Let Me Tell You a Story..

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

I’ve been ‘making things up’ since I was a kid. Thankfully, creativity was encouraged, well, the sort of creativity that produced 500 word essays in English anyway. It was my favourite subject and I would regularly get an A or A+ marked on my work. It was the only thing I was good at. It didn’t really impress my parents, because I was good at nothing else and my report cards always reflected this.

‘Deborah is reticent in class. She is an intelligent girl and needs to participate in class discussions more’.

I loathed parents day and would always get a telling off, no matter that I never had any really bad reports and English was always good.

When I elected to study English for my degree, my parents wondered what the ‘point’ was. Maybe other people did too. I wanted a job in publishing and degree entry was mandatory for most things. Get a typing job I was told, work your way up. I didn’t get a typing job or a publishing job, but I did always work with words and never felt my degree was ‘wasted’.

I’m grateful that I was encouraged to tell stories as a youngster - the habit has never left me. I don’t often ‘do’ anything with my creative writing, so this feature in my publication will be a repository for some of the stories I’ve written over the years.

Interestingly, I’ve had a couple of short fiction pieces accepted for publication later in the year, so you will get to read them in the big wide world too.

I’ve written a couple of full length novels and one novella - although lots of editing is required for the last one and I don’t have the capacity for that at the moment. Whether they ever see the light day remains to be seen.

Do watch this space though for the occasional piece of short fiction. You can unsubscribe from this strand, I think, if you don’t want to see them.

I wrote the following flash piece for a competition ages ago and it was published.

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The Kissing Booth

Estella fixed her sign- ‘Kisses a pound’- and looked admiringly at her fundraiser. She’d no time for car washing, or sponsored silences. Honestly, who can be silent at 14?

She waited as the boys queued. Yuk! Thomas! She hadn’t reckoned on kissing mingers. She closed her eyes, and her mouth, and concentrated on the chink of pound coins. She rated the kissers to pass the time: six out of ten was the best so far. She was dreading Thomas, minus five for sure.

Another six there; and...wow, nine and a half that one! She lingered, opened her eyes to find Thomas smiling.