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Foreword—A Gallery Of Ephemera

One of the cool things about assembling a collection of stories from across my writing career is the photograph album effect. Looking back on stories I wrote when I was starting out is like browsing through old snaps. Recognising that awkward teenager with an 80s rock band mullet and questionable taste in clothes is like acknowledging the absence of polish in some of those early stories. Which is not to say by any means that I dislike them. On the contrary, they're part of who I am. I love their directness and I'd kill to have some of those ideas again, but that's the point: if I was to try writing those stories now, they would be different stories because, in writing terms, I grew up.

Leafing through these Kodachrome snapshots now is a rewarding exercise in reminiscence. Many of the tales surprise me in terms of their construction and approach, a few irk me because there are better ways to achieve the effects I was aiming for, and I now freely hold my hand up to an over-fondness for what the members of the Glasgow SF Writers Circle referred to as 'Neil's melancholy endings', but for the most part I'm proud of my early efforts. The questionable taste in clothes may remain, but nowadays I'm calling that my style, and it's interesting to chart its development from story to story as the years passed.

But think about those snapshots for a second. Think about what they represent.

Non-writers appear continually to be baffled as to where authors get their outlandish ideas. Writers on the other hand think nothing of this. They have ideas all the time. It's in knowing what to do with them that the skill lies. When I started writing—when I started thinking like a writer—I was overwhelmed by ideas for stories. They blossomed around me everywhere I looked, and I blithely picked the pretty ones, and the cool ones, and the weird ones, stuffed them into my pockets or pressed them in a book for later. Not all of these notions were usable of course, but some of them I attempted to build into pictures. Into stories. The stories you see here are the best of the ones that got published. So, as snapshots go, they each represent something unique: the moment when an inspiration—one of thousands—was nurtured into a story.

Which makes this collection a genuine gallery of ephemera, and I thought that was something worth celebrating. So, for this new edition, I've appended to each story a short note recounting the notion that engendered it. Some are very specific while others are pretty general; some are surprising while a few are banal. But that's the nature of ideas, and of writing.

What else is new in this edition? Well, I've also added a handful of additional stories that for one reason or another were not available to include the first time round. And, lastly, I've also written a new story. At the top of this piece I wondered about how one of my early story ideas would turn out if I were to write it now, so I decided to find out. I rummaged through the drawers and found a faded, old idea that I once had high hopes for. The story that resulted is called Crow's Steps. The idea dates from the mid-nineties but it's always been at the back of my mind, and I hope I've finally managed to do it justice.

Of course, there's a melancholy ending. But that's my style.

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Framed