Fiction
Genuine question for indie authors as I’m thinking about an ‘author’s newsletter’. Not to be rude, but it would surprise me if anyone gave a fig about my ‘process’. Do you get much traction for posts about how you’ve had a great/terrible/random week’s writing?
Breaking news: a slim young guy on the opposite pavement suddenly stopped, put down the coke bottles he had in each hand, pulled his t shirt up, and watched himself slapping his pale white stomach a few times. Then he replaced the t shirt, picked up the bottles and moved on. #writing
Rewriting is so much easier than the initial writing. Sadly, I can’t rewrite without having writ. #writing #amwriting #writingcommunity
Just finished the vomit draft of quick side-project short story that was only going to be a couple of thousand words then back to the main gig. Quick side project is currently 9500 words. Anyhow, put it away for a week then I’ll come back to do some rewriting. #writingcommunity #amwriting
My grandfather got out of the car, and casually asked me to move it down the hill while he was inside the office. I was 12.
The first time I acted like an adult while feeling like a kid, but not the last.
#WritingCommunity
Driving my grandfather’s car
Short story - King of the Mountain
He’d felt watched, but there was nobody there to watch him.
He lifted a single eyelid and checked his cycle was still leaning against the bench. The French village square was scorching in the afternoon sun, and empty, apart from a scatter of long-parked cars and the small village shop in one of the corners. The shop, he had discovered, sold rich cold ice cream which had scorched his tongue as he bit into it.
So that’s the plotting done. Now it’s just… typing. Which is great and also daunting.
#writingcommunity #iamwriting
Watched/went to a webinar about making money from short stories. The good news is that there are many more outlets for my genre than I thought. The bad news is that ‘payment’ is not really a thing. Good for just getting stuff out there anyhow.
A 16 year old skateboarder - baseball cap, plaid shirt - takes repeated runs at jumping off an 18 inch concrete step on the concrete plaza. Every time, he falls off, hands fly out behind him as he crashes onto his arse. He gets up, grins, does it over again.
#WritingCommunity
Two twenties women on main street are wandering up to blokes and asking them something… it’s all fun and not sketchy but who knows what it is. One of them takes a photo of the other talking to the bloke (or occasionally woman).
#WritingCommunity
Door
I must look like I’m meditating. I’m not. I’m waiting to die.
I sit, foursquare on a bric a brac dining chair behind the empty boho cafe counter, palms on my thighs, waiting for impact.
I’m waiting for the sound of an old school shop doorbell, the kind designed to call staff running from their back room when a customer arrives.
I’m fighting an inchoate, terror-soaked impulse to flee, with the only thing I have: intense concentration. The most I can do is clench my eyes shut, so at least I have the extra few seconds of not knowing the end is a few seconds away. Here I sit, eyes closed. Experiencing my final moments as fully as I can.
Voyage
I scuttled from the quay down the ship’s gangway, the overhead rigging clattering against the masts and booms in the early summer evening. No-one observed me. The local fisherman were out trawling for herring and cod, or settled into the fug of the village’s inn. I did not want to elicit questions about the antecedents of a clearly affluent man of the cloth skulking on board a schooner flying a unidentifiable flag. It was academic anyway. An hour later, the schooner was edging out to sea through the north Norfolk creeks, and nobody knew a thing. Or so I hoped.
Men
This cafe is full of older men. Retired. Or lone laptop typers, like me, habitues with a coffee and a scone or a sandwich. Who knows what we’re writing, if anything. Sometimes on a sofa, one of us will doze off, head dipping and the thumb on his phone creaking to a stop in its scrolling, the screen darkening ten seconds later. A few moments later, one of the very Gen Z staff, frequently androgynous (and we know we’re not meant to use that word any more) will cough tactfully. And then again, louder if necessary. It’s quiet here. Safe.
Nightmare
He’s woken by her twitching beside him in the undergrowth, dreaming. Small gasps and whimpers as she squirms and jerks, eyes closed, body tensing and arching in the pitch dark under the black polythene sheet. It crackles as she moves, water dripping off the branches above them. He wants to reach out to muffle her but even twisting his body risks being heard. and he can hear the men smashing through the trees, closing in. She spasms awake, terrified eyes opening, looking straight at him. He shakes his head. Stay quiet. A boot drives down on the polythene covering them.
#microfiction
Defiance
Two of us were studying music for the exams at the end of high school, and I was the only one also in the school band, private piano lessons, the village brass band, a swing jazz band doing gigs in the evenings. Music, as someone said, was my life. But I wasn’t on the list of the school’s best musicians, I’d just found, left by the school music teacher at the end of last term for his successor. This adult was wrong about me and for once, I wasn’t going to accept their judgement. I was going to prove the adults wrong.
Mama
The woman in the supermarket queue in front of me is swivelling left to right, eyes panicky wide, combing the gaudy aisles of the supermarket. Wedged into place, she tries to bend light around people cross-currenting through the wide gutter between the cash registers and the rows of shelves to see what she was looking for. At the other end of the cereal aisle, a young girl takes a man’s hand and walks away from her. The woman takes a deep breath and turns back to the till. Job done, she smiles at the cashier over her shopping. ‘How much?’.
On the opposite pavement, a bloke in a tracksuit has paused, phone in hand, to shout at my compost recycling bin.
Grave
The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, like it had been crushed by the dark. The sexton had known the occupant of the coffin and he was happier now she was in the earth instead of on it. But the outline worried him. He imagined malignant goo seeping up from crack of the coffin lid. He closed his eyes and prayed it was nature’s goodness fleeing the evil inside the coffin, not her evil returning to wreak revenge.
Song
The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays on his side just a few centimetres away, the floor digging into his shoulder. He’s surrounded by the unforgiving hardness and months of built up scum, and the smell of shit and bleach sliding into his nostrils. In the bath, his guitar lies smashed, its neck broken, the slack strings echoing in the tub, water drumming on it from the showerhead. I am a rock, he thinks.