admin
No description.Please update your profile.
(02) 2145 22368
[email protected]
Alternate Melbourne Boating History
Funny thing about writing short stories for a living: it involves SO much research. At any moment I could get commissioned to write in the genre of gothic horror, or minimalist horror, and suddenly I have to scramble to read those kinds of short stories to get a feel for how they work. Oh, I have a load of them stored in my memory, but you have to refresh these kinds of things or you’ll end up writing the entire thing again and again and wasting a whole load of time.
And then there are the period stories. Quick, write me a five-thousand-word story about pirates! Well, better get on the search machine and look up how to hoist a mainsail, or what side is starboard. I’m working on one right now, actually. Someone wanted a swashbuckling tale about Melbourne’s anchor winch industry, which is…niche, I’ll admit. I did some research, informed them that anchor winches did not technically exist back in the 1700s (at least, not in the way they wanted). It’s fine, he said. Just create an alternate history in which they were invented sooner!
It’s technically a light fantasy story, so that’s no problem, but the story brief does concern me a bit. ‘Write me a story about pirates in Melbourne. Make it so that their quality anchor winch saves the day. Also, a kraken at some point.’
Ironically, the kraken is less of a challenge to work in. I’m on the verge of asking whether they belong to some anchor winch appreciation society and have been asked to give a dramatic reading at a quarterly meeting. People are into all sorts of things- you would not BELIEVE some of the short story requests I’ve had to decline (there’s a very clear clause that states what I will not write on…)- so I suppose anchor winches are pretty tame.
Making them save the day? That’ll be a challenge. And then they had to go and mention that outboard motor servicing in Melbourne of the 1700s has to play a role in getting the main conflict started. Sigh…how much of an alternate history do they want me to wring out of this, anyway??
-Clarence