ADULT STORIES


Practical Joker (1300 words) is a sentimental ghost story with a twist.  I wrote it for a local writing club competition, and when it won I was urged to submit it for publication.  I struck lucky and it was published in Bella magazine sometime in the early 1990's.  It is the only short story I have ever submitted for publication, so that is a 100% record of sorts.   With the benefit of hindsight, I think all the other stories on this site read better - perhaps I should have been more diligent in my marketing efforts over the years.

A few years after writing Practical Joker I won the local competition again with The Thunderstorm (1,700 words), a dryly humorous account of a huge thunderstorm crashing over a small village and the consequences arising from a single fork of lightning.  After writing the Flatulent Ghost I had it mind to try the narrative style again, and so the sequence of events in The Thunderstorm is told by a local bartender to a customer.  It turns out that he had a personal interest in the drama unfolding within the dark, violent storm which remains undisclosed until the very end - but if you want to find out what it was, you'll have to read the story.