Stanley Thomas is a Very Bad Man

One of my favourite places in the world is Whitby … I know, a bold statement to make, but I genuinely love it there.   I’ve spent a lot of time there, it’s a place I always find a sense of calm, no matter what is going on in my life, the moment I see Whitby Abbey looming in the distance a feeling of peace floods my body.    So, a couple of weeks ago, me and Lucy (my sister) took ourselves off to the North Yorkshire coast for a weekend of sea air, walks on the beach and food in our favourite restaurants. Me (left) & Lucy (right) in Whitby    It turns out we had a stow away on our trip, in fact this stow away seems to be with me a lot. It’s Stanley Thomas, although as we know he’s a very bad man, so he probably doesn’t care that he’s gatecrashed our trip. As we sat in our favourite cafe on the West Cliff having a whimsical cup of tea and looking at the sea, our conversation turned to Stanley and just why he was a very bad man. ...

I first met Stanley in a dream a few years ago…. I say dream, it was more of a nightmare. The dream was all about a prison guard who kept seeing the face of people he’d executed, everywhere he turned, there they were.  I’ve decided my flashback suffering prison guard is called Henry Mason, Stanley is one of the men he'd executed. He’d faced the gallows for being a very bad man. I’ve spent a lot of this week messing around with dates (not the romantic type) but dates of my story. It occurred to me, there might be a massive flaw in my story before I’d even decided why Stanley Thomas was a very bad man.  The flaw was this…. Hanging was abolished in the UK in 1965 (the last hangings took place in 1964 fact fans) so if Henry was at the very youngest 18 years old at the time of Stanley’s hanging, in 2019 he’d be well in his 70’s. So, this is my dilemma, do I set my story in present day or I do I pick another decade? Moving everything back in time means that I can...

6 years ago, I went on holiday and had what I thought was a crazy dream. When I told my sister Lucy, she said “That sounds like the plot of a film” and I thought, Yes! Yes, it does!   As I lay on my sunbed I decided that when I got home I would write an Oscar winning film and become best friends with the Hollywood glitterati and they would all want to star in my film.  Tom Hanks would phone me say say, “Please Katie, I really feel that this would be my seminal work, “Forrest Gump”, “Philadelphia” and“Big”, will be nothing compared to what I could do with this role” I’d tell him, I’d think about it. I returned home and bought a new notebook to begin my musings. 3 years ago, I wrote in the aforementioned notebook. I decided my main character would be called Stanley Thomas. It was a good day’s work. 3 years ago, I wrote the first line of my novel (it’s now a novel, I decided I didn’t want to deal with the constant phone calls from Tom Hanks) It...