Whether your first draft process looks like an elegant flow chart or, as E. L. Doctorow put it, “like driving at night in the fog”, structure will eventually become relevant to your story. I know when I’m scribbling through my first pass at a new story that pacing, flow, and rhythm will shift in later drafts as I slowly find the right way to order and prioritise scenes. After writing several novels, I like to think I have some instinctive knowledge of what will make the story flow effectively, but I’m still often surprised when I read over work at how much of a difference I can make by improving its structure.

There has been recent increading pressure from the market (i.e. risk-averse publishers, and books competing with cinema, games and social media for attention) to structure novels using only tried-and-tested methods that hold attention in predictable ways. There’s nothing wrong with any of the well-known methods—I’ve used traditional 3 act structure and the ‘Save the Cat’ beat sheet in several projects. But in writing work that I want to feel more uncanny, unexpected, or experimental, I have found myself in recent years wanting to explore alternatives. If content and form are to be linked (which makes for a really cohesive, atmospheric reading experience), then I want more options in the back of my mind.

Here are just a few plot skeletons for your closet. Whether you’re writing something surreal and resistant to structure, or something in a niche genre which might benefit from a bit of ‘weirding’, hopefully these methods will inspire you as they have me…

The Folk Horror Chain

Fellow Influx author Adam Scovell’s excellent essay “The Folk Horror Chain” is tailored to film but is so useful to fiction writers alike. As a diagnostic tool, it breaks down folk horror titles to try and establish a canon for this niche genre. However, for writers in the planning or first-draft stage, it outlines a useful sequence to unlock your story and give it the unsettling feeling that horror and surreal novels are so good at evoking.

The basic structure is:

Landscape > Isolation > Old/New Clash > Happening

To put this into a one sentence pitch: “Character enters a new world via an unfamiliar setting, they become cut off from their old life, they encounter increasingly strange people or events, before a ritual or climactic transformation takes place.”

This is a useful guide for narratives about cults, witchcraft, haunted houses, and any outsiders in a new place. Though it conjures up rural tales most often, think about how it might look in an urban setting, a dream world, a secondary fantasy world, or even within the confines of a single person or house.

Kishōtenketsu

I could talk about Studio Ghibli all day (just try me!). The lingering calm of their films, even when bizarre or even frightening events are taking place, has made them favourites I return to throughout my life and can’t wait to share with my little one. My Neighbour Totoro illuminates many a quiet evening in our flat. Not all Ghibli films follow kishōtenketsu, but it does permeate many of them.

This structure came originally from Chinese poems of four lines—hence the four-part narrative structure referenced today. It travelled through the essay form and also across borders. Throughout history you’ll find examples from Korea, Vietnam, and Japan (kishōtenketsu is a Japanese term).

The basic shape looks like this:

ki (起) is from kiku (起句), meaning introduction (of characters, place, etc).

sho (承) is from shōku (承句), meaning development or receiving.

ten (転) is from tenku (転句), which means twist or change.

ketsu (結) is kekku (結句), meaning endpoint or consequence.

If you have a story which changes significantly (maybe even changing genre) at the halfway or even three-quarter mark, this structure could be very helpful to study. Likewise if you write quiet novels that don’t have a clear climax and which are described as peaceful or ‘without conflict’. Kishōtenketsu is well-known for not having the conflict beats Westerners might expect. The inciting incident may arrived as late as halfway through the narrative (though may begin to unravel from the beginning), and it might well also be the climax! Think of the shape of this conflict as a bell curve, with the highest point leaning slightly towards the back half.

6-Arc Story Structure

One for the character-driven literary writers next, and I came across this structure on Shaelin Bishop’s YouTube channel. Bishop’s work is playful with words and filled with rich interiority—while also featuring a lot of experimental style choices such as unusual points of view, and vignette chapters. If any of this rings bells to you, I’d recommend watching the full breakdown of this structure here.

This structure is great for interpersonal stories: romances, friendships, family dynamics, and so on. Readers will see the characters ravel into each other and unravel again, allowing for deft exploration of themes such as obsession or grief.

Bishop’s structure looks like this:

Introduction > Establishment > Complication > Transformation > Actualisation > Revelation

I love that Revelation follows Actualisation: just when a character has internalised a change, they are shown anew the changing nature of the world. I feel like I have a revelation each time I watch a video on this channel—I can’t recommend subscribing enough.

Closing thoughts

My debut novel, Tender, is written in four parts. At the time I thought this was completely unconscious as a decision, but in retrospect I see echoes of the Folk Horror Chain and Kishōtenketsu throughout. I still locate an inciting incident in the first chapter and a climax in the last part, which is more of a Western contemporary vibe, but the slow creep and twist of my protagonist’s world definitely reveal the workings of my research through me. I’ll be using the Folk Horror Chain as a reference again in an upcoming project, and I can’t wait to dive even further into its intricacies and strangeness.

Please do share your own recommendations in the comments—and share if you have ever used any of these structural methods!

As always, have a wonderful reading and writing week. At times like this, words are more powerful than ever. We must learn their power, work with them, liberate them, play with them. See you soon.

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This is a companion story to ‘Same Instincts’, which was originally published in Menacing Hedge magazine and which you can read below. I’m very fond of this pair, following a slightly unhinged, uncanny pair of characters and the kitten who connects them…

Lady Death

Sooterkins are not real: after a lifetime contrary to the folklore of her childhood, Isolde knows that a woman will not birth a mouse-sized, furry offspring if she spends too much time with animals, or sits on a radiator to warm herself during pregnancy. However. At eighty-five years old, she has never come so close to feeling as though something were a sooterkin to her as she has with Nyx, and so sooterkin she calls her.

“Sooterkin,” she says, “Didn’t you eat anything while you were gone?”

The emaciated kitten squelches through jellied tuna, eating so quickly she’s sure to throw it up again later. Isolde can only hope the moment of expulsion doesn’t arrive while they are in the living room; her knees no longer tolerate scrubbing carpet.

A line of sunset-pink skims the hedge outside her back door, but with the late hour it is darkening to red. Another of these hot September days, the sort that could unflinchingly kill off either Isolde or Nyx if they found themselves in the wrong spot at the wrong time.

When Nyx vanished three days ago, Isolde had wondered if their time together was ever meant to last. She did what she could to search, of course—she went through the bins, combed the garden’s delighting knots, and told any neighbour who’d listen on her afternoon walk. But she hadn’t been sick with worry. She’d had a wonderful month with the little creature and she was grateful. If a kind child had discovered an unchipped stray, and taken it home with a rapture of pleas to keep it, then que sera, sera.

But now Nyx is back, the difference is palpable. As Isolde brews her evening tea on the hob, and nibbles on lavender biscuits, her heart swells with love for the bald-patched little thing.

After sitting in the living room for a while and regaining their strength, Isolde shuffles with Nyx to the bathroom. She opens the bath unit door and nudges the kitten inside with her foot. Then, she turns on the water and laughs at Nyx’s yowls. They are soaked through in seconds, Isolde’s hair sticking to her chest and clinging down her stomach, which jaunts to one side after her hip replacement.

She very much enjoyed having her hip replaced. This new metal instrument was the first segment of her armature, as she thought of it. With a few more years of life she might add a metal leg, a metal shoulder. Slowly her skeleton would be replaced, and her flesh would be draped upon a wire model, and she would be worthy of a natural history museum.

She turns off the water. Nyx shivers. They climb out of the unit and Isolde dries herself before leaning over, carefully, to scoop Nyx into a flannel for a thorough blotting. No sign of ticks or fleas, and other than the lost weight she seems healthy. Still an improvement on her condition when the two of them had first met.

A month ago—maybe more, all days feel like a single long day—she found a ball of fur the size of a rat on the pavement near her house. It mewed when she prodded it with her cane. Like the stork delivering a babe, so the world had chosen for her a last-chance dependent.

As they make their way towards the back of the house on the red paisley carpet (not her choice, here when she arrived) Nyx slaloms between her legs, purring like some mechanical toy. Save in the shower, she has hardly stopped purring since her three-day runaway ended and Isolde plucked her from the hands of the boy outside.

It was the boy from number twelve on the street below who found her, and when it came to that boy, Isolde knew the way his soul was turning. The first time she’d seen him was on a brisk Spring morning several years ago, when she was still grieving Harry. She was descending the steps on the way to the garden centre in the hopes that a thousand little terracotta pots would lift her. The boy didn’t see her. He squatted by some cross-hatched fence, easing what looked to be a limp pigeon into a shoe box. He was ungloved, unknowing, clearly unfamiliar with dead bodies. And yet he exuded such confidence in what he was doing that he didn’t look back over his shoulder before closing the box and heading home. Isolde knew then that he was like her.

Taxidermy is one of very few fields in which you can find joy in the taking apart of dead things, she thinks as she enters her workshop, which is really an old bedroom filled with desks and boxes. Nyx scrambles under a desk to find a cardboard box worthy of cosying into, as had become her routine before her disappearing act. Isolde takes her seat at the broad workbench, flicks the lamp on, and lifts the bell jar off of the squirrel. Only the nuts and seeds remain to be added, and she had been out searching for such items earlier today when she came across the boy holding quivery Nyx in his hand.

Isolde doesn’t know how close her kitten came to an unnatural ending. She’s not even sure the boy kills his prey. Perhaps, like her, he’s a carrion hunter. When she found the boy with Nyx, his eyes (which had probably only observed thirteen years of the world) were wide with shock, his eyebrows high with doubt. There might be time to reach that turning soul, she thought.

That’s why she invited him in, she thinks as she fixes a nut between the stiff claws of her latest project. It stares up at her with lifeless glass eyes, but she’s sure it looks happier.

The boy was young, and he hadn’t killed her kitten, therefore he was probably not the killer she’d feared he was: he was instead a little purveyor. One who wished to collect, analyse, and understand. So, she had paid him with two items for the return of Nyx, as he shifted from foot to foot in her hallway. Harry’s old binoculars, with oil-stained eyepieces. They were heavy on her wrists, no longer practical. A ten pound note, because maybe that was enough for him to buy some distraction in this day and age. He retreated with his tail between his legs, and she thought of the countless creatures’ lives she may have saved. Squirrels, rabbits, birds, and kittens would now live their full lives, and if he still needed to understand their bodies afterwards, he had seen the taxidermied Mister Smokes displayed on her cabinet. He had seen what was possible.

