it’s your native state

Friday Fiction. Going Under.

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AFTER THE RISING. EPISODE FIVE: GOING UNDER

The story so far: Jo Devereux is back in Mucknamore, the Irish seaside village where she grew up, for her mother's funeral. In her will, her mother’s has bequeathed a pile of family papers and asked her to write about her family's part in the Irish liberation struggle in 1922.   It might suit Jp to stay on and take refuge from the raddled life she's been living in San Francisco since her friend Richard died. But how can she, now that the family pub and shop is to be sold?  And when Rory O’Donovan, the only man she ever really loved, still lives there with his wife and children and seems to think they can be friends?

You can read previous chapters HERE.

Now Read On: After Rory’s gone I go to the sitting room and slide the pictures of my eighteen-year-old self out of their envelope, to look again at this girl with her unlined face and body, to look and look until I can’t see her image any more, until it blurs and clears and mists again.  At some point I fall asleep staring into her wildly glittering eyes.

I wake with

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Change To Friday Fiction

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Because I've just been given an exciting new screenwriting opportunity (of which more anon)…  and because, as advised by Joanna last week, I need to have my published novels e-reader-ready for Christmas…  and because I'm also publishing a poetry book this month…, I find I have to put Skin Diving on hold.

This hurts. I've spent days resisting. Firstly, your feedback told me you were enjoying the chapter-by-chapter, Friday fiction slot. So was I.

And I've been carrying this story about the MacIntyre family for years. A part of me, a very big part of me, wants more than anything to write this book. That's why I started serialising it in the first place.

But I've learned enough about the creative process to know

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Skin Diving. Chapter 3.

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My New Novel (Serialised fortnightly on Fridays).

Chapter 3. Send Me A Girl.

The Story So Far: From the ‘Advanced Psychotherapeutic Facility' in upstate New York to which her father, Mack, has admitted her, Mel McIntyre mines family history and her own memory for details of a 20-year-old tragedy: the death of  baby sister, Tara.  Mel has reason to believe the mysterious circumstances of this death connect in some way to the recent suicide of her twin, Jamie. Previous Chapters Can be Read Here. Now Read On:

Ah the girl breaking out of the box. That classic image of the flamboyant 1920s: femininity dressed up as liberation.

When planning this scene to tickle Mack’s nostalgia bone, Scottie and Zelda had originally intended to deliver a cake. But they didn’t have the utensils to bake one big enough and they couldn't afford to pay a baker. (And what if it broke en route? And anyway, how did a girl get to breathe in there?)

It was Scottie who had the idea of using the

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