Dervla Writes

  "There is something magical about school before the holidays...." A bit of a different post today! As I'm sure you've seen on twitter/Instagram, I wrote a Christmas monologue for the Ink Festival that was featured on BBC Radio Suffolk. It's probably one of the coolest things I've done, and I'm really thankful for the opportunity.  I don't think I can post the full story here (but it's still available to hear, I have a link up on my instagram)  But I wanted to do what I normally do on this blog and add some behind the scenes fun facts, because I find it interesting, and I hope you do too: - whenever I write in first person I usually write as a boy and it’s interesting to see how it’s read as a girl narrating, and how the actress reading it solidifies it as a girl's perspective - I’m really bad at coming up with surnames and I was watching Brooklyn 99 and used a name from that as a placeholder and didn’t realise until I heard it read back to me...

To the side of the bookcase in the spare room, slotted right down the narrow crack between shelf and wall, there are tiny folded bits of paper. If you are small enough to squeeze a finger in, or resourceful enough to fish around with a coat hanger, you can take them out. Each one contains a different message, carries a different emotion. They are there to be read, but it’s vital they are put back in place, lest they fall into the wrong hands. The first note Sam had found when his little brother had stolen his fiddle from its case and when he found it, the bridge was cracked and there was a long scratch down the centre. His mother had waved away his compliant, explaining Aiden was only young, and after all, it wouldn’t be that expensive to replace, but she didn’t seem to understand the principle of the thing. He had come to the spare room, because his bedroom didn’t have a lock, and attempted to hide himself away. Sulking with his back against the door, he noticed a l...

“You could tell her she has a nice smile?” Sam asked, his arms spread out for balance as he carefully walked heel to toe along the wall, not caring about the steep drop below him. “Maybe,” The thing was, he wasn’t sure she had a nice smile. It had been an entire year since he saw her last and while her face in his mind was beautiful, it had also began to fade. He actually wasn’t sure how much of her features had distorted over time, his brain editing out all her imperfections. “Or nice hair?” His friend moved closer to the edge of the building, and Aidan ’s stomach seemed to overturn. Since he was a child he had hated heights, but somehow landed himself a best friend who seemed to relish in the danger of being tens of feet from the ground, in abandoned buildings where no one would notice or care if you fell. “I don’t remember her hair being that nice.” He laughed at that, “It’s that brutal honesty that girls really appreciate.” Sam must have realised that...

The Princess of Dusk never knew what it was like to live in darkness. Her world was in perpetual sunset, the sky in hues of orange, yellow and red. Candles and lamps and other things that existed as protection from the dark gathered dust in the corners of attics and in old drawers, relics of a forgotten age. People were always on the streets, in the markets and around the parks. Hard days ploughing the fields never seemed to end, but neither did long days lying in the grass, listening to the birds and watching the clouds in the amber sky. Darkness was something only talked about in hushed whispers, a long forgotten foe that had been banished from the land. It was the monster that lay under the bed, a nightmare from a children’s story. For the kingdom believed that dark meant deceit, villainy and deception. Darkness was a place of great evil, where people revealed the worst in themselves. The Princess had a different perspective. She had grown up in a palace of gold...

"You’ll spoil your dress!”  The first time I saw the ocean I wasn’t allowed to go near it. My parents had dressed me up for the ferry and I was to go across the sea to meet my great uncle. He wouldn’t have wanted a girl covered in sand, and drenched in salt water, although after living there for three years I don’t think he would have cared.  I was never one for sitting down for long periods. My childhood was filled with daydreams of wings, of me flying through the air. I thought one day I would sprout feathers and rise. But that dream faded with age, until I saw the sea and wondered what it would feel like to be engulfed in it.  Since then I’ve been back and forth on the ferry, each time staring at the waves, the sand, even in the winter there was something so different about it. It was peaceful chaos, the quiet of the beach and the unpredictability of the waves. Each time my dress was too fancy to ruin or my hair too styled to risk messing up. I was never allowe...