#anyway i love writing about rural backwater villages because

[bison-appreciation-club]

@gooseberry--fool

firstly, thank you! secondly, the similarity is unintentional lmao. i just find it a good way to open a story. i used to start right in the middle of the first piece of action as a narrative hook, but i found over time that grew quite confusing. idk maybe as my style changed i just lost the ability to write that way.

now i like starting off with a punchy sentence and a bit of context for what's going to happen later. setting up the whole storyline in the first few sentences basically. i start the action proper at the end of chapter one, ready to lead into chapter two. i haven't read enough of your writing to compare tbh. (hint hint i want to read more hint hint).

anyway as you've reblogged this twice you get the rest of chapter one (it's super short but i'll deal with that later)

Then there were the people. Treadwell’s Emporium was run by two people, and neither of them had the surname Treadwell. One was called Hebe. Surname unknown, presumed ‘ordinary’. The other was hardly ever seen and was assumed to be a recluse. Like most small rural villages, Luddesworth had more than its fair share of petty prejudices. Most of the inhabitants were elderly and adverse to change. Their attitude was one of shunning technology and any new faces. As it was, Hebe got rather a few strange looks. Her Afro, her bright pink outfits, her wheelchair. There wasn’t anything unusual about her – at least, there wouldn’t have been if she lived in a city. But here, she was unusual enough to be stared at through the window-panes. I took the diversion as an opportunity to dye my hair bright blue. Before Hebe, I had been the oddball.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Luddesworth was full of the sort of people that are often described as ‘normal’. You pass a thousand of them by each day and never think of it again. Most of them are side characters in their own lives, content to drift, clinging to rushes by the river bank, instead of chasing the currents. My parents were one of the group of young families – newly married with young children – who had moved somewhere safe and peaceful where we could gambol and play without the risk of getting squashed into roadkill, stabbed in a dark alleyway, or suffer one of the other terrible fates that plagues a parent’s mind. That was how my mother phrased it. Gambolling. But I had passed the gambolling age. What was worse, my little brother Jake hadn’t. So I was stuck. Alone. There was a primary school in Luddesworth, but no secondary. That was in Iyrton, the nearest town some three miles away, and most of my friends from school lived there. It was a lot of hassle for my parents to drive me there (or so they acted; I thought it was the easiest thing in the world), and I was forbidden from walking there. And then there was my brother to consider. I knew that things were difficult with Jake (difficult, said in whispers late at night when I was thought to be asleep), and they had to spend more time looking after him. But it hurt to be told to go to my room and do my homework and then be promptly forgotten about for the rest of the day. My parents wanted to keep me a child forever, but what was worse, they wanted to keep me as their small, quiet, second-fiddle child forever. And I couldn’t bear the thought of that.

Which is how I turned up outside Treadwell’s Emporium. And is how I became the hero of a story I never quite believed was real.

LET'S GOOOO NEW WIP

People said that Treadwell’s Emporium was always strangely busy for the little market town of Luddesworth. People coming and going at all hours – strange sorts of people at that. Aaminah Salim, who lived next to the shop, said that she had once seen a man with a ruff and stockings leave the by the front door. Nobody had quite believed that, but they’d been quick to explain it away. Perhaps he was going to a fancy dress party as Henry VIII, or had been going to a historical re-enactment. Or perhaps Aaminah had been dreaming.

The truth was that it wasn’t Henry VIII anyway. It was Francis I.