Ghost Stories - How My Own Draft Wouldn't Stay Buried

My latest collection of short stories, The Birthday Present and Other Stories, opens with a bit of a ghost story - very appropriate as a Locktober tale, coming as it does right before Hallowe'en! 

But it's also a ghost story in another way: like one or two other tales in The Birthday Present and Other Stories, it began as a very different story. 

This happens to me a lot. I've talked before about how I like to write multiple stories at once to keep my imagination firing - but sometimes that doesn't work. 

Sometimes I abandon a story, or I finish it (even share it!) - only to denounce it, so that it never reaches a wider audience. 

...And sometimes those stories refuse to die. 

Instead, they niggle at me, snag at my attention when I should be doing something else, idly broadcast ‘I'm still here and you didn't let me finish, look how patient I'm being! I'll wait as long as you want, fuck, please, please let me finish, I promise I'm not asking I'm just saying it's been so long!’ 

...Which, obviously, is a phenomenon I quite enjoy giggling at… but sometimes they really do have a point. 

Under the Typewriter Keys is one of them. 

It began life as a piece I wanted to include in Anna Voss Writes The Classics: it was going to have a strong M.R. James vibe, which I think is still fairly clear - haunted typewriter, everyday / technological object visits spooky terror on the characters… You can see how it might have worked. 

Where it didn't work was up against The Red Wallpaper, my deliciously warped reworking of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Gilman and James are almost nothing alike, but the claustrophobic domestic domination ran too much together.

One had to go - and The Red Wallpaper is a piece I absolutely love. 

By my standards, it's pretty extreme - it's truly Gothic, it touches not just on brutal orgasm denial but also arguably identity death, and there's one tiny cover-your-eyes-and-you'll-miss-it line that quietly reveals exactly what the titular Red Wallpaper is which genuinely gives me goosebumps. And I wrote it! 

So Under the Typewriter Keys had to go... but as befits a ghost story, it simply wouldn't stay dead: the core of the story was too strong! 

Plus I promised myself I'd write an evil typewriter ever since I used one to write noir, so instead of forgetting it forever, I allowed it to become its own tale, lined up with a full suite of stories of denial. 

Even then, though, there was another novella I had half-written and then abandoned, and that overlapped too much with Under the Typewriter Keys, because it was also a Locktober story - so that wouldn't work in the collection either! 

That one, therefore, I'm releasing for free, in installments, over on Reddit: I can't possibly hold it back for another short collection (I've got a full length cold war femdom espionage piece I need to finish editing!) - and besides, it's leading lady didn't seem to want to wait. Sometimes my characters are insistent like that. 

So it's coming out free, throughout Locktober, and hopefully causing some intense frustration as it does! It's called Penny Keeps the Keys, and you can find the first part of it here. 

My other collections of short stories you can buy right now though, both The Birthday Present and Other Stories, and Anna Voss Writes The Classics - or try one of my longer novels like Sense of Submission, if you prefer more intense, long-term long-form denial!