NeonBlue Dreams
People live inside my head

People live inside my head. No, seriously, they do! Come back! Don’t back away from the keyboard as though I’m some crazy woman! (though I probably am)

For as long as I can remember I’ve had the urge to write. When I was nine, my headteacher at junior school, Mr Keating, had an accident. He had a heart attack while up a ladder pruning an apple tree. All the kids in the class made him cards to send and wrote letters to him. I wrote him a story. I think my mum’s still probably got a copy of it somewhere. It was all about the accident and his body. His organs all had names and were all dreadfully shocked and shook up when he fell from the ladder, and they had conversations and chatted together, rallying round to make him feel better.

When I was 10, in the top year of junior school, in an English class we were given the task of writing a story about going into space. We had to imagine what it would be like, what we’d wear, and the things we’d see. We all got down to writing, and by the end of the class most of the kids had finished writing theirs. I was just getting into mine. Next lesson Mr Cook, my form teacher let me carry on with it. It featured most of the class as crew, and we had some amazing adventures. A week later and all the other kids were onto other stuff, but I was working away at my story. At the end of each lesson Mr Cook would ask me if I’d nearly finished, and would give a resigned smile when I said I was nearly there, but could I have just a little more time please? In the end it filled six jotters, and Mr Cook breathed a sigh of relief when I finally put away my pen.

When I was in my teens when my health problems first started to affect me badly and I was out of school for nearly three years, it was writing that kept me going and took me to another world. My mum would get sent to the library on research missions for me, and between school work I’d keep myself occupied with writing.

It was while I was at college that I started my “magnum opus”, ‘Fallen Angel’. In it’s first incarnation it’s characters were loosely based on people I was at college with. Since then I’ve written various bits and pieces. I haven’t had anything published since I was in my late teens when I was in a local writer’s group. We got an anthology of the group’s work published, and I had a short story and a couple of poems in it. For a while I had quite a long break from any serious writing, but then in 2001 when I started a new job, I soon discovered that my manager did some writing too. We never really had a normal manager-underling relationship, seeing a lot of each other socially, along with our section head, and inevitably one day when we got onto the subject of writing, one or other of us said why don’t we write something together? And so Womble Casserole was born. We wrote alternate chapters, and it’s very nearly finished - a least my chapters are anyway - it’s just lacking a final couple of chapters from a certain JMB. Maybe one of these days we’ll get around to finishing it.

That kick-started me into writing again though, and I dug out the early drafts of Fallen Angel and dusted it off, re-reading again what I’d already done to remind myself where I was up to before I launched into it in earnest.

Fallen Angel’s currently on it’s fourth incarnation, and it’s changed a lot since my college days and the characters are no longer loosely based on people I was at college with, but are people in their own right. When I started work on it again in 2001, though I was ploughing on with chapters, I realised something wasn’t right. Something was missing. For a couple of months I played about with different opening scenes, and a slightly different plot, and then I realised that I didn’t actually know the characters that well. I didn’t really know them; not really. I didn’t know what they ate for breakfast, what their favourite film was, what made them laugh, and what made them cry. So I set about getting to know them.

I was in Nottingham at the time, doing some trade union training, and I’d take with me along with my course materials a couple of notebooks. In the evenings after the course finished I’d got about an hour’s wait for the bus home, so I’d take myself off to a pub around the corner and sit and write about their lives, asking each of them a series of questions about themselves, and faithfully write down their answers in their own words. In the end I filled four notebooks with their stories, and I felt I was really starting to know them.

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