Tagged: short fiction
Short Story – “For I Will Not Allow It.”
After efforts to write stories about the gaps between action, about day-to-day life, it was refreshing to write something simple and heroic. And so, a simple action scene.
Short Story – “On Ice”
In writing a continuation of Night / Morning I decided to change the perspective and tense slightly; I wanted to keep my idea of trying to write something about the senses, about how it feels to feel alive, and indeed the discomfort of the setting, but to expand it slightly in scope. It has moved from one person in one room, in a way; it is now about someone trying to turn their current situation over in their mind.
Short Story – Lunch at the Real
The inspiration for this story came from the aesthetics of Dishonored 2, which took steampunk and industrial fantasy into the Mediterranean; there was a lot to like about this, and I simply ran with the inspiration it invited into a magic-school setting.
Short Story: The Special Consultant (Again?)
After creating the character of a faceless enforcer of the dystopian state in the previous story in this setting, I thought it would be interesting to characterise them as something other than the usual meathead or killer cyborg.
Thus this came about.
Short Story – The Usual, for Two
I am not quite sure where this story came from. My other short stories have been clear responses to things that have had some impact on me as a writer – my fantasy writing evoking Shonagon and Pliny, my robot-stories drawing on Infinity and Aim for the Top and more.
This aesthetically, I suppose, most evokes Michiko and Hatchin and Black Lagoon, set as it is in some unreal, loosely-defined setting somewhere between South America and Asia. I know I wanted to try and, in descriptive terms, evoke the fantastic opening to Under the Volcano by Lowry even if there is nothing of Lowry’s novel specifically in it save a description of a possibly South American tourist town.
I do know it was easy to write. Once I began describing Cana Luz filling out this image of a fictional settlement between a town and a city, somewhere in the midst of postwar reconstruction, it was very easy to visualise. The decadent, narcissistic Governor was a similarly easy character to visualise. At one point she – and her conversation-partner – were going to have defined names. They didn’t make it into the final writing.
Ideas Without End 