Giant spiders and school girls

My first ever piece of writing was a short story. I was nine and a class mate had — accidentally-on-purpose 🙄 — broken my favourite ruler. I wrote a story about a giant spider chasing a schoolboy down the street, complete with blood & gore, a pigtailed, bespectacled heroine (moi!) and a gloomy end, and read it out in class. The boy took it in stride, gave me his own ruler, and showed me, for the first time, that the pen really is mightier than the sword.

I ended up being the class scribe for a while, even writing stories to spec (‘can you make me fly, please?’), but these days I create what I love reading myself: vast and wordy narrative canvasses, steeped in atmosphere and story layers — and always with a lot of extra words needing to be to cut at the end. 

Miniature worlds

Recently, however, I’ve come back to short fiction and remembered why writing them is such an exquisite pleasure — and such a challenge. Every word counts. Every character has to be distilled down to its very essence, for maximum effect within minimum space; atmosphere and verbal poetry have to be as efficiently delivered as possible. A story does the same as a novel: it entertains, shocks, teaches. But the canvas is a miniature and the tiny brush strokes have to be perfect and precise.

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I no longer exact my revenge with my writing these days — or maybe I’m more subtle about it at 46 😉 — and I really hope you’ll like The Christmas Card and Lou, who mourns the loss of her noisy, warm in-law family after her marriage ends, most especially around Christmas, most especially her mother-in-law, Lilly. It’s a little thank you for being such a wonderful, inspirational and all-round lovely reader of my books.