WRITE NOW, I'M FINE

 3. A Drag of a Guy Chloe picked up the pouch that the jacks came in and ran her finger over the monogrammed initials of its former owner. S.E.T. One of the first things Chloe found out about her family, the thing that lead to their discovery, was that Stanley Thomas had died in odd circumstances when he was eight years old.  'That's morbid.' Guy took the pouch and threw it back in the box. 'I just think it's interesting. The boy who played with these jacks was murdered a few miles away from here. You don't find that interesting?' 'What's more interesting is that you'd rather play with a dead kid's toy than contemplate what a potential goldmine you're sitting on. Anyway, murder was never proven.' 'What do you think happened, then?' 'I think he saw one too many westerns, decided to camp out in the woods, fell down a hole, and accidentally set himself on fire.' 'I think it was murder.' 'Well whatever it was, ...

 Little Treasures was a novel that came to me when I thought about all of the little collectables people amass over a lifetime, that they pass down to their families. It occured to me that even the cheapest stuff must've meant something, had a past of its own.  LITTLE TREASURES 1. Chloe Chloe Brady couldn’t believe how twisted fate could be. She lost her parents in February, found out she was adopted in March, and discovered that her last blood relative was dead in April, which made her the sole inheritor of a magnificent, Cape Cod-style house. What she wanted more than anything was a family but, in lieu of that, a mansion would suffice. Then she saw the place. ‘Jesus.’ ‘So it’s a fixer-upper,’ said her boyfriend. Up until April, Chloe thought she’d have to bop Guy over the head, caveman style, and drag him up the aisle, but he’d been very keen to commit since the reading of the will. These days, it was Chloe’s feet that were turning blue. She wasn’t an idiot, she’d wa...

 Very rarely for me do story ideas start with a concept rather than a plot or a character, but at the time I wrote Persistence, I was obsessed with the idea of non-linear storytelling, and once I tried to imagine what it would be like to literally go back and retrace your steps to solve your own mystery, I was off. This kind of storytelling isn't new, I know, but it was interesting to explore. PERSISTENCE  You can only bleed so much. You can only bleed so much. That just popped into my head and I don’t know why. I think someone’s here. My mouth tastes like salt and blood and barbecue sauce, and I don’t know why. I’m sure the sore on my hand must have bled more when I first started picking at it, whenever that was. Now it just weeps a little. You can only bleed so much, I suppose. I hate the heat. It makes everything stink like filth. The hole in the centre of the sore on my hand is really filthy. Really big, too. Too big to have nothing in it. I licked it because it looked li...