Q: What distracts you?
A: I’d like to say I’m not easily distracted, but it’s a different matter entirely when an idea for a story pops into my head. A concept, word, title, or the temptation of ‘what if’ can distract me from my usual day-to-day life of being a wife to a patient husband and mum to three very loved children. When a story grabs me, I can write until sunrise, yet still function through the day as though I’d slept better than Sleeping Beauty. I am guilty of not being present when these moments strike. I might be baking that pie or making a bed, but in my mind, I’m firmly in my story and I stay there until the story is done. I have learnt over the years not to bore my family with the messy details of an evolving story, but they are very good critics, and no story gets sent anywhere without at least one of them reading the final copy first.
Pauline Yates’s story “An Aftertaste of Earth” was published on Friday, 25 August 2017.
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