Isolde pins dried moss to the base of the squirrel, and spends some time fixing its fur into jubilant shapes. She posed it alert, stretching the skin tight over its armature so its head is tilted upwards, the nut gripped preciously in its clutches, ears pricked and tail bushy. It will rest forever in a state of pure instinct.

When she had brought out his rewards, the boy was staring at Mister Smokes on the hallway dresser, surrounded by all the things that had made him the cat he was. Decorative tuna tins from around the world, the tooth he lost in a fight with a glass door, and a pink mouse on string. The boy had asked if there were more taxidermied animals within her house and Isolde had lied, telling him her career was exclusively in servitude to museums. It wasn’t a complete lie—no ostrich paraded the living room, no lion’s head presided over her headboard.

But Mister Smokes had been the first of many retirement projects. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer the week her first state pension payment came in. Not wanting to see him suffer, she had him put to sleep at the vet once his symptoms became difficult on a daily basis. She took his body home, excised the enormous and previously inoperable tumours, and taxidermied him. His last resting place was not in the pain of uncontrollable growths, but his favourite spot in the house, where the morning sun rose to turn his green eyes topaz. That had been the hardest part of the process: painting a gold-tinged iris worthy of the body.

Isolde sighs. The squirrel is complete. She has no buyer yet, but surely one will appear, as they always do. Certain types want a memento mori in their home, a vanitas, and once this idea occurs to them it’s hard to let go until they have secured one.

A lost mew muffles through the workshop. Isolde turns the main light on (nowadays her eyes prefer only the soft lamp light over the workbench) and jumbles through the lines of boxes. On the first row is clothes, the second books, the third kitchenware, the fourth taxidermy materials and equipment.

“Nyxie?” she calls. The cry is louder. She eases herself down the final aisle, where her works-in-progress await her energy. Another squirrel, young, curled into permanent hibernation. An owl, donated, found by a little girl a few doors down, whose parents are unusually unbothered by what Isolde does. A swallow—a rare and special find— wings spread in flight. She would never have told the boy who found Nyx about this private collection, however much she thought he needed the inspiration. She feels a personal relationship with each of them. They are each a spiritual sooterkin, in some way.

Nyx, it turns out, is stuck in the large box on the very end of the aisle—of course. Its bifold lid has flapped open, and curiosity got the better of her. She sits, paws together and turned out like a ballet student, on top of a tupperware box filled with coils of wire. The large meshes to her side have prevented her from trying to climb to freedom, threatening her with their sharp, unfinished edges. There’s a human torso at the bottom, a pair of hands laid either side, and the beginning of a skull on top.

“That’s my armature, little one. You’re getting ahead of us,” she says, leaning to scoop the kitten up. “I plan to take care of you a while longer yet.”

She wheels them back to her workstation and replaces the bell jar over the completed squirrel.

“You must be exhausted, Nyxie. After three days on your own. Shall we get ready for bed?”

Isolde gets up slowly, leaves her workshop, and makes her way back up the corridor to the bathroom, absentmindedly checking Nyx’s ears (warm), nose (dry, flaky), and claws (split, sharp).

“Where did you go, anyway? Did you visit next door and stare at the indoor angora through their bay windows? Did you…”

It’s perfectly alright with Isolde that she’ll never have the answers to these questions. The answers are for Nyx to know; they are her story.

Nyx likes to curl up on the towel by the sink, so Isolde puts her there while she removes and rinses her dentures. It is funny, she thinks, that when somebody does find her body, and her armature, if they feel so moved as to taxidermy her (as she has specified in a drafted will in her bedside table drawer), they will be able to place her original teeth back into her mouth, for she keeps them in a tin beside the toiletries.

Nyx purrs loudly. Isolde watches her for a moment, and sighs, “Oh, my sooterkin. Little child. Best company.”

Then she looks at herself in the mirror. How will a stranger paint her eyes, she wonders, with their green flecks through grey, their deep brown centres, the dots of pinkish orange that scatter like stars near her left pupil?

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My dad recently told me about the concept of a mast year, which 2025 appears to be—based on the wet, mild weather of 2024 in the UK, followed by a dry spring and summer this year. A mast year happens when trees, shrubs and other plant life overproduce fruit and seeds in order to compensate for and balance with an excess of animals.

Seed-eating animals like squirrels are everywhere this year, and in order for their offspring to survive, trees need to make sure that they’re producing more seeds than usual. Even if the majority do get eaten by animals, the surplus seeds are still able to fall to the ground and sprout, or travel on the wind and disperse effectively.

So, we’re talking about over-production to maintain balance—and there’s something really beautiful about that, but also something quite intense and overwhelming about it. And it made me think about how this year has been my own kind of mast year. In 2024 I had a kid, and just about six months later sold my debut novel.

While my child was very small I was drafting my second adult novel, and this year I’m drafting my third—alongside lots of short stories, too. This is all in the hopes that one of these projects soon becomes book deal number two. I don’t have a set pipeline for this yet, so I suppose what I’m doing is getting all of the ideas that I currently have out of my mind and on to pages. If they exist in abundance, surely one has a chance of sprouting?

Basically, I’m overproducing like the trees and the shrubs! And it’s having the same kind of effect on me, spiritually: it feels very beautiful but overwhelming. It feels like I don’t have time to be working on this stuff, especially now I have a toddler, a job, and plenty of other personal stuff that’s filling my mind. But it’s also so freeing and beautiful when I have a day to myself, however few and far between those are. When I’m able to write a couple of thousand words, it feels like scratching the best itch ever. It feels like finding myself again, even though I also feel like I never really left. I’m always brewing stuff, but it’s amazing to actually get that stuff out of me and into a story that I can share.

I suppose I’m writing this to celebrate a wonderfully creative year, but also to remind myself to slow down as we come into the colder months. For a start, it’s sickness season: and anyone with a child in nursery or school knows how that goes! But I do also want to allow myself space to rest and hibernate creatively a little. I have set myself the goal of finishing a current novel draft by the end of the year, but I don’t want that to come at the expense of burning out during December. So, as my mast year comes to a close, here’s what I hope to do to maintain a sense of balance, if it can be had…

Store ideas for later

Like a squirrel with a good acorn. I need to save ideas for later and not feel pressure to explore every idea the moment it comes to me. With a month or two sitting in my Notes app, the idea might become something even better.

Let evenings be evenings

I tend to try and write after my little one has gone to bed, as it’s the main quiet time in my day. But I think I need to set one night a week when no writing is allowed to occur! I would rather have an hour of relaxed time some nights, so my brain is refreshed for the next writing session—whether that’s the next day or in a few days’ time.

Go on winter art dates

Artist dates are a concept from The Artist’s Way, and I’ve always found them really inspiring. It’s much harder to just grab my things and head out for the day now, but it’s not impossible if I plan for it. I’d love to find a couple of exhibitions or just nice cafes/libraries where I can go for the day and write, on a day when I’m not working or child-wrangling!

I’d love to hear more suggestions and wintering ideas below. After a period of intense creativity, do you have any fun ways of winding down and giving yourself space to rest?

Hopefully if I can get the balance right, winter should be a chance to reset ahead of another inspiring year ahead… though honestly, I don’t think I need another mast year anytime soon!

Happy reading and writing this week, lovely readers.

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Tender has been out in the wild for an entire month. I’ve taken part in my first events, signed my first copies, and stopped in my tracks several times, remembering that my book is on shelves. Anyone could pick it up—how exciting, and how unbelieavable that truly is.

As I work on book two and maybe three (it’s not always easy to tell whether a draft is going to make it to the shelves one day, after all), I’ve been recalling the sticking points of Tender and how I overcame them. In particular, writing the final three chapters of Tender was a rollercoaster: I wrote quickly, excited to reach the end and discover what I really wanted to say as the author. The scenes arc up and down, from melancholy to desperation to the final acts of horror/hope. And when I first approached the climactic end, I was kind of afraid to commit. I didn’t want to be pidgeon-holed as a horror writer (I hope to write different genres in the future), and I was unsure if readers would be as excited about the weirdness as I was. My favourite novels always go completely off the rails, but surreal or twisty endings can be divisive for readers.

Because of the nerves, it took some time for me to find and embrace the right ending for Tender. In part, I think that was due to a sort of oxymoronic coming-together of genres and goals in my work, which I jokingly call “self-help horror”. I wanted to push the body-horror in Nell’s arc to a pinnacle, while maintaining a sense of hope and compassion. I won’t say too much, but Nell as a character is desperate for acceptance and yet reluctant to accept it: her loneliness defines her darkest moments but also her revelations.

And there was another blocker: I didn’t want Nell’s story to feel neatly finished. While my brain is a very different place to hers, I wanted to reflect through her the continuous journey of mental health recovery. I have OCD and anorexia, and though I’m mostly recovered and stable they are still regular companions to my daily life, and my unhealthy coping habits when I’m caught off-guard. They inch into my thought patterns and also my art. They are, in some ways, inseparable from me, and I wonder if the Nell who exists beyond the pages of Tender would be the same. To fully close off her journey felt somehow insincere.

So there I was, faced with a balancing act in my last few chapters: to maintain hope for Nell’s future while not wrapping things in a bow, and also to amplify the horror as far as I could.

The final decision came from a dinner table conversation I had with my husband. This is a frequent occurence when I’m drafting or doing a first edit, as he’s a fantastic idea generator. I arrived with three options for how Nell could ‘meet’ the true self she had been hiding for so long. He took it all in, and then said, “You’re being too normal with this. You should just…” And there’s the spoiler! He put into words what I had been blocked on: that Nell had to have a chance to bury her past self in the most striking way. We continued to discuss how this would look and feel, and I came away ready to plan the ending. I’m pretty sure the draft was complete within the next week or two. So thank you, Darren, unblocker extraordinaire!

