Tuesday 30 September 2014

Amelia: A Girl Transported Back in Time: Victorian Schoolroom Discipline in the Twenty-First Century



Outside, the London traffic thundered, horns honked, taxis bobbed and weaved, police sirens wailed and screeched past and buses waited impatiently for passengers to board at their stops.  Inside, it was 1889 from dawn to dusk, night and day, right down to the typically severe Victorian schoolroom discipline.  It was a world in microcosm in which Victoria was on the throne,  corporal punishment was the norm, authority was unquestionable and a girl like this, even one of marriageable age, could - and would - be returned to childhood: and if you were to as much as show the young honourable Amelia Fotheringale-Sloane, heiress to the famed Fotheringale-Sloane estate, a mobile phone she'd turn her pretty head away in terror.

Nothing to do with the NEW book, but inspired by a sequel to one of my earlier works (one of the INSTITUTIONALISED series - some of you may remember it) which never got much further than a hint at the end of a story and a few words on my hard drive - oh well!  Something about this image just brought my mind back to it - I'm not entirely sure what, but that's often the way.  The cane resting on the desk is of course something I created and later added; you have to imagine the metronome is positioned somehere close to the viewer's position.

By the way:  I'm still hard at work on the new book, even though also still working with the artist, Roger Benson, and working on a book on Mad Cows Disease / CJD and other protein conformation disorders in the background.  

I'm also very soon going to reinstate direct, non-moderated, commenting on this blog, since it has been some while since there has been any attempt to post spam - perhaps as early as this very afternoon.  So there will no longer be that annoying delay between you writing in and you seeing your lovingly composed comment up in lights...  Nice, eh!

5 comments:

Paulo Post said...

What a wonderful scenario!
I really hope you'll find time and inspiration to develop this sketch in a full story!

P.S.
I'm getting a malware warning about amateurteensnude.com when I try to open your blog with Chrome

Toyntanen said...

Hi Paulo Post!

I still find it a tempting scenario to follow up, and I DO have fragments completed on my hard drive, as I have of several scenarios. My favorite revolves around a female character back in the 50s or 60s who - with friends - engineers a young girl's dismissal from her job as a 'Nippy' (waitress) at a Lyons Tea Rooms before then taking control of her victim's life while acting as if providing an arm to lean on and a guiding light. For the time being, though, I have to remain committed to the new book.

As for your other comment: That seems very strange. I don't host any links to amateurteensnude.com nor have I ever visited that site.

I have just accessed my blog myself via Google Chrome (ordinarily I use Fire Fox - which I am using to write this)and did not encounter any problem, nor did I recieve any such warning.

I suggest the problem is with your own computer and / or copy of Chrome. Try deleating all browser history and then try again. Actualy I dislike Chrome - all too often it has in the past crashed my computer somehow, although the present edition seems ok.

Anyone else encountered Paulo Post's problem?

Toyntanen said...

I have now removed comment moderation (which I introduced to control a certain spamming individual)so from this point on your comments should appear straight away without the involvement of yours truely, as they used to.

Please don't abuse this (you know who you are!).

Anonymous said...

Would really like to see this somewhat snooty girl take a hard cane thrashing from this formidable disciplinarian

Garno said...

So would I to be honest. It was so long ago I can't remember the source now. Back then there was little hope of producing such an image if some fairly large part of it didn't already exist... Now, though, we have AI image generation (see my latest couple of posts) I still use traditional Photoshop type techniques myself but often based on AI generated originals created by a friend. I'd certainly like to follow up on this storyline concept one way or another