Freaky Tuesday : The Trailer
I did not intend to write ‘Freaky Tuesday’. I never intended to write another set of short stories. In fact, there was absolutely nothing about this new publication that was in my plans at all.
Let us go back a few years. When Simon Warr taught me about how to self-publish, I was halfway through a book inspired by the Scottish independence referendum and the experience of bathing in seaweed in Northern Ireland. ‘Land of Song & Seaweed’ was coming along at a rare old rate and I was pretty sure that that was going to be my first published novel.
However, I had a dilemma in that I wanted to start on the publishing process and I had set myself the objective of having something to market by the time I was addressing my last meeting of Youth Volunteering Advisors as a WCVA employee. It was Simon who replied to my query of ‘should it be a political book or a book of comic stories?’ with ‘why not do both?’. You can still buy ‘The Seven Pillows of Wisdom’ and ‘Cheese Market of the Future’ via my website [http://dewiheald.wixsite.com/rainbows/shop].
This was fine as a stop-gap. Actually, I quite like Cheese Market of the Future. The stories come from a very wide time period (the zombie story parody – one of my favourites – is from about 1998) and I had to write some new ones to make sure that I had enough for a collection. To be honest, some of them are very simple one-joke stories with a little bit of detail thrown in, but others go a bit deeper. I am proud of ‘The Book Had Other Plans’, which skips through a series of character descriptions with hopefully a bit of depth to each one. However, Cheese Market of the Future was a stop-gap.
I finished Land of Song & Seaweed during 2016 and started on the long round of publishers’ rejections. However, bored with these, I decided to start on another novel in the summer of 2017. This was what was to become ‘The Future’s History’. I had had the idea ages ago, a radical government comes to power determined to write an ‘authorative version’ of history. All the population is given a duty rather like jury service – ‘history service’ – where they must report to history centres to tell their story for posterity. The book was to follow the lives of a man trying to cover up his belief that he is a werewolf and a woman trying to cover up her job as a pole dancer. As I wrote this, it expanded to include other characters with something to hide and drama based in the University of the Vale of Glamorgan (or UniVale, naturally) where they are charged with trying to make sense of people’s stories and create history from them.
The Future’s History is a weird book which I don’t imagine any mainstream publisher will publish, but I am very fond of it. I was very lucky to have a friend, Non, who read it as I wrote it. Usually I write things in a random order – set out twenty-six chapters and then write each one in any order – but having a reader trying to follow the story meant that I started to write in chronological order for a change. More importantly, it meant that I wrote in sections. Non would have three chapters at a time and so I became used to writing with the idea of having a dramatic development or question for the reader at the end of each section.
However, I was not intending to write any more short stories.
After Cheese Market of the Future, I did write a few more. These date from around October 2016 and they were caused by specific ideas or discussions with people. ‘The Tale of Charlotte the Liberator’ owed its life to a dream I had and then the need for material to enter a writing competition (that is how it became a novella, also available through all good website [http://dewiheald.wixsite.com/rainbows/latest-release]). However, by the autumn of 2017 I could honestly say that I had only written four short stories in eighteen months. They were fun and interesting, but I was thinking no more than that. The fourth had been motivated by the need to write something after the mess that Georgia had caused in my life in early 2017.
That last comment probably explains something important. Life keeps happening. Just because you want a pause to look at doing some self-publishing, it does not stop events happening and the need to deal with them in some way – and for me that is creatively. In 2017 I started writing more songs of course and songs are great. From January 2018 I have had a monthly space for performance and that has been a great discipline in terms of trying to write to a deadline. However, not everything fits into a song. Some things need a story.
I continued writing stories in the latter months of 2017, really just to capture ideas or thought that I had. The challenge of a short story is to get across a convincing character or a set of events in a short space of time. I also moved from thinking in terms of how to get across the joke of the story to how to get across a point or a development that would surprise the reader. Freaky Tuesday is a more thoughtful and darker collection of stories than Cheese Market of the Future, though I would like to think that it has moments that will make even the hardest to please reader smile.
At Christmas I decided to look at what I had written over the previous eighteen months. I was surprised at how many short stories I had completed and then how good some of them were (oh, I can be modest and/or insecure another time). However, there were only fourteen of them. Cheese Market of the Future had twenty-one stories, so I was clearly only two-thirds complete. Except that when I ran the whole thing through a spreadsheet (there has to be a spreadsheet, of course), I realised that Cheese Market is 50,000 words long but Freaky Tuesday is 55,000 words long. I have stopped writing stories that are two or three thousands words long and I am much more comfortable at 5000 words now.
I like giving the short story collections a ‘X and other stories’ formula for their titles. I am not sure why. Once upon a time it was going to be ‘Charlotte the Liberator and Other Stories’ but that was before I developed the novella for Charlotte’s story. For some reason, ‘Freaky Tuesday’ struck me as a good title. I have now discovered that it is also the title of an episode of ‘Glee’ and a book by another author. Let them sue. The short story ‘Freaky Tuesday’ was written last November as an expression of frustration at adults who demanded adult behaviour of teenagers when research shows that they are physically incapable of it. If you want to know what I mean by that, you will have to read the story.
As I write this, I am waiting for a hard copy of the finished book for me to do the final proof-reading. Then it will be available in both e-book and print versions. Let us stop here for a minute for me to explain the ‘Kindle Unlimited’ programme. If you go to Amazon and download a book for free, then what you are saying is that you want to give your money to Amazon and not the author. Seriously, that is how ‘free downloads’ work. You enrol in the free downloads programme and Amazon take money from you but have the joy of not having to pay anything to authors. As it is, the margin on books for authors are tiny, but zero is the tiniest profit of all. So, however tempting it is, do not buy from the ‘free’ offer for Amazon Kindle if you care about authors.
Then again, if you go to my website, click on a link to Amazon and then buy anything – anything – Amazon will pay me a referral fee. I mean it. Go there now [http://dewiheald.wixsite.com/rainbows/shop] and click on one of the books. You will be taken to the Amazon link for that book. Now, do not buy the book but do a search for a nice present for your mother. Buy that and yes, I am not kidding you, your foot massage spa or whatever will generate a payment to me as a referral fee. It is a tiny payment, but it is still a way to make Amazon pay talented people.
What happens next?
Once Freaky Tuesday has had its final proof read I will release the buying details to you and then you can buy a copy. However, I will do fourteen blogs, one for each of the stories to tell you a little about what they are, what inspired them and why you should ponder them.
I never intended to do this one, but it is done.