Rhys on Little Girls

RHYS BOWEN: Please raise a glass to celebrate with me. I have finished my new stand-alone, the one I am tentatively calling IN AN ABANDONED PLACE, but might end up being called THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE, THE LOST VILLAGE, THE LOST GIRLS, THE LAST LITTLE GIRL  etc etc. Stay tuned!

Anyway, as I've mentioned in previous what we're writing weeks, the story is about little girls in various time periods...three girls who disappeared on their way to be evacuated in WWII, one little girl who has vanished in London in 1968 and a heroine who visits an abandoned village and has a flashback of memory, realizing she's been there before, which starts to unravel everything she knows about her own life.

Probably the most complicated book I've ever tried to write. Every piece of one story fills in a missing piece of another story so there was a lot of juggling about what to tell and when.

One of the vehicles I've used was to show some small random scenes from the point of view of various missing girls in the book. I never say which girl is which. I want to reader to try to guess and then put that piece into the puzzle as we learn more.

Here is one of those scenes:

A Little Girl

 The little girl was finding her suitcase too heavy and the gas mask bumped up and down across her front as she walked. It was warmed than usual and she felt hot and clammy in her good coat. But Mum had insisted she wear it. “You’ll be cold once it’s winter,” she said. “And then you’ll thank me that I made you wear it.” 

 The little girl dumped the suitcase and opened the buttons of the coat. That was better. She stood on the corner, gulping in big breaths of air that blew in from the river. She was quite excited about going to the country. She had only been out of London once, on a school outing to the seaside for the day. That had been exciting. She wondered if they’d be taken anywhere near the seaside now. Her mum didn’t know. “You’ll find out when you get there,” she had said. The little girl could see that her mum was upset she was going. That was why she didn’t want to come to the school with the other mums. She claimed she had to be at work in the factory on time but the little girl suspected it was because she knew she was going to make a fuss and cry. 

 The girl lifted her suitcase again. It weighed a ton. She reckoned her mum had packed every single thing she owned into it. On she staggered, waiting for the traffic light to turn before she crossed the busy street. 

Then she turned into a quiet backroad.Here it was peaceful after the traffic noise. Nobody else in sight. Only the sound of a radio voice giving the morning news from an upstairs window. It wasn’t far to the station now. She could see its roof, sticking up behind the rows of houses. The suitcase handle was making her hand burn. She put it down and spat on her palm. 

She wasn’t aware to begin with, of the big black car that drew up beside her. 

     “Do you need a lift somewhere?” The man inside the car had wound down his window. 

     “It’s all right. I’m only going to the station,” she said. 

     “The station? By yourself? Are you running away from home?” He asked it almost as a joke.

     “No!” She could tell the man was teasing in that annoying way grownups had. “I’ve got to meet my class an we’re getting on a train out to the country,” she said. “We’re being evacuated.” 

     “Well, I’m driving past Victoria Station, as it happens. How about I take you that far? That will save you lugging that heavy suitcase, won’t it?” 

     The little girl hesitated. She had been warned about strangers. But the man looked like someone’s uncle. What’s more he had a posh voice and he was wearing a uniform, so he must be all right. And the suitcase was jolly heavy. 

     “Thank you, sir,” she said. “It’s very kind of you.” 

     “Not at all. We all have to help each other when there’s a war on, don’t we?” He came around and opened the back door. “Put your case in there.” And then the passenger door. “Hop in. That’s right. Off we go, eh?” 

 And off they went.  

Was he a good guy or a bad guy? There are both in the book , in face one aspect of the story is the blurred lines between right and wrong. I'm really pleased with it now I've finished. My agent has seen it. She said she started reading and didn't move until she'd finished, so that's a good sign, isn't it?

I'm off to England in a few days, seeking out more hidden stories like the abandoned village. In fact I'm going to Jersey in the Channel Islands that were occupied by the Nazis during WWII so I'm hoping for juicy details from there. I'll give updates on my Facebook page.

And any brilliant title ideas?

