simon collis

This is the “Behind The Scenes” post for “The Woman In The Water“. Please read the original story first to avoid spoilers.

This story was the first idea that I had and tried to write for this year of short stories. For some reason, it wouldn’t come then, and it wouldn’t come a few weeks ago either when I tried it again.

My initial plan this time was for there to be an actual ghost, and for the whole thing to leave Eric alone and bemused on the pedalo. About halfway through, when I was writing very slowly and getting distracted every few minutes, I realised this wouldn’t really work. So I decided to change things around and came up with the ending we have here. Once I thought of it, I couldn’t wait to get there.

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This is the “Behind The Scenes” for Veronica. Please read the original story if you want to avoid spoilers.

Veronica came to me while walking the dogs, basically while looking for a story to write for the week. The idea came to me more or less fully formed, and all I had to do is to follow the characters through, so the writing was fairly easy.

One of the things I wanted to try and do was to maintain the surprise until the end, and try to make it so that nobody knew where exactly the story was going until it got there.

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This is the “Behind The Scenes” post for the latest story, “Underground Supporters“. If you haven’t read the original story yet, I advise you to do so as this post is more spoiler-laden than usual…

First off, an apology for this instalment of “Behind The Scenes” being a day later than usual. That’s simply because the release of the podcast yesterday meant I either tagged it onto this post, or delayed it for a day. Since I never really even committed to writing one of these every week (even though that’s what I am doing), I decided that it would be a good idea to delay this a day, so my apologies if you’ve been waiting for this post since then.

“Underground Supporters” was an attempt to write a story set in a not-too-distant, and plausibly wretched, future. Having watched both “Where The Wild Things Are”, as well the qualifying for the Monaco GP, in the days before writing this one the name Max was stuck in my head so I used it for the protagonist. The name Max is pretty well associated with dystopian futures, of course, not only Mad Max, of course, Max Headroom, and (my favourite) Max Damage from the brilliantly bonkers Carmageddon series (although avoid TDR 2000 if you enjoy staying awake).

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This is the “Behind The Scenes” post for the story “Trees Looking At Me“. Please read the original story first if you want to avoid spoilers.

I had a great idea for a story last Tuesday. There was a talking tiger, it was set in 1830s India, it was kind of kooky. It was going to be great. Except it was almost impossible to get started.

So in the end I decided to try and write something in under a thousand words – something I’ve not done before this year. I went on a site that generates random titles (https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/book-title-generator.php) and ended up with “Trees Looking At Me”. And I just started writing.

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This is the “Behind The Scenes” post for the story “She And Him“. Please read the original story first if you want to avoid spoilers.

I stumbled around looking for an idea for this week’s story until Friday night – I knew we were going out Saturday, and that was also the day of the Eurovision final, so the evening was out.

I started with a few different titles – I began writing a story about a surfer called “Son of the Beach”, which not only suffered from having a pun for a title, an author who knows next to nothing about surfing and no idea of what I was going to do for a plot.

Finally I just typed “S” and started off with the idea of someone looking down at their hands and not recognising it.

Continue reading “Behind The Scenes: She and Him”