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IdeasBecomeWords

Aspiring Author & Life Juggler

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  • DEBUT NOVEL

The silk kaftan billowed against her bronzed skin..

Kate Frances May 2, 2019

The silk kaftan billowed against her bronzed skin before Blanche pulled it over her head and let it flutter to the ground, landing on the terracotta tiles in a rippled heap of muted colour. She smiled at her painted toes gripping the edge of the wooden diving board, the one she and her sister had begged Giovanni to build over the pool the previous summer.
She paused, bent her knees and bounced once, twice before springing and folding into an elegant arc. She pierced the water and swam near the dolphins which decorated the bottom, emerging at the far end of the pool. She hung her arms on the smooth, warm concrete which edged the pool allowing her lower body to sway gently. As the water drained from her skin and briefly darkened the stone before evaporating, movement caught her attention. Her two year old nephew was thwacking snails with a toy truck. Snails always appeared around the pool following a rain shower.

‘Vi my lovely, what did the snail do to you?’
‘It made my space gooey. Cattiva lumina!’ His pout returned as he gave it one last bash for good measure.
‘He’s not a bad snail Vi! He’s just come out to find food and drink. We mustn’t kill animals. He hasn’t hurt you has he now?’
Giovanni hovered nearby, talking on the phone which had the longest coil of phonewire Blanche had ever seen. Giovanni had known someone who knew someone who had provided the special telephone cable. There was nothing he could not source.
Ingrid appeared in the pagoda which bridged the back of the house from the pool area and placed a lunch tray on the table. As she watched Ingrid arrange items on the table she allowed the chinking of glass and clatter of cutlery to sooth her the throbbing at the back of her head. Sounds of daily life at the Tuscan vineyard with the family she loved more than anything.
On closer inspection the table top appeared shiny. Aluminium where it should be teak, and the cutlery had morphed into surgical implements. A nurse stood in Blanche’s line of vision, obscuring her view of lngrid. She closed her eyes and turned her head away, preferring to watch the sunlight dance on the surface ripples. She watched aghast as her forearms slid down the edge and her shoulders felt the cool cover of water. Her fingers were the last of her to feel the Italian breeze. An exhaustion wrapped itself around her and although she always swam under water, this time the sinking sensation was accompanied by no urgency to return to the surface. Perhaps a little sleep on the bottom, next to the dolphins she coveted….

  • DEBUT NOVEL
  • TRAVEL

17:16 from Leeds – on my way to Romantic Suspense 💜

Kate Frances May 1, 2019

Having fun going back through some posts from last year .. and I cannot believe how far my manuscript has come when I re-read some. Like this Leeds train journey feels like only yesterday. At that time I had only 24,000 (very naive) words written … wow.

IdeasBecomeWords

So you’re itching to hear how I got on aren’t you?

Have you ever been so tired, you’re almost delirious? You’re aware of how many bags you need to keep near you and which pocket your ticket is snuggled in, but there’s a general fog? Not a hungover fog as I kept my alcohol intake to a sensible level so as to attend my one to ones with wits about me. Drunk on information and inspiration maybe….

I did have a little lift selfie moment. Does my bum look big in this? Doesn’t matter if it did because I found a hibiscus 🌺

Maud has become Blanche as the niggle about introducing two characters in a first chapter with names starting with the same letter grew into a cactus which kept meeting me head-on at every corner.

I’ve been advised also to think about an aspect in my early chapters…

View original post 514 more words

  • FICTION
  • LIFE

Meet my new bonsai .. he’s called Joseph ⛩

Kate Frances May 1, 2019

Isn’t he stunning? A red maple ..

Once upon a time there was a blogger who suggested a book. The book was called ‘The Samurai’s Garden’ by Gail Tsukiyama.

I fell in love with the story and it’s characters, especially Matsu and I bought a bonsai in his honour and even wrote a post about it which for those of you who have not been following me since I started here can read about that here!

The blogger is someone a long way from me but someone I consider one of a handful of loyal wordpress buddies I am fortunate enough to have shared bits of writing life with. You will find him over at Flowers in Bloom.