Beyond that climactic scene there were several non-spoiler examples of where I had to let the weirdness out. The bug scene—readers will know the one—was actually quite a last-minute addition. There was always going to be a breakdown moment outside of Nell’s flat in Bristol, but I’m so glad I continued working into it, adding more and more creepy details, because it became an externalisation of Nell’s inner turmoil in a way that captured her growing connection (or curse) with nature. And that, of course, encouraged me to get back and thread more critters into earlier scenes: the bee landing on Nell’s hand when she talks to her mother, and several instances where she imagines ants or flies on her skin, but finds none when she looks.

I’m a big fan of Weird fiction, with the capital W. Stories that hint and suggest horrors beyond our understanding (whether cosmic, supernatural, etc) rather than traditional ‘monsters’, and that don’t necessarily explain all of their mechanics but evoke a sense of terror and discomfort that stays with the reader beyond the page. Overall, pushing my work just a little further into the gross, uncomfortable details was liberating to me. And by peppering the narrative with Weird scenes, balanced on the foundation of slow dread and intense passion that flows through the rest of the novel, I felt like I was able to bend genres slightly and embrace my love of strangeness.

Following these additions and intensifications, I was nervous about how to pitch the novel—but with Influx’s help I think we nailed it. Luke Bird’s fantastic cover has the perfect balance between creepy, edgy undertones and an appearance of delicate beauty. When people ask the genre, I now say “literary horror” and “weird girl fiction”, as these categories fit the novel well and are definitely both having a moment in the spotlight. It feels like a stroke of luck that the kind of writing I love most is thriving in our collective imagination. But of course, I do still get plenty of comments asking how scary the book is going to get, or if there’s a chapter they might skip! I love how weirdness can get under a reader’s skin, and at least that tells me I’ve nailed the atmosphere :)

If you happen to be in the Liverpool area and want to learn more about Tender, you might like to join myself and the incredible Lucy McKnight Hardy (author of Water Shall Refuse Them and Dead Relatives) in conversation at the Dead Ink Bookshop on November 20th!

‘Du Plessis weaves an intricate garland of folklore, body horror and elegant surrealism into this intriguing and disturbing novel. The intrinsic power of nature, and the threat it can hold over humanity, loom large in this absorbing, weird and unsettling debut.’
– Lucie McKnight Hardy

Buy Tender at Bookshop.org

Get the audiobook at Libro.fm

It is, at first glance, a day like any other. I drop the little one at nursery and go to a café where I start work for my freelance job. I find a playlist of ‘focus’ music, but inevitably find my way back to AURORA or The Beatles. But at a second glance it becomes clear that I’m twitching, anxious, excited. Today is unlike any other day; today my debut novel appears on bookshelves around the UK, and in warehouses waiting for online orders from around the world. In other words: eek.

Tender is officially in the wild!

This book is clear evidence that I never got over my childhood fears of/ fascinations with nature. The first bloody bite I watched a lion tear from a gazelle, narrated by David Attenborough, on a Sunday night. The obsessive research into sharks, water fleas, carnivorous plant species, and fungi. Nature’s rollercoaster between nurturing and rending is embedded in everything I write about, but especially in my botanical body horror tale.

I am still asking myself whether this book is about the environment, body issues, OCD, sexuality, existentialism… Perhaps because I’m a young writer still trying to figure out what I want to say, or perhaps because it’s about all of them at once and that’s the point. I suppose that’s up to the reader now! I hope you read Nell’s story with a smile and maybe an occasional wince, I hope you think about it the next time you see a flower or a hot sunrise.

What I do know for sure is that this book sprang from the most wonderful root system: my family, friends, and publishing team. Mum, Dad, Jim, Darren, C, Abi, Gary, Dan, Fleur—all integral to bringing this book into the world. Thank you.

September is truly the perfect month for this book, which is set between a late summer heatwave and creeping autumn. If you’re looking for something spooky to add to your TBR, you can learn more about the book here, or order it below…

Bookshop.org (support indie bookshops!)

Waterstones

Blackwells

Amazon (paperback/ebook)

I am so excited and grateful to finally have this book out in the world. I hope you enjoy it!

Now, onto frantic drafting of the next projects, in the hopes that one of them turns into book 2…

Recently I shared a post about the process of writing my debut novel, but now we’re only a week away from the launch in UK bookstores on September 25th, I wanted to offer more to you, a maybe-future-reader. Here are some snippets and hints to help you decide if this is going on your Halloween TBR…

Tender is a “lit-horror”/folk horror book about a botanist who digs up more than she expects from ancient fenland in Somerset. Nell must untangle her past and future from the murmurings of the earth beneath her before she finds herself buried, too.

“What’s your book about?”: Quick-fire round

What? An archaeobotanist grapples with her past and present identity while digging up a mysterious, ritualistic burial site.

Who? Nell, a twenty-eight year old plant scientist, who holds herself to unrealistic high standards, and her sister Liz, who forces her to confront their difficult past and personalities…

When? Contemporary—the early 2020s, against the backdrop of acidifying farmland and blazing heatwaves.

Where? A farm in the Somerset Levels, close to where the Nell and Liz grew up.

POV: Third person present tense, following Nell. I loved writing in this close, eerie point of view. Who might be ‘watching’ Nell alongside the reader?

What are the themes? Personal growth, shame, and self-acceptance.

How scary is it? I’d say it leans more gothic and unsettling in tone, but there are several scenes featuring body horror.

Content warnings? The aforementioned body horror (especially involving skin), some disordered eating and self-harm. If it were a movie it would probably be an 18!

“Character or plot-driven?”

Character, no doubt about it. The narrative takes place over a few months during a dry, baking summer, and largely follows Nell’s internal journey. We follow her as she entangles herself in toxic relationships, strange behaviours and increasingly ‘wild’ thoughts. Nell wears a mask day to day, doing her best to look like the woman she thinks she ought to be, but it won’t be long before she will have to accept the things about herself that she’s tried to bury.

“The vibes?”

I took a writing course when I was drafting the novel, and during one of the sessions we had to come up with a short descriptor that summed up the theme and vibes of our work. Mine was, “monstrously feminine coming-of-age”. I wanted to write about the body, and both the joys and discomforts of being ‘feminine’ (in Nell’s case, feelings of wildness clashing with fears about being seen and taking up space).

Here’s a little word cloud I wrote alongside the pitch…

“Can I read a bit?”

Oh, go on then. Here are some snippets from Tender…

I don’t want to say too much more, both for fear of rambling (who, me?) and fear of spoilers! But I’ll sign off for today by saying: if you do happen to come across my book in a bookstore, and pick it up, and tumble into Nell’s strange world, I am so grateful to you.

Have a lovely reading and writing week 🌹

Dearest reader/scroller,

If you’re a reader or writer looking for new ways of telling stories, I can’t recommend Interactive Fiction (IF) highly enough. Think retro, choose-your-own-adventure games, but often with beautiful artwork and moody 16-bit tunes as well. At least, that’s the kind of rabbit hole I’ve fallen into on itch.io lately.

I love how interactive fiction can make us question, rethink, and explore a character’s perspective, or even undermine the meaning of a story in interesting ways. What does it mean if a reader gets to choose an ending for your story: how many endings will you give them? How will each one make them feel? The possibilities make my wee narrative designer brain very happy.

I suppose I ought to get to the point… My short story, The Branches, is now available for you to read! It’s a sci-fi fiction piece following a woman working on a desolate planet outpost. What she discovers will change her, and not always in the ways she wants. She must make decisions, and choose a path towards…

Care?

Escape?

You decide.

The story takes 15-20 minutes to play/read, and leans very much to the fiction side (although I’m hoping to make some more game-y stories soon).
I wrote this while grappling with the new-to-me trials of parenting. You never know if what you're doing is the right thing, or who will judge you, or how you might judge yourself. I wanted to write about the self-sacrifice that can be required whenever we decide to care for and nurture something else, while using a more abstract setting to tell it. However, I also wanted to leave space for the main character to make a variety of choices, including those that might seem self-destructive or unhelpful. This expanded the story’s outer limits, to create something not necessarily about parenting, but about creating anything new—an artwork, a houseplant, an idea. How do we know when to step away, or when to step closer?

Anyways, I hope you enjoy playing around with it for a while, seeing how things might work out differently (or not) depending on the path you choose.

Read / Play 'The Branches' now!

Only two weeks until Tender launches in UK bookshops! If you enjoyed the feral plant energy of The Branches, you might enjoy my debut folk-horror novel…

Learn more about Tender here.

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June by the Lake

June stared at her reflection so long it stopped looking like her. The dry, golden skin turned warm mauve in the evening light, night-sky hair flecked with snow stars—those were hers. But the lines around her mouth and eyes, and tired, dilated pupils? A stranger’s.

She lay prone at the edge of the dark lake until the melting snow beneath her body reached inside, spreading like anaesthetic. Three days she’d been at the chalet, and on her first trip outside she was already losing it. June sighed, thankful the off-season was setting in, so nobody would have seen her earlier, shuffling down the hill in fluoro pink ski boots, only to collapse by the glorified pond.

She rolled onto her back, escaping the uncanny gaze of her double. Above, the eerie disc of the setting sun was veiled with clouds. They wafted over it like the lightest chiffon. A surprise solar flare would shoot auroras over France this week, June had seen on the news. If the skies cleared, she would watch them alone.

You look miserable.

June froze. The only other souls around at this time would be groundskeepers from the nearby hotel, or neighbours on an evening walk, but this voice was familiar. She lurched up to face the speaker, but found only the line of conifers leading back to the chalet.

It’s a shame you’re so miserable here, when here is so beautiful. A bit of a waste.

“Is this some sort of trick?” June asked. “Please come out, I’m not in the mood.”

Turn around.

June shuffled to face the lake once more. There was a woman in the water. She emerged from a neat, thawed circle, several metres out. Otherworldly, her hair clinging to her neck in wavy tattoos, apparently naked.

“What the hell are you doing?” June found her leg muscles and scrambled to the waterside. “You’ll freeze!”

