Nursery tales

As a child I frequently but uselessly wished for my favourite characters from different books to meet up and have conversations and new adventures together.  K M Peyton did this to a small extent with her Pennington series, incorporating the girl from Fallen Angels but by not appearing until 1970 they were too late for me, by some decades.

All my own fiction has been character-inspired and led.  Some have arrived as a pair, such as Jenna and Ed; others, such as Jenna’s daughter, grew up and met an ever-expanding cast of characters, during fifteen years and four novels which began, fortuitously (for the sex) in 1963.

Others – the majority of them –  came from responses to prompts on the several sites I’ve used to practise and hone my writing (many since disappeared, but the lessons have been gratefully retained.)

Journalists Baz Rose and Rose Madigan come into this category, as does Luke Darbyshere.  Susannah Elphinstone arrived in my head as the peg to hang a second novel of their story on.

John Pettinger was created for a short story written in advance of a writing retreat;  his career continues, week by week and drabble by drabble, under the title ‘A change of focus’ led by prompts from Prediction Fiction, rapidly approaching episode 100.

Another short story, an entry for this year’s Bloody Scotland had Pettinger meeting with Annabel Buckingham.  Not only a friend of a friend of Luke and Baz, she was part of an alliterative, unpublished serial which went by the name of ‘Shenanigans’, written back in 2010 and loosely based on a town near me.   

All have stood up to be counted into the third in the Baz, Luke and Madigan trilogy, along with Ivo who arrived last month in Tennessee and the principal of the school who interviewed and employed him.

The delight of getting to know them, seeing how they interact and what they hide  and the lies they tell to cover up their true feelings gives me such joy, that I no longer yearn for the days when I had to rely on other writers.