This is the “Behind the Scenes” post for this week’s story, “Penny Drops”, which you can read here if you haven’t already
This one didn’t really come together in the same way as the others. Penny’s a character that I’ve had in my mind for quite a while, although I’ve never had a surname for her but always the initials “PC” (that tied in with another story that I was writing that I never finished, and then when the name came into my head, somehow the idea brought in to drop her down a well.
I kind of based this on a castle I visited on the Isle of Wight, which had a similar well in the courtyard, but theirs had a grid put further up. My assumption with this was that when it dried up, the original owners of the castle started to use the well as a place to dump people from the dungeons if they didn’t cooperate. The grid was installed in the well simply because there was the opening and that was the most obvious place to install it – plus it would provide a great little “added extra” for tours, I suppose – at least, in the days before people started to pay proper attention to health and safety concerns, anyway.
I wanted to concentrate on the experience of being in a well, and to try and make the exit plausible. I didn’t want to explain too much, so how Craig opened the well, and what exactly Penny’s revenge will be (assuming she isn’t just dialling the police, of course), is up to your imagination…