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Not All Ghost Stories are Frightening

 This was not exactly the blog that we planned to write. We were going to share a post about our Ghost Story Competition  (which this still is), but it has suddenly become very pertinent and personal. On Saturday, only a day after sharing our Puplishing  blog, we lost our founding publisher, Orlando. We are all utterly devastated, and Crowvus HQ has become very quiet. It is truly strange not to see him at the bottom of the stairs, or not to have him sitting at my feet while I write this. It is the little, everyday, routine  things where his death is most acutely felt. Nine years ago, in our first ever Ghost Story Competition , we received a story entitled Black Dog . I admit, I had preconceived ideas about this one, based on its title, thinking about baying hounds and the Black Shuck. Nothing was further from the truth. A. J. Black's beautiful story was a journey of grief, a coming to terms with a loss of more than life, but of a companion. I remember reading it and ...
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Story Day - plotting a story 1

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. Aylwin remains one of my favourite characters I have ever written!

Now I have figured out which characters I am keeping, I need to fully determine what they are there for. I also need to jot down the plot ideas!

More updates tomorrow...
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