I quickly scanned the story before sending, and still love it.

I intend to complete my Hong Kong zombie story, but also to write some short pieces of fiction just to whet my whistle. Writing is a muscle, and it needs working before it can be effective, so the idea of just batting out short flashes of fiction is in my parlance akin to having a bit of a stretch and warm up before going for a big run.

When the ideas come, though, they come at odd moments. Following a restless night some days ago, where I skipped in and out of dreams about alien invasions and joining the contestants on US Celebrity Apprentice (not in the same dream I should add, although I accept this would make an awesome episode. Imagine Meatloaf trying to project manage a children’s musical while spaceships are destroying New York outside. Who says I don’t get any ideas?), I lay there, staring at the ceiling early in the morning and found myself wondering where all the good futuristic city sci-fi stories had gone. Perhaps I’ve never looked properly. Perhaps I believed that I had read the greatest futuristic city book already (Only Forward, by Michael Marshall Smith) and see the best film (you shouldn’t need to guess this one) so why bother looking?

So, good point. But what about writing one? How about going a step further and writing a series of short stories based in a futuristic city, loosely intertwined, yet heavily character based and connected only by their existence in this same world? I have already written a few short stories in such a vein and enjoyed the freedom of creating a story in a whole new undiscovered country. In my teenage youth I had desires to write a novel based on a city on an asteroid, and a young boy kidnapped and transported from earth to this place. The ideas were great. I even had a song. Both the song and the title of the novel was awful, and will not bear repeating here. The story faded, as all stories do if they remain in ones head and not on the page, but the images I conjured in my imagination are there still in my memory. The story may have been rubbish, but the world was not. I could awaken it once more.

It could work. I have a rough outline in my head of a story already, of a husband suspecting his wife of adultery and his attempts to investigate, all set on the canvas of this fantastical city out there in space. Normal characters/abnormal places. I like normal characters. I enjoy putting them in weird new places* and poking them with a stick.

The trick, as always, is getting them out of my head. Before they fade.

*readers of Warp Factory will probably be nodding in agreement at this point.

In other news I’ve heard some promising news about a publisher who is interested in publishing one of my novellas through Amazon. Very exciting, but negotiations are in the early stages. However, fingers crossed and all that jive.

I do not have the rest of the story.

All his life he thought this was his imagination.

Nice, eh?

This story was born out of twelve long years, countless re-edits, three abandonments and at least ten other stories in between. Yet somehow it stuck in there, nagging and haranguing me until I took three months out and just nailed it. Some stories come easy, some come hard. This invented its own category.

What counts against the story is the length – it runs into novelette territory, which I’ve found rather hard to publish – but even so it is a tight read. I’ve sent this to Post Mortem press, who specialise in stories of this length. Hopefully they enjoy the read as much as I did writing it.

The main protagonist is also called Frank Spencer. That’s got to count for something.

Post Mortem Press can be found here

Hope they find it absurd enough.

The Grand Station is available here