Category Archives: Challenges

The enthusiasm, the doubt, the late nights, early morning coffee and word races, an incredible combination that had me going through the whole of November with only one goal in mind – to write 50,000 words that would be part of a novel. Well, let’s call it a story. Novel has such a scary sound to it.

The last week of NaNoWriMo was the hardest. Having the end in sight, I became impatient to finish, to reach those magic 50,000 words that would make me a winner. I began to grow afraid and at the same time I was less willing to write. One day I even stopped altogether, took a break and went out to see friends. But there was a nagging voice inside me saying, you should be writing. It’s a tough thing to quiet, that inner voice, so I went back to my laptop, even though I would have done almost anything else instead.

I reached my goal on the 28th, two days before the allotted time. Just to see that word count bar go from green to purple it was an incredible emotional moment. I had done it, one month of commitment to writing, through great days and not so great days, just sitting down and writing word after word even if reading them afterwards made me want to delete many of them. The story is not finished but things are slowly moving into place and this month hopefully will see me write The End on that last page.
At the moment I feel a little lost. After investing a lot of energy and time in the story, now when the challenge has come to an end I feel both sadness and relief. The pressure to write had lessened and I feel like a small weight has been lifted from my shoulders but at the same time I know I should keep going until all the words are there and then put the story away for a while before the big editing process begins.

Here’s what I learned from my first NaNoWriMo experience:

1. Writing is not difficult, but writing beautifully and in a linear way definitely is.
2. An idea is enough for a start.
3. I couldn’t have done an outline anyway, never tried it because I never wrote a novel before. So yes, I’m a bit of a pantser.
4. Fear of writing badly can be conquered by saying “nobody will see this anyway until it’s done”. It worked for me.
5. Having supportive friends and family helped immensely. Sometimes it was the only thing that kept me going. Yes, my blogging friends, that includes you too.
6. This was the first time I allowed myself to write without looking back and changing things. Well, not major things anyway.
7. Some surprising scenes made their way into the book, and I had no idea I was going to write them until the moment I did.
8. I enjoyed writing the scary parts the most.
9. Writing dialogue is not my favorite part but describing feelings is.
10. My story belongs to the “dark fantasy” genre.

A few statistics about my story – I’ve used the word:

telephones – 2 times
weary – 4 times
king – 24 times
pain – 25
cold – 33 times
rain – 35 times
cut – 65 times
death – 32 times
forest – 104 times
hands – 110 times
no – 152 times
tree – 254 times
the – 3309 times

When I started writing in week one I knew there would come a day when my enthusiasm will eventually die, just like I know that after a high comes the terrible low. That is why I was so determined to write more than the average amount of words required to finish my novel on time. Well, that day came during week three, but truth be told it was more like days. I got to know the characters and they had no surprises left to reveal. The story moved forward but it happened slowly. Writing was not swimming in the sweet waters of inspiration anymore but more like fighting the currents while trying to catch fish with my bare hands. It got difficult. Just the thought that I had to sit down and fill the screen with words made me nervous. Suddenly, there were more interesting things to do, like checking email and Twitter and see what photos my Facebook friends had posted since last time I checked which was ten minutes ago. And time began to slip away, which made me even more aware of how much more work I had left to do.

Word races became a necessary routine. I showed up at the 10 p.m. sessions and began to type away. It felt great to work knowing that other people were doing the exact same thing at the same time. I even raced by myself one night when no one else was around on Skype. It did me good.
And even though most of these times I just showed up and began to type without the slightest idea of where I was going, one night I managed to write a scene that scared me so badly I had trouble going to sleep and kept looking at the bedroom door and imagining things. I have no idea how that scene got there but it’s one of my favorite parts of the whole story.

In an attempt to get more ideas I looked back on what I had written. And there, on printed pages I had typed just a few days ago was an entire section I had just written. That made me panic, so I put the pages away in a drawer and vowed not to look at them again until all this was over.

