THREE INTO ONE DOES GO


It is scarcely a spoiler to explain that I fulfil my promise to Mary in Part I: Mary. And once Part I was complete, I felt obliged to go on to write Part II: Monique and Part III: Ivy. If you can't figure out why the book falls into these three parts, you need to read through the section of this website called About Me.

Part I took some twenty years to write. Three growing children, two dogs and a cat, a lot of tournament bridge, writing other stories - oh, and a full-time job - left me short of time. Plus, for a long time I couldn't figure out where to start the book, and what style to write it in. And some of it was very hard to write, getting my emotional memories onto the page.

Part II, weirdly, was completed before I even started Part I. But it was written in the style of a short story, so when I got it out of my virtual archives, it needed an extended edit. Not only to get it into the right style, but also to include bits from Part I that I didn't know about when I wrote Part II, and similarly to include bits that would lead into Part III. Still, the overall structure was there, and it only took a few months for me to get Part II repurposed.

Part III took about eighteen months to write. The main problems were to write about Ivy's unique use of language without in any way laughing at her, only at the images she managed to conjure up. And Part III is not written as chronologically as the earlier parts of the book, for reasons that you'll find out when you read it.