STORYWORLD

After spending over a year reading books, letters and newspaper articles about the infamous Mary Ann Cotton and basically being haunted by that picture I"m disappointed I couldn't get to the auction in Leyburn, North Yorkshire to see her last desperate letters from prison auctioned off. Not that I wanted to buy them.  I've already read most of them.  I wanted to see who was interested in these sad mementos of a tragic life. The Old Execution Yard A Yorkshire dealer bought the letters for 2200 pounds.  A fortune compared to the insurance payments of 30 pounds here and 8 pounds there that Cotton collected on the death of several husbands and numerous children. I don't pass judgement on her in my novel, Unnatural .  The Victorian press did a good job of that already.  In fact she's not the main character.  I was more interested in how the people at the time reacted to her crimes. Durham Prison: the original building   Maybe she didn't commit all the

Yes - and one of them is a guy! Mary Wollstonecraft Over a hundred years before Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir three brave intellectuals swept aside the objections of all the stodgy chauvinists running 18th and 19th century England and insisted that women should enjoy equality with men. I reference them all in my new novel, Unnatural.  Who were they? MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759-1797)   Writer, philosopher and advocate of women’s rights.   Mother of the famous Mary Shelly (author of Frankenstein)   After a rough family life with a violent father she founded a school, became a high-ranking and respected intellectual, penned A Vindication of the Rights of Women, among many other books and essays, and ridiculed the image of the “trivial sexualized female – obsessed with appearance and living an empty, self gratifying life with male admiration as its only purpose.” Read more about her  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/wol

The womb is an animal, which longs to generate children.  When it remains barren too long after puberty, it is distressed and sorely disturbed, and straying about in the body and cutting off the passages of breath, it impedes respiration and brings the sufferer into the extremest anguish and provokes all manner of disease besides. Mary Ann Cotton, serial poisoner Plato Unnatural is the story of two women; one who longs to have a child and the other accused of murdering twelve of her children and stepchildren as well as several husbands. Clara Blackstone is a childless woman in 1872, a time when a married woman was expected to be a wife and mother.  A traumatic miscarriage causes her to suffer a breakdown which sends her to the madhouse.  Afterwards Clara lives on a knife-edge, afraid that any show of hysteria or nerves will result in a return to the horrors of the asylum since her controlling husband, Henry’s major concern is that she sh

  "Ass in chair" - at least eight hours a day in front of a laptop filling the pages  2 walks to take the dog out and mentally sort out story details Reading, reading, reading Researching, researching, researching Travel and photography Lots of greens, fish and figs Limited and selective shopping (shoes especially) Great movies, greater TV series The Rewards: Transportation to other worlds Many imaginary friends Multiple romances with perfect male characters Time travel Eternal Life An Out of Body Experience Now you know the reality, welcome to my story world!