Other Ways of Being

                                                                     

  

Other Ways of Being is my latest collection of short stories.  An earlier collection contained what I would call my “every day, real life stories”.  This one has stories in different settings: the supernatural, near future, fantasy and back in history. Hence the title.

Some of them have been published before.

We’re often asked “Where do you get your ideas from?” So here’s a list of what sparked the stories.

I forced myself to write a story that included the were-wolf / vampire conflict – but they went and fell in love.

I explored the backstory of a fantasy I’ve written for children.

A colleague made a chance remark that she could do with cloning herself so that she could get all of her work done. I wondered how that might work.

What if the infrastructure breaks down? 

How might an alien see our planet? This came from an exercise at Winchester cathedral when I was doing my MA.

A newspaper article about the disappearance of a couple on a boating holiday sparked an idea.

There was another newspaper article about a young man who had been living wild in the forests. I coupled that with similar stories I’d heard about people fleeing the Nazis that way in the 1930s and 1940s.

What would it be like to be the mind of a blue whale?

What happens when the money runs out?

And if we no longer use money how could we repurpose the old ATMs?

I noticed that religious people respect one another’s places of worship, even if they don’t believe the same things. Might churches then become a place of refuge?

What might we discover if we really could freeze people and bring them back to life?

What was it like in biblical times as those events we now know so well were actually happening? For instance, the journey of the Magi and the feeding of the five thousand?

What was that strange experience of telepathy all about?

They’re talking about driverless cars.  Let’s explore that and add a bit of spooky magic.

There you have them and I’ve written a heap more since then.  It’s always a matter of exploring the “what if”?