If I stopped blogging tomorrow (and for the record I plan to do the opposite as I’ve had approximately seven and a half people visit my site this spring due to my inactivity) this book is one I shall never forget, nor shall I forget where I first heard about it.

  • FICTION
  • Flash Fiction
  • The Dark Corner

A photo prompt and four words…. 🖊 … became a piece of thriller flash fiction ⚙️

Kate Frances April 26, 2019

Today on the Fiction Cafe Writer’s Group this photo prompt appeared along with some words which ideally they wanted as the first few words He wanted her job and it would be easy enough …

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I enjoyed sipping a coffee during a break from the rug room activities and came up with the following 742 words. I decided to share it with you – especially you Patti, as I know you like a creepy tale from me 🔪xxx

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Happy reading folks and keep writing

🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊

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He wanted her job and it would be easy enough to achieve if he was subtle. Eight years he’d been overlooked as each new high-flying and well-spoken graduate came in to look after the collection.

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‘No-one knows the pieces like we do, do they?’ Mason snarled his upper lip while his huge hands flattened the static fur of the old cat on his lap. Its bony frame felt good beneath his touch and he pressed a little harder, but still the cat purred, the sound vibrating through the small cellar room where he kept all the tools for his caretaker role beneath the museum.

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A light flashed on his call box which he knew meant she had arrived. He stood and the cat rolled off, scrabbling to hold on to his trousers with extended claws, one embedding itself in his flesh.

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‘Geroff!’ Mason flicked the paw away and re-opened the email photo. Just one more look. His pupils reduced to pin holes as the light from the screen gave her delicious face to him. He licked his lips at her sweet smile, the angle of her neck rising from a cream dress which showed her collarbones. His heart quickened as he imagined running a finger along one. It would snap delightfully between his strong fingers.

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The cat curled around his ankles and he shook out some food from a box onto the floor and watched the animal crouch over it before he opened the door and locked it behind him.

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* * *

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‘Good morning! You must be Arabella, do please come this way.’ Mason stepped back to allow her through.

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‘Thank you so much, and for agreeing to my request. I always like to start a day early to get to know the place so I feel more at ease when the public come through, you know?’ she smiled at him, her teeth a perfect row of ivory. 

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‘I couldn’t agree more. So many curators do not understand the lie of the land when they start and concentrate only on the most valuable items, but I say it’s the building, its infrastructure which can hold all the fascination.’

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He kept his hands behind his back and the brown tweed three-piece suit he wore camouflaged the raging need within his limbs to pull her to one side, into the dark corridors.

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She was wearing the same cream dress and as she shrugged off her coat, he noticed how the material hugged her petit frame. ‘Oh, you’re so right! I love architecture and have always admired this building. How long have you worked here?’

.

‘Eight years now.’ They strolled up the stone stairway to the main hall, away from the side door which she’d been advised to use today while the museum was closed, when all other staff were home playing happy families. Mason had been delighted to have been asked to show her in, show her round. It gave him a chance to size her up.

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He pulled the half moon glasses from an inside pocket and perched them on the end of his nose. ‘These stained glass windows? On Mondays and Tuesdays, I clean each pane. Very carefully, with very gentle movements using soft cloths.’ 

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‘Wow! No wonder they still look so brilliant.’ She was so enraptured by their colour, she did not realise her mouth was open while she looked up through the dust motes circling in the air above them. She was oblivious to Mason’s eyes upon her throat, or the vein throbbing fast in his neck.

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‘Yes, you have to handle them with the most delicate of touches because they will break very easily and cannot ever be replaced, and that would be a tragedy.’ did her smile just falter, had he pushed his luck and scared her off as he so often did.

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‘Can we see my office if that’s ok?’ 

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‘Yes, of course, forgive me. This way.’ And he gestured for her to walk along the west wing, across the black and white tiled floor he polished on Wednesdays and towards the row of mahogany doors with brass handles.

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‘Oh look!’ she turned to him, her tiny hand over her mouth like a child in awe of a coveted gift, ‘This must be me!’

