and it's also the way it shot this long distance. And I'm sure that's influenced from the O'Whistle version with Michael Horden, where he's on the beach and there's the tiny, tiny apparition in the background. And then it gets closer and there's sometimes he's on the beach and he's a tiny apparition. And these expansive beaches and the east, is it trying to think of the place where it's based or the name?
01:14:47
Speaker
Yeah, he gives it a name and I can only think... Is it halfway or something like that? Yeah, it's something like that. I can't remember. Anyway, I'm sure so many people who've gone to produce, you know, TV versions of MI James stories,
01:15:05
Speaker
have that image of that singular body, that person on a beach or in a wide natural space because it happens so often in those things. And then you've got the other ones like Karen Albrecht's Grapbook where you do have the demon. And they've never done a Karen Albrecht's Grapbook so far as I'm aware. And that's one of my favorites. I'd love them to do. But that would be a bit more of a challenge for it to maintain its integrity over time, needing special effects and not having them because you are seeing a demon there.
01:15:32
Speaker
Ali, you've got a bit of news actually. We mentioned it in the introduction to this episode that you've got a book coming out soon. Is it the anthology that you've got coming out soon or a novel? I know you've got something coming out under your pseudonym.
01:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, I have a couple of things coming out actually. I've got a little mini collection of Victorian short stories coming out with a publisher called Black Shark Books and that's under my name Alison Littlewood, it's called The Flowering and it's just Victorian strange tales, some are ghostly, some are mysterious in other ways.
01:16:13
Speaker
but all of them set in that era. And then the novel is The Other Lives of Miss Emily White, and that's coming out under the name AJ Elwood in April next year. And that's a tale, it's set in a Victorian school and there's a new teacher comes along and very soon strange rumours start circling that she's being seen in two places at the same time. And one of the girls has a book that was around at the time that mentioned a teacher
01:16:41
Speaker
from a slightly earlier time called Emily Siggy and this is an actual book and she was rumored to have a doppelganger so it becomes a case of whether this book is being used as a blueprint by the girls to play tricks on the teacher
01:16:54
Speaker
or whether there's genuinely something uncanny about her. And there's one of the schoolgirls called Ivy, who's become a little bit attached to this teacher and quite obsessed with her, and she's kind of stuck in the middle of the two. So it's her story of how she resolves what's going on. Fantastic. Is that going to be published by Joe Fletcher Books?
01:17:12
Speaker
It's not, it's coming out with Titan in April. Fantastic. Can we talk about the flowering a little bit as we're on the topic of ghostly tales? I'm particularly interested in this and I think Bean probably will be as well. We've written quite a bit of short fiction over the years of varying lengths from flash fiction. On Crohn's we have the 75 word challenges, that's a real micro fiction.
01:17:39
Speaker
all the way up to sort of novella length. And one thing we've taken as received wisdom is that finding a market for short stories is nigh on impossible. It's very, very difficult. And just so we put a definition on short story, I'm going to use the definition of between five and 10,000 words in length per story. Is that fair?
01:18:00
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's room for shorter still, I think. There are a lot of exceptions out there, once you take it a little bit longer as well, but yeah. Okay, so a little bit of leeway there. But we've heard from different sources. We've both had short fiction published in different forms.
01:18:17
Speaker
But we've heard that the market for it is very, very difficult. So I'm really interested in how you worked with Black Shark Press because I know Black Shark Press, Chris, you're aware of them as well, aren't you? That they publish ghost stories and horror. Is it particularly British, isn't it? Black Shark Press. They publish a series of anthologies called Great British Horror. Yeah. Great British Horror. Right. So I'm keen to understand the relationship between you and the guys at Black Shark Press, how they
01:18:47
Speaker
view the market for short stories. I know that it's a specific genre, but how they view the market for short stories generally and how they make it work and how you how you pitched it. So could you tell us a little bit about how the flowering came to be? OK, I mean, it may not be a very typical story, really. I mean, certainly they've been around for a few years and I think they just know the market really well. So they tend to approach people and ask them to write for them.
01:19:19
Speaker
A couple of years back, I was asked to do a story for one of the great British horror anthologies, so I did that. There was another anthology that they were doing with the guest editor, and the guest editor approached me to write for that one. And the shadows collection came about because of those prior contacts, I've got to know the editor there. And we were chatting at Chillicon earlier this year. And it was quite funny because Steve came up to me
01:19:47
Speaker
and said, how about doing a shadows collection? And I'd gone along to the same event with a little pitch with a couple of different ideas of themes for a shadows collection. So I was like, hang on a second. There you go. Do you fancy doing one of these? And we settled on the Victorian one. So it just came together through networking, that one really. But
01:20:08
Speaker
how he goes about sourcing things generally and you know he's been doing it for a few years before i did a story for them so he just knows the market inside out so i guess it's you know reading other magazines and things i would probably have to ask him but he's certainly around at conventions and things like that going to know people who the writers are and so on so there is still a market for short fiction.
