My inspiration for Ghost Training came to me as I travelled past a fairground big dipper on the top deck of a bus. My three characters popped into my head complete with their unlikely names, Mikey, Bodger and Noddy. Before the fairground was out of sight, I could see them and hear Mikey’s voice recounting exactly what happened to them. I went home and wrote it all down in one go that evening, my first ever short story which then won my first ever competition. It was so disturbingly authentic; I have never forgotten those boys. It made me believe the dead may still be out there somewhere and listening for their voices has informed much of my subsequent writing.
There has been so much death, the universe is full of voices but whether we hear them and how we interpret them is up to us.
I’ve coped with the pandemic by making great inroads into my “to read” stack of
books whilst also tinkering with my own two completed novel manuscripts in the
hope of finding one or both of them a friendly publisher.
All the publications I have been in up to now have been anthologies of winning short stories with my own collection due out next year with Bridge House.
And another poem from Anne:
Me
A stack of bones, two hundred tall,
encased with precision under my skin.
Fleshed out with muscles, six hundred in all,
like chicken breasts jerked by adrenaline.
A labyrinth of nerves like the underground;
Spaghetti Junction up to my brain.
Travelling thoughts on a merry-go-round
fire the neurons again and again.
Over one hundred thousand kilometres
of lifeblood coursing through arteries and veins;
pounding a rhythm, a lifetime of metres,
in crimson and scarlet embroidery skeins.
Four hundred million breaths in a life time,
aiding forty million heartbeats each year.
Such a great work of art and a paradigm.
A veritable human biosphere.
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