Short Story – Ruth Livingstone

Day 26 and Castro is dead

Or. how inspiration can come from Radio 4

the-return-gif-500 It was day 26 of NaNoWriMo and for the second day in a row I woke up with no ideas in my head for #30days30shorts.

Nothing.

Usually my subconscious brain mulls over various options during the night and pops an idea straight into the front of my conscious mind when I wake. But today, like yesterday, nothing.

As I lay there, desperately trawling my brain for ideas – any idea – the radio alarm came on. It was the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme. The lead headline was the death of Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary and dictator.

And I started thinking about revolutionaries and what they do when the war is over. And then I started thinking about their families and how they cope with returning warriors. Within a couple of hours, the first draft of the story, The Return, was finished.

Yes, short story ideas can come from anywhere, and that includes Radio 4 and the Today programme.

Day 24 and Day 25 of NaNo and I’m a winner!

NaNoWriMo 2016 is done and dusted. Or is it?

I’ve written 54,493 words and a few hours ago I pasted my text into the NaNoWriMo word count goblin, and he chewed it up, spat it out, and said ‘YES, you’re a winner!‘. Then the NaNo crew appeared, yelled their congratulations and gave me a round of applause.

This is my 6th NaNoWriMo win, and it’s still a great thrill to have finished.

But, wait, it isn’t over yet. As a NaNo rebel, my self-inflicted challenge was to write 30 short stories during the 30 days of November. One story per day. #30days30shorts

Day 24: Goodbye Cruel World

The prompt for this story was another Writing Magazine competition.

The theme? “Goodbye.”

I got the idea for this story some time ago, but it didn’t turn out exactly as I planned. That’s been happening with many of my stories this month. They’ve been running feral and tearing off in new directions. Continue reading “Day 24 and Day 25 of NaNo and I’m a winner!”

Eleven things I don’t remember

Day 16 of NaNo and 11 things I don’t remember

11-things-i-dont-remember-gif-500
No, I’m not losing my memory.
It’s the title of my latest story.

At only 700 words, it’s a very short story, again written with a Writing Magazine competition in mind.

The inspiration was a wonderful novel written by Joe Brainard, called simply, I Remember, in which every paragraph begins with the words… ‘I remember’. Continue reading “Eleven things I don’t remember”

Unreliable

An unreliable narrator and stolen money…

unreliable narrators in a short story, Ruth Livingstone Oh yes, there is nothing more intriguing than a narrator who leads you up the garden path.

Or, in this case, down to Ward 4, where cash is mysteriously going missing.

This was one of those short stories where I started out with a voice in my head and a vague idea that it would involve theft in a medical setting. I started writing, and the story simply wrote itself. Continue reading “Unreliable”