Kieran.Stories

I have a new story out this week titled Orders of Magnitude. Thanks to Literally Stories for publishing it.

I have slowed down a bit on the short story writing and submitting front in April, mainly due to starting a new job at the beginning of May. It’s all change here! It’s also my birthday in a couple of weeks, and that generally means I start to go a bit stir-crazy, thinking about time.

I wanted to write a little below about the new story.

The title ‘Orders of Magnitude’ was inspired by an interview with Alan Moore on the first story in his 2022 collection, Illuminations. Annoyingly, I can’t find the interview. I know it was a podcast and I am pretty sure the interviewer was Robin Ince. There are actually a few different podcasts in which Ince interviews Moore, but I haven’t been able to find that exact conversation. Anyway, in the interview, Moore talks about time at the start of the universe, and how he wanted to compress time in this first story. For the record, Illuminations is still on my list to read, so I can’t speak too much about it. But listening to Moore talk about this made me think about the use of time in short stories. I wanted to write something that covered about twenty years, with the same two or three characters.

I had written a story that was three-hundred-ish words about two sisters in a kitchen. One sister admits to the other that she has been poisoning her husband and soon-to-be father of her child. That kitchen scene is the opening of this longer story. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, although there’s something about the ending that niggles me. There is a proper, more satisfying ending out there, in the ether, but I missed it. You have to end a story at some point.