The vast majority of my stories begin life as a word document hastily pasted to the desktop of my computer with no information entered except the title.

They dwell in the warm shallows of my desktop for a time, flirting coquettishly with their enticing blankness until either a story coalesces around the title or, a more likely scenario, they are rounded up in threes and fours and dumped into the Marianas Trench that is my ‘Ideas’ folder, where they languish in the cold and dark for the rest of eternity. A very few are plucked from these depths in infrequent trawlings, and I marvel at the strange abyssal creatures dragged up– all mouths and translucent pouches…

I thought it might be fun to have a gander at these bizarre misfires of the creative process, these unpolished zygotes of prose potentiality, and perhaps I may find another story just waiting to be teased with the end of my literary baton.

At one stage I vowed to turn all of them into viable stories, leaving none behind, but now there are – gosh – 113 of the little blighters, with the oldest dating from July last year, and this vow is looking increasingly unlikely.  A selection follows. They range from the lyrical (and possibly useful):

Raisins for the Recipe Bench (Hot Soapy Weasels) (That’s to the tune of ‘Pop goes the weasel’, obviously)

               Strange Agencies Form the Liberty Lung (That also seems to follow the tune of ‘Pop goes the weasel’, for some reason. But what on earth is a Liberty Lung??

An Inheritance of Sweat

The Lambs Are Out to Lunch With Crows (this one is just waiting for a story)

To the blasphemous:

              Hold Me Close, Cries Deacon Balls

The Day We Fucked The Son of God and Threw Him In The Cold, Cold Sea (no comment)

To the frankly impossible to write:

Committee by Day equals Ivy over Room (I may still do this one– the idea was to cut up the Joyce story Committee Day in the Ivy Room with perhaps another story and use pi or something lke that to put the pieces together. Actually it sounds rubbish.)

        You Call Me The Apple-Cheek Wunder (we’re the end, we’re the end, we’re the end)  I have no idea.

Jesus No! My Rockery Lives! (woman convinced her deceased husband is reincarnated as floral display?)

My Pillows Call Me Jackson Christ

To the half-baked:

              My Teeth Happiness

Pissy of the Open Flow (Little Mutant living in a sewer?)

God is in the Got-You Spot

The Willy in the Wave (??)

Mostly I Am Manganese

To the downright offensive:

Darkness Gives Us Different Dicks (offensive or not, this one might have legs– someone with genitalia that look different when the sun sets or something.)

               Hot Handicapped of Holness Hill

Even My Dreams Are Shaped Like Cunts (I’m really, really sorry)

There are dozens more of the blinkin’ things, though looking through them I think I can rescue four or five (I haven’t mentioned them anywhere above) Hopefully now that I’ve dragged some of them into the light they’ll spark a bout of creativity on my part. Or perhaps they inspire you, dear reader? Or perhaps they will sink back into darkness, never to be seen again…