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He nodded at her excitement and opened the door with Curator on a brass plaque. ‘Yes, this is you, and on the desk is a green button. Anything you need, I’m always on the other end. You only have to call.’

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‘It’s amazing! Thank you … Mason, isn’t it?’ her heels clicked back to where he stood taking up the whole doorway and offered to shake his hand. ‘I look forward to working with you.’

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His hand engulfed hers. ‘The pleasure is all mine.’

  • Family
  • FICTION
  • LIFE

Birthday flowers, friendships and loose horses

Kate Frances April 25, 2019

That’s really uncouth, to advertise your birthday btw…

Maybe, but then again it’s a great way to share the day with my WordPress friends 🎉

My son said to me: “you’re half way to a hundred now!” and grinned as it is a given I’ll make it there. Bless.

So I’m a 1969 baby. Lots happened that year, so my arrival onto this planet shares some fascinating company:-

Neil Armstrong landed on the moon

March saw Concorde’s maiden flight

President Nixon declared the start of the end of The Vietnam War

Have a coffee .. this is fun! When did you last pause to see what happened around the world in the year of your birth?!

The flowers, by the way, were from a friend and her mother – sent in a clever box in the post by a florist company. They are my favourite colour combination of petals, so pretty and feminine 🌸 I met the friend when she was four and I was eight while our fathers served in the Royal Air Force together. Our mothers were good friends in their twenties and thirties but then geography appeared to be what kept them apart thereafter.

Now our mothers are in their seventies, they have absolutely nothing in common and rarely see each other. My friend’s father sadly passed away about ten years ago from lung cancer whereas mine is hanging in there with lung breathing difficulties, ironically. I totally see now that our mothers were friends purely because of their husbands’ career choice.

They live only two hours apart and both drive but have only seen each other twice in the last five years. One is smiley, friendly, laughs a lot and socialises with many local friends and is totally at ease when mixing with her daughter. The other is tetchy, judgmental, cold, has no friends and finds it almost impossible to do something for another.

Here’s a crop of oilseed rape in the evening sun in front of one of the biggest oak trees on the farm. I took it last night during an hour’s drive searching the farm for a runaway horse.

A flustered neighbour appeared at my kitchen window in a panic as her friend’s horse had ‘pushed past the gate and has been seen running towards your farm’

This happens sporadically throughout the year. We are surrounded by horse owners and sometimes a lapse of concentration can happen, or an electric fence can fail. Horses can be home birds or flight animals and if the latter they can travel miles.

Turned out this little chap had galloped about six miles to the edge of town! Luckily a dog walker who knows about horses was able to catch it and various police cars were by now involved, the owner sensibly having warned them. This is the photo I sent the owner (who stayed home in case he went back) and I know the vision would have brought huge relief to her evening of anxiety. I’ve mislaid a horse once or twice in my past and there is no worse feeling in the pit of your stomach. Actually there would be. Losing a child.

I am over half way through the CBC course EDIT & PITCH YOUR NOVEL

See this link for their next start date in June. I can thoroughly recommend it for anyone who has finished writing a first draft and then is stuck as to how to start editing, how to approach the process while not wasting your valuable time. It’s £200 and worth every penny. The video tutorials each week cover all the worries we have and how to break up the editing process into manageable chunks.

I’ve really enjoyed starting to incorporate the detail scene analysis we did through week 2. Each and every scene is only allowed to stay if it moves the plot forward and/or heightens tension. I shall no longer keep a scene simply because I like it or I think that one was well written and it was one of my originals!

When we’ve got back to Suffolk from a drive to Manchester area where we are collecting our son’s new truck, I’ll get back to the book. Hopefully there’ll be no errant horses!

Man of the Woods is driving, my son is to my left and I’m in the middle of the bench seat .. we look like a rabble of builders!

I’ll give you a wave if you like anywhere near the A14, A1 to Leeds then across the M62 towards Manchester across something called Saddleworth Moor.

Ok, well it’s lovely to chat and to have exercised my wordel-mind for half an hour but I’ll leave you alone now to get on with your day. I’ve got some reading material 🖊

  • FICTION

A bedtime story… ☠️☠️☠️

Kate Frances April 18, 2019

Blades slice skin as he pushes his way through undergrowth which whispers against his legs; high brambles snag his top and he pauses to listen for his hunter.

