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It seems I’m surrounded by imaginative and wonderful bloggers that I can’t resist stealing from. First off we had the post about your 10 favourite stories and now Danielle Ferries has blogged about her five favourite characters – ones she created, of course (her Tallulah Todd sounds perfectly awesome). So, not one to be left out, here are mine…

Tobias Tribute
Tobias Tribute is a grim reaper with emphasis on the grim. I feel sorry for him (is that a bad reason to like a character?) despite the fact he is nasty, selfish and doesn’t care that the people he murders (in many varied and gruesome ways) are young and happy (or even old and grumpy). All that matters is that he reaches his quota. Tobias can be found within the pages of my novel, ‘The Midnight Motel’. Unfortunately, you’ll never get to meet him.

Frog
Frog just wants someone to love him. Well he did until he met his mail order bride. Frog can be found in the obviously titled short story, ‘Frog & the Mail Order Bride’, and I very much hope you get to meet him.

Uncle Joe Kendrick
A supporting character in ‘The Poisoned Apple’, I think he is a sweet, bizarre man who doesn’t see the world quite as we do. Plus, he talks to garden gnomes.

Wolfram Lavoisier
Wolfram (who sometimes doubles as the not-so-ferocious Wolf Dude) has not yet been fully realised. He makes a brief, but very important, appearance in the rewritten ‘The Poisoned Apple’, and his fate is balancing on the acceptance of TPA. He is on the brink of starring alongside his daughter in the unimaginatively titled ‘Red’. Red is about a girl who is to become a werewolf on her eleventh birthday and who would rather be a chiropractor even though she hates feet. Especially hairy feet. I guess I really like Red too.

Swan Ecklund
Swan is a selfish, preening, anti-hero. What’s not to love about that? He’s one of my soldiers in the ‘Theatre of Curious Acts’.

If I disappear from the internet for any length of time it means one of my characters has escaped and snared me in a real-life net for not naming them amongst my favourites. I would like to reassure them now that I love them all too.

A coincidental and fitting day to post the next extract from my NaNoWriMo novel as it is Remembrance Sunday and almost 90 years since the end of World War One.

Part Two: PAPER DRAGONS

(i)

The Show

1918

Silence.

Ever since the guns had ceased their tirade across the western front, Daniel Cole had sought solace in silence. He would wake in the early hours, the night ink blank, the stars concealed behind the weight of clouds that refused to release the ghosts from the earth, and he would sit on the worn chair in the corner of his bedroom, look out at the emptied world, and remember all the lost men.

Their ghosts brushed past him when he entered the bakers where Eddie Tarpey dusted loaves and dreamed of Mabel Normand; when he rode his bicycle past Newsham School where Norman Bulmer instructed children in physical education; and down by the lake where the twins spent their summers fishing. In this very room, where prior to 1914 Walter James Cole had wept, snored and dreamed of glory in the bed next to his.

Sometimes, in the silence of three a.m., he heard his dead brother snore. Sometimes he remembered Walter had been as young as the century. Fifteen when an enemy shell found his heart. When its shrapnel crossed the channel, embedded in the walls of their old terrace, and stole their parents.

Sometimes the silence broke him.

His uniform hung on a wire hanger over the back of the door. It formed ghost of its own in the dark, and one month since quiet had fallen over blood red fields its shoulders slumped, its legs baggy over emaciated thighs, its collar bent beneath the weight of a bowed head. He had that morning decided he would never put it on again. He wondered if Swan, George, Ken and Harvey would wear theirs when they met the following day at the White Horse Inn.

Swan Ecklund would, of that Daniel had no doubt.

The curtains dragged along the yellowing wire as he pulled them open and looked out at what he considered a ghost town. The cobbled streets glistened with rain. Gas lamps washed the streets with pools of light. He lifted the sash window. The gas lamp located outside his terraced house hissed, in his darkest hours Daniel imagined that hiss was for him alone.

Let me introduce you to my NaNoWriMo project: THEATRE OF CURIOUS ACTS.

Oh, and by the way – I’m cheating.  The ‘Theatre of Curious Acts’ is a set of intertwined stories set over a century – three novellas and two short stories – all heading toward the same conclusion.  The basic premise is:

The Grim Reaper is a girl, her name is Olivia and her pale horse is a pirate ship.  When Daniel Cole, a shell-shocked WW1 soldier, is transported to the surreal otherworld where she resides, he ruins her and her sisters plans for the coming apocalypse.

So we have:

Part One: Shrapnel From a Broken Smile

A ghost story. It’s 2008, the once glorious ‘Theatre of Curious Acts’ is derelict and provides the perfect playground for a boy out to impress a girl.

Part Two: Paper Dragons

In 1918 a group of WW1 Soldiers head out to the Theatre of Curious Acts for a fabled ‘Paper Dragon’ show.  They are transported to a surreal otherworld where Daniel Cole and Swan Ecklund are beguiled by two sisters – Olivia and Blanche.

Part Three: (The man with) One Yellow Shoe

It is 1985 and Harvey Cadell (one of our soldiers from ‘Paper Dragons’) has returned to the theatre, which is now a cinema, to catch one last performance before he dies. And in the hope he will find a door back to that otherworld and some of his lost friends. Instead he meets The Collector of Memories and finds himself trapped in a movie.

Part Four: Monstrous Interlude

It’s 1955 and during the showing of a B-movie a monster escapes. It is up to ‘The Collector of Memories’ to put it back.

Part Five: Anticipating Pitchforks

Daniel Cole returns from the otherworld just in time for Armageddon. Oh, and he’s arrived on Olivia’s pirate ship and her sisters are following in their own transport: a zeppelin, a battleship and a train.