She outstretched both arms, not quite able to dive in herself. The woman ducked under the ice, and frog-kicked to the muddied bank, completely unbothered. June shrugged off her jacket and met the stranger’s purple-blotched body with warmth.

“Are you lost? Is someone here with you?” June was already listing possibilities in her head. Was she lost, ill, or taking part in some obscure healthcare trend? But the woman’s face was soft, uncreased. Her lips met in an unreadable smile.

Let’s go.

The chalet peeked over the treetops and could be seen from anywhere nearby. June hated that, hated feeling observed when she was trying to escape. But it explained how the Lake Girl was able to lead them effortlessly to the door. She must have seen June stumbling down earlier, after all. That was how she knew the way. June picked up a sharp-looking branch in case.

The chalet was a two floor, A-framed wooden cabin, with large glass windows illuminating the front elevation. Her dad’s lifelong dream, so he could come and hike whenever he wanted. It was so jarring, every approach to the house without her family, without the person she’d imagined bringing here for the rest of an imagined life. They crossed the tarmac and stone path to the front door, which the Lake Girl opened without a key. June wondered if she’d left it unlocked. They went inside.

-

The Lake Girl made matcha lattes just as June liked—mixing the powder with honey to make a paste, and filling the cup with steamed milk. She fit all of June’s clothes. She had a way with words that deflected conversation around her origins or her intention. But she talked, constantly. In that strange way that wasn’t quite a voice. The words appeared in June’s head as clear as if whispered into her ear. Even over the length of the chalet, the girl reading under a pile of blankets and June shivering under the outdoor shower. So, after three days with no brutal murder—not a hint of unrest—her presence became normal.

Between restaurant trips to nearby villages, and the gentle, day-long walks that meandered through a purple haze of crocuses, June didn’t notice the daily messages bleeping in her pocket. She wanted only to watch the blithe body ahead of her, dancing through the grass as sunlight wove through her hair.

The two women were not, in fact, identical. The Lake Girl sat with a straight back, like she’d actually continued those yoga classes June began before the break-up. Her smile was easier, wider, uncaring how it dimpled her cheeks. And though she wouldn’t talk about where she came from, she could talk about anything else. They wove words in and out, deep into the night, lying beside each other. June watched the stars vibrate through the ceiling window, as the Lake Girl traced a finger over the gap where a ring should be, and folded their hands together.

-

On the fifth night, over glasses of wine, June finally realised that she, too, held secrets from her companion.

“We haven’t talked about why I’m here,” she said. The Lake Girl’s eyes widened, white and deep brown marbles. June clinked her glass onto the coaster and fetched her phone. When she returned, she dropped onto the sofa and passed the phone with the message app open.

The Lake Girl scrolled through twenty unanswered pleas from Chris.

“It was him who left.” June snuggled into the blankets. “Him who said he couldn’t stand me anymore. He said I became a different person over the last few years. After university, the magazine job, no time, only work. Then my cysts, it was like something was removed from me along with them. Chris said things to me I swore I’d never forgive. And now he wants to talk again.” She flinched at the three month-old twinge, a wound that healed wrong. Her finger throbbed with emptiness for the first time in a week.

Are you a different person?

June looked up from her cramped foetal position to the Lake Girl.

“Are you?” she asked.

You know the answer.

June sniffed, and gathered the older, rattier blankets into a pile.

“We should watch the aurora. We’ll miss it if we don’t go soon.”

Only cracking twigs broke the silence as they trekked to the lake. The water seemed invisible in the darkness. They found a dry patch of earth on the bank and laid out the blankets. The ground was firm with Spring frost and June wished she’d brought cushions, but the Lake Girl pulled her down before she could protest.

Twenty minutes hushed by, and June wondered if her companion had fallen asleep. But when she looked across, the Lake Girl’s eyes were open, serene, reflecting pins of light. The Lake Girl pointed north.

There it is.

First, green smudges of light, like an afterglow. Then, winding ribbons of connection, subtle waves across the horizon. June drew breath for the explosion, the magic. But after another half hour, the aurora had not brightened. Neither the lime nor the aqua nor the lavender she had seen on Instagram and in brochures. It was an untouchable, shy emerald that she knew wouldn’t photograph. Even her memory wouldn’t pin it down.

June found a tear rolling down the side of her face, sticking to her hair in crystals.

“It’s not what I expected,” she said.

That’s okay.

June ducked her head into the Lake Girl’s embrace, a growing understanding heavy as a stone in her chest, and they lay quiet in the knowledge that when June awoke the next day she would be alone.

If you like the idea of transforming women, otherworldly places and moments, and the uneasy wildness of nature, you might like Tender.

From the blurb:

“Nell has curated a perfect museum of the self: a successful career in archaeobotany, a pastel Instagram filled with flowers, and an uncompromising manicure routine. She’s convinced that her veneer of perfection will mask the parts of her she’d rather not think about.

When two ‘bog bodies’ are discovered in elaborate floral graves in a Somerset fen, Nell seizes the opportunity to excavate their secrets. But the deeper she digs into the fertile, waterlogged earth, the more she uncovers memories of her unsettled childhood and strained relationship with her sister… and the more her body manifests her own wildness in ways she can’t ignore.”

In UK bookshops September 25th 🌹

Thank you for reading! Look out for snippets from Tender and more here on Fictive Figments in the coming weeks.

The format comes from UK women’s literary magazine, Mslexia. I was lucky enough to place a story with them back in issue 94 a couple of years ago (‘All That We Made’), and I’m a long-time reader. I’ve always loved their ‘1,000 ways to write a book’ section, which is placed above a longer author interview. In this snappy summary, the author lists out the ways they string together enough words to make a book. And, of course, they really are all different! I love being reminded that there is no one way to be an artist. As long as you have an open heart, listening ears, and the itch to self-express, the method can take whatever shape suits you.

So, without further ado…

The ‘du Plessis’ method for penning a novel

You start with Google Docs

One file for brain dumping ideas, one for early research (arranged under useful headers if you’re feeling organised), and one for the first ‘images’—see next section.

You identify the ‘first images’

When you say images, you mean those short and impactful scenes that are likely to inspire the overall emotional arcs of the novel. They’re the first moments that come to you like snippets of cinema. (In Tender’s case, a girl sitting alone, picking sharp flowers out of her skin.)

You get stuck in a few research loops

…before realising you need to get some actual words down.

You do the above during naptimes/at night

Heavy-lidded, sometimes feeling angsty and ready to snap the laptop shut. But these moments are precious: you try to make the most of your writing time and be grateful for it. It isn’t regular, and it isn’t scheduled, but it is yours.

You don’t know what the ending is when you start out

Once you might have called yourself a ‘plotter’ or ‘planner’, but these days it’s all very spontaneous, floaty, and un-pin-downable. You draft in near darkness, looking ahead for the occasional beacon of light that will eventually lead to a stronger second draft.

You write most scenes in the order they occur

…but some will inevitably jump around during editing.

You draw on how things made you feel rather than direct events

Unless you’re writing narrative non-fiction, you try to pick out the emotional beats of the big moments in your life, and wrap those in the specific narratives of your characters, making your feelings into theirs. From there, they will become more specific, and might end up looking quite different to your own, but probably more interesting for it.

You throw away the rules of grammar and let the character’s inner voice win

Sometimes on purpose, and sometimes because it feels like your unique writing ‘voice’… Though the dashes and repetitive phrases often need cutting down in edits!

You can write a book in three or four months

And will need twice as long in edits.

You know not every day is a writing day, and that’s okay

You’re only human, and life is demanding. Each writing day will leave you feeling energised, and ready to cope with what else life throws your way.

You reach a point where you can’t see the forest for the trees

A wall will magically appear, maybe a few re-reads in, and you suddenly won’t be able to pinpoint the current flaws in the project (even though you know they are there, and the effect they have on you). That’s how you know it’s time to share.

You really need to keep your phone in another room

Even with notifications turned off, and apps kept to a minimum, that little screen pulls you back with miniature distractions. Maybe one day you’ll find a nice little tray for it and keep it in the kitchen.

You try (really try!) and practice self-care throughout the process

It can feel like there’s ‘no time’ to look after yourself during a novel-drafting period, but there will always be little pockets where you can do something to stay healthy. A short walk, the ritual of making tea, a hairwash, and a book to refill the well. Your busy brain deserves some compassion and rest, and your work-in-progress will thank you for it too.

Tender is available for pre-order in UK outlets and at https://www.influxpress.com/tender.

‘A lush, intoxicating debut where secrets are poison and every touch carries the risk of contamination. A story of obsession and transformation, written with the relentless creep of untamed weeds and the bite of a thistle.’
– Kirsty Logan, author of Now She Is Witch

I’m back, after burning myself out so quickly with a new job, book promo and writing a new novel! Hopefully there will be some consistency in my upload schedule as we move towards Autumn. I’m digging up a short piece from the archives today, trying to share more work here on Substack as my book launch approaches (see below for more on that).

The plot (okay, ‘plot’ might be an overstatement for this one): An avoidant young woman attempts a luxurious (??) but potentially deadly flirtation with nothingness…

Three words to describe this piece? Escape, privilege, void.

And as ever, for more stories and thoughts about writing…

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Store me in a cool, dark place

Louise Cavendish, wet preparation, that’s what her label would read. Lou’s champagne-pale reflection stares back from the syrup, unlaughing. Her foot hovers, moon-luminous, over the tank. It’s silly, because there’s nothing out here worth hesitating for. Air whistles through her teeth, like she’s stepping into a hotel pool after sauna heat. One toe at a time. It’s eerie, lukewarm. She eases down from the ladder, and stands on the wide step before the deep. This was an afterthought in the design: she’s in no hurry to leave again.

As the concoction reaches waist-height, a two year-old memory bobs like a jewel of body oil on bathwater. Just before the world changed, Lou met Charlotte and Emily for a much-needed spa day at The Grand. After a swim and massages, she noted their voucher included thirty minutes in the sensory deprivation pod: a silver pill that might shoot them to Mars. It was only on Emily’s dare that she clambered in. Darkness closed over, under, everywhere. She squealed, then fell silent. Something whispered through her fibres. Flirted with her soul for what felt like hours. When the lid opened, she blinked several times before finding her lips and a quip about twee spiritual enlightenment. They all giggled. Reality snapped back into place like a bag buckle. But when the others toasted the future with prosecco later that day, the whisper tickled Lou’s ear. It wanted her back.

