This is my short stories page. Here you'll find works which are longer that my flash stuff, which is no more than 800 words but less than the much longer stuff, which I'm saying starts at 5000 words.

Nanowrimo warm up 2007
These works here are the results of the warm up challenges I got my family and friends to set me in the run up to the 2007 nanowrimo. They are therefore much like the nanowrimo stories them selves in that they are written at speed and appear here, pretty much unedited.

Week 1 (07/09/2007), The Merlin Artifice

Nanowrimo warm up 2008
As you can see above my idea for ‘warming up’ ready for Nanowrimo didn’t actually last for very long. I’m going to try the same thing this year (2008) and hopefully it might last a bit longer. As before the stories are written at speed, in around an hour or so and are presented here with only minimal editing. In other words don’t expect to much from them quality wise.
They mostly come from notes in my ever growing ideas file, so one day the ideas I’m working on here might appear in an expanded and improved form!

Week 1
19/9/2008, The Road
I wrote this one late at night. I’d already gone to bed and I’d spent an hour laying there trying to get to sleep. If I can’t get to sleep after that I normally get up and do something. This particular sleepless Friday night resulted in this story. Since I my self was feeling very tired I’d hoped to get that feeling on unreality and disconnectedness you get when you are very tired. After I’d written the story, it seemed to me that it had worked very well. However having had a good nights sleep re-reading it again in the morning I could see what happens when you write and are tired! This particular story has been done many, many times and I don’t think it really gets across that feeling of extreme tiredness. Anyway when I started this I said I would put it up whatever, so here it is.

20/9/2008, The Basement
Wow, two stories in two days, thats got to be a record for me. Well I didn’t quite write this one in the hour or so I’d allocated. It came from my ideas file and in fact I’d completed the first page of the idea already some time ago. However I wasn’t really happy with that page, so it was edited so heavily it was practically a new bit of writing. This story is supposed to be the start of a whole saga, but in fact I’ve already released a story on these pages which is connected to this one. Can you work out which one (it’s not that difficult actually).
The original idea came from working in a data center very early one morning. I’ve always found data centers to be slightly spooky places, they are made for the machines comfort, not peoples. They are cool, brightly lit, nosey and have very dry air. Working in one for any length of time is never much fun. This particular night I’d been working since 6 o’clock in the evening and it was now 2 the next morning and I was alone. I got to thinking what was going on side these rows and rows of identical cabinets. Then as I was thinking this some where one of the servers in one of these rows started beeping.
Okay that doesn’t sound very spooky, but at the time it did freak me out a little.
Lack of sleep is never good for your perception of reality! Here is the result of that early morning beeping,