BOOK BLURB
Lauren Wilson is travelling by ferry to the Outer Hebrides, about to begin a new job as a social worker. When somebody sits opposite her at the cafeteria table, she refuses to look up, annoyed at having her privacy disturbed. But a hand is pushing a mug of tea towards her, and a livid scar on the back of the hand releases a flood of memories. Some people believe in the existence of a parallel universe. Does Lauren have a retrospective choice about the outcome of a terrible recent accident, or is it the bearer of that much older scar who has the power to decide what happens to her now?
Character-Building
A story wouldn’t be a story without characters. So how does it all come together? In my case, usually the idea for a story comes before the characters. They emerge as the vehicle for carrying the story. But not always – sometimes the character comes first. For example I want to write a dystopian fiction about the baby of my main character in Another Rebecca. Evelyn Iris Catriona O’Toole is born at the end of Another Rebecca (she also features towards the end of my totally-unrelated novel The Eliza Doll – I like to carry characters across from one novel to another) and I like her name so much she conjures up a character – and a novel – called EICO. Eico will be the nemesis of her petite mother, Rebecca, and she will also be in possession of slightly mystical powers. The story’s been brewing in my head for a while, carried on the back of the character.
I never deliberately pick a character’s name. I just think about them, knowing roughly their age, sex, gender and circumstances until the name they should have drops into my mind.
I don’t always like my characters but I usually have some sympathy for them. There’s always a reason for someone behaving the way they do, and different people deal in a better or worse way with similarly difficult situations. Often this will depend on what might have happened to them in the past. Bex, in Another Rebecca is shockingly selfish and a terrible mother to poor Rebecca, but you can’t help feeling a bit sorry for her sometimes, especially because it’s her alcoholism, coupled with the tragic accident in her past that dictates her behaviour.
As far as putting myself into characters (people always ask if the book ‘is really about you’, Ellie, in The Eliza Doll, is the closest character to me I’ve ever written. As a twenty-year-old she goes to live in a commune in the village of Pottersea on the estuary of the River Humber, with her musician boyfriend Jonah. She’s pregnant with their baby and she gives birth to her daughter, Rosie. Her story parallels mine in that I also moved out to a sort of artists’ commune in the same location (Kilnsea, East Yorkshire) with my musician boyfriend, and I was also pregnant. But my baby was stillborn at 26 weeks. It was difficult to force Ellie out of the parameters of my own story and mould her into an independent character. It took several drafts of the novel before I could ‘like’ it. But when I think of Ellie now she’s nothing like me and her life story completely diverged from mine.
Now that I’m in my fifties, I find my characters are getting older too. But like me, they were also once young and so their stories become multi-faceted. Lauren Wilson is the main character in Sea Babies, my latest novel. On a ferry to the Outer Hebrides, having suffered a recent tragic loss and always with an historic regret at the back of her mind, she comes face-to-face with her ex-lover of thirty years previously. But the story begins with them kissing for the first time, on Granny’s Green Steps in Edinburgh, where the book is partly set, along with locations on the Western Isles. My older characters have so much to convey of their life stories – whether in the case of Maya, the backpacking mother in my 2020 novel The Vagabond Mother, following in the travelling footsteps of her missing sons; or Lauren in Sea Babies, mourning a decision she made in her youth – about their experiences as women, and of motherhood or otherwise.
Author Bio
Tracey is the author of The Last Time We Saw Marion, Of His Bones, The Eliza Doll and Another Rebecca. Her fifth novel, Sea Babies will be released on 1 st llection, So Fast was published in January 2018. Tracey is also a visual artist. All her work is inspired by the emotions of her own experiences and perceptions.
Tracey is the mother of four grown-up children and now spends a lot of time travelling in a small camper van with husband Phil and their rescue dogs, Pixie and Luna, gathering her thoughts and writing them down.
Twitter: @authortrace
PUBLICATION DATE: 21st February 2019
PRINT LENGTH: 169 Pages
PUBLISHER: Wild Press Books
GENRE: Psychological Fiction
PURCHASE LINK...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sea-Babies-Tracey-Scott-Townsend-ebook/dp/B07KTTRRTQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1551478263&sr=1-1&keywords=sea+babies
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