Read, read, read, and I say it three times just to show how important this is for me. From Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (borrowed from a friend) to The House of Doctor Dee by Peter Ackroyd (picked up at a second hand book sale), to blogs and online newspapers. Without reading it would be difficult to write. I look for inspiration, for ideas that can help me dislodge that big boulder which stands in the way of my story.

I took up running again, something I’ve been doing on and off for years. But this year something was different, because my determination to write 50k by the end of the month had began to seep into other aspects of my life. This time I did not stop when I felt like I had no air. I slowed down a bit and kept going. All I could see was someone holding a big banner with 50,000 written in big red letters on it. And I pushed on and on and did not stop for 30 minutes. It may not be a lot for many people but it was something I hadn’t done in years and felt so good I almost cried.
The story is never far from my mind. I knew how to start it and the characters that would play a crucial role in the story, but now that the end is getting closer, things got a little murky. I have no idea how to end it so I keep writing. I began to add more details and I’m constantly thinking of new ways to make the story more gripping. I want to write the kind of book that would make readers say I didn’t see that coming, and turn the next page and the one after that because they just have to see what happens next. Will the woman with a secret get her wish? Will she have to die for it in the end? Is there hope at the end of it all, maybe a happily ever after, or will everything end in a bloodbath? I guess I’ll have to keep typing to find out.

Fear by Skogalfar – deviantart

After the euphoria of the first week, things began to settle down. I was dutifully putting in my 2000 words a day without looking back, moving the story forward, but something was different. Doubts started creeping in.

It’s weird to start writing with an idea in mind and then try to set a certain scene on paper and then have the main character turn around and say, I don’t want to do that, that’s boring. Instead, this is what I’m going to do. And then I begin to think, is he right, is this going where it’s supposed to go, but more important, where is this supposed to go? I have no clue.

After the 25,000 words mark I began to fear for my story. Halfway there, I thought, now what? There is so much yet that needs to be written. What if I can’t do it, what if the ideas will stop coming and my story will shrivel up and die? What if it was a silly feeble thing to begin with and only my enthusiasm made it bigger? And still I can’t think of giving up. It’s not an option. But now and then I find my courage faltering.

I began to look for different ways to keep me going. Whereas before I liked the silence, now I listen to music. Actually wrote a whole scene while immersed into Depeche Mode’s Should Be Higher. It’s got such an upbeat power, that song. And last weekend I got into “word races” on Skype, with a group of NaNo participants from Thailand. It was great. I wrote over 3000 words last Sunday, and that made me feel a little better. It’s good to have a little extra to fall back to when things get tough. The pep talks on the NaNo website helped as well. Here are some of my favorite lines:

“Write something true. Write something frightening. Write something close to the bone. You are on this planet to tell the story of what you saw here. What you heard. What you felt. What you learned. Any effort spent in that pursuit cannot be wasted. Any way that you can tell that story more truly, more vividly, more you-ly, is the right way.
So holler. Tell it loud and tell it bright and tell it slant and tell it bold. Tell it with space whales and silent films or tell it with quiet desperation or tell it with war or tell it with dragons or tell it with tall ships or tell it with divorce in the suburbs or tell it with dancing skeletons and a kraken in the wings.
Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.”

Catherynne M. Valente

“Get into a writing routine. Think it’s hard to write every day during NaNo? Most professional writers keep this kind of pace all year round. Holidays, birthdays, vacations—you name it, we’re writing. The trick is making writing into a daily habit. Same time. Same place. Same hot beverage of choice. Every. Single. Day. Again. And. Again.”

James Patterson

I also have a writing buddy who has proven to be amazing. She may be living on another continent but that doesn’t matter. It also helps that she’s been through this before and won a few years in a row. And when I complained and said my enthusiasm was on the downside she said:

“The first draft of everything is awful.
Write as if this is the last day, and that will help you.”

Her words made me feel better so I kept typing.

