For today's stop on the blog tour for my new release Delusion and Dreams, I've brought you back here to my blog so I can tell you a bit more about how the collection came to be. I've added a reminder about the tour-wide giveaway, at the end.





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A while back, I found some short stories I had written, saved on my computer. I had initially written them as entries for short story competitions, but then forgotten about them. Most were written in the early to mid noughties. I was thinking of putting them together as a collection and publishing them.

Then, I found some more old stories on a floppy disk (which I must have written in the late ’90s). Of course, I didn’t have a floppy disk drive, so I purchased one from Amazon in the hope that the format would still be compatible with modern computers. I managed to salvage two or three of the old stories from the floppy disk, but some were unreadable, so they’ll have to wait until I’m more technologically able to find a way to read them.

So anyway, I now had quite a few stories that could be collected together for a book.

Not all of those stories made it into the selection for Delusion and Dreams, and I wrote some new stories for the collection. So here’s how each story found its way into the new collection:

Delusion and Dreams - Part I - This story was one I’d written a few years ago, and I found the handwritten version among some papers in a drawer when tidying up one day. I really liked it when I read it, so typed it up.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow - This is a new story, written this year. Originally, someone sent me a message on Goodreads saying they were looking for comedy stories for a new anthology. I’ve never written a comedy, as such, before. Although many of my stories and novels contain some humour, I’d never written a story intending it to be a comedy. So, this story was a challenge I set myself. It turned out to have quite a bit of serious stuff mixed in with the comedy element. It also turned out to be too long to submit to the comedy anthology, at almost 5000 words, so I put it in Delusion and Dreams instead.

Happy New Year - This is probably the darkest story in the collection, crime fiction, and is a new one that I wrote specifically for the collection.

Friends and Neighbours - This is one of the old stories I found on my computer. I edited it a bit, but it’s basically in its original form. It had been originally written for a short story competition, in the mid noughties, I think.

Delusion and Dreams - Part II - This continuation of the story was written specifically for this collection. When I read the original short story, Delusion and Dreams, I was inspired to write more. The characters in this story all have such interesting backgrounds, so I thought it would be nice to explore those in more detail.

Getting Away With It - This is one of the oldest stories in the collection, found on a floppy disk. I edited it slightly, but it’s more or less the same story. It was originally written for a short story competition.


Friends and Neighbours - Revisited - This is a new story, written for this collection. It was inspired by the older story, Friends and Neighbours. I wanted to show the story from the point of view of Jill’s neighbours. It’s a dark story, more in keeping with the direction my writing is going.

Seeing is Believing - This is another of the old floppy disk stories. Again written in the late nineties for a competition (I used to enter a lot of short story competitions years ago, and found it was a great way to keep my imagination and creativity active). I edited the story slightly for this collection, but again, it is still the same story as the one I found on the disk.

Delusion and Dreams - Part III - another new story, written as a continuation of the series.

Merry-go-round - This was an old story found on my computer. Again slightly edited for this collection.

Courage - This story was originally written as the “yellow” story for my short story collection Pieces of a Rainbow. But I wasn’t happy with the story in the form that it was in when I originally wrote it back in 2009, so I didn’t include it in that collection. When I found it again on my computer, I thought it would be a good story with a bit of editing. So that’s what I did. I edited it and it’s now one of the stories in this collection.

Delusion and Dreams - Part IV - The final part of the story. Written this year, for this collection.

I hope you'll enjoy the stories.

Here's a reminder of all the stops on the tour, and the links so you can catch up!

31st May: Darcia Helle's blog: http://quietfurybooks.com/blog/2013/0...

1st June: Interview on J. Michael Radcliffe's blog.: http://michaelradcliffe.wordpress.com...

2nd June: Seumas Gallacher's blog: http://seumasgallacher.com/2013/06/02...

3rd June: BestsellerBound Recommends blog! http://quietfurybooks.com/bestsellerb...

4th June: Savannah Rayne's blog: http://savannahrayne.blogspot.co.uk/2...

5th June: The Secret Writer's blog: http://thesecretwriterblog.blogspot.c...

6th June: K.B. Walker's blog: http://nutsandcrisps.wordpress.com/20...

7th June: Pinky Pollock's blog: http://pinkypollock.blogspot.co.uk/20...

8th June: Kathleen Valentine's blog: http://www.kathleenvalentineblog.com/...

9th June: Ben Ditmars's blog: http://niceoldspice.blogspot.co.uk/20...

10th June: Helle Gade's blog: http://hellegade.wordpress.com/2013/0...

11th June: Bitsy Bling Books: http://bitsybling.blogspot.co.uk/2013...

12th June: Jaime McDougall's blog: http://inkyblots.com/guest-author-mar...

13th June: Merita King's blog: http://meritaking.com/2013/06/12/delu...

14th June: Jenny Hilborne's blog:
http://jfhilborne.wordpress.com/2013/...

15th June: Wendy Laharnar's blog: http://wendylaharnar.blogspot.com.au/...

16th June: Claire Voet's blog: http://clairevoetauthor.blogspot.com....

17th June: Orchard Book Club's blog: http://orchardbookclub.wordpress.com/...

There are a few more stops to go:

19th June: I'll be at author Geoffrey D. West's blog, with a guest post about my other short story collections: http://geoffreywestdotcom.wordpress.c...

20th June: I will be at Angela Turpin's blog where I will be telling you what I'm working on now... http://angelalamturpin.com/?p=970

21st June: The final stop in the tour. I'll be at Mark Rice's blog with another excerpt from Delusion and Dreams: http://metallicdreams.wordpress.com/2...

Don't forget to enter the giveaway. You could win a signed paperback copy of Delusion and Dreams as well as runner-up prizes of Kindle/e-book copies of great books by some of my favourite authors! The details and entry form are at the following link a Rafflecopter giveaway


Good luck!