The beginning of a love story.

Now, she smiles and slides petrol-smooth to the edge of the step. A final check of the air filter. A tightening of the mask. Then, freedom. Surface tension suspends her, embryonic, floating towards the centre of the tank. The dark is waiting here. She pushes her head below.

Of course, had the lockdowns not happened, Lou’s romance with nothingness might never have gone beyond the pod. Back then, she had a wholesome, stable relationship with life. The museum overflowed with tourists. Front of house, in a pressed red dress, she was in charge of directing lost souls and displaying interesting jars to lure others in. It never occurred to her to join the ten thousand specimens they preserved so well you could see tiny claws and delicate alveoli. Instead, there were guards to chatter with, and sun that beamed down from the atrium onto her skin.

Will she feel it again? For just a moment her legs kick, panicked, and she’s touching her face and feeling her realness. She’s remembering sunshine, chocolate, beach reads, paychecks, sex. But the solution is too viscous to fight for long. Besides, all that goodness was simply a honeymoon phase. The truth came out, didn’t it? When she was banished home and saw the real nature of the world through the unnatural blue of a screen. When she had to work in the storeroom in PPE, labelling rather than talking. When she began to envy the little creatures, and found herself dipping her fingers into chemicals like kisses.

Surrender. This is better. Her limbs drift gently downwards and her fingers stir the solution. So gently. This would not have been possible had she stuck with formaldehyde, of course. Those early potions burned hives and welts on her skin, requiring a week’s wage of aloe vera to heal. She tinkered with the mixture for months — stole from the storeroom with a smile and wink above her mask — and the other employees were so relieved to see another face they never questioned. Junior researchers sought her out for banter that took the edge off the death tolls. They said things like, “I’m swamped”, and she said, “how d’you think that kitten foetus feels”. And all the time, she stared at the kittens and wondered herself. The elixir was perfect by December: a precious balance of formalin, minerals, and pricey salts from an Instagram ad. She took two-hour baths each night, and her skin glowed like bioluminescence.

Brighter now, even as the cold sets in. No hands and feet, they’re gone. Initial preservation will take a few days. Once complete, a lever will trigger the alcohol level to climb until it reaches an optimum. Equilibrium, numb and safe, untouched by a world that wants to suck her dry. No more. She will stay plump with energy and moisture, indefinitely.

Her thoughts fray at the edges. The nothing is eating her up, at last. She missed it so much. The last memory is a soft vignette of lentil and split-pea stew on a Tuesday evening in January. Cooking for yourself had become de rigueur online, so long as you photographed the process. The phone rang as a pan of water boiled.

“The museum, Lou. It’s closing. I’m sorry. We can’t go on without the funding.”

She ended the call without a goodbye and picked up the lentil pack. Years, they’d been in her cupboard. Years, she’d worked at the museum. She read the label aloud.

“Store me in a cool, dark place.”

There it was, the whisper, now a shout. She negotiated the sale of her flat with a city-hungry couple, and moved here, to the dim cottage in nowhere-town on the border. She so needed to get away — that’s the story everyone heard. They gradually accepted it as one of her more extravagant impulses. She didn’t tell them about the cellar, or the bulk order of perspex, industrial chemicals, and a tool kit.

Her heart softens, slows. Enough that her senses bubble away to a smooth brine, a divine emptiness. She is done remembering. No reports, no statistics, no faking, no thought. Only the sweet nothing’s embrace, and the soothing rhythm of life. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

Several of my characters are over-thinking, anxious types who self-sabotage in order to keep themselves safe. But the truth—whether about the character’s true feelings, or the realities of life—will eventually be revealed.

Speaking of facing our shadowy, secret selves: my debut novel, Tender, is out at the end of September! It follows Nell, a botanist whose mask of feminine perfection is about to be torn down by the wild forces she grew up alongside. Think litfic meets folk horror, with lots of floral imagery and some messy relationships. Recently, some wonderful writers said some truly wonderful things about my strange little tale…

'[A]n odd, spiky and compelling read.'
– Adam Leslie, author of Lost in the Garden

‘Du Plessis weaves an intricate garland of folklore, body horror and elegant surrealism into this intriguing and disturbing novel.’
– Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them

‘A lush, intoxicating debut where secrets are poison and every touch carries the risk of contamination.’
– Kirsty Logan, author of Now She Is Witch

I’m still adapting to the amazing response so far. Soon, my novel will no longer be mine, but the reader’s.

Pre-order Tender here.

Visit Fictive Figments

I tightrope along the kerb stones and finger the chestnuts in my pocket. No bones today. The sun hangs low in the cleft of the street, an angry peach, and burns my shoulders through my shirt. If I make it to the front door in three hundred steps, I’ll be pleased.

As I pass the gated house, which is six houses down from our terrace, a guttural sound interrupts count forty-eight. I glance over my shoulder but find nothing. There is another, a yowl. It must be Baby Green, the street’s latest arrival and all the adults can talk about. I don’t blame them: Baby Green is evolutionarily cute. Thousands of years of optimisation have seen to it. If babies weren’t cute, our species would be doomed. Humans are very preoccupied with their own survival. I keep walking.

Again. I decide it’s not Baby Green. Perhaps it’s a rabbit, wedged in the coils of a wire fence. Rabbits don’t normally venture this far into town, but I did catch one on Broadmoor Lane in June. Once all its body was gone, its jaw resembled a beak. I almost confused its skull with the crow’s.

The air blisters with sunset. I want to get home now, because Mum clingfilmed pizza in the fridge. But the thought of the rabbit, and how it’s going to suffer needlessly if it’s skewered with metal, draws me back on myself. It’s lucky that Mum and Dad do long hours even in summer. An empty house won’t know I’m late.

I turn and draw in a feeling of gratitude. None of my friends go out past dinnertime. I think it’s how I came to consider bigger things in life than homework or Pokémon. No offence to Pokémon, of course. It’s my favourite fictional taxonomy of creatures.

The cries peel like an alarm, urging me back to where the pavement opens wide as an adder’s mouth on thirteen winding stone steps, leading up to the next row in an endless growth of houses. Someone has chalked pink butterflies around them. I think of my butterflies, pierced gently in their cases.

It was two years ago that I began with them—butterflies, and other arthropods. Last year was birds. This year I finally felt ready for mammals. I’ve learned in my studies that mammals are all very alike. One squirrel, one rabbit, one rat and one dormouse all hold similar secrets, whether I trap them myself or scavenge for one of nature’s own sacrifices. Not much to distinguish animals from humans. That comforts me, makes me feel inevitable. My instincts belong to the same world they do.

The steps are framed on both sides by tall wooden slats. The sound is sharp and raw now, but moving. The creature isn’t trapped, only afraid. I creep up the steps, along the base of the left-hand fence, a suture between wood and stone, searching for a hole. When I find one haemorrhaging dandelions, I crouch and part the stalks to look through.

“Who’s there?” I ask in my softest inside voice. My acquaintance whimpers, then squeaks with curiosity. I call it again. We enter a conversation this way. As the grass rustles louder, I wonder what it will be and where it will fit.

Adding a new friend will take time. I rearranged my collection this morning. I’ve always done it by date of discovery, marked in sharpie on the mandible. But today, based on my growing awareness that everything is everything else, I made a bold decision. I fragmented the skeletons and rearranged them by bone size. From the bulkiest cranium to each humerus, scapula, tooth, all the way to the tiniest tail vertebrae (those I was able to dig out of the soil). It took hours, but now the flat, square box I keep under my wardrobe contains a Fibonacci spiral of precious remains. I sat with it for an hour, grinning, chest bursting. I felt like nature had brought us all together.

A finger touches my face. I gasp and scramble from the hole. My mind reframes the touch immediately: not a finger, a tiny paw. I recover my position quickly enough to see a long, black tail flash into the grass on the other side. Kitten. I push my face closer to the wood slats and coo apologies. Several minutes pass before a gaunt face emerges through the foliage.

“Hello little guy,” I say, closing my hand around the scruff of its neck and pulling it through the hole. I sit back on the warm concrete, and maneuver the kitten onto my lap. Legs splayed out, it wobbles from side to side, taking in my scent, before curling up. Bulbous topaz eyes and ridiculous ears that tell me it’s young (same tactics as Baby Green). There’s pollen in its whiskers. It’s quite thin. Maybe lost for a while.

Even so, this is a specific cat. I can feel the tag near the top of its shoulder. It’s not like when I take a crow or squirrel, because any crow could be any crow, and any squirrel could be any squirrel. This cat probably has a name. I lift it up so our eyes are level.

“I don’t know if you’re a good fit for what I do,” I tell it, standing slowly. I’ll take it home and figure out a plan. If it’s been missing a while, maybe its owner has given up. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they weren’t good owners. The kitten shuffles in my arms and throws back its head, restless.

“Shh,” I say, “You’re coming home with me.”

“Is she now?”

I turn, frowning, bothered from my thoughts. An old woman stands on the top step framed by ivy and drying wisteria. She is short and her hips sit out of alignment, making her lean. A faded pink dress hangs off her and she holds a walking stick, carved with shapes and headed with a crow’s face. Witch, my subconscious says, fed by a month of gaming after lights out. I square my shoulders.

“Is this your cat?” I hold the wriggling creature up so she can see. I’m happy to give it back. It would save me the stress, and I’d quite like to eat my pizza and watch The Simpsons at six.

“Yes! That’s my Nyx!”

She extends her cane to the next step. As if each bone is independent, she inches forwards then down, easing her body through the motion. I suppose I can’t just stand here, make an old woman walk all the way. I stride two steps at a time, relishing the burn in my thighs. It reminds me I am strong.

“Here,” I say.

Tucking the cane under her elbow, she places one hand under the kitten’s bottom, and the other underneath its front legs. It purrs with recognition.

“How long was it missing?”

“Three days,” she sighs, “I thought maybe — well, never mind.” Her nose wrinkles. “How did you find her?”