The NaNo rules decree that I should write no less than 1667 words a day and so far I’m doing good on the word count but not so good on the quality. And here we come to an important reality about National Novel Writing Month a.k.a. NaNoWriMo: it’s not about quality but quantity. It’s about setting down the words as they come, without thinking about the symmetry of the sentences or the beauty of the words. The words just have to come out. Rough, ugly. Some of them might shine but most of them won’t. I look to some of them with pride and others fill me with disgust. Did I really write that? I did. But it will get better. I will make them shine, all of them. I will cut and scrub and polish and shift them on the page until they sparkle. But there’s still a long way to go until that happens.
And now back to writing. Somewhere inside me there are 2000 words wanting to come out. I’d better do something about that. See you next week.

The first week of NaNo has come and gone and I have had such a good time. It has been an incredibly exhilarating experience, to try and create a novel every day, working on it every morning and evening for an hour each time. The first few days I was in writer heaven, sitting on a soft comfortable cloud, surrounded by the characters I was trying to bring to life. They had faces, and a vague shape, and they smiled and waved at me and said nice things and I waved and smiled back and felt like this couldn’t have been easier. Indeed, why hadn’t I done it sooner?

At night I would go to bed thinking about the morning and how great it will be to get back to my fictional world and write the next exciting thing that happened. In the morning I finished my writing session with an idea firmly stuck in my head about the next step I wanted the story to take and would actually daydream about it throughout the day. Fortunately, with no bad consequences, although once I was almost run over by a car. Still not sure if it was me or them. Perhaps both. It has happened before.

The worlds blurred – real and fictional, and since I have never spent so much time on a writing project before, it was a strange feeling. It’s like being totally engrossed in a good book or a movie, and coming back to reality feels almost like a letdown. A bit of a challenge to manage both, but now it’s getting better.
Once, a few years ago, when I was starting running, I experienced the runner’s high. I felt happy, elated, I was beaming. It hasn’t happened since. I felt like that for the most part of the first week. I felt like Superwoman, Catwoman and whatever other super female character you could think of, all rolled in one. I was invincible, I had power, I was great. I conjured words out of the air and put them on the page, like beads on a string. They behaved. I was happy.
I managed to write at least 2000 words every day except one. And because I didn’t want to drop too far behind I made it up for it the next day.
I updated my word count twice a day. Because yes, now I do have an obsession, and also because seeing the numbers on the little widget to the right of the page really kept me going.

The second week has started and I have come back from the clouds. I still like where the writing has taken me but things are a little different. But more on that at the end of the week.
As always, your opinions and encouragements are very welcome.

November is finally here. The days are still hot (above 30 degrees Celsius) and the sun seems to burn a hundred times brighter now that the rainy season is over. The air is crisp and the humidity gone for the most part. That’s nice. It actually means I can go for walks outside and not sweat in the first five minutes. But the weather is not exactly what got me excited this month.

I’ve heard about NaNoWriMo some years ago – thirty days of writing abandon fuelled by the desire to have a book ready by the end of November. It sounded like a lot of hard work, and fun, and a task for courageous people with lots of time on their hands. In the past I told myself I had neither the time nor the courage. Especially the courage. But then something happened this year. I had a “now or never” moment and decided to see if I could be one of these courageous people and finally write that book. To prepare for it, in October I wanted to test myself and see if I can actually sit down and write every day, more specifically, for a certain amount of time every day. So I set the alarm on my mobile phone for thirty minutes and got busy.

I had a vague idea of a story and no end in mind. I managed to write for thirteen days, with two days off in between. I tried to make up for those two days by writing more the next day and it worked. And that elusive ending came to me as I was writing and made me really happy. Suddenly, I had hope, and so decided that the time for writing that book is now. I have no idea if I will finish but I will do my best and then some. Most of it will probably be nonsense but if I can excavate something out of it and work with those bits, I’ll consider myself lucky and quite content.

