Story: TO RECEIVE IS BETTER

Number 10 in the online collection

Welcome again to the online collection, as announced here. The tenth story is TO RECEIVE IS BETTER. Links to download are below, along with basic instructions.

This story has a bit of history. I woke one morning with a bitingly clear memory of a dream — or a moment from a dream. I — or the point of view — had been in a dark tunnel, with blue light. Indistinct figures were lurching about in the gloom. That’s it. But it rapidly became an idea for a short story about cloning, which I wrote in a day — and that’s the story linked here.

As soon as I’d finished writing it, however, I knew the idea had a lot more legs… and it became the basis for my second novel, SPARES. That was a bastard to write — second novels generally are — but was eventually completed just in time for it to be with my publishers as the news of Dolly, the first cloned mammal, hit the world. My timing is very, very rarely this good. As a result the book was optioned for film by the then-new Spielberg production entity DreamWorks SKG. And yeah, that was as exciting as it sounds.

The story of how (and why) it failed to become a movie will be known to some, so I won’t rehash it here. And it doesn’t matter. SPARES went on to be translated into over a dozen languages around the world and the option was enough for us to put money down on our first house. All because of a random dream that I happened to bother to turn into a story. And this is why the writer’s life can sometimes feel like a random crapshoot in which you have very little control of your career lows, or highs.

As noted, this story and subsequent (and previous) ones in an initial bi-weekly run of a dozen are available as a benefit to paid subscribers only. That’s $5/month for two stories — or even less on an annual sub — for the next six months.

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I hope you enjoy the story!