Looking for Laurie

 

 

This 7500-word short story (or Long Read in People’s Friend terms) has just been published in a bookazine Feel Good Fiction (see details below).

I’m thrilled the story found a home (and a great illustration) but almost more thrilled that I eventually managed to finish it …

 

Some stories go quite quickly from inspiration to thinking where to go with it; others take a little longer and one or two much looonger.

 

I had the initial idea, the ‘What if?’ thought, for Looking for Laurie twenty years ago.

 

We’d booked a short family holiday in Canada during the October school holidays but unfortunately had to cancel a couple of days before we travelled when one of the children took appendicitis.

 

After we’d all recovered from that I thought What if? … What if the appendix chose to get nasty after a family arrived in Toronto? And what if the child couldn’t fly home on the return date and the mother had to stay on? How would she spend those few days on her own in a strange city?

 

I could have stuck with Toronto for the setting but as I’ve never been (see above … ) I decided to turn the story around and have a young Canadian woman – the name Joanne popped into my head – arriving with her teenage son in London. She’d just got married and this was a business trip for her new husband combined with a honeymoon.

 

What if Laurie, the London-born father of her son, had left her in Toronto promising to return but he never did? Never knew he had a son, in fact?

 

Thoughts percolated and bubbled inconclusively for a while. I wrote other stories, magazine serials.

 

Wait! Could this be a serial rather than a story? I tried to make that work, cliff-hangers and all. It didn’t.

 

But now I knew what Joanne would do in London on her own while her husband David travelled north on business and Ben was still in hospital. She’d been thinking how little she actually knew about Laurie and became determined to find out more – and find out why he’d left her when they’d been so happy.

 

I realised I had to set the story back in the day so that her sleuthing would be more tricky than making internet searches. As I’d lived in London, moving there in the fiendishly hot summer of 1976, I placed Joanne there (with a flashback to 1962).

 

What took the longest to work out was what would happen when/if she found him? Would she still love him? How would her son and husband react?

 

I pecked away at it, thinking and rejecting various solutions. When I had success in placing two 7500-word stories with The People's Friend that suddenly seemed the best length to tell the story. I never wanted to give up on it – I wanted to find out myself what happened when Joanne went looking for Laurie.

 

And if you want to know, the story is in this bookazine – available from larger supermarkets, T. G. Jones (where I got mine), online from DC Thomson, Amazon and elsewhere. Yes, it’s £8.99 but that’s only around 20p a story including (see above!) a Long Read.

 

 

 

 

Jingle bells, jingle bells ...

 

New collection of short stories available for pre-order now:

Fourteen short stories, all previously published, six with a Christmas theme. Other topics include the pros and cons of vinyl, teenage rebellion, sunbathing, long-distance love, names given to babies and to storms, punctuality and a king’s coronation. 

 

My story A Year to Remember is the first one in The People's Friend Annual this year (available in bookshops).

 

 

And I have the last story, Pass the Parcel, in The Magic of Christmas (from newsagents).

 

And if you'd like to read about a snowy Christmas in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders:

May all your wishes come true this Christmas.

Times Two

 I’ve been published in two very different publications this week. 

 

My Sister’s Eyes is published in the Federation of Writers (Scotland) anthology Sea Change. It’s a great collection – it was a delight to hear some of the pieces read at the launch at the Poetry Library last Friday.

 

I posted on the background to the story here.

 

And I have a story in The People’s Friend Special, Christmas issue. It’s set in the 1960s. There’s been a snowstorm and the trains are cancelled so seventeen-year-old Annie is unable to get home to the Yorkshire Dales for Christmas. Her rather scary boss invites her to stay with him and his wife – what could possibly go right?

 

One is an uplifting, heart-warming story, the other … is not. No prizes for guessing which is which.

The Saturday Scribblers

 

In 2005 I did two things that changed my life. I started going to a drop-in creative writing class run by Edinburgh Council and I joined Edinburgh Writers’ Club. As well as meeting lots of lovely people I discovered a whole new world of writing prompts and exercises.

