‘Astonishing!’ resulted from a challenge at the Writers’ Circus:
‘Describe a Person.’
This piece was originally embedded in the tale called “Just Prawns, John!” and so you may recognise a version of it in that story.
In fact when I made a start at what became ‘Just Prawns’, my aim was to take that John to his encounter with this girl.
The astonishing girl, her mother, and their their meeting with that John did occur, more or less as recounted in these two linked tales.
Perhaps ‘Just Prawns’, in its own way, also describes a person I might know?
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This tale was written in response to a Writers’ Circus challenge.
“Why did he/she do that?”
The idea was that the emphasis could be placed on any of the five words, or not.
The story wrote itself, from first to last, almost at one sitting. I like that!
Sanctuary ends with a rather graphic scene, but no worse I claim, than we see nightly on TV.
One lady complained, loudly,so you may wish to avoid it!
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This is a nearly true story, an amalgamation of things that happened to me and others around me during my apprenticeship.
Editing it today brought memories flooding back.
A word of warning - this piece is full of Glasgow vernacular dialogue and swear words.
Sorry, but there it is. This is how people spoke in the Clydeside shipyards of those long ago days.
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This is a wee story that has its genesis in a visit to a coffee shop.
I was about to sit down when I saw what I thought was a ten pound note wrapped in something.
For an instance, I thought I had found a Lottery Ticket.
What I had actually ‘found’ was just a colourful receipt wrapped in another stiffer white card receipt.
A that point the story was born and I went straight home and tapped it out.
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This is a silly,naive tale that I wrote a long time ago.
There was an older lady in our Creative Writing class called Lois.
“I have been on a course and I am an Analytical Reflector, apparently”, she said.
I wrote this tale for her and to be fair, she was totally unimpressed.
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This story arose from a challenge at the Writers’ Circus - we should choose a Proverb, and write a story about it.
The next weekend we went off to Edinburgh to stay with our friends Alan and Jean, in their brand new town house in Morningside. Part of the same impressive development, was a new block of luxury flats, the locus in my mind for this story.
I dug out a Bible that had belonged to my mother-in-law, Georgie. From it fell a greetings card sent to her from one of her Women’s Guild friends. The image on the front of the card was of a Sweet Sultan.
The story wrote itself.
You may note the input form the ubiquitous Maisie Kaywood, she of “Hook, Line and Sinker”.
(Please, do not use Sweet Sultans to make an infusion, unless you know that it is safe so to do! This is fiction, folks!)
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This story is a response to a challenge from Janette at the Writers’ Circus. The topic she gave was “Winter Blues”.
As the story developed the Dr Mel and Anisa characters began to emerge from the shadows of Maise Kaywood’s back-story as a former guru in MI6/GCHQ. These support characters will appear again in another story being spun in the ether, coming soon. It may be called “Spanish Sparrows”.
Fracking seems to be coming. Fracking for subterranean gas in the US and oil from Shale Sands in Canada have changed the Oil Supply Dynamics world-wide, causing attendant financial and political unrest. We can see it today in the North Sea sector. It seems that the Britain, an island built on coal, will be an obvious target for US Fracking companies.
But this story is not about fracking. It’s about something else...
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We sat round the table at the second session of our Creative Writing 2 class.
Some of us had come flown up from CW 1 but other were new.
David Pettigrew our Tutor set the challenge of setting down a few points about ourselves which we would be asked to read aloud to the class.
We were allowed five minutes.
A shorter version of this story appeared on the page in front of me, as if by magic.
It still makes me smile, because it 99% true.
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When we lived in Pollokshaws I was befriended by an older crafter boy from a large family. They had a small mongrel dog, which I have dubbed Rusty.
The story of six-year old Johnny tells itself and happened almost as set down.
Sadly, re-telling it has not expunged my feeling of guilt.
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During stage two of the Creative Writing course at Strathclyde University, I noticed that one lady in our class nearly always wrote of people being ‘done in’. Until then I had never dared to kill anyone in my stories. I decided to try and this story is the result.
It was written against a target of 4,000 words forcing me to turf on words to get down to this limit.
In the opening scene Maisie appears as her deceased mother, (whom I subsequently discovered was Myra).
This image of Myra haunted me.
After many years of visiting and revisiting this story, you can read “Living with Myra” published here in June 2024.
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