Rhys on Being in Limbo.

 RHYS BOWEN:  Best laid plans of mice and men etc... 

I had plans for the last week of the year. My Christmas company departed on Sunday morning. I had planned to work with Clare to do the final polish on Molly 24, so that we turn it in on at the beginning of the year.

Actually I had planned to work with Clare while she was with us for a week. But the day before the family arrived I came down with a horrible respiratory infection. Not Covid. Not flu or RSV. But coughing my head off and fatigue. It was all I could do to show up and look joyful all week.  John, meanwhile had been battling his own respiratory thing. We got through the holidays. My family was wonderful and did everything. Then on the day they left John ran a fever of 102.  I rushed him to emergency and he has pneumonia in both lungs. He's in hospital, having IV antibiotics, breathing treatments etc. And I'm siting in a cold hospital room, not able to do much.

So that's where I am. I have time. I have quet. I could be working more. I have to do final edits on the next Royal Spyness book, but I don't seem to have the energy.  So I thought I'd start my new stand-alone, which I've been looking forward to tackling. Then I had to make the decision: do I start it in the present, which is the main story line, or do I put in a teaser from the past, which will give clues to what we are discovering in the present?

The story is about an expert in atiquarian books who has been hired to value a library of an English stately home. She finds a book printed in 1460 which seems to have been written by a nun at the priory which stood on the land of the current house.  So we are seeing stories unfold in the present and in 1460.

So how do I write this? Write the whole of the 1460 story and then the other one, which is what I did for the Tuscan Child, or let both unfold as we go, which is what I did for the Venice Sketchbook?

I am asking for feedback. when you start a new book do you like to get a teaser, as I have just done for my upcoming stand alone, which is now called THE CASTLE IN THE GLEN.  

OR....

Do you like to plunge straight into the main story and get going with the characters we are going to follow?

Let me know.

And to remind you, this is how the Castle in the Glen begins...

From The Wild Girl, Inspector Melrose’s First Case.

By Iris Blackburn.

 The Isle of Skye, autumn 1932

 Flora was the name her mother had given her at birth, but her mother had died before the child reached five years, a wee scrap of a bairn, and in the village of Dun Akyn she was known only as The Wild Girl. Her father was a fisherman, out at sea long hours at a time and Flora learned quickly how to fend for herself. She helped herself to eggs from those who kept chickens. She begged a roll or two from the baker. The kind folk in the village left a bowl of soup out for her and their own children’s outgrown clothing. She went to school when she felt like it but was most often seen running barefoot across the heather, or splashing in the tide pools, communing with the wild creatures from seals to roe deer. It was whispered that Angus MacLeod was not her father at all, but that it was one of the fairy folk, or even a storm kelpie. Whatever was true in this regard she stayed clear of the well-meaning village women who tried to take her in hand, made no friends among the village children, and could seemingly vanish in the blink of an eye like the fairy folk.

                Either way she was destined to come to a bad end.

And then we move to a young woman in London in 1965.

Both stories unfold throughout the book.  Fun but challenging to write as for half the book I'm writing in the style of another writer, and what's more it's not her normal style.

Ah well.  Back to work. And please spare a thought for John who is gradually getting over the worst ( and for me).

And I've just realized: it's New Year's Eve. I'd completely lost track of days.

So wishing you all a very happy, healthy New Year!

Rhys