STASH: And Other Stories

by L.M. Payne

STASH is a collection of four short stories each portraying a woman’s experience at a pivotal stage in her life. In STASH, the story the collection is named after, we meet Valerie. A girl on the cusp of her womanhood, who sneaks nips of her alcoholic mother’s vodka, steals away her fags and pills, and stashes porn magazines in a hollowed out tree in the farmer’s fields next door. One day her collection goes missing. As her world falls apart she gets the one thing she’s been hankering after - only to find its not at all what she expected. We also hear the stories of a woman who looses her body at the end of a Pilates class, another who turns an absence into a presence, and we find out that Love is in fact a dangerous virus, but thankfully there’s a vaccine.

‘STASH’ is a collection of short stories from L M Payne, the author of “This Is Not A Love Story”. Set in London with a soundtrack that covers everything from The Cramps to NIN via Avenue D (rockabilly, industrial, electro - is that even a thing?). Together with a smattering of rollergirls, “This Is Not A Love Story” is a retro-hipster bonkbuster on rollerskates. If you love Mhairi McFarlane’s Geordie rom-coms, then this whacked-out comedy of errors with wrong lovers and wrong people is for you. It's a story about experimentation, exploration and, ultimately, the strength of female friendship. Buy the book and get entangled in Betty’s twisted love life today!

31 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 13, 2016

About the author

I've been an aromatherapist, a roller-girl, a DJ, a singer in a band, a designer, a craft tutor, and an organic farmer. But I've always been a writer.

I wrote my first short story when I was twelve featuring "Martian Kemp". No, not an early attempt at cross-genre Spandau Ballet alien fan fiction, just bad spelling. Since then I've written numerous short stories, articles and essays, as well as keeping a journal for over 20 years, and my spelling has greatly improved.

Writing a novel was always the pinnacle, one of the things I was going to do "one day".  And so, one day, I did. I tamped down all that experience, mixed it in with the general bits and bobs of living and loving in London, and jumped up and down for a bit. Picking over the resulting cat-sick, I embellished it, polished it up and wrote my first novel.

"This Is Not A Love Story" is now available to buy from Amazon. Click here to buy a copy or download a free sample today.



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