The second Friday Fiction post for the month and a very, very different kind of story (though with a similarly troubled gestation!).

I started writing Human Touch about ten years ago as an assignment for an Open University course and ran into a wall. I had a great opening and zero idea of where it was going! For the assignment I ended up writing something very different (that neither I nor my tutor actually liked all that much, so it’s not going to become a Friday Fiction piece!), but I kept the opening on file, reasoning that, sooner or later, I’d know how to end it.

And so to now. After ten years of nibbling away at the project, I was finally able to get it finished, inspired at least partially by current (political) events in various parts of the world. It’s not a happy story (unusually for me) and it’s definitely not seasonal, but it is a story I’m very pleased with.

As yet, I have no plans to revisit this set of characters…but as it does exist in the same universe as the sprawling space saga mentioned in the Project Notes section (though it’s chronologically, about a hundred years prior), I’m not going to say never.

Read Human Touch

Happy reading!