The story I’m writing is not new. A couple of years ago I had an idea that I really liked and started on the story but a few weeks later I abandoned it. Why, well, because I love to procrastinate and there were a million things that seemed more enjoyable at the time. Like a new TV series or a book or just surfing the net. So I’m giving it another go, keeping the main characters but rewriting it from the beginning. The story is going to have some horror elements, possibly some supernatural dust thrown in and a pinch of fairy-tale. That’s the plan as of today but by the end of the month I may end up with a different thing altogether. That’s fine, I don’t mind a bit, I’m actually very excited to see where the story will take me and what the characters have to say.

If you’ve taken part in NaNoWriMo before, feel free to chime in with your impressions. And if you haven’t, your encouragements are more than welcome. I may come back with more posts about NaNo and my writing adventure, but that depends on the available time I have – writing 2,000 words a day is my goal and it would be great to keep that up. It’s still a long way to the required 50,000 words but I hope to get there, putting one word after another, like Neil Gaiman said. Wish me luck.

In Liesel’s mind, the moon was sewn into the sky that night.
Clouds were stitched around it.
Curtains of rain were drawn around the car.
The horizon was the colour of milk. Cold and fresh. Poured out, amongst the bodies.
Tears like crystal floated down his skin,
despite the fact that he was not crying.
The tears had been bashed out of him….
….held together by the quiet gathering of words.
The words were visible.
They dropped from his mouth like jewels.
As the book quivered in her lap, the secret sat in her mouth.
It made itself comfortable.
It crossed its legs.
Her blood loudened.
The sentences blurred.
She couldn’t tell exactly where the words came from.
They arrived and kneeled next to the bed.
The soft-spoken words fell off the side of the bed,
emptying onto the floor like powder.

No, it’s not a poem but it could easily be one. This book is like a long, long poem about a little girl and her love for stories. In a world turned upside down during the Second World War in Germany, there were few other things that could offer comfort. Food was scarce and suffering aplenty. Death was telling a story while taking souls away. I guess you could say he was giving something back to the world: a story, Liesel Meminger’s story. The book thief.

The book begins with a death. This is, after all, how the narrator got in. Liesel is a little girl whose family broke apart during the war. Taken away from her mother, she was given into the care of a foster family who lived in the city of Molching, on Himmel Street. She began to love them, Mama and Papa, she of the loud mouth and cursing words, and he, whose music and gentle ways brought back hope into her heart. She began to make friends: Rudy – the boy with “hair the color of lemons” who becomes her constant companion and best friend, Max – the fist-fighting Jew who had visions of defeating the Fuhrer in a boxing match, and the mayor’s wife, whose grief was pierced by the little girl who hungered for words so badly she began to steal her books. One at a time.

A small note: Himmel means Heaven.

Ironic, isn’t it, when there was so much suffering. But there was also joy, for the words from Liesel’s stolen books held the people together during times of grief, of hiding, and during those dark slowly moving hours of air raids, when nobody knew if they were going to leave the shelter alive or die a crowded cold death.
As I was moving on with the story, I felt like this was not exactly someone’s story, not Death’s story, or Liesel’s, but an ode to books and the worlds inside them. I remember Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read about burning books and not think about this particular one – and how little it takes to create an entire universe with a pencil, some sheets of paper and a bit of imagination. I love books that make me cry and this was one of them. It happened several times. I couldn’t help it. Especially when I got to that story in the middle – a story within a story. There were actually two, and one was an autobiography, the other was about the Fuhrer, and a friendship. The drawings were pretty good, too.

The writing is beautiful and delicate and heartbreaking. It flows and binds itself around you, squeezing your heart. The little “poem” at the beginning of this review is but a tiny fraction of what it looks like. The rest is even better. Cruelty, suffering, friendship, love, bound together in words – found in the books Liesel steals and reads but also in the ones she and Max eventually write, because that’s what happens when you take so many words in – sometimes they spill out.

I got this book from a friend at a book club. I had wanted to read it for a long time. And then she came and said five magic words: I’ll lend it to you. Now that I’ve finished, I’ll have to give it back. But I will buy my own copy because I would very much like to read about Liesel again someday, even if the words won’t be new. Sometimes, some books are even better the second time around. I can’t wait to find out.

