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Discovering hope for Eliot

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I think it’s the hardest stories that turn out the best, in the end. The easy ones or the ones you write without much struggle don’t seem to turn into as much.

This weekend, one of those difficult stories will finally be released. And in paperback no less, like an actual printed book. That’s always exciting. Possibly five or more years in the making, my short story ‘Eliot’ will appear in the anthology Hope, a collection of speculative fiction short stories on that theme to raise suicide awareness.

Edited by Sasha Beatie, it’s the brainchild of long time writing friend, Karen Lee Field. The issue is very close to her heart and makes the resulting collection all the more special, featuring an exciting table of contents including many friends.

The resulting story looks extremely different to the original one, first titled ‘An Abused Mind.’ The character, a young teenage boy who hides in his room from the outside world, is there, as well as his father, but the initial confrontation was originally with a clown, and then shortly after, a garden gnome. That is all gone now after the essence of what Eliot was fighting came to me when I was asked to write something for this anthology.

Instead of a story about one external danger, it became about his own internal conflict as much as what threatened him from the outside. Hence, it is a story that is tied deeply in the main character and partly why I titled it after him.

And as I elude to in this month’s article for Write Anything on writing darkness, getting my characters out of these horrible situations that the world throws at them is one of my weaknesses. The need to find hope in Eliot’s story forced me to find it, which I felt relieved about in the kind of way you would as if Eliot were a real boy whom I had previously no hope for. Over the years I became quite attached to the kid. This might have something to do with the fact that all your early characters have part of yourself in them.

So I look forward to the release of ‘Eliot’ this weekend, I hope people enjoy it and find hope of their own in it.

You can now buy the eBook version here. Details of the paperback to come.



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