I haven't saved everything I've written, and I've started and abandoned far more than I ever finished. My very early stuff when I was a late teenager, was typed on an old Corona typewriter, and I'm sure they are squirreled away somewhere. I also went through a phase of only writing longhand in a jotter with a pen, so those works are around somewhere but not in electronic format. Someday I'll find them and get them on here. So this collection is more a gathering together of fragments and intentions than complete stories. There are a few completed ones, but somehow I find the fragments more exciting - dreams of what might have been if I'd finished them? Therein lies my problem - my dream of them is never lived up to in the execution of them. So here they are, anyway.
| Through a Window | Mar 1997 | doc rtf txt | A writing course I was trying suggested I try to think outside the box by simply starting with a generic title, such as 'Seen trhough a window' and writing a short descriptive story. This was the result of that attempt. |
| Revenge | May 1997 | doc rtf txt | A story about a man whose daughter comes home after being attacked, and he goes out into the streets to hunt down the perpetrator. |
| Blizzard V | Aug 1997 | doc rtf txt | A return to my Science Fiction roots with this story of an undersea civilization of earth's near future. Mankind is living on the ocean floor, on the continental Shelf, in the Marianas Trench, and on the mid-Atlantci Ridge. These three societies are in cold war, and the main character of this story is a Ridger spy in Trench who discovers a secret. |
| Tales 001 | Dec 1997 | doc rtf txt | A fragmentary narrative set in Glasgow about a man who loses his job just before Christmas, describing his anger at his boss and his despair at having to tell his wife and children of the upcoming hardship. Part of a series of stories which I later hoped to incorporate into a novel of short stories. |
| Dial Home for Murder | May 1998 | doc rtf txt | I'd been reading a lot of Larry Niven's ARM short stories which were locked-room mysteries, so I decided to try to write a locked room mystery of my own. Jeremy Main, famous crime writer, is called in to solve a locked-room murder which may involve little green men... I did start to write a sequel to this story, with an eye for a serial, but it never came off. |
| Television | Dec 1998 | doc rtf txt | I wrote this short story with an idea of writing a novel in the form of shorts, a la Trainspotting. I only ever managed another 2 or 3 in this series. This story is a slightly comedic tale of a Glasgow wide-boy trying to sell a stolen TV around the pubs of Springburn in the 1970s. The big selling point is that the TV has been signed by Billy Connolly, not that it does the protagonist any good at all, as he is accosted by odd Glasgow characters. |
| Trio | Dec 1998 | doc rtf txt | The second story in the series. This one was my first ever attempt to make the reader cry, and while I thought I'd made a mess of it at the time, on reading it again later I think I did a pretty good job of it. The story was inspired by a poem by Edwin Morgan of the same name, and is about a young boy in Glasgow in the 1970s who is seriously ill in hospital and tells his older brother and sister that he wants a special present for Christmas but can't tell them what it is. |
| Sephanus & Abinieri | Sep 1999 | doc rtf txt | This one was heavily allegorical, it was intended both as the story of a doomed romance, as well as alluding to various Druidic images. I was quite into Druid lore at the time of writing. |
| Tabotan | Nov 1999 | txt | Not very often, I dream an entire short story, but this was one of those times. Even the name came straight out of the dream. Ironic to have a dream about a monster who can control dreams. This is a horror tale of a small English village and the dark secret that lies there, discovered by the newly arrived couple who are the protagonists of the story. |
| Cowboy Sin | Aug 2000 | doc rtf txt | I wrote this story for a writing competiton, and the subject of the story was to be 'sin'. I wrote a tale of a young fat man being spurned by the girl of his dreams until he decides to do something about it. I didn't win the competiton. On later reading, it's clear I didn't really stick to the topic of sin very well, since it's an uplifting story about someone overcoming a sin. |
| Speed Cam | Aug 2003 | txt | I'd been snapped by a speedcam and I was livid, so instead of beating myself up about it, I decided to take my revenge in fiction. This story was a playing out of my personal fantasy about speed cams and the system which suppoerted them. |