Another small note: the movie is coming out next month.

I’ve read this book for R.I.P. hosted by Carl at stainlesssteeldroppings.

*Read in October, 2013

I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt. I fear. I see strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me!

This is the second book I’ve read for the R.I.P. Challenge hosted by Carl at stainlesssteeldroppings

I love horror stories. The terrors of the night which make sleep hard to conquer and make horrible monsters out of every shape in the room, where mirrors are portals to the unknown and the slightly open door of a closet becomes a stone door to a deep and dark cellar, where the wind shaking the curtains changes them into diaphanous veils worn by beguiling beings sent to harm. The quiet of the night unbroken but for the sounds in my head, small, insignificant sounds which I can only hear with my eyes closed. Sweet sleep that finally comes only to bring dreams of fantastical white creatures flying in the night, converging on a tower, their mouths red with blood. Such a powerful dream, I still remember waking up and being surprised to see I was in my bed and not running for my life on the streets of an unknown city filled with people whose fascination with the creatures was bigger than the fear of them.

I had put off reading Dracula for a long time. After watching its 1992 movie adaptation (with Gary Oldman as Count Dracula), I was afraid the printed work would have no surprises for me. How glad I was to see my fears turned to nothing!
The story is told in the form of letters, journal entries and newspaper clippings. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, is sent by his employer to Transylvania, Romania, to explain to a nobleman of the country the legal procedures connected with some properties the nobleman recently acquired in England. His experience at Castle Dracula is unforgettable in a very horrible way, and barely escaping with his life, Jonathan makes his way back home only to have his sanity shaken yet again when he sees the Count on the street.
His journal becomes a powerful tool in dealing with the monster he knows would have taken his life. His wife Mina, proves to be one of his most intelligent allies in the great adventure that will have him question his judgment and worth as a human being. In fact, the whole story becomes a fight strategy, and the characters each have their own part to play in the battle against the evil embodied by the Count. Mina’s friend, Lucy Westenra, becomes the count’s first victim, a turning point in the story, which serves to strengthen the belief that the enemy is someone so extraordinary that unusual measures have to be taken and the outmost secrecy preserved.
Lucy’s suitors, Quincey Morris – the American adventurer, Jack Seward – a doctor working in a lunatic asylum, and Arthur Holmwood, Lucy’s fiancé, are joined by Abraham Van Helsing – a Dutch doctor and famous scientist of those times. Renfield, a patient in Seward’s lunatic asylum proves to be of notable help in unmasking Dracula’s plans. His penchant for “consuming life”, starting with the flies and working his way up to bigger creatures, makes him an unreliable ally at first – what is more intriguing and hard to believe than a madman telling the truth – but his death brings new facts which are taken into account.

I loved this book. I was under the impression that Dracula would be more likable, a monster that should be pitied, maybe envied for his power but he was just pure evil. I guess that’s what happens when you watch the movie before reading the book. His death was anticlimactic but the story leading to that point was more than worth it. The constant fear, the dramatic turns, the threat to life and sanity, these were fascinating to read about and the fact that the book was written in epistolary form gave it a sense of intimacy and also of credibility, as much as a work of fiction can be said to be credible. Reading this book also made me feel a bit homesick. It’s been a while since I’ve visited Transylvania.

Dracula is a work of fiction but history is a part of the story. Here are some interesting facts mentioned in the book that are still valid today:

• mamaliga – a porridge made from maize flour, a traditional Romanian food, is still very popular, not only in Transylvania but also in another region of the country called Moldavia. So is slivovitz, “the plum brandy of the country” which is still being made but the name varies depending on the region;
• the leiter wagon, a type of wooden wagon used to carry Dracula’s box – my grandfather had one, which he used for carrying hay and sacks of sunflower seeds, with a pair of buffaloes pulling it.
• The clothes of the peasants described in the story reminded me of a photograph I saw of my aunt from more than twenty years ago – “white undergarment with a long double apron, front and back, of colored stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty”. I had to laugh at the “modesty” part, as those clothes would be termed plain old-fashioned these days.
• The names of the places are slightly changed but real nevertheless – Bistritz is Bistrita and river Pruth is the actual Prut. Szgany is a transliteration of the word “gypsy” in Romanian, and Veresti is the name of an actual village.
As for Dracula himself, there is little I can add to the known facts. A Romanian ruler in the 15th century, famous for his ruthlessness with which he defended the country against the Turks, he was and still is, one of the most revered figures in Romanian history.