Although I’ve subsequently (and with no little thanks to both these organsiations) had a novel, four magazine serials, and around seventy short stories published, I still go to both the class and EWC and it’s still a thrill to get a great writing prompt to respond to.

So when it came to writing a fifth People’s Friend serial I decided to move from my previous locations in rural Scotland* and set it in a writing group in a fictional town in the north of England (in my mind, it’s near Alnwick).

In my writing class there can be up to eighteen people and more than that at an EWC meeting but of course I couldn’t have that many in a story.

So it was fun to think of a reason why the class would be small (it’s migrated to Jess’s house when funding is withdrawn from it being held in a library) and to dream up the attendees, Tina, Madeleine, Clarissa and Neil, and decide on their varying reasons for joining, and of course their lives when they’re not being ‘Saturday Scribblers’.

I’ve found in real life that everyone responds differently to a writing prompt and personalities emerge so that turned out to be a good way for the characters (or some of them anyway … ) to find out more about each other.

I was delighted with the illustration (see above) for the first instalment (in issue dated 17 April) and (I have a subscription so get an early copy) here’s a sneak preview of the second.

 

* my first four serials are now available on Kindle; the first three are in a ‘boxset’ Kindle edition and in large-print library editions:

 

The Family at Farrshore

The Ferryboat

A Time to Reap

Jinty's Farm

 

 

 

 

 

Jinty's Farm

An everyday story of farming and gin-making.

Jinty’s Farm is my fourth People’s Friend serial, now available for pre-order an e-book; publication date 26 June.

I’ve written a farming serial before. A Time to Reap was set in 1963; this one is contemporary, set in the Kingdom of Fife on Scotland’s east coast.

These days, farmers have to diversify as never before to make ends meet. That could mean having paying guests, cheese-making, opening farm shops, making crisps or preserves or ready-meals. Or, as in my story, making gin.

I did enjoy finding out about gin-making … I read articles about various craft gin makers and how they come up with ideas for making their product stand out. I read about the process for making gin and I visited a couple of distilleries; and I had the occasional glass – in the interests of research of course.

There’s another aspect to the story which I liked researching too – the deployment of Polish soldiers to work on farms in Scotland during the Second World War.

I remember a Fife minster, some years ago now, telling me that when he visited elderly ladies in his parish they always talked about that time with a definite twinkle in the eye … the innate good manners as well as the good looks of the soldiers had left a lasting impression.

That inspired me to include one such soldier – whose existence is known about from the farm diary and the entries by Jinty, late grandmother of the present generation.

So, farming and gin-making – plus arguments and accidents, romances and break-ups, and family history echoing through the ages. It's all happening down on Jinty's Farm.

My previous three serials are now available as a (Kindle) boxset.

Family Stories Boxset

 

I completed a short story last week and have submitted it to a magazine – the first new writing I’ve done since lockdown (apart from the diary I’ve kept now for 63 days). 

It’s hard to forget the elephant in the room but it’s too early to write lockdown stories – I think we’ll need a bit of distance for that – but undoubtedly it will eventually keep writers of books and screenplays in plotlines for decades to come.

To keep my writing hand in as it were I’ve been looking at previously published work and repurposing it.

First up was an anthology of magazine stories, Still Rocking, see more details in this post.

Now I’ve published a ‘Family Stories Boxset’, or Kindle e-equivalent – three of my People’s Friend serials in one file. These are already available singly at £1.99; the boxset is £3.99 so you get three for the price of two. 

It was easy enough to put the three texts together but it took a bit of Internet trawling to find out how to do the graphic (preferably at no cost). Here it is, courtesy of www.covervault.com – the website is well worth a look.

  

The Ferryboat: Judy and Tom Jeffrey move north after buying a hotel in the West Highlands of Scotland, with their daughter and her chef husband – but have they made a terrible mistake?

