menagerie of caterwauling pet marmosets which throng about her skirts wherever she wanders. As the snow falls through my reverie, my thoughts a pleasant tumble of memories of Dr Mesmer and my fair cousin, I wonder about the future: if I became a painter of lasting repute, could my portrait of Lady Eloise Schlossover adorn the walls of another generation? I suddenly have a feeling like an inversion of deja vu. I can see my painting on the wall of a house in the future, speaking sternly to a confused young man who works in the house.

It is Christmas Eve 1751 and the tavern is full of all my old friends from my youth. In the corner I spy

An introduction

Hello! This is Olivia writing the first post of Nine Writers, the writing blog of the 2006-7 fiction MA in creative writing at the University of London, Royal Holloway. The idea of this is a group fiction blog to which each of us nine writers can contribute, writing one piece together purely for fun, letting all of our very different characters and ideas (either those we all know from our workshops, or other experiments, or both - whatever we like) mingle. Any one of us who feels like it can add to our piece at any time, whether it's just a few words, a paragraph or whole chapters, and the piece can develop into whatever it becomes! And anyone else is of course very welcome to add their comments too.

Soo...I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when Jane's C18th classical musicians meet Camille's apocalyptic coke fiends and what might come when Karen's Mr A meets Kelley's Brazilian cleaner. Perhaps Penny's actor Aaron will end up getting a job at Ann's haunted house and maybe Sarah's narrator will flee from diseased rabbits with my precocious Madeleine and set out to sea with Chris's whale watchers...

Who's going to start?