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Claire Ladds

Crime and suspense author

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the reason for everything

Joy is a bubble: complete crime short story

31st July 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

When a reader wants to try out a new author, or a new series by an author, I’ve often wondered what it is that makes someone want to give that book they’ve found online or in a bookstore a whirl. I know that, for me, it’s sometimes the cover that attracts me, and sometimes it’s the book title. The blurb on the back, or on the online store page, can be the factor that intrigues me, too. It’s also possible (because I’m human without an indefinite depth to my wallet, like many people) that I might well be intrigued by a price that seems reasonable to try out the book I’ve found. It may even be that I’ve managed to find a snippet of the book posted by the author and decided I really fancy giving the rest of it a go. I have to say that I’ve made a number of audiobook purchases by listening to the free sample first.

Like any author, I love people to want to read my books. I love to be able to tempt new readers to try out my series. Most of all, I love to find the right readers – those who feel that my books resonate with them. No matter what I write, whether it’s the Hearts & Crimes series, or the new crime and suspense series I have coming up soon, or the Victorian detective series that I’m planning to start releasing next year, all my books have the same qualities – something dark and unnerving lurking in the minds and hearts of the characters, suspense (sometimes strong and tense and sometimes subtle), a deep emotional connection of some kind, a twist, and a murder (or sometimes more!).

If you’ve never come across my short story collection, The Reason for Everything and other short stories, then I thought today’s blog post would be a good place to share a complete crime short story with you from this collection. So here you go…! 😊

***

Joy is a bubble

There’s a man sitting on the riverbank, gnome-like, with a fishing rod in his hand. All he needs, she thinks, is a pointy red hat and he’ll look just like the ugly little statue in next-door’s garden. She hadn’t noticed him as she went down to the newsagent, muttering her list of things-to-do to herself. She stands now, holding the newspaper, the packet of cigarettes she was expected to fetch hidden in her handbag, and a mental note to ask for the money this time, watching the little fairytale action taking place right below her.

The human gnome stranger casts his line then sits in silence, with a Tupperware box of sandwiches waiting their turn on top of the wicker fishing basket, not to be confused with the second tub containing a Dolly Mixture assortment of maggots. She hadn’t realised they came in so many colours. She can see them, wriggling en-mass in the tub, their sense of desperate urgency mimicking the squirming that’s going on just below the surface algae in the deep green secret land of ‘keep net’, while the white float with the psychedelic orange tip bobs half way across the water.

Suddenly the white vanishes, and the man proves he’s better, cleverer than the fish; she watches, gripping tightly onto the newspaper as the scaly sliver whirls past her vision and into the man’s hand. She watches him remove the hook from the fish’s face then hurl the creature into the keep net to join the rest of the mystery in the green pool. Catching sight of a big stone, she has the urge to throw it and hit the man on the head – see how he likes being bashed about, having his skin damaged, cast aside to keep for later – but she knows she won’t.

Her fingers hurt and she realises how tightly she’s holding the newspaper that’s not for her, either. The sweat has seeped into the print and left grubby smears in regular oval patches on the front page. Something for him to have a go at her about over breakfast, and he won’t even need to look hard this morning. She starts to feel ever so slightly sick; it’s the empty belly, she tells herself. She needs to get some breakfast. She needs to go home. She sighs, but it’s an inaudible one because she’s used to making them that way. Her face adopts its invariable impassive ghostly expression, ready for the kitchen and the multitude of sins she’ll commit at breakfast.

But then, just briefly, she catches sight of something on the water. There, in the keep net, expanding on the river’s surface, a series of penny-sized bubbles catch the early morning shards of sunlight. They wink back up at her in a glorious rainbow of colour, and she smiles back at the sign of life under the water. As a kid she used to sit on the bank and watch the bubbles rise to the surface when the fish came up to gobble the air. Little bubbles; she’d had to concentrate to see them. Once she sat there for over an hour, waiting. She spotted one. It sat, alone on the surface, and a wet tear surprised her cheek as she smiled at it. Then he came along with his school shirt rolled up to his elbows and scudded a stone across the surface, and the bubble was gone. He shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t even notice she was there at first. Then he grinned, and scooted off on his bike. She didn’t see any more bubbles on the surface that afternoon.

Without warning, the fisher gnome gathers in his line, and grabs the keep net, hurling his captives back into the algae. All at once the bubbles are forced into the algae, too, and they burst on contact. And she thinks how sad it is that the bubbles must burst and that things must end.

She leaves the gnomish sadist and makes her way back along the dirt track where the grass bank stretches beyond her vision, then round the curbing pathway in front of the cul-de-sac of Council bungalows and its artificially planted beech trees, that grow haphazardly on the patches of grass in between the parking bays. The milkman is still out on his rounds, such as they are now, and she stops to listen, eyes closed momentarily, to the chink of glass against hard plastic as he lifts the bottles from the deep ocean blue crate and takes them to number 27. He catches her eye and smiles, waves, and she returns the gesture. He’ll have been to her house already and the milk will still be sitting in the doorway, already in the sun, by the time she gets home. It’s already heating up outside. Another scorcher due. She sighs. She hopes it won’t taste funny. He’ll let her know in no uncertain terms if it is. It’ll be her fault. And her job to clear up the cereal running down the wall, and the bits of broken bowl. She should have got home quicker. He’ll tell her that it’s not worth having the milkman, that they can get their milk from the supermarket. No one relies on the milkman anymore. But she does. He brings her what she needs every day. Just like the postman. Just for a moment she glances up and down the street, wondering whether he is already on his rounds, too.

