Back in March, I wrote an entry for Hour of Writes in response to the prompt ‘Writers without Borders’. The prompt reminded me of an idea I’d had for a story but never done anything with; so I did something with it! It was very well received, it got my highest mark to date from reviewers (89%) and was a featured entry that week. More than that, when I shared the core idea with friends, they agreed with me that it was a much bigger idea than a single, very short story.

So I worked it up, from about 1,400 words to almost 8,000. It’s the same basic idea, just fleshed out a bit more. Even as I was writing it, though, I realised that this wasn’t the end of the story and I was right; the end of the 8,000 words felt more like the end of the first chapter.

Still, I submitted it to the Luna Press Publishing Contest under the title ‘Beyond Fiction’. I’m delighted to say that today I received an email confirming that the story was shortlisted and will be included in their 2016 anthology ‘Beyond Realities, Volume II’.

What’s next for this particular story? Well, I could take it to the next stage and write another 12,000 or so words and make a novella or I could go the whole hog and work it up into my very first adult novel. Choices, choices.

It’s amazing to me that the germ of an idea can grow and grow like this; from tiny acorns written in an hour, to an anthology and way beyond that, into the hearts and minds of the people who read it.

Magic.