| The Basement | Jan 2008 | txt | After a gap of a lot of years, I had decided to start writing seriously again. NYC Midnight run an annual competition and I entered it. My given genre was 'Drama' and my subject was 'Laundry'. I was a little bit worried when I received them, since I haven't written any drama before. The story was about a woman who finds out some bad news, and this provides the catalyst for her to change her attitudes to her bullying husband. The story came 5th in the heats, so didn't qualify for the final (top 4 only) |
| The Book | Jan 2012 | txt | After struggling with writer's block for nearly years I began a novel. Going was tough. After a discussion with my brother, he convinced me that I was overthinking my writing. So I decided just to write a short story about nothing in particular, not to plan it in advance, and just see where it went. And it went here. |
| Archways The Van The King |
Apr 2013 | txt | Trying to write a script, I felt writers block, so I decided just to completely freeflow with no plan and see what came out. What came out were three flash fiction story fragments. Archways was about a meeting under a bridge. The Van was about an awkward conversation between a young man and his strict father. The King was about a king (duh!) surveying a battlefield before a battle. I was quite pleased by the way they came out of nowhere. |
| Rise of the Magus | Mar 1995 | doc rtf txt | Children of the Stones had been one of my most loved children's TV series, and I decided to write a sequel to it. I started off with Matthew Brake, the child protagonist of the original series, at work as a young adult in a University when he gets a strange phone call... This suffered from being a story I wanted to read but not write. |
| The Midgie Raker | Jan 1996 | doc rtf txt | I had been trying to write scripts and sitcoms for years. Based around a man who rakes in the middens in Glasgow, his wife (who is separated from him) and his well-to-do daughter, who always thinks the best of him, no matter what he does, but who always tries, in vain, to get him to stop raking in the middens. Alas my proposed main actor Rikki Fulton has since passed on. |
| Am Ferla Mór | Jan 1996 | A Scottish horror story based on the legends of the Big Grey Man of Ben Macdui. Three friends from the city camp out in Cairngorm after a day's hillwalking. Fragment only. UPDATE! I have actually finished this story, 17 years later! Will post in the 'completed works' once it's gone through some comps. |
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| Robin Hood | Jul 1996 | txt | I was watching reruns of the 1980s TV series Robin of Sherwood, and I was chatting on the fan webpage about it and decided to try my hand at some fan fiction. The Sheriff employs the services of De Flamier, a famous Norman manhunter with his bloodhounds to track down the wolfshead and his men. Unfinished. |
| Scottish Revolution | Feb 1997 | doc rtf txt | I started yet another attempt at a novel, this time a comedy novel about a bumbling group of revolutionaries who want Scotland to be independent for various unspecified reasons. Didn't get very far, there was no story as such and I lost faith in it. |
| Necropolis | Mar 1997 | doc txt | I'd been reading up on the history of the gothic horror novel, and decided to give it a go myself. I started out with the typical elements of a good horror: recently bereaved man scrabbling at a tomb in the dead of night.... I had no idea where it was going, so it went nowhere. |
| Winnie | Mar 1997 | doc rtf txt | A fragment of a story about an old lady who stays alone in a top floor flat in Glasgow. Not enough here to remember if this ever had anything more to it than this. |
| Dodie | Jul 1997 | doc rtf txt | Another fragment of a sitcom. Dodie Connolly, Glasgow spiv and local gangster of Irish catholic extraction meets up with Effie Stoddart, local lay-preacher to the Kirk and vehement protestant. Despite her dislike for everything that Dodie stands for, she is completely taken with him, and the things that his status can get him. While she protests a lot, she learns to live with the murders and beatings that Dodie doles out every day. |
| Prieure | Mar 1998 | doc rtf txt | Imagine a world before Dan Brown's "DaVinci Code" when ideas of the bloodline of Jesus Christ surviving thanks to a secret society called the Prieure De Sion was just a crackpot theory. That was when I began this novel about Jesus being brough forward in time from the crucifixion to fight a new Holy War in the future. Was a good idea, I lost it as usual. |
| Coma | Apr 1998 | doc rtf txt | Another fragment of a story about a man coming out of a coma and struggling to come to terms with having to relate to people again.. |
