Middle Grade Settings: An Introduction Having photos in front of you can help you write about your settings I’m going to make a confession. Settings are not something I often spend time planning. Perhaps my stories are the poorer for it, but the settings come as I’m writing or editing. The Glass Room, in Taking Wing, is not something I planned before I started writing. Personally, I’m a very visual writer, seeing my characters as though they are a video in my head, and I write what I see. As such, the setting just happens! There are benefits and drawbacks to this. The main benefit is that the writing process is more interesting. Not everything is set, and my story can still give me surprises. The drawback is that, similar to AI, I cannot know that I’m not stealing settings from films and books I’ve seen/read previously. I certainly don’t mean to plagiarise but the concern is a real one! With that in mind, I have started to at least have a vague idea of my settings before I start t...
Today, I'm super-excited to be sharing a short story from the fabulous Gothic Horror writer, Judith Crow. Here is her Poe-inspired story, The Clockmaker...
The Clockmaker
I cannot sleep. I cannot allow myself to sleep. In sleep, Death may strike with as little awareness as warning, and I find myself refusing to accept unawareness at the moment of demise. Yet, I wish I were afforded others’ natural ignorance of the timing of death. In the names of heaven and hell: I both curse and envy them for their ignorance!
I, like others, started my final day with little to suggest it may be my last. I was in rude health when I arrived in London twelve days earlier, and today I took the time to call upon Sir Benjamin Pelham, a man I had served alongside in India. Twenty years ago, his interest in science and invention had lured him back to the English universities, while I had stayed abroad to make my fortune overseeing the collapse and redistribution of the once-mighty East India Company.
Sitting in the entrance hall and waiting for Pelham to return from his daily work, I found myself enchanted by a beautiful marble clock just inside the drawing room. I could not see its face, but the marble of its body was coloured by deep purple veins. Once, I heard it chime the hour: a clear, musical note which seemed to sing in perfect harmony with itself.
When Sir Benjamin arrived later, we sat together, and I informed him of the many things which had occupied me since last we had met. He did not immediately discuss his own research, but I assumed he was like many other inventors: fiercely guarding their intellectual property until a patent had been established. However, as I was leaving, I passed the beautiful marble clock and looked at it properly for the first time.
“Your clock has stopped, Pelham,” I pointed out.
Sir Benjamin shook his head. “Not stopped,” he said with a smile. “Only waiting.”
I now regret my decision to request an explanation.
“It is the project to which I have committed my past fifteen years. I have named it the Donne Clock. ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’? Familiar to a Cambridge man such as yourself, surely?”
“I know the work,” I replied. “But what has Donne to do with this clock?”
Sir Benjamin smiled again.
“This clock is my genius,” he said, gazing at it with the paternal pride of a patriarch admiring their eldest son upon his wedding day. “I have created here a clock which does not tell the time, but an implement which betrays the time. The bell will never strike, save for when it senses that the final twelve hours of a nearby man are upon him.”
I cannot begin to describe the horror I felt as he went on: each syllable of his explanation condemning me to the grave. I wait now, as no man has a right to wait, knowing that Death is coming.
Knowing the exact day, hour, and minute of death.
The bell has tolled for me.
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