Saturday 16 July 2011

A Chance Encounter (c1996 - 2011)



A Chance Encounter is a short story that I have been writing and rewriting on and off for about sixteen years, but which I never quite finished. While I was at university I decided that I wanted to write, and set about pulling together short stories, recording my dreams and noting down ideas. Sadly, I don't think that any of those inchoate scribbles exist today, but one idea did make it through, which was the notion for A Chance Encounter. Unusually, I've never changed the title despite how long I've been writing it for (normally the original title and the final title are quite different), and the concept itself is - with a few minor exceptions - not that different from the first, incomplete draft that I still have knocking about on my hard drive. This is the third or fourth - and definitely final - version of this story, and the only one that I've completed.

A Chance Encounter describes an unexpected meeting between an angel and a victim of a horrific train crash. I can no longer recall what inspired this originally, but in the final version I wrote from scratch this year, there's a degree of cynicism about bureaucracy which may or may be a reflection of having been working for thirteen of the sixteen years that have elapsed since I started this.

You can read A Chance Encounter by clicking here.

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