| Barry | Sep 1998 | doc rtf txt | Boaby comes back to his flat in 1970s Glasgow after a hard day at work, party seven under his arm, ready to relax all weekend. But some nutter has broken into his flat, and claims he's his old friend Barry, the previous tenant. |
| Glasgow Story | Jul 2000 | txt | Start of a story or novel in a conversation style. Set in the hard man Glasgow of the 1980s, it follows the exploits of Sammy and Arthur. |
| Traveller | Nov 2004 | doc rtf txt | Another sitcom script, and this was my most fully formed attempt at a traditional sitcom format. It involves a couple of New Age Travellers who stop off at a posh rural village and make friends and enemies. I did finish this first episode script to show to a friend but that completed epsiode is lost in the mists of time. I didn't write any more. |
| No Shoes | Jul 2006 | txt | After a gap of a lot of years, I decided to start writing again. I bought a dictaphone while I was working away from home and dictated a couple of stories. I never revisited them to tidy them up and beef them out, however. The first was about a girl travelling in America with no shoes on, and the strange reactions she gets from the locals. |
| The Magic Diary | Jul 2006 | txt | The second story to be written on the dictaphone. A boy discovers a diary which appears to be magic, since writing appears in it, and he begins a strange conversation with his great grandson. Again, never revisited for tidying or rewriting. |
| Garbled | Oct 2007 | txt | I'd been reading Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and although I thought the book meandered a bit, I did really enjoy the way the narrative seemed to wind in and out. My writing tends to be direct and journalistic. So to get back into writing I decided just to start out with no story and just meander, and see where it went. It was fun, and I enjoyed how it turned out, the narrative about a man and his assertive wife and how their lives have drifted apart. |
| Garbled 2 | Oct 2007 | txt | On the heels of the last one, I decided to start again, and this time try to get in more of a backstory. I meandered again: a man wakes up blind in a hospital on some unnamed Carribean island and doesn't know where he is. Then he wakes up, it is dark, but he's blind anyway.... |
| Jumper (Chapter 1) | Nov 2007 | txt | Flushed with enthusiasm, I began on a novel. The story involves a young man who has invented an airbag system that allows people to jump off buildings and land safely on the ground below. He inadvertantly gets involved with a suicide group on the internet, and they see his invention as a way to experience death without dying. he gets sucked into the new extreme sport until tragedy strikes. This is chapter 1, first draft, and I am technically still writing this, even though I've lost faith in the premise... |
| Adulthood | 1994 | txt | Poem supposedly about coming into adulthood, which is a laughable sentiment considering how naive I was then :) |
| Azil | 1994 | txt | Poem about an evil warlord and his adoration of his demonic god. |
| Dance | 1994 | txt | Poem about crop circles, which I still believed in back then. |
| Glastonbury | 1994 | txt | One of my 'recursive' poems about Glastonbury. The first word gives the letters for the start letters of all the words in the first verse, and then each letter in the first verse gives the start letters for all the words in the poem. |
| Herne | 1994 | txt | Druidic poem about the old Druid forest god herne the Hunter. |
| History | 1994 | txt | Symmetrical poem detailing the history of the world. |
| Ravenswolde | 1994 | txt | Bardic poem about a journey to defeat a monster in a castle. |
| Sidhe | 1994 | txt | Druidic poem about a meeting with a spirit. Actually based on a children's TV serial from the 1970s called 'Sky'. |
| Bard | 1995 | txt | Another Druidic poem about... well the usual nondescript nonsense that Druid poems are often about. |
| Destiny | 1995 | txt | Another Druid inspired poem about ancient warring races celebrating the souls of their dead flying off into the sky. |
| Tower | 1995 | txt | A poem about a tower, but the first line moves one line down in each verse. |
| Phorever | 1995 | txt | Embarrassing 'neu' internet stylee poem about, internet things, yeah man. Jack in!. |
| Springburn | 1996 | txt | A poem about my memories of childhood Springburn |
| To Be A Scot | 1997 | txt | Uncharacteristic expression of Scottishness by myself |
| Who Wants to go to Kirkie Anyway? | 1998 | txt | Another stab at describing Springburn of the 1970s |
| The Odd Brown Shoe of Wullie McGrew | 1998 | doc rtf txt | Me trying to write a humorous poem like Matt McGinn |
| At The Garrison | 2000 | txt | Another Scottish poem about the battle of Culloden |