01:20:36
Speaker
There is, and that one for me, certainly my case, it was very much on personal contact, but you know that there are magazines out there that publish the submission guidelines and tell people how they can submit and what format they like and so on. I think certainly my impression is that it has got harder just in terms of numbers. I mean, I used to look on a website called relan.com, R-A-L-A-N.com.
01:21:01
Speaker
It lists different markets that are looking for submissions. I seem to think that there used to be a lot more around. From that point of view, it probably has got more difficult. The website is still there and still listing different markets. That's one place that people can go if they're starting out and looking for where to submit.
Writing Journey and Encouragement
01:21:22
Speaker
One of our listeners once remarked that he listened to several of our episodes and we've interviewed authors, agents, people who've worked in publishing, and they came away from it feeling mightily depressed about the whole enterprise of writing. Because, like you said, there's a dwindling number of opportunities and an ever-expanding pool of increasingly talented writers out there.
01:21:51
Speaker
who are competing against one another for those opportunities. So I always think that to temper the cold mathematics of the writing game, you've got to boil it down to why you're doing it, which is not normally for success, but it's normally because you have to do it. It's normally because it's the vocational side of writing. Yeah. I mean, we do it for love, don't we? Let's face it, really. I think that's how we all start out.
01:22:17
Speaker
you know, I just wrote for my own benefit in the early years. And yeah, I started trying to get short stories into different publications and I was in the sort of free to read online stuff and for the love markets and things like that. And you do set yourself targets to reach and
01:22:39
Speaker
You want to get out there, but if you didn't love the actual writing, I'm not sure any of us would really be doing this because that's what it comes down to, isn't it? Most of this is you in a room with a laptop and you fighting your own personal battles with the words and wanting to put a better plot together than you did last time. I guess it's the stories and the words that drive us really.
01:23:02
Speaker
I think a lot of people have a problem with the idea of effort. No, not even that. I was getting at the idea of producing something, a manuscript, a story, and then it never sees the light of day apart from maybe the odd beta reader or the odd proof reader. Certainly I've written stuff that will never see the light of day, which is probably a mercy on the world and upon me as well.
01:23:29
Speaker
But I'm happy with that and I don't regret having written them because it leads to two other things which are better. That's just Yeah, exactly. Yeah, everything's a learning experience, isn't it? I always used to find that even when I wrote a short story that I got rejected everywhere or I just thought wasn't worth sending anywhere as I'd still learn something from it and go away and want to do something better next time and I think that
01:23:57
Speaker
the best way to go into writing really just try and be a sponge and learn all that you can and and just keep improving so you're kind of battling yourself but obviously yeah there does come a point where you you want to to get your work out there and yeah it's impossible to be a writer without having some sort of portfolio of failure behind you it's how you learn isn't it and you hopefully
01:24:19
Speaker
get some generous editors, we'll give you a bit of feedback and we'll start to get published. One of our good friends from Kron's cast, Tadde Thompson, he sent out a tweet not long ago and he said, one of the best pieces of advice I can give writers is to give yourself permission to write crap.
01:24:37
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. I think that's kind of how we are able to write in the first place, isn't it? If you sit down and think I'm going to be the new Shakespeare and this is going to be perfect, then yeah, no, don't put that kind of pressure on yourself. I think there's a lot of management of expectations and hopes have to be put into the equation. And also the fact that many roads can lead to the same destination. You know, how many Dan authors have we spoken to who took the same route to get published, whether it's short stories,
01:25:06
Speaker
anthology or novels. They're all different. You know, sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's graft, sometimes it's networking. There's so many different ways to do it. We now live in a society with TV shows that promise instant talent, like Britain's Got Talent or X Factor. All social media, social media, everybody is celebrity. I know what you're getting at, but that's part of it as well.
01:25:30
Speaker
Well, I'm saying specifically to the cache of a proper celebrity, because I think at the moment, social media is still like... Content creator is still like a bit of a dirty word or TikTok. She or he does TikTok videos. It's a little bit sort of... There's a bit of snobby around that. They might be earning money, but whatever.
01:25:48
Speaker
But the thing is, if you're not into music or dance or magic and you don't have a cat that can talk, then, you know, you can't go on Britain's Got Talent, but you might like to write. You might like whether it's fan fiction or you might be serious about writing, but everybody else who's in this aspirational business is able to go somewhere like Britain's Got Talent, a local talent show, whatever it is, some quick feedback on their skills. Whereas writing, it is a long journey. The learning is long.
