Tag Archives: Short Story

General musings

Story ideas


Inspiration is a curious thing. It comes from anywhere and occasionally ties your brain in a knot before disappearing like smoke on the breeze. This weeks offering originated when we were on holiday recently and I put bare feet onto one of those rough sisal carpets.

The story has gone into my ‘oddball work in progress’ file tagged to a strange visual image of dust and close up of insect debris in an empty room that came to me as I felt the roughness under my feet. Haven’t even decided what sort of story it’s going to be.

Science fiction brain says ‘dimensional transition gone wrong’ or ‘temporal prisoner reflects’. Fantasy brain says ‘depressed alcoholic meets Caspar Hauser’. Oddball sense of humour says ‘Why not both’? I’ll see where it goes over the next month or so. If I don’t get distracted.

Still blocked over ‘Darkness between the stars’, the last book in the ‘Stars’ series I began writing in 2005. Not because I’m stuck for ideas, but rather can’t decide which way I want the story to go. There are just too many narrative lines flapping around. Lots of good dialogue and plot points but the whole project has become a monkey on my back. I’m compelled to finish, but can’t decide how.

For a writer, life is something that can to get in the way of the business of writing. For me there are still too many chores to do, bits of our new home to finish, things to make for the garden and sheds or interruptions just as my thoughts settle down.

The work is not the problem. I can push out two or three thousand words a day, but it’s the direction I’m having issues with.

Publishing

Finally…


At last I’ve managed to put together a video reading for ‘Blink!’ that I’m half way happy with. The short YouTube version of which can be seen below. Hope the multiple fluffs and tongue stumbles don’t prove too stressful for any viewers. Dailymotion and Vimeo will also be getting a copy.

The full 2500 word reading can be found here on Bitchute.

Note 1: In future, all YouTube / Vimeo / Dailymotion versions will only be partial readings. Full story readings will henceforth only be found on my Bitchute channel.

Note 2: The colourful tropical and Provencal shirts are going to become a feature of future readings as I have quite a nice selection. Doing straight readings, although not my greatest strength, are a lot less work than producing multiple simple artworks for a story like I did for ‘The Cat tree’. Such graphics also distract from actually writing, so I’m going to try and keep that side of things to a minimum.

Note 3: Work on the supernatural compilation ‘The Cat Tree and other stories’ continues and I hope to be proofing the first hardback version in September prior to visiting London in late October. Work on ‘Darkness between the Stars’, the third volume of the Stars trilogy should be close to story completion by Spring 2020, ready for what I’m starting to think of as ‘the great edit’.

Note 4: Have moved all my (admittedly minimal) social media activity over to Minds.com here and will be opening a Gab account in the next week or two. This may sound like opening the door to the Lions cage and strolling inside, but I’m game if they are.

Happy reading and viewing.

Update:

Looks like Vimeo and Dailymotion don’t want my content. Dailymotion want me to pay them to upload and Vimeo say I’ve gone past my monthly upload limit when I haven’t put anything on their platforms for months. This is why YouTube is the biggest player in the market.

Publishing

An expression of pleasant surprise


Last night I got an email from Kevin Hillman over at Leg-Iron books who recently accepted my short story submission “A Coelacanth in the bathroom”. Apparently there’s a small eZine publisher based in California that is looking for original horror writers. They have expressed an interest in the kind of quirky, off the wall story I like to write and asked me, via Kevin, if I had anything. So, pleasantly surprised, I said yes. So I dashed off a brief email explaining who I was and what I did and the response was guardedly positive. They don’t pay, but they do have a fairly good distribution spread.

Now I’ve offered them a short story, currently a work in progress; target length about five thousand words that is kind of a spin off from “Coelacanth” in that it includes one of the characters from that tale. Without giving too much away, it’s mainly about an infestation of semi-mythical beasts who are a little, but not quite like they are portrayed in mainstream fantasy stories.

I did my research and looked at the crypto-biology behind these creatures before fleshing out the details and making them a little more believable. Nothing much, just playing around with the how, what, why, when and where of their mythology. I haven’t gone the full J K Rowling on them because I’ve always considered using the Harry Potter style of magic and wand waving as a bit of a cop out. Far more fun to take the impossible and set it off against the mundane. I mean, what would someone do if they found an endangered species in their bathroom or a plague of mythical beasts in their place of work? Whose job is it to deal with these things? How big a crimp would it put in their day?

It’s oddball questions like these that make my mouth twist into a villainous little smile and make me take to my office for so long that my wife greets me with “Oh, hello stranger” in the evenings when I finally surface.