Guest Post: Tracey Scott-Townsend talks about her new book Another Rebecca

Another Rebecca by Tracey Scott-Townsend

Release Date: 21st March 2015 (available for pre-order)
Publisher: Inspired Quill

Genres: Contemporary Fiction

Brook Cottage Books is thrilled to introduce Tracey Scott-Townsend to the blog. Tracey has written a great guest post for us. Thank you Tracey.

About me and Another Rebecca

I’m lucky to have a private space in which to write. I was a single parent for ten years and it was important to have somewhere, however tiny, for peace and reflection. This is my third shed. I worked as a visual artist prior to 2010 and before that everything was covered in spatters of paint and glue. 

I’m married to Phil now. We were at the same schools throughout our childhoods and I remember asking for his views on family life when we were about ten. (He swore he and his siblings didn’t fight, although his sister has since put me right on this.) Phil also gave me a silver horseshoe with a horse’s head in it and I wish I still had that.

I met him again 30 years after leaving school. We moved in together pretty quickly and got married. It was a year of immense upheavals for me. My sister died and later the same year my father did too. But it was also around that time that I took up writing seriously, starting with The Last Time We Saw Marion (Inspired Quill 2014) initially written 20 years before. I was able to give my youthful story the colour and shade of my real-life experiences. Like Jane in the book, I was now the mother of four. I had lost a baby and my middle son suffered the same condition as baby Caitlin in the book.

As well as motherhood, travelling is a marvellous source of inspiration for writing. My favourite way to travel is in the bus-with-a-woodstove with Phil and our dog, Riley. We’re always on the look-out for a decent layby to settle for the night in.

My favourite places (so far) are Ireland, the Outer Hebrides and Iceland – which I have to go to in an aeroplane, of course. Future books will be set in all of these places.

Another Rebecca, my second novel with Inspired Quill, is derived from a story I wrote in my twenties.

It was inspired by the painting There is no Night by Jack B. Yeats. I imagined the figure in the foreground coming to life and whistling for his horse. I was studying for my Art degree at the time, writing a lot as well as painting and drawing. I don’t even know where the rest of the story came from. I used to work into the early hours of the morning and I sat down one night and it poured itself onto the pages of my notebook.  It was easy to develop it into a novel all these years later. Young Rebecca is derived from my memories of being on the cusp of adulthood. She lives in a caravan as I did at the same age, (my dad was building a new family home). Like Rebecca, I also had a friend in the village who owned horses. Rebecca later moves to Newtown Linford in Leicestershire, a place I know well from a yearly camp I’ve been to since my children were small.

Initially Another Rebecca was told exclusively from the first person perspectives of Rebecca and Bex only. But then the reader could only see and know what these two claustrophobically intertwined characters were telling us and so I brought in Jack, Rebecca’s father, as the third narrator. He steps back and gives us a wider view of Bex in the past as well as adding a third voice to their present, giving us a fuller story. He also shows us how Rebecca has been damaged by both her parents.

Seventeen-going-on-eighteen is an age I identify with most when writing a character. Maybe it’s because I was that age when I left home and I remember clearly how it felt to be stepping away from my family at the same time as feeling parts of me were left behind. You are always entangled in some way. Childhood is a powerful influence on the future and my characters always struggle to shake off the shackles of theirs.

Published work

Novels:

The Last Time We Saw Marion (April 2014 Inspired Quill)

  

    

Another Rebecca (March 2015 Inspired Quill)

      

[I have also written a sequel to The Last Time We Saw Marion, as yet unpublished]

 Short Stories:

Jennifer’s Dream (Etherbooks 2014)

The Water is Wide (Etherbooks 2014)

The Man in the Sea (Etherbooks 2014)

Two Weeks in the Sun (Etherbooks 2014)

Surprised to Know (Full of Crow Fiction July 2013)

White Hope (Momaya Annual Review 2013)

Brook Cottage Books is thrilled to announce that Tracey will be touring with us in May so if you are interested in being a part of the tour for ANOTHER REBECCA then you can email me at brookbooks@hotmail.co.uk