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    Nothing Is As It Seems: A Novelette
    Nothing Is As It Seems: A Novelette
    Nothing Is As It Seems: A Novelette
    Ebook67 pages51 minutes

    Nothing Is As It Seems: A Novelette

    By Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Always careful and planning ahead, PhD in statistics under her belt, Elizabeth leaves her past in Germany and flies to London, the city she knows to be her birth place. Other than that and her English first name, Elizabeth knows nothing of her early childhood, before she and her Ukrainian father left for Germany.

    With her father's recent death, Elizabeth visits the place of her childhood, wanting to know more. What will she find out in the majestic house? Will she regret coming here, or is there some hope that the deeply entrenched melancholy in her heart could finally melt away?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOptimist Writer
    Release dateJun 20, 2016
    ISBN9781534799790
    Nothing Is As It Seems: A Novelette
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      Book preview

      Nothing Is As It Seems - Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

      NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS

      A Novelette

      Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

      Nothing Is As It Seems: A Novelette

      Copyright © 2016 Victoria Ichizli-Bartels

      The moral right of the author has been asserted.

      All rights reserved.

      The original version of this story appeared at victoriaichizlibartels.com

      from September 2015 to March 2016 .

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author.

      Cover design by Victoria Ichizli-Bartels and Alice Jago

      E-book cover image ©Canva.com

      The first paragraph from The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag is reproduced in Chapter 1 and in Just before Chapter 1 starts… Reproduced with the permission of the author.

      For Menna,

      Thank you for igniting this story.

      Preface

      Have you ever thought about how a book or a story you love could have been told differently? Or have different characters?

      I hadn’t ever wondered this myself until my writing teacher and friend Menna van Praag shared her one-minute writing class, with the idea to develop a story starting with the first paragraph of her best-selling book The House at the End of Hope Street. You can find the video posted on Menna’s Facebook writer’s page.

      I’ve learned a lot from Menna’s international seminars, both from her edits of excerpts from my books, and from the feedback she has given to her other students. My first book The Truth About Family profited considerably from Menna’s advice and feedback.

      Each of Menna’s one minute courses provides a self-standing, inspiring and complete in itself piece of advice, which I never would have believed possible to embrace in one minute.

      So the idea I mentioned above was given by Menna in her one minute course titled One Minute Writing Class - Play & Taking the Pressure Off. Menna said in this video that she gave one of her students a sentence from one of her favourite books, and the student would write a page inspired by this sentence or paragraph. This exercise took the pressure off the student, because she didn’t have to come up with the first sentence herself and she didn’t have to face an empty page. The start was made by the sentence provided by Menna.

      In this particular one-minute course, Menna read the first paragraph from her book The House at the End of Hope Street. I read this book and loved it from the start, and every scene of it. Images generated by its text come up again and again as bright glimpses in various situations of my life. They make me smile. This is truly one of my favourite books.

      As soon as I watched this video with Menna I grew immensely curious about what story would appear in my head after reading this beautiful paragraph.

      So I wrote a page and sent it to Menna. Menna answered that she liked it very much.

      This feedback seeded something in me, which emerged a week or two later. What if I continue writing this story? Bit by bit, here on my blog?

      This is how it all began, and subscribers of my website were able to read the first version of the story on a bi-weekly basis, as I was writing and publishing the chapters.

      The following pages contain the final, edited version of Nothing Is As It Seems.

      Just before Chapter 1 starts…

      Here is the first paragraph from the bestselling novel The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna van Praag.

      "The house has stood at the end of Hope Street for nearly two hundred years. It’s larger than all the others, with turrets and chimneys rising high into the sky. The front garden grows wild, the long grasses scattered with cowslips, reaching toward the long-hanging leaves of the willow trees. At night the house looks like a Victorian orphanage housing a hundred despairing souls, but when the clouds part and it is lit

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