I managed to do something today which seems to have eluded me over the last year or so – and yet was something which I’d done so easily for so much of my life. It sounds a bit pretentious and fanciful to say that I’m a story-teller, it always sounds a bit corny, so I say I’m a writer. However what I write is stories, some based on my life, some completely autobiographical, but most are the stories of the people in my head. There are whole worlds inside my tiny bonce – I never realised I have a very small head, until my family teased me about it. Classic was at my daughter’s graduation when son took her mortar board and said, “and in this is where we keep our mother”.
Back to stories, and telling them and writing them. I guess writing them is telling them on paper. I was walking back from town and thinking about an unfinished story I have been rereading. The main character is Frederico who is a lecturer at a further education college in my imaginary seaside town of Strand. Several years previously his wife unexpectedly left him for the man she was having an affair with – no-one, least of all Frederico knew she was having an affair, let alone who the man was. She left him one terrible night when the coast was lashed with a violent storm, and he – and no-one else ever saw her again. Her father was convinced that Frederico had murdered her but despite a police investigation there was no evidence that he had done so, but no trace of where she went or who with. Since the story is told from Frederico’s point of view we know that he is innocent (I’m not going to trick the reader by having the main protagonist as the guilty party!)
When the story starts, Frederico’s mother-in-law is due to have a very serious operation and begs him to tell her what happened to her daughter. Of course, he doesn’t know, but father-in-law threatens him, and a vulnerable friend of his, if Frederico doesn’t confess – or find out what happened. So this is the set-up, and I had written about half of the story, and Frederico and his best friend have gone to my imaginary island, just seven miles across the sea from Strand, following some clues they have managed to find. The fog comes down, and they are wandering around, trying to find out if maybe the missing woman came to Farholm Island to join what’s described as ‘a hippy commune’. And that’s as far as I got, Frederico in the fog!
So walking back from town, I began to think of what was happening on Farholm, and suddenly I was there – walking along the real streets on auto-pilot, but with Frederico as he tracked down people who may have known his missing wife. It was so vivid and so real, the muffled sounds, the damp and oppressive fog, the waves listlessly slapping on the shore, Frederico’s mind working overtime as he tried to imagine his wife being here – the people he meets on his misty tramp island roads… Yes, it was all there, I was there – and I was in a story as I hadn’t been for such a long time!
Maybe at long last I am clambering out of my trough of blank mindedness and disappeared imagination! I had thought I would carry on with other things, but Frederico seems to want me to help him find out what happened to his wife. Actually, I do know, but he doesn’t yet!
If you want to know more about Farholm Island, here is a novel I wrote which is set there
https://www.amazon.co.uk/FARHOLM-Lois-Elsden/dp/B08M2FXYKP/
Devastated by the death of her young husband, Deke Colefox is determined to find out all she can about the man she married, Niko Nicolaides and decides to go to his family home on Farholm Island. Dr Michael Cabus has his own secret reason for visiting the island; he too wants to find the truth about a beloved stranger. Deke and Dr Cabus arrive on the same ferry as a beautiful girl who then disappears. The islanders fear the worst as two other young women were horrifically murdered the previous year. Deke and Michael each have a personal interest in finding the missing girl, and finding her before she meets the same fate as the other two. Their desire for answers leads them to face uncomfortable truths and their lives are put at risk in an unexpected and terrifying way.
Lois Elsden 