"The roses are dead,
The violets are too,
Don't mention romance,
You'll make me spew."
Francesca Burton knows all there is to know about love and romance. She knows that love is for the naïve and romance is for the delusional. Her parents taught her...
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Well that was a whirlwind!
If you've made it this far, thank you.
I started writing Frankie and Trav's story on a whim when I chanced upon the Open Novella Contest back in February. It's the first thing that I've published on Wattpad and the longest story I've ever written. I wrote it for no other reason than to see if I could.
When I sat down to type the first chapter, the world was a different place. COVID-19 was already front page news but it had yet to lock down the world. I'd just returned from a girls' trip to Sydney. I took for granted that I could go to a movie, or to a bar with friends, or visit my parents whenever I wanted. If you'd told me what was to come, I wouldn't have believed you.
At the time, I had a spare day a week that I planned to use as my writing day. In that context, writing 20,000 words before May seemed challenging but achievable. By March, I found myself working from home with young kids in tow. Suddenly, I was a corporate employee, a teacher and a childcare worker all rolled into one. Finding time or energy to write became more difficult. But it also became increasingly important to me.
In the mayhem of pandemic groundhog day, this novella came to represent something that it hadn't before - a chance to seize back a tiny bit of control in an otherwise uncontrollable world.
Four Little Words is far from perfect. I know that. The last 10,000 words were written in five days at ungodly hours after my kids were in bed. It was finished at 3am the morning it was due with minimal chance to reflect or edit. I completely rushed the ending and ran out of time to properly explore threads of the story that I'd considered to be important to Frankie's character development (sorry Amy Burgess).
When Open Novella is over, I plan to go back and give Frankie and her friends the full length story I think (hope) they deserve. Frankie, Trav, Felix, Cass, Chomper, Cec and Amy have become real people residing in my head. I'm not ready to say goodbye to them yet.
If you have any ideas that you think would enhance the story, or bits of it that you really didn't enjoy, please feel free to let me know.
