Guest Post: Chantal Halpin

To celebrate the release of her second short story, The Brinded Cat, author Chantal Halpin discusses where she gets her ideas for the story.

Where Do Stories Come From?

Well when a mummy story and a daddy story love each other very much, they have special cuddles and... oh if it were only that simple!

My idea for The Brinded Cat came, quite simply, from Sam trying to 'rescue' a cat stuck in a tree and it not just being a cat. I had a visual image of my main character looking a bit ridiculous, and asked myself, 'What happens next?'

Four is Fair, the forerunner to The Brinded Cat, again started life with a picture in my head. I could (and still can) see my main character, Sam, quite clearly looking effortlessly cool while sitting on the edge of a balcony and swinging her boots above a dancefloor in a nightclub.

Sometimes this image gets shifted around to suit the plot as it develops. I usually have a beginning and ending in mind and maybe a few key scenes in between. But that is about as far as planning goes for me. For larger projects I write down time lines, a list of characters and outline a couple of scenes in advance. I would love to be able to plan everything, but to be honest some of the more fun stuff happens spontaneously when I am at the keyboard.

So perhaps, stories are the offspring of a bored and over fertile imagination. Personally I seem to get ideas when I'm doing boring chores and day dreaming. So perhaps I'd better go and chop some carrots or do some ironing and maybe dream up the next big thing.

Insurance claims worker, Sam, doesn't want to do any more jobs for the Community. She just wants to fill in her nice, harmless forms. But when she is coaxed into rescuing a witch's familiar from a tree,  she finds her charge is more than an average kitty.

Faced with the option of handing him over to the authorities, she instead risks her liberty and flees across London with the witch hunters in hot pursuit. But for a change it seems the Latino pyromaniacs are not the most dangerous players in this game of cat and mouse.

This is a short story of approx 10,000 words with British spellings, and set in London.

The Brinded Cat is FREE to download from Smashwords and it is also available from Amazon US and Amazon UK, and will be available from most other online retailers shortly.

Chantal Halpin lives in the South West of England with her husband, two kids and their smelly rescue dog. She mostly writes Urban Fantasy and loves anything in the Paranormal and Fantasy genre. If it has fangs, can shift into an animal or use magic then it is pretty cool by her. Chantal also works full-on during term time in a school and tries to write like a demon during the in-between bits. Oh, and she occasionally studies creative writing with the Open University. She is currently working on The Witch Hunters series which includes both urban fantasy and young adult stories.

Follow Chantal on -

Blog - http://wearegoingonawitchhunt.wordpress.com/

Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/chantalhalpin

Good Reads - http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6475137.Chantal_Halpin