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| Step inside for a while, you'll find Gordon, Nat, warmth, laughter, tears, multiple goldfish, Julie Andrews, and a host of colourful characters. |
| Hope House Prequels: Stories about Gordon and Nat's Early Days Together. 1: Out Of The Box. 2: Out Of Tune. |
| Newly edited and re-uploaded 2008 |
| Chapter one. Chapter two. Chapter three. Chapter four. Chapter five. Chapter six. Chapter seven. Chapter eight. Chapter nine. Chapter ten. Chapter eleven. |
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| Author’s Notes: Hope House is another series that I very much enjoyed writing at the time. I was always surprised, pleasantly so, by how popular the HH stories became, given some of their subject matter. I think people who could relate to some of the characters eccentricities found a kind of comfort in the idea that there was a caring and kind refuge available, even if that refuge was at times, to say the least, chaotic. I doubt that the Hope House story will ever be completed, it’s too big and I think it’s gotten away from me to some extent. I am myself a manic-depressive and because of frequent shifts in mood and thought patterns I find it nigh on impossible to concentrate on one thing at a time, which is one reason I create so many different stories that run concurrently. As I’m getting older I’m finding the mood disturbances increasingly difficult to effectively manage, especially as the episodes of deep depression are lasting much longer than the ‘ups’ with the result that I just don’t have the energy or the same sense of enthusiasm or commitment to writing that I once had. I have tons of notes and sketches and ideas for the characters in Hope House and some partially written stories but in all honesty I now fear that they’ll never be developed into complete pieces. Mental illness, from whatever source it stems, is a painful and debilitating thing, like living on the dark side of the moon with no sense that the sun will ever shine again, but that’s not to say that there’s no humour, or affection or optimism and that’s what HH was intended to show, as well as being a forum for my interest in different aspects of discipline of course. Hope House, some of its characters and both Gordon and Nat are loosely based on people I’ve met and experiences I’ve had (with a great deal of poetic licence flung in for effect) and so it was especially nice when the stories received such a positive response. Cat. 2008. |