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.

 

 

 

 

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 …