Louise Cusack:Beauty & Mr Beast

It's January 2006 and while I'm finishing off my mermaid story I'm starting to work towards writing Beauty and Mr Beast, which is just now stirring inside my mind and causing me to pull out my notepad at odd hours to jot down notes.  It's shaping up as a skin-crawling scare read, which I am SO looking forward to writing.  Lots of creepy and yet compellingly fascinating memories from my childhood are surfacing, so I'm hoping to explore those emotions and some of the situations in the story.

I guess every form of creativity is a type of therapy.  And although I didn't have a scary childhood, even the most cosseted child will have had moments when they felt as if they were all alone in the world, so no one would hear them scream if the Boogey Man under the bed actually did grab their ankle.  (okay, I've always had an active imagination)  And I've also had a terrifying fascination with the idea of what's inside a mirror.  I mean, when you look into one you see yourself, sure.  Because you're on the real side.  But what's on the other side of the mirror, behind the glass, on the unreal side?

Anyway, I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but the action happens in a crumbling castle in the middle of a rainforest in Nth Queensland where a young and seemingly innocent girl finds herself employed by an eccentric recluse.  What happens once she gets there... well, I guess there's no telling until I write it!

WAIT A MINUTE.....

June 2007:  What a surprise, the story has changed completely from what I first envisaged.  It's now called BEAUTY IS THE BEAST and the plotline is going to have to remain a mystery because it's making itself up as it goes along!  I can tell you it's another hilarious misadventure novel set in Brisbane, and the beast has turned out to be such an unexpected character that I'm still marvelling about the whole thing, even at the quarter-way mark! But I'm laughing as I write it, shaking my head at the way the characters are tangling themselves up, and really looking forward to finding out how on earth they're going to get themselves out of the holes they've dug.

I do love writing.  Every day is such a surprise!