Well, this is the last #HistFicThursday blog before I launch Beneath A Darkening Sky at an event in Thurso on Monday 13th . Shame it couldn't be a Friday 13th, but we can't have everything! One thing is for certain: October is the spookiest month. And not just because we have Halloween. Halloween could be a day later and October would still be the spookiest month... Look at how the light retreats at this time of the year: up here, the seasons' turning drains away the daylight at a rate of 2.5hours over the course of this month! Up here, anyway. Our ancestors knew, a long time before they tracked time using clocks, that this month we now call October was a time to look back at what has been and ahead to how we will survive the winter. Is it any wonder then that, with generations of people looking back, October became a month for souls and spectres? People we have loved and lost come back to visit our hearts, imaginations - and, perhaps, our homes - as we recall autumns of ...
Every Christmas holiday, Ginny, Jude and I have a story day. This, quite simply, is a day when we all sit down together and have a mega long writeathon. We are fully immersed in our own fantasy world and our poor parents have to put up with our obsession. We each have our "story story" which is our main story. Tomorrow I am revisiting my old story story that I finished when I was still a kid. There was a reasonably good plot but the writing was iffy, and there were way too many characters. Today, I sat down and wrote a list of characters that I couldn't bear to miss out... Here's my vague list of essential characters to include. To give you an idea of how many have been left out, here's some others I can remember: Jacob, Felice, Calantha, Edward, Nicholas, David, Eloise and Michael. I'm sure there are more which I've forgotten! Yes...that was as well as the list in the picture!! As you can see, some of the characters stick with you...