Nancy Jardine Author: T is for Tales

Thursday, 24 April 2014

T is for Tales – Crooked Cat ones.

T is for Tales – Crooked Cat ones.

I'm back to my A to Z and it's time for the letter T.

My publisher, Crooked Cat, made an excellent suggestion, at Christmastime 2013, about creating a FREE anthology of short stories to be made available to the public to showcase the talents of Crooked Cat Authors. It was also suggested that if any charge had to be made for the collection it would be a very small nominal fee with all proceeds going to the same charities as was used for the FEAR collection which was compiled in 2012; Medecins sans Frontieres and Barnardos.

When asked if I was interested, I jumped at the chance – even though I’ve not written any short stories for many years, not since I was a practising teacher. Those short stories weren’t written for publication but for using as ‘scaffolding’ in story writing classes.

Once committed, I set to in January and thought about what to write. My publishers had suggested something which might be compatible with titles which were already published and using characters I’d already created.

I immediately rejected any new additions to my Celtic Fervour historical series since Book 2 had just recently been published in mid-December 2013 and Book 3 was due to be published around March 2014.

That left me only one publication with Crooked Cat which was Topaz Eyes - my ancestral/dynasty based contemporary mystery thriller. There were quite a few characters I knew I could write about from it and it seemed like a great choice, since at that time Topaz Eyes was being voted on in THE PEOPLE’S BOOK PRIZE winter section.

I had already given Teun and Keira from Topaz Eyes their happy ending and had resolved the mysteries of the Tiru Salana Emerald collection, thus any short story needed to be about secondary characters. There are a number to choose from so I picked two very likeable ones:

- Zaan who is one of the third generation cousins from the progeny of Geertje Hoogeveen who scattered the collection amongst the family

- And Fenna, the archivist, who helps to uncover the written evidence to prove the ownership of the Tiru Salana Jewels in the 1880s, when Geertje was given the jewels.