Fi Phillips

Today, I have something for you to read. It's a passage that I've decided to remove from my work-in-progress but I will use it in a future novel. This is still in first draft condition but I'd love to hear what you think and whether it creates the same emotions in the reader as it does in the writer (me). *** Aggie Endersleigh was dying. She wasn’t quite sure how old she was. She knew that the terrible magical explosion had taken place two days after her seventy fifth birthday but nobody would tell her how long ago that was. Some days it seemed that only a week or so had passed since then and on other days, when she caught sight of herself in a puddle or a window, she thought that decades must have gone by. Her grand-daughter had braided Aggie’s hair, finishing it with a tartan ribbon, and fastened her shoes for her. Such a good girl. There’d been cake and presents and lots of people laughing. Sometimes in her dreams she saw their faces but when she woke she could never...

When I began writing murder mystery plays, I had the massive advantage of writing for a cast of actors whom I had worked with for several years. I knew their voice patterns, what they looked like and just as importantly, what they were capable of portraying on stage. For me, that was an incredible luxury. When it came to my novel, I knew that I would find it easier to write if I had an idea of what my characters looked like, what they sounded like, how they moved and so on. I'm a visual person - that is my main way of perceiving the world - and as such I 'see' my stories, either as plays on a stage or as films on a big screen. I decided that alongside my storyline, character list and chapter plan, I would also put together a cast. Each character in my novel is based loosely around the thought of a particular actor playing the role of Hartley or Isabelle or some other person from my created world. Note I don't say the characters are based 'on' those actors. Th...

One of the main incentives for starting this blog was to write about the process and progress of writing my novel. I've written about so many things here that the novel news has taken a back seat so I thought I'd take this opportunity to bring you up to speed. Firstly, the title of the novel has changed. What started out as 'Split' is now 'There is a Dark Divide'. The new title is a direct quote from one of the characters in the novel. It speaks of not only the central storyline but also the world in which the storyline takes place. Secondly, in writing the novel (I'm halfway through the first draft), I've discovered a number of things that I didn't know from my original notes.The characters have told me things about themselves, details of their past and their attitudes on life (especially Hartley, he's very vocal).  I decided to keep one of the first characters you meet in the novel alive (rather than killing her off in chapter three). This ...