Celebrating the Week!

If you are a magazine writer, you know how it goes. You'll have a week of sales and then one of rejections. Then you'll have nothing in a magazine only to find that the following week you have six stories in four of them - which is what happened to me last week. One of the stories in The People's Friend Special is written under my pen-name Emma Toone... but more of that another time.

I think that due to the uncertainty of what we do, we should remember to celebrate the feast as well as mourning the famine and so today, this is what I shall be doing - in case it never happens again!

The story I have picked today for the latest in my inspiration series, is one of the two I have in this month's Take a Break Fiction Feast. It is the picture of the little girl that you an see on the cover and is called, Keep it Forever, Mummy (yes, the title was changed!)

The inspiration behind this story, is a short holiday I had in Charmouth, in Dorset, with my children. My eldest daughter was around twelve and my youngest eight. We had a cottage in the village and spent the days on the beach, fossil hunting. I can still remember the look of boredom on the eldest's face when we arrived at the beach. She was at the age where she was aware of her looks and it had been a fight to get her to wear wellies and a raincoat.

As we started to hunt for ammonites, a cold wind began to blow and I must admit, I wasn't sure whether we'd find anything before having to escape the inevitable storm that was approaching. Then, I heard a shout and turning round, saw my eldest holding something up to the sky. When we got there, we saw she had found a perfect ammonite of fool's gold.

After that first find, she forgot her hair and make up and even donned a woolly hat as she searched for more fossils and I was able to see the little girl hiding inside the one so desperate to grow up.

Several hours later, cold, wet and tired, we sheltered in the Heritage Centre with its fossil display and little shop and looked at our treasures. The girl, Kelly, in my story, is just like my daughter (although a little older) and her story is a sad one (albeit with a happy ending).

This coming of age story was a very poignant one for me to write, with familiar characters, settings and themes (although the story itself was fictional) and I was thrilled to read that Keep it Forever, Mummy was magazine editor Margaret's favourite story.

I shall be sharing the inspiration behind some of my other stories very soon.