Writers are only supposed to let readers see the good stuff. You don’t show people the stories you’ve already rejected: the bad zombie tale that never found an ending, or a middle; the moment-of-genius-idea that looked so dreadful in the morning; the unedited, awful prose that makes you squirm; those pieces of work that cause you to sputter and say, “What was I thinking when I wrote that?”
No. That would be a bad idea. I don’t think my publishers would like it. They’d worry that people who saw the worst of my writing would be put off. And that I wouldn’t sell any more books.
Then again, I’d love to look inside the reject folders of other writers. So, in the hope of persuading any of the other writers who blog here to bare all (don’t leave me out on a limb, guys), I’m going to swallow my pride and post my most embarrassing attempts at fiction.
These are all scraps of stories and ideas I junked years ago. I’d forgotten about most of them until I dug them out for this blog. The majority never got beyond the first paragraph. I binned them all because they were missing something (a plot, characters, common sense), because they’re clumsily written, pointless, or because they’re just generally awful. They will not be available in any good bookshop.
1) UNTITLED SHEEP STORY. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I wrote the following two lines with the full intention of turning them into a story. I have absolutely no recollection of what it was going to be about, but it worries me.
Something weird was happening to McTavish’s sheep. Something unnatural.
2) UNTITLED CANNIBALS IN SPACE STORY. Next is an SF tale I started three times, then abandoned. Set on a spaceship, it was going to be about a couple who wake from hibernation early, and must survive the long trip by defrosting the rest of the crew, one by one, and eating them. It never got beyond the second paragraph, because it is silly.
Colony ship Edicol Stephens shot through the freezing dark like something spat from Earth, rolling and shedding pinches of starlight from her hull. Inside, in a cramped dark conduit on deck 64, a torch-beam shone between the close-pressed faces of John and Elizabeth Nightingale. They were looking at a waxy green circuit sheet the way two murderers would look at evidence about to be presented against them.
