Story and Memory

To keep up the streak of announcements, I’ve got a reprint out this week – one of my oldest stories given new life in the latest issue of THEMA, a long-running magazine out in the States. They’re a theme-focused magazine, and when I saw ‘light and shadow’ I immediately thought of an old friend from back in university, ‘A Conversation at the End of the World’. If it qualified for ‘Light and Dark’, it should qualify for ‘Light and Shadow’, thought I – and it did. So if you fancy reading what was originally a short film idea before I realised my complete lack of cinematic talent, and seeing two old friends-turned-enemies watching the stars go out, one by one, you can.

Seeing such an old story of mine back in print made me equal parts nostalgic and self-evaluative. I’ve got quite a few stories out in the world now, in publications big and small, British and American and Australian. I like them all. I definitely like some better than others. The latest, Great Martian Railways, is definitely among my favourites, for reasons I went into last week. It’s one of those with a genuine emotional connection for me – in this case trains – which a fair few of my stories have in very different ways. The Only Cure is based on a bit of history homework I did in about 2008, and so stays close to my heart – The Scar is essentially a vision of Todra Gorge, the sight of which will always be indelibly etched on my mind as a hidden wonder of the world.

I look at my submission tracker, and the pleasingly tall stack of bricks that are my published stories, and it’s like peering into my own memories.

Robot Mechanic holds my laptop power cable when necessary. Lego is a useful thing to have around.

And then there are the many, many more stories that are in need of editing, and those bold ones right now out waiting for judgement. Some of them have been submitted many, many times, and I’m sure they’ll be submitted many more. I have some of my favourite work in that pile, and I still hope that one day it’ll find a home, if I can find a suitable magazine to which I’ve not already submitted it.

It’s an unpredictable game, this writing lark. I can write something that I think is the best thing I’ve ever put on paper, and it can languish on my hard drive for years – or I can write something that I think is, for me, a solid mid-tier piece and have it snapped up instantly. All art is subjective, of course, but that fact is seldom hammered home as effectively as when I add another rejection to my list of submissions. As I’ve said before, though, you’ve just got to keep trying. It’s taken me years to build up the modest portfolio I have. It’ll take years more before it’s really worth singing about.

But of all the stories I’ve done, published and unpublished, my favourite might still be the first. Or at least my first proper paid story, The Vigil of Talos, from way back in 2018. It’s not a particularly complex story. It’s got a very big robot punching things in it, which was generously deemed to still be on-theme for the Making Monsters anthology and its compendium of reimagined classical myths. But it’s also about fantasy becoming reality, about seeing an idle dream suddenly brought to life, about a quiet desire being fulfilled. What it’s about for me, looking back, is about being a writer. It’s about seeing my work in print for one of the first times, it’s about realising that I could, maybe, actually make something of myself in this arena. When I see that book on my shelf it reminds me of that moment of acceptance, literal and metaphorical.

It reminds me of where I started, and that I really should keep going.

All my stories are available… somewhere. Some will take more work to find than others, some are just up on this blog, their original publishings having long since faded away. Perhaps more of them will be reprinted, some day, and be properly available once again. But if you feel like reading them, you can. You might feel the same way I felt writing them, if you’re lucky.