Detox | Writing News

Lenses in the lightroom of South Stack Lighthouse.

As I work away on the second draft of my novel (working title ‘Detox’), I recently had the opportunity to visit South Stack Lighthouse in North Wales.

‘Detox’ is set on a rock lighthouse, and getting a sense of the space and isolation of such a building was helpful as I look to weave the building and landscape into my plot.

South Stack sits somewhere between a shore station and a rock station; the lighthouse is accessible from the North Wales shore, but only via a set of steep switchbacks cut into the rock and a bridge over to the main island. As such, I was able to get a sense of the isolation of being an early twentieth century keeper without the hassle of going out on a boat. Weather can still get pretty wild on South Stack – our guide told us that there have been storms so severe that seawater reached the top of the tower – I wouldn’t want to traverse either the bridge or the switchbacks in such weather!

Looking northwest to South Stack Lighthouse in Wales. A white lighthouse sits upon a rugged island in the sea.

The visit gave me both plot contextualisation and ‘grace notes’ to add to my writing. The birdlife was astonishing in volume. Guillemots and razorbills were packed tightly together on the precipitous cliffs facing onto the lighthouse, whilst the lightroom itself was far more cramped than I was expecting; there was really only room for two people to nudge past each other whilst walking around the lenses. I will have to adjust the plot to suit this tighter-than-anticipated space.

Looking up at the spiral staircase of the lighthouse leading to the lightroom.

My main takeaway from the visit to South Stack was the importance of using place in my writing. This was a building steeped in drama and history, built onto bare rock and designed to weather the fiercest storms. I will have to endeavour to ensure that the prose is worthy of the place!

Enjoyed this? Sign up to my blog below. Recent short stories include ‘His the Night‘ and ‘Philosophising‘.

Matthew J. Richardson’s fiction has appeared in publications including Golddust Magazine, Flashback Fiction, Close to the Bone, Shooter, and Idle Ink. His work often explores psychological tension, place, and the quiet edges of human behaviour. He lives in Scotland and holds a Professional Doctorate in Education.

Philosophising | Short Story

Shelves holding numerous gold bars, wooden boxes labeled INGOTS, and assorted tools in a workshop

Even the boy’s parents conceded that the optics were poor.

Pages of notes in the haphazard handwriting of an eleven year-old, grime-encrusted beakers, oranged rubber piping curling across desks, and all of those phials filled with viscous, bubbling liquid…

Whether it had been a neighbour or a delivery driver who had alerted the authorities they never knew, and by the time the story took off on social media, no-one really cared. All anyone could talk about was the forensic tent erected on the front porch and the boy being taken away for interview. Then, of course, came the speculators – the Twittering, Redditing vultures happy to get creative, to opine that the boy had always been odd, that he had spent too much time on shady internet forums, or that – in an apparent non sequitur put forwards by his primary school classroom assistant – the boy had shown an unhealthy interest in science.

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His the Night | Short Story

Person in dark cloak holding lantern walking on wet cobblestone street at night.

No-one was quite sure what the lampman’s purpose was. They knew that he appeared on still nights when the fog swept up from the Avon and slicked the dark cobblestones. They knew that he was looking for someone or something, but his purpose? No-one could come up with a plausible explanation.

It was not as though the man was shy. His buckled boots sounded loud against the worn stone, and he was unabashed in leaning close in to the shop fronts and the street level windows, cupping his hands around his eyes to avoid his own reflection. A moment’s searching, and then moving on, the flame of his cruisie lamp guttering with his movement.

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Twelve Cans Beans | Short Story

Shelves with canned goods labeled beans, soup, canned meat, peas, and sacks labeled grains, wheat, rice, oats in a basement pantry

Twelve cans beans.

Ditto lentils.

Twenty bags assorted grains.

Enough powdered milk to choke a donkey.

And then the jumble sale – the canned vegetables, the fruits, the canned meats. She sometimes thinks that it is the world’s worst tombola. They are brought forwards, these tin, flush against the edge of the steel shelves. Everything in its place.

There is a comforting airlessness down here. A silence. Everything is in its place. Everything counted, stacked against some half-imagined Event which would send them down here.

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Detox | Writing News

White lighthouse on rocky island cliff with waves crashing and small islands in the background

As I mentioned recently, for the past couple of years I’ve been working away on the first draft of a novel (working title ‘Detox).

It will be a literary thriller set on the island of Eilean Mor in the Flannan Isles, which is about as far flung a place as you can get in the UK. One of the narrative threads that I’m weaving through the novel is the famous disappearance of three lighthouse keepers (James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur) in 1900 from the lighthouse. No trace of the men has ever been discovered, despite Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB) regulations stating that one man had to stay in the building at all times.

The mystery gave me the excuse to travel through to the National Records of Scotland search rooms in Edinburgh, which holds documents going back as far as the twelfth century. Pre-booking is essential, as many of the more delicate books need to be brought out of storage.

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Feedback | Short Story

Wastebasket containing crumpled manuscript pages with handwritten edits

Dear Ronald,

I have had the opportunity to read your submission – an opportunity I wish I had not availed myself of.

As you will no doubt be aware, flash fiction is a flexible format which authors have used in a near-limitless number of ways to tell stories. I suppose your piece meets this criteria, although it was flash fiction to me in the sense that it left the imprint of your hackneyed spelling and of a grammatical smorgasbord of dunderheadedness imprinted on the insides of my eyelids.

As for structure? I can only assume that something happened to your submission between your posting it and the document arriving in my hands. Some intra-dimensional event perhaps? Maybe it was torn apart by rabid, foam-flecked Alsatians before being hurriedly pasted back together by a well-meaning postal worker with an acute visual impairment.

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