PIGEON SURPRISE

SPOT THE PIGEON

A pigeon smashes through a window at one point in WASTED. This actually happened to me while I was writing the book. If it hadn’t, the whole story would have been different. While you're reading the book - if you do! - see if you can predict when it will happen…

I thought you might like to see the picture of my window afterwards. Rather bizarrely, this has happened to me twice, same window, and both times I was in the room.

The time which affected WASTED was interesting: I was sitting in my study, near the window, with my laptop on my lap, trying to think of something that could happen to one of the characters which would make a few minutes' difference to the time when he reached a particular spot. It had to be a completely unconnected, random event. Anyway, as I was trying to think of this, CRASH! A pigeon smashed through the window.

Once I'd finished screaming (and running out of the room), I realised that this was exactly what I needed in my plot, because it would delay him by a couple of minutes, which was all I needed. As you'll see when you get to that point, whether he is there when the pigeon smashes through the window or not makes a life or death difference.

You see, sometimes writers don't need an imagination: sometimes real life is all we need.

Warning: both my editor and agent said that the pigeon incident is one of the shocking moments of the book.

WASTED BLOG TOUR - begins tomorrow, with a visit to Nik Perring's blog. Thanks, Nik! His blog today has lovely pictures of his new book of short stories, Not So Perfect. In view of the fact that my post today has been about pigeons, it's quite interesting that his has a picture of a cat on the cover. Cat among the pigeons, eh? Or something.