Winter People: Jennifer McMahon, inspired by what scares kids

Kathy Reel! Congratulations! You are the winner of our story challenge! A copy of Lucy Burdette's MURDER WITH GANACHE will be winging its way to you just as soon as you email me at Hallie "at" HallieEphron dot com with your mailing address.
 
HALLIE EPHRON: Lucy Burdette and I went on tour some months back in North Carolina (yay, mystery maven Molly Weston!) with Jennifer McMahon, so we heard bits about Jennifer's new novel, The Winter People and I've been looking forward to it every since.

I fell in love with Jennifer's work when I read "Island of Lost Girls." It's about a little girl who's kidnapped from from her mother's car by a life-sized Easter bunny.

Jennifer told us the idea came to her when she was stopped at a gas station in Vermont.  A woman pulled in, left her car running, and ran into the store leaving a little girl strapped in the backseat. Jennifer's mind started to what-if terrible scenarios: what if someone came along, jumped in the car, and drove off with the girl?

What if it was stranger than that; what if it was someone in a costume: Santa, a clown, the Easter Bunny? What would she do, and who would believe her?

No one (including yours truly) does CREEPY better than Jennifer. Her new book, The Winter People, is about a town of strange disappearances, a missing sister, and an ancient diary. I asked Jennifer to tell us how she came up with its story. I was not surprised to hear that it was inspired by a child's scary fantasy.

JENNIFER MCMAHON: A few years ago, my daughter asked me to play a game -- she loved to create these tightly scripted make-believe games.  She gave me the set-up: “We’re sisters.  You’re nineteen.  I’m seven.  You wake up one morning and I’m in bed with you.  I tell you our parents are missing.”

“Missing?” I said.  “That’s terrible.  What happened to them?”

“They were taken,” she said.  “Into the woods.”  She shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly and added, “Sometimes it just happens.” 
I knew right away that it belonged in a book, and wrote it down -- "The Missing Parents Book," I called it.   I didn't have a feeling for what had happened, though, who these girls were, or where their story would go.  So, like with so many half-formed story ideas, I set it aside. 

Then a couple of years ago, I started playing around with a story set partly in the Civil War, about a woman who becomes a spiritualist in Vermont at the turn of the century.  She'd lost a child, but came to believe she could communicate with her and with others who had passed on.

One day, I was writing from the point of view of this character, Sara.  And I wrote down this line: "The first time I saw a sleeper, I was nine years old." 

Whoa! I thought, getting chills. What’s a sleeper? 
I had to keep writing to find out. Soon I understood that I was writing about a woman who believed she could bring the dead back to life. I remembered my two sisters with the parents who were taken into the woods (“Sometimes it just happens”) and knew they belonged in there, too. 

HALLIE: A sleeper? Whoa, creepy. Can you give us just a tiny hint of where you went with it from there?

JENNIFER:  Well, it continues to get creepier!   Sara believes she can use a ritual she learned about as a child to bring her beloved daughter back to life.  Her husband Martin is baffled and horrified by his wife's apparent descent into madness. 

In the present day, our two sisters, Ruthie and Fawn, are living in Sara's old farmhouse in West Hall, Vermont with their quirky and reclusive mother.  They wake up one morning to discover their mother is missing, and in trying to figure out where she could have gone, they discover a published copy of Sara's diary along with some other disturbing items. 

I ended up including a third storyline, about Katherine, an artist in Boston whose husband has died recently -- she learns that he visited West Hall the day he died, and is determined to find out why.  Naturally, her story intersects with Ruthie's and Sara's before long. 

HALLIE: Have you started your next book, and did your daughter inspire you? 

JENNIFER:  I just finished an early draft of my next book, actually.    It takes place largely at a strange roadside motel, and is set in the 1960s, 1980s and present day.  

Last summer, two of my daughter's cousins -- twin girls, one year older than Zella -- came and stayed with us for a week.  The twins were fascinated by the fact that I write scary books, and the four of us had many long, animated talks about what the scariest things in the world are. 

Without giving away too much, there is a certain critical and creepy aspect of this next book that was inspired by these chats.

HALLIE: Inviting our readers to share what scared you as a kid... I'm sure I'm not the only one who was afraid of clowns.