Release Day: A White Cross Beside a Lonely Road (Short Fiction Lab #3)
A ten-hour drive, a relationship on the rocks, and a ghost waiting for company on a lonely stretch of road.
The last thing Alex wants is a trip home with his boyfriend in tow, but when Brendan insists on coming there’s nothing for it but a ten hour drive and the dread of what might happen when they reach their destination.
There is nothing about the idea of being trapped in car with his lover that Alex is looking forward too, but a haunted stretch of lonely road is about to make him question everything he knows about his relationship and his life.
A White Cross Beside A Lonely Road is the third short story in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press—home to stand-alone short story experiments in fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fabulist literature. This experiment has been filed under: ghost stories, outback fantasy, supernatural encounters, and Australian weirdness.
The third Short Fiction Lab release is now out in the world, and available from the usual suspects via this handy Books2Read Link: books2read.com/u/47EM6E
The story will be on sale for .99 cents US until August 8th, so I’d encourage you to pick it up early.
This is very much a story built out of two writing workshops. I wrote the first draft back in 2007, while I was at Clarion South. At the time it was a relatively straightforward ghost story about isolated roads, relationships going wrong, and taking corners too fast. It worked okay, but it never really felt like it had something to say beyond “look, ghost! Spooky!”
Twelve years later I signed up for Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass online, and figured this would be a good story to use as a test-run for the exercises in his story development class. After twelve years of tinkering with what happened in the story and how it was told, I put my focus back on what it was actually about, which turned out to be less about ghosts and more about expectations, “adulting,” and being trapped between two worlds.
If you pick up the story and enjoy it, you could do me a huge favour by leaving some stars or a review on the platform of your choice.
And now I’m off to work on the next Short Fiction Lab #4, so I can get this series back on track.
PeterMBall
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