The Family at Farrshore: Spending the summer working on Scotland’s north coast, archaeologist Cathryn is drawn into the local community – and to Magnus who is visiting the area for reasons of his own.

A Time to Reap: It’s 1963 on a Scottish Highlands estate. Farm manager Elizabeth Duncan has the unpleasant factor to contend with, and is unsettled by the arrival of an American visitor.

Still Rocking

I've published a new collection of short stories.

All except one were previously published in The People's Friend, Woman's Weekly and The Weekly News. The last story, What Prue Didn't Know, won the Woman's Short Story award, one of the competitions organised by the Scottish Association of Writers in March 2020, judged by Helen Walters and is published here for the first time.

The Spaghetti Tree

Seven-year-old Alfie plans an April Fool joke to play on his Grampa, but Alfie’s dad isn’t sure that Grampa’s in a laughing mood.

Swimming for One

Joe, middle-aged and newly single, is happily indolent – or he would be if his bossy little sister didn’t interfere.

History Lessons

Re-enacting a Jacobite battle isn’t Lucy’s idea of (every) Saturday afternoon fun, a fact she’s hiding from her new boyfriend.

To the Moon and Back

It’s July, 1969, and Apollo 11 is heading for the moon. Meanwhile, on Earth, Mike is trying to keep house while Patsy is in hospital awaiting their third baby.

Don’t Say Cheese!

Cheese hates the childish nickname she seems to be stuck with – it’s not the image she wants when she finally meets her French friend’s glamorous older brother.

A Labour of Love

George arrives home unexpectedly to find a strange man in the house with his wife. Is his complacency about his long marriage about to be shattered?

What Would Jane Think?

Is the dishy new staff member ‘in want of a wife’? Evie tries surreptitiously to find out – isn’t that what Miss Austen would do?

Still Rocking

Marnie appeals for her granny’s back-up when she wants to attend a festival, but Flora has her own musical memories which she’s not about to share.

Following Joel

Alison and Tommy have moved from Scotland to London to help their son and his wife with childcare but it’s getting rather overwhelming.

Back to the Sixties

It’s 1999. When Meg encounters a former classmate who caused her to break up with her best friend she’s at a loss to know how to behave.

Arthur and the Stone Lintel

When widowed Arthur takes up Architecture Appreciation classes, led by the obnoxious Roland, the last thing on his mind is a new relationship.

What Prue Didn’t Know

City girl Prue stays with her new friend Sarah and her family on their smallholding and makes some unexpected discoveries about herself. 

A paperback will follow. Meanwhile Still Rocking is available as an e-book from Amazon – and hey! it's up in lights!

Find out about my other publications, including three story anthologies, here.

Jinty's Farm

My latest People's Friend serial, Jinty's Farm, is set on – surprise! – a farm. The first instalment is in the bumper issue dated 21 December.

The setting for my last serial, A Time to Reap, was also a farm, although the scenarios are quite different.

Whereas A Time to Reap was historical (1963 – yes, a story taking place before 1970 is now deemed 'historical') and the farm was part of a large estate in the Scottish Highlands, 'Jinty's' is a small farm in Fife which, in 2019, the Watson family have run for a hundred years.

All farms have to diversify in some way these days and so Isla and Kerry, wives of the Watson brothers, have begun an artisan gin company in the old byre; Jinty's Gin (named after the brothers' granny) is flavoured with local rosehips and rowan berries. I did have fun researching how to make it!

Then there's Isla and Bill's elder daughter Rosalyn and her boyfriend problems; an entry in the farm diary from the WW2 years which has a link to the present day; and Isla, the main character, who's run ragged between managing the house and the family and school farm visits and the gin company and the holiday cottages and her part-time teaching job ...

I was brought up on a farm but that doesn't mean I know anything much about farming as I blogged here when A Time to Reap came out. However, as I can't seem to stop writing about it, it would seem you can take the girl out of the farm but not the farm out of the girl.

A large glass of Jinty's Gin (or your chosen tipple) to all my readers. Cheers!