01:26:14
Speaker
and the producing of one novel is long, and you don't get that. I think that's why a lot of people fail or a lot of people get frustrated is because they just don't have the ethic, the work ethos. Even if they do, it takes such a long time to get the feedback that the head can go down, can't it? Yeah, exactly. It's the love for the words part of it that gets you through those times, isn't it? It really is. On to the next thing and the next thing.
01:26:40
Speaker
Do you have anybody that you, you know, so for example, Dan and I work very closely together with our writing when it comes to having each other read, having other people read our stuff, I will go to Dan because he likes my stuff or he not he like that's not that sounds
01:26:57
Speaker
Well, yeah. And that's fine, you know. I think it's useful to have a cheerleader, isn't it? Yeah, but what I meant was, you know what I'm going for, and I think I know what you're going for. And I think that's made it quite easy for us to talk like this, because I've just thought about what I've said. And Alison,
01:27:19
Speaker
might have a writers group around her that help boy her up in the way that we do on Crohn's, you know, our contacts within Crohn's the way I have you and P and, you know, the others. I just realized, yeah, maybe it is something people need support with because they might not have the support that we do. I was wondering, Alison, are you in splendid isolation? Well, I am and I'm not really. I don't kind of have beta readers or anything like that. I tend to do
01:27:49
Speaker
a lot of editing myself and I try to clear my head sort of between drafts by working on a short story or, or just turning my hand to something else for a while. Um, so that I almost try and forget what I've been working on and then come to it as freshly as I can after a break. But then obviously it goes off to an actual editor and, and the editing starts again, you know what I mean? And, um, I've learned an awful lot through working with,
01:28:16
Speaker
at Joe Fletcher, Joe Fletcher books and editors at Titan who, you know, I've been lucky to work with some really great people and they've taught me a lot. Yeah, but I mean, the actual early drafts until I hand something in, it's splendid isolation. But what about before you made those contacts? Who were you? Did you have anyone to share with? Did you have anybody to sort of bounce ideas off with before you had any interest, before you got any professional publishing qualifications?
01:28:42
Speaker
I started off, actually, really, really started off creative writing at all by going to a local class. So I did start off in that way at the very beginning. And then when I started writing short stories and submitting those to magazines, I was working with editors in the indie presses who would edit my work as well. So yeah, get feedback then. But also I do have a good network now of writer friends that I see at
01:29:07
Speaker
at Fantasy Con and there was Silicon earlier this year and other events like that, like Edge Lit at Derby. You know, just having that network where as a writer, I think you get quite used to meeting a lot of people who aren't really into what you're into and they don't really understand the writing process. And it's just great to suddenly walk into a convention like that. And suddenly everybody understands. And, you know, I can go from being quite
01:29:36
Speaker
an introverted quiet person to somebody who's like talking night and meld an hour with loads of different people and it's just like finding your tribe, isn't it? So yeah, I certainly have a support network and I keep in touch with them on social media as
Holiday Traditions and Conclusion
01:29:50
Speaker
well. So it's not quite as isolated as all that. They're around and I get to see what they're doing, what they're working on and we email each other sometimes and the connections are there.
01:30:02
Speaker
Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about, Ali, while you're on the podcast before we wrap up? No, I don't think so. OK, well, thanks for joining us on this Christmas Ghost Story special. Thank you very much. That's OK. And can we ask how you're planning on spending Christmas? Are you going to be hauling large tendrils of mistletoe all across your mantelpiece and in between the cracks in the floorboard?
01:30:26
Speaker
Yeah, we usually go out and somehow end up with a Christmas tree that's about two feet too high for the room that we put it in. There was one memorable year when the trunk was too big to cut through, so we just kind of chopped the top off it.
01:30:41
Speaker
Do you do the thing where you chop the top off of the tree and then take the top bit and put it on the floor above? I did that. Yeah, I actually hung things on it. Yeah. So it was like little and large. Very good. Right. Well, thanks very much, Ali. It's been a delight. Yes. Thank you, Ali. I really appreciated hearing about your process as well for Mistletoe. I've enjoyed it. Thanks for inviting me.
01:31:07
Speaker
You're very welcome. Have a great Christmas. You too. Oh yeah, happy Christmas everyone. Happy Christmas.
01:33:25
Speaker
This episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean with our special guest, Alison Litterwood. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton and Jay Stiloper. Special thanks to Brian Turner and all the staff at Crohn's and thanks to you for listening.
01:33:43
Speaker
If you want to join, for free, the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community, visit sffchronicles.com. And last but not least, have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks for joining us throughout 2022. We hope to have you with us throughout 2023.
01:34:04
Speaker
Next month, we will be joined by Chad Pfeiffer and Chris Lacking, the hosts of the seminal podcast's HP podcast, and Strange Studies with Strange Stories. Chad and Chris will be used for cleaning up the cult in 1982 science fiction horror masterpiece, John Carpenter's
01:35:02
Speaker
I love it.