Tuesday night. Home from work and knocked down by some kind of flu. Awful. Straight to bed and no supper.
Wednesday morning, up and about with the children, dropping them off to school with my mind focussed on a little lie down, see if it might make me feel better.
Bump inot Tadg. Tadg is cool. He’s a writer of many hats. One hat was his rather ingenioius ‘The Average Life Of The Average Person: How It All Adds Up‘.
It’s not long before we sit for coffee in his wonderful home, surrounded by charm and things half-finished.
Chat turns to writing. It often does.
Tadg has a story he’s not going to write. There’s the duelling piece he’s been collaborating on and the kitchen’s to be ripped out and there are so many pies he doesn’t have enough fingers.
I offer to write it. I’ve not written a story for a month now. He says yes.
It’s a ghostly, horror piece. It’s not something I’ve considered trying before as reader of writer. Then again, Chris Holm and Heath Lowrance and Ron Brown and Jodi MacArthur things at Beat To A Pulp and more besides have meant I’ve come across dark tales almost by accident and loved them.
Somehow the story gets under my skin. I carry it home in my head.
There’s also something to prove, that ebooks make sense (Tadg, soon-to-be owner of a kindle has a room of books that’s like a library or the old curiosity shop and isn’t yet convinved).
I write. Should be sleeping, but I type away and send it back.
Tadg likes it. Adds a different ending. I have it again.
It bounces back and forth like a lamb on a trampoline.
Finally we have it. A polished story (last time I looked). A ghost story. Horror, I think.
It’s aslo got the tag erotic. There’s definitely an erotic strand in there if you’re fairly unusual, the tag mainly being to see if we can sell an extra couple of copies.
We resisted and erotic title.
Second hand became ‘A Handsome Man’.
I wonder what you’ll think.