“I was playing outside and I heard her.”

“Well she’s very shy, so she must like you, to let you pick her up,” the woman says, holding the kitten up to her face, “Have you made a new friend, Nyxie?”

I sense that my part in this story is over and edge away, eager to resume my step count (five hundred should do it from here), when the old woman speaks again.

“You like animals. Let me give you something to say thank you.”

These are statements, not questions. She eyes me, impatient with my silence as if I were her misbehaving grandson. Then she hobbles up the steps, cawing for me to follow. I suddenly feel like a finch, about to stumble into the sort of trap I’d set. I wrench a branch from one of the overhanging bushes and hold it at my waist.

We cross the road, and walk through the rusted gate of number thirty-six, a crumbling bungalow painted lilac and overgrown with wildflowers. Dad complains about this house when we drive past. The bins in the driveway are full. The car has no wheels. I always assumed it was abandoned. On the peeling blue door, the knocker is a large, carved wasp head that makes me shiver. The old woman pushes the door open and tells me to wait in the hallway and put my stick down somewhere.

It is dark and acrid. I lean the branch against the doorframe, and look around. Elaborate burgundy wallpaper on the walls. Long corridors off to rooms I can’t see. And a dresser in one corner. An ancient thing on swirling feet with tall shelves. A large, mottled-grey cat sits on the largest shelf, surrounded by dried flowers in vases and weird trinkets. Puzzle boxes, agate, a chipped whisky glass, chess pieces, tiny porcelain animals. A collection, thoughtfully arranged, like my bones. I move closer, careful not to spook the cat. Its fur is wispy and I imagine it feels like clouds.

“Oh, he won’t hear you now.”

I spin and almost stumble against the wall. “You have another cat.”

“I did have another cat,” she nods from a doorway, “That’s Mister Smokes. I was a taxidermist before retirement, you see.”

I turn to look closer at the unblinking eyes and gold plaque at his feet, the eerie symmetry of his legs and stillness of his tail.

“Do you have other animals?” I ask, and I’m not sure if I mean alive or dead.

“No, no. I worked with museums, on rare species. They’d never let me keep a lion, more’s the pity!” she chuckles.

“Will you taxidermy Nyx when she dies?”

She looks down at the kitten, now slaloming round her legs.

“That’s a long way off, so I’m not sure. You have to find the balance for each creature I think: between respect and keeping their spirit alive. But oh my, what gloomy things to think about on a Monday evening. Take this and you’d better be off.”

She walks over, hiding something behind her back, and without thinking I extend my hands in a cup, where she places a ten pound note and a pair of binoculars. As I look from my gifts to her face, something snaps. Her voice turns caustic.

“I’ve seen you. And I’ve seen your traps. I think it’d do you well to watch, rather than butting in all the time.”

I go hot. My brutality has always been personal; I never intended to share it with anyone.

“What are you—”

“Your animals. I don’t mean to presume, but something tells me you don’t always let them go.”

I want to scream. I want to throw the binoculars back at her. Nobody ever put two and two together: to my parents, the smell of soil-bones was old football kit and the acid was lacquer for my model tanks.

“I didn’t know anyone saw me,” I say, because her eyes are narrowed, not angry but fierce with disappointment. I blink when she taps the binoculars and cackles, darkness breaking.

“People like us make good taxidermists. Or morticians. At least you’d be contributing to something, aye?”

I clutch my rewards to my chest and walk away from her and Nyx’s smug face peeking from behind her shin. The street is empty, sun a sliver, everything cut in scarlet and orange. I count the steps all the way home as dusk crawls in, with my hands sweating around the binoculars. Six hundred and eighteen. My shoulders cramp and my back arches over, making myself small.

Thank you for reading this short story. My debut novel is coming in September, so there will be lots more blogs and stories from me coming soon. Please consider sharing Fictive Figments with your friends!

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Pre-order Tender

My fellow writers fascinate me. How do their brains work? What strange magic fuses their ideas together? How do they manage to get the dreamy narrative of the mind onto paper? This post is my personal answer to those questions, adding my story to the many that have come before.

Tender is the alchemical product between a few facets of my writing life and my personal life. Namely: the short fiction I wrote at the time, my kaleidoscopic mental health journey, and the toothsome beast of “the market”. So, without further ado, for the curious out there, here’s how I wrote my debut novel…

The alchemy

In 2021 after the first of several redundancies (oh, the gaming industry), I decided to take my short fiction writing seriously. I spent a couple of months focusing on it, earning some early publications. But the very first story I wrote during this period never sold. It was called Personal Cultivation, and was 2000 words long or thereabouts. It followed a young woman who, during a dance class, discovered that her body was changing far beyond the expected reaches of puberty: she was growing something from her skin. In that story I began to build a world where secret beauty bloomed underneath collars and dresses, and women found kindred spirits through a seemingly-scary transformation. This is a vague description of course—I don’t want to spoil Tender for you if you might like to read it! But I knew I’d hit on something I wanted to explore more deeply.

I had been writing teen fiction for a couple of years prior and had written two projects, one of which went on submission to traditional publishers, and one of which never got past the first draft. The former told a story inspired by my experience with OCD. Its protagonist had a neurotic and repetitive mind, and developing her voice allowed me to find a way to capture this whirling state in a way that was hopefully readable and perhaps relatable (this ended up being essential practice for the protagonist of Tender!). After going through the motions of trying to sell that book, my agent asked if I’d be interested in repositioning and looking at the adult fiction market too. Luckily, I'd already been considering this—as not only is the YA space a small and competitive market, but I also sought more freedom to write scarier, more mature themes. I do love YA still, and might return to it one day! But, in the summer of 2022, I pitched the idea for Tender, which had been brewing quietly in my heart. Excitingly, my agent gave me the go-ahead to try out a draft.

The first draft

Tender was mostly written ‘by the seat of my pants’, as the popular saying goes. I knew what was going to happen up until the halfway point, but the ending only came when I got there, after arguing plenty with myself and mind-mapping with my husband (a true idea machine who always helps me get out of the weeds and see the bigger picture).

The first draft was written at my usual pace, three or four months total—but that writing time extended over about six months. I worked remotely, and so I was writing when I would have been commuting, and at the weekends when I would try and really cram in some words. I was lucky: it was the kind of book that fell out of my head. This is certainly not my experience for other novels! I've found it to be a little bit more like pulling teeth on my projects since… interesting and meaningful teeth, but teeth all the same.

The ‘discovery writing’ process helped me to stay surprised by what was happening, and hopefully that translates to moments of surprise in the reader too. I think all of my work tends to be heavily symbolic (I drop a lot of hints as to what's going to happen early on in the plot), but moments of surprise or shock bring my characters’ development to the fore, and bring that symbolism full circle.

The protagonist

So, to Nell. From early reviews, I’m getting hints that she is intriguing and bothering readers in the ways I’d hoped, and in new ones! Her head is a difficult place to be. She is, as I mentioned, quite a neurotic character. She has some self-awareness, in that she knows she's putting on a performance in order to get other characters to like her. But initially, she doesn't have the depth of self-understanding that she’ll need by the climax. Throughout the narrative she has to do the work of rediscovering herself, although she doesn’t want to!

Nell doesn’t have OCD or any named mental health condition, but she does have a loud, busy brain that constantly critiques her. She’s terrified of appearing ‘wrong’ in front of others, and doesn’t fully trust herself. The sensual imagery of farmland foliage and the dig site became the perfect setting for her. I've always been fascinated by archaeology and botany, so being able to bring those two together in this character's profession was both absolutely fascinating during the research process, and I think also fruitful for the writing. It helped me to find poetry and viscerality in Nell’s re-becoming, and of course the ‘excavation’ became a metaphor for the internal work she has to do.

The camera, or point-of-view

I wrote the first three chapters in several points of view before settling on a final choice. First person present tense made my voice sound like my YA work—not a flaw, but a stylistic choice that just didn’t seem to fit. Plus, being inside Nell’s head in the first person made for an intense reading experience!

Eventually, I chose to write the novel in third person present tense (Nell wants, Nell blossoms). This is, as I understand it, also a weird choice and perhaps not the preference of all readers… It’s somewhat jarring, voyeuristic, and the kind of thing that I have mostly written in short fiction. But it felt right. What I love about this POV is that you get the immediacy of present tense, something that feels cinematic and free from a filtering narrator, coupled with a sense of distance offered by the third person frame.

We do see the inside of Nell's thoughts here and there, and we certainly get a lot of her visceral, bodily feelings (the third person is ‘close’). But we can also observe her body from a distance. I loved writing this watchful style, which seemed to link nicely with the themes relating to Mother Nature. I’ve always been fascinated about the ties between the body and the natural world—how we are these little segments of nature, temporarily contained from the rest of the world. Our bodies are collections of little living things all attached together and existing as a person for a relatively short period of time before they break down again, and return to the soil, the water, and the air. I won’t say too much about how Mother Nature manifests in the novel (spoilers!), but let’s just say the reader isn’t the only one watching over Nell.

The edits

After the first draft was complete, I did one self-edit before I shared it with my agent. I cut some slacking scenes, tweaked Nell’s character arc, and played with the language a ton. We then did a couple of rounds fixing up character intentions across the board, and making sure that the moments of drama really hit and contrasted with the quieter moments. Because I’d done a fair bit of developmental editing myself, this stage was more about cutting up and chopping chapters that didn't work, moving things around, and such.

In early 2023 I enrolled in a writer’s workshop, where I shared a couple of chapters of Tender, alongside my short fiction, with a small group of fellow writers. This helped clarify how some readers would feel about Nell, what small details about her they would notice or not notice. It also helped me bring out the visual and sensual details, to ensure each scene reached the emotional beats I hoped for.

Going on submission!

I was on around the fourth draft of the novel when we prepared it for submission. Having been on submission a couple of times before, I knew that this process was going to be long and drawn out. As a first timer, I’d wondered if I’d get the unicorn experience of a preempt, exciting auction, or immediate interest from a publisher, but now I was far more relaxed. If we got a bite after a few months, that was a huge win. Our first submission round went out to ten or twelve editors, and the waiting began.

