Friday, 31 January 2020

Friday Fiction Feature: Purple Michaelmas

Friday Fiction Feature – Purple Michaelmas by Patricia Hutson

Lorraine, I would like to thank you for accepting my story Purple Michaelmas for your Friday Fiction Feature.

I have always enjoyed, writing, when our children were little I used to invent stories for them.  Most children when to bed with tales of Sleeping Beauty etc. not mine.  Because we were living during the cold war era, I invented spies, and as we travelled to Germany and Austria a great deal I was able to invent these characters. 

It was an unexpected incident at the Border post of Aachen, that really gave life to my stories.  The car in front of us was stopped by Police and we witnessed the arrest of the Bader - Meinhof a terrorist group that gave even more life to my stories.

As our children were growing up I decided that I should start writing stories for grown ups.  I had to think what genre I would use as my form of tale telling.  I did not want Detective Stories as apart from Agatha Christie I knew nothing about that world.  It was a comment from my husband that put me on the road to writing Purple Michaelmas/


Sitting in the beer garden at the Brau Haus (the Hubertus in the book) he suggested I would a story linking England and Germany together.  

I spent quite a few days trying to work out a scenario, eventually I came up with the idea.  As a working a Medium, I had come to realise that everyone is looking for that one thing that is very difficult to find.  That indefinable something, that little bubble of hope and love. 


I had my answer, so it was that Purple Michaelmas was born.  It is a love story, but not like any other.  It links body and soul. I was terrified when I first put pen to paper, then remembered something a well known writer had said: Write about what you know.

As I knew Germany and Austria really well, our local Football Club and the German team I was able to  weave their character together.   The spiritual link cam from my own experiences in my working life.

My tastes in reading are pretty catholic, I love Lloyd C Douglas, James Hilton, H Rider Haggard and the Historian Ian Wilson.  I enjoy adventure stories and factual historical ones.

Yes, my story is a Romance, something that many people will laugh at.  But, this one is different.  It gives the reader something to think about, not just happy ever after.  There are questions to be asked and answered.  Is there? Or isn't there?

I was born in India and came to England in 1958, the book is published in my maiden name in honour of my Father Harold Hutson, a soldier who was in WW1 in Baghdad with T E Lawrence together they translated Arabic books into English for the British Government.  In both wars he was in the Intelligence Corp.  and died two weeks before I was born. 

I love writing, I like to make the world as I would want it to be.  I hate the overuse of a certain four letter word.  I feel our language is descriptive enough.

Website: www.ankhara.com


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