Pin-Ups

 It’s a wee while since I was a teenager … but I plumbed the depths of my memory to write Back to the Sixties, a short story which is published in The People’s Friend this week (issue dated 19 October).

They have given it a lovely illustration complete with LPs and a portable record player, a Jackie annual and of course some pin-ups. (The story is set in the 1990s and the character is looking back to being fourteen.)

What sparked the story was meeting up with old schoolfriends (well, not old old obviously … ) and reminiscing about the discussions in the girls’ cloakrooms on Friday mornings after an episode of Top of the Pops the previous evening, and on Monday mornings after the new Top 20 was announced on Sunday. Goodness, teenagers nowadays don’t know what they’re missing … these things were crucially important.

Some of my classmates were fanatical about particular stars and regarded them as their own property – no one else was allowed to even like them.

No internet to trawl back then – information on our heroes (and the glossy pix to pin up on our walls) came from magazines such as Jackie and Fab 208. I remember one girl in tears when she found out that Glen Campbell was married – he was supposed to wait for her; and another loudly jubilant when Dean Ford and Marmalade got to number one with Obladi Oblada. Andy Fairweather Low from Amen Corner and Steve Ellis from Love Affair were other jealously guarded favourites.

And yes, as in my story, there was one brave lass who held out for Andy Stewart …

My own pop pin-up was Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits (There’s a Kind of Hush, Something is Happening, My Sentimental Friend – I remember most of the words; do join in) and many years later did actually see him in concert in Edinburgh when he was on a Solid Silver golden oldies tour. He hadn’t changed that much: Peter Pan rather than Peter Noone, a fact commented on with envy by a couple of his fellow performers.

I’d changed of course – and thank goodness, because who would like to stay fourteen for ever? Apart from pimples and general awkwardness, there was the way you were treated by adults – you were old enough to be sensible apparently but far too young to do anything you really wanted to do.

There were non-pop pin ups too – James Drury who played the lead in The Virginian (the American western TV series; my sister and I preferred his sidekick Trampas after whom we named a collie); William Shatner from Star Trek; and footballers George Best and ‘Scotland’s George Best’ Peter Marinello. Weirdly (I think now) we were all interested in football and I recorded the Saturday results in my diary. A story subject for another time perhaps.

Who was your pin-up? (You are not allowed to have Peter Noone, remember … )

A Time to Reap – hold the front page!

In 2016 I had a serial A Time to Reap published in The People’s Friend. And from 18 January 2019, it’s having a new lease of life as it’s being serialised in a daily newspaper (print edition), another D C Thomson publication, The Courier.

I don’t think I’ve enjoyed writing anything quite so much as this. It’s set in a Highland farming community in 1963. So, yippeee, one modern writerly problem was dispensed with right away – no need to worry about 21st-century methods of communication (about which I blogged here). And as I was brought up in such a community at that time there would be no requirement to do any research.

Or so I thought.

The main characters, including my heroine, farm manager Elizabeth Duncan, are of course grown-ups; I quite wee in 1963 so I had to think from a different perspective. And just because you lived on a farm doesn’t mean you know anything about farming – especially if you were a child who spent most of her time indoors with her nose in a book.

Among the many questions I asked Google/my cousin David/a farm-implement blogger/fashion-expert friend/lawyer husband of (different) friend and a manual bought in a junk shop called The Farm as a Business: A Handbook of Standards and Statistics for use in Farm Management Advisory Work, published for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in 1957, were:

How bad was that snowy winter 1962/63?

How would you look after your sheep in those conditions?

What would you be planting/harvesting in the different seasons?

Good reasons for expanding a dairy herd?

How do you persuade an angry bull into a pen?

What style/colour of dress would suit tall, fair-haired Elizabeth to wear to the gillies’ ball?

How much did it cost to send a letter in 1963?

Did you have to get a provisional driving licence then?

Adoption law in Scotland at the time?

If you don’t manage to get hold of The Courier and you want to find the answers to these questions … you can read A Time to Reap on Kindle; it is also available in large-print from libraries.

