Insecure Writers Group – If you could…

For September the prompt/question is – “If you could pick one place in the world to sit and write your next story, where would it be and why?”

Well that didn’t take much thought and although I know an answer, I’m not sure if the book/story will ever get written.

Do you have the kind of imagination that sees something and then wonders if you are really ‘seeing’ or is there something else going on. Okay that’s kind of a weird way for me to state what I’m thinking of so, lets get into the story of the story which was never written, but should be.

During the 1990’s I lived near Pisa, Italy. Actually the town was Tirrenia and I had with me my small son, not sure if he was even kindergarten age at this time. Being single with a single child means that child needs some activity and so we would often go to the beach in Marina di Pisa, the village/town where the Arno River (flows through Florence and Pisa) empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea. They had just installed HUGE rocks along the sea side to cut down on storm erosion and small child thought they were great for climbing on and conveniently at the point where the Arno meets the sea there is a bar. All bars in Italy are family/tourist friendly. So you can get alcoholic drinks, but most people are there for the coffee or soft drinks, or ice cream.

Back to the story. One morning, a Saturday or a Sunday, I took my energetic son down to that bar, parked the car and let him start clambering over the rocks as I walked on the sidewalk edging the breakers. In places enough sand had washed into make ‘tiny’ beaches. At one spot there looked to be ‘fabric’ washed up and mostly buried by the sand. Imagination kicked in…”what if you went over to the spot and pulled on that fabric and discovered it was part of a dress and it was still connected to a body?”

I never did ‘check’ to see if there was anything but fabric, but I still think the setting and idea would be a great mystery story, especially if the luckless person who investigated the cloth, in the public place, turned out to have a connection to the dead body and therefore a suspect.

So I should go back to that bar on the confluence of the Arno with the Tyrrhenian Sea and write this book?

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Linked here

More writers’ ideas here.