A Brand New World of Wonder

Sometimes when a new story comes to me it can start as a trickle but no more and over time I'll gradually add more and more to my pile of notes on the subject. Other times, like today, a story idea may start as a single droplet, or a need to release some sort of emotion, and it'll grow steadily to become like a waterfall within minutes and it'll be all I can do to write down my ideas before I lose them.

I feel so amazing right now - I don't want to sleep, or eat or sing or cry or anything else but write. This new story is so much more than I anticipated and it's fast becoming as important to me as Daphne Savoy or Allora, the characters almost as real. Maybe because it was born from a very low moment or maybe because it's a story that I should have written years ago, one hat has been brewing as a subconscious thought for weeks but never entertained.

It's just right.

I won't tell you about it on here just yet, I want to keep that my little secret for a little longer. But rest assured that as it grows I'll let you know more. For now, I'll give you a sneak peak of the very beginning. I hope you like it.

And just for the record - no, I haven't heard back from the agent yet. That isn't what this is about.

Sam xox

Down the Rabbit Hole

As she walks through haunted hallways,

She ponders of her strife;

Her memories are like always,

Torn by wrong and right.

                “I’m sorry, Eleanor, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction.”

                The words hurt, you wouldn’t believe how much so. Eleanor Price couldn’t shake them as she wrapped her scarf tighter around her and trudged further through the slush covered walkways of Fleet Street and towards the city. There had been other people around when she’d first left the Publisher’s office but that was hours ago now and as night had descended, the chill had forced Londoners from the city streets and to their warm homes.

                But not Eleanor.

                No, she was still wandering around aimlessly, lost in the troubling thoughts and depression that had been triggered by the Publisher’s hurtful rejection.

                Eleanor Price grew up in Sussex, not too far out of the city, and although she was relatively good in school that had never mattered too much to her for all she’d ever wanted to do was write. There had always been so many stories in her head she’d wanted to  share; characters that had become more like friends and family than figments of an overactive imagination. And the cliché of that way of life had never bothered her too much.

                But this afternoon, her fifth rejection by publishers both in the UK and America, had left her feeling particularly vulnerable.

                So, she’d left the offices of Cardigan and Clarke and begun to walk. She barely even felt the cold.

                Eleanor had been feeling blue lately, even before today, and it was something neither she, nor her friends, nor her psychologist could really seem to help too much or explain. And it was difficult; each day was a struggle in optimism and positivity that Elle was worried she was losing.

                As Fleet Street became the Strand and the bells of Big Ben chimed midnight in the distance, Eleanor finally drew to a stop and heaved a sigh of resignation. She wasn’t far from the Charring Cross tube station that would take her home, but she wasn’t in a hurry.

                It was Friday night, there was no rush to dive into bed for work in the morning; her cat, Chess, would be fine with his over-filled food bowl until the morning, and she had no plans – her phone had long since died anyway. The battery, as in most smart phones of the age, didn’t last so long.

                For the most part, Eleanor was pretty much free to just think and wallow in her misery a little longer.

                She sighed again and kicked some of the slush from her boots when a barely audible scratching drew her to peer around and down into an alley to her left.

                Even with her overactive imagination, Eleanor would later barely have been able to describe what exactly it was that she saw: A large rabbit, one perhaps the size of a human dwarf, stood crouched in the shadows beside an old-fashioned trash can. He wore a purple pin-striped waistcoat with a brass pocket watch on the end of a long chain attached to the breast pocket.

                She blinked. She was hallucinating; she’s finally crossed the line between writer’s imagination and insanity – all without inhaling too much of the same mercury or hallucinogens that Stephen King and Lewis Carroll had.

                Finally, she’d lost it.

                “Are you late?” She called down the alley to it.

                The rabbit twitched it’s nose and squinted back at her. “I’m sorry?”

                Eleanor was hardly even surprised at the clipped upper crust words it spoke. Of course it spoke. In for a penny, in for a pound.

                “For a very important date? No time to say hello goodbye?”

                The rabbit scoffed and brushed off its waistcoat in indignation. “You’re one of those Carrollers, aren’t you? Miss...?”

                “Price, Eleanor Price.”

                “Well then, Miss Price, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in books.”

                And with that, the rabbit turned around and strolled, very regally, down the alley in the opposite direction and out of sight leaving Eleanor staring after it.

                “Hello sanatorium,” Eleanor muttered and stepped back out  onto the Strand.

                Well, at least if she was going crazy, Eleanor figured, then her depression wasn’t going to be her biggest problem anymore.

                The first time Eleanor realised that she had depression was far earlier than her psychologist suggested it to her.

                It hadn’t necessarily been brought on at all by anything being wrong, on the contrary, Eleanor had always been a happy, optimistic girl. She’d always had plenty of friends, a loving family and had always been relatively well off. She’d never really had any sort of romance in her life, but she tried not to let that bother her either.

                A year ago, at 23, she’d finally spiralled downward enough that it had rung a warning bell with her friends and she’d been found out. It was hard on everyone, particularly since not everyone understood it when she’d always seemed like she’d had a head above water.

                But depression was like that – it didn’t always really need a reason.

                But what had caught her was her cavalier attitude to danger; she didn’t really ever seem to think she was in it. She lived alone, often walked at night alone through darkened alleys and walkways, and never once stopped to question the validity of her actions. Never once questioned her lack of fear – because that is what it was: Eleanor wasn’t afraid of danger.

                Her psychologist finally put it into words one session late last year: Eleanor wasn’t afraid of the dangerous things she did, because she wasn’t afraid of the consequences, didn’t think they mattered. Eleanor didn’t think, deep down, that she really mattered.

                And no one really knew why.

                Which is why a few weeks later, when she happened upon that same alley on the Strand, Eleanor didn’t think things through before she walked down it and into the shadows to where she’d hallucinated the rabbit in the waistcoat.

                Or at least she’d thought she’d hallucinated the rabbit. Beside the trash can, in a swath of green silk, lay the bronze pocket watch.