[Read more…] about Joy is a bubble: complete crime short story

Filed Under: Free Reads Tagged With: crime fiction, short story, the reason for everything

Short Story Month – I’m addicted to short stories!

27th May 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Addicted to short stories

May has been Short Story Month. Anyone who knows me well is aware that I’m a real short story fan, so I’ve loved this, and I’ve been popping images of short story collections that I own on Instagram on and off all month. That’s been great fun. At the last count, I have 79 paperback editions of short story collections, and if I add in those on my Kindle, then I’ve got way over a hundred! It won’t come as any great surprise that almost all of them are pretty dark in some way.

I grab them from anywhere: in bookshops, online – even once at a toddler group where they had a second hand bookshelf to raise funds. I remember the very first collection I read. I was ill and in bed as a twelve year old, and I was given a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man. Each of the tattoos on the man tells an individual story. I loved these stories! They told a tale in a confined amount of space, and it made everything about each one really punchy, especially the end. This way of grabbing a moment in time and wringing it for every thought and emotion to create a powerful ending is what fascinated me, as did those which left me with a dark twist or consequence, and left me pondering the rights and wrongs.

As I got older, I became fascinated with the blurred lines of moral and emotional choices in collections by great writers such as Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Ian McEwan, Carol Joyce Oates and Agatha Christie (who wrote many more short stories than you probably realise. I have 16 collections of her stories!). This blurring, and the inner wrangles of the characters, was the thing that got me totally hooked. People are complex, and those events, thoughts and emotions which lead up to a choice between what is right and wrong can make all the difference to the outcome.

It may well have been this endless collection and devouring of short stories (which I think might be my guilty, addictive pleasure) that has enabled me to be fortunate enough to get short stories published in magazines and anthologies worldwide, and to win several competitions. I even got a trophy once! But when I tried to ‘write to market’ for the women’s magazines, I just couldn’t get it right. Envelopes kept winging their way back and dropping through my letterbox, sometimes with explanatory letters that the stories were too dark for the women’s magazine market, and consequently only one or two were accepted (one of them twice in two different countries, which was pretty great!). I had much more success with the literary magazines and anthologies, where the topics can be much more varied, not to mention darker. This suited me perfectly.

The Reason for Everything by Claire Ladds ebook

When I began publishing my own work, I always knew that I would continue writing those dark short stories – the ones full of crimes of the heart, of moral and emotional grappling with right and wrong, and those in which ordinary people are driven to the edge and crime spills over into both reality and the dark deeds which follow. This is what I achieved with my first collection, The Reason for Everything. I’m truly proud of that book. There are stories in it that make me well up and give me chills and heart-thumping moments. Even better – if a reader can leave one of my stories thinking, ‘I woudn’t have done it like that. Would I?’, or ‘I totally get why they did that,’ or it leaves them pondering those blurred lines, then that’s what makes me feel I’ve succeeded in telling the story.

Readers have contacted me and told me which are their favourites, and this always fascinates me. For a start, it always makes me thrilled that someone has taken the time to read my work(!). What interests me are the stories that they pick as favourites. There is usually something that has caused that particular reader to identify with the character in the story – although I’ll add a caveat to that: if your favourite story turns out to be ‘The death of Mr Ackworth’ and you identify fully with the main character there, then I’m more than a little concerned about you! 😂

If you’d like to grab yourself a copy of the collection which left me dubbed with the nickname ‘Mistress of Melancholy’ (I really LOVE that description! I’m very proud of it! 😁), then you can find it on your preferred store here. If you’re quick, it might even be priced at 0.99. Or if you’d like to delve a little deeper into my collection, you can read a couple of the stories from it here.

If you’d like to see which short stories – and other stuff – that I’ve been posting on Instagram, you can find me here.

Happy reading!

Filed Under: My writing, Reading Tagged With: crime fiction, short stories, short story, short story collection, the reason for everything, writing short stories

Sneak peek at new book cover for my short story collection

11th May 2021 by claireladds Leave a Comment

The Reason for Everything by Claire Ladds

I’m very excited today because I have been waiting for ages to give you a sneak peek at the new cover for my short story collection, The Reason for Everything. Finally, I’m able to do it!

This new version, dominated by black and red (two colours which I happen to love, especially together), is much more in keeping with the dark, emotional noir and suspenseful feeling that I’ve incorporated into all of the stories, be they actual physical crimes, emotional deviance and difficulties or murky memories and experiences.

The Reason for Everything will be getting its new look very soon. I’ll also be offering the collection for a VERY limited time, at a special price, to celebrate the new cover. Watch this space! 😊

If you’d like to read an extract from the book while you wait for its makeover, you can find that here.