It’s April 1963 in the Scottish Highlands. Elizabeth Duncan, widowed with two small daughters, is the farm manager on the Rosland estate, the job previously held by her husband, Matthew. Following a hard, snowy winter, her working life is made more difficult by the unpleasant estate factor.

Elizabeth enjoys support in the small community from family and friends, including her cousin Peggy and local vet Andy Kerr. The arrival of an American visitor at Rosland House unsettles her in a way she hadn’t expected but, after Matthew’s mysterious death, a new relationship has been the last thing on her mind. However, as she dances at the annual estate ball in September, that may be about to change …

Celebration time at The People's Friend!

My acquaintance with The People’s Friend goes back many (many) years as I said here.

My association with the magazine as a writer isn’t so long but it has been wonderful. The fiction team give such encouragement to writers, whether they are brand new or of longstanding, and in a climate when other magazines are abandoning fiction or being positively discouraging, that is a beacon of light that shines in a naughty world, as Shakespeare (almost) said.

To date, I have had 34 stories published by them and three serials, not forgetting one article and one poem. Along with many other contributors, I was delighted to be invited to help celebrate the 150th (the 150th!) anniversary of the magazine.

And what a swell party it was (fizz, cocktails, canapes and cake plus dancing displays and a small dog ... ); it was lovely to meet staff members, and other writers, some of whom were friends already, plus others I had met only virtually or knew only by name.

As was said in one of the speeches last night the magazine was first published in 1869 when women’s lives were completely different to how they are now and it has sustained them through many vicissitudes including two world wars; that it sells 170,000 copies each week now shows that its comfort and joy are still required. You can find out about the history of the magazine in this anniversary volume.

Long may it continue.

Writer of the Week

I have a story in this week’s People’s Friend called Goodbye Sukey (issue dated 24 February). I was delighted when the editor, Shirley Blair, said that she was going to make me ‘Writer of the Week’ and sent me some questions to answer about how I came to write that story and, more generally, about my writing.

You can read the interview here.

If you like Goodbye Sukey you can read more of my short stories in these three collections. All of the stories have been previously published in The People’s Friend, Woman’s Weekly and elsewhere, or have been placed in competitions.

The Palace of Complete Happiness and other love stories

Three’s a Crowd and other family stories

Another World and other stories

Ups and downs

It’s been an ‘up’ week at katewritesandreads:

On Monday, to celebrate National Short Story Week, I brought out a new collection of eleven stories, nine of which have won/been placed in competitions. See last blog post for further details.

On Wednesday I was interviewed on radio, a first for me. Crime writer Wendy H. Jones has a fortnightly radio show called Wendy’s Book Buzz on Mearns Radio, which operates from Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire. My first instinct when Wendy asked me was to say No! I couldn’t do that but then I remembered that my new policy when it comes to stepping out of my comfort zone (where my writing is involved ...) is to say Yes, I'd love to! and worry about the details later. So there I was clutching the phone and chatting to a very-well prepared Wendy about Stella’s Christmas Wish. 

It was the nearest I shall ever get to being on Desert Island Discs … I’d chosen six songs in advance and in between playing them Wendy asked me some great questions. Later, I plucked up courage to listen to the whole thing – how weird it is to hear your own voice. Good music choices though! See what you think – it’s available on listen-again (go down the list to find Wendy's Book Buzz) until about the 24th of November I believe.

And on Saturday, as well as having lunch with 32 of the brilliant Authors and Book Bloggers in Scotland Facebook Group, I acquired a couple of copies of The People’s Friend Special, no 149 with its lovely Christmassy cover. 

I have a story in it The Overnight Guest: Judith is dreading Christmas. Instead of it being a quiet day spent with her son like last year, she’s with him, his new girlfriend – and her three children. But on Christmas Eve there’s an unexpected development …

Living vicariously – or not

One reason I like writing fiction is that I can live vicariously through my characters. I can look different, travel to other times and far-off places, and have talents that I certainly don’t have in real life. For example I have been an archaeologist, played the fiddle, been a glamorous redhead, and travelled back to the 1950s (not all in the same story ...).

