welcome to long words

K.B. Goddard has a new novella coming out and I’ve been lucky enough to get a sneak preview before its released.  ‘The Girl with The Roses’ is a genuinely unnerving and atmospheric horror novella.  The story begins in the sales room of Thornhill and Swift, where items with an unusual and unique past are sold to the highest bidder.  It’s there we find a statue of a young girl holding a bouquet of roses.  As with all the items that are sold there, this statue has a story to tell.

There was a definite menace in the silence that followed.  I don’t think I heard a front door close, which makes me wonder if I heard anything at all.  Still, that silence pressed down on me.  It wouldn’t let me close my eyes.  I wasn’t scared.  I wasn’t fearing for my own safety.  My sleep, maybe; but not my safety.  I lay there and waited for a violent encore.  Raised voices.  Doors slamming shut.  Glass smashing.  Or, worse, laughter.

Here at The Blank Page, we like to try and keep our offerings to a fairly high standard.  Sadly, this week, your erstwhile blogger is suffering from a mild existential crisis.  He’s currently hiding in the attic and is refusing to come out.  It’s been a pretty rough week for him and any attempts to blog about it have led to screaming fits, drinking and drawing on the walls.

Time has been misbehaving this year.  Or maybe it’s just me.  I’ve certainly noticed it’s been toying with me, especially since the beginning of March.  I had gone into Christmas last year feeling quietly confident about the draft of the novel I’d been working on for all of 2016.  It felt like it was meant to be something special.  A novel that was about something worthwhile.  Social commentary was new to me, but I was giving it a go.  I just needed to hack the first draft into a tighter version of itself.  Hone the edges, kick the tires.  It felt like it was going to be pretty simple.

Thinking about releasing something new has got me remembering the first novella I published with Kensington Gore Publishing.  The Compressionist wasn’t the first horror story I wrote.  No, that was The Low Road, back in the days of invisible self publishing.  That was followed by The Narrow Doors, which came from attending a cremation and thinking about those patronising advice books they used to publish for girls decades before.  Well, that and a first draft ending that freaked me out.  The Compressionist found me wanting to try something different.  

The relationship you have with your characters can get pretty fraught at times.  Granted, you create them and set them on a path.  The thing is, over time, they have a habit of rebelling against your intentions.  Especially when you’re putting them through a ghost story.
    I’ve recently been challenged by Christine Ardron of the endlessly inventive Predgarians blog to have one of my characters answer some question for her.  What can possibly go wrong?