Fiction

I keep dithering as to whether I should put fiction up here or not. If something is particularly good I want to try to sell it and if something isn’t particularly good I don’t really want anyone to see it. On the other, I do like just sticking stuff up on the web, especially when I hear back from people who’ve read it, especially if it’s either positive (ego-boo is always useful) or constructive (even more useful).

This would be more straightforward if I were constant in my own opinion of my own fiction. Unfortunately what I’m proud of one minute I’ll want to burn the next. It also doesn’t really help that this site is called “hackcraft” given that that’s got much better connotations when talking about programming (if we ignore the way the tabloids use the word, which of course I mostly do) than about writing.

Layout is also decidedly plain on these for now. I’m pretty much sick of the design of this site, but have had neither ideas nor time for changing it.

Scary Stories

I’ve had the beginnings of this in my head for some time, but was encouraged to finally write it by reading a negative review of a children’s book which the reviewer argued was a bad idea because “children have enough horrors to deal with today”. This idea seemed extremely ill-founded in many ways to me, and this story deals with just one of those ways. I’m pretty happy with the voice of this one, but not as sure about how well it delivers as a story.

The Fifth Girl

Warning. Contains some explicit and unpleasant content.

A story inspired by Mark Ryden’s picture “Allegory of the Four Elements”. Inspired by rather than based on, so I’m not sure whether it’s better to know the picture or not to know it. The most rounded of my stories in my own opinion.

Chaperone

Warning. Contains some explicit and unpleasant content.

I love adult retellings of faïrie-tales. For that matter I love the originals, or retellings aimed at children. I thought of trying my hand at such a story, but all my ideas kept ending in something I’d already read someone else done. At one point I was very excited by one combination of ideas until I realised that I’d come, through the opposite route, to the same idea one of my favourite authors had done extremely well in one of his best-acclaimed stories (the day I feel I can bring something new to that particular tale is some time after the day I’m a household name!).

However, this lead to my thinking about why I like such retellings of faïrie-tales, which is when the wolf started talking to me….