I spent that time drafting another novel and writing short fiction to clear my mind, knowing that whatever happened I was doing what I loved and would continue to do. I’ve been writing comics and fiction for as long as I’ve been able to, processing the world around me and my own personal development chanelled through characters and worlds—I don’t think that’s ever going to change! I reassured myself that whatever the result of this submission was, it wasn’t the end.

Of course, this time I got lucky, and the timing was right. My novel found its way to my publisher Influx Press. After some amazing successes for their authors, the indie press was re-establishing itself with a new direction and lots of new talent. Somehow, I slipped in there! It was very serendipitous moment. And while we went through a brief auction process, I decided to go ahead with Influx’s offer.

Since acquisition, we've done some line editing and copy editing. By the time Tender hits shelves, in September 2025, I think we'll be somewhere around draft six. It hasn't required complete rewrites every time, but careful tweaks and adjustments. Now, the next thing to happen is for it to enter reader's hands. My readers will interpret the story in their own way and bring their own stories to it, finding meaning that I never could have imagined. That is the amazing and scary thing about sharing art. You do not know what other people will bring to the table—all you know is what you’ve brought, and what you’ve invented. It’s a beautiful, humbling and vulnerable process!

Writing tenderly

Above all, I wanted to write Tender as the title suggested: I wanted it to be a tender and compassionate exploration of characters with messed-up feelings about themselves and about others. Many of the relationships in the novel are toxic, or at least unproductive, for the people involved. But I'm fond of all of my characters, however difficult they can be with each other and despite the poor choices that some of them make. They are each forces of nature. I can see buds of growth occurring in all of them throughout the novel. I don't consider there to be any one antagonistic force: it's all about growth and change, and how we transform each other.

But now, it’s up to each reader to decide whether/how I succeeded, and what they want to take away from my work.

What now?

I'm incredibly grateful and still in disbelief about this experience so far. Tender will be released in September 2025, and I’ll be sharing more about it on my Instagram and here on Substack as we approach launch.

You can read my short fiction right here, too—some pieces of which were written just before the drafting of Tender. If you happen to take a look through (if you do, thank you!), you will probably see the threads slowly weaving together as I found what I wanted to write about.

Thank you so much for reading. I hope this long ramble satisfied your curiosity! Publishing can be an esoteric process, so I want to try and be open about how it went for me. Any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

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So, I appear to be writing to the market without meaning to. That’s cool! And also makes me doubt my originality… thought I reckon that’s a healthy thing for a creative to do. My ideas have grown from the zeitgeist as well as the four walls of my own mind.

When I describe my work, it sounds something like this:

• speculative fiction (horror, a hint of sci-fi, magical realism)

• folkloric stories and twisted fairy tales

• dark contemporary tales of young people (mostly women) finding their way

And it turns out that when you combine those elements, you can end up making weird girl fiction.

What is weird girl fiction?

Possibly a microgenre, possibly a marketing category, a mood, or just a fleeting trend. I think it’s a mixture. But according to my bubbles of the internet, it seems to be a thing.

The microgenre goes by a few other names, like unhinged women’s fiction, sad girl lit, etc. But as far as I can tell, it was designed for my brain in a lab, and usually looks like this:

Troubled woman goes through a transformative or alternative experience, challenging society’s expectations/norms. The setting is usually contemporary, and the sense of reality is thin and malleable.

At some point, readers end up asking: what is real in this story? And what does it mean if none of it objectively happened?

The wider genre tends to be either contemporary, horror, crime, or thriller, and the climaxes of the narratives are frequently based around revenge or empowerment (referred to as ‘good for her’), and/or complete escapes from society. The tone can be pithy and satirical, dark and unsettling, or sometimes more whimsical.

Despite the overlapping use of the term ‘weird’, this emerging genre isn’t the same as Weird fiction, a speculative subgenre from the turn of the twentieth century which de-emphasised traditional horror beasties in favour of the unknowable, unseen, and ambiguous. Think M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, etc. That being said, some contemporary titles do fall under both! I might be guilty of such reckless genre splicing (more on the self-promo later…), but not all of these books have such a spooky mood.

Why so weird?

Is it millennials coming of age and feeling disillusioned? World politics? The environmental crisis? The rollback of human rights and general kindness? I could go on (for a long time). The world has always been multifaceted, but we’ve never been more aware (and self-aware) of it all before. For that reason, many weird girl stories are political in nature, commenting on modern life.

Themes include workplace culture and burnout, overconsumption, beauty standards, social media, being othered or marginalised, dating struggles, sexuality, and the pressure of parenthood and managing a family. Young girls are often told that in this day and age they can/should have it all: a career, great personal style, a loving partner, a social media presence, and so on and so on.

However, I don’t think all of these books aim to be overtly political, or even to have a ‘message’. Some are focused on the deeply personal, bodily, or dreamlike. These books are often exploratory and questioning in nature. They invent their own moralities, or play with pre-existing ones. There are lots with open endings and questions asked but not answered.

And it’s not all doom and gloom: I think this moment is happening because there are so many women readers right now (and those of nonbinary and other genders too, who may relate to the same topics), and encouragement for writers to explore ideas that once felt taboo. In this particular cultural moment, the more open and mind-expanding stories, the better.

Regardless of whether readers can find clear meaning or not, the feelings created are recognisable. The goals seem to be: escapism, catharsis, or just wacky, feral fun that says, “you know what, be the strange creature that you are!”

With this admittedly rambly definition in mind, I now want to rave about some amazing examples. Most of these are popular and appear on lists around the internet, but a few are personal favourites I’ve come across by luck.

Books with weird girl vibes

You might take this as a jumping off point if you’re new to the genre. It’s not comprehensive by any means, so please do add your own recommendations in the comments and make sure people know about your favourites! Hopefully there can be a little something for everyone…

Bunny, and Rouge, by Mona Awad

Satirical thrillers. Awad’s lonely narrators escape into hyper-feminine cults, and reality quickly begins to unravel.

The Eyes Are The Best Part, by Monica Kim

Dark comedy. Ji-won will not let her mother’s new boyfriend, George, disrupt their lives. His blue eyes haunt her dreams and awaken unsettling desires…

My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, and Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh

Dark contemporaries with gross-out elements. Moshfegh’s narrators become absorbed in their own obsessions, their strange daily lives described in starkly honest detail.

Chlorine, by Jade Song

Coming-of-age with mermaid body horror! Ren Yu, a high school swimmer, is driven to transform herself through her rage at the world, and love for a classmate.

Briefly, A Delicious Life, by Nell Stevens

Literary, gothic. In Mallorca, a ghostly girl watches over composer Chopin and writer George Sand as they stay at an old monastery, and explores her complex feelings hundreds of years after her death.

Water Shall Refuse Them, by Lucie McKnight Hardy

Literary, gothic. Nif and her family arrive in an isolated Welsh village, but are they welcome? And what did Nif’s strange, personal spirituality lead her to do?

Our Wives Under The Sea, by Julia Armfield

Literary horror. Grief saturates this British novel, where Miri watches her wife Leah come apart (sometimes literally) after a botched deep sea expedition.

The Pisces, by Melissa Broder

Contemporary tragicomedy. A woman unravels her life in a beachside cabin, while falling in love with a merman (and yes, there is touching of things).

Lolly Willowes (or The Loving Huntsman), by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Classic. An unmarried woman moves to the rainy Chilterns in the English countryside and potentially makes a deal with the devil (??).

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin

Classic, early feminist. Modernist novel of the American South, where a woman tries to escape her rigid duties as mother and wife, ending in tragedy.

Convenience Store Woman, and Earthlings, by Sayaka Murata

Contemporary translations. In these Japanese novels, women seek alternative ways of living to resist the machine of marriage and parenting: one through working in a convenience store, and one through…more extreme methods, let’s just say!

My Sister, The Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Thriller (humour elements). This Nigerian novel follows Korede, a nurse who gets pulled into her sister’s antics… disposing of the boyfriends she keeps bumping off.

Diary Of A Void, by Emi Yagi

Contemporary, translation. An office worker takes advantage of her work culture by pretending to be pregnant. But she can only lie for nine months…

Boy Parts, by Eliza Clark

Dark contemporary. Sometimes compared with American Pscyho, this British novel follows a photographer whose appetites are catching up with her. But does anyone actually believe the acts she’s performed on camera?

Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder

Contemporary, horror elements. An American artist becomes a mother, and perhaps more than that. Convinced she is turning into a dog, the protagonist must come to terms with her new, carnal behaviours.

The Vegetarian, by Han Kang

Literary, psychological/horror elements. Yeong-hye wishes to become a vegetarian, but also to escape the horror and violence of humanity. A haunting critique of the roles of women in Korean society.

All Fours, by Miranda July

Autofiction. The artist narrator explores midlife by going on a roadtrip…and exploring alteratives to her family life.

Writing my weird girls

I've written teen and adult fiction, but both are focused around my characters’ mental states as they go through life-changing shifts. Unsurprisingly for someone with OCD and EDs, my characters’ bodies are often forefront at this transformation. But once I have the basis of a character I really try and let them run away from me and become their own thing. I try to follow their trains of thoughts to their extremes, flexing the unique weirdnesses I find in them, so they can become something wild and different.

I hope that my work is a fun mix of cathartic and unsettling for my readers. I’ve come of age writing-wise in a cultural moment that seems suited to what I write. It’s fortunate, and also a bit intimidating (I end up asking those questions that plague all writers: how will I stand out? will anyone care?). I suppose this is the moment to plug my work, isn’t it? My weird girl novel is called Tender, and it’s out in September. Think: bog bodies, body horror, and a whole lot of wildflowers. Nell, the protagonist, needs to break free—even though she’s not sure what from…

In my next projects, I’m hoping to write an older female protagonist than Nell, and a male protagonist too (though I plan to surround him with weird women). But I'm also cautious that this isn't the only kind of character I want to write, or the only microgenre I want to write in. I wonder if and when a peak will come in the market, but for now I’ll make the most of this strange little moment.

