My latest story, Counting Down, went live at Daily Science Fiction on Friday.
There are all sorts of reasons to write a short story. Sometimes you write them because you have something you want to say, or because you’re trying to chip away at a problem that you can’t seem to tackle any other way. Sometimes you write them because you want to entertain one of your friends, and you think there’s a good chance that you can write something you think they’ll like.
Sometimes you listen to Release the Bats on repeat, and after the fiftieth time you’ve shrieked HORROR, VAMPIRE, BAT BITE! you start getting nostalgic for the time you were stuck in Brisbane, overnight and without a place to stay, because the DJ dropped the Birthday Party at a goth club you were at and you decided that dancing to Release the Bats was more important than catching the last train back to the Gold Coast.
There were four or five of us who made that decision. We did not regret it.
The gulf between conception and execution is wide and stories change as you work on them, so you do not need to be familiar with the song to read the story. That said, it cannot hurt, so…
