The Story Blog.

A few people have asked whether I plan to post any of my stories on the blog. I explained that there was the ‘First Rights’ issue to be considered, and also that they would take up an inordinate amount of space. I’ve had a re-think.

A fair number of them have been published already, so the Rights issue isn’t a problem; and I decided that I could take care of the space problem by simply having a second blog devoted entirely to the stories, with one story per page. So that’s what I started today. It’s now listed on my profile.

I haven’t decided yet which stories I’m going to put up there. Certain ones are still excluded - either because they are so far unpublished, they’ve been in extant publications for only a short time and it would be unfair to the publisher to reprint them yet, they’re still in Exclusive Rights contractual territory, or I simply don’t regard them highly enough. I also haven’t decided on the order of posting.

In the early days I’m sure I was influenced by my favourite ghost story writer, MR James. They were also mostly written in the first person because they had their starting point in some personal experience. As time went by I developed my own style, and the later ones read quite differently. And I wrote most of the later ones in third person because I know there is a prejudice against first person narratives. I don’t know yet whether I’ll alternate early and late stories, or post them in the order in which they were written. I would welcome suggestions on that one.

Of course, I’m sure that many people will ask ‘Why the hell does he think we want to read his stories?’ I well understand that, and I don’t. I’m just following a suggestion, so please yourselves.