Mystery
Suspense
Thriller
Dark Fantasy
Gothic
Horror
Supernatural

Words I love to hear year round but even more so during September and October when Carl from stainlesssteeldroppings is hosting a special reading event called
R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril or R.I.P. The participants have to read at least one story or watch a movie that belongs to any of the genres mentioned above. I really enjoyed participating last year with The Secret of Crickley Hall by James Herbert, Bedtime Stories – Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, so I decided to join again this year. The event ends October 31st so there’s still time if you decide to take part.

The first book on my list is Stephen King’s short novel Joyland, which came out this year.
Devin Jones, the main protagonist, is a college student who takes a summer job at Joyland, an amusement park run by an elderly gentleman, Mr. Easterbrook. It’s 1973 and Devin plans to go to college the following year. His mother is dead and his father lives alone in a big house, mourning his wife’s death.
The summer job turns out to be quite enjoyable. The work is physically demanding and the pay not that great but Devin makes a few friends and begins to like it more and more. It’s also a good distraction from thinking about his girlfriend Wendy all the time.

The people working at the amusement park get along with each other for the most part – Lane Hardy is all smiles and encouragement, Rozzie the fortune teller does have some fortune telling abilities which people don’t take seriously until they come true, and Tom and Erin are just college students like Devin, working summers to save some money towards their education.
That summer Devin meets a little girl whose life he saves, and a little boy whose life he can’t, and both encounters affect him profoundly. Then there’s the Horror House, a place where a few years ago a girl was killed, her body found by the staff, her murder a mystery for years. Some claim to have seen her at the place where she was murdered, her spirit wandering, seeking closure. Devin becomes intrigued by the mystery and with Erin’s help starts putting together the facts in the hope of discovering her killer, a bold move which nearly costs him his life and the lives of the ones he cares about.

First I have to say that murder mysteries are not really my cup of tea, unless it’s Sherlock Holmes doing the investigating, and of course everything has to take place in a Victorian setting. That being said, I love King’s books and so decided not to skip this one. His writing is easy to follow, the story built up nicely, the characters intriguing – I really hoped to see more of Rozzie, or Madame Fortuna – her working name at the amusement park, but she only plays a small role in the story. The little boy in the wheelchair was another interesting addition, and so was his little dog, Milo.

It took me a while to get used to the “carny” lingo – specific words used by the staff at the amusement park, and had to go back once or twice to remember what certain terms meant. What I really enjoyed were the references to other writers or their work: Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Joyce Carol Oates, and I may have missed a few others. And Devin Jones, or Jonesy as some people called him, reminded me of a character in “Dreamcatcher”, another one of King’s books. I treasure these little gems.

If you’re looking for a horror novel, this is not it. Or maybe I have read too many and crave the intensity of not knowing what happens next, that pure adrenaline rush when your body turns cold and the benign shapes in the room become monsters. A murder mystery, definitely, with a bit of supernatural thrown in for an interesting flavor and just a sprinkle of horror. That being said, it was a good story and I had fun getting lost in it for a few days. I look forward to reading “Doctor Sleep”, King’s latest novel and the sequel to “The Shining”, which I have yet to read as well.

December felt like a really short month. For this event, I had planned to read some short stories, watch a movie or two, do “A Christmas Carol” read-along and read a novel. Well, you can scrap that last part.
What I did manage to do is watch two movies, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001) and The Old Curiosity Shop (2007), read three short stories and participate in the readalong.
I was excited to see how many people joined Caroline and I for this event and I enjoyed reading their contributions. There are so many wonderful blogs out there!

