Writing The Colonel’s Ducks

With Leprechaun I’ve tried to tell how I get story ideas but sometimes it’s just a follow on from something before. The Colonel’s Ducks at Oakhaven is the sequel to Welcome to Oakhaven. I’d given the Colonel a dream to make a rehabilitation centre for soldiers coming back from war zones, a kind of Help the Heroes place, where the families could rebuild relationships but hadn’t followed it through. It would need planning permission – not always easy. There would have to be city visitors to make the rehabilitation place pay and that meant ducks and chickens and pony rides. Then, one day, I was on the bus and two Women’s Institute members were sitting behind. They talked about the crochet and embroidery, the sketching and painting, someone was making fashion jewellery and someone wanted to start pottery – but didn’t that mean a kiln and things? Oakhaven is too small to have a WI but their interests went into the plot. I’ve often commented on how things come in batches and I wasn’t surprised when I noticed a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) leaflet and there was how to make a garden for the birds and the bees, not to mention hedgehogs to be added to the mixture. It all seemed a bit mild and I wanted something a dramatic and saw a book called UXB (UneXploded Bomb) on the wartime Bomb Disposal Squad (I had an uncle in it) and that went into the Oakhaven basket. I thought about making that the dramatic ending but, one day, looking out of the window, I saw a hot air balloon and the sequence of the story settled out. That’s the bare bones and illustrates how things come together in mysterious ways, or, as I read somewhere, don’t just look at the stars, there’s treasure at your feet.