A pain grips his hoarse throat as he gasps for oxygen after running miles in the moonlight. He searched for and found the cover of forest but it feels far from safe.

Scanning the space he left behind he can no longer feel the shadow chasing him or smell the toxic burning of scorched flesh. .

The bark on an old oak is damp and feels gnarled against his young palm. His fingertips find a groove, fingernails fill with matter.  Mack does not see the ruby eyes blink above his dishevelled head, nor notice the fog cloaking the forest.

Snapping twigs beneath his trainers sound like symbols to his heightened hearing and he stops in a clearing.

Cold air moves his hair from his forehead, the stench has returned. He is close and Mack would rather die than see again the face which is melting…

🕷🕷🕷🕷🕷🕷🕷🕷🕷🕷

Sorry; don’t know where that came from – I just looked out at the moon 🌒 😂

  • DEBUT NOVEL
  • FICTION

Kisses .. is as far as my characters get on the page! Editing observations… helped out by Stephen King

Kate Frances April 15, 2019

Good morning my lovelies – I’m drinking tea brought to me by Man of the Woods. He’s gone out to check slug activity on the young crops and I’m watching the clock hands do that thing where they look sedentary but they’re not. Imagine going round and round in circles and never seeing any other platform.

“Oh, hello 10 it’s you again. What have you been up to for the last twelve hours?”

Self editing can start to feel like that so I was delighted when a Curtis Brown Creative email dropped in to tell me one of their courses was about to start.

I’ve already done the first two of their set of three, so having got to the end of my manuscript a few weeks ago, it seemed churlish not to do the final one – EDIT & PITCH YOUR NOVEL.

Yes I purchased the genius book called Save The Cat (STC which I now can’t help using to analyse every damn film I watch) but the necessary evil task of actually reaching in to the chest freezer of my novel and hauling out really heavy scenes which grip in their frozen determination was proving impossibly painful.

The first tutorial video last week was a blessing when Anna – one of the top tutors on the course, and a published author herself – reminded us how far we’d come. We’d arrived at the end of our first draft; a goal which for many is never attained.

We were encouraged to think about what type of novel we wanted to write. (This is the bit where I get in a muddle as we already know I’ve been told it crosses genres. I’m still going to whisper at this point that I want it to… and this is why I’ve been more seriously considering Indie Publishing).

There is romance, but no sex. This is as warm as this one gets…

(And the book’s not called TRAIN by the way..!)

Anyway, for now, let’s keep walking down the Prepare for agent submission path. This week Anna wants us to print the beast out and re-read it again; while pausing to analyse every scene, marking on a chart (made in Word) whether it works, drives the story on, has more than one story ‘point’… she calls this the diagnosis of the pain, which is rather relevant don’t you think?!

The rape is in flower .. it’s pretty though lots of people suffer with hay fever 🤒

(Nice pic, but totally irrelevant to the blog. So that would go if I was editing this post like my novel!)

This one is totally relevant though. To the title of this post! I’ve not read the book, which he wrote in 1983, but I watched with gripped fascination more than fear at the genius clue-dropping as to what the two MC characters’ worst fears in life are… delivered carefully to the viewer should they choose to ‘see’ them.

The mirror image of opening and closing scenes – which STC says we should see in 99% of films – was not only there, but cleverly illustrated the journey arc of the characters. The only constant was the Volvo. The horrendous premise of the final frame leaves the viewer facing their own primal fear … I won’t say what it is in case you haven’t seen it … suffice to conclude that as a human experience it GETS you.

My friend, who is not studying writing and does not read novels actually left the cinema saying ‘that was crap’ (she likes SAW and HOUSE OF WAX type horrors). I totally disagreed, in our good-friendship humour way that we can!

She’s also not a parent…..

🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊🖊

All of the Curtis Brown Creative writing courses can be found here.

I recommend printout out the coursework and sticking it into a journal like I’ve done here… you’ve got it then for every book you write!

Have a great week whatever you’re up to xxx

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