Spoiler Alert: read Florence first, if you haven’t already…
This one was quite fun to write, although I suspect it might not be quite as much fun to read as I had writing it. I actually wrote the first draft straight after writing Doctor Fog, knowing that I was going to be away and wanting to try and make sure that I had a story for every week.
Florence is essentially an Austin Seven Top Hat Saloon car, in case you’re interested. She was put in the barn on Wednesday, 31st May 2000 and Daisy retrieved her on Saturday 16th April 2011. There’s no real significance to those dates, except that I wanted something that was exactly the right number of days. Whatever else Florence can do, or understands, she can count – she had to count the miles she drives, after all.
I decided to make this kind of a reverse “”, in that the car isn’t haunted but is actually sentient.
How far I succeeded with this one I’m not actually sure. I really like the characters that are in there other than Florence, but they’re quite loosely drawn. To do anything more interesting with them, I’d have had to break Florence’s viewpoint more than I did, and I really didn’t want that. If anything, I’d have wanted to get deeper into how Florence saw things rather than the other way around.
The ending was actually the first part of the plot that I worked out, and I originally had a longer one, but it felt weaker. The single sentence seemed to just say enough, so I left it at that.
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