Feed the birds!

People ask me all the time how I get my inspiration for stories. The truth is always much less exciting than what they probably think. Stories come to me like jokes come to comedians, I would imagine. They pop up in my head, sometimes fully fleshed out and sometimes requiring a little work to join the dots together. But the ones I choose to work on are the ones which have characters who are more than three-dimensional. In my head, these are living, breathing entities in their own right and in some ways I have no more control over them than an absent mother does of her children!

Therefore I didn't set out to write The Boy Who Rescues Pigeons for any other reason than it was a fantastic story idea and I  thought the characters had something powerful to say. But at the beginning I wasn't sure what that would be. Now I do!

This book has been a painful journey for me and one which has been more personal than perhaps many of my other books. You see I was the little girl who fed the birds and I guess at heart I still am her, in all her frailties and foibles.

Life and time moves us all in different directions and sometimes that is far away from where we really ought to be. Slowly I am finding my way back to my rightful place - and will there be pigeons there? You can bet on it.

So introspection over, here is today's snippet, hot off my laptop. 

Oh and to quote Mary Poppins, "Feed the birds, tuppence a bag..."

Brighteyes’s empty box nearly broke his heart and for a moment his mind played tricks on him, making him see what wasn’t there - the little bobbing head, the iridescent sheen of feathers, the bright inquisitive eyes.

His heart held on to the image, eager not to relinquish it to the reality of the empty room, his empty life…

He flung open the window. It was just starting to get dark outside although the hour was not late. No birds flew high in the sky or overhead but he sprinkled the contents of the bag across the outside of the ledge anyway. They would be there ready for the morning and that was for the best anyway.

He ran a hand across the crumbs, evening them out and breaking the bigger chunks into more manageable bite sized pieces. Maybe the pie would attract all different types and sizes of birds, maybe only the braver ones would alight there. Time would tell. But he knew that as long as they were willing to come, he would be willing to feed them.

 

For more snippets of this or other books, take a look at my previous blog posts.

Happy Reading!