I’ve gone back and forth with my weirdness, and turning thirty has helped a lot. I remember moments of initial horror when people pointed out anything they interpreted as ‘different’. This quickly developed into pride at being ‘not like other girls’, then spiralled back into low self-worth, and now has become my fully embodied experience. Thank goodness we are all full of contradictory, niche, and beautiful things—making and consuming art wouldn’t be much fun otherwise. I’m a big mixture of the offbeat novels, emo Tumblr posts, Japanese metal music, Wiccan practices, mental health storms, boys’ clothing, and fear of skin care that have built me. These days, I try to be glad that I look like what Quentin Blake would draw if given the prompt: cheerful art teacher witch.

So come on, let’s be feral and live in the woods with our books.

x

Pre-order Tender

Happy reading!

A talent for burning:

that’s what she was thinking, as the flames—real ones this time—snaked over the rug. Tentative, then inevitable. She knew how to burn garlic in oil, coffee beans in the cappuccino machine, and women. Sometimes it was an explosion, sometimes a creeping consumption, but everything ended in carbon dust. Burns punctuated her life: ellipsis, exclamation, terminus.

She had hoped tonight would cleanse it out of her. A candle-lit vigil for another heartbreak—white wine bought for a fiver, and tealights arranged in a square containing their hand-drawn Valentines cards. She had given a speech to her empty living room, asking whoever else might be listening to initiate a magical girl transformation sequence, turn her into a better girlfriend for next time. It would be a small start towards making sure this never happened again.

“But it’s about to get bigger,” she frowned. There was no more time to ponder how this moment would fit into the graphic memoir she’d likely never find the time to write. She had to move now. She uncrossed her legs, clambered up, eyes fixed on the devouring light. The flat had an extinguisher somewhere, though she couldn’t remember exactly where. She edged across the living room, then tore into the kitchen.

Drawers rattled, cupboards clanged against their hinges. Meanwhile, the fire made no noise, keeping its progress a secret. Its silence and her movements were both a kind of chaos. And she couldn’t find the extinguisher. Plan B. She jabbed a tea towel under the tap, but as the freezing water bit her skin the narrative in her mind resurfaced.

Whoever had been listening to her pleas knew that it’d take a lot more than a candle burning for her past to dissipate. Every ghosted message, each bizarre lie about herself made up of first-date jitters and then impossible to keep to, and now this business with Alice. A year they were together, and she broke up with Alice by text. Couldn’t face that conversation, her own failure. If she was going to come back from this, a lot more needed to burn.

She returned to the fore with her defences: soaked towel, filter jug. She pulled the lid off and splattered the flames. Tried to smother the worst of it with the towel. Too late. Always too late. For all her flapping and stamping, sparks lit the curtains and yucca plant. As her dad would say, “Fuck it.”

So she pulled her mobile from her back pocket and told the 999 responder, “My flat’s on fire! Sorry.”

She gave the address, they gave a five minute wait time and the instruction to evacuate and plug the door with clothes. They clearly understood: here was one of life’s full stops.

Outside, neighbours’ heads emerged wincing at the automatic alarm. Margaret from opposite fussed her grandkids out the door in their dressing gowns. The lady two doors down carried her pomeranian under her arm like a rugby ball, tutting. The student recluse at the end of the corridor cursed her as she passed.

When everyone else had reached the stairs, she turned back to face her accidental pyre. In her hands, a moving-out gift from her father and his third wife—the pink, cat-shaped clock that long since stopped ticking.

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Ice, lighter, needle, apple, nine o’clock, three girls.

Ava holds her down while Georgie hovers the sterilised glint of metal over her ear.

“Keep still! It only hurts for ten seconds.”

But then it’s coming at her and every muscle flares. She bucks, twists her head just so that Georgie’s needle misses her earlobe and soundlessly pierces her cheek. It sinks right in, like she’s made of butter, grazing her canine.

“You moved!” Ava shrieks.

She sits up, silver in her peripheral vision like a bright underline.

They scream her to the bathroom, dragging her under the armpits.

“Someone has to pull it out!”

Ava and Georgie back up against the tiles while she pinches the end and assesses her surreal reflection over the sink. She looks away again, and pulls.

A neat red bead forms instantly on the outside, but inside the loose blood coats her teeth. She rinses her mouth and spends the next two hours pressing the inside of her cheek with her thumb.

Even her own parents don’t notice the difference when they get home from their party at midnight. They package the girls into sleeping bags and sofa cushions, then shut the door.

Ava and Georgie murmur goodnights, but she can’t remove her thumb to respond. Because it isn’t only the blood her thumb holds in place—it’s the instinct to cry and claw at those girls’ faces. For piercing her cheek, sure, but also for the messages.

She saw them on Georgie’s phone over dinner, after they’d done all their revision, so unimportant and obvious she hadn’t bothered to lock the screen.

Why do we have to do this, from Ava.

And Georgie’s reply. Once we’ve passed we’re free of her, no worries.

Her thumb will stopper her mouth until she falls asleep. But she’ll wake in the morning, and the mark will remain.

Thank you for reading this flash fiction piece from my archives. More to come soon! I’d love if you could share my work with fellow readers and writers.

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But I’m wrong: two steps ahead, a pigeon lies bludgeoned on the concrete. I search the white sky and catch a hawk cutting behind park trees.

Oh god, now I’m looking at the corpse. Three deep talon wounds puncture its chest, like my lunchtime cupcake after I pulled the candles out. Red velvet.

I sigh, and thank Nature for the birthday gift. Then, I head home to throw out the remaining cupcakes.

An apology to pigeons. You are a lovely addition to town centres across the globe.

This is an older flash fiction piece (a bit more pithy and silly than my usual stuff!) that needed a new home. I’ll be sharing more flash fiction and short stories soon, along with blogs about my writing process and journey as a 2025 debut author. If you enjoy my writing, please consider sharing Fictive Figments. Thank you!

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The fact that one of those things happened makes today a pretty good day for me.

In 2024 I had a baby and got a book deal. Both of those things were, of course, never a guarantee. With some historical health issues, I didn’t know how pregnancy would go. And in the tumult of publishing, it was far more likely that I would never publish a novel than that I would. They are the two greatest transformations of my life. Terrifying, beautiful, and bloody lucky.

Now, a year later, I am trying to stitch back together some patchwork of a life outside of maternity leave. Looking for work, editing the novel, trying to write a new one…and all while being headbutted by a toddler, and having picture books coming out of my ears (not a complaint, I love a good picture book!). For some reason, I’ve decided that now is also a great time to start a substack. I’m calling it Fictive Figments for the time being.

A quiet corner for thorny knots of fiction

So, what can you expect as a reader of this little corner of the internet? I don’t have a content plan I’m afraid, but what I do have is…

• a backlog of flash fiction

• some short stories, some of which will be reprints and some brand new

• stories about my publishing journey

• thoughts on the craft, creativity, and probably motherhood

• here and there, book recommendations

The vibes

I’m a vibes-over-plot writer in general. Here’s what to expect…

• Literary (i.e. poetic, pensive, and mayyyybe a bit pretentious, sorry in advance)

• Folkloric (inspired by British folklore, fairy tales, and the natural world)

• Horror (gothic, supernatural, and body horror)

• Speculative (hints of sci-fi and magical realism)

So, you know, if that all sounds cool to you, you could maybe…

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Thank you!

I’m excited to start sharing some of my backlog, creating a little nook for the strange harvest of fiction I’ve reaped so far. At the moment, it will be free to all subscribers (though I might set up a tipjar or paywalled posts later, depending on how things go).

And if you’d like to start reading right away, some of my work is already freely available from some lovely online lit mags:

Ash Mama at Litro Online

The Lookout at Litro Online (CW: self-harm)

Same Instincts at Menacing Hedge

Current reads on matrescence…

I think a lot of my work in the coming months will relate to parenthood. It’s been such an all-consuming experience for me, I can’t see it not bleeding into everything I write in some way.

Of course, there are a many incredible writers who have already turned their art towards the process of becoming a parent. I took great heart in Mslexia’s Issue #104, Acts of Creation, where mothers of all walks of life shared their experiences and how becoming a parent had changed their process. I umm-ed and ahh-ed over my responses to the survey they put out just beforehand, trying to deduce the percentage to which my life and art had actually changed. Was I 74% or 75% more tired? 30% more creative? I still don’t know, but it was quite fun to stop and dedicate some time to noodling on it.

Anyway, some books to check out…

Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder. One of my first reads this year. It was intense, a gut punch, and I loved it. The protagonist, an artist-turned-SAHM struggles against her urge to eat raw meat and bark at the other mothers. She can’t really be turning into a dog, can she?

Chouette, Claire Oshetsky. My current read. A woman gives birth to an owl…or does she? What does it mean that her child is ‘different’? Does Chouette need to be ‘fixed’…or liberated? I’m just a few pages in, and it’s wonderfully strange. I can’t wait to read more.

My book!

This book was written before the year of midnight reading and baby brain. But it does share some themes with what I’m hoping to write soon: compassion, tenderness, and bodily transformation.

Tender is forthcoming from Influx Press this September (2025). From the website…

“Twenty-eight-year-old Nell has curated a perfect museum of the self: early accolades in her career as an archaeobotanist, a pastel Instagram filled with flowers, and a consistent manicure routine to give a veneer of control. But there has always been a part of her that doesn’t fit the mask of perfection she wears.

When two ‘bog bodies’ are discovered in elaborate floral graves in a Somerset fen, Nell gets the opportunity of a lifetime to excavate and uncover their secrets. But the deeper she digs into the fertile, waterlogged mud, the more she uncovers repressed memories of her unsettled childhood and strained relationship with her sister… and the more her body manifests her own wildness in ways she can’t ignore.

Under the pressure of a blazing summer, Nell whirlwinds into a heated but toxic romance, intense friendships, and the brutal process of reconciling her past and her future before the weight of it all buries her, too.”

You can pre-order it on the Influx website if you like the sound of it. Much appreciated!

I suppose that’s it for now. Let’s see where this little space leads. Thank you for reading this brambly, rambly first post. I’m very happy to have you here.

Best wishes for your reading and writing week 🌹