Katerina Vasiliou

Biography

Katerina Vasiliou's difficult to pronounce name comes from Cyprus, where half her family is located. The other half originates from Scotland and England and she was brought up in London. Katerina moved to Edinburgh five years ago to complete a Masters in Creative Writing and she fell in love with the city which has become her home. She has done a number of jobs during her 29 years, ranging from door-to-door selling to teaching high school children in Japan. At the moment she juggles working part-time for a charity, where she gives information and advice to disabled people, with tutoring standard grade students and feature writing for and online vintage fashion magazine. In addition to this she is hard at work on her first novel, Pinching Doesn't Hurt which she hopes to publish in the next couple of years.

Writing excerpt from Pinching Doesn't Hurt

Loll, loll, loll.

Stephanie was lolling about on the sofa. She wasn't allowed and she grinned at the thought of her transgression. The cushions that surrounded her were plump so Stephanie only had a narrow space to loll about on.  She lay on her back and her eyes whizzed round the moulding above the chandelier dangling from the ceiling. She pushed her bottom down repeatedly, flattening her back and whispering "Loll" in time with the shuddering of her diaphragm. Her left hand stroked the velvet cushion pushing into her side, whilst her right hand slid along the velvet below her on the bottom of the sofa. It was not padded down there: an entirely different sensation.

She didn't have her shoes on. Shoes would get a slap, so to be clear she had had tucked their tips neatly under the sofa, a sock sticking out of each top. She couldn't be faulted on that count. She had been there for 23 minutes. The clock on the mantelpiece said so. She reckoned there would be no more than 10 minutes of uninterrupted pleasure left to her, as it was almost lunchtime. She raised her left leg and pointed her toes at the moulding, like an arrow about be discharged from a bow. If her leg grew very, very long she would be able to tease the bottom of the chandelier with it and she'd hear the tinkle, tinkle like when Elsie made the cobwebs go away with the feather duster on a stick. If Stephanie tickled the chandelier it might fall down on top of her and then Julia could make it into a necklace. She lowered her leg down and rested her ankle next its partner on the arm of the sofa. She dragged them from side to side, feeling the velvet tickle her Achilles tendons. Then she went back to lolling.

Comment

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