A big thank you to Caroline, for helping make this event a reality.
If you’d like to see a list of all participants, it’s here.

For those of you who plan on reading another Dickens novel soon, Fanda is hosting Celebrating Dickens in February, an event which I will be joining and finally read that novel (fingers crossed!).

To everyone who has contributed to “Dickens in December”, thank you for your time, reviews and comments, and hope to have you along for similar events. Until then I wish you a great New Year, and may all your wishes (or at least most of them) come true!

These were the first stories I’ve read for the Dickens in December event, but I got so caught up in other stories that I didn’t get to write my thoughts on them until now. They are part of The Wordsworth Book of Horror Stories, a magnificent collection that kept me awake until the late hours of the night.

The Story of the Bagman’s Uncle

The voice of the narrator draws the reader in as he tells the story of an extraordinary night in the life of his uncle. Described as very jovial person, with a real honest smile upon his face at all times, fond of drink and making merry, the uncle seemed to be a well liked person. One night, as he was going home, he stopped at a waste ground where he saw a number of old, abandoned mail coaches, and being of a curious nature and an admirer of old coaches, went closer to have a look. As the clock struck 2, the whole place came to life, coaches were moving and people were moving about. To his astonishment, he found himself more or less ordered to get into one of the vehicles. Playing along, he did, only to discover that he was sharing the space with two wicked looking men and a very beautiful woman. What happened next astonished him even more, but by the end of the night he’d made the beautiful woman a promise that he kept to the end of his days.

From all 3 stories, this was the least horrific. I was, in the beginning, a little weary of the lengthy description, as Dickens is fond of, saying the same thing again and again in different ways as to make sure he gets his point across. I am in two minds about these paragraphs – on one hand I find them redundant but on the other hand they do serve the purpose of making one more familiar with the story and its characters.

To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt

Told by a first person narrator, this story begins with the news of a murder committed in England “many years ago”, and of a man who was arrested as the criminal, even though he wasn’t publicly suspected as being the author of the gruesome act.
After experiencing a strange vision of two men whose appearance is most unusual, the health of the protagonist is described as “not ill” but “not well”, as to serve as a possible excuse for the event. Not long after that, he and his valet both see a man which is described as “a dead man beckoning”, and whose identity is revealed later, as the narrator is asked to perform jury duty in the very same murder case he was reading about. Visions of the dead man, who – it turns out – was the murdered person, come to the narrator for the whole duration of the trial, as witnesses come and testify.

I enjoyed reading about the “ghost’s’ reaction to some testimonials – my favorite part of the story. The end is weird and it doesn’t really shed light upon the case. Was the man guilty or not, and what about those last words? Intriguing.

The Signalman

This was my favorite story of the three. Not only it was sufficiently mysterious to have me glued to the page, but the end had me truly astonished and also horrified. There are two protagonists – one is the signalman, whose job requires him to stand in a box near a tunnel and direct the incoming trains, and the other a traveler who was visiting the area for a short while. The two become acquainted in a rather abrupt manner, and the signalman ends up by telling his visitor of the strange things he’d been hearing and seeing. This involved the sudden apparition of a man who said the exact same words as the visitor had said when he first saw the signalman. Hours after he first saw the apparition, the signalman told his companion, a great accident took place near the spot where the strange man appeared. Several months later, the apparition came back but no words were spoken this time. The gestures, however, made it clear that this was some sort of warning as well. As the story progressed, I was anticipating some sort of horror but I was not prepared for what happened in the end. That’s what a great story does, it takes you by surprise, and this was definitely one of them.

It is said Dickens’s inspiration for this story came from the Staplehurst train crash which he survived, not before trying to help others and actually witnessing the death of few people, which affected him greatly.
The end comes with a thorough explanation of the facts which doesn’t make it any less easy to accept. A truly brilliant story.

Coming up on the 30th: a wrap up post of “Dickens in December”.