Where do ideas come from?

Over there in the bit we can't see. Dreams. The Universe. Life.

After many years of writing short stories with varying degrees of success and many failures, I’ve now published my short story collection, Homecoming Queen and Other Twisted Tales.

The book contains 21 weird tales, some winners, short listed or long listed in various competitions ranging from the Commonwealth Prize and Bridport to Folkestone Literary Festival (now called Folkestone Book Festival) where The Unravelling of Mr Growler won me first prize and validation I was going in the right direction nearly 12 years ago.

I’ve also read some of the stories at our Hand of Doom story nights at Halloween or Twisted Love Valentine’s events. People often comment on how weird some of the stories are (whilst pulling ‘should I really be talking to you’ faces) and ask where I get my ideas from.

I always feel a bit hippy-dippy when I say ‘the universe’ because I’m not really sure what I mean. They come from over there, the bit we can’t see and from dreams. The monstrous wheelie-ham pets – a hybrid hamster grown with incorporated wheels of cartilage – was one such dream which makes an appearance in Attack of the Killer Slugs. The War of the Woollen Willie Warmers which appears in a story I’m writing at the moment also came from a very detailed dream where a war was started by an anonymous mischief-maker sending small hand-knitted willie warmers to male world leaders who suspect they’re being sent from other world leaders as an insult and World War III erupts.

I wrote Tiger Talking for my mum while she was dying in hospital. In the story The Great Tigerinho’s circus is shipwrecked off Dover 200 years before and tigers now inhabit a landslip coastal area called The Warren. This also came via a dream though it was one about horses being shipwrecked and swimming to land. Thatcher The Musical was one of my most recent dreams. I dreamt I’d written it and was now watching singing and tapdancing miners and scared-looking children singing about our milk snatching PM.

Other ideas come from a mish-mash of real life and plenty of what ifs. Very few are lifted directly from true experience though there may be a truth in each story such as Great Uncle Randolph which was inspired by my friend Charlie who owns a haunted portrait of one of his relatives. The horrible woman in Lost Things is also true. It actually happened. It still baffles me to this day why she did what she did. The AGM of the East Kent Macumba Society is also based on a grain of truth in that I attended an all night macumba ceremony in one of Rio’s favellas when I taught English there. The Centring of Olives, a story of a cult-like pizza factory figurehead, is also based on experience of working in a pizza factory.

The Dogs of Kavala has a semblance of truth too. I visited the wonderful Greek town with a group of friends and a huge dog wouldn’t stop following us for much of our stay. Also, two of the ghosts appearing in The Ghost Next Door were real to me, though I will leave it to you to guess which ones, if you ever read it. Finally, the story that receives the most looks of horror as I read it is Call Me Mr Moogle about a sinister and spiteful talking mouth lump. It was inspired by my friend who was training as a dentist at the time and explained to another friend, while she waited in hospital to have her mouth lump removed, that it could, in fact, be a teratoma, a growth containing teeth, hair, tissue and organs.

My collection is also available as an ebook here.