Strict! All girls and never allowed to mix with the boys school down the road. After reading your bio I have to ask, convent school! What was that like? The afternoon is a chaotic mix of housework, starving children, cooking, editing and beta reading if I can squeeze it in, and all that dribbles into the evening, where I finally (once the kids are in bed) collapse on the couch with a cup of tea and the remote. I try to write 1 to 2 K a day, then catch up on my admin work, like interviews etc. Once they’re all up and gone, I settle into some writing time. The morning is crazy, I have to get my four kids out to school. So I had a good idea how I was going to tackle the retelling before I started. I did a little research before I started writing and studied how different authors worked their story curve. There’s no time for tension build up, so you have to be able to wham it all out on the table and hook the reader right from the beginning. Trying to squish background, plot, and interesting character that the readers will connect with, into three to four thousands words is no mean task. I have to admit it was a bit daunting writing a short story for the first time.

Yes, this is the first short story I’ve had published. Is this the first time having a short story published in an anthology? How different is it writing a short story vs a full length novel?

It's an engaging story, heavy on the 'snogging' and light on the mystical perils, from an author likely to improve with time. The intense, immediate romance between Megan and Adam remains the focus and the main draw.

Several chapters of teenage day-in-the-life narration ensue before Fallon suddenly dumps mysterious marks, elemental forces, and the Celtic goddess Danu into the mix, and the story takes off in a paranormal direction that the first third of the book has only hinted at. Megan fits right in with the popular crowd at her new school, but a broodingly handsome boy, Adam DeR s, keeps staring at her, and Megan stares right back, despite her friends' warnings. The setup is familiar and briskly handled: 17-year-old Megan Rosenberg has moved to Kinsale, Ireland, with her father after several unsettled years following the death of Megan's mother. Fallon's debut novel, first published on the HarperCollins online writing community and then selected for print, is a better-than-average offering that occasionally betrays its amateur roots with some uneven pacing.

Carrier of the mark by leigh fallon