After the gnome appeared in the story and vanished, having served his purpose, I missed him a bit, but he had served his purpose … which was to prove that Angela’s journal could make things happen. Even if not possible. So imagine my surprise when he suddenly pops out of the bushes again to wave at Angela, when she hadn’t written a thing in her journal. Glimrick’s re-arrival in the story took it in an entirely new direction and I was so glad. Now I cannot even imagine the story without him. And it led me to find an answer to one of the questions I knew I had to answer by the end of the story, but had no idea how I was going to do so.

For me, writing without an outline was a good exercise. I had become too entrenched in this is the way I must write and was in danger of stifling the voices of my characters … because let’s face it, at heart I’m a bit of a control freak. So the lesson of Glimrick was to let my characters lead the way, and by doing so I will have the story I was meant to write. Do I still outline stories? Yes, but perhaps in a less restrictive manner.

The illustration is by the fabulous Sam Shearon who illustrated not only the cover for The Journal of Angela Ashby but created 13 images for a set of playing cards based on the book. He plucked the image of the gnome out of my head and brought it to life on the page.

A little man with a full white beard, and fluffy eyebrows, wearing a blue work shirt, sat in the middle of the grass outside the window and waved at me. He didn’t have the red pointed hat I expected, but a flat cap covered his head instead. His face, lined with the wrinkles of a lifetime, wore a gleeful expression.

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Interestingly, I did know there would be a tunnel, but had no answers for things like: How did a tunnel come to be built under a Middle School? I did attend a college in the Midwest that had tunnels running from some of the older buildings to the others, which had been built for use in extreme weather conditions, but had never been used in recent years. Besides, those weren’t like the hand hewn tunnel of Washington Academy. The fully-lined concrete walls took away all the romance of the concept of tunnels and they simply became cold, dark corridors where you were more likely to greet a scurrying rat than anything interesting.

I wanted this tunnel to be more romantic. Which meant a potentially modern day construction was out as far as the school was concerned. And out of that thought blossomed the background for the school location and an off-page character (because he’d been dead for over a hundred years by the start of the story). Silas Tucker, though not a part of the school itself, definitely played a major role in the story and it was he who built the tunnel.

     Rhonda scraped the dust away with her foot. Come on, be there. Her stomach twisted at the thought of what Spencer would say if she had picked the wrong spot. And the rest of the kids would agree, especially the ones who’d moved the mainframe.
     Was that a groove? She knelt.
     She brushed her fingers across it. Definitely not a scrape from the mainframe. Teeny bits of grit fell into it and disappeared. Tracing it, she shook her head. A single groove wasn’t enough, there had to be more. And there had to be a handle somewhere.
     Dennis squatted beside her. “What’re you looking for?”
     “It’s here. The door into the tunnel, but we have to figure out how to open it.”

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