And if you’d like to be among the first to know of the new and revamped book, its special price for a really short time, and news of my upcoming books and other good stuff, you can sign up to my Readers Club. If you do choose to sign up, you’ll also receive a welcome gift of a Darker Minds novella which is completely exclusive to my Readers Club.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: book cover, cover reveal, short stories, the reason for everything

Writing what you know (Part 1): Relatability and familiarity in The Reason for Everything

16th May 2019 by claireladds 1 Comment

Writing what you know part 1 by Claire Ladds

This is my first blog post on my shiny new website. It’s all very exciting for me, and it comes straight after the launch period of my first collection, The Reason for Everything. This is a book which focuses on the lives of ordinary people who, through circumstances or due to their own memories and emotions, often find themselves driven to feel, or do, the most extraordinary of things. It also explores the ways in which people react to what they know – their version of reality and the truth – which may be very different from someone else’s as an outsider looking in.

Relatability and familiarity

Given these themes, ‘writing what you know’ became something that hovered in the background throughout the creation of this collection. In writing terms, not for one minute do I believe that writers should meticulously stick to only writing what they know, or where would be the place of reading and research and the sheer love of discovering things to write about? But I did find that, in all of the stories, somewhere, there’s an essence of something that I know, or have felt, or have experienced (now, there are a few murderers among my cast of characters, and I can categorically state that that’s pure fiction!). Put simply, there’s an empathy with the characters and their circumstances at some level. They are all relatable to me in some way. And I came to understand that, somewhere, there was always a reason for everything that happened to them.

I’m struggling to think of even one story that doesn’t have a personal connection to me in some way. Some are tenuous – ‘Little star’, for instance, is the story of a mother with her small son on Christmas Eve (I won’t spoil it, in case you want to read it), and it came about because I was staring at our Christmas tree, all packed away in the box and in desperate need of being shoved back into the loft. ‘In two minds’ was written using three pictures cut from magazines that I found one Sunday. I was playing Scrabble with the kids and… bingo! A story about two men playing the ultimate game of Scrabble. Similarly, others contain pinpoint observations I’ve made over the years, one way or another. After all, that’s what writers do – soak up characters, costume, settings, snippets of conversations and anything else we can squirrel away for later, which becomes eventually another way of ‘writing what you know’.

However, there are others in which I really have written from a depth of personal experience which has infiltrated the fiction. This is, therefore, the first in a short series of posts about those particular stories and the experiences which shaped the stories in which they occur. Some are comical, some uncomfortable, some heartbreaking, but maybe, just maybe, you might relate to them.

Jeff the travelling fish

To the first experience, then, and this is one I intend to keep light. It tells the story of a fish and its bizarre journey one May weekend in 2015…

My main character in ‘Joy is a bubble’ wins a fish at the fair, and it becomes integral to the story. This fish is, or was, in reality, a goldfish called Jeff.

The fair has always come to my home town during May. I loved it as a child and I can picture every part of it vividly: the painted swirls of colour, the aromas of candyfloss and hot dogs, the bustle and the music. I haven’t lived in that town for almost thirty years, yet I still really miss it.

The other year, while I was visiting my parents with my daughter, we took a trip to the fair. Amid the excitement and the chaos, we found a hook-a-duck stall, where, to my astonishment, one of the prizes you could win was a goldfish. I thought that kind of thing had been outlawed years ago.

My daughter was desperate to have a go, so she did. And what else but promptly won a fish! Without thinking (and, to be honest, to rescue the fish), I said she could have it, and we carried it around the fair in its little plastic tub, went and bought a tank, and… only then did I remember we had come on the train and now we’d got to get a fish home on it, too.

My dad tried to persuade my daughter to put the fish in his pond. Well, she was having none of that. So Jeff was duly named and my mum put him in one of those large cereal tubs (those ones with a lid that opens so you can pour out your cereal), we hid him in a plastic bag, and took him on a train ride.

When we had to change stations, we went to get something to eat. I’ve never been thrown out of a cafe before, but this was a close call due to our extra passenger, until I pointed out that the fish was unlikely to be much of a health hazard at it was unlikely to jump out of the water and into the sandwiches. At which point, the waitress left us alone.

Jeff seemed not to mind the train ride, and was oblivious of the conductor giving us a strange look, although he didn’t question our oddball travelling arrangements. Jeff lived happily in his tank for three years before old age finally got the better of him last year. My daughter came into the room to find him floating one afternoon. She was distraught and insisted he was buried in the garden, deep enough for the cats not to find him.

So… you can see that ’Joy is a bubble’ is grounded in a bit of unexpected reality! The rest of the story just snowballed from the notion that something as small and benign as the sight of a fish can imbue someone with such strong feelings of possession and empathy.

Where can you find the collection?

Claire Ladds - The Reason for Everything and other short stories

If you would like to buy my collection, The Reason for Everything, you can find it as an ebook in many digital stores here. Paperback and other variants are on their way. Alternatively, you can find out more information (and read the first couple of stories) here.

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE

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Filed Under: My writing Tagged With: short story, short story collection, story inspiration, the reason for everything, writing what you know

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