But I’ve never wanted to do what my heroine Elizabeth Duncan, in A Time to Reap, does – be a farmer.

My father was a farm manager so I was brought up on several farms in the Scottish Highlands. Most of my uncles were farmers, on both sides of the family. But get up early every single morning, be outside in all weathers? Not for me, thank you very much. I was roped in to help at some unearthly hour of the morning when it was time to gather the sheep off the hill and, I am shamefaced to recall, I did nothing but moan about it.

Sometimes I’d watch what Dad and his colleagues were doing, whether it was sheep-dipping, lambing, ploughing, making hay bales or milking the cow, and with my siblings and neighbouring children I roamed around over a wide radius, untroubled by traffic or worries about bogeymen.

My much-preferred occupation though was to read (in the garden on warmer days, hugging the Raeburn the rest of the year). The books I liked best were set hundreds of miles away geographically (in rambling houses in Cornwall, tapping walls for secret passages and finding buried treasure), or light years away from my own experience (having midnight feasts in a boarding-school dormitory). When, around the age of ten, I tried to write stories myself I aped my favourite authors. Write about life on a Highland farm? It never crossed my mind for a minute.

So no one was more surprised than me when many years later I found myself writing a serial for The People’s Friend – about a farming community in 1963. Despite my upbringing, research was required. Online I found a ‘calendar’ of a farmer’s year from around the right time-period and place. I asked a cousin how a haystack was made. In a second-hand shop I found a copy of The Farm as a Business: A Handbook of Standards and Statistics (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, seven shillings) and an item in it, about cattle-rearing, gave me an idea for a plotline.

I got rather obsessed with remembering life on big estates – not just the farming side; there were gamekeepers, foresters, gardeners, the wider community – and trying to think of it from the perspective of a grown-up, not as the child I was when actually there.

I enjoyed writing A Time to Reap more than anything I’ve ever written and of all my characters (in over 50 short stories, two other serials and a novel) I’d like to be Elizabeth Duncan.

That’s on paper only though – I’m afraid the intervening years have shown no improvement in my bad temper when I have to get up very early.

It’s April 1963 in the Scottish Highlands. Elizabeth Duncan, widowed with two small daughters, is the farm manager on the Rosland estate, the job previously held by her husband, Matthew. Following a hard, snowy winter, her working life is made more difficult by the unpleasant estate factor.

Elizabeth enjoys support in the small community from family and friends, including her cousin Peggy and local vet Andy Kerr. The arrival of an American visitor at Rosland House unsettles her in a way she hadn’t expected but, after Matthew’s mysterious death, a new relationship has been the last thing on her mind. However, as she dances at the annual estate ball in September, that may be about to change …

A Time to Reap is available in a large-print edition in libraries, and on Kindle.

Just my Luck

We all have our little superstitions even those of us who say they’re not superstitious (she said, crossing her fingers).

My mum would definitely say she wasn’t superstitious, but she thought bringing pretty hawthorn blossoms into the house would cause something bad to happen – because one time a sad event did follow the blossoms.

Years ago I worked with a girl who believed all her horoscopes in various magazines and newspapers – even when they gave conflicting advice. She had her stars done once, although I can’t remember now what that entailed apart from sheets of that lined computer paper you used to get. Or was that her bio-rhythms? – she had those done too (whatever they were) and she put great store in coincidences and number patterns. We lost touch but I do hope life turned out happily for her.

Perhaps she was hovering in my sub-conscious when I thought of a storyline involving a girl who wouldn’t walk under ladders and who followed her horoscope to the letter. Then when a discussion a few months ago in my writing class led to the superstitions around seeing magpies the two things came together to make a magazine story.

Just my Luck was published in The People’s Friend this week (14 Oct.) with a lovely illustration:

and I got my